Articles on search engine optimization these days often discuss Google’s changed expectations. To succeed on Google search today, you need to publish valuable content that engages the reader. Your content should also interest readers enough to make them want to share it with their friends on the social networks.
While telling businesses to create valuable, shareable content is good advice, it leaves important details out. Usually, businesses only bother creating attractive content because it has the potential to bring in new visitors – ones who might then go on to make a purchase. Great content, though, is no guarantee of a conversion.
If you are interested in creating content specifically to engage customers and drive sales, you need to keep a few things in mind.
1. Think about where on your website you keep your best-converting content
Internet marketing consultants often advise their clients to use analytics software like Google Analytics to find out which content pages manage the highest conversion rates. You need to invest in creating more content in the mold of the successful content that you already have. It is also important that you find a place on your website for it that is easy for new visitors to locate.
Visitors to pages featuring high-quality content often come in through search engine results as they search for content. Since these pages are often located in some difficult-to-find subcategory visitors don’t come in by the front page and navigate their way in.
To make sure that people landing on your website’s homepage are able to easily see your best-converting content, you need to place a prominent link to it there. The more your content is seen, the more people are likely to convert. Search engines crawl website homepages more than they do inside pages, too. This is another reason why placing links on your homepage to your best content is likely to bring in more search visitors.
2. Put more stuff on your most popular pages
If you have content that converts well, you can try taking advantage of its popularity by placing links to other good content on that page. If your other content is good, this kind of move should help you bring more visitors to it.
3. You need to keep testing every move you make for results
Trying out different page layout plans is one of the most powerful ways you have of improving the conversion rate of a piece of content. You need to experiment by moving content, images, advertisements and other page components around and testing for a few days how each layout affects your conversion rate. A/B testing of this kind can be time-consuming. Nevertheless, finding the optimal page layout plan can be an effective way of improving conversion rates. You can use tools like UnBounce to make your job easier,
Alternatively, you can conduct user surveys to find out what layout plan your visitors like best
While you certainly can quietly go around A/B testing your webpages with different layouts, you mustn’t overlook the direct way – simply asking your users. UserTesting and many other tools like it help small business owners poll webpage visitors for their opinions. You can gain a great deal of marketing intelligence with simple surveys.
4. You mustn’t forget to internally link your pages
Internal linking – the practice of placing links around your website to help suggest to visitors what other webpages you have that might be of interest to them – is an old SEO method. Whether or not it has SEO merit, it does have relevance when it comes to improving conversions. If the links you place around your website really direct visitors to content that might be useful to them, it can help improve conversions .
5. Why can’t you just depend on the search engines to drive relevant traffic to your webpages?
Strictly speaking, quality content should be able to get the search engines to direct traffic to them without extra help. The only problem with waiting for the search engines to act is that they can take a long time to recognize how valuable a site really is to people. In the meantime, you need strategies like the ones above to help your pages convert.