Since we’ve built our brand on prioritizing high buying-intent keywords, and we measure conversions from every piece of content we create, we thought it would be interesting and useful to the content marketing and SEO community to report on the conversion metrics of different types of bottom-of-funnel SEO keywords. 

As explained in Pain Point SEO, we think of high buying-intent keywords as being in one of three categories:

1. Category Keywords
2. Comparison and Alternative Keywords
3. Jobs To Be Done keywords

To do this study, we pulled six months of data from 95 articles we wrote for our clients, each ranking for a different primary keyword. In total, these 95 articles got over 123,000 organic pageviews in the period analyzed and 4687 product-related conversions (meaning free trial starts, demo requests, or sales form fills). 

Below, we compare the conversion rates of articles ranking for SEO keywords in the three categories above. Our post explains how and why the conversion rates are what they are (and how to use this information for your benefit). 

Overall Results: How Well Different Bottom-of-Funnel Keywords Convert

Here are the types (and sub-types) of keywords we analyzed and their conversion rates:

1. Category Keywords

• [Main] Category Keywords: Queries that describe exactly what you offer (4.85% average conversion rate)

• [Side] Category Keywords: Queries that show buying intent for a secondary feature or use case (1.94%)

• Category + Layer of Specificity: Queries that imply the searcher is looking for a product like yours but for a specific use case or vertical (2.96%)

2. Alternatives + Competitors

• Queries that mention competitor names, indicating Googlers are aware of other brands in your industry, searching for alternatives, and could be good candidates for your solution

• These had the highest average conversion rate (8.43%)

• “Vs.” Keywords: Queries comparing two solutions —
  [Brand #1] vs. [Brand #2] — (5.45%) 

3. JTBD Keywords

• Queries that describe jobs to be done — or problems to be solved — that you offer the absolute best solution for (2.44%)

We’ll discuss each type of keyword and its average conversion rate below. 

Main Category Keywords Are Your Brand’s Bread and Butter 

4.85% average conversion rate

These are the queries that describe exactly what you offer — i.e., the person searching is shopping for the type of products or services you offer. This includes keywords like “best accounting software” or “men’s running shoes.” If you sell accounting software or men’s running shoes, these are keywords you absolutely want to be ranking for. 

We expect the conversion rate of keywords with this much buying intent to be high, and it is. Most people don’t expect blog posts to convert at multiple percentage points, much less 4.85%, but this data shows that they can when they rank for the right keywords and are written to sell the product.

That’s why we have long advised that brands prioritize these keywords, and this data further supports that assertion. For example, Geekbot — a solution to run online standup meetings (full case study here), and a past client of ours — ranks #2 for “Slack standup bot” via a post we wrote for them, and that single long-form blog post has a lifetime conversion rate of 8.36%.

In addition, we ranked a video marketing client on page one for multiple terms around their video marketing sub-category; the app, software, and service variations of those keywords convert at 5.73%, 3.31%, and 3.00%, respectively. 

Importantly, the takeaway here is not that app keywords convert higher than software and service keywords!

In this case, it just so happens that the post ranking for an “app” keyword converted at the highest rate. Still, the takeaway is simply that when you target variations of product keywords and cover all of your bases, you should expect most variations to convert well (i.e., at 3% or higher to free trial starts) because Googlers are researching products similar to yours. 

Now, with that said, if you only offer an app or only offer a service, you may find certain category keywords simply don’t fit your offerings, so all category keywords may not convert as well for you. 

But in general, category keywords consistently convert for all of our clients; specifically, we see these conversion rates (3–5%, or even higher, like in the case of Geekbot) routinely for main category keywords. 

This reinforces the advice we’ve given many times: Every company investing in SEO should start by identifying their main category keywords and very intentionally crafting dedicated pages on their site to rank for them.   

Category Keywords Around Side Offerings Have a Lower Conversion Rate (But Are Still Valuable)

1.94% average conversion rate

Many companies release new features or services and want to build content to promote those offerings. While that’s fine, this study taught us that these keywords don’t usually convert as well as keywords related to your core offering (aka your main category keywords).

This could be for various reasons: perhaps that side offering just isn’t very strong, or it’s a part of your solution that can’t be used or purchased separately, or the side offering is too expensive compared to other brands. It could also be that the rest of the marketing site simply doesn’t sell the side offering as much as the main features, so it naturally converts less. 

For example, one of our clients sells digital asset management (DAM) software, a common software category for many businesses with creative assets. One of the creative assets you could store in a DAM is videos. One of the posts we wrote for them targeted a keyword around storing video assets and it converts at 1.45%.

That’s still a good conversion rate, and far higher than most brands’ typical TOF content, which converts at a tiny fraction of a percent. But we have several posts for this same client that target general digital asset management type keywords. Those are converting at 3%, 6%, and even 15%! 

We think the low conversion rate of the video-specific keyword is because users who only need a video asset solution could opt for something simpler than full digital asset management (DAM) software, whereas users who need to store all kinds of digital assets, not just videos, need a general-purpose DAM.    

This reinforces our core Pain Point SEO message: The #1 thing dictating your conversion rate is the intent of the person searching and how well the query aligns with what your product does. 

Our next observations further support this.

Category Keywords with Added Layers of Specificity Are Hidden Gem Keywords That Most Brands Miss 

2.77% average conversion rate

An additional flavor of category keywords are those that add a word or two that make them more specific to a particular feature, use case, or customer type. For example, adding “for small business” to the end of the keyword “best accounting tools,” or adding “for trail running” to the end of “men’s running shoes.” 

We’d expect these “added layer of specificity” category keywords to convert really well because you’re targeting searchers who (1) already have some knowledge of the category, and (2) are searching for a very particular solution (what you offer). 

The data in this study does confirm this, but with some important nuances and caveats. 

Going back to our digital asset management example: this client markets their DAM to support professionals across all different industries (manufacturing, education, healthcare, real estate, eCommerce, etc.), but as you’d expect, their primary audience is marketers and creative professionals because that’s who stores the most digital assets (product images, etc.). And our client happened to have extra features designed for those users, specifically. So we targeted “marketing asset management software” and saw a whopping 15.2% conversion rate from that post!

So we do see several “layer of specificity” category keywords convert even higher than 4.85%, which is the average standard category keyword conversion rate discussed above. 

But why is it that most “layer of specificity” keywords don’t convert that high, and the average is only 2.77%?

We think these keywords are simply a game of taking bets where you have to guess which specific keyword variants will “hit” with your target audience and your product, and the reality is that most will not hit, you’ll have plenty of misses. But when you do get a hit (like “marketing digital asset management software,” above) it can convert incredibly well. 

Here are the conversion rates of 13 posts for different clients that target various “specific” category keywords:

We grouped these by type of specificity in the keyword:

• Business size keywords could include “enterprise accounting software” or “accounting software for small businesses.” 

• Cost specific keywords are typically around savings, like “budget-friendly accounting software” or “free accounting software.” 

• Industry specific keywords speak to specific audiences, like “accounting software for HVAC business.”

• Feature specific keywords emphasize unique selling points, for example, “accounting software with inventory management.” 

For example, that same digital asset software client is positioned mainly as an enterprise tool.  So we targeted enterprise-focused keywords and keywords that attract smaller teams, and the results were not surprising: certain “enterprise” keywords converted around ~6.5% while other industry-specific keywords converted around ~2%.  

Again, the more a keyword and article align with your product’s natural strengths, the higher the conversion rate.

Most Category Keywords Need Long-Form Content to Rank

As we briefly mentioned above, most brands think of category keywords as something only their homepage, or maybe a landing page should target. Most don’t even consider long-form blog content as the right content type for category keywords. This thinking leaves a massive amount of opportunity on the table. 

Here’s why: 

1. You can’t possibly rank in the top results (or even hit the first page) for every category keyword on your radar using just your homepage or a couple of feature or solution pages. You may be able to rank for one or two keywords, but there’s no way a single page will rank for the dozens of category keywords that likely exist in your space. It’s just very difficult to optimize a single page for that many different keywords (extreme long tail aside), so you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. 
   

2. Your homepage isn’t tailored to specific audiences or queries; it contains high-level information about your brand and products/services. Unless readers are already familiar with or somewhat bought into your brand, this won’t capture their attention or drive desired actions from website visitors. 
   

3. People think their homepage or landing pages will always convert at a much higher rate than blog content. However, as per this data and previous comparisons, that’s not often true. Many homepages convert at low, single-digit percentages — usually less than a well-written blog post custom-tailored to sell your product or service. 

Creating unique content for each category keyword lets you solve the problems mentioned above. 

First, since most of these category keywords require long-form, tailored copy to compete in SERPs, you actually have a chance of ranking and moving to the top of page one.

Second, creating long-form content (unlike a generic homepage) lets you speak to very specific pain points and challenges. You can actually tailor content around different search queries for specific readers — which attracts qualified leads, keeps audiences engaged, and improves conversion rates. 

Let’s look at the keyword “free website analytics tools” as an example. 

Here are some of the page one results in the Google SERPs: 

The SERP shows one list post after another comparing software solutions, with only Similarweb — an incredibly popular and longstanding analytics tool — ranking with their homepage. So, it’s incredibly unlikely that any other analytics tool is going to rank for this keyword with their homepage. You need to create a blog post to capture this organic traffic. 

In fact, as of this writing, a post we wrote for our client Smartlook is ranking #1: 

It would have been almost impossible to rank #1 for this keyword by attempting to optimize their homepage or even a dedicated product page for this keyword. Search engines clearly favor lists. 

There Are a Lot More Category Keywords Than Companies Realize

So many of the brands we talk to (whose analytics we see) haven’t systematically identified and targeted their category keywords — which is an absolute shame and waste of marketing potential. 

As per the above data, we think you should brainstorm: 

• The obvious category keywords and every variation of those terms that people may Google to find products or services exactly like yours.

• What layers of specificity could be added to those keywords that align with your product’s strengths.

Comparison and Alternative Keywords Are the Highest Converting SEO Keywords We’ve Seen 

8.43% average conversion rate

One of the most interesting takeaways from this analysis is that comparison and alternatives keywords convert at a higher rate than any other keyword type. 

This includes both alternative keywords like “salesforce alternative” and versus keywords like “Salesforce vs. Pipedrive.” Both of those keyword types, on average, convert better than even main category keywords. 

We suspect this is because these Googlers are even more qualified than ones doing general research on a product or service. Clearly, these searchers: 

• Already know about your industry.
• Are familiar with competitors who offer similar products/services as yours.
• Are actively comparing alternative solutions (with some vested interest in making a purchase).

So, you obviously want to show up for these users when they search these terms. Just be strategic in the competitor keywords you target and prioritize — as expected, this category will have a spread in conversion rates. From what we’ve noticed, keywords mentioning direct competitors will convert better than those featuring some loosely-related competitor. 

For example, here is a visual comparison of conversion rates for all 23 competitor and alternative keywords we looked at in this study:

You can see that although the average conversion rate is 8.43%, the majority of these posts convert at less than 4%. That shows what we’re saying above: the closer the competitor, the higher the conversion rate. 

That said, conversion rates between 1–4% are still far higher than top-of-funnel blog posts that barely convert; so in our experience and opinion, it’s worth taking bets on a variety of alternative and comparison keywords. 

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that many competitor and alternatives keywords have very low organic search volume. As per our mini-volume keywords article, however, the high conversion rates make them very worthwhile to target. 

Jobs To Be Done Keywords Show High Conversion Potential — Despite Being “Up the Funnel” 

2.44% average conversion rate

The final category in our Pain Point SEO framework is “Jobs To Be Done” keywords — these are queries that describe a job to be done (or pain, challenge) that is best solved with your product or service.  

These are slightly more up-funnel because they don’t explicitly say “software” or “tools” (like category keywords) or mention competitors (like alternatives keywords) — these are mostly “how to” queries: how to organize design files, how to do a poll in Slack, how to get video testimonials from customers. 

Although these users may not be aware of your brand or competitors, or precisely what they need for their problem, they still have the potential to buy because they have a job or problem that you solve. 

We insert our clients’ names in these conversations by creating content to specifically solve what the reader is searching for in the context of the client’s solution, and we see these convert at a ridiculously high rate. 

For example: 

• “Collect video testimonials” — a keyword we targeted for a video marketing client — has a 9.71% CR; this keyword presents a good opportunity for our client because the Googler requires some sort of software to do this task, and the task the Googler needs to complete is exactly what our client’s product solves for. 

• A JTBD keyword we targeted for online meeting software is “how to run standups in Slack” — this has a 12.5% CR, and once again, our client’s product is a great way to do that exact job.

• We targeted “record website visitors” for a website analytics tool, and that converts at 10.48% (this Googler requires a specific type of software to complete this task, and our client offers that very solution). 

JTBD Keywords with Little to No Buying Intent Are Considered “Top of Funnel” (And Least Likely to Convert Readers)

Similar to comparison and alternative keywords, there is a wide spread in conversion rates for JTBD keywords, and also similarly, intent drives that difference. We’ve noticed that JTBD keywords with low conversion rates simply don’t have that high of conversion rates. 

The contrast here is stark: 

For example, for our video marketing client, JTBD keywords around collecting or gathering video testimonials (exactly what their software does) converted to free trials at 5–9%. But other JTBD keywords were less transactional: opportunities around what to say in a testimonial video converted at only 0.6%. That’s because no one needs to purchase software to learn what to say in a testimonial; they just need advice. 

Overall Thoughts

There are a few takeaways from this analysis: 

• Not all SEO keywords are created equally. Some convert extremely well (10%+), and others not at all. So, if you’re interested in SEO for lead generation and want to reach potential customers, you need to target bottom-of-funnel or high buying-intent keywords. 

• Even within bottom-of-funnel keywords, there is a wide range of SEO conversion rates — depending on the type and level of intent of the keyword.

• It behooves every brand to target their main category keywords and comparison and alternative keywords related to their primary competitors.

• Jobs to be Done keywords are an often-overlooked category that also show a lot of potential for higher conversion rates. 

If you want to learn more about conversion-focused SEO and conversion rate optimization, you can check out our course and community, where we and hundreds of other digital marketers discuss these marketing strategies.

If you want to work with us directly, you can reach out here to learn more. 

In contrast to general purpose CRO, which often centers around doing A/B testing to improve a website’s conversion rate, content CRO has some key factors that precede (and are of greater importance than) running AB tests:

1. Targeting keywords that have buying intent. In our experience, as we’ll demonstrate below, this is by far the #1 driving factor that determines whether or not content converts.
   
   
2. Ranking highly for those keywords. To get sustainable traffic and conversions from content, you need to at least rank on page one of search results, ideally in the top three positions. 
   
   
3. Writing compelling content that sells your product or service. Converting readers into customers requires intelligent, thoughtful writing that demonstrates how your product or service solves the customer’s problem. Doing this well (while difficult) can significantly influence conversion rates.

With that said, there are aspects of general practice CRO that still apply to content. So, in this post we’re going to share 9 practices that — based on our experience measuring conversions of hundreds of blog posts for dozens of clients — every company should follow to optimize their content for conversion.

We’ve grouped these steps into three categories:

SEO

1. Focus on targeting high buying intent SEO keywords

2. Optimize content to rank for those keywords

Content Writing

3. Write non-generic blog introductions

4. Highlight customer pain points

5. Describe how your product or service solves those pain points

6. Emphasize your unique differentiators

Blog Design and CTAs

7. Have a clear call-to-action in your navigation bar

8. Optimize your blog design for readability

9. Use in-line contextualized CTAs throughout your blog copy

Note: If you’d like help improving your blog conversion rate, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) — the process of choosing keywords and optimizing content to rank for those keywords in organic search — plays a critical role in optimizing content for conversion because:

• Without sustainable traffic to your content, making CRO tweaks to your site won’t matter. (i.e. You can’t analyze and influence user behavior if there aren’t enough users on your site to begin with.)

• By intentionally targeting keywords that indicate searchers have buying intent, SEO offers a unique opportunity to bring in highly targeted website traffic which can drastically increase conversion rates.

For these reasons, the following two aspects of SEO are where we focus first when optimizing content for conversion.

1. Focus On Targeting High Buying Intent SEO Keywords

The logic behind this point is simple:

If a piece of content ranks for keywords in which people searching have intent to buy what you sell, it will convert at a higher rate than if it ranks for keywords in which people do not have intent to buy what you sell.

This point is neatly summarized in this Google analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO content strategy): 

The right-most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. 

The number of conversions from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

We also showed this at a larger scale in a case study that analyzed 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert at 10%, 20% or even 50% better than the “top of funnel,” lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. And furthermore, the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

No AB or split testing is going to get you a 2400% lift in average conversion rate. That’s why we say this is the #1 factor, by far, in content conversion optimization.  

If you do nothing else, simply ranking for keywords where people are actively looking to buy what you sell will inevitably increase conversions from your content. 

2. Optimize Content to Rank for Those Keywords

In addition to focusing on the right keywords (i.e. ones that can drive actual paying customers), you need to write content that’s optimized to rank highly for those keywords. Ideally, in the top half of page one of search results where the majority of traffic comes from.

This is nontrivial. You can’t just “sprinkle” keywords into an article and expect your post to rank for a competitive, valuable business keyword. For example, category keywords such as “social media management software” or “executive assistant service.” 

The process is much more involved than that.

We’ve written at length about how we approach content optimization here which breaks down our process into the following five steps:

1. Topic: Come up with content ideas and identify target keywords that have business value.
   
   
2. SERP Analysis: Analyze the search engine results page (SERP) for each of those keywords to understand which topics need to be covered in your article for it to rank.
   
   
3. Structure: Choose the angle and structure of your article based on that SERP analysis.
   
   
4. Writing: Write the content in a way that fills in that structure with compelling information to sell your product or service.
   
   
5. On-Page SEO: Polish off your content with on-page SEO.

Read our full post which provides detailed explanations and examples for each step: SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

Content Writing

Content writing itself is a highly underrated aspect of content CRO strategy because people tend to focus on general purpose CRO as we mentioned above. For example, using pop-ups, analyzing heatmaps, decreasing web page load times, or using social proof and customer testimonials.

But converting readers into customers requires selling your product or service inside blog posts, which is a very different style of blog writing than typical top of funnel how-to or intro-guide style posts. The following are the most important aspects of writing content that converts.

3. Write Non-Generic Blog Introductions 

The internet is fraught with generic, cliche blog introductions that can turn off potential customers and cause high bounce rates. This is particularly true in the B2B space where website visitors are often advanced in the topic area of the content. 

For example, for an article aimed at attracting sales managers and selling them on a CRM tool, if it starts off with descriptions about how CRMs are really important to tracking sales data, it’s an immediate turn offs to actual, experienced sales managers. These articles are written below the knowledge level of the target audience and the introduction is what gives that away. 

If you write generic introductions, you show the reader that you aren’t on their level, you fail to entice readers to keep reading, and you’ll lose a chunk of them, thereby reducing your conversion rate right out of the gate. So, getting your introductions right is essential.

This is a topic that one of our founders, Devesh, has written about at length in a previous piece: How to Write Great Blog Introductions (And Why Most Are Bad)

He compares and contrasts good introductions with bad ones, so you can learn how to write better introductions that hook readers and cause them to keep reading.

4. Highlight Customer Pain Points

In the same fashion that you would discuss customer pain points on a product page or sales landing page, highlighting pain points in your blog content is another key aspect of optimizing content for conversion. 

If you can hit on pain points that resonate with readers, particularly early on in a post (and in language that they use themselves to describe their problems), you can:

• Earn their trust and attention.
• Entice them to continue reading.
• Naturally transition into discussing how your product or service can solve those problems, and thus generate conversions.

Check out this post to learn how to identify customer pain points that you can highlight in your content: Content Ideation: How to Identify Content Ideas That Convert

5. Describe How Your Product or Service Solves Those Pain Points

Most blog content only glancingly mentions the company’s product or service, if it does so at all. This is in part due to the top of funnel, non product-centric topics that blogs often focus on. And in part due to a culture of content marketing that says you shouldn’t be too “salesy” in your content. This is a massive conversion mistake that many brands make. 

If you don’t discuss your product or service in your content, you’re guaranteeing it won’t convert well. Plus, if you’re not discussing your product, someone else will.

Particularly if you focus on buying intent topics as we discussed above, discussing your product or service is actually necessary to satisfy search intent. Searchers are looking to understand how your product works, whether it can solve their problems, and how it’s different from other solutions. So, this is exactly what you need to discuss in order to rank for buying intent keywords and convert readers into leads and customers. 

When writing content for our clients, significant portions of our copy (50%+) are dedicated to describing the features and benefits of the product or service, highlighting the key value propositions, and demonstrating the ways in which our client can solve the customer’s pain points.

For an in-depth tutorial on the pitfalls of writing product-focused content, and how to execute it well, check out: Pain Point Copywriting: How to Write Compelling Sales Copy Inside Blog Posts

6. Emphasize Your Unique Differentiators

Finally, as you discuss how your product or service solves customer pain points, it’s important to emphasize your unique differentiators. This is a key aspect of helping readers understand how your product or service is different and why they should choose you over your competitors.

In our experience evaluating thousands of applicants and reviewing hundreds of test projects, we’ve learned that hiring writers to do this type of Pain Point Copywriting is difficult. Learn more about how to solve that here.

If you want help doing this type of sales-focused content marketing, you can learn more about our service here. 

Blog Design and CTAs

Finally, after all of the above steps, we get to what most people think are the important aspects of “conversion optimization” for content: design, UX, call-to-action (CTA) placements and the like. For us, this bucket intentionally comes last. As we’ve argued before, blog design, CTAs, and other visual aspects of CRO are akin to the “window dressing” of conversion optimization, you should only focus on them after you take care of the fundamentals above. 

Why? Because the steps above ensure (a) the traffic to your content has a high intent to purchase (b) the content itself is written to compel them to purchase. If you have those two aspects in place, then these high-intent customers will figure out how to buy. It’s not hard to scroll up to your navbar and learn more about your product, sign up for a trial, reach out, or purchase. 

However, this isn’t to say that the aesthetic and user experience aspects of CRO aren’t important for conversion. 

What follows are the key aspects of blog design and CTAs that we recommend paying attention to and implementing.

7. Have a Clear Call-to-Action in Your Navigation Bar

Many modern website and blog designs offer the option to include CTA buttons in the top right corner of the page in the navigation bar. However, we’ll occasionally have leads with websites that are missing this element, and we’ll recommend that they fix that. 

Having a clear CTA button in the navigation bar makes it simple for readers to reach out if they want to learn more about your product or service; there’s only upside to having that option there. You might even experiment with making your navbar “sticky,” so that the CTA button remains visible to website visitors even as they scroll down the page.

8. Optimize Your Blog Design for Readability

We often see companies crowd their blog pages with graphical CTAs in their sidebars and even throughout their content. In our experience, these graphics can be counterproductive in a few ways:

• They hurt readability making it less likely that people continue reading your entire post.

• They distract readers from focusing on and learning about how your product or service can solve their problems.

• They look like ads which readers are often programmed to ignore anyway.

For these reasons, we recommend that you optimize your blog design for readability — particularly if you’re following the strategy we laid out above and writing compelling content that sells your product or service. 

This means using less graphical CTAs, email marketing opt-ins, etc., and using a more minimalist design with clear text that focuses the reader on the content itself. Remember, if you’ve followed the advice above, in particular steps 3–6, your content should be selling your product, so you don’t need graphical ad-looking CTAs in the first place. 

9. Use In-Line Contextualized CTAs Throughout the Copy of Your Blog Posts

Lastly, as an alternative to using graphical CTAs, we recommend using plain text, contextualized CTAs throughout your content. When doing this, keep in mind the following:

• Don’t just put CTAs at the end of the article. Many readers won’t make it to the end of your posts, so it’s useful to include CTAs in the introduction and body of the post. 

• Don’t use the same exact CTA for every article. Write CTAs that make sense contextually within your post. For example, if the topic of your post is on invoicing, and invoicing is one of a number of features offered by your software platform, make the CTA pertain specifically to your invoicing feature as opposed to your broader platform.

Keep in mind that the advice we’ve provided here on CTAs and design “best practices” are trivial in comparison to the sections on keyword selection and content writing above. 

For example, if someone is Googling a super high buying intent term, like “plumbing management app” and they go to a page that explains in detail the ways in which your plumbing management app works, and how it’s better (or different) than competitors, most modern blog layouts have plenty of call-to-action buttons for them to take your desired action (click to learn more, sign up for a demo or trial, etc.).

Get Help Driving Leads & Sales from Your Content Marketing Efforts

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can view our pricing and learn more about working with us here.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content marketing strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

1. Prioritizing ranking for SEO keywords with high buying intent
2. Selling your product or service through your blog content

Below we’ll explain why focusing on these two things will improve your conversion rates more than typical CRO “tips and tricks” that marketers discuss (e.g. A/B testing, analyzing heatmaps, adding social proof and testimonials, etc.).

Then, before we wrap up, we’ll share some additional resources and factors to consider for execution, including: 

• Why you should target individual keywords with dedicated blog posts
• How to measure blog conversion rates in Google Analytics 4
• What a good blog conversion rate is

Note: If you’d like help improving your blog conversion rate, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

Action #1: Prioritize Ranking for SEO Keywords with High Buying Intent

Most businesses, in-house marketers, content marketing agencies, and SEO agencies view blogs strictly as a channel for getting potential customers in their “conversion funnel,” not as an asset for directly selling products and services.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but little buying intent. For example, if you sell social media management software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “how to stand out on Twitter” or “social media ad trends.”

This approach is based on the assumption that with enough traffic — and by implementing conversion rate optimization practices such as providing a good user experience, including calls to action, etc. — conversions will inevitably follow. 

However, having measured conversion rates for hundreds of blog posts for dozens of clients, this assumption is flawed and untrue.

Specifically, while these keywords could potentially be searched for by your audience and may have high search volumes, searchers of these terms show no clear indication that they have intent to buy social media management software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best social media management software” or “social media management app.”) 

As a result, by our measures, these top of funnel keywords have very low conversion rates. And trying to solve that by making CRO tweaks to your site (e.g. adding popups with CTAs, offering a lead magnet, adding long sections selling your product or service,  etc.) is unlikely to make much of a difference because the website visitors coming in from those keywords are either a) too early in the customer journey to convert or b) flat-out not on the market for what you sell. 

This point is neatly summarized in this analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO content strategy): 

The right most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. 

The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

We also showed this at a larger scale in an analysis of 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. In that case study, you can read about how the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

This is why, in our experience, prioritizing high buying intent keywords is by far the most impactful way to boost conversion rates. If you do nothing else — and frankly, even if you don’t have super high-quality content — simply ranking for keywords where people are actively looking to buy what you sell will inevitably drive more conversions than ranking for low intent keywords. 

Regarding how you can actually execute this, check out these two articles which lay out our agencies processes in detail:

1. Choosing keywords — SEO Keyword Strategy: How to Prioritize Based on Buying Intent to Drive More Conversions
   
2. Ranking for those keywords — SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

Once you have that down, the other key part of improving website conversion rates is writing compelling product or sales copy to convert visitors into customers (this includes blog posts).

Action #2: Sell Your Product or Service In Each Piece of Content

Many SEO’s and content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the blog content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a service or product page in their content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.) to “take care of conversions.”

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed above — the tendency to prioritize keywords with high traffic potential but low buying intent. The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your blog content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely). 

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Particularly if you focus on high buying intent keywords, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent. 

If someone is searching for “best social media management software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. These are potential customers that want to understand the value propositions of this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. 

Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this type of search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content needs to discuss your product or service in-depth, much like a sales page.

We’ve written at length about the challenges of doing this well, and how we execute this for our clients. Check out our post on Pain Point Copywriting for a deep dive on writing copy that converts.

Additional Resources and Factors to Keep In Mind

Target Each High Intent Keyword with a Single, Dedicated Page That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

People in search engine optimization often try to target many different keywords with a single web page. But search engines don’t reward this approach like they used to. As algorithms have evolved, the approach of trying to rank for a bunch of keywords (especially competitive buying intent keywords) with a single blog post rarely works.

One of our key learnings in recent years (and a differentiator of our agency’s strategy) is that the best way to get top positions for high intent keywords is to create a dedicated page for each one — even when keywords have very similar meanings. 

For example, consider the keywords “sick leave tracking” and “sick leave app.” You can imagine that the intent behind these two search terms is nearly identical: searchers are looking for a tool to track employee sick leave.

But when you look at search results for these two terms, the top results are different. 

Here are the results for “sick leave tracking”:

And here are results for “sick leave app”:

Although intent is very similar, Google is ranking different pages for these terms, which indicates an opportunity to create dedicated pages to go after each of these keywords.

As we discussed in our conversation with Bernard Huang of Clearscope, you only get one SEO title, one H1 heading, one meta description, etc. If you try to rank for multiple target keywords with one piece of content, often it will only end up ranking for one of those keywords (or worse, you won’t match the intent of any individual keyword, and you won’t end up ranking for any of them).

Note: We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing.

Measuring Blog Conversions in Google Analytics

Clients and the companies we speak with ask us all the time about how we track conversions in Google Analytics, so we’ve created two long-form pieces of content that explain how to do this.  

First, we wrote a step by step tutorial on how to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Check that out for the full explanation.

Second, we created a long-form video walkthrough explaining the process:

What Is a Good Blog Conversion Rate?

Over the years, we’ve had a number of conversations with clients where they’ve expressed that they feel their organic conversion rate is low compared to what they thought was good. 

We think this is partially a result of companies using paid conversion rates as a benchmark for overall organic conversion rates. For example, they might see that their average conversion rate from Google Ads is ~3%, while their average overall conversion rate from organic search is somewhere in the 0.1%-0.3% range, and then conclude that their organic conversion rate is very low.

However, as we discussed at length in our deep dive video on average blog conversion rates, oftentimes the way companies look at their organic conversion rates is flawed. Specifically, they don’t segment out the different parts of their site and different mediums of traffic which skew conversion rates and make them seem higher or lower than they should be.

To gain a deeper understanding of what makes a good conversion rate, and how to more accurately measure your conversion rates from SEO, check out the video:

In the video, we share conversion rate data from two different clients of ours — both a mid-market/enterprise demo based SaaS company and a B2SMB self service SaaS company — and show how we’re getting 2%+ average conversion rates on our blog posts and compare those stats to how their sites convert overall from organic.

We share data on what we’ve seen for average blog conversion rates and explain what we think a good conversion rate target should be for each individual blog post.

In general, a good SEO conversion rate for pages ranking for bottom of funnel keywords is between 1%–5%. Anything above that is great. And in general, for an entire blog or content operation that largely focuses on bottom of funnel pieces, a conversion rate of 0.5%– 2% from visitor to lead, trial start, or eCommerce sale is good. 

Lastly, we share 3 examples of us outranking landing pages with blog posts and debate why we think blog posts are usually the better approach for high intent keywords — and why we think they may have higher conversion rates (even if the landing page were to rank higher than our blog post). 

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute an SEO-focused content strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us here.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team as a content strategist or writer.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content marketing strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here. 

While these user experience (UX) design tweaks and conversion optimization tactics are fine, in our experience they aren’t nearly as impactful as prioritizing and ranking for keywords where the people searching indicate they’re on the market looking to buy what you sell — we call these “high buying intent keywords.” 

In this article we’re going to share examples and data — based on the last 5 years tracking conversions of hundreds of blog posts for our clients — to back this up. Then, we’ll share other key learnings that have helped us maximize SEO conversions for our clients, as we’ve demonstrated in numerous in-depth case studies.

Below, we cover:

• Why ranking for high buying intent keywords is the most important aspect of improving SEO conversion rates

• 3 key factors to keep in mind for executing a conversion-focused SEO strategy

• How to track SEO conversions in Google Analytics

• What is a good SEO conversion rate?

Why Ranking for High Buying Intent Keywords Is the Most Important Aspect of Improving SEO Conversion Rates

As we’ve discussed at length many times, most businesses, in-house marketers, content marketing agencies, and SEO agencies use traffic-focused SEO strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that with enough website traffic, conversions will inevitably follow.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but low to zero buying intent. For example, if you sell employee scheduling software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “how to become a better manager” or “minimum wage by state.”

While these keywords could potentially be searched for by your audience and likely have high search volumes that could drive substantial organic traffic, searchers of these terms show no indication that they have intent to buy employee scheduling software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best employee scheduling software” or “employee scheduling app for small business.”) 

As a result, by our measures, these keywords have very low conversion rates. And trying to solve that by making CRO tweaks or UX improvements to your site is unlikely to make much of a difference because the website visitors coming in from those keywords aren’t even on the market for what you sell in the first place. 

If you’re a B2B or enterprise SaaS company selling employee scheduling software, is a pop-up or side bar CTA really going to convince someone that they all of the sudden need your product? In our experience, no. 

Could these tactics work for generating email subscriptions or selling low cost eCommerce products? Maybe (because these are much smaller asks) — but they’re still unlikely to impact conversion rates in the way that ranking for high buying intent keywords will.

This point is neatly summarized in this analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO strategy): 

The right most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. 

The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher.

We also showed this at a larger scale in an analysis of 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better.

In that case study, you can read about how the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

By all means, follow CRO best practices, but don’t expect that to be the thing that will improve your conversion rates. Instead, focus on ranking for as many high buying intent keywords as possible.

As you do, take into consideration the following 3 factors:

3 Key Factors to Consider When Developing and Executing a Conversion-Focused SEO Strategy

1. There’s Way More Buying Intent Keywords Than Most Businesses Realize

For many companies, the basic approach to SEO looks something like this:

1. Homepage: Optimize the homepage for one or two product or service category keywords. These are high buying intent keywords that describe what the company sells. For example, “executive assistant service” or “PPC reporting software.”
   
   
2. Service or product pages: Optimize a small handful of product or service pages (or feature and solutions pages in SaaS) for similar high buying intent keywords that describe the product or service. 
   
   
3. Blog: Use the blog to go after high search volume but low buying intent keywords as we discussed above. The blog is considered a tool for generating brand awareness and getting potential customers in your “conversion funnel,” not an asset for ranking for buying intent keywords and selling your service (more on this below).

In this scenario, companies are only targeting a small handful of buying intent keywords (maybe 5 to 10). But in our experience, this typically leaves a ton of buying intent keywords on the table.

Why?

First off, people often describe products and services in many different ways. For example, any given software may be described as:

• “Software” (e.g. “small business accounting software”)
• “Tool” (e.g. “project management tool”)
• “Platform” (e.g. “marketing analytics platform”)
• “App” (e.g. “field service app”)

It’s common for there to be several different keyword variations for your product or service. And if a business serves multiple industries or verticals, the list of variations grows longer. As we’ll discuss below, you simply won’t rank for all of these with your homepage and a small handful of product or service pages.

Furthermore, there are two other high intent keyword frameworks — competitor and alternatives keywords, and jobs to be done keywords — that can drive significant conversions, but are not going to be ranked for with home and product or service pages.

Companies should leverage blog content to go after all of these additional high intent opportunities — as we do at our agency — but most do not. 

Note: Pair this post with our article on SEO keyword strategy to aid you in your own keyword research.

2. Target Each High Intent Keyword with a Single, Dedicated Page That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

People in search engine optimization often try to target many different keywords with a single web page. But search engines don’t reward this approach like they used to. As algorithms have evolved, the approach of trying to rank for a bunch of keywords (especially competitive buying intent keywords) with a single page rarely works.

One of our key learnings in recent years (and a differentiator of our agency’s strategy) is that the best way to get top positions for high intent keywords is to create a dedicated page for each one — even when keywords have very similar meanings. 

For example, consider the keywords “sick leave tracking” and “sick leave app.” You can imagine that the intent behind these two search terms is nearly identical: searchers are looking for a tool to track employee sick leave.

But when you look at search results for these two terms, the top results are different. 

Here are the results for “sick leave tracking”:

And here are results for “sick leave app”:

Although intent is very similar, Google is ranking different pages for these terms, which indicates an opportunity to create dedicated pages to go after each of these keywords.

As we discussed in our conversation with Bernard Huang of Clearscope, you only get one SEO title, one H1 heading, one meta description, etc. If you try to rank for multiple target keywords with one piece of content, often it will only end up ranking for one of them (or worse, you won’t match the intent of any individual keyword, and you won’t end up ranking for any of them).

Note: We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing.

3. Sell Your Product in Each Piece of Content

Many SEO’s and content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the blog content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a product or service page in their content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.) to “take care of conversions.”

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed above — the tendency to prioritize keywords with high traffic potential but low buying intent. The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your blog content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely). 

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Particularly if you focus on high buying intent keywords, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent. 

If someone is doing a Google search for “best employee scheduling software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. They want to know what’s better about this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. 

Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content of the page needs to discuss your product or service in-depth.

How to Track SEO Conversions in Google Analytics

At a high-level, there are 3 steps to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):

1. Create “Conversion Events”. In Universal Analytics (UA), the previous version of Google Analytics, conversions were typically tracked by setting up what were called “Conversion Goals.” However, in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), conversion tracking is based on “Conversion Events.” You do that by first creating events you want to track and then marking the ones of interest as a “Conversion” event. These must be set up in order to access or create custom reports to view conversion data for the specific events you want to track.
   
   
2. Consider which attribution models you’ll use in your reports. An attribution model is a conversion counting method that determines how credit for conversions is assigned to touchpoints on conversion paths. No single attribution model will give you a complete and accurate view of your conversion data, so we recommend setting up multiple reports that use different models to get the best understanding of your conversion data.
   
   
3. Access or create reports to view and track your conversion data. GA4 offers a default conversion report which can provide a high-level overview of conversion performance. However, it’s useful to leverage additional custom reports to build up a more holistic view of your conversion data. We use the model comparison tool as well as an any touchpoint report. 

We’ve created two long-form pieces of content that explain how to track and report on SEO conversions in GA4.  

First, we wrote a step by step tutorial on how to set up SEO conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Check that out for the full explanation.

Second, we created a long-form video walkthrough explaining the process:

What Is a Good SEO Conversion Rate?

Over the years, we’ve had a number of conversations with clients where they’ve expressed that they feel their organic conversion rate is low compared to what they thought was good. 

We think this is partially a result of companies using paid conversion rates as a benchmark for overall organic conversion rates. For example, they might see that their average conversion rate from Google Ads is ~3%, while their average overall conversion rate from organic search is somewhere in the 0.1%-0.3% range, and then conclude that their organic conversion rate is very low.

However, as we discussed at length in our deep dive video on average blog conversion rates, oftentimes the way companies look at their organic conversion rates is flawed. Specifically, they don’t segment out the different parts of their site and different mediums of traffic which skew conversion rates and make them seem higher or lower than they should be.

To gain a deeper understanding of what makes a good conversion rate, and how to more accurately measure your conversion rates from SEO, check out the video:

In the video we share conversion rate data from two different clients of ours — both a mid-market/enterprise demo based SaaS company and a B2SMB self service SaaS company — and show how we’re getting 2%+ average conversion rates on our blog posts and compare those stats to how their sites convert overall from organic.

We share data on what we’ve seen for average blog conversion rates and explain what we think a good conversion rate target should be for each individual blog post.

In general, as we share in the video, a good SEO conversion rate for pages ranking for bottom of funnel keywords is between 1% – 5%. Anything above that is great. And in general, for an entire blog or content operation that largely focuses on bottom of funnel pieces, a conversion rate of 0.5% to 2% from visitor to lead, trial start, or eCommerce sale is good. 

Lastly, we share 3 examples of us outranking landing pages with blog posts and debate why we think blog posts are usually better to go after high intent keywords with — and how we think they may have higher conversion rates (even if the landing page were to rank higher than our blog post). 

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us here.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here. 

Typically, it comes up when we’re discussing going after a bottom-of-funnel SEO keyword with a blog post. For example, a software category keyword like “proposal creation software.”

In this scenario, the client will often ask us, “shouldn’t we create a landing page instead of a blog post for that?” And in many cases, when we look at what’s already ranking for a keyword like that, product landing pages are one of the primary page types in the SERPs (alongside home pages and list-style blog posts).

Whether to target a keyword with a landing page or a blog post is a legitimate question.

The main argument for going after a keyword with a landing page (instead of a blog post) is that landing pages convert better. So they think you should use landing pages for bottom-of-funnel, product based keywords, which have high product conversion intent, and save blog posts for mid and top funnel keywords that are more informational.

On the surface, this sounds logical.

But, in our experience, when you get into the fine details, you realize this simple argument may not be true. In fact, we almost always target bottom-of-funnel keywords with blog posts, not landing pages, and have seen a lot of success doing so.

There are a number of reasons why:

1. Conversions: Conversion rates of product landing pages are not always higher than conversion rates of blog posts (even for equivalent types of BOF keywords). We think this misconception comes from thinking about landing pages in the context of paid ads (search and social), where conversion rates can sometimes be as high as 10% – 20%. But from what we’ve seen, in the context of ranking product landing pages for organic positions (what we’re referring to as a “product landing page”), it’s not automatic that they have a higher conversion rate than blog posts. We have anecdotal evidence to support this, which we’ll discuss below.
2. Ranking: It’s often much more difficult to get a landing page to rank highly in organic search. A blog post format gives you more room to include relevant SEO keywords and answer the intent of the searcher, so blog posts are often easier to get ranking highly. And ranking needs to take priority first, since if your page doesn’t rank, it won’t matter how high your conversion rate is.
3. Intent: Often the intent of a BOF product category keyword is to view options, in which case a blog list post will often rank more highly than product landing pages (like in the screenshot above) because they’re better at satisfying search intent.

In this post, we’re going to share data and examples backing up these claims. Specifically:

• Anecdotal data that indicates product landing pages don’t always convert better than blog posts, and in some cases, convert at a significantly lower rate.
• The framework we use to decide when to use one or the other.
• Examples of blog posts we’ve created for clients where they’re outranking product landing pages for BOF keywords.
• A hybrid strategy of combining landing pages and blog posts.

The Idea That Product Landing Pages Convert Better than Blog Posts Isn’t Always True

In 2020, we were working with a SaaS client and one of their team members stood firmly on the side of creating product landing pages for BOF software category keywords. It started our own internal debate around this topic of landing page versus blog post conversion rates.

Devesh, who has run a conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency for years, was initially sympathetic to the client’s perspective—he felt that in his experience, a landing page structure does generally convert at a higher rate than most blog posts. But we decided to look into the data (examples below) and found what was, at first, a surprising conclusion.

The Notion of “High Converting Landing Pages” Tends to Come from Paid Search, Not Organic

Devesh was thinking of PPC landing pages that are highly optimized for conversion (excluding the main site navigation, reducing the number of options users can click on the page, etc.) and for which people are often self-qualifying when they click on an ad (most commonly a Google search ad).

For example, if you Google “data analytics software” (the kind of B2B SaaS term where PPC landing pages abound), you’re met with not one, not two, but four ad spots, all of which go to dedicated landing pages for each product (yes, we clicked on all four, sorry to these brands and their PPC agencies):

All of them have the same structure—a very common and well tested structure—of information on the left and a demo request or trial start form on the right, all above the fold:

It’s a very aggressive, conversion-focused experience. And these landing pages can convert as high as double digits (10%+).

But think about the psychology of someone who clicks on that ad. They Googled a software related term and willingly clicked on one of the ads. They know what they are getting into.

Our hypothesis is that a larger fraction of these ad-clicking users are not in research mode but are ready to request demos or start trials—as evidenced by them willingly clicking those ads. In other words, if you click an ad, you are self-selecting as someone who is ready to be sold. As a result, conversion rates can be very high for these landing pages.

Organic Results Are Different: Blog Posts Can (And Have) Converted Better Than Product Landing Pages

But the organic listing spots can be a lot different. In the organic spots, as per data we’ll show below, we haven’t seen product landing pages convert much higher than blog posts.

There are a few reasons for why we think this is:

1. Way more people click on organic listings than ads (e.g. tens of thousands of visitors in the example we share below). Pages getting that kind of traffic aren’t going to convert at 10%+.
2. Someone scrolling down the SERP and clicking on an organic listing is slightly higher in the funnel and has less immediate purchase intent (i.e. they’re more in research mode) than someone who clicks on an ad.
3. Compared to a blog post, a product landing page format is typically thin on content, providing less room to discuss a product’s positioning at length, educate visitors on how it’s different and better than competitors, etc.

So, to show some anecdotal data that supports this, here’s what we found when we compared conversion rates of blog posts versus landing pages for the client we mentioned above:

We calculated the conversion rates from organic traffic for three product landing pages and blog posts targeting closely comparable BOF keywords.

The data set on top looks at conversion rates for their industry product landing pages, and the data set on bottom looks at our blog posts for three of those same industries—the only difference being that for industries #2 and #3, we were targeting keywords that included industry + software + a specific feature.

For industry #1, we were essentially targeting the exact same keyword as the “QuickBooks Integration” version of the landing page. That post outranks the equivalent product landing page shown above (Industry #1 + Software + QuickBooks Integration), drives more organic traffic, and also has converted at 1.27% on average since it’s been published.

On average, you can see their conversion rate hovers in the 0.4% range for the product landing pages we looked at, whereas our blog posts convert at 1.13%.

Yes, the traffic and conversion volume for the product landing pages is much higher overall. In part that’s a function of those pages having been published for a longer time period, and in part it’s due to those head target keywords (“industry + software” vs. “industry + software + feature”) having higher search volume. However, the purpose of gathering this data was to look specifically at conversion rates, because that’s the most common reasoning behind using landing pages over blog posts for BOF terms.

This is obviously a small data set and not a perfect comparison, but it’s illustrative of the fact that product landing pages do not always convert at a higher rate than blog posts. They usually do because most companies don’t write BOF blog posts that sell their product in a compelling way. But blog content that does this can convert just as high or higher than product landing pages.

And, blog posts are typically easier to get ranking highly in the SERPs, which we’ll discuss more in the next section.

Note: If you’d like to learn our content strategy and apply it to your business, we teach everything we do and give personalized feedback in our content marketing course and community.

Our Framework for Deciding When to Go After a Keyword with a Blog Post vs. a Landing Page

Now, just because we’ve dismissed the idea that landing pages generally convert better than blog posts doesn’t mean there is no decision to be made. It still may be the case that for a given keyword a landing page (or just a more product-focused page) is better than a blog post.

To help make that decision, we look to SERP analysis, which (among other steps) involves reviewing the titles, page types, and sources of existing page one results.

When we’re looking at search results for a BOF keyword, like a software category keyword, we’re first looking to understand:

• Which page types are showing up? (e.g. Software review lists? Competitor product home pages? Competitor product landing pages? Blog posts?)
• Would a blog post be an appropriate fit for satisfying search intent?
• Would a blog post have a good chance of ranking in the top 3 positions?
• What type of blog post would most closely satisfy search intent?

If all or a majority of the results are blog posts, the decision is easy. A blog post can rank highly and satisfy search intent.

However, often there’s a mix of product landing pages and product home pages with just a few blog posts (or sometimes none at all). This is when we need to figure out whether a) it’s still worth creating a blog post or b) our client would be better off going after that keyword with a product landing page.

Here’s how we think about this:

First, we take into consideration our client’s authority in their space. Are they a super well known brand that generally has an easy time getting product pages to rank for competitive BOF keywords?

If that’s the case, it may well make sense for them to create a product landing page due to the majority of the SERP being landing or product pages suggesting that perhaps that’s what the user is looking for—not a wordy blog post.

However, if they aren’t a super well known brand in the space that search engines recognize as an authority, it’s likely that client may have low chances of ranking a product page—which has less space for including relevant keywords, increasing time spent on site, and improving other ranking factors which Google takes into account when ranking web pages.

In this case, we’ll often choose to go ahead with a blog post because it gives our client a more realistic chance of ranking. (Which, again, has to take first priority because if a page doesn’t rank, the format of the page won’t make a difference.)

Then it becomes a question of which type of post we’ll write. We’ll often do a list post because as we mentioned above, these types of posts often rank highly for BOF product and service keywords where search intent is to view and weigh options against each other.

Note: A lot of companies feel hesitant or unwilling to write list-style posts because they don’t want to draw attention to their competitors. However, we’ve found that the advantages of leveraging that format—which in many cases increases the chances of ranking in a top spot—outweighs the disadvantages of mentioning their competitors. We’ve found that when list posts are done well, they’re very effective for ranking and producing conversions. And they can also aid your sales process by talking up your key value props relative to competitors upfront. Ultimately, if people are Googling a product related keyword and seeing lists of products and you’re not controlling that conversation, you’re just leaving those conversions and customers on the table. If what it takes to rank highly for one of these high-converting keywords (and capture the customers searching for it as a result) is listing products beyond just yours, we think it’s more than worth it.

Next, we’ll share examples where we’ve earned top positions in the SERPs for BOF keywords, where many of the search results are product landing pages.

Client Examples of Blog Posts Outranking Product Landing Pages for BOF Keywords

We rank #1 with a blog post—in a SERP of mostly product landing pages—for the keyword “clock in clock out app” for our client Buddy Punch, an employee time clock software and app:

We also rank #1 for Buddy Punch for “mobile time clock app” with a blog post where 7 of the results ranking below us are product landing pages and home pages:

We’re ranking #2 underneath G2 for the keyword “sales onboarding software” with this list post for our client Bigtincan:

Notice how results in positions #3 and #4 are product landing pages (there are also several others below).

We’re ranking #1 for the keyword “delivery mapping software” for our client Circuit, with two product home pages ranking below:

We’re ranking #1 for the keyword “video to text transcription software” for our client Reduct:

Notice the two results below—a product landing page and a home page. There are several other home pages lower on the page as well.

The above examples are just a sample, there are many more like this across dozens of clients.

We can see that there are many cases in which a list-style blog post can better satisfy search intent for BOF products or service keywords, and therefore outrank competitors’ product landing pages.

When you take into account that, on average, search results in position 1-3 receive ~60% of organic traffic, even if the list post does have a lower conversion rate—which as we showed above isn’t always true—the increased organic traffic can easily still produce a higher volume of conversions.

So, when you’re choosing whether to create a landing page or blog post for any given BOF keyword, it’s worth considering this in your decision making process.

Note: Interested in whether we can drive these types of results for your business? Learn more about our content marketing service here.

The Hybrid Strategy: Combining Landing Pages and Blog Posts

Some companies and marketers are beginning to use a hybrid strategy where they create a template that folds blog content into a traditional product landing page structure.

The thinking is that the editorial content from the blog post can help the page rank higher, while the landing page structure can increase conversion rates.

Our client ServiceTitan has been experimenting with this on their competitor comparison pages. We write comparison blog posts optimized for “[Competitor] vs. ServiceTitan”—and they place that editorial content within a landing page template.

The top of the page uses a common landing page format:

Beneath that, they use a comparison table, which is another common element of a product comparison landing page:

And beneath that, they place our blog post with a Table of Contents for easy navigation:

Below, you can see them ranking in position #1—above Software Advice, G2, and one of their top competitors, Housecall Pro:

Whereas, Ahrefs shows them ranking in position #3 (below Software Advice and Capterra) back in December 2020 prior to publishing the blog content on that page:

In ServiceTitan’s case, they had pre-existing (and already ranking) comparison landing pages that they added the blog content to which boosted the rankings even higher.

However, there are other ways you can consider approaching this. For example, you could create the blog post first to have the highest likelihood of ranking. And then once you’ve achieved that ranking, build a landing page-style template around it later to optimize the page for conversions.

Or, you could create a hybrid page from the get-go. Either way, based on what we’re seeing, it’s absolutely worth testing a hybrid strategy.

Get Help on Your SaaS Content Marketing

• Questions/Comments? If you have any questions or comments about what we’ve discussed in this post, please let us know in the comments section below.
• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here or see this video walkthrough:

Here are two examples, from companies we’ve worked with recently, of how customer feedback was a game changer for their business.

A financial advisory company in the beta version of our upcoming content marketing training program used an email based customer feedback survey to learn the salary range and job titles of their existing customers (retirees). But also discovered a surprising insight: their customers hardly read about investing or financial planning. Their customers were getting financial recommendations from friends, the news and top publications. This is a breakthrough insight: it means that writing more content on financial tools, interest rates, 401(k)s and such wasn’t going to attract more of these customers. So they decided to switch their strategy to focus on customer success stories and guest posts.

A real estate software company in the same program learned that their ideal customers were real estate brokerages with the team size (2 – 3 people) and revenue range ($500k – $2MM).. This differed from their original hypothesis that companies they worked with ranged from 1-25 people and revenue from $500k-$25MM. It turns out that the problems of real estate agents with smaller (1 person) and larger (10+) teams are very different from this 2 – 3 person sweet spot. This was critical to developing a content strategy with a laser focus on this sweet spot.

A great content strategy starts and ends with a total obsession with knowing everything about your best customers so you can attract more of them.

Note: The word “best” in front of customers is intentional. Building a consistent customer generation machine from content takes work. So why spend that energy, time, and money only to attract low revenue, high churn, or simply bad-fit customers?

Now, email based surveys are great, but no tool is a panacea, and emailed surveys have limitations for many businesses. In particular:

• Limited “email capital” – You can only email your customers asking them to take a survey so often without starting to turn  them off. So if you want to ask a quick follow up question, you often have to wait weeks or months.
• Segmentation headache – For multi-product businesses like e-commerce, how do you ask specific questions to only customers interested in specific products? Or for any business, how do you ask questions to customers who arrived via certain channels? It’s possible, but tedious.

In this article, we’re going to dissect a different survey tool: on-site feedback surveys.

On-site surveys break open the two limitations above, and have other benefits like getting instant feedback on the copy, contents, and usability of your site. We discuss all of these in this article as well as how you can leverage the answers you get into content ideas.

I’ll briefly introduce what these are first, and then we’ll dive into the use cases and strategy.

What is an on-site customer feedback survey?

This is what we’re talking about:

You’ve likely seen them at the bottom of websites, such as our homepage:

They can be triggered by time on page, scroll amount, or exit intent.

We have zero affiliation with any of the dozens of companies that make this type of survey tool, but we use Hotjar and here are some more options from this Quora question where people discuss the competitors:

• Qualaroo
• Qeryz
• Survicate
• Usability Tools
• Informizely
• Webengage
• Free Survey Creator

Aside: Look at how competitive this space is. Isn’t it amusing that to stand out in the customer survey space, you’ll need to understand the pains, hopes, dreams, and fears of the customers better than everyone else? It’s the opposite of irony. What’s the word for that?

You apply this to your site the same way as most website tools: put their javascript snippet on every page and run everything else from the company’s dashboard.

That’s it. Check out any of the software company’s sites above for more info on how to set them up.

Now let’s talk strategy.

Using Customer Feedback Tools To Improve Sales: Find Out Why Customers Don’t Purchase

One of the biggest objections we hear to email based surveys is along the lines of:

We don’t want to over-email our customers.

Even after a company sends a survey and gets great insights, there’s a hesitation about when they can email again.

No single survey tells you every single thing you need to know about your customers, and often times, the answers you get spark additional questions that you’re dying to ask.

For example, a client of my conversion optimization agency sells swimsuits to women. To understand what content was missing from their product pages, we asked first this:

We were looking for responses that could help us build more persuasive product pages.

For example:

• Were they unsure about returns?
• Were they looking for certain features?
• Could they not find the products they were looking for?
• Did they want a discount?
• Etc.

We got some good insights on those fronts, but we also got a sizeable number of unexpected responses like these:

Hold the phone. They don’t have enough sizes? This is a plus size swimsuits site, the right size selection is a core part of the value proposition.

Obviously, that’s not a UI/UX issue, it’s a merchandizing issue. So it’s not something we can “fix” with an AB test, but it’s incredibly insightful.

But now, as a result of this one survey question, we wanted to ask another.

We wanted to know the exact products and sizes potential customers wanted, but that the store didn’t carry. We also wanted to know what percentage of users could find their size versus could not (how big of a problem was this?).

Asking this follow up question is simple with an on-site feedback survey: we just stopped the question above and turned on this two part question instead:

Despite the clunky and grammatically incorrect second question, we got exactly what we were looking for:

In addition to just “I want this product in this size” feedback, look at the subtleties we got from certain customers and their frustrations. Men may not understand this (I certainly didn’t) but buying a swimsuit as a woman isn’t as simple as finding one size number.

The last two responses in the sample screenshot above will show the product team (not just the marketing team) that there are customers with this frustration: for smaller swimsuits, women weren’t finding a bust size that worked for them.

What’s more, you get a sense from reading this feedback that these prospects want to find a solution that works. They want to buy. They’re just frustrated that the product offering is not quite right for them.

Our hypothesis: The company is losing these otherwise easy sales.

If you’re curious about how this “ended”, these are recent results, so merchandizing decisions to appease these complaints are still in the works.

Grow and Convert Monthly Coaching

We recently started asking a similar question on our coaching page:

And have a few responses already:

Even though we just have a few responses, we’ve already seen two people mention that they are just starting out, which is an interesting nugget about the type of people that are hitting that page and have some interest in the program.

After a dozen or more responses we should be able to uncover some more insights.

Hidden Content Opportunities

Finally, this benefit is not exclusive to on-site surveys, but is a benefit nonetheless: product frustrations can often be leveraged as content opportunities.

In this case of the plus size swimsuit site, we saw the frustration that many women had about finding unique combinations of top/bottom sizes when buying a swimsuit. A swimsuit sizing guide, an interactive swimsuit sizing “mini app” or something similar could be a great content or mega project opportunity.

Using On-Site Customer Feedback Surveys To Create Copy That Compels Customers To Purchase

Another wonderful page-specific use of on-site polls is getting direct customer quotes for copy on your marketing site. For example:

• How do you figure out what benefits are most interesting to your users?
• What features are making them sign up?
• What headline or sub-headline would resonate the most?

This use case can be really impactful for businesses such as SaaS, services (agencies), marketplaces (Upwork, Codeable, etc.), that generally have this onboarding flow:

1. User browses the marketing site, which usually consists of: homepage summary, features, product, services, pricing, case studies, etc.
2. If the user is persuaded, they “convert” by signing up for a demo, free trial, free plan, or purchasing the product outright.

These types of businesses are notorious for feature overload. For example, ask a founder of a SaaS company to explain what their company does and in 0.5 seconds you’ll be knee deep in feature minutiae.

But if you’re a marketing manager that wants to optimize the list of features, change messaging, optimize headlines, or focus more on benefits, it can be a fight (with executives, founders, product managers, engineers):

“No way Robbie, we HAVE to mention this feature…”

It’s easy to lecture your coworkers on persuasion best practices like the features vs. benefits principle. But the frustrating paradox is prospective customers of these businesses do want to know what features are available.

For example, the one reason I use Hotjar vs. others for our surveys is because of its features. In addition to on-site surveys, it also includes screen recording, form analytics, and heatmaps at a damn good price, so I don’t have to use 3 or 4 separate tools. (I promise we have no relationship with them, I’m just being honest.)

But what features are the most important to your business? What benefits should be mentioned at the top? How should you word your headline? Would more screenshots work better than more case studies?

These are hard questions to answer.

It often takes many iterations and months (or years) to get it right. That’s okay. We’re not here to oversimplify things and tell you to just follow these “15 best practices” and sales will go through the roof.

But what we are saying is that by asking your customers the right questions, it can help you figure out the right combination of words, features and benefits to make customers purchase.

For example, for a SaaS client that makes a communications app (web, iOS, and Android) for small business owners, we asked this question:

What more do you want to know about [PRODUCT] before signing up?

There were a huge number of users that wanted to know how it worked.

Interesting…we thought we already explained that!

Instead of asking follow up questions (after we asked this first question) and digging deep into their answers, we jumped to conclusions and started testing what we assumed would satisfy them.

We tested putting a bunch of features from the features page right on landing pages. Didn’t work.

Then we tested featuring the how it works video on the page more prominently. Didn’t work.

Doing this was a big mistake. Instead of assuming, we should’ve just asked our customers more questions to figure out what we didn’t explain well.

We went through numerous tests that took up a bunch of time and resources, and all of that could’ve been saved by asking the right questions.

We eventually found out that all customers wanted to know was that the product was easy to use and that we didn’t explicitly say that anywhere on the site. 

The customers of this company were small business owners, who are notoriously: busy, stressed out, and in this case, not tech savvy.

They didn’t want to waste time learning something complex. They needed a product that was intuitive and easy to use.

If we had asked the follow up questions needed to get to this conclusion early on, we would’ve found the answer to increasing sales much faster.

After numerous iterations, we finally changed the wording on the site to a simple section that explained how the product works in 3 steps (and got the results we were looking for).

The new copy subtly mentioned features, and wrapped them in benefit-heavy copy. This, along with some other minor changes we made to the page, increased signups 7.6%.

There are a bunch of ways we could have used on site polls to lead us in the right direction before running all of the previous failed tests:

• We could have asked users who just signed up what made them sign up
• We could have asked users inside the app what they like most about it.
• We could have asked an iterative question on the homepage about what one feature or benefit the prospects were hoping to get.
• We could have asked a myriad of questions about prospects’ pain points

I could go on and on…

Hidden Content Opportunities

Just like the e-commerce example above, these types of businesses can also leverage survey answers to create content that attracts their ideal customers.

For example, a todo list app may ask what users biggest frustrations with todo lists are and find a bunch of users complaining about saying yes to too many requests – not the mechanics of their actual to-do list. Not only can this be leveraged for on site copywriting (emphasize more free time, and de-emphasize some nerdy feature), but it can also make for content pieces that attract bottom of the funnel customers that are likely to convert: i.e. how to say no to requests, how to delegate tasks or projects, etc.

A mobile development agency could learn that most prospects have tried to develop the app “themselves” by finding solo contractors for each step of the process: interaction designer, visual designer, coder, etc.

So, the company could create content on ‘how to manage a remote mobile development team’, or ‘how to find the best Swift coders’. This could be a great way to attract middle of funnel customers.

Using Survey Tools to Simply Ask Customers What Resources to Create

I want to mention another simple way of getting continuous feedback on customer pain points and content ideas: ask your readers what else they want to read on your blog.

We recently installed this poll on our homepage:

Response rates are low right now, but we’ve begun receiving responses:

There are other ways that we’re hoping to increase responses. In particular we’re keen on these two ideas:

1. We can trigger a question like this when a reader reaches the end of a post (and they are very engaged, as opposed to on our homepage).
2. We can ask topic specific questions to get more ideas and insights into readers’ pain points on specific posts, such as hiring writers, conversions, user research, etc.

We’ll be testing these methods soon.

Advantages of using instant, on-site, page specific surveys

Above we covered the tactics of what questions you can ask where for different business types. Now, let’s step back and understand, from a strategy perspective, the advantages of on-site surveys.

Instant responses are more detailed responses

For ecommerce companies with many products (like apparel), it’s very hard to get product specific feedback like the first use case over email. We were asking the size question at the exact moment the customers had the frustration.

Ask them a week later over email? They may not remember exactly what product details were frustrating them. They may have looked at 10 products on your site then another 10 on your competitor’s site. Information can get muddled and you lose the insight.

Stops you from jumping to conclusions

Let’s just put this out there: we marketers are experts at jumping to conclusions.

The last half decade of “growth” and “lean startup” trends help push us towards this:

“Iterate quickly!”

“Fail fast!”

“High throughput growth experiments!”

Look, there is a lot of value in this philosophy, and by and large, I agree with it. But like anything, the devil is in the details.

In this case, not understanding why an idea “failed” is the devil.

And this “why” is very often qualitative, not quantitative. That is, you need your customer to talk about their reasoning, not just look at some analytics numbers yourself.

In the swimsuits example above, a rash decision would be to pull a new product from the store because it wasn’t selling well. But you wouldn’t even know that a simple thing like a few size combinations could be the difference between low selling and high selling.

(To be fair to the lean startup movement, they emphasize this customer feedback step extensively. But most people just don’t do it.)

Your Turn: Prep Your Own On Site Polls

We want to help you take action on this, even if it’s a tiny step. So we’ve prepared this action item. It doesn’t take long and like you saw above, the results can be transformative:

Stop for 5 minutes and brainstorm two things that could pay big dividends for your company’s site-based lead generation.

1. First, what are the three most high impact or high traffic pages on your site?
2. Second, think of 5 questions for each page that, if you got the answers to, could help validate, invalidate, or totally change assumptions you are making on that page about what your users want.
3. Finally, pick one question to start with for each page.

The resulting list is your initial on-site customer feedback survey plan. (Think of how impactful getting all 15 questions answered would be.)

Or, take the very first step right now by mentioning in the comment what the #1 most critical conversion page (or page category) on your site is — this is the page where insights from on site polls would be most useful. Is it your homepage? Product page? Signup page? Pricing page?

Want us to write an in depth case study or story like this about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

What brings higher ROI for companies, nurturing leads through an email list or going for direct conversions?

Let me explain.

Some people think it’s more effective to ask readers to join an email list first, then nurture these “email leads” by dripping content to them. Once the lead has been properly nurtured, the company will finally get the prospect to convert into a “real lead” by taking the first step in becoming a customer: start a trial, request a demo, buy some products (ecommerce), talk to a sales rep (B2B sales).

Others think it’s best to go directly for the sale and skip the email list nurturing altogether.

In this article, we’re going to answer the question “Which strategy is better: Lead nurturing or direct conversions?” with simple arithmetic.

We’ll walk through some typical conversion funnels for a few common business types, run through some example conversion rates, and see why, for most businesses, getting blog readers to directly start the purchase process makes more sense from a conversion perspective than having blog readers first join an email list.

Let’s get started.

The Funnel Options: Email List Nurturing vs. Direct Conversions

To anchor this discussion, let’s create a hypothetical SaaS company: account.ly, that makes small business accounting software (like Quickbooks or Xero).

Note: I love making fun of the fact that every other startup these days ends with .ly. Runner up was accountant.io. If you have other ideas for cliche startup names, please let me know in comments, it’ll make my day.

Let’s say account.ly has built a blog for small businesses owners as part of their demand generation efforts. In it, they discuss financial tips, accounting tips, and other useful strategies for small businesses (their target audience).

After some hard work doing user research to understand their audience, coming up with a unique angle to content strategy based on what they know about their customers, then promoting their content well, they start to get some good traffic to their blog: 30,000 unique visitors a month.

How can account.ly most efficiently turn blog readers into paying users for their software platform?

Strategy 1: Join Email List, Nurture to a Lead. Ask blog readers to join an email list; send drip emails to nurture these “leads”.

Joining your email list can happen in a few different ways. We’ve talked about content upgrades inside individual blog posts before, there are also popups and other forms, as well as the traditional (some say, outdated) method of offering a whitepaper or ebook.

Then, eventually, after these email subscribers are warmed up, the company will pitch them their product or service a few times, and some fraction of their email list will convert into a fully grown up, grade A, full-fledged, lead. Again, a lead being defined as: someone who has expressed interest in your product or service.

In the case of account.ly, a SaaS company, that means they sign up for a free trial of the software. (In the case of agencies or B2B services businesses, that usually means they sign up to talk to a sales rep.)

Strategy 2: Direct to Trial. Ask blog readers to start their trial directly from the blog.

This is more straightforward. In this option, the reader is simply asked to signup to become a lead directly (that means starting a trial, talking a salesperson, or somehow being asked to express interest in the product).

How to Decide Which Conversion Strategy Is Best for Your Business

Deciding which lead generation strategy is better for your company is a matter of measuring and multiplying the conversion rate percentages in the two strategies presented above.

Here’s the key difference.

Note that Strategy 1, “Lead Nurturing”, has two conversion rate percentages:

1. Percent that join the email list
2. Percent that become leads from the email list.

But, Strategy 2, “Direct Conversion”, has only one conversion rate percentage.

Deciding which is the most efficient conversion strategy for you is simply a matter of measuring these conversion rates and multiplying them. (Note, we’ve created a simple spreadsheet to do this. You can get it free, here.)

Example Conversion Rates for a SaaS Company

Here are example numbers for our hypothetical accounting SaaS company: account.ly.

I’ve put in example numbers that I think are typical based on my experience optimizing conversion rates for clients via my agency.

The three key inputs are lines 4, 5, and 7.

Line 4: Email Conversion Rate

This is your conversion rate from reader to email subscriber. It varies wildly from blog to blog, and in our experience is a heavy function of content quality and email optin tactics.

I put in 3% because it’s achievable for most good blogs with 5 figures in traffic a month in unique visitors. That should be your benchmark for email conversion rates for 5 figure traffic blogs.

For example, here are our conversion rates to email in the last 30 days for our top 10 landing pages:

Most posts convert higher than 3%, with the highest at 12% (that’s this post on getting traffic from Medium, in case you want to dissect why), and we achieve an average of 4.6% across all of them.

In my experience, if a blog exceeds 100,000 uniques a month, then it becomes hard to crack 2% in conversion rate to email. I’ve had clients that have done it, but they are special cases and most blogs can’t do that.

If you’ve been measuring this number via GA or another tool, put that into line 4 of the conversion calculator. If you haven’t, look up how many email subscribers you got in the last 30 days from your company blog, then divide this number by your unique visitors (users) in the last 30 days on your company blog, that’s your blog-reader to email-subscriber conversion rate.

Note: We’ll release another post soon on how to measure these conversion rates via Google Analytics. If you are on our email list, you’ll get it first. If not, you can join for free here and you’ll also get the spreadsheet that we’re talking about in this article.

Line 5: Direct to Lead Conversion Rate

This is the conversion rate from blog readers to actual leads.

I’ve defined what an actual lead is above, but in short it’s the first step in the funnel to buying your product or service. In the case of account.ly, it’s starting a free trial.

I know, most companies at this point want to know “What is a typical conversion rate?”. Sadly, this is even more tough to give a sweeping generality.

Remember though:

• We’re not talking about conversion rates from a landing page.
• We’re not talking about conversion rate from your homepage.
• We’re talking about conversion rates from content (i.e., blog posts).

I’ve seen single SaaS blog articles convert from just above zero to 5%+ to a free trial. So, I think for an entire blog, half a percent is average/achievable when traffic is in the 5-figure uniques per month range. (As usual, as traffic increases, expect for there to be a decrease in conversion rates.)

So, for the sake of the calculation below, we’ll use 0.5% as the direct to lead conversion rate because it should be very achievable for most businesses.

Note: If your business is B2B Enterprise, an agency, a subscription service, or even e-commerce, your conversion rate on this step may vary wildly. You have to measure.

If you don’t have any idea what your direct to lead conversion rate is, you can simply put in an initial guess and flip the use of this calculation around and ask:

“What would my direct conversion rate have to be in order to beat the email lead nurturing strategy?”

Line 7: Email to Lead Conversion Rate

Finally, the 3rd key input is the percentage of email subscribers you can convert into leads per month. This is arguably the hardest to measure because most companies don’t have clarity on whether an email subscriber is also a product/service lead (e.g. has started a trial or talked to a sales rep) due to improper reporting in their analytics and CRM.

For example, most companies don’t know if the prospect became a lead first or an email subscriber first. (So, how can you figure out if the nurture emails are converting email subscribers into leads if you’re not sure if they were already leads when they subscribed or not?)

The majority of companies in our beta Customers from Content Program told us the leads that convert from their email list were near zero. Most could not recall the last time they got a paying customer from their email list.

So, I’m being (rather) generous here and saying 8% of account.ly email subscribers will eventually start a trial. (We’ll discuss some more scenarios for this number below).

Compare Rates to Decide The Optimal Conversion Strategy

After you’ve input the above 3 conversion rates into the model, simply multiply the blog-to-email (Line 4) and email-to-lead (Line 7) rates and compare it to your direct conversion rate (Line 5).

Our little conversion calculator does this for you on Line 10:

So in the case of our hypothetical SaaS startup, account.ly, even though they can capture email opt-ins at 600% the rate that they get direct leads (3% vs. 0.5%), it makes more sense to get direct leads.

In our experience, these numbers are extremely typical.

Note: If you skipped down to this section and are wondering where 3%, 5% and 8% came from, scroll up to the Example Conversion Rates for a SaaS Company section.

Although the vast majority of companies can capture email subscribers far more efficiently than leads for their product or service, when you factor in the difficulty of converting potential prospects twice — once to email subscriber, then from email subscriber to lead — the direct conversion route typically wins.

Let’s explore a few more “typical” scenarios.

Other Common Conversion Scenarios For Businesses

Scenario 1: “No one from our email list becomes an actual lead”

Like I briefly mentioned above, not getting an email subscriber to convert to a customer for your business, is extremely common. For many businesses, it’s really hard to convert email subscribers, who joined to consume content, to actual leads for their business.

We see this with development agencies, enterprise software companies that have a high touch B2B sales process, and more.

There are many factors involved, but typically this due to:

• An undeveloped drip email strategy (Having literally zero strategy.)

• Infrequent emailing (“We email once a month.”)

• The best customers self-selecting to fill out a lead form instead of join an email list.

In this case, the email-to-lead conversion rate (Line 7) is nearly zero, so it doesn’t matter how many emails you collect (Line 4), they’ll never become customers.

For example, here’s a typical case:

This may look like an exaggeration, but this is extremely typical for many businesses. 900 email subscribers a month but only 1.8 leads from the email list a month on average.

If this example relates to your business, you should think very carefully before investing in expensive “marketing automation” software that promote dripping emails to “nurture leads”.

Focusing instead on careful user research, and writing bottom of the funnel content, and converting them directly into leads will likely let you enjoy much higher conversion rates.

Scenario 2: A very high direct to lead conversion rate

Another common scenario, seen often in B2C companies is a high direct to lead conversion rate. Apps like Buffer would likely fall into this category. If it’s trivial for users to sign up for your service (for example with Buffer, you just login with Twitter and schedule a few tweets, not a huge ask), then just asking them to sign up will be hard to beat by a two step email nurturing process.

Here’s what that could look like:

If you can collect a ton of leads or signups directly off of blog posts, it just doesn’t make sense to waste your time with email.

I’ve picked Buffer as an example not just because it’s an easy ask to ask someone to join their email list, but they actually switched their blog CTAs from email signups to Buffer app signups a while back and Kevan Lee wrote a great extensive post about it.

Some things in his post stand out to me:

What do you do with the list?

They are transparent about the fact that they had no idea what to do with emails once they collected them. I love this. Kevan even coins (I believe he coined it) the term “zero sell” to describe how they were neither hard selling nor soft selling to their email list. Amusing. Indeed it’s tough to get signups when you don’t ask for them.

Who is on the list?

He has an interesting discussion on email list segmentation, where he talks about the difficulty of not knowing who on your email list is already a customer, as I alluded to above.

Conversion Rates!

Most importantly, he (in typical transparent Buffer fashion) reveals their conversion rates, and we learn that reader to blog is 2.81%, and reader to Buffer app signup is 2.27%.

Now, I don’t know the details of those numbers and whether they are measuring conversion rates from the same sources/traffic/pages.

But, if they are, it’s a no brainer to go straight to Buffer signups. We can use our conversion calculator to see how high the email to Buffer app signups would need to be for this 2.81% vs. 2.27% difference to tilt the scales in favor of collecting emails first.

Their email “nurturing” would need to convert 81% of email subscribers in to app signups to beat the 2.27% direct to signup rate they have now!

That’s not easy. I want to say impossible, but I won’t say it, because who knows. But a trying to get 80% of your email list to open your emails is next to impossible…forget about getting that many to sign up for your app.

Exception: Blog and launch based businesses

Finally, if you’re a “blogger” or have a “launch” based businesses that is driven off of your email list, then congrats for making it this far, because this article didn’t really apply to you. For these businesses, there is no direct conversion, customers can only purchase via select product launches that have set open and close dates and are promoted through the email list. For such businesses, of course it makes sense to build an email list first. Grow and Convert is one example.

More Complex Models

Finally, I’d like to note that, yes, there are far more complexities that one could model than what we’ve done in this article. I’m fully aware that our little calculator is just multiplying a few numbers.

The reason we’ve belabored this multiplication, however, is to outline the concept.

In our experience working with multiple companies building content marketing engines that produces customers reliably, we’ve found that analytics and measuring conversion rates effectively were huge pain points.

Marketer after marketer had little clarity on this.

So walking through a simple calculation like this in a methodical way helps marketers understand this concept.

Two additional complexities that have not been modeled in this article include:

• What happens when there are calls to action for both joining your email list and signing up for your product? Our current spreadsheet doesn’t account for “and”, it just shows you “or”.

• What if free to paid conversion rates differ between the two strategies? The model currently doesn’t delve into how email lead nurturing could affect how many trials or leads convert into paying customers.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into questions like these, or others, you can do a few things.

First, you can get a link to our spreadsheet by joining our email list (or if you’re already on it, just re-enter your email), fill it in and reply to the email with your question and we’ll do our best to discuss your specific scenario as time allows.

Second, individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

Today we’re profiling a fitness site that grew traffic and subscribers with Facebook Ads that made them money.

We’re going to see how Erika of Erika Volk Fitness added 1,892 email subscribers and got 11,850 unique visitors in one month with a Facebook ad campaign that hasn’t cost her a dime. In fact, she’s come out of the campaign ROI positive.

The best part is, Erika did this:

• without any prior Facebook ad knowledge (this was her very first campaign)
• without a massive budget (she started with $20/day)
• without a massive Facebook following (her Facebook page had 551 likes).

Because this is paid advertising driven customer acquisition, these aren’t one off numbers, they’re rates. Until she exhausts her target audience on Facebook, she can continue serving up ads and keep getting results like this month after month.

In true Grow and Convert style, we’re going to walk through exactly what she did, step by step, sharing every single detail and screenshot Erika was willing to share with us.

Let’s start by looking at her results in more detail.

Erika’s Results: 1,892 Email Subscribers and 11,850 Pageviews While Making Money on Facebook Ads

We’ll learn more about Erika and uncover the details of how this campaign was executed shortly, but first let’s see what kind of results Erika Volk Fitness (EVF) got with their Facebook campaign.

Over almost 2 months running the ad EVF received 11,850 unique visitors to their landing page.

Erika didn’t put her Google Analytics snippet onto her Leadpage but to put that in perspective, her main site received 6,484 users in that same time frame

So, that’s a 82% more targeted visitors being exposed to her brand from this campaign.

And did they take action? Yes, 1,892 of them signed up for her email list, for a conversion rate of 16%.

This skyrocketed her email list growth starting in January, when she pushed start on the ads. Here’s a plot of new email subscribers added each month:

For any small business, a step change in an important metric like that (email subscribers in this case) is transformative.

So how much did this traffic and subscribers cost EVF? $492

For 1892 subscribers, that comes out to an unbelievable $0.26 per subscriber.

For anyone who has used Facebook ads to collect leads before, they know this is a low number. (For example, compare this with the 43 cents per subscriber that this marketer got.) Below is more discussion as to why this could be.

But here’s the kicker: These email subscribers were sent through an autoresponder sequence where they could buy one of two full exercise programs.

And some bought almost immediately. To date, Erika has sold $632 of ebooks, enough to pay for the ads, and then some.

So that’s 82% extra traffic per month and 1892 leads into the top of her funnel that cost a net -$140.

And, like I mentioned before, the best part of this is that this isn’t a “one off” campaign. Erika Volk Fitness can continue running these ads for a long time (we’ll look at how long it would take to exhaust their target demographic on Facebook below).

So it’s a steady, predictable, and insanely affordable source of customer acquisition.

Now let’s dive into the meaty details, and start by learning more about Erika and her business.

Let’s meet Erika, owner of Erika Volk Fitness, and Learn Why She Turned to Facebook Ads for More Predictable Growth

Erika runs ErikaVolkFitness.com, a site that helps women with PCOS fight the symptoms, lose weight, and become healthier.

If you don’t know what PCOS is, just know it throws women’s hormones out of balance, so they gain a ton of weight, have a lot of trouble losing it, can often have trouble getting pregnant, get diabetes and heart problems.

In other words, it’s crippling. And the weight gain is a foundational part of the problem.

Erika beat PCOS with an exercise routine she crafted and honed over years, to a point where when she goes to the doctor now, her hormone profile almost show no signs of symptoms.

Her transformation is inspiring:

Those photos are impressive for anyone trying to lose weight, but even more impressive when you know she was fighting a hormone altering disease along the way.

Beating PCOS for a woman with the disease is, no exaggeration, life changing.

And that’s what her company, Erika Volk Fitness, is aiming to do: help women beat PCOS just like Erika did:

Revenue comes from ebooks, coaching, and (soon) a monthly membership program.

Quite frankly, Erika has a business that many entrepreneurs we’ve talked to aspire to have: make money and genuinely help people at the same time.

Although she spent 1.5  years growing her blog to 6000 monthly uniques and 3596 email subscribers, she wanted a more predictable, steady way to target her ideal customers (women with PCOS) and get them onto her email list (the online channel with the highest engagement, by far).

So, after being inspired by Videofruit’sFacebook Ad Experiment, she decided to give Facebook ads a shot.

The first step, of course, was laying out the funnel.

The Facebook Funnel For Capturing Leads

This was her funnel:

(1) Facebook ad promoting an email course; (2) Linked to a LeadPages landing page; (3) Opting in triggers an 8 email series delivering the material; (4) Occasional upsells during the course for premium workout routines and plans.

We’ll dive into the details of each step and show the creative and the numbers of each step.

Step 1: Facebook Ads

Facebook Ad Creative

This was the Facebook ad creative:

She made the image with Canva for $1.

As a peak into ad performance, which we will discuss shortly, you can see the kind of engagement this ad has received: 566 reactions, 59 comments, and a whopping 219 shares.

The shares are particularly powerful, because every time someone shares your promoted post, it’s exposed to their friends for free. That is, views and clicks on the shared post by the sharer’s friends cost nothing to you.

Facebook Ad Targeting and Budget

She set the ad to display on:

• Desktop news feed
• Desktop right column
• Mobile news feed
• Audience network.

She didn’t include Instagram.

Targeting is critical to her performance. She targeted women ages 24 – 54 with interest in PCOS in a few countries.

(We’re blurring out her interest categories because she’s worked hard refining that list.)

Her daily budget is $20 per day.

All of this gives her a estimated reach of 730,000, which Facebook characterizes as “fairly broad”.

This is interesting to note: the raw number of people in her “Potential Reach” is pretty large from a Facebook ad campaign perspective.

But qualitatively, we know that what she is promoting is highly specific to one of the biggest “pain points” of their lives: PCOS. Keep this in mind in the next section.

Now let’s look at the good stuff.

Facebook Ad Performance

Here are the overall campaign stats from January 17th to March 13th:

Note that a “conversion” in this case is just a click to the landing page. The ad pixel was not placed on the Thank You page, so Facebook isn’t tracking conversions from landing page to opt-in. (We are using LeadPages’ stats for that.)

The most notable stat is the insanely low cost per conversion (cost per visitor to her landing page): 6 cents!

Obviously, this is a critical component of what made this entire campaign ROI positive. The mysteries of the Facebook algorithms aren’t totally clear to anyone, but you’ll get low cost per click (CPC) if:

1. There isn’t a lot of competition from other advertisers to show ads to your target audience
2. Your ad gets a high click through rates (CTRs); showing Facebook that  the audience likes it.

Facebook doesn’t publish average CTR stats, but various private companies do analyses and a quick survey of a European study of 3 million Facebook ad impressions showed an average newsfeed CTR of around 2%

and Quora answers by various professional Facebook advertisers suggests that newsfeed CTRs range from 1% – 3% between desktop and mobile newsfeeds, and anything above a 2.5% CTR is “rocking it.”

Erika’s campaign is averaging 6.37% CTR on clicks anywhere on the ad and 3.84% on the link to her landing page:

So by all accounts those CTRs are incredible. In other words, she found “ad-market-fit”: her target audience loves her ads. Like I mentioned above, the fact that she’s targeting women with a specific disease and offering a solution to that pain is, I’m sure, critical to this high CTR and low cost per click.

Another metric to mention is reach. A key benefit to uncovering a profitable paid advertising funnel is the ability to keep it running all the time, so your customer acquisition is on autopilot. Of course, anyone who has run ads knows this is not really true. You have to keep monitoring performance as it degrades over time.

Why?

In this case, mostly because of ad fatigue. If you show the same ad to the same people over and over, eventually they stop clicking or engaging with it. Not surprising. You can look for this by observing when your CTR starts dipping and your CPC starts rising. Or in general by looking at frequency: on average how often the ad has been shown to the same person.

Perry Marshall, in his book Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising has this table of Facebook ad fatigue rules based on frequency:

• 0 to 3: Very Low Risk
• 3 – 6: Low Risk
• 6 – 9: Moderate Risk
• 9 – 12: High Risk
• 12+: Very High Risk

Erika’s ads, so far, are at a frequency of 2.27 and she’s reached 96,000 of her total audience of 700,000, so she still hasn’t come close to exhausting her audience with this ad. Great news.

So in summary, she’s had over 8,165 people click over to her landing page (depending on who you ask, more on that below) at around $0.06 per click, for a total spend for January to march of $492.01.

The ads have shown to only 14% of her target audience of 700,000. And been shown an average of 2.3 times for each person.

Now let’s see how her funnel has performed once people reach her landing page.

Step 2: Landing Page to Collect Leads

People who clicked on the Facebook ad were taken to this page:

This was made from a LeadPages template and took Erika about 30 minutes.

It’s pretty simple, but qualitatively, it has a few things going for it.

First, it has one (and only one) CTA. Some people send PPC ads to home pages or product pages with a full navbar and a bunch of choices. Erika didn’t make that mistake and sent them to a simple Landing page with only one choice: optin or not.

Second, it has message and design consistency with the Facebook ad. This is a topic all its own and you can read a nice article from ConversionXL about it. Erika has done this well. The visual of the woman working out is the same and the title is (almost) the same.

Third, it has some social proof. Although the testimonials just have first names so it’s unclear how legitimate they are, they are natural, not over the top, and most importantly, they exist.

Quantitatively the LeadPage has been converting at 16%:

That said, I typically see landing pages with simple asks (name, email) convert between 10 – 20%. With 10% being way more common (I can’t think of any 20%+ PPC landing pages I’ve seen off the top of my head).

Finally, recently I tried to create a Facebook to email funnel for a real estate agent and got 40 views on the page without a single optin, and I immediately shut it off. Even if the next click would have converted 1 email out of 41 clicks (2.4%) was way too low for it to work for us financially. Maybe for your business, that’s acceptable.

Landing Page vs. Facebook Ad Stat Differences

Notice that Leadpages says it got 11,850 unique visitors above. If you scroll up you’ll see Facebook says she got 8,395 clicks.

We’re not entirely sure why this is. Surely it’s in Facebook’s financial interest to make sure it counts every last click on the ads since it charges by the click (or in CPM, it wants advertisers to feel like they’re getting as low of a CPC as possible).

Our best guess is that this has to do with the 220 shares of her post that she received:

Once a post is shared, it’s on the sharer’s timeline and further clicks on it aren’t charged to Erika, so she gets those clicks for free (of course, she was charged for the click to share it).

Step 3: The Email Funnel

This step is pretty simple, she simply created the email course that she promised and made sure it was good.

She sent users through an 5 – 8 email autoresponder (she kept experimenting with longer and longer series and has currently settled at 8).

She created these Mailchimp, and they took time. She started from a series she had been using for over a year and she estimates she put in 2 solid days, or 15 additional hours in turning it into this.

But this step should take time, this is where value is being given to your subscribers. If you plan on building enough trust to eventually make an ask, you have to make sure what you’ve given is damn good.

Here’s an excerpt from one of her emails, so you can see the level of detail:

If you’re thinking “Well this doesn’t look extravagant…” Remember this isn’t an email from Old Navy. It’s not meant to razzle dazzle the customer with photos.

Her entire brand is based on a 1-on-1 relationship between her and the reader. So emails are conversational, mostly text, and most important of all actionable. Above she doesn’t just say “HIIT is great, go do it. Here’s a Wikipedia link.” She give them an exact 5 step routine.

The #1 “leadgen” goal in her business is for a lead to take her advice before purchasing anything and see results, so emails like this help tremendously.

Speaking of purchases…now for the fun part, recovering the ad spend by selling product immediately.

Step 4: The paid offers to recover ad cost

Here is how the Facebook ad campaign was (less than) free.

In emails 1, 4 and 6, of her eight email autoresponder, she mentions to the reader that she has some premium workout plans already made and points them to the link. She does it in a non-pushy way and doesn’t really “sell” it until email 6, after they’ve received nearly a week’s worth of value.

Let’s look more closely.

Email 1 – is a welcome email that gets sent immediately after opting in. She shows people her transformation, gets them pumped about the course and says the first lesson will come tomorrow.

But there are always some customers who, after they opt in or take any action with a company (purchase, etc.) are on a high and want more. She gives them a chance to do that here:

The video introduces her “Just Start” Workout program, which is a downloadable PDF and costs only $15.

Email 2 – 3 deliver straight value like I showed you above. They make no ask and the customer doesn’t hear about the premium workouts at all. These two emails cover the foundation of her PCOS workout strategy: strength conditioning and cardio.

Email 4 discusses active rest, and how you should orchestrate the week and fit in the workouts outlined in emails 2 and 3. So continuing on that theme, at the bottom of the email, Erika once again gently mentions that she has workouts that “put it all together”:

Email 5 ads more value with a discussion on belly fat – a key pain point of the customer.

Email 6 is the first “hard sell” email. At this point the customer has received almost a week’s worth of lessons with someone finally speaking to them about beating the disease that is affecting their entire life and that they think about every day.

Email 7 then talks about willpower and reminds them of the guide in the PS and Email 8 closes the course.

Overall she has sold $632 dollars of workout programs from the Facebook campaign, $140 more than the $492 she spent while collecting around 2000 email subscribers and over 11,000 unique visitors to her site.

Could this apply to your business?

While working on this case study, I’ve thought a lot about how it may or may not apply to other businesses.

Here is a framework I’ve come up with:

(1) Importance of Lead Collection – Erika Volk Fitness, as a business, has a funnel that relies on building trust by sending a lot of content to the leads and occasionally pitching a product, so lead collection is very important. If on the other hand you’re selling low priced ecommerce goods that are flippant decisions and email subscribers are difficult to monetize, maybe it’s less important.

(2) Cash Flow Restriction – If preserving cash (on the order of what you’d spend on FB ads) isn’t important, than covering your ad spend with a small sale upfront is irrelevant. You might as well just run ads, collect leads, and just minimize your cost per acquisition (CPA) without worrying about making instant sales. But for startups or early bootstrapped businesses, where cash flow is important, this can be a lot more effective.

So for example, if you’re selling a product or service to SMBs that (1) requires nurturing leads and (2) you’re bootstrapping the business, it could be great for acquiring early clients if you found a small product to offer in your nurture sequence that covered ad expense.

On the other hand if you’ve just raised VC money and or you’re rather profitable, it doesn’t matter if you recover the ad spend immediately because you can take the cash hit while you spend time turning the leads into full blown customers.

Here’s a schematic to help visualize what I’m talking about:

Erika Volk Fitness is a bootstrapped business, so that negative cash flow to acquire customers is very real and covering that in near realtime with early sales helps a lot while she nurtures these leads until she launches major products. No, she’s not going to starve without that $492, that’s not the point. It’s knowing that she can cover FB ad costs if she scales this operation that is a big deal.

For businesses with lots of cash or profitability

The cost to acquire a customer isn’t a big deal if you’ve been given a chunk of VC money or are already profitable. You just funnel that cash or profits into that cost and have plenty of cash left over to keep the lights on as you work your way up that blue curve to profitability.

For businesses with similar smaller priced items (e.g. ecommerce)

Lastly, for businesses that don’t have a “major” product that requires nurturing, this also may not apply. For example, if you’re selling menswear from your newly minted ecommerce store, the shirts and jeans are your final products. There isn’t some “major” sale that you’re waiting to make after you nurture the lead (e.g. a large B2B service contract). In this case you may learn that just sending ad traffic to a category page makes more money in the short and long term versus capturing their email first and nurturing them.

That said, if you’re finding it hard to run ads profitably, but you know that email list subscribers are worth a lot in lifetime value, consider running ads to get people on an email list and offer a tiny upsell for an inexpensive but popular item just to cover the cost of the ad spend.

Questions on whether this applies to you? Ask away in the comments.

———-

Special thanks to William Harris, Growth Marketer at Elumynt.com and Facebook ads afficianado for reviewing this article.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story like this about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

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For companies using a blog as a way of driving traffic and generating leads, getting an email subscriber is just step 1 of the conversion funnel.

While getting e-mail subscribers is great, the real goal of most company blogs is to generate leads for your sales team or get your prospects to make purchases online.

Excluding customers that purchase outright after landing on your blog, this is how most companies look at the process for converting their blog traffic into customers:

For companies without a free trial (like e-commerce), your funnel to convert visitors from your blog likely looks like this:

Many businesses follow the traditional path of nurturing their blog subscribers over time by emailing good content until they convert into a lead or customer.

This strategy is fine. We do it at SnackNation and it’s a solid way of providing value to your prospects until they’re ready to learn more about your product.

In addition, for more complex purchases or expensive products (enterprise software, large capital expenditures, complex consumer products or services like home renovations or personal training), it’s essential, because the customer doesn’t make a flippant decision, so nurture is required.

Note: For the purpose of clarity, when using the terms “lead” in this post I mean someone who has given you more information that just name and email. For our business, this includes a work phone and company name. Otherwise, I’ll refer to them as an email subscriber or prospect.

But recently, our team started testing a way to shortcut this process dramatically with a simple tweak on our thank you page.

Here’s What We Did to Our Thank You Page

This is a typical Thank You page that most company blogs send you to after you become an email subscriber or download content from their blog:

InfusionSoft’s thank you page after I downloaded an ebook about maximizing email delivery

We wanted to test something different. We were curious to see what would happen if we offered our free trial (in our case, it’s a free sample box of snacks for their office) directly on our blog’s Thank You page.

The idea was that when a visitor downloads content from your blog, they’re obviously interested in what you have to say. Why not give them a chance to “upgrade” and try out your free trial?

We first started testing Thank You pages with an offer for our free sample box about 10 months ago and haven’t looked back since.

These Thank You pages alone have brought in 884 leads, from which we’ve closed over 20 sales.

Note: Of these 884 leads, only about 18% were qualified. We get a lot of leads from outside the US (who somehow have phone numbers registered in North America), so those are automatically unqualified because we only ship our product within the US. So if you have a digital product or service, you would probably see a better conversion rate of sales from your leads.

Needless to say, this strategy has been very effective for our business. It has also dramatically shortened the typical time it takes to convert a blog subscriber into a lead for our sales team.

One of the keys to converting on these Thank You pages is to create a “Message Match” between the content that was downloaded and your free trial or product (more about this later in the post). By following this formula, we’re seeing conversion rates between about 7.5-11%.

Now let’s walk through the process of creating these Free Trial Thank You pages.

Step 1: Find your highest trafficked posts and create a content upgrade

By now, I assume you’ve heard about the effectiveness of using content upgrades for list building. Devesh has gone into a lot of detail about them here and outlined how you can scale this tactic.

However, while some marketers like to immediately add a content upgrade for each new post they publish, our content strategy has been heavily focused around SEO. So my strategy has been to wait until we’re getting organic traffic to the post before offering a content upgrade.

Why do I wait to add a content upgrade and sacrifice all those potential email subscribers?

As an in-house Content Marketer, there’s a lot going on. At any given time, you probably have 127 other things on your plate.

While I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all to add your content upgrade right when you publish, I personally like to wait until the post starts ranking for our target keyword and bringing in consistent organic traffic before investing time in creating a nice PDF.

The other advantage here is that if the post is a dud for any reason, I don’t want to waste time adding the content upgrade and configuring all the automation rules that go along with it.

My rule of thumb is at least 50 unique visits to the page/day before spending time to create a content upgrade specific to that blog post.

I’ll keep an eye on our keyword position tracking software and Google Analytics until that happens:

So once I’ve seen a couple weeks of those consistent traffic hills, it’s time to get to work.

There are 3 places I’ll add CTA’s for the content upgrade on a high-traffic post:

1. Towards the top of the post between the intro and the body
2. At the end of the post below the conclusion
3. Exit popup

Top of post CTA (thanks to Brian Dean for the inspiration on the CTA copy):

Here’s the popup that shows up when you click the link (as you can see, nothing fancy and it converts 55.98% of visitors who click the link):

End of the article CTA:

Exit Popup:

I use OptinMonster for these text link and exit popups, but you can also use a service like LeadPages.

Side note: I’m a huge fan of the full-page exit popup pictured above in green. We used to use standard exit popups for our content upgrades that looked similar to this template:

Those popup templates converted at around 2.6%. Since switching to the full-page exit popup, we’ve seen them convert nearly 115% better at 5.58%. If you’re using the standard popup template, I highly suggest testing full-page ones to see what results you get.

Step 2: Use your Thank You page to tie the content upgrade into your product and offer your free trial or sample

If you have a solid content strategy, most of what you write ties back to your product in some way.

For example, at SnackNation one of our top performing posts is a massive list of employee engagement ideas.

We believe that healthy snacks can be an awesome way to help companies increase employee engagement. One of the experts who contributed to this post even mentioned this connection we’re making and supports it with data:

Now here’s where we do things differently.

After someone enters their first name and email into one of the popups mentioned earlier, they’re directed to a page that ties the topic of the content upgrade (employee engagement) to our product (healthy snack delivery subscription for offices) and offers them a free sample.

Here’s how the Thank You page for our employee engagement ideas post looks:

This Thank You page is converting 10.52% visitors into leads for our sales team.

Let’s breakdown the components used on this landing page so you can see how our prospect is able to make the connection from the topic of the content upgrade to our product.

1. Build “scent”

The first thing your landing page needs to do is build “scent” from the previous page:

Scent is basically maintaining a similar message as the page from which your visitor came.

We’re calling out the thing they just opted in for and letting them know how they will receive access to it.

2. Ask if they’re interested in accelerating their results

The next thing you’ll need to do is take the topic of the content upgrade and ask if they want to get results in that area faster, better, or more efficiently:

3. The offer

The last major component of this Message Match Thank You page is the offer itself.

This is where you offer the CTA to get a free sample or trial of your product or service:

The key here is to show how your product will help solve your prospect’s pain point. Then make it risk-free for them to try it out.

Some other things to point out about this page:

Even though this prospect already gave you their first name and email address, they’re still pretty cold traffic. Use elements of social proof on your landing page to help build trust:

I want to point out kissmetrics because I noticed that they also do a great job with this Message Match Thank You page technique.

After I downloaded a guide on A/B split testing from their blog, I was directed to a Thank You page with a relevant message to take the next step in their funnel (i.e. a 14-day free trial of their software):

Step 3: Rinse and repeat with other blog posts on your site

After we started seeing results with these Message Match Thank You pages, we repeated the process in Step 1 and 2 for the other top performing posts on our blog.

Here’s a landing page we made around the topic of employee recognition/appreciation after someone downloads the content upgrade on this post:

The conversion rate on this page is a bit lower than the one earlier about employee engagement. The employee appreciation landing page is only converting at 7.59%.

Although the traffic and conversion data from this landing page are still a bit low to be conclusive, I can gather a potential hypothesis here. It’s possible we’re not doing a good job of connecting the dots between employee appreciation and a perk like free healthy snacks.

What it could also mean is that these prospects will need more nurturing via content and email before they convert. That’s totally fine and we’ll continue to provide these people with valuable content until they’re ready to learn more about our product.

How to Scale This Process

It would obviously be extremely time consuming to scale this process for every topic area we cover on the blog and every content upgrade we create.

So to help us be more efficient as we scale, I’ve also created a “Catch All” Thank You page. Here’s how the “Catch All” landing page looks:

We’ve been using this landing page for higher in the funnel posts that are more of an awareness play like these:

11 Insanely Powerful and Motivational Videos For Your Team

87 Fun Office Activities That Make Work Awesome

What’s been really surprising is that this page without a clear “message match to free offer” is converting at 10.67%.

When looking at improving conversion, it’s easy to look at the top of the funnel conversion rates and call it a winner. What you should do is dig a bit deeper to find out if those leads are converting into sales.

Although this page has a higher conversion rate than the others, it has resulted in a lower percentage of leads that have converted into sales. So we’re getting more people to give us their information to be contacted, but the tradeoff has been lower quality leads.

Can you also shortcut your funnel with the landing page?

My hope is that we’ve been able to show you the difference that a good Thank You page can make for your business. As marketers, we’re all fighting for our potential customer’s attention in a noisy world. So while you have a prospect’s attention and they’re on a high after just engaging with you, see if you can shortcut your sales funnel by giving them a chance to test, sample, try, or learn more about your product or service.

Like anything else with improving conversions on a website, use the tactics you’ve learned here as a starting point but test different messages to find what converts best for your business. Just because something is working for our business it doesn’t mean you will see the same results (for better or worse).

Emil Shour is the Content Marketing Manager at SnackNation, a healthy snack delivery service for offices across the US.

In the last post on converting blog traffic, we talked about measuring your conversion rates and putting calls-to-actions in the proper places so you convert as much traffic into leads as possible.

In this article we’re going to talk about a particular conversion tactic called content upgrades.

Content upgrades are a game changer for the conversion rate of your blog (or any content based site).

But here’s the #1 problem content marketers have with content upgrades: no time. To do them well, it takes time, and to do it at scale it can be oppressively time-consuming.

So in today’s post I’m going to walk through 3 techniques I’ve used, are using, or readers have used to get most of the benefit of content upgrades with a fraction of the time input.

As usual we’ll report as much data as possible on each and every tactic.

Let’s dive in…

What are Content Upgrades and How Well Do They Convert?

In short, content upgrades are content specific bonuses. Instead of offering a generic ebook at the end of your posts, you offer a bonus that’s intimately tied to the topic of that post itself.

And they convert like crazy.

For example, we implemented content upgrades on a few high traffic posts on JeffBullas.com, and after 2 months, the 4 posts with content upgrades were converting 344% more than the rest of the top 20 posts on his site.

What were the upgrades? We made simple checklists of the strategies he was writing about in those posts. For example, here’s a checklist for a post he had on SEO:

We gave away these checklists free in exchange for an email.

The reason content upgrades convert so well is because users on that page are already reading a post about SEO. So when they see an offer for something intimately related to implementing that posts’ ideas (the checklist), a far greater percentage of them optin. These types of optins work much better than something like a generic eBook offered site-wide.

Brian Dean of Backlinko.com implemented a similar checklist style content upgrade on one his articles and saw a 785% increase in conversion rate from 0.54% to 4.82%.

Just to make sure we’re on the same page about how outrageous these conversion “lifts” are, keep in mind that I do A/B testing for companies professionally and you simply don’t see multiple hundred percent lifts with things like A/B testing.

So let’s look at how impactful these sorts of lifts can be.

The Impact That a 500% Increase in Optins Can Have On Lead Generation

If your business has a blog that is getting 100,000 uniques a month, generating 300% to 800% more email addresses or leads from the traffic can be a top-of-the-funnel game changer.

For example, let’s say you run marketing at a SaaS business (say a sales/CRM platform) and you spend 2 years building a sales blog to 100,000 uniques a month. Great.

Let’s say you convert 0.5% of that traffic to an email list, where they get sent through an autoresponder that eventually pitches them a free trial of your platform. Assume 10% of subscribers from the autoresponder start a free trial. That means every month you’re getting 50 free trials from the blog (100k*0.5%*10%).

But if you increased that rate by 500% (to 2.5% optins from blog content)?

That’s 250 leads, or 200 more free trials a month!

If you are already making money or growing at 50/month, imagine what shifting to 250 would do.

The Problem With Content Upgrades Is, Ironically, Content

The problem with content upgrades, of course, is that they require you to make a unique bonus for each blog post. You can imagine how tedious that would be on large blogs with lots of posts and lots of traffic.

In my math for the hypothetical SaaS business above, to see a 500% increase in optins blog-wide, they’d have to in theory make a content upgrade for every post. That’s going to be tough. Very few blogs of that size have a manageable number of posts.

So what do you do?

Today we’re going to talk about 3 solutions that have worked well for me and other companies we’ve done this for:

1. The Topicbox – How to use a few content upgrades across a multitude of blog posts to get the majority of the conversion gain with a minimum of work.
2. The PDF – Developing a repeatable process to give bonuses away for every post
3. The Cliffhanger – How to use the content itself to increase optin rates without a unique upgrade.

The Topicbox

Last year a company approached me to help increase their email optins from content. I thought:

Great! I can most certainly help you with that…

I had been working with blogs big and small to help grow their email lists, so I felt like like this was totally up my alley.  The #1 tool I had in my arsenal was the content upgrade.

I was so confident that I would walk in, teach them what a content upgrade is, implement a bunch, their conversion rate would go through the roof, and we’d all be smoking cigars in a hot tub with gold chains around our necks.

Then they told me what their site was: an investing news site that publishes ~50 new articles a day.

What?! How were we supposed to make content upgrades for 50 new articles every day?

It sounded impossible.

Then I thought I had brilliant idea #2: Let me just look at their top 20 most popular pages and make content upgrades for those, and by the grace of the 80/20 rule, I’ll convert most of their traffic.

That’s when I learned something about traffic for news sites: they’re hella spikey (Benji wants me to point out that “hella” is a Northern Califonian phrase). There’s a spike in traffic when it comes out, and then it dies down as the next day/week’s news takes hold. Traffic graphs like this are not unusual (this is an actual screenshot from a single article on ValueWalk ):

The top 20 articles this month are different from the top 20 next month. So making a single content upgrade for a single article doesn’t make sense.

Argh. So now what?

That’s when I had this idea:

What if instead of making content upgrades for individual articles, I just made topic-specific content upgrades. This way I could use them across an entire category of articles (past and future).

After all, the site reliably published articles on a few set topics: certain investing frameworks, certain famous investors, certain companies, and certain political issues.

So, we worked with their creative team to create guides, books, or “best of” pages for each of those categories and we gave them away in exchange for an optin.

To easily implement them sitewide, we used Optinmonster popups because they let you target by WordPress category. By using this tool we could set a popup to show on all posts in a certain category. All articles from then on in that category would show that popup.

That’s why I called this the Topicbox Technique, because we used lightbox popups to actually promote the topic specific bonuses.

It worked brilliantly:

Over the course of a couple months of rolling this out, we saw a 216% increase in optins.

And again, because their site was meticulous about having writers categorize each article, we didn’t have to keep going back and adding individual URLs to the popups as new articles got published.

Steps to do this on your own site

Step 1: Figure out what your categories are.

If you’re like most blogs, you don’t have meticulous categorization of each post in WordPress. You also probably don’t publish 50 articles a day, so adding URLs manually to a popup is no big deal. In that case, you can use any popup service that lets you target by URL. Sumome, for example, let’s you do that for free.

To actually group posts into topics, just go through your top 20 – 50 posts in Google Analytics, look for patterns, and start labeling them by rough topic area. For example, here’s how I would do that for Grow and Convert (even though we don’t have 20 posts yet).

Step 2: Create genuinely useful bonuses for those posts

Even this step may sound like it’s too tedious:

I have to create 5 ebooks! FML….

Let me say this once and for all: eBooks are not the be all end all of lead magnets. In fact, they’re a bit over done, don’t you think? 

In fact, even the “ultimate guide” is getting a bit tedious (do we really need another 100 tips to grow a social following?).

Let me give you some alternatives (instead of just complaining):

• For personal, B2C blogs, try an insanely specific Q&A on a topic. So for a fitness blog, if a topic is nutrition, you should pretty easily know (or be able to figure out) what the main 5 questions your readers ask about nutrition are. Answer them. Either by text, or by video. And offer that as the topic specific bonus. You don’t need 100 questions! Or even 10, which is the most popular listicle number. Just a handful of questions answered really well will do the trick. It feels (and actually is) a lot more unique, specific, and valuable, than “My Ultimate Guide to Nutrition!”, which has been done to death.
• For a B2B business, try a case study or collection of case studies on that topic. This shows your expertise, and people looking to achieve a certain goal usually can’t get enough of seeing other people achieve that goal. One caveat: Make sure the case study isn’t just a 2 page PowerPoint presentation that has no meat about what actually happened and mostly just sells your company. That’s not enticing. If “legal won’t let me give more details” is an excuse, then think of something else.

Step 3: Give the bonus away with a popup (or slider, or on page form) on all posts on that topic.

I mentioned how to do it with Optinmonster using WordPress categories. If you have a manageable number of posts, then you can also use a tool like Sumome to target specific URLs to show your popup.

The PDF of the Post Itself

This is a lazy yet repeatable way to turn posts into a content upgrade: Just turn the post into a PDF.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous: Why would someone optin to get a PDF of what they just read. But trust me, people actually want that, for 2 reasons:

1. Most of your unique visitors to a post do not read the post. As evidence, my agency once investigated why some of a client’s posts (Backlinko’s) were converting really well (>4-8%) while others were not (<1-3%) when they all had content upgrades. We found that the posts that mentioned the content upgrade at the top were convert 315% better than the ones that only mentioned the content upgrade at the end. Think about that, it means even people who are willing to optin for the upgrade (your most engaged readers) won’t optin unless you offer it at the top because they actually never scroll to the bottom. Think about that again.
2. Even if they do read the whole thing, people love saving things to read later and a PDF let’s you do that.

For example, just a few posts ago, a Grow and Convert reader, Michael, actually asked us for a PDF of the post:

In fact, Michael has noticed on his own blog that the PDF version of a post often gets the most signups.

For example, he has a mega post on doing SEO audits, and offers 2 content upgrades: a checklist and a PDF download:

When he looks at his conversion rates, the PDF download is outperforming the “true” content upgrade (a checklist) on this post by almost double (left): 

And the PDF outperformed on another post as well (right), where Michael analyzed a bunch of data from top bloggers and presented his analysis in the post. The content upgrade was the full spreadsheet of the data, but the PDF still got more downloads.

That’s crazy because the spreadsheet in that post is a really topical content upgrade. And yet, people still preferred the PDF.

I’ll be honest, a part of me still believes that a really good content upgrade should beat the PDF version of a post. But this data is so intriguing that I’m testing it on this post (and the previous post in this series).

We’re giving away a PDF version of both posts.

Together they cover blog conversions in solid detail and span over 7000 words. From setting up analytics, to positioning optin forms in the right place, to using popups vs. other tactics, to content upgrades and content upgrade alternatives, it’s all there. If you want it, you can get it for free here (just click this link and let us know where to email it).

So, if you’re looking for a scalable process to implement content upgrades blog wide, PDF-ing (long) posts is definitely something I would consider. You will have to actually scale it somehow though, so fair warning.

It took me 15 minutes to PDF this post and I hired someone from Fiverr to do the previous one (for $5, although it seems everyone on Fiverr always wants to convince you that your task requires purchasing bonuses…argh.).

I haven’t done this myself at scale, but here are some ideas:

1. Manual – If this converts well and readers keep wanting PDFs, we’re thinking of drafting all posts in Word or Pages, finalizing there, saving as PDF, then, as the last step, importing them into WordPress. I did a couple of (unscientific surveys) on how many people draft directly in WordPress and, was, quite frankly, shocked at how basically no one drafts in WordPress (am I really the only one?!):
   

   Bloggers: Do you draft posts in WordPress or somewhere else first then import into wordpress?

   — Devesh Khanal (@deveshkhanal) January 28, 2016

   
   So, if you’re already drafting it somewhere outside of WordPress, then this will add 37 seconds of saving as PDF to your workflow, as long as your “somewhere else” is a word processor built after 1997.

2. Assistant – Hire an assistant to turn every post into a PDF. Simple enough.
3. Software – If your company is big enough, this is something to consider. If Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote, and a bunch of other services can scrape a page for the article, surely your tech team can find a way to do that for your blog and turn each into a PDF in a click or two. (Side note: If you know of software that does this already, let us know in the comments.)

The CliffHanger

So just to recap, we’ve now covered creating fewer content upgrades (Topicbox Technique), and repeatable upgrades (PDFs). You should be able to get solid conversion rates with those.

This last example is going to be (in some ways) even easier than the other two: instead of a content upgrade, just give your audience a cliffhanger for the next post.

Since Grow and Convert has, to date, been a side project (100% emotional commitment, less than 100% time), we just haven’t had the time to create content upgrades.

So instead, this is something we’ve just started trying on Grow and Convert and it’s converting moderately well, considering how much easier it is than content upgrades. We haven’t hit conversion rates as high as real content upgrades (not surprising) but considering how much easier this is, it’s worth mentioning, so you have it in your arsenal.

Here’s how it works.

Step 1: We take a topic (such as this post’s topic: converting readers from content marketing), and plan to write 2 or 3 posts on it.

Step 2: When we write the first post on the topic, we intentionally tease the next post on the topic.

For example, in the our recent post on the Suggested Search Hack, we teased the next post in the series:

Step 3: Then we attach a call to action with that tease to collect emails.

So in the above example, below the paragraph we showed above, we included an explicit call to action to get notified when Part 2 comes out. When you click the link , it opens this optin form:

The post has received 3394 unique pageviews to date and created 108 email subscribers:

So it has a 3.2% conversion rate.

Since Grow and Convert is all about transparency, let me be the first to tell you that 3.2% on a good blog post with our current level of traffic (10k uniques) is not stellar (if we had a really good content upgrade, we should convert 6%+).

But considering we literally have no content upgrade for that post, that’s pretty damn good. And note that 3.2% doesn’t include the people who landed on that post and joined via our sitewide popup or by clicking to the homepage and joining via our featurebox.

On another post, Part 1 of this series on converting blog traffic, we did something similar, but our CTA for the next post in the series wasn’t as clear (the popup just said “get updates of future posts”), and it’s only converted around 2.1%. That’s starting to approach “not good enough” territory, so, use this method with caution.

Do This On Your Own Blog: Become a Content Conversion Pro

Over the course of 2 posts and over 7000 words, we’ve now covered multiple aspects of converting blog traffic into email subscribers:

• How to set up analytics to measure conversions
• Where to place optin forms so they convert the best (popups vs. sidebar vs. smartbars, etc.)
• What content upgrades are
• Alternatives to content upgrades that convert well but take less time.

This is a lot of information. But if you actually apply it, you will almost guaranteedly see more emails or leads come through from your content marketing. So, we’re offering these posts in PDF form. They are totally free and lets you easily reference and implement all of these ideas, or pass them along to your team. Get them here.

Questions? Ask me in the comments and I’ll try to answer every single one.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story like this about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

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