For example, if you’re a software company that helps small business owners track employee time off, then a blog post or landing page written to rank for the keyword “best employee time off tracking software” is BOFU content. People searching for queries like that are ready to make a purchase.

That conversion potential is BOFU content’s primary selling point, and we’ve been preaching the benefits of bottom of the funnel content for years.

We think too many brands overfocus on top of the funnel content and would be better off prioritizing BOFU instead. We have plenty of data to back that up, including a conversion analysis of 95 articles we’ve written for clients.

We’ve noticed, however, that even when marketers publish BOFU content, they make several mistakes:

• Using the wrong criteria to pick topics. In our experience, marketers pick keywords using one of two frameworks: (a) researching what the competition is ranking for and (b) prioritizing keywords by search volume. Both criteria are worth considering as you develop your strategy, but neither is a strong enough indicator on their own when choosing which topics to write about. 
  
  • First, just because a competitor ranks for a keyword doesn’t mean that keyword is driving leads, or that it would drive leads for you. A competitor might be ranking for topics with no buying intent. They also might be ranking for BOFU topics where you cannot meaningfully differentiate yourself (i.e. topics where you’re not going to connect with your target audience).
    
  • Second, higher keyword volume doesn’t translate to more conversions. In fact, we have seen organic leads grow for our clients when targeting mini-volume or even zero-volume keywords. (Keyword volume becomes even less meaningful when your goal is to show up in AI search. No one knows what queries are being typed into AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, but we do know that ultra-specific writing is showing up in AI search results.)

• Writing bad content. This can negate the benefits of publishing BOFU content. For example, the content may not match search intent and fail to show up in search engines, or it may not address specific customer pain points and struggle to convert. 
  
  At Grow and Convert, we’ve always championed the importance of addressing the exact pain points your customers have, not surface-level overviews, in our content. This approach has paid off for our clients in the past, and is continuing to pay off as more customers use AI search. This is because AI search results tend to be very specific to the user, based on chat history. We wrote about this aspect in our piece on Invisible Prompts. The more specific and precise your content, the more likely LLMs and Google are going to connect you with your target audience.
  
• Not knowing how to make strategic choices based on what’s working. As you publish more content on your site, you’ll start tracking success through various metrics, such as page views, rankings, AI visibility, and new leads. But often companies focus on the wrong metrics or miss the full picture — like seeing declining Google traffic and concluding their BOFU content isn’t working, while not realizing that the same content is being recommended in AI search tools they aren’t tracking.

At Grow and Convert, we create organic channels that bring in qualified leads for brands. We do this by writing bottom of the funnel content that matches what your target customers are looking for.

We publish this content on a client’s blog so it can rank in search engines (both traditional and  AI search). This creates an organic channel that drives conversions. We’ve been doing this for a decade, across a wide variety of clients, and have a lot of data on what bottom of the funnel content types convert the most. 

In this article, we look at different types of BOFU content (with examples of content we’ve written for clients), how to find the best BOFU topics for your company, and how we write BOFU content.

Table of Contents

• 5 types of BOFU content. We cover five types of BOFU content and show actual data on how well they convert for our clients.
• How to come up with bottom of the funnel content ideas. We share how we ideate topics with new clients and why we don’t start with keywords, even though SEO is key to our process.
• How to write bottom of the funnel content. We discuss our research-based method, which lets us write high-quality, rankable content across various industries.
• Measuring your BOFU content and making data-informed decisions. We cover what metrics to track — including conversions, rankings, and AI visibility — and how to use that data to decide which content to double down on, re-optimize, or deprioritize.

5 Types of Bottom of the Funnel Content Shown to Drive the Most Leads

To help us find out what type of BOFU content converts the most, we analyzed 95 articles across clients, totaling over 123,000 organic pageviews and 4,687 conversions. 

Across that dataset, we identified five types of content: 

1. Category keywords
2. Side category keywords
3. Category keywords with a layer of specificity 
4. Comparison and alternatives keywords
5. Jobs to be done keywords

(Read more about the conversion rates across these keywords.)

1. Category Keywords (4.85% Average Conversion Rate)

These are queries that describe exactly what you offer. Think of topics like “best accounting software” or “men’s running shoes.” For Grow and Convert, a category keyword would be “content marketing agency,” because that’s what we are.

Most people don’t expect blog posts to convert at multiple percentage points, but our data shows they can when they rank for the right keywords and are written to sell the product. For example, Geekbot, a past client and a solution for running online standup meetings, ranks #2 for “Slack standup bot” via a post we wrote for them, and that single blog post has a lifetime conversion rate of 8.36%.

To be clear, this is extremely high, and essentially unheard of for a typical blog content strategy (which heavily skews to top of funnel content). For example, in one of our clients we compared the conversion rate of BOTF vs. TOF content. 

Their TOF content converted at just .19%, while their BOTF content had a 4.78% conversion rate.

We’ve seen this pattern across clients: when you target variations of your core product keywords, most variations convert well. A video marketing client we ranked on page one for app, software, and service variations of their category saw conversion rates of 5.73%, 3.31%, and 3.00%, respectively. Not every variation will convert equally, but category keywords consistently convert at 3–5% or higher across our clients.

When you’re developing your BOFU content strategy, you want to identify your main category keywords.

2. Side Category Keywords (1.94% Average Conversion Rate)

These are queries that show buying intent for a secondary feature or use case — not your core offering. Many companies build content to promote these offerings, and while these keywords don’t usually convert as well as your main category keywords, they still can drive leads.

For example, one of our clients sells digital asset management (DAM) software. Based on our conversations with their sales team, we wrote a BOFU post on storing video assets, a specific use case within their broader product. That post converts at 1.45%. That’s still far higher than typical top of funnel content, but their posts targeting general DAM keywords convert at 3%, 6%, and even 15%. The difference comes down to fit: users who only need video storage could opt for something simpler, whereas users searching for general DAM software need exactly what this client offers.

3. Category Keywords + Layer of Specificity (2.96% Average Conversion Rate)

These are queries 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 “best accounting tools,” or adding “for trail running” to “men’s running shoes.” You’re targeting searchers who already have some knowledge of the category and are searching for a very particular solution.

Here’s a recent example from our client that works in the private education space. Their main category keywords are topics like “best private schools in california” or “best private schools in the US.” But a key part of their offering is working with students that have learning differences, such as dyslexia, ADHD, and autism.

For this client, we targeted the topic “dyslexia private schools.” That’s a more specific query than “best private schools.” It has a smaller audience and smaller search volume, but it’s been a major driver of conversions for our client. It has an average conversion rate of 1.11%.

Taking this learning, we also targeted “private schools for autism,” which while bringing in less traffic, has brought in more conversions with a higher average conversion rate of 2.32%.

Note this kind of specificity has an additional benefit for AI search, where LLMs recommend products that are highly specific solutions to the users situation or problems. More on this below.   

4. Comparison and Alternatives Keywords (8.43% Average Conversion Rate)

These are queries that mention competitor names, indicating the searcher is aware of other brands in your industry, is looking for alternatives, and could be a good candidate for your solution. This includes keywords like “salesforce alternative” or “Salesforce vs. Pipedrive.”

These were the highest converting keyword types in our analysis. This makes sense: these searchers already know about your industry, are familiar with competing products, and are actively evaluating options with a serious intent to buy.

But you want to be strategic about which competitor keywords you target. From our data, keywords mentioning direct competitors convert significantly better than those featuring loosely related competitors. Although the average conversion rate is 8.43%, the majority of the 23 competitor keywords we analyzed actually converted at less than 4%. The closer the competitor is to your product, the higher the conversion rate.

That said, even conversion rates between 1–4% are far higher than top of funnel content. And many comparison and alternative keywords have very low search volume — but as we’ve seen with our analysis of mini-volume keywords, the high conversion rates make them well worth targeting.

VS Keywords

These are a specific flavor of comparison keywords — queries comparing two solutions head-to-head, like [Brand #1] vs. [Brand #2]. The searcher is trying to decide between two specific options they’re already considering, which is why these converted at 5.45% in our analysis.

5. Jobs to Be Done Keywords (2.44% Average Conversion Rate)

These are queries that describe a job to be done (which is a problem to be solved) that your product offers the best solution for. 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, etc. Although these users may not be aware of your brand or competitors, they still have the potential to buy because they have a job or problem that you solve.

While these types of keywords have a lower conversion rate than the above buckets, 2.44%, they still convert leagues higher than typical top of funnel blog content. Also these JTBD keywords often have higher search volume, which means more traffic. 

And when the job in the query maps directly to what your product does, these keywords can convert incredibly well. For example, “collect video testimonials” — a keyword we targeted for a video marketing client — converts at 9.71%, because the searcher needs software to do that exact task and our client’s product is built for it. 

The takeaway is that looking at the highest average conversion rate and focusing only on those keyword types is not a strategy. There is a large variety in what converts well, based on the client and the types of customers they serve.

How to Come Up with Bottom of the Funnel Content Ideas for Your Business

Often agencies approach content ideation in one of two ways: they open a keyword tool and target whatever keywords have the highest search volume, or they look at what competitors are ranking for and try to cover the same topics. 

Neither approach is wrong on its own, but when your goal is to build an organic channel that generates qualified leads, they’re not the best starting points. High-volume keywords may not align with what your ideal customers are actually searching for when they’re ready to buy. And just because a topic works for a competitor doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your business — their customers, positioning, and strengths may be completely different from yours.

Instead, the more effective approach is to start by asking: what problems do our customers have that our product solves?

At Grow and Convert, we begin every new client engagement with a series of interviews with people from different departments,  sales, customer success, founders, anyone who has direct interaction with customers. The goal is to understand the details of the product, the ideal customer personas, and most importantly, the specific pain points that the product solves.

Outside of speaking directly with customers, this is the fastest way to identify topics that resonate with potential buyers and naturally position your product as the solution.

These interviews are what allow us to choose topics based on how your customers actually search, rather than defaulting to whatever has the highest volume, mimicking what competitors are doing, or even relying on average conversion rates amongst types of BOFU content.

For example, one of our clients made a straightforward employee time off tracking tool for small business owners. Through our interviews with their team, we learned that most of their customers had been managing time off in spreadsheets and physical wall calendars. They weren’t coming from competing software. That insight changed the entire content strategy. Instead of prioritizing comparison and alternative keywords, which have the highest average conversion rate in our data, we focused on JTBD keywords like “how to track employee time off,” because that matched how their customers were actually searching. It worked: we grew a profitable organic channel for them by targeting keywords that matched their specific customers’ pain points.

Find Keywords That Correspond to Your Topics

Once you have topic ideas grounded in customer pain points, you can plug them into keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to check search volume and keyword difficulty. The role of keyword tools in our process is to confirm that people are actually searching for the topics you’ve identified, not to generate the topics in the first place.

The most important thing to resist here is letting search volume override buying intent. A keyword with 200 searches per month and high buying intent will almost always outperform a keyword with 10,000 searches per month that attracts people who are just learning about a topic. We’ve seen this repeatedly in client data: the posts that drive the most leads are rarely the ones with the highest traffic.

That said, not every topic you identify needs a Google keyword to be worth pursuing. With more customers using AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to find products and services, there’s demand happening in conversations that no keyword tool will ever show you. 

As we mentioned above, LLMs recommend products based on the specificity and relevance of your content to a user’s situation, not based on whether you targeted a high-volume keyword (though we do see a positive correlation between ranking #1 for a keyword and showing up in AI results). So if your interviews surface a pain point that your product solves well but there’s no obvious keyword to match it to, it can still be worth producing content around that topic.

We’ve seen this with clients whose content is now showing up in AI search results for prompts we never could have predicted. We call this new type of search query answering Invisible Prompts, and it’s a big part of why we’ve developed a topic-based approach to GEO that doesn’t rely on keyword volume.

How to Write Bottom of the Funnel Content That Ranks and Converts

Choosing good high-intent keywords to target is the most important step but a close second in importance is how these pieces are written. If the content itself is generic or surface level (for example a very basic listicle of top software in a category) it risks you (a) not ranking and (b) not impressing or converting visitors that do land. 

We’ve noticed this is actually extremely common, and we think it happens because most writers — and now most AI tools — don’t have deep enough knowledge of the product or customer to write anything original. Without that knowledge, they default to copying what’s already ranking in the SERP, which produces content that says the same thing everyone else is saying.

At Grow and Convert, we use a content writing process that helps us overcome these challenges.

• We interview subject matter experts. For every piece we write, we interview subject matter experts from within our client’s organization — sales leads, founders, product managers, whoever knows the product and customer best. This is the step most content teams skip. Without it, writers default to “Google research papers” — reading what competitors have published and repackaging it into a new article that says nothing original. The interview surfaces the specific details, positioning arguments, and customer insights that make a piece actually useful to a buyer. (Learn more about our content writing process here.)

• We conduct a SERP analysis. Before writing, we analyze what’s currently ranking on Google for the target keyword. We review the types of content on page one (listicles, how-to guides, landing pages), identify the subtopics and themes that come up repeatedly, and assess what existing results do well and where they fall short. This tells us what our piece needs to cover to compete, and where there’s an opportunity to differentiate. (Learn more about our SERP analysis process in our article on SEO Content Writing.)

• We use the Grow and Convert Questionnaire, not a formulaic template, to help us outline the piece. Most content briefs focus on logistics — word count, how many internal links to include, which heading tags to use, what Grammarly score to hit. But that kind of information doesn’t help a writer produce great content that will rank and convert.
  
  Our questionnaire is fundamentally different. After the interview, writers answer a series of questions designed to help them synthesize what they learned from the interview and their SERP analysis. Our Questionnaire focuses on understanding the target audience at a level deeper than “our audience is a startup looking for accounting software” and understanding the SERP. 
  
• We draft the piece. The draft is written with the product woven throughout, not just mentioned in a CTA at the end. This means opening with the customer’s pain points, explaining the product’s positioning early to grab the right reader’s attention, and highlighting differentiating features as the foundation of the article. For example, when we wrote a piece for TapClicks targeting “paid search dashboard,” we structured the entire post as a walkthrough of how to create a dashboard using their product, which let us naturally showcase the features that made them different from competitors. (Learn more about our writing style in our post on How to Improve Your Content Writing.)

We’ve also built an AI writing tool, Wave Writer, that helps with this process. Unlike other AI writing tools that only learn your brand voice, Wave Writer ingests your business’s products, features, positioning, and customer pain points. It analyzes a SERP for any given keyword and suggests angles tailored to your business, produces outlines grounded in your actual arguments, and drafts content that says something substantive.

We used Wave Writer to do an SEO analysis for this very post, which you can view here, along with my comments on the output.

Measuring Your BOFU Content and Making Data-Informed Decisions 

As discussed in this article, writing BOFU content is a good strategy to grow your organic channel. When done correctly — that’s writing about the right topics and writing content that ranks — your BOFU content can lead to new leads, free trial signups, demo requests, new customers. 

But a key aspect of developing your BOFU content strategy is knowing what types of content to double down on, and what to deprioritize. At Grow and Convert, we track three things to create a full picture of your organic channel: conversions (our primary metric), keyword rankings and traffic, and AI visibility. 

• Conversions. This is our primary metric. Traffic and rankings matter, but only because they lead to conversions — new leads, signups, demo requests. We track conversions from each piece of content so we can see which posts are actually driving business results, not just pageviews. (Learn how we track conversions in our article on measuring conversions in GA4.)

• Keyword rankings and traffic. Rankings and traffic tell you where you’re positioned, what’s growing, and where you’re slipping. For example, when one client saw a dip in conversions despite still ranking for their target keywords, we discovered they had lost rankings for secondary keywords — related keywords their posts had been ranking for that were quietly driving conversions. Re-optimizing 22 posts brought monthly conversions from 171 to 258. (Read the full process in our article on how to find and use secondary keywords to increase conversions.)

• AI visibility. Traditional search metrics don’t capture whether LLMs are recommending your brand. We track AI visibility at the topic level, not the individual prompt level. Our client Constitution Lending now appears in AI search results for 50+ bottom of the funnel prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — competing with lenders that have been in the market for decades. There’s still a gap in attribution here — it’s more difficult to track customers who found you through AI search — but visibility is the leading indicator. (Read more about our topic-based approach to GEO.)

Over the past eight years, we’ve built organic channels for clients across dozens of industries — from SaaS to healthcare to private education — using the process described in this article. Our BOFU content has driven thousands of conversions for clients, with conversion rates routinely hitting 3-10% on individual posts.

Our clients are now showing up in AI search results alongside competitors with decades of industry presence. If you want to build an organic channel that drives real leads, learn more about working with us.

Content Writing Tips

1. Use an interview-backed research process
2. Be your own editor
3. Organize your thoughts into bullet points
4. Look for symmetry between your intro and body sections
5. Read your piece only by its headings
6. Get to the value of a sentence faster
7. Write towards the job, not job titles

The first tip — use an interview-backed research process — is the most important on our list.

At Grow and Convert, we interview our clients to 1) generate blog post topics and 2) help us write those posts to deliver value. This process is crucial for writing high-quality content because understanding the audience shapes how you write.

The next 6 tips focus on editing and presenting the information you’ve gathered from your interviews. But remember, incorporating interviews is essential. Without them, your content might read well but will lack the specificity and detail that impress an informed target customer and motivate conversions.

A quick note on the growing role of AI tools in content writing: We recently surveyed 50+ marketers about their writing process with AI. The second most common use case was improving writing with AI. We found that the tips in this post still apply when using AI tools. For instance, you can upload a piece of content to your AI tool and ask it to make edits that align with tip #3 (organizing thoughts into bullet points) or tip #6 (getting to the value of the sentence faster).

1. Use an Interview-Backed Research Process

When you get an assignment, emphasize to your client the importance of conducting an interview to help you research the topic. Use this interview to gather insights about the intended audience and what matters to them within the context of your topic.

There are several benefits to this approach.

First, it leads to better results for your clients, which helps show value and improve retention. When writing a piece of content for a company, your goal is usually to capture their target customer’s attention (whether through Google Search, ads, or email campaigns) and prompt action from the customer (like signing up for a free trial, scheduling a demo, joining a newsletter). 

To do this effectively, you need more than just topic knowledge — you need insights into your client’s customers, particularly the features they value most. 

For example, let’s say you’re working on content marketing for StartUp Accounting, a (fictional) accounting service specializing in startups. They’re building an organic channel to attract new customers. As part of your content strategy, you’re writing a blog post targeting the keyword “best accounting software for startups.” The post will outline software options for startups while positioning StartUp Accounting’s services as a better option for specific use cases. 

This isn’t a trivial assignment. To do it properly, you need to understand key details, such:

• What do startups need most from accounting services? 
  
• How do startups manage their accounting before looking for software options? 
  
• How does your client’s service solve the specific accounting problems these customers face?

Even if you’ve written about accounting software before, you still need to know how StartUp Accounting specifically solves their customers’ problems.

In our experience, interviewing their team is the best way to gain this understanding. Without an interview, you’re left relying on Google, YouTube, AI tools, and the client’s website — which can be helpful but shouldn’t be the sole basis for your piece of content. What others say isn’t always valuable information to your reader. 

An interview lets you uncover unique insights about your client and their target audience that you can’t find anywhere else. 

Second, using interviews makes your job as a writer more enjoyable, more interesting — and, in a way, easier. When you interview a subject-matter expert, you’re learning new things from someone knowledgeable. This can be far more fulfilling than researching on your own, which often means sifting through a lot of bad mirage content found online.

It also makes researching the topic easier. You’re not left trying to figure out technical terms or nuances by yourself. You have a knowledgeable resource who can explain things clearly and put them into context. Plus, interviewing a client helps you understand which key points matter most and how to incorporate them effectively in your draft. This leads to a more efficient process and fewer edits when you submit the piece.

Finally, it opens up new topics you can write about with authority. Using an interview process also helps grow your career by allowing you to cover a variety of subjects. 

At Grow and Convert, we’ve written about:

• Route optimization software
• Hyperhidrosis 
• Digital asset management 
• Paid media reporting
• Concussions
• The US healthcare billing system
• International shipping for IT companies
• Time clock software
• User testing
• Translation software
• 1-to-1 private education

And much, much more.

How We Use Interviews to Shape the Entire Content Writing Process: From Initial Topics to Final Draft

If you’re working with a content writing agency, the typical content production process looks like this:

• The agency’s SEOs/marketing managers conduct keyword research for the client.
• They prioritize the keywords and assign projects to content writers.
• You, the content writer, receive a content brief outlining the assignment.

When I just started out as a freelance content writer, I would get content briefs that looked like this:

• Article Keyword: Best accounting software for startups
• Audience: Accounting department / CFO at startups
• Estimated word count: 2,000-2,500 words
• Article guidelines
  • Include links to stats that are no more than 3 years old
  • Include an image every 250-300 words
  • Write short paragraphs (no more than 4 sentences) and short sentences
  • Use headings. Specifically, include h3 and h4 subheaders, but not h5s
  • Include exact match keyword in the title and first heading
  • Run the piece through Grammarly and get an overall score of 90 or higher
  • Run the piece through Hemingway and get readability score of no higher than 7th grade

Unfortunately, all the information included in the brief is ineffective for guiding the writer to produce great content. It focuses on logistics — formatting instructions and basic on-page SEO (search engine optimization) best practices — rather than the argumentation or substance of the piece. 

Even if you agree with some of these guidelines (like keeping the content at a 7th grade level), these edits are the easiest part of the process. They can be done at the end of drafting, so they don’t make our list of the most impactful content writing tips. 

The hard part of content writing is creating content that is 1) aimed at your target audience and 2) backs up its claims. That’s the focus of our content creation process.  

In fact, our process starts shaping the argumentation and understanding of customer pain points and the brand or product’s unique selling points before the content interview. 

Namely, this begins during the topic ideation phase: 

• We interview our clients before we look for keywords. We learn about the client’s company, what pain points it solves for their customers, who their best customers are, who they think their main competitors are, etc.

• Based on those interviews, we come up with topics that we think are most relevant to our client’s target audience.

• We then find keywords that correspond to that topic. Keywords are a critical part of our process, and we’ve written at length on topics such as competitor keywords, bottom of the funnel keywords, secondary keywords. Our process focuses on finding keywords tied to the target customer’s pain points, which is why we don’t start with keyword research.

• Finally, when it’s time to write a piece for a particular keyword, we interview a member of our client’s team to ask them questions about the given topic related to customer pain points and how the product or service addresses those pain points in relation to the keyword we’re writing about.

After we interview a subject, writers fill out a questionnaire based on the interview.

Our questionnaire process is fundamentally different from a typical content brief. It’s not about logistical details like word count or the number of internal links. Instead, it focuses on:

• Understanding your target audience. This goes beyond simply saying, “Our audience is a startup looking for accounting software” or “Our audience is likely an accountant at a startup and may have a limited budget.” That’s surface-level. You should be able to articulate the specific pain points the reader is likely experiencing that led them to search for “accounting software for startups.” This insight comes directly from the client interview. Until you’ve had the interview, you can’t be sure if the driving motivator is a faster process, a more affordable option, a more scalable solution, etc. 

• Understanding the SERP (search engine results page) for the keyword. This involves analyzing the content ranking on Google and figuring out why certain pieces may be ranking. What does it say about search intent? For example, if multiple pieces in the SERP highlight “free” software, it might be worth talking about free software in your post. Whether you choose to cover the limits of free software or recommend it for certain customers depends on insights gathered in the interview.

After exploring those two areas, you propose an outline. Here, you have a lot of freedom. The outline section is a blank space, where you can propose your title, the kind of intro you want to write, and how you want the article structured. These decisions will be guided by your understanding of the target audience and the SERP.

If you’re interested in learning more about the questionnaire, topic ideation, content strategy process, sign up for our content writing course. 

If this is the kind of content writing you excel at and want to do more of, apply to work with us. While we may not always have readily available writing assignments, we’re always on the lookout for skilled content writers.

AI use case for this tip: If you want to experiment with AI to write articles more efficiently, consider recording your client interview and uploading it into an AI tool for summarization. The AI can analyze the interview and provide a structured outline or summary of key topics. This saves time by eliminating the need to re-watch and transcribe the interview, speeding up the writing process, while still allowing you to maintain control over the article’s argument and structure.

2. Be Your Own Editor

Often when I receive a piece of writing from a writer I work with, or when I’m re-reading my own work, I think “This needs another round of edits.”

I’m not just talking about fixing typos or spelling mistakes (though those are important, and thorough proofreading is a must). What I’m really noticing is that the content is geared towards helping the writer understand the topic rather than being written for the audience. Writers need to understand a topic, and they do that by writing out their thoughts. But that shouldn’t be the end of the process, because the piece is meant for the audience, not the writer.

Here’s a very simple and exaggerated example:

Let’s say a writer is writing a blog post targeting the keyword “employee time tracking software,” and their primary audience is small business owners who need to track employee hours.

They might write an intro like this:

“Every employee loves taking time off. But as a business owner you’re busy trying to do your job, run your business, and keep your company staffed. So it can be frustrating to have to keep managing every new time off request that comes your way. The good news is that there is software.”

There’s a lot to critique in that small paragraph, and none of it is positive. But let’s focus on the first two lines, which come across as a writer trying too hard to relate to the audience. The writer is stating the obvious to the business owner.

Remember, this piece is for people Googling “employee time tracking software,” so they already know they need to track employee time. They recognize it’s a problem, understand the need for a solution, and are actively seeking software for help. This opener doesn’t add anything new — it’s just obvious.  

If you were to read this as an editor, you’d think, “This is very obvious. What are the specific things the reader is trying to solve? Let’s start there.” And you’d see that “do your job” and “run your business” are the same thing and “keep your company staffed” is vague and potentially wrong.

Again, these things seem obvious when you consider the piece of content from an editor’s perspective, someone focused on the audience’s interests.

Before submitting work, make sure you’ve reviewed it with an editor’s mindset, not a writer’s.

But this is easier said than done, so I’m going to provide three different ways to help you switch into the editor role when working on your own piece.

Editing Tip #1: Take Some Time Away from Your Piece

For me, the best method is to step away from your piece for a day. When you’re in the middle of writing, you’re working in a state of mind that can make it challenging to see issues in your logic or approach. 

But once you take a break, you’ll return to it with fresh eyes, and things that weren’t obvious before will become clear.

Editing Tip #2: Change the Font & Color of Your Content

This method is great for catching typos and styling issues, but it also helps you shift into an editor’s mindset. 

By changing the font and color of your article to something absurd, like purple Comic Sans in size 16, you create distance between what you originally wrote and what is in front of you. It feels like a new piece written by someone else.

Editing Tip #3: Use a Text-to-Speech Feature to Have Your Piece Read to You

This is another great way to catch typos, spelling mistakes, and just awkward phrasing. By having your ears be the editor and not your eyes, you’re again creating distance between yourself and your piece.

Using text-to-speech can also help with structural edits. As you listen to your piece, you’ll understand what you expect to follow next logically and if that doesn’t happen, then that’s a sign that you need to revisit your piece’s structure.

3. Organize Your Thoughts Into Bullet Points

Sometimes, writers submit work that meanders, jumping from point to point without a clear structure or flow. You can spot this in your own work by reading it aloud. 

If it sounds a bit like listening to a kid tell you about their day at school, then it’s meandering.

The issues with meandering writing are two-fold:

• It can confuse your audience about the main point or message.

• It makes it harder for you as the writer to ensure you’ve addressed everything that needs to be covered.

For example, we have a client that works in the education space, providing personalized education for middle and high school students. One of our pieces is about how this private school helps students with sensory processing disorder, a learning difference in which students are either underwhelmed or overwhelmed by sensory input. 

Here’s an example of a meandering intro for that topic:

“When looking for the best schools for sensory processing disorder, you want to factor in several things. You want a school that can cater its environment towards the student. Sensory processing students often struggle with traditional classrooms, and need personalization. Sometimes a teacher may even suggest a sensory break to help overwhelmed students. Typically this is easier to do when a class is small, so look for small classes. Plus, keep in mind if your children have other classes or therapy sessions they need to attend.”

To me, this reads as rambling, which can confuse the reader and make it difficult to grasp your points. It also hides gaps in your argument. Without clarity, it’s hard to tell if you’re making the point you intend to.

An edit here would be to ask the writer to rewrite this using bullet points to organize their thoughts. Here’s how that might look:

In general, the best schools for sensory processing disorder will:

1. Cater the school environment towards your child: Teachers will be able and willing to alter the classroom’s stimulation levels to match your child’s unique learning needs, preventing exhaustion and maintaining their interest. This requires a high level of flexibility and a faculty that values one-on-one instruction.
   
   
2. Implement sensory breaks into classes: Sensory breaks such as periods for movement around the class, or moments for silence, help children with SPD stay motivated and prevent fatigue.
   
   
3. Keep class sizes small: Schools with smaller class sizes are generally more appropriate and mentally peaceful for those with SPD, as large classes are full of visual and auditory stimulations which can be highly distracting, and hard to control. Further, in large classrooms, teachers cannot provide specialized, one-on-one instruction that is so valuable for students with sensory processing difficulties.
   
   
4. Offer flexible scheduling: Students with SPD generally have appointments with therapists and counselors — this routine is significant and it’s best when a school can work with your child’s existing programs, not against them. For this, we recommend you find a school that offers flexible scheduling.

First, this just reads better. It also went through several edits to get to this level. By breaking the writing into bullet points, we realized we could add more detail to each section. 

The biggest takeaway from this edit is that the first bullet point, “cater the school environment towards your child,” is the main value proposition. The rest of the bullet points serve as supporting evidence for this key claim.

In short, organizing the content into bullet points allowed us to clearly identify the core argument of the piece.

Here’s the final intro:

In general, the best schools for sensory processing disorder are schools that are able to cater the classroom, campus environment, and class schedule towards the student. This can include:

1. Changing how an instructor teaches the curriculum. Perhaps your child does better with video tools or highly visual textbooks. Other children may do better with conversational teaching, where they and the instructor can engage in 1-to-1 dialogue.
   
   
2. Adapting the classroom environment towards the student (vs. making the student adapt to an uncomfortable and distracting environment). This can involve creating a sensory-sensitive environment, like using dim lighting, taking graphics and distracting images off walls, playing white noise in the background, etc.
   
   
3. Implementing sensory breaks into classes. Sensory breaks — such as periods for movement around the class or moments for silence — can help children with SPD stay motivated and prevent learning fatigue.
   
   
4. Keeping classes small. Schools with smaller class sizes are generally better suited for students with SPD, as large classes are full of visual and auditory simulations which can be distracting and overwhelming. Further, in large classrooms, teachers cannot provide specialized, one-to-one instruction that can be so valuable for students with sensory processing difficulties.
   
   
5. Offering flexible scheduling. Flexible scheduling benefits students and their families in key ways. First, some students may concentrate better earlier in the morning or later in the day. Being able to pick when class starts is a big plus for these students. Second, students with SPD may have appointments with therapists and counselors, and keeping this routine is important. So it’s best when a school can work with your child’s existing programs, not against them.

All these changes came from simply having the writer organize their original intro into bullet points.

4. Look for Symmetry Between Your Intro & Body Sections

At Grow and Convert, we sometimes write first drafts that either:

• A. Have a strong introduction, but a relatively weak body.
• B. Have a weak introduction, but a relatively strong body.

As a hypothetical of the first example (A), we could be reading a post about digital marketing dashboards. 

The intro can highlight what key features these dashboards need. But in the body, the post takes a few steps back, explaining the importance of digital marketing, providing some irrelevant stats (like how important companies think digital marketing is), and never really gets around to expanding on the value props positioned in the intro.

But more often, the opposite happens (B), and we read a post with a really fluffy and pointless intro. 

The type of intro that starts with a line like “Everyone knows digital marketing is important in this day and age. As the internet refuses to go away, more and more companies are focusing their marketing budget on online strategies.” But the body actually dives into useful information, like how to import and segment data into reporting dashboards.

This is why we recommend looking for symmetry between the intro and the body.

• For A, our feedback would be to take the good info in the intro and expand on it in the body, providing more detail. 
  

• For B, we’d suggest taking the valuable information in the body and using it to reverse-engineer an intro. 

Sometimes, writers submit very light intros because they’ve been taught (or simply believe) that most people skip the intro and go straight to the body. But people skip intros because they’re weak. If you make the intro strong, people will read it. And if they skip it, no worries — they’ll find the same valuable info in your body paragraphs. 

5. Read Your Piece by Only Its Headings

This feedback actually came from one of our clients. He requested that before submitting a piece for review, we read it only by its headlines. I hadn’t heard of this strategy before, but I quickly saw its value when I applied it to my work.

I’ve found this has two benefits:

1. Checking if your article is scannable. As you scroll through your piece, do the headings clearly describe what’s being discussed? Strong headings help readers decide whether to dive into a specific section.
   
   
2. Ensuring a logical narrative flow. Reviewing a piece by its headlines alone can reveal gaps or disruptions in the argument.

For example, let’s use this post. Here’s the outline by headings:

• H1: How to Improve Your Content Writing Skills by Using an Interview Process (+ 6 Other Content Writing Tips)
  • H2: 1. Use an Interview-Backed Research Process
    • H3: How We Use Interview to Shape the Entire Content Production Process: From Keyword Research to to Final Drafts
  • H2: 2. Be Your Own Editor
    • H3: Editing Tip #1: Take Some Time Away from Your Piece
    • H3: Editing Tip #2: Change the Font and Color of Your Content
    • H3: Editing Tip #3: Use a Text-to-Speech Feature to Have Your Piece Read to You
  • H2: 3. Organize Your Thoughts Into Bullet Points
  • H2: 4. Look for Symmetry Between Your Intro & Body Sections
  • H2: 5. Read Your Piece by Only Its Headings
  • H2: 6. Get to the Value of the Sentence Faster
  • H2: 7. Write Towards Tasks, Not Job Titles

The headings were written to be descriptive and informative every step of the way, so a reader can easily see how we’re going to follow through on our initial promise (the title of the piece).

But what if our heading outline looked like this, with the added heading in bold:

• H1: How to Improve Your Content Writing Skills by Using an Interview Process (+ 6 Other Content Writing Tips)
  • H2: What is Content Writing?
  • H2: 1. Use an Interview-Backed Research Process
    • H3: How We Use Interview to Shape the Entire Content Production Process: From Keyword Research to to Final Drafts
  • H2: 2. Be Your Own Editor
    • H3: Editing Tip #1: Take Some Time Away from Your Piece
    • H3: Editing Tip #2: Change the Font and Color of Your Content
    • H3: Editing Tip #3: Use a Text-to-Speech Feature to Have Your Piece Read to You
  • H2: 3. Organize Your Thoughts into Bullet Points
  • H2: 4. Look for Symmetry Between Your Intro & Body Sections
  • H2: 5. Read Your Piece by Only Its Headings
  • H2: 6. Get to the Value of the Sentence Faster
  • H2: 7. Write Towards Tasks, Not Job Titles

You’ll notice the added heading is “What is Content Writing?” in bold. This is a top-of-funnel heading that we often see in bottom-of-the-funnel content, but it doesn’t belong here, does it? 

The title of the blog post focuses on improving your content writing, with a specific example: using an interview process. Does it make sense to assume that someone clicking on this blog post (whether from Google search or an ad) doesn’t already know what content writing is?

By reading your piece by its headings, you can easily assess its flow and whether the structure works.

6. Get to the Value of the Sentence Faster

This is just another way of “cutting out the fluff” or “cutting out the fat” in your writing. I personally like to focus on the verbs to find the value, but that’s not the only way to do it.

For example, here’s a sentence we might see from a writer:

“The best thing about our software’s feature is that it lets you create schedules for your team that can then be auto populated each week.”

When I review it, the first valuable phrase is “create schedules for your team that can then be auto populated each week.”  While this seems obvious, I identified the value by focusing on the first dynamic verb in the sentence: “create.”

If I asked a writer to focus on that value and move it up in the sentence, we might get something like:

“With our software you can create schedules for your team that will auto-populate each week.”

We removed unnecessary phrases like “the best thing about” because the value lies not in our opinion of the feature but in the feature and its benefits.

7. Write Towards the Job, Not Job Titles

One of my more consistent pieces of feedback to writers is to focus less on job titles and more on the job itself.

Here’s an intro paragraph we might get for a piece targeting small businesses that need time clock software to track employee time worked:

“When you’re an HR manager, founder, COO, or any other admin who handles time tracking, you know how difficult it can be to track time worked by employees.”

Now, there’s plenty we could say about that sentence, but let’s focus on that long list of job titles. The writer is trying to show they’re writing towards the audience, but in reality, they’re doing a bit of the opposite.

I don’t imagine that someone reading this will go “Oh hey, I’m an HR manager” and be convinced the article is for them. The better way to connect with an audience is by describing the job act or function they’re currently doing and why it isn’t working.

So, an edit I’d give a writer would be: “Remove the job title, but still convey to the reader who the post is for by focusing on the tasks associated with the job.”

If we do that, we might get an opening sentence such as:

“When you’re trying to get accurate time records for each employee, you need to manage time off requests (segmenting the requests down into separate categories, such as paid time off and sick days), employee leave balances, total hours worked, and any carryover balances from last year.”

This new version doesn’t rely on job titles (which are insufficient anyway in describing the breadth of your potential audience) because it focuses on the specific job acts your audience is performing. It’s much more specific. Whether you’re a middle manager, team lead, department manager, or HR manager, if you’re trying to get accurate time records for your employees, you’ll resonate with the tasks outlined in the intro.

Final Thoughts: Be Wary of Content Writing Tips (Even Ours)

Effective content writing connects with the target audience. That’s the key content writing tip to take to heart.

As a writer — especially a freelance writer trying to build your career — make sure the tips you follow help you connect with your audience.

To first do this, you need to be able to articulate:

• Who your audience is
• Why they’re reading your content

In my view, that’s the biggest challenge in writing great content. The tips shared here have helped me and other writers improve our content writing process. If you find that a tip isn’t helping you, then set it aside and focus on the overarching goal of writing good content: delivering value to your reader.

Additional Resources for Content Writers

The specific tools and tips that you use to improve your writing will depend on the type of content you’re creating. At Grow and Convert, we focus on SEO-driven pieces that target bottom-of-the funnel keywords.

We’ve written several other posts that can help writers in this space, including:

• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow
• The Detail Principle for Writing Good Blog Posts
• How to Write Great Blog Introductions

We also have case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of our content marketing strategy, such as:

• How Writing for Humans Increased Blog Conversions by 66% to 900%
• How We Scaled Content from Bottom of the Funnel to Top of the Funnel While Still Bringing the Client Conversions
• How We Scaled a Client to Over 200 Signups a Month

If you’re interested in writing for Grow and Convert, you can learn more here. 

We also offer a content marketing course that covers:

• How to identify SEO keywords that drive qualified leads from organic traffic.
• How to write content that outranks the competition. 
• How to measure conversions (and which metrics matter most) while scaling your content operation.

At Grow and Convert, we generate conversions (not just traffic and rankings) for clients by writing original, interview-backed blog content optimized to rank for high buying-intent keywords.

Every blog post we write for a client is written to rank for a specific keyword, and it’s written with the intention that it will convert. What counts as a conversion varies from client to client, but it’s generally signing up for a free trial or scheduling a demo.

This strategy has been incredibly effective for clients across all types of industries, including:

• A no-code software testing platform
• A post-concussion treatment center
• A self-service B2B SaaS company

Because we’re hyper-focused on bringing in conversions for our clients, we know when a blog post starts to falter or plateau (i.e., converting less than it once did or not continuing to grow as expected).

This happened last year with a SaaS client. 

The number of free trial signups directly attributable to our content for this client was growing steadily before plateauing in 2022 and then dipping in late 2022 and early 2023 (see how we attribute conversion events to specific pages in GA4 here). 

What was the problem? And how did we turn it around? 

It turns out there were multiple factors in play (including Google algorithm updates), but, in our analysis, we also discovered the massive importance of secondary keywords. Secondary keywords are keywords that our posts happen to rank for but aren’t the main target keyword that we optimize the post for. 

In the case of this client, we noticed that these secondary keywords, which were similar in intent to the primary keyword, often brought in more traffic than the primary keyword — sometimes significantly more. 

For example, “accounting app for small business” gets 390 searches a month, but many posts ranking for it also rank for “small business accounting software,” which gets 9900 searches per month. That’s an extreme example, but it’s illustrative of the impact secondary keywords can have. We had countless posts that were doing exactly this for our client. What’s also pertinent about this example is that the search intent of these two keywords is similar: both indicate someone is looking to buy accounting software. 

So, if you rank for secondary keywords like this, those “serendipitous” or “unintentional” rankings will also bring in conversions for you. Inversely, if you lose this ranking, you’ll see a dip in conversions from that article.

And that’s what happened with a few key articles for our client. The SERPs changed over time, and our content started losing its top positions for secondary keywords. Finding those secondary keywords allowed us to implement strategies to reclaim those lost rankings, which ultimately increased conversions for our client.

That’s what this post is about, and we break it down into these three sections:

1. Conducting a content audit to find opportunities
   
   
2. Locating high-value secondary keywords that were lost due to SERP changes
   
   
3. Developing a strategy to re-rank for those lost secondary keywords

1. Conducting a Content Audit

We had published original blog posts for this specific client for ~2 years, which meant we had published ~71 posts — all of which were designed to rank for high buying-intent keywords. 

As per our Pain Point SEO strategy, we targeted category keywords, comparison keywords, jobs-to-be-done keywords, and deviant keywords. We discovered keywords in each of those buckets by first interviewing the client to learn what specific pain points they solve for their customers and then finding keywords that correspond to those pain points.

And the results were strong. 

• By the first 6 months, our content had converted 168 times. 
• By the first 12 months, our content had converted 848 times.
• 18 months into the engagement, our content had brought in 2,059 conversions.

Plus, our client was seeing a significant ROI based on their internal data of how many free trials were converted to paid customers and the average lifetime value of one customer.

But, as discussed in the intro, a plateau in new free trial sign-ups occurred, followed by a dip. The growth we saw in the first year of engagement wasn’t happening (that we could see) in the second year. 

When we noticed this stagnation and degradation, we did a high-level content audit. We looked closely at how each article was converting to try and spot opportunities for improvement. 

After conducting the audit, we saw two things.

First, plenty of our posts were still converting well. 31 out of 60 published posts were converting consistently (and bringing in at least one conversion a month). A quick note: Blog articles take time to rank, so we excluded 3 months’ worth of published posts from this tally as those posts are too new to consider in the round-up of “Is this post ranking and converting?”. 

But we also noticed some posts that either a) weren’t performing as well as they once did, or b) hadn’t performed well comparatively. We grouped these posts into 4 different categories:

1. Historically high-converting posts that had dropped out of the top 3 spots for their target keyword. 
   
   
2. Historically high-converting posts that were still ranking in the top 3 for their target keyword yet saw a significant dip in conversions. 
   
   
3. Historically low-converting posts that were (and had always been) in the top 3 for their target keyword.
   
   
4. Low-converting / non-converting posts that had never consistently ranked for their target keyword.

Once we had those broad categories, the next step was developing strategies to increase conversions and continue to deliver growth to our client.

Narrowing Our Scope (to See as Much Growth as Possible, as Soon as Possible)

Since our goal was to reverse the conversion dip as fast as possible, we decided to focus on these two categories of posts first:

1. Historically high-converting posts that had dropped out of the top 3 spots for their target keyword. 
   
   
2. Historically high-converting posts that were still ranking in the top 3 for their target keyword yet saw a significant dip in conversions. 

These posts had, at some point, brought in a lot of conversions, so we just had to get them to do that again.

In contrast, the category “historically low-converting posts that always ranked in the top 3 for its target keyword” involved posts that never brought in a lot of conversions despite ranking well. We noticed that those posts just got less traffic and, thus, fewer conversions. So while their conversion rates were on par with the rest of our content, they were always just going to bring in fewer conversions for the client. And, while there are strategies to improve those types of low-converting posts, the immediate effect would be too small to make a significant difference in growth. 

Similarly, “low-converting / non-converting posts that had never consistently ranked for their target keyword” would take longer to see growth and conversions because you have to wait to get rankings you hadn’t had before. Therefore, we marked these as low-priority posts that we’d take a closer look at after we first maximized growth by targeting the two types of historically high-converting posts. 

Developing the Appropriate Strategy (on a per Article Basis)

Once we had a list of posts to focus on, we thought of two immediate tactics to reclaim lost secondary keyword rankings and increase conversions again.

Tactic 1: Increase Link-Building Efforts

As part of our normal service, we build links for clients to help our content rank faster. We have a certain number of articles and links that we create on behalf of the client every month, but the challenge on the link-building side is that some articles require more links than others. So we don’t distribute links evenly. 

As the engagement goes on, we shift priorities from building links to recently published pieces to focus more on building links to the pieces we know convert well. 

After doing the audit, we felt there was an opportunity to build more links to some of the pieces that had recently slipped in rankings.

We were more likely to choose this strategy if:

• The post in question didn’t have a lot of backlinks built to it.

• The post was ranking in position 3-5 for the target keyword.

• The SERP for the target keyword has not changed significantly since the post was published (more on this below).

Tactic 2: Re-optimize Past Content

When we write content for a client, we use two sources of information that help inform our post: 

• The client-specific information that we get during interviews with them. It’s this information that lets us do productive and intentional keyword research, where we find keywords tied to real pain points that the client’s customer is actively trying to solve. It’s precisely what gets our content to bring in high buying-intent traffic that generates leads and new customers. 

• The existing SERP for the keyword. Our posts must rank high for their target keyword to have a chance at converting — that means we must have a case for how our content will rank in the SERP.

But SERPs change over time. New content gets published by the competition. Interpretations and meanings of search terms shift and evolve. Google updates its algorithm. So we considered it might be the case that some of our previously published content might need to be “re-optimized” to be able to compete within the new SERP landscape.

Here’s a hypothetical example of SERP changes that should help illustrate our point.

Example 1: Changing Target Customer

Let’s say we wrote a blog post targeting the keyword “vacation tracker,” and at that time, the SERP was full of posts about vacation tracking software for companies, i.e., software that helps companies track their team’s vacations. But let’s say as time went on, the SERP began to change into a different use-case: individuals tracking their own personal vacation. 

In that case, we’d need to take the original content we wrote for “vacation tracker” and re-optimize it towards a more suitable keyword. 

Example 2: Changing Solution Types

Here’s another hypothetical showing a different (but also common) way that SERPs can change: let’s say we wrote a post for “employee onboarding systems,” and when we wrote the post, the SERP was full of listicles and how-to guides showing small businesses how to onboard new employees using ad hoc tools like spreadsheets to build their own “system” — a keyword in that search query. 

But, say that over time, more HR SaaS solutions emerged with dedicated software for employee onboarding. It’s quite possible, in that case, that the SERP would change, and some of these “how to build an onboarding system with spreadsheets” posts would get replaced by sites from these dedicated onboarding SaaS tools. It’s also likely that the search engine would no longer differentiate between “system” and “software,” and the SERP for “employee onboarding system” would have a lot of overlap with “employee onboarding software”. We’ve seen shifts like this many times. 

In this case, again, our old content would need to be updated and re-optimized to the new SERP landscape.

We were more likely to choose this “re-optimization” strategy if:

• The post was ranking in position 6 or lower for its target keyword.

• The SERP had changed significantly since our piece was published.

• The post’s Clearscope score has gone down. 

A quick note: We use Clearscope, a content optimization tool, to help give our blog posts an even greater competitive edge within search engine results. While a piece’s Clearscope score is not the ultimate deciding metric in whether or not a piece will rank, we’ve found that it helps. There are other content optimization tools you can use, but we really like Clearscope and prefer it. Full disclosure: They are also a client, although we had been using the tool long before working with them.

It was in the process of assigning one of these strategies to each post that we discovered secondary keywords and their potential impact on conversions, which is what we discuss below.

2. Finding Secondary Keywords with High Buying-Intent

When we took a deeper look at historically high-converting blog content that was still ranking in the top spots for its target keyword yet had seen a drop in conversions, we noticed something that we started calling “secondary keywords”. Secondary keywords are keywords that our blog posts had ranked for indirectly. As discussed in the intro, these secondary keywords were often semantically similar or related to our primary keyword. Here’s an example using a blog post from our own blog.

We wrote this post, How to Create a SaaS Content Strategy That Drives Signups, to rank for the target keyword “saas content strategy.” 

At the time of writing this post, that post ranks for its target keyword in position 5. A quick note: These screenshots are pulled from Ahrefs, but many other keyword research tools like SEMRush do something similar in terms of secondary keyword analysis. Although, you’ll likely need a tool more advanced than Google Keyword Planner.

But, if we look at all of its organic keywords, we see that it ranks for around 91 other relevant keywords. Most of these keywords are semantically similar or just variations or synonyms of the main keyword. But this post receives a good percentage of its traffic from these secondary keywords.

To find as many opportunities to add to our list of keywords, we can take a look at the specific post’s performance in terms of traffic. When we do that, we see that right now (as of this article’s writing), it’s at a peak in terms of traffic. But it also had a strong month in April 2023, with its highest organic traffic date being April 15th.

Then we can pull up all the secondary keywords this post ranked for on April 15th and compare them to those it ranked for on June 22nd (i.e., the current date at the time).

This lets us see what keywords were gained or lost in that time.

This example illustrates the crux of our process, but, when it comes to doing this type of research for our client, what we look at first is the best converting month for a specific post in the entire engagement (not the highest-trafficked month, though they’re often the same). 

For example, here’s a screenshot of a waterfall chart we use to track conversions for this client. You can see that in June 2022, the highlighted post had converted 61 times, then it began to decline, getting as few as 15 conversions in December and 24 in January 2023. 

To fix this problem, we pulled up what organic keywords this post was ranking for in June 2022. And then we focused on the keywords that brought in the most traffic and that had the highest buying-intent. It’s essential to keep in mind that our focus on targeting high buying-intent keywords never goes away.

Identifying high buying-intent keywords (whether they’re long tail keywords, comparison keywords, etc.) is the foundation of our content marketing strategy.

Our goal is not to increase traffic but to increase conversions (that’s why this process starts with consulting our conversion spreadsheet, not our traffic report). All other things being equal, we would pick a secondary keyword with high buying-intent and low search volume over a secondary keyword with low buying-intent and high search volume.

3. Developing a Strategy to Re-rank for Those Lost Secondary Keywords

Once we had the secondary keywords we thought were the most valuable, we saw two viable strategies:

1. Write brand new content for those secondary keywords we had once ranked for but had since lost.
   
   
2. Go back and re-optimize that existing post to rank for that lost secondary keyword.

Let’s look at how we decided which method to use.

Deciding When a Lost Secondary Keyword Warrants a New Article

A lost secondary keyword can be a great opportunity for a brand-new article. This is because the secondary keywords we found are of similar intent to keywords we know convert. 

If the SERP has changed enough between the primary keyword and the secondary keyword, a new article may be warranted. 

To figure out if this is the case, we look at the existing SERP of both the primary keyword and the lost secondary keyword. This free tool lets you do a high-level SERP comparison, but we also recommend taking a deep-dive into the SERP and looking at what the ranking articles are positioning. 

Another way to find potentially new keywords to target: Secondary keywords that were never ranking in the top 10 spots could also be viable options for new articles

Deciding When a Lost Secondary Keyword’s Intent Can Be Fulfilled by an Existing Article

But, sometimes the lost secondary keyword doesn’t warrant a new article. Instead, we found the best strategy was to re-optimize the existing article to target that lost secondary keyword.

This is the case when the SERPs for the two distinct keywords are more similar than they are different or if that secondary keyword is still ranking on the first page of the SERP.

For example, let’s look back at our own blog post we referenced above. 

You can see the post is ranking in position 5 for the keyword “saas content marketing” and in position 8 for “b2b saas content marketing strategy.”

So the question becomes: Does the inclusion of “b2b” and “strategy” in that secondary keyword make the SERP different enough that it warrants a brand-new post? 

To answer this, we first look at a clear visual comparison of the SERPs (using the free tool we referenced above).

From this tool, we can see that these keywords have the same #1 post. The SERPs are also 60% similar. And, more importantly, our one post is ranking in both SERPs. Because of this, we would re-optimize our existing post to also rank for the secondary keyword “b2b saas content marketing strategy.”

What Does Re-optimizing Content Look Like?

The actual specifics of re-optimizing a blog post are too nuanced to get into here, as it changes drastically depending on the specific keyword you’re trying to rank for.

But, as a general guideline, we focus on:

• The angling and intent of the blog post. At the forefront of our minds through every edit is: does the angling/positioning match the searcher’s intent. While there will be overlap between related keywords, there are also likely some differences. We make sure the updated content is tailored towards the search intent of both the primary and secondary keywords.

• Basics of on-page SEO. We look at the title, headings, meta descriptions, and alt tags. We also check to make sure the new keyword is mentioned throughout the copy (while avoiding obvious pitfalls like keyword stuffing or flagrantly forced writing). 

Results from This Process

We started doing this re-optimization process for our client in February 2023, and the results were quick and promising.

Our client saw an all-time high in free trial sign-ups, and while there were ebbs and flows in performance in the following months, conversions were now bottoming out at what was once an all-time high.

In the 4 months before we did re-optimizations, our content was averaging 171 conversions a month. In the 4 months since we started doing re-optimizations, our content has averaged 258 conversions a month.

Finally, we re-optimized 22 blog posts to re-rank for secondary keywords. We had 30 secondary keywords we were trying to re-rank for. Out of those 30, 20 of those secondary keywords saw significant improvement in ranking positions.

Liked this article? You might also enjoy:

• Growing a Digital Marketing Agency: from $0 to $1M in 12 Months

• How to Research Competitor Keywords (and Find Hidden Gems)

• SaaS Keyword Research: Finding the Best Keywords to Drive Leads

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.