You’re blogging, you’re using keywords, you’re using calls-to-action, but things just aren’t clicking for you (literally, nobody is clicking). What gives? According to inbound marketing strategy, you should be crushing it.
Typically, with blogging, we see two frustrating trends that can make even the best marketer throw their hands up and want to make a career change;
- Your blogs are getting a ton of traffic, but aren’t getting any conversions.
- Your blogs are converting like crazy, but are getting barely any traffic to even make a difference.
Obviously, in these two common scenarios, you want the blogs that are getting a ton of traffic to convert higher and the blogs that are converting really well to get more traffic. In either case, the leads will be rolling in and you’ll be a happy little marketer if this can be achieved.
So, how can you get to that point?
It’s all about successfully connecting your calls-to-action with your blogging for those blogs that aren’t converting high enough, and all about updating and optimizing those blogs that are converting well but aren’t getting enough traffic.
Let’s break it down.
Boosting Conversions on Low-Converting Articles
There are a couple of ways you can get creative with CTAs in your blog articles to address the ones that seem to be performing well on search engines but the same can’t be said for lead generation.
First, before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to identify which articles fall into this category. Take a look at your analytics. If you’re using HubSpot, you’ll want to go into your blog performance tool and see your “top performing posts” either by all time or by month, depending on how much you want to narrow it down.
We can see from this report that our top performing post of all time is “Time to Explore: Top 4 Most Interesting Blogs on the Internet”.
Diving in a little deeper into this particular blog article, I see that while it is performing great on search engines and is receiving a ton of traffic, the same can’t be said for conversions:
So, what’s a marketer to do?
We can analyze which CTA we currently have in the blog article to see if it is connected enough to the overall topic.
In this instance, we have a CTA driving readers to check out our “Art and Science of Blogging” eBook. This CTA seems to be relevant and connected to the overall topic about “most interesting blogs on the internet”, but obviously we still aren’t getting the conversions we are looking for.
To remedy this situation, we can try including a different relevant CTA to see if that one will convert better and resonate with readers a bit more. We have another CTA for a “Blog Editorial Calendar” tool that allows you to organize your monthly blogging strategy. We could try A/B testing these CTAs to see if one performs better, or implement a smart CTA so a different relevant offer will appear if the reader has already downloaded the other offer that we are promoting.
Another thing we could do would be to test the placement of the CTA. Maybe instead of including the CTA at the bottom of the article, we could include an inline CTA in the middle of the article where relevant.
(See what I did there?)
Finally, maybe the offer that we are promoting with the CTA isn’t the problem, but maybe it’s the CTA itself. We could try updating the copy or design on the CTA to resonate more with readers by either repositioning the offer and why readers should download it or by changing the copy to include the exact keywords that people are searching for on Google to try and boost click rates for that particular CTA and offer.
Boosting Traffic on High-Converting Articles
On the other hand, maybe you have an article that is converting at an extremely high rate, but only a few people are actually viewing it. Those few people that are viewing it, however, are converting, but when you only have 10 visits in a month to that piece, it seems like a missed opportunity. If you can boost traffic to 100 visits in a month to that article instead and maintain an excellent conversion rate, that will equal some great results for leads.
Let’s take a look at another example:
I found a blog article that has a 5.88% conversion rate (not bad), but only has 17 views all time and is a post that is relatively old. This shows that some of the readers who are visiting the article find the CTA relevant, but not that many people are actually visiting the article so we are missing out on conversion opportunities. If we could boost this traffic to 100 views/month and maintain the same conversion rate, we could generate 6 submissions a month vs. 1. If we could keep growing that over time, even better.
In order to do this, it’s important to go back through these posts to see what you can do to optimize them for search engines. If you can get more eyeballs to the article, there will be more chances for people to convert on it, especially if the ones who are seeing it do find the CTA relevant and desirable.
It’s important to be consistently optimizing and updating blog articles in order to keep them as relevant as possible so you can build long-term value out of them and use them as some of your top tools for converting leads.
Successfully connecting CTAs to your blogging may seem simple, but there are a lot of ways you can get creative with how you do it so you can see the results that you are setting out to achieve from the moment you sit down to write your blog article.
So, the next time you are planning a blog article, be sure to keep your CTA strategy in mind. And remember, the next time you get frustrated when a blog article isn’t converting or getting enough traffic, all hope is not lost. There are strategies you can implement to fix whatever is going on; all you have to do is dig into the data and see what it’s telling you and then put your marketing skills to work!