Writing articles for your blog is a fantastic all-around strategy to increase authority and rank on Google. “Further, informative content can keep visitors on your site, increasing the chance they’ll buy your products or affiliate referrals” marketing managers at Write Any Papers, assumes. Unfortunately, converting visitors from readers to buyers using content isn’t just a matter of publishing material. Even high-quality content can suffer from a lack of conversion potential if it hasn’t been optimized.
Below are tips to conversion optimization; making small changes to your written content in order to maximize its chances at converting a reader to a buyer.
Step One: Write a Catchy Title
Your title might be the most important part of your piece. It’s going to immediately capture your audience’s attention, which means it needs to be concise, appealing, and appropriate to the body of your content. Typically, you’ll want to use clear, precise language and action words that lead a user to participate, like “find out…” One recent trend involves a tease to the reader, offering a taste of what’s in the article without giving away the entire post, like “You’ll never guess this secret everyone’s talking about…”
These types of titles are good at drawing people in, but you’ll also need to make sure your title is relevant to your content and meaningful enough to get a user to stay on the page. Sensational headlines like “You must read this quote…” tend to attract people only long enough to see what the quote is, leading to a higher bounce rate.
Instead, invite users to stay with titles such as, “learn how to ____ in 5 steps.”
Step Two: Guide the Eyes With Appropriate Structures
Hopefully, your title will be strong enough to get a user on the page and grounded enough to get them to read your article. Now, you want to optimize the overall structure of your article. Break up your article into key sections with bold, clear headlines and bulleted or numbered lists. Include images when you can as well. This type of structuring guides a user’s eye down the page, and it appeals to visitors who want to read the bulk of your article, as well those who skim for high-level meaning.
You can also include an advertisement, such as a brief pop-up or a signup form in the blog banner. Just make sure your conversion items are easy to see without obstructing the view of your entire article.
Step Three: Use Language to Create a Sense of Urgency
Throughout your article, use words and phrasing to imbue your audience with a sense of urgency. For example, words like “essential,” “necessary,” and “must” all convey a sense of importance, and action-based phrases such as “take action immediately,” or “start as soon as possible” encourage readers to follow your suggestions. Just be careful not to overuse these powerful elements of language. If you get carried away and spam your article full with too much hype or pressure, your content will read as salesy and turn people off.
Step Four: Interlink
Throughout the body of your article, make it a point to link to other topic related content on your site. The best way to do this is to link to other, more detailed blog posts on various topics you refer to throughout your piece. You can also link to your services pages, a contact page, or any other page on your site, as long as it makes sense in the body of your work.
Interlinking increases your domain authority by creating a tighter network linked pages on your website. More importantly, it gives your visitors cause to stay on your site longer. The more time they spend on your site, the more likely they will become buyers.
Step Five: Make an Obvious Callout (or Two)
Finally, make sure you have at least one buyer call to action. I mentioned a pop-up ad or a conversion form on the side of the blog, but these aren’t your only options. You can (and should) also use a brief callout at the bottom of your written piece, with language that gives readers something to do as a part of the next step of the process. For example, you could say, “Now that you’ve learned how to ____, you can work with an expert to _____ better. Contact us today for a free trial and to find out how we can help.”
Once you’ve got a handful of conversion-optimized posts on your website, you can track their success in Google Analytics. Set up goals in Analytics to measure how many visitors you are and behavior reports to understand which posts are performing the best. Use this information to form meaningful conclusions about which factors are and are not successful in your conversion optimization strategy, and make changes to your campaign moving forward. Only through measurement, analysis, and improvement will you start to see significant results.
Author’s bio: David Hoang works as a copywriter for Write Any Papers. He used to be a web developer, but he decided to change his career. In this case, David has an opportunity to tell others how to apply different solutions.
