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The perfect blog doesn’t happen by accident.
It takes time, energy, and let’s be honest — money, to get it up and running how you’ve always wanted. And, if lightning strikes, your blog will have a high conversion rate, a true indicator that your hard work has paid off.
But what if that isn’t the case? If you’ve been noticing a slip in blog conversion rates, or have always struggled with less-than-ideal conversions, it’s time to take action.
After all, a boost in conversions won’t happen overnight.
Let’s get to work.
Ready to roll up your sleeves and make a change? Jump ahead to:
When it comes to your blog or website, there are a few reasons why you could be experiencing a low conversion rate.
One of the most popular reasons for a low conversion rate is that your calls to action (CTAs) simply aren’t converting. But how could you notice that in the first place? You need to have someone in your team responsible for CRO who is able to study your website’s analytics and make changes on a whim.
One of the things you should consider doing is implementing an A/B test on your website to see what kind of language works best for your customers or clients. If your CTA is a simple button, you could also play around with images, color themes, and overall language. Remember that “buy now” or “add to bag” are a little… average and boring. So, change it up!
If you have multiple CTAs in one blog post, all requiring the visitors to do something different, they will most likely bounce away from your site without making any decision at all.
To prevent this from happening, make sure your pages have a single call-to-action that actually leads them to take the next logical step through your site.
Let’s not forget about your website copy. If you’re experiencing a low conversion rate, it could be because your copy is missing the mark. It could be failing to ask the questions your audience is seeking, or even be too muddled with “buzzworthy” keywords. Take the time to deliver a clear and concise message to your audience if you want them to convert.
And finally, when was the last time you checked how your blog looks on mobile? And I don’t just mean your smartphone.
Consider a different make and model, and by the same token, screen size to ensure everything looks how you want it to, from text size to button placement. You also want to double-check for tablets, as things could get shuffled around on this size screen, too.
At the end of the day, you want your customers to be able to convert everywhere and that includes when they’re scrolling on their phone.
No matter the size of your company or the industry it’s in, there are always ways to improve your blog conversion rates.
If you aren’t sure where to start, 12 experts with high blog conversion rates (more than 11%) weigh in on what worked for their blog.
To give you more context, 60% of those respondents are B2B companies, 33% are B2C and only 7% are D2C businesses.
And while most of them come from the marketing niche, 40% come from various niches like schools or educational systems, manufacturing, entertainment, software and tech industries, etc.
Now let’s get into the meat.
To optimize your website’s content for conversion, you probably use Google Analytics 4 to learn how many people are interacting with your site, which pages brought them to the site in the first place, which pages they engage with the most, and more.
You may have to navigate multiple areas and reports within Google Analytics to get the data you want though. Now you can quickly assess your content performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for measuring your website content marketing performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Our first expert tip for getting your blog to convert isn’t about what your blog says, it’s about how your blog says it.
Aaron Agius at Louder Online recommends, “A good blog conversion rate strategy is to use more paragraphs and fewer long sentences. This is a modernized blog structure but it’s a lot easier to consume for the audience, and it converts a lot better too. If you have a lot of blog subscribers, I would advise you to experiment with publishing frequency and times. This tactic can make a big difference when it comes to conversion rates so make sure you do the testing.”
When looking to boost blog conversion rates, it’s in your best interest to consider who your audience is, the content they’re looking for, and the questions they need answers to.
Tori Bell at Clever Touch Marketing elaborates further to say, “Target specific audiences. You can’t please or interest everyone so rather customize your blog to target and attract a certain audience. If you are concentrating on Tech, which is a massive industry to try to compete in, then target a niche area like mobile tech or car tech. Before people even read your posts they must be able to decide if your blog is of value to them. As soon as you offer people something different and of value to them your conversion rates will go up and you will get noticed on social media and by search engines.”
On a similar note, you’ll need to take the time to personalize your strategies to cater to your buyer personas. This can take some time, especially if you have more than one buyer persona you’re looking to target.
Andrea Moxham at Horseshoe & Co recommends, “The use of personalization strategies has been very effective for our blogs’ conversion. We use smart content to show tailored resources based on our different buyer personas. We also customize our pop-ups to directly relate to the blog the visitor is reading to ensure relevancy.”
Another tip that you can start implementing is to optimize the call to actions (CTAs) on your company’s blog.
Lily Ugbaja at Finding Balance Mom starts this tip off by saying, “One thing I did to successfully improve my blog conversion rate was to simplify and optimize my CTAs. This is where you lead them to where you want them to go and what you need them to do.
Your call-to-action should be clear, understandable, easy to navigate, thorough, and assertive. It should also be personalized to suit your type of audience. For example, a mom site offering baby products would want to appeal to the mothering instinct, ‘Your little one would love you for this warm blankie- Add to cart now’. Your landing page isn’t effective if it doesn’t translate to visitors following the CTA leading to a high rate of conversions. And this happens when your CTAs are well designed and optimized.”
Another way to put this tip to action, no pun intended, is to use a gated piece of content as your main CTA. “One of the biggest contributors to a healthy conversion rate is CTAs. We use a gated piece of content as the main CTA for every blog post we publish and we place this CTA in the sidebar so it stands out. We’ve seen other blogs place their CTAs at the bottom, which works too, however not everyone reads a blog post to completion, so placing a CTA in a more obvious spot is something we recommend.
It’s also helpful to make your main CTA an image or a button – something that stands out and gives some context so people are enticed to click and fill out the form to download. But don’t stop there! We recommend strategically placing in-text CTAs within your blog content, too.
Any time you mention something that relates to a piece of gated content, you can add an in-text CTA that’s bolded or italicized so people will see it better. Above all, it’s crucial that whatever CTA you’re adding makes sense and relates to the blog article. The more it relates to the piece as a whole, the more likely it will be that people will click, fill out the form, and become leads for your company,” adds Natalie Slyman, BenchmarkONE and Benchmark Email.
Additionally, you can play around with your CTAs by running on A/B test to see which one gets your blog a higher conversion. Not sure how to go about this? Khabeer Rockley at The 5% Institute shares, “We’ve done two key things to increase the number of sales as well as email list subscribers on our website. The first thing we’ve done is at the bottom of every article, we give people two calls to action, depending on where they are in the buying cycle based on their interest and motivation.
One option is to opt-in for our free 7-day sales challenge, and the other is to buy our online sales course. The second thing we’ve done is highlighted two widgets on each blog post with the same options – the free opt-in, and a widget linking to the course. Making both options a lot more accessible as well as attainable has massively increased our conversions.”
You’ve targeted a specific audience. You’ve thought about specific personas. Now it’s time to factor in the journey of the buyer.
For this, Anu Ramani at Isoline Communications elaborates to say, “Providing high levels of value tailored to the stage of the purchase journey that the buyer is in, is essential to improve blog conversion rates: it has worked very successfully with Isoline blogs. Too often, you find companies that keep posting article after article in the blog or resource center to keep content fresh for SEO purposes, but the content can be superficial. Your real users and prospects can quickly see through this tactic: they reward genuine value-added content with completion, engagement, and conversion.”
It seems like we can’t go a week without hearing about another major breach in customer data or security. Because of this, it’s crucial that your organization consider the privacy of its consumer when trying to boost blog conversions.
Unsure where to start? Daniel Daines-Hutt at Convert elaborates “It may seem strange, but user privacy is a big thing for us. When people opt-in, marketers almost as a given assume they can then market with further emails, etc., which is fair enough, but it’s gotten a little crazy in recent years. Opting in for site cookies usually means agreeing to other things that you might not see, data being sold, etc. We have had that on our minds for a while, and so recently we started asking users permission to send them further content. They would opt-in for a lead and then we would explain that so far, they are just getting that one thing they opted in for. If they want more content then please tick the box for some more content and give consent. This small thing saw us get a 60% lift from lead to trial. We saw a lift from reader to sub from 43 to 50%, and then a 60% lift in sub to trial!”
At the end of the day, content is king, and your customers can sniff out poorly written and under-researched content from a mile away. Because of this, no matter what kind of content your blog is offering, it needs to be high quality if you want it to convert.
Moody Nashawaty at MuteSix goes on to say, “If you really want your blogs to convert, then it’s imperative to write high-quality content that will engage the reader and provide useful, actionable tips. The days of writing poor content around your keywords are over. Google actually cares that your content provides something beneficial to the reader, and this will show in your rankings.”
Another direction you can take for your high-quality content is to write for specific search intent. To do this, Moss Clement at Writers Per Hour adds, “One of the best ways to improve blog conversions is by providing content that conforms with user search intent. Why? Because every internet activity begins with a search, and Google bots understand how to pinpoint the type of queries users are searching online. Search engines also know the terms you’re using to build your content and the best search results to offer. So, to help your audience find your posts and improve conversions, your articles and other blog content materials must satisfy user intent. Nevertheless, your content must be informative, persuasive, and created around topics that convert. It helps you increase organic search traffic, build a loyal readership, and boost conversions.”
Going one step further in creating high-quality content, you can’t really do this unless you take the time to do keyword research.
Louis Swartz from Fio Group recommends, “Doing keyword research and targeting the correct keywords, looking at the blog trends and writing what the readers are looking for, adding images and infographics and always keeping our blogs above 800 words.”
Lastly, if you’re looking to boost blog conversions, consider simplifying your homepage to remove any distractions in your audience’s way.
“One of the effective ways to improve blog conversion rate is to remove distractions and add appropriate options. No one likes to visit a website that pulls them in too many directions. The main page of your blog should be clear, concise, and easy to navigate. To improve the conversion rate, we also added useful options that our visitors need to know and nothing else,” adds Mia Green from FindThisBest.
Now is the time to give your blog a facelift. Regardless of which tip you’re implementing, or if you’re giving more than one a try, your customers are sure to notice. Remember to have patience, as a strong conversion rate wasn’t built in a day. Once you’ve done the hard work of transforming your blog, chances are a better conversion rate is just around the corner.
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Mara is a freelance writer at Databox and a Content Marketing Manager at G2. In her spare time, she's either at the gym, reading a book from her overcrowded bookshelf, enjoying the great outdoors with her rescue dog Zeke, or right in the middle of a Netflix binge. Obsessions include the Chicago Cubs, Harry Potter, and all of the Italian food imaginable.
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