PHOS Creative Awarded 7 Angel Awards for Excellence in Public Service Advertising
September 30, 2024 |
Bailey Revis
November 1, 2024
We’ve all heard it before: “Content is king.” There’s a reason that every digital marketer has been saying it for the last 10+ years. Providing valuable and educational content on your website is the best way to establish trust, authority, and credibility with your users—and also with Google. That trust should lead to an increase in your conversions.
To provide the best possible experience to their users, Google judges content’s credibility and value on how educational, relevant, and backed-up it is. Like a viral blog post, high-traffic content is typically the result of ranking highly in organic search results. In some instances, users can make content popular on social media or link to it on a different website.
No matter the channel your content is receiving the most traffic from, driving a ton of users to your website is great for establishing domain authority. If those people are consistently exiting your website after only viewing one page, that isn’t helping you reach your larger lead generation goals. So what can you do if your content isn’t converting? Simply refreshing content may lead to better results than you’d expect.
Before you can start optimizing your content to drive more leads, you need to first determine what content is driving the most traffic. You can do this by digging deep into your website analytics. You’ll want to focus on content that generates a lot of traffic but not a lot of interaction. These pages will become an integral part of your marketing strategy.
There are a few reasons why people may be leaving your content quickly. It could be that your content is slightly too long or overwhelming to read through. They are unsure what to look at next and therefore are not continuing to navigate through the website or (hopefully not this one) that your content isn’t relevant to them. For any of these reasons, we have a few tips and tricks that help keep users on your website longer.
For those who have never heard of “TL;DR,” it’s a fairly simple way that people with novel-worthy Facebook posts summarize their thoughts at the end. “Too long; didn’t read” or “TL;DR” is a way to summarize your content in an easy, consumable way at the end of your content.
Plus, Google loves short summaries of the important information to showcase in AI-generated featured snippets. Including “TL;DR” sections at the end of your content helps increase your chances of staying at the top of search results and driving more traffic to your website. Place the summary right before your next steps or calls to action. (Bonus Tip: if being featured in an AI-generated snippet is your goal, try targeting keywords that don’t currently have a featured snippet).
If it’s been a while since you’ve published the high-traffic content, go through it to see if you can link to new content or services. You’ve most likely written new content in the meantime and can now utilize your high-performing content to funnel more traffic to other parts of your website. Be careful not to overwhelm your readers with dozens of links. Be smart about where you are linking and do it with the user’s intent in mind.
Take an audit of the calls to action (CTA) located in the content. Do they use powerful action words? Do they clearly show a user where they should go next? Spend time thinking through how captivating your CTAs are. Try to use more powerful words than just “learn more.” Add a button to draw the eye to your CTA, so they don’t get buried in body text.
Another way to analyze your CTAs is to ensure that you are tracking them in Google Tag Manager (GTM). If you haven’t worked in GTM before, don’t worry—we wrote an article all about it!
The title of your content is a big part of how a search engine understands what the content is about and who it should present it to. Does your title accurately reflect what the content is about? What about keywords—is there one in the title itself?
Rework your title to include relevant keywords—this will help Google serve it to users more likely to convert. The same goes for headings throughout the body of the text, but be careful not to force keywords where they don’t make sense—this can hurt your credibility with users.
Maybe you’ve done some optimizing and are looking for more ways to keep the momentum going on your content. You can create more resources stemming from that high-performing post to help capture new leads on different channels. A simple way to do this is to create infographics to share on social media. Pinterest users love interacting with infographics that contain the important points of your content.
You have already written the content, so you can reuse it for webinars, podcasts, or guest blogging opportunities. If your content is doing well bringing in traffic on one channel, share the wealth across other channels!
Lastly, if it’s been more than a year since you’ve published the content, you’ll need to make sure that the content is still relevant. If it’s a technical blog, it’s imperative that you include important updates surrounding the topic that have come out since it was first published. Users will look at the publish date and determine whether or not the content is still relevant to them.
We recommend that if you add updates to a blog, make a note underneath the heading or footer to let users know that the information was updated on a date different from the original publish date.
Focus on quality, not quantity. Try to only release high-quality content that will really be useful to your users. If your older content does not hold up, don’t be afraid to take it down and reevaluate.
Now that you’ve analyzed your content and made changes, it’s time to measure your content’s performance. Slight changes in traffic may occur, but the most important thing to look at is your engagement metrics: bounce rate, exit rate, conversion rate, and goal completion rate.
If you add Google tags to your content, be sure to take a closer look at your “events” in Google Analytics. Are more people clicking on your CTA button? Do you notice an increase in phone calls specific to that page? Do people click on your button, but don’t fill out your contact form? These are just a few questions to ask in order to measure how your conversions have been affected by your refresh.
Great content and refreshing content is just one part of a complete digital marketing strategy. With great content marketing can come even greater amounts of traffic. High traffic is important when establishing domain authority but isn’t as helpful if no conversions occur.
At PHOS, we understand how important the bottom of the funnel is to your business, which is why we specialize in creating brand systems that look amazing and fuel your bottom line. Want to start publishing content that increases conversions? Let’s chat.