But, this can mean sacrificing traffic in order to get more leads, which is where a lot of marketers get hung up.

You’ve probably heard advice like “create quality content,” “optimize your website for search,” or “target the same keywords as your competitors.” But in our experience, most of that advice is either obvious (of course you should create high quality content) or ineffective (increasing traffic only helps with leads if those people are ready to buy).

We’ve ranked clients for thousands of keywords over the past 8+ years, and our data shows that the #1 factor in whether SEO generates leads is the type of keywords you target.

In this article, we get into the details of how to find and rank for keywords with high buying intent and common mistakes people make in the process. We also briefly cover how to effectively track leads and ROI, how long it takes to get results from SEO, how to speed up results, and how to drive leads while you’re waiting for those results.

Why High-Buying Intent Keywords Convert 20x Better (+ How to Find and Rank for Them)

Like we said above, the biggest mistake we see in B2B SEO is traffic chasing. Yes, a lot of SEOs give lip service to “intent”, for example labeling SEO keywords as “commercial” versus “informational” like Ahrefs does. Almost every single time we look at the keywords a client has already gone after before working with us, it’s a bunch of low-buying-intent top of funnel keywords, while leaving tons of really high intent bottom of funnel keywords on the table.

The argument for top of funnel keywords is that you need traffic above all else. That traffic is alluring. There’s this underlying assumption that if you generate enough traffic, surely it’ll lead to conversions and ultimately customers.

Right? Wrong.

The difference in conversion rates between bottom and top of funnel keywords is massive. Not 10% or 20%, but as much as 20x, meaning high buying intent keywords convert 20x better than top-of-funnel traffic-generating keywords.

Top-of-funnel searches are simply done by people who likely aren’t ready to buy your product. For example, a top of funnel keyword for an IT company might be ‘cybersecurity’, which has a search volume of 124k.

When you look at the top results on Google, they’re mostly informational posts on what cybersecurity is, which tells us this reader doesn’t know what cybersecurity means and wants to learn about it.

Sure, these readers might eventually be head of IT and in charge of hiring an IT security service, and they might remember that your company once wrote a nice article on the topic and look you up.

Meanwhile, there are people actively searching for solutions like yours. Continuing with the cybersecurity example, someone who is ready to pay for an IT security service or software already knows what cybersecurity is and just needs help implementing it. Those are the people you should be targeting.

This is especially important for B2B companies. In B2C, there are scenarios where top of funnel content leads to a purchase because purchases are often made more impulsively for stylistic reasons. For example, a B2C apparel shopper might search “summer fashion trends 2025,” learn about something new, and then within a day or two try to buy an item they like. In this case top of funnel content can directly lead to a purchase.

But B2B purchases take more consideration. They aren’t as flippant. For example, if you’re selling IT security software, your customer isn’t buying on a whim, and they’re certainly not buying because they saw a mention of your brand in a general purpose article on “IT security tips in 2025”. They’re buying only when and if they’re in the market for new security software.

Note this is true even when the B2B purchase is relatively “cheap”. Take project management software, for example. Tools like Trello or Asana aren’t expensive (around $10 per user per month) and can be purchased self-serve with a credit card.

But they’re operationally expensive because they require an entire team or company to change their habits (switch to a new project management tool). No organization makes that decision lightly. That’s why there’s a massive difference in conversion rates between traffic reading a general article on project management tips and traffic searching for “best project management software for startups.”

Lastly, in our experience, you can’t nurture someone from no buying intent to buying intent. No amount of drip emails to someone who isn’t in the market for new PM software or new IT security software is going to manufacture that buying intent. They’ll want it when they need it. In the meantime you could have spent that same time and energy creating content that ranked for keywords that do have buying intent.

Three Types of High Buying Intent Keywords for B2B Companies to Target

Based on our analysis of over 90 blog posts we wrote for B2B clients, there are three types of high buying intent keywords that consistently drive the most conversions.

And, all three of these keyword types significantly outperform top-of-funnel content keywords, which typically convert at just 0.2% in our data.

1. Category Keywords convert at 3.25% on average

These are search terms that directly correspond to the product or service category you’re in. Examples include “content marketing agency,” “CRM software,” or “accounting software for small business.”

These are usually the easiest ones to think of, but there are also typically more than you think. Read our article to learn more about how to find these.

In our data, category keywords convert at 3.2% on average.

2. Comparison and Alternatives Keywords convert at 6.94% on average

These terms indicate the searcher is actively comparing products or looking for alternatives to existing solutions. Examples include “Salesforce vs. HubSpot,” “Mailchimp alternatives,” or “best alternatives to Shopify.”

These keywords typically convert quite well on average at 8.43%, because searchers are actively evaluating solutions and are closest to making a purchase decision.

3. Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) Keywords convert up to 12.5%

These are queries that indicate the searcher has a specific problem your product solves. Examples include “how to manage sales leads,” “how to track content marketing ROI,” or “how to migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot.”

JTBD keywords convert at 2.44% on average in our data because they capture people who have identified a specific pain point, but may not yet know what category of solution they need. In other words, they’re just looking to solve a problem. They aren’t looking specifically to buy your product/service, which is why we see a lower average conversion rate.

However, they do have the possibility to convert at a much higher rate — up to 12.5% in our experience. This is because some JTBD keywords have extremely high buying intent while others have less.

For example, for our digital marketing client, JTBD keywords around collecting or gathering video testimonials (exactly what their software does) converted to free trials at 5–9%. But keywords around what to say in a testimonial video, i.e., no intent for buying software, converted at only 0.6%.

How to Find High-Converting Keywords That Most Teams Overlook

It’s usually pretty easy to find a handful of the most obvious category keywords (like “content marketing agency” if you’re a content marketing agency), but these often run out quickly. So how do you find more?

We suggest talking to your sales team and any other customer-facing teams. Many B2B marketing teams will review a few sales calls, read customer feedback, and look at sales battlecards, but they don’t systematically involve the sales team in their SEO strategy.

This is a missed opportunity. Your sales team knows exactly which pain points resonate most with prospects, which objections come up repeatedly, and which benefits actually close deals. This is where you can find JTBD keywords that actually have buying intent, additional category keywords, and competitor keywords you might have missed.

For example, a marketing automation company might target the obvious category keyword “marketing automation software.” But, after talking to sales, they might discover prospects frequently ask about “how to set up drip email campaigns” or “how to track email marketing ROI” — both high-intent JTBD keywords that indicate someone needs marketing automation.

Ask your sales team specific questions like:

• What pain points do prospects mention most often in sales calls?

• Which product benefits close the most deals?

• What objections do you hear repeatedly, and how do you overcome them?

• What language and terminology do prospects use when describing their problems?

• Which types of leads convert best and why?

• What are prospects typically using or doing when they come to us?

• What competitors do they mention most often?

This research should directly inform your keyword strategy and content creation.

Plus, it can also tell you whether your content is working and help you drive more qualified leads. Check in with sales regularly to learn what type of leads your content is bringing in, get specific about why certain leads are or are not closing, and use that information to fine tune your marketing strategy.

How to Rank for High Buying Intent Keywords

Most advice on writing SEO content talks about creating quality content and thoroughly meeting search intent — understanding what the searcher wants and giving them exactly that. This is great advice and we agree completely.

However, when it comes to B2B blog content, most marketers go wrong with this approach in two ways: they don’t write at the expertise level of their audience, and they don’t sell their product or service.

How to Write for B2B Readers (Beyond Just “Create Quality Content”)

With B2B, your reader has likely been in the industry for many years and knows the ins and outs of the job. In short, they’re experts on the topic. And yet, most content reads like a “Google research paper” — surface-level content that regurgitates what’s already available online without adding any new insights or expertise.

This usually happens because the writers aren’t experts themselves (whether internal marketing team members or freelancers), so they end up just researching what’s already published or reading through a few internal documents.

This approach fails for two reasons:

1. Google can only provide what everyone else has already said on the topic, not your company’s unique perspective or any details about your product/service.

2. Internal documents are often outdated or not detailed enough, so the content ends up reading like the writer knows less than the reader — because it’s true.

To solve this, we conduct detailed interviews with subject matter experts for each blog post (or at least each blog post where we’re covering new information). More importantly, these SMEs are from within our clients’ own companies, so we get the unique perspective they have to offer and can easily tie their product or service directly to the pain points hidden in the keyword we’re targeting.

In these interviews, we ask questions like:

• What do you think a potential customer is looking for when they search {keyword}?

• Why are they looking for that (i.e., what problem are they trying to solve)?

• Do you think there’s anyone who would be searching this term that wouldn’t be a good fit for your company? Why?

• What specific features or capabilities does our product have that solves this problem?

• What mistakes do you see prospects making when they try to solve this problem on their own?

• What questions do customers ask most often about this topic?

Further reading: How to Improve Your Content Writing Skills by Using an Interview Process (+ 6 Other Content Writing Tips)

Why You Need to Sell Your Product

If you follow our suggestion and target high buying intent keywords, you need to sell your product or service in order to satisfy intent.

Many marketers and business owners shy away from this because they don’t want to be “too salesy” with their content marketing. They often have this belief that with content marketing you should ‘give and not ask’.

But, the searcher is literally looking for something to solve their problem. So, if you do solve that problem, the best way you can help them is by showing them exactly how you solve it.

Additionally, we believe you should spend the majority of the blog post going into detail about how you can help them. Again, B2B buyers want this level of detail. And, it makes sense that you only know that level of detail for your own product or service, so the other sections about the competitors have to be shorter.

Plus, they can see whose website they’re on, so it can seem disingenuous to try to sound completely unbiased. Include specific details related to the keyword, screenshots of your product in action, and use roughly half of the blog post real estate to explain your own solution.

How to Effectively Measure Leads and ROI From SEO

All of the advice so far can help you take SEO content from something that just generates traffic into a lead generation tool, but you will still need a way to track leads and ROI.

Organic traffic and search rankings can tell you if what you’re doing has potential, but it’s not the same as actually tracking conversions. In order to know whether your content is actually generating a positive ROI, you need to be able to directly tie individual leads to specific pages.

In this article, we go over how to set up conversion tracking in GA4 to track form submissions, demo requests, and other lead actions. But, there are other tools besides Google Analytics like WhatConverts that can help you track additional types of leads, like phone calls.

If you can track which leads actually become paying customers, even better. Every company will have a different process for how they do this.

Next, figure out the ROI or breakeven point. How much are you spending on content right now? How much is the average value of a lead in dollars? Use that to figure out how many leads per month you need to break even and start plotting those numbers on a graph.

It Takes 3–6 Months to Start Seeing Results from SEO

Our study on how long it takes to rank on the first page of Google shows that it takes an average of 3-6 months to start seeing meaningful rankings for new content. But that’s just rankings.

We typically see a few leads start to come in with page one rankings, but steady leads typically don’t come in until you’re ranking in the top three spots for your target keyword.

Figuring out your timeline for getting into the top three positions is harder to predict because it depends on the specific keyword, your industry, and your domain authority. We sometimes see slower results in industries with longer sales cycles (think switching over your entire CRM, which would require buy-in from multiple levels of management, all departments, significant financial investment, and significant disruption for all employees using it) or for highly competitive keywords.

However, on average our data shows that nearly half of the blog posts we create for clients rank in the top three positions within the first year.

How to Speed Up Results and Drive Leads in the Short Term

While the number one factor for getting results from SEO is time, you can speed up results with strategic link building. This means getting high-quality, relevant websites to link to your content through guest posting, editorial outreach, and relationship building. Quality backlinks signal to Google that your content is authoritative and can help you rank faster for competitive keywords.

While you’re waiting to get those results organically, you can also drive leads in the short term with:

• Paid ads: Run targeted ads on Google, LinkedIn, or other platforms to drive immediate traffic to your high-intent content. This approach allows you to start generating leads from your content investment while you wait for organic rankings to develop. Just like with organic search, we recommend taking an intentional, buying intent focused approach with PPC. You can learn more about our approach to PPC here.

• Disruption stories: If your company has a unique perspective that challenges conventional wisdom in your industry, write about it and share it across social media channels and industry forums. These contrarian takes often generate immediate attention and can drive qualified traffic to your site. Plus, they can attract buyers who may not be actively searching for your product/service because they don’t know it exists. You can learn more about disruption stories here.

  
  

How Does the Shift to ChatGPT and LLMs Affect Content and SEO Strategy?

Finally, the shift in everyone’s search habits from Google to AI tools like ChatGPT is on every marketer’s minds — how to show up in AI searches, how to get mentioned by Google’s AI overviews, how to use AI for writing and optimizing content— but the truth is, no one actually knows very much about how it works or how to hack the system.

We share our thoughts on AI in these articles:

• Pain Point LLMO: Why Product-Centric Content on Your Own Site Beats Reddit & PR

• How SEO Will Change in a World of AI Search

• Does Google SEO Affect LLM Optimization? We Analyzed 400+ Keywords to Find Out

• How Marketers Are Using AI for Writing [Survey]

To summarize these articles, we believe a lot of the advice out there right now is largely unhelpful (‘get mentioned on Reddit’ — nice, but how?) or unnecessary (‘add .txt files’). The best thing you can do is have a strong SEO presence and produce the type of content we recommend above.

When it comes to using AI to create content, we recommend caution because many of the writing tools out there are nowhere near good enough to produce the kind of content you need to get quality leads or AI mentions. (That’s why we’ve created our own tool, which you can read about here.)

How to Work With Us or Learn More

• Work with our agency: If you want to hire us to create and execute a search engine optimization strategy by identifying your best keywords, creating content that is laser-focused on ranking and driving conversions, and link building to improve your ranking positions, you can learn more about working with us here.

• Join our team: If you’re a content marketer or writer who wants to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Learn our methods in 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.

  
  

In fact, we ourselves are responsible for a lot of that thinking since we published Pain Point SEO. Since then, we’ve been touting the massive conversion rate benefits of bottom-of-funnel, high-intent keywords.

It’s true that high-intent keywords convert obscenely higher than everything else. But what we haven’t discussed much is the writing needed to unlock those conversion benefits.

In short, the writing matters. Content written just for ranking misses key nuances, which can hurt your conversion rate. This case study highlights that.

We had a client come to us who had previously taken our course and produced content targeting various bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. Despite ranking in the topmost positions for several high-value keywords and driving traffic, their content wasn’t converting at the levels that we typically see for other clients.

We’ve seen this happen before when a product doesn’t compete well in the market or when the audience isn’t a good fit, so we considered that possibility.

However, after reviewing their ranking blog posts, we hypothesized the issue stemmed from content quality and how the product was positioned and sold in the articles.

The content lacked flow — it was written more for the SERP than for the target customer — and the product positioning wasn’t tailored to the intended reader. It felt like generic, templated content.

After updating the articles, we saw conversion rate increases ranging from 66% to 900%.

In this article, we’ll share:

• Our approach to writing bottom-of-the-funnel content and how we use SERP analysis to guide our writing

• Data showing the conversion rate increases from improving bottom-of-funnel content

• Before-and-after writing examples

Our Best Practices for Writing Bottom-of-Funnel, Conversion-Oriented Content

Write for the reader, not for search engines.

1. Consider the nuance of the keyword & know your reader

The specific query — what the person types into Google — is crucial. Small language variations offer insights into the Googler’s search intent.

What problem are they trying to solve? What’s the goal of their search?

A really basic example here is “accounting software” vs. “enterprise accounting software.”

The “enterprise” clarifier tells you the Googler works for a large company, likely interested in scalability, multi-entity/currency support, security, compliance, and a more flexible budget.

You can swap “enterprise” with other qualifiers like “small business,” “medical,” or “free,” each reflecting different search intent.

Most writers would approach these keywords in the same way — explaining basic accounting software and listing options. However, the product positioning should differ based on intent (small business vs. enterprise vs. medical accounting software).

Another example: “accounting software” vs. “accounting software with inventory management” — the latter shows the Googler prioritizes inventory management features. Offering the same generic accounting software content won’t cut it here.

Another language variance to pay attention to is “software” vs. “app” — if someone searches accounting apps, it’s likely they’re looking for mobile apps, and in our experience, Google will prioritize pages talking about or linking to iOS or Android apps.

While considering the reader’s search intent, also think about their knowledge level and where they are in the buying process. Tailor your content to meet them where they are, avoiding too much backstory or diving too deep into advanced topics.

Try to step into the reader’s shoes as you outline, draft, and edit.

2. Identify your product’s features & benefits that solve your reader’s pain points

Once you understand your reader, the next step is to align your product or solution with their specific needs. Ask yourself:

• What are the readers’ pain points?

• What solutions are they looking for, and which ones would work best for them?

Part of positioning your product is understanding that readers want practical, implementable (and, ideally, convenient) solutions. If they have to jump through too many hoops or exert too much effort, you risk losing them.

• Do you have a suitable solution for them?

We’re assuming at this stage that the keyword you’ve chosen is a good fit. If you reach this point and realize your product isn’t the best solution for the audience, it may be time to revisit the keyword and target something else.

You can read more about that in our guides here and here.

• Why is your solution the right choice? Which features or benefits directly address the reader’s pain points?

It’s useful to map out pain points alongside corresponding product features and benefits. This will clarify the main points to cover and help you structure your content outline.

• How has a similar person (user) benefited from your solution in the past?

This insight can help you explain product features and create relatable examples, adding personality to your content. It also helps make your content feel original and unique.

3. Align your pitch to the keyword

Now you can start bringing together all the pieces from your earlier brainstorming to create your pitch and positioning.

While this may seem straightforward, it can be challenging for many teams.

First, it might not always be clear what the best positioning for your product is relative to a specific keyword. We’ve also seen debates within client organizations about whether their product fits a specific audience or which features should be emphasized.

It’s your job to navigate these discussions, but here’s an important point we remind clients of: the positioning in each article doesn’t need to drastically change how you present your brand or content across all channels.

Clients often get caught up in remixing small details, worrying that if they sell a feature one way in one post, they need to update sales copy everywhere else. That’s not necessary.

Your core selling and messaging points can remain consistent across all channels, even when you tailor content for specific keywords and audiences. Highlighting small business accounting features in one blog post doesn’t mean your entire brand is now targeted toward small businesses.

Readers coming across your content via search engines are seeing it within the context of their specific query. Other readers will encounter your brand through different channels and searches.

Some of the most effective ways to implement your strategy and write for the reader include:

#1. Focus your introduction on the reader’s pain points and your proposed solution.

This can be the hardest part of writing and setting up the flow of your post, and you might go through multiple iterations until you land on what’s best.

The goal is to relate and resonate with the reader immediately, showing you understand their search intent and have the answers they need. Content should be at a higher knowledge level, offering valuable insights that teach the reader something.

You should also prepare the reader for what’s covered in the article. A clear table of contents helps guide them, making it easy to see your article addresses their interests and allows them to find the information they need quickly.

#2. Choose a content structure that aligns with the keyword and engages the reader.

For example, if you’re writing a how-to guide, break it down into a clear, step-by-step list to make it easy for readers to follow.

If you’re writing a product review guide, list the products and maintain a consistent format for each review (with extra emphasis on your product, of course).

#3. Introduce and sell your solution where it fits naturally in your content.

In a step-by-step guide, you could explain how your product supports each step.

In a review guide, list your product at the top and provide a detailed walkthrough of its features, showing how they solve readers’ specific pain points. This allows you to convey your core value propositions and help the customer decide if what you’re selling is right for them.

#4. Don’t be afraid to sell your product.

Many businesses hesitate to promote their product, fearing it feels too self-serving. We believe this stems from the dominance of top-of-funnel content, where the norm is to “give” rather than “ask.”

While avoiding a pitch in educational pieces makes sense (“What is a cash flow statement?”), bottom-of-funnel queries (“enterprise accounting software”) signal clear purchase intent. Here, selling isn’t awkward — it’s expected.

Providing feature details, real customer examples, and supporting media can be more valuable than a generic landing page or a software review site like G2.

This approach acts as a “mini-demo,” helping readers see how your product fits their needs — which drives engagement and conversions.

Our Results from Updates

We updated several of our client’s top-ranking posts and tracked conversions month-by-month after the updates.

To prioritize which posts to update, we analyzed historical conversion data. We started this experiment in mid-2024 (April/May), tracking conversions from January 2023 to mid-2024, gathering over 12 months of data.

As shown in the left-side columns of our sheet, these posts averaged less than one demo per month before the updates, with some seeing only one or two conversions every few months.

After our updates, we were seeing posts convert multiple times per month — with average monthly conversion increases between 36% to 900%!

We saw a significant win right away with Post #1 — converting less than once per month before updates, then bringing in five, three, and 11 conversions in the three months after. This resulted in a 622% increase in average monthly conversions for Post #1.

We did notice a couple of outliers: one post saw a 1600% increase due to extremely low conversions before updates, while another post experienced a -50% drop in average conversions. However, this drop is likely noise since the post had less than one conversion every other month before updates and followed a similar pattern afterward. If it converts next month, it should return to normal levels.

It’s also worth noting that we’ve only recorded six months of post-update data, so our dataset is limited. However, these early results and emerging patterns are promising and support our original hypothesis.

Specific Writing Examples from Our Updates

Now, let’s dive into some of the updates we made to our client’s product review guides to better target the specific reader.

Starting with the introduction, many of the posts followed a “Wirecutter-esque” approach, positioning the content as an independent third-party review of products.

For example, one post intro read:

“Today, there are 168 different purchase order software for construction companies. In this guide, we spent 40 hours comparing the top 5 purchase order software to find the five best you can use to improve your purchasing process and track purchase orders.”

While this may seem like it helps to build credibility, it often comes across as overwhelming and hard to believe. Additionally, readers finding this content on our client’s site likely already know whose product they’re reading about, so posing as a third party feels disingenuous. They probably expect some mention of the client’s product.

Here’s what our update looked like:

This speaks directly to where the reader is in the purchasing process, and provides information on how to comparison shop for this type of software in the construction industry, which teaches them something. It also shows readers that we know their industry and have experience with other construction companies, building that credibility the original intro was going for.

We provide background on the relevant features and benefits to look for when shopping — the ones we mapped during keyword research above — and gear our language and examples to the construction industry. This is a perfect example of how selling in a blog post can be married to giving value just fine — those two things don’t have to conflict.

At the end, we prep readers for a pitch on our product while telling them we’ll also cover key details about other top-rated competitors. The client’s site also includes an embedded table of contents so readers can preview sections and skip to the one(s) they’re most interested in.

Another update we made across client posts was expanding upon their product sections. In many of these review guide posts, they’d provide a quick bulleted list of features, not really emphasizing one over another or explaining how features work in the context of the workflow.

We included dedicated sections within our client’s product review to discuss and show an image or GIF of each feature, and we presented features in the order of the typical workflow. More so “showing” (vs. telling) readers how they’d use our client’s product to solve their specific pain points. Painting that picture, as discussed above.

We prioritize the features and considerations discussed in our intro — also going back to our map above — and explain how other features support those key points and the overall product functionality. Constantly dropping examples and bringing content back to our reader’s pain points.

It’s important to note: this format gives our clients ample real estate on the page, and we don’t shy away from the opportunity to wholly pitch our client’s product to these readers. Googlers searching product category keywords, like “purchase order software for construction,” are looking to learn about and be sold products. We have the natural opportunity to go all in here.

While on this note, we should also mention how we handle competitor sections. Instead of pushing readers to the client’s product alone, we provide ample detail about competitors so readers can truly comparison shop.

Googlers searching for products are in a buying mode — but still need to get a lay of the land. Shoving one product at them is too biased. It’s natural for buyers to consider multiple products before making a decision, so you can lend in that process.

We compile all of the most common names readers will encounter in their search — other names ranking on the first page, other names mentioned in software review lists, etc. Then we provide a brief explainer of each one, a bulleted list of features, pricing details, and links to competitors’ websites, so readers can get the gist of each product.

We follow a consistent format here so readers can easily move from one product to the next and compare the key details between solutions.

Here’s an example of a competitor section from the same post we mentioned above:

This less-than-biased, helpful approach can build reliability with readers. When they see you understand their search intent and are there to help, they’re more likely to spend more time on your content and trust you. Which can ultimately lead to conversions.

Another key change we made was updating our client’s positioning in which audience or user they best suit. Most posts included a “Best For” section with a very specific type of user listed.

For example, in this “purchase order for construction” post, they listed their product as best for: construction companies with a job costing model that wants to associate cost with granular job-level budgets.

While this specific detail might resonate with a small fraction of readers, it’s limiting, confusing, and most importantly untrue. One of the main USPs of this client’s product is its flexibility and customization options, and white-glove onboarding to set the software up to your specifications. This lets them work with various industries and business sizes.

So instead of trying to hone in on one specific reader vs. another, we discuss this benefit and drop a few examples of how the software can be customized for the specific industry at hand (in this case, construction).

This sells our solution to a broader set of readers, touts the benefits and convenience of choosing our client’s product (personalized to you, set up for you), and encourages a higher volume of conversions.

Our post also includes a variety of CTAs where we encourage customers to start a demo and convert. We make it easy for readers to take the next steps with our client directly from the post.

What to Avoid (What We Hypothesize Writers Are Doing to Rank)

Now that we’ve covered best practices for updating content to drive conversions, let’s explain what we believe is happening in top-ranking content that isn’t converting.

SERP research is essential for guiding keyword research and identifying viable opportunities. It’s important to search the keyword you plan to target, see what’s ranking, and assess whether it makes sense to enter that conversation. However, we believe many writers are over-relying on SERP results to shape their outlines.

For example, here’s a look below at the search results for “e-procurement software” and our client’s initial outline for this keyword:

You can see that most of the H2s in the article map exactly to questions people had in the SERP or the key topics around the parent topic. Then the article was written in a Q&A format, just answering these questions in a 2000+ word article.

Many people in SEO or content marketing who read this may think, “What’s the problem here? They’re just fulfilling search intent.”

Yes, to a large extent, that’s true. But the challenge with writing things this way is that the content doesn’t flow well and doesn’t help the reader get the answer they’re looking for around the topic. It’s also not really personalized or tailored to the reader — which is critical to encouraging conversions per our best practices.

So although it’s a good idea to look at SERP features, like People Also Ask and related searches, when doing SERP analysis, this analysis should only help inform key points to make in the article. It shouldn’t just become your outline.

Originality and differentiation of ideas, brands, and products are what convert SEO traffic into leads and customers. Without that, you have rankings and organic traffic that doesn’t convert.

Final Notes

Many clients hesitate to update content ranking on the first page, especially in the top spots, even if it’s not converting, for fear of “breaking what’s working.” However, rankings aren’t the ultimate performance metric.

Yes, tracking rankings is important, but if content isn’t converting or bringing in new business, it’s not fulfilling its purpose. It’s broken. When this happens, it’s crucial to investigate the cause and update content to better appeal to your readers.

Since we’ve built our brand on prioritizing high buying-intent keywords, and we measure conversions from every piece of content we create, we thought it would be interesting and useful to the content marketing and SEO community to report on the conversion metrics of different types of bottom-of-funnel SEO keywords. 

As explained in Pain Point SEO, we think of high buying-intent keywords as being in one of three categories:

1. Category Keywords
2. Comparison and Alternative Keywords
3. Jobs To Be Done keywords

To do this study, we pulled six months of data from 95 articles we wrote for our clients, each ranking for a different primary keyword. In total, these 95 articles got over 123,000 organic pageviews in the period analyzed and 4687 product-related conversions (meaning free trial starts, demo requests, or sales form fills). 

Below, we compare the conversion rates of articles ranking for SEO keywords in the three categories above. Our post explains how and why the conversion rates are what they are (and how to use this information for your benefit). 

Note: If you want to know what we mean by ‘SEO conversion rate’, how to calculate it, and more, jump down to our FAQ section.

Overall Results: How Well Different Bottom-of-Funnel Keywords Convert

Here are the types (and sub-types) of keywords we analyzed and their conversion rates:

1. Category Keywords

• [Main] Category Keywords: Queries that describe exactly what you offer (4.85% average conversion rate)

• [Side] Category Keywords: Queries that show buying intent for a secondary feature or use case (1.94%)

• Category + Layer of Specificity: Queries that imply the searcher is looking for a product like yours but for a specific use case or vertical (2.96%)

2. Alternatives + Competitors

• Queries that mention competitor names, indicating Googlers are aware of other brands in your industry, searching for alternatives, and could be good candidates for your solution

• These had the highest average conversion rate (8.43%)

• “Vs.” Keywords: Queries comparing two solutions —
  [Brand #1] vs. [Brand #2] — (5.45%) 

3. JTBD Keywords

• Queries that describe jobs to be done — or problems to be solved — that you offer the absolute best solution for (2.44%)

We’ll discuss each type of keyword and its average conversion rate below. 

Main Category Keywords Are Your Brand’s Bread and Butter 

4.85% average conversion rate

These are the queries that describe exactly what you offer — i.e., the person searching is shopping for the type of products or services you offer. This includes keywords like “best accounting software” or “men’s running shoes.” If you sell accounting software or men’s running shoes, these are keywords you absolutely want to be ranking for. 

We expect the conversion rate of keywords with this much buying intent to be high, and it is. Most people don’t expect blog posts to convert at multiple percentage points, much less 4.85%, but this data shows that they can when they rank for the right keywords and are written to sell the product.

That’s why we have long advised that brands prioritize these keywords, and this data further supports that assertion. For example, Geekbot — a solution to run online standup meetings (full case study here), and a past client of ours — ranks #2 for “Slack standup bot” via a post we wrote for them, and that single long-form blog post has a lifetime conversion rate of 8.36%.

In addition, we ranked a video marketing client on page one for multiple terms around their video marketing sub-category; the app, software, and service variations of those keywords convert at 5.73%, 3.31%, and 3.00%, respectively. 

Importantly, the takeaway here is not that app keywords convert higher than software and service keywords!

In this case, it just so happens that the post ranking for an “app” keyword converted at the highest rate. Still, the takeaway is simply that when you target variations of product keywords and cover all of your bases, you should expect most variations to convert well (i.e., at 3% or higher to free trial starts) because Googlers are researching products similar to yours. 

Now, with that said, if you only offer an app or only offer a service, you may find certain category keywords simply don’t fit your offerings, so all category keywords may not convert as well for you. 

But in general, category keywords consistently convert for all of our clients; specifically, we see these conversion rates (3–5%, or even higher, like in the case of Geekbot) routinely for main category keywords. 

This reinforces the advice we’ve given many times: Every company investing in SEO should start by identifying their main category keywords and very intentionally crafting dedicated pages on their site to rank for them.   

Category Keywords Around Side Offerings Have a Lower Conversion Rate (But Are Still Valuable)

1.94% average conversion rate

Many companies release new features or services and want to build content to promote those offerings. While that’s fine, this study taught us that these keywords don’t usually convert as well as keywords related to your core offering (aka your main category keywords).

This could be for various reasons: perhaps that side offering just isn’t very strong, or it’s a part of your solution that can’t be used or purchased separately, or the side offering is too expensive compared to other brands. It could also be that the rest of the marketing site simply doesn’t sell the side offering as much as the main features, so it naturally converts less. 

For example, one of our clients sells digital asset management (DAM) software, a common software category for many businesses with creative assets. One of the creative assets you could store in a DAM is videos. One of the posts we wrote for them targeted a keyword around storing video assets and it converts at 1.45%.

That’s still a good conversion rate, and far higher than most brands’ typical TOF content, which converts at a tiny fraction of a percent. But we have several posts for this same client that target general digital asset management type keywords. Those are converting at 3%, 6%, and even 15%! 

We think the low conversion rate of the video-specific keyword is because users who only need a video asset solution could opt for something simpler than full digital asset management (DAM) software, whereas users who need to store all kinds of digital assets, not just videos, need a general-purpose DAM.    

This reinforces our core Pain Point SEO message: The #1 thing dictating your conversion rate is the search intent of the person searching and how well the query aligns with what your product does. 

Our next observations further support this.

Category Keywords with Added Layers of Specificity Are Hidden Gem Keywords That Most Brands Miss 

2.77% average conversion rate

An additional flavor of category keywords are those 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 the end of the keyword “best accounting tools,” or adding “for trail running” to the end of “men’s running shoes.” 

We’d expect these “added layer of specificity” category keywords to convert really well because you’re targeting searchers who (1) already have some knowledge of the category, and (2) are searching for a very particular solution (what you offer). 

The data in this study does confirm this, but with some important nuances and caveats. 

Going back to our digital asset management example: this client markets their DAM to support professionals across all different industries (manufacturing, education, healthcare, real estate, eCommerce, etc.), but as you’d expect, their primary audience is marketers and creative professionals because that’s who stores the most digital assets (product images, etc.). And our client happened to have extra features designed for those users, specifically. So we targeted “marketing asset management software” and saw a whopping 15.2% conversion rate from that post!

So we do see several “layer of specificity” category keywords convert even higher than 4.85%, which is the average standard category keyword conversion rate discussed above. 

But why is it that most “layer of specificity” keywords don’t convert that high, and the average is only 2.77%?

We think these keywords are simply a game of taking bets where you have to guess which specific keyword variants will “hit” with your target audience and your product, and the reality is that most will not hit, you’ll have plenty of misses. But when you do get a hit (like “marketing digital asset management software,” above) it can convert incredibly well. 

Here are the conversion rates of 13 posts for different clients that target various “specific” category keywords:

We grouped these by type of specificity in the keyword:

• Business size keywords could include “enterprise accounting software” or “accounting software for small businesses.” 

• Cost specific keywords are typically around savings, like “budget-friendly accounting software” or “free accounting software.” 

• Industry specific keywords speak to specific audiences, like “accounting software for HVAC business.”

• Feature specific keywords emphasize unique selling points, for example, “accounting software with inventory management.” 

For example, that same digital asset software client is positioned mainly as an enterprise tool.  So we targeted enterprise-focused keywords and keywords that attract smaller teams, and the results were not surprising: certain “enterprise” keywords converted around ~6.5% while other industry-specific keywords converted around ~2%.  

Again, the more a keyword and article align with your product’s natural strengths, the higher the conversion rate.

Most Category Keywords Need Long-Form Content to Rank

As we briefly mentioned above, most brands think of category keywords as something only their homepage, or maybe a landing page should target. Most don’t even consider long-form blog content as the right content type for category keywords. This thinking leaves a massive amount of opportunity on the table. 

Here’s why: 

1. You can’t possibly rank in the top results (or even hit the first page) for every category keyword on your radar using just your homepage or a couple of feature or solution pages. You may be able to rank for one or two keywords, but there’s no way a single page will rank for the dozens of category keywords that likely exist in your space. It’s just very difficult to optimize a single page for that many different keywords (extreme long tail aside), so you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. 
   

2. Your homepage isn’t tailored to specific audiences or queries; it contains high-level information about your brand and products/services. Unless readers are already familiar with or somewhat bought into your brand, this won’t capture their attention or drive desired actions from website visitors. 
   

3. People think their homepage or landing pages will always convert at a much higher rate than blog content. However, as per this data and previous comparisons, that’s not often true. Many homepages convert at low, single-digit percentages — usually less than a well-written blog post custom-tailored to sell your product or service. 

Creating unique content for each category keyword lets you solve the problems mentioned above. 

First, since most of these category keywords require long-form, tailored copy to compete in SERPs, you actually have a chance of ranking and moving to the top of page one.

Second, creating long-form content (unlike a generic homepage) lets you speak to very specific pain points and challenges. You can actually tailor content around different search queries for specific readers — which attracts qualified leads, keeps audiences engaged, and improves conversion rates. 

Let’s look at the keyword “free website analytics tools” as an example. 

Here are some of the page one results in the Google SERPs: 

The SERP shows one list post after another comparing software solutions, with only Similarweb — an incredibly popular and longstanding analytics tool — ranking with their homepage. So, it’s incredibly unlikely that any other analytics tool is going to rank for this keyword with their homepage. You need to create a blog post to capture this organic traffic. 

In fact, as of this writing, a post we wrote for our client Smartlook is ranking #1: 

It would have been almost impossible to rank #1 for this keyword by attempting to optimize their homepage or even a dedicated product page for this keyword. Google’s search engine clearly favors lists. 

There Are a Lot More Category Keywords Than Companies Realize

So many of the brands we talk to (whose analytics we see) haven’t systematically identified and targeted their category keywords — which is an absolute shame and waste of marketing potential. 

As per the above data, we think you should brainstorm: 

• The obvious category keywords and every variation of those terms that people may Google to find products or services exactly like yours.

• What layers of specificity could be added to those keywords that align with your product’s strengths.

Comparison and Alternative Keywords Are the Highest Converting SEO Keywords We’ve Seen 

8.43% average conversion rate

One of the most interesting takeaways from this analysis is that comparison and alternatives keywords convert at a higher rate than any other keyword type. 

This includes both alternative keywords like “salesforce alternative” and versus keywords like “Salesforce vs. Pipedrive.” Both of those keyword types, on average, convert better than even main category keywords. 

We suspect this is because these Googlers are even more qualified than ones doing general research on a product or service. Clearly, these searchers: 

• Already know about your industry.
• Are familiar with competitors who offer similar products/services as yours.
• Are actively comparing alternative solutions (with some vested interest in making a purchase).

So, you obviously want to show up for these users when they search these terms. Just be strategic in the competitor keywords you target and prioritize — as expected, this category will have a spread in conversion rates. From what we’ve noticed, keywords mentioning direct competitors will convert better than those featuring some loosely-related competitor. 

For example, here is a visual comparison of conversion rates for all 23 competitor and alternative keywords we looked at in this study:

You can see that although the average conversion rate is 8.43%, the majority of these posts convert at less than 4%. That shows what we’re saying above: the closer the competitor, the higher the conversion rate. 

That said, conversion rates between 1–4% are still far higher than top-of-funnel blog posts that barely convert; so in our experience and opinion, it’s worth taking bets on a variety of alternative and comparison keywords. 

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that many competitor and alternatives keywords have very low organic search volume. As per our mini-volume keywords article, however, the high conversion rates make them very worthwhile to target. 

Jobs To Be Done Keywords Show High Conversion Potential — Despite Being “Up the Funnel” 

2.44% average conversion rate

The final category in our Pain Point SEO framework is “Jobs To Be Done” keywords — these are queries that describe a job to be done (or pain, challenge) that is best solved with your product or service.  

These are slightly more up-funnel because they don’t explicitly say “software” or “tools” (like category keywords) or mention competitors (like alternatives keywords) — 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. 

Although these users may not be aware of your brand or competitors, or precisely what they need for their problem, they still have the potential to buy because they have a job or problem that you solve. 

We insert our clients’ names in these conversations by creating content to specifically solve what the reader is searching for in the context of the client’s solution, and we see these convert at a ridiculously high rate. 

For example: 

• “Collect video testimonials” — a keyword we targeted for a video marketing client — has a 9.71% CR; this keyword presents a good opportunity for our client because the Googler requires some sort of software to do this task, and the task the Googler needs to complete is exactly what our client’s product solves for. 

• A JTBD keyword we targeted for online meeting software is “how to run standups in Slack” — this has a 12.5% CR, and once again, our client’s product is a great way to do that exact job.

• We targeted “record website visitors” for a website analytics tool, and that converts at 10.48% (this Googler requires a specific type of software to complete this task, and our client offers that very solution). 

JTBD Keywords with Little to No Buying Intent Are Considered “Top of Funnel” (And Least Likely to Convert Readers)

Similar to comparison and alternative keywords, there is a wide spread in conversion rates for JTBD keywords, and also similarly, intent drives that difference. We’ve noticed that JTBD keywords with low conversion rates simply don’t have that high of conversion rates. 

The contrast here is stark: 

For example, for our video marketing client, JTBD keywords around collecting or gathering video testimonials (exactly what their software does) converted to free trials at 5–9%. But other JTBD keywords were less transactional: opportunities around what to say in a testimonial video converted at only 0.6%. That’s because no one needs to purchase software to learn what to say in a testimonial; they just need advice. 

Overall Thoughts

There are a few takeaways from this analysis: 

• Not all SEO keywords are created equally. Some convert extremely well (10%+), and others not at all. So, if you’re interested in SEO for lead generation and want to reach potential customers, you need to target bottom-of-funnel or high buying-intent keywords. 

• Even within bottom-of-funnel keywords, there is a wide range of SEO conversion rates — depending on the type and level of intent of the keyword.

• It behooves every brand to target their main category keywords and comparison and alternative keywords related to their primary competitors.

• Jobs to be Done keywords are an often-overlooked category that also show a lot of potential for higher conversion rates. 

If you want to learn more about conversion-focused SEO and conversion rate optimization, you can check out our course and community, where we and hundreds of other digital marketers discuss these marketing strategies. If you want to work with us directly, you can reach out here to learn more. 

Note: We also offer PPC services. Rather than just focusing on click-through rate (CTR), we do careful keyword research and curate each campaign in order to maximize conversions per dollar spent.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ‘SEO conversion rate’?

SEO conversion rate is the percent of organic traffic that completes a specific action on your website such as filling out a contact form or signing up for a free trial or subscription. 

How do you calculate your SEO conversion rate?

SEO conversion rate is calculated by dividing total organic conversions by total organic website traffic. 

SEO conversion rate = Organic conversions/organic traffic

What is a good SEO conversion rate?

In our experience, typical blog posts that target high volume keywords convert at a rate of 1% or less. And the average homepage converts at a rate of about 3%. However, ranking for keywords with high buying intent often returns a conversion rate of 5% or higher.

What is conversion rate optimization? 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of maximizing the conversions you receive from your website.

When talking about CRO, most marketers mean the process of making small tweaks to a website to increase the conversion rate of a desired action, for example, making technical adjustments to decrease page load time or bounce rate, or A/B testing different calls to action (CTAs).

(It can be used to talk about overall website conversion rate or on a more granular level by blog post, product page/web page, keyword, etc.) 

However, in our experience, these small tweaks aren’t all that impactful. Instead, we recommend focusing on choosing high buying-intent keywords.

You can learn more about conversion optimization in these posts:

• The #1 Factor for Improving Your SEO Conversion Rate
• How to Optimize Content for Conversions: 9 Core Steps

In contrast to general purpose CRO, which often centers around doing A/B testing to improve a website’s conversion rate, content CRO has some key factors that precede (and are of greater importance than) running AB tests:

1. Targeting keywords that have buying intent. In our experience, as we’ll demonstrate below, this is by far the #1 driving factor that determines whether or not content converts.
   
   
2. Ranking highly for those keywords. To get sustainable traffic and conversions from content, you need to at least rank on page one of search results, ideally in the top three positions. 
   
   
3. Writing compelling content that sells your product or service. Converting readers into customers requires intelligent, thoughtful writing that demonstrates how your product or service solves the customer’s problem. Doing this well (while difficult) can significantly influence conversion rates.

With that said, there are aspects of general practice CRO that still apply to content. So, in this post we’re going to share 9 practices that — based on our experience measuring conversions of hundreds of blog posts for dozens of clients — every company should follow to optimize their content for conversion.

We’ve grouped these steps into three categories:

SEO

1. Focus on targeting high buying intent SEO keywords

2. Optimize content to rank for those keywords

Content Writing

3. Write non-generic blog introductions

4. Highlight customer pain points

5. Describe how your product or service solves those pain points

6. Emphasize your unique differentiators

Blog Design and CTAs

7. Have a clear call-to-action in your navigation bar

8. Optimize your blog design for readability

9. Use in-line contextualized CTAs throughout your blog copy

Note: If you’d like help improving your blog conversion rate, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) — the process of choosing keywords and optimizing content to rank for those keywords in organic search — plays a critical role in optimizing content for conversion because:

• Without sustainable traffic to your content, making CRO tweaks to your site won’t matter. (i.e. You can’t analyze and influence user behavior if there aren’t enough users on your site to begin with.)

• By intentionally targeting keywords that indicate searchers have buying intent, SEO offers a unique opportunity to bring in highly targeted website traffic which can drastically increase conversion rates.

For these reasons, the following two aspects of SEO are where we focus first when optimizing content for conversion.

1. Focus On Targeting High Buying Intent SEO Keywords

The logic behind this point is simple:

If a piece of content ranks for keywords in which people searching have intent to buy what you sell, it will convert at a higher rate than if it ranks for keywords in which people do not have intent to buy what you sell.

This point is neatly summarized in this Google analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO content strategy): 

The right-most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. 

The number of conversions from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

We also showed this at a larger scale in a case study that analyzed 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert at 10%, 20% or even 50% better than the “top of funnel,” lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. And furthermore, the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

No AB or split testing is going to get you a 2400% lift in average conversion rate. That’s why we say this is the #1 factor, by far, in content conversion optimization.  

If you do nothing else, simply ranking for keywords where people are actively looking to buy what you sell will inevitably increase conversions from your content. 

2. Optimize Content to Rank for Those Keywords

In addition to focusing on the right keywords (i.e. ones that can drive actual paying customers), you need to write content that’s optimized to rank highly for those keywords. Ideally, in the top half of page one of search results where the majority of traffic comes from.

This is nontrivial. You can’t just “sprinkle” keywords into an article and expect your post to rank for a competitive, valuable business keyword. For example, category keywords such as “social media management software” or “executive assistant service.” 

The process is much more involved than that.

We’ve written at length about how we approach content optimization here which breaks down our process into the following five steps:

1. Topic: Come up with content ideas and identify target keywords that have business value.
   
   
2. SERP Analysis: Analyze the search engine results page (SERP) for each of those keywords to understand which topics need to be covered in your article for it to rank.
   
   
3. Structure: Choose the angle and structure of your article based on that SERP analysis.
   
   
4. Writing: Write the content in a way that fills in that structure with compelling information to sell your product or service.
   
   
5. On-Page SEO: Polish off your content with on-page SEO.

Read our full post which provides detailed explanations and examples for each step: SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

Content Writing

Content writing itself is a highly underrated aspect of content CRO strategy because people tend to focus on general purpose CRO as we mentioned above. For example, using pop-ups, analyzing heatmaps, decreasing web page load times, or using social proof and customer testimonials.

But converting readers into customers requires selling your product or service inside blog posts, which is a very different style of blog writing than typical top of funnel how-to or intro-guide style posts. The following are the most important aspects of writing content that converts.

3. Write Non-Generic Blog Introductions 

The internet is fraught with generic, cliche blog introductions that can turn off potential customers and cause high bounce rates. This is particularly true in the B2B space where website visitors are often advanced in the topic area of the content. 

For example, for an article aimed at attracting sales managers and selling them on a CRM tool, if it starts off with descriptions about how CRMs are really important to tracking sales data, it’s an immediate turn offs to actual, experienced sales managers. These articles are written below the knowledge level of the target audience and the introduction is what gives that away. 

If you write generic introductions, you show the reader that you aren’t on their level, you fail to entice readers to keep reading, and you’ll lose a chunk of them, thereby reducing your conversion rate right out of the gate. So, getting your introductions right is essential.

This is a topic that one of our founders, Devesh, has written about at length in a previous piece: How to Write Great Blog Introductions (And Why Most Are Bad)

He compares and contrasts good introductions with bad ones, so you can learn how to write better introductions that hook readers and cause them to keep reading.

4. Highlight Customer Pain Points

In the same fashion that you would discuss customer pain points on a product page or sales landing page, highlighting pain points in your blog content is another key aspect of optimizing content for conversion. 

If you can hit on pain points that resonate with readers, particularly early on in a post (and in language that they use themselves to describe their problems), you can:

• Earn their trust and attention.
• Entice them to continue reading.
• Naturally transition into discussing how your product or service can solve those problems, and thus generate conversions.

Check out this post to learn how to identify customer pain points that you can highlight in your content: Content Ideation: How to Identify Content Ideas That Convert

5. Describe How Your Product or Service Solves Those Pain Points

Most blog content only glancingly mentions the company’s product or service, if it does so at all. This is in part due to the top of funnel, non product-centric topics that blogs often focus on. And in part due to a culture of content marketing that says you shouldn’t be too “salesy” in your content. This is a massive conversion mistake that many brands make. 

If you don’t discuss your product or service in your content, you’re guaranteeing it won’t convert well. Plus, if you’re not discussing your product, someone else will.

Particularly if you focus on buying intent topics as we discussed above, discussing your product or service is actually necessary to satisfy search intent. Searchers are looking to understand how your product works, whether it can solve their problems, and how it’s different from other solutions. So, this is exactly what you need to discuss in order to rank for buying intent keywords and convert readers into leads and customers. 

When writing content for our clients, significant portions of our copy (50%+) are dedicated to describing the features and benefits of the product or service, highlighting the key value propositions, and demonstrating the ways in which our client can solve the customer’s pain points.

For an in-depth tutorial on the pitfalls of writing product-focused content, and how to execute it well, check out: Pain Point Copywriting: How to Write Compelling Sales Copy Inside Blog Posts

6. Emphasize Your Unique Differentiators

Finally, as you discuss how your product or service solves customer pain points, it’s important to emphasize your unique differentiators. This is a key aspect of helping readers understand how your product or service is different and why they should choose you over your competitors.

In our experience evaluating thousands of applicants and reviewing hundreds of test projects, we’ve learned that hiring writers to do this type of Pain Point Copywriting is difficult. Learn more about how to solve that here.

If you want help doing this type of sales-focused content marketing, you can learn more about our service here. 

Blog Design and CTAs

Finally, after all of the above steps, we get to what most people think are the important aspects of “conversion optimization” for content: design, UX, call-to-action (CTA) placements and the like. For us, this bucket intentionally comes last. As we’ve argued before, blog design, CTAs, and other visual aspects of CRO are akin to the “window dressing” of conversion optimization, you should only focus on them after you take care of the fundamentals above. 

Why? Because the steps above ensure (a) the traffic to your content has a high intent to purchase (b) the content itself is written to compel them to purchase. If you have those two aspects in place, then these high-intent customers will figure out how to buy. It’s not hard to scroll up to your navbar and learn more about your product, sign up for a trial, reach out, or purchase. 

However, this isn’t to say that the aesthetic and user experience aspects of CRO aren’t important for conversion. 

What follows are the key aspects of blog design and CTAs that we recommend paying attention to and implementing.

7. Have a Clear Call-to-Action in Your Navigation Bar

Many modern website and blog designs offer the option to include CTA buttons in the top right corner of the page in the navigation bar. However, we’ll occasionally have leads with websites that are missing this element, and we’ll recommend that they fix that. 

Having a clear CTA button in the navigation bar makes it simple for readers to reach out if they want to learn more about your product or service; there’s only upside to having that option there. You might even experiment with making your navbar “sticky,” so that the CTA button remains visible to website visitors even as they scroll down the page.

8. Optimize Your Blog Design for Readability

We often see companies crowd their blog pages with graphical CTAs in their sidebars and even throughout their content. In our experience, these graphics can be counterproductive in a few ways:

• They hurt readability making it less likely that people continue reading your entire post.

• They distract readers from focusing on and learning about how your product or service can solve their problems.

• They look like ads which readers are often programmed to ignore anyway.

For these reasons, we recommend that you optimize your blog design for readability — particularly if you’re following the strategy we laid out above and writing compelling content that sells your product or service. 

This means using less graphical CTAs, email marketing opt-ins, etc., and using a more minimalist design with clear text that focuses the reader on the content itself. Remember, if you’ve followed the advice above, in particular steps 3–6, your content should be selling your product, so you don’t need graphical ad-looking CTAs in the first place. 

9. Use In-Line Contextualized CTAs Throughout the Copy of Your Blog Posts

Lastly, as an alternative to using graphical CTAs, we recommend using plain text, contextualized CTAs throughout your content. When doing this, keep in mind the following:

• Don’t just put CTAs at the end of the article. Many readers won’t make it to the end of your posts, so it’s useful to include CTAs in the introduction and body of the post. 

• Don’t use the same exact CTA for every article. Write CTAs that make sense contextually within your post. For example, if the topic of your post is on invoicing, and invoicing is one of a number of features offered by your software platform, make the CTA pertain specifically to your invoicing feature as opposed to your broader platform.

Keep in mind that the advice we’ve provided here on CTAs and design “best practices” are trivial in comparison to the sections on keyword selection and content writing above. 

For example, if someone is Googling a super high buying intent term, like “plumbing management app” and they go to a page that explains in detail the ways in which your plumbing management app works, and how it’s better (or different) than competitors, most modern blog layouts have plenty of call-to-action buttons for them to take your desired action (click to learn more, sign up for a demo or trial, etc.).

Get Help Driving Leads & Sales from Your Content Marketing Efforts

• 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 view our pricing and 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 marketing 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.

1. Prioritizing ranking for SEO keywords with high buying intent
2. Selling your product or service through your blog content

Below we’ll explain why focusing on these two things will improve your conversion rates more than typical CRO “tips and tricks” that marketers discuss (e.g. A/B testing, analyzing heatmaps, adding social proof and testimonials, etc.).

Then, before we wrap up, we’ll share some additional resources and factors to consider for execution, including: 

• Why you should target individual keywords with dedicated blog posts
• How to measure blog conversion rates in Google Analytics 4
• What a good blog conversion rate is

Note: If you’d like help improving your blog conversion rate, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

Action #1: Prioritize Ranking for SEO Keywords with High Buying Intent

Most businesses, in-house marketers, content marketing agencies, and SEO agencies view blogs strictly as a channel for getting potential customers in their “conversion funnel,” not as an asset for directly selling products and services.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but little buying intent. For example, if you sell social media management software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “how to stand out on Twitter” or “social media ad trends.”

This approach is based on the assumption that with enough traffic — and by implementing conversion rate optimization practices such as providing a good user experience, including calls to action, etc. — conversions will inevitably follow. 

However, having measured conversion rates for hundreds of blog posts for dozens of clients, this assumption is flawed and untrue.

Specifically, while these keywords could potentially be searched for by your audience and may have high search volumes, searchers of these terms show no clear indication that they have intent to buy social media management software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best social media management software” or “social media management app.”) 

As a result, by our measures, these top of funnel keywords have very low conversion rates. And trying to solve that by making CRO tweaks to your site (e.g. adding popups with CTAs, offering a lead magnet, adding long sections selling your product or service,  etc.) is unlikely to make much of a difference because the website visitors coming in from those keywords are either a) too early in the customer journey to convert or b) flat-out not on the market for what you sell. 

This point is neatly summarized in this analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO content strategy): 

The right most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. 

The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

We also showed this at a larger scale in an analysis of 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. In that case study, you can read about how the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

This is why, in our experience, prioritizing high buying intent keywords is by far the most impactful way to boost conversion rates. If you do nothing else — and frankly, even if you don’t have super high-quality content — simply ranking for keywords where people are actively looking to buy what you sell will inevitably drive more conversions than ranking for low intent keywords. 

Regarding how you can actually execute this, check out these two articles which lay out our agencies processes in detail:

1. Choosing keywords — SEO Keyword Strategy: How to Prioritize Based on Buying Intent to Drive More Conversions
   
2. Ranking for those keywords — SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

Once you have that down, the other key part of improving website conversion rates is writing compelling product or sales copy to convert visitors into customers (this includes blog posts).

Action #2: Sell Your Product or Service In Each Piece of Content

Many SEO’s and content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the blog content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a service or product page in their content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.) to “take care of conversions.”

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed above — the tendency to prioritize keywords with high traffic potential but low buying intent. The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your blog content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely). 

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Particularly if you focus on high buying intent keywords, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent. 

If someone is searching for “best social media management software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. These are potential customers that want to understand the value propositions of this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. 

Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this type of search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content needs to discuss your product or service in-depth, much like a sales page.

We’ve written at length about the challenges of doing this well, and how we execute this for our clients. Check out our post on Pain Point Copywriting for a deep dive on writing copy that converts.

Additional Resources and Factors to Keep In Mind

Target Each High Intent Keyword with a Single, Dedicated Page That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

People in search engine optimization often try to target many different keywords with a single web page. But search engines don’t reward this approach like they used to. As algorithms have evolved, the approach of trying to rank for a bunch of keywords (especially competitive buying intent keywords) with a single blog post rarely works.

One of our key learnings in recent years (and a differentiator of our agency’s strategy) is that the best way to get top positions for high intent keywords is to create a dedicated page for each one — even when keywords have very similar meanings. 

For example, consider the keywords “sick leave tracking” and “sick leave app.” You can imagine that the intent behind these two search terms is nearly identical: searchers are looking for a tool to track employee sick leave.

But when you look at search results for these two terms, the top results are different. 

Here are the results for “sick leave tracking”:

And here are results for “sick leave app”:

Although intent is very similar, Google is ranking different pages for these terms, which indicates an opportunity to create dedicated pages to go after each of these keywords.

As we discussed in our conversation with Bernard Huang of Clearscope, you only get one SEO title, one H1 heading, one meta description, etc. If you try to rank for multiple target keywords with one piece of content, often it will only end up ranking for one of those keywords (or worse, you won’t match the intent of any individual keyword, and you won’t end up ranking for any of them).

Note: We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing.

Measuring Blog Conversions in Google Analytics

Clients and the companies we speak with ask us all the time about how we track conversions in Google Analytics, so we’ve created two long-form pieces of content that explain how to do this.  

First, we wrote a step by step tutorial on how to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Check that out for the full explanation.

Second, we created a long-form video walkthrough explaining the process:

What Is a Good Blog Conversion Rate?

Over the years, we’ve had a number of conversations with clients where they’ve expressed that they feel their organic conversion rate is low compared to what they thought was good. 

We think this is partially a result of companies using paid conversion rates as a benchmark for overall organic conversion rates. For example, they might see that their average conversion rate from Google Ads is ~3%, while their average overall conversion rate from organic search is somewhere in the 0.1%-0.3% range, and then conclude that their organic conversion rate is very low.

However, as we discussed at length in our deep dive video on average blog conversion rates, oftentimes the way companies look at their organic conversion rates is flawed. Specifically, they don’t segment out the different parts of their site and different mediums of traffic which skew conversion rates and make them seem higher or lower than they should be.

To gain a deeper understanding of what makes a good conversion rate, and how to more accurately measure your conversion rates from SEO, check out the video:

In the video, we share conversion rate data from two different clients of ours — both a mid-market/enterprise demo based SaaS company and a B2SMB self service SaaS company — and show how we’re getting 2%+ average conversion rates on our blog posts and compare those stats to how their sites convert overall from organic.

We share data on what we’ve seen for average blog conversion rates and explain what we think a good conversion rate target should be for each individual blog post.

In general, a good SEO conversion rate for pages ranking for bottom of funnel keywords is between 1%–5%. Anything above that is great. And in general, for an entire blog or content operation that largely focuses on bottom of funnel pieces, a conversion rate of 0.5%– 2% from visitor to lead, trial start, or eCommerce sale is good. 

Lastly, we share 3 examples of us outranking landing pages with blog posts and debate why we think blog posts are usually the better approach for high intent keywords — and why we think they may have higher conversion rates (even if the landing page were to rank higher than our blog post). 

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute an SEO-focused content 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 would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team as a content strategist or writer.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content marketing 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. 

When the topic of improving SEO conversion rates comes up, many marketers jump straight into advice centered around conversion rate optimization (CRO) — the process of making small tweaks to a website to increase the conversion rate of a desired action, for example, implementing pop-ups and email list opt-ins, making technical adjustments to decrease page load time or bounce rate, or A/B testing different calls to action (CTAs). 

While these user experience (UX) design tweaks and conversion optimization tactics are fine, in our experience they aren’t nearly as impactful as prioritizing and ranking for keywords where the people searching indicate they’re on the market looking to buy what you sell — we call these “high buying intent keywords.” 

In this article we’re going to share examples and data — based on the last 5 years tracking conversions of hundreds of blog posts for our clients — to back this up. Then, we’ll share other key learnings that have helped us maximize SEO conversions for our clients, as we’ve demonstrated in numerous in-depth case studies.

Below, we cover:

• Why ranking for high buying intent keywords is the most important aspect of improving SEO conversion rates

• 3 key factors to keep in mind for executing a conversion-focused SEO strategy

• How to track SEO conversions in Google Analytics

• What is a good SEO conversion rate?

• How to measure the ROI of SEO

Why Ranking for High Buying Intent Keywords Is the Most Important Aspect of Improving SEO Conversion Rates

As we’ve discussed at length many times, most businesses, in-house marketers, content marketing agencies, and SEO agencies use traffic-focused SEO strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that with enough website traffic, conversions will inevitably follow.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but low to zero buying intent. For example, if you sell employee scheduling software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “how to become a better manager” or “minimum wage by state.”

While these keywords could potentially be searched for by your audience and likely have high search volumes that could drive substantial organic traffic, searchers of these terms show no indication that they have intent to buy employee scheduling software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best employee scheduling software” or “employee scheduling app for small business.”) 

As a result, by our measures, these keywords have very low conversion rates. And trying to solve that by making CRO tweaks or UX improvements to your site is unlikely to make much of a difference because the website visitors coming in from those keywords aren’t even on the market for what you sell in the first place. 

If you’re a B2B or enterprise SaaS company selling employee scheduling software, is a pop-up with the right messaging or a sidebar CTA really going to convince someone that they all of the sudden need your product? In our experience, no. 

Could these tactics work for generating email subscriptions or selling low cost eCommerce products? Maybe (because these are much smaller asks) — but they’re still unlikely to impact conversion rates in the way that ranking for high buying intent keywords will.

This point is neatly summarized in this analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO strategy): 

The right most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. 

The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher.

We also showed this at a larger scale in an analysis of 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better.

In that case study, you can read about how the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

By all means, follow CRO best practices, but don’t expect that to be the thing that will improve your conversion rates. Instead, focus on ranking for as many high buying intent keywords as possible.

As you do, take into consideration the following 3 factors:

3 Key Factors to Consider When Developing and Executing a Conversion-Focused SEO Strategy

1. There’s Way More Buying Intent Keywords Than Most Businesses Realize

For many companies, the basic approach to SEO looks something like this:

1. Homepage: Optimize the homepage for one or two product or service category keywords. These are high buying intent keywords that describe what the company sells. For example, “executive assistant service” or “PPC reporting software.”
   
   
2. Service or product pages: Optimize a small handful of product or service pages (or feature and solutions pages in SaaS) for similar high buying intent keywords that describe the product or service. 
   
   
3. Blog: Use the blog to go after high search volume but low buying intent keywords as we discussed above. The blog is considered a tool for generating brand awareness and getting potential customers in your “conversion funnel,” not an asset for ranking for buying intent keywords and selling your service (more on this below).

In this scenario, companies are only targeting a small handful of buying intent keywords (maybe 5 to 10). But in our experience, this typically leaves a ton of buying intent keywords on the table.

Why?

First off, people often describe products and services in many different ways. For example, any given software may be described as:

• “Software” (e.g. “small business accounting software”)
• “Tool” (e.g. “project management tool”)
• “Platform” (e.g. “marketing analytics platform”)
• “App” (e.g. “field service app”)

It’s common for there to be several different keyword variations for your product or service. And if a business serves multiple industries or verticals, the list of variations grows longer. As we’ll discuss below, you simply won’t rank for all of these with your homepage and a small handful of product or service pages.

Furthermore, there are two other high intent keyword frameworks — competitor and alternatives keywords, and jobs to be done keywords — that can drive significant conversions, but are not going to be ranked for with home and product or service pages.

Companies should leverage blog content to go after all of these additional high intent opportunities — as we do at our agency — but most do not. 

Note: Pair this post with our article on SEO keyword strategy to aid you in your own keyword research.

You can also check out our YouTube video for Semrush Academy:

2. Target Each High Intent Keyword with a Single, Dedicated Page That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

People in search engine optimization often try to target many different keywords with a single web page. But search engines don’t reward this approach like they used to. As algorithms have evolved, the approach of trying to rank for a bunch of keywords (especially competitive buying intent keywords) with a single page rarely works.

One of our key learnings in recent years (and a differentiator of our agency’s strategy) is that the best way to get top positions for high intent keywords is to create a dedicated page for each one — even when keywords have very similar meanings. 

For example, consider the keywords “sick leave tracking” and “sick leave app.” You can imagine that the intent behind these two search terms is nearly identical: searchers are looking for a tool to track employee sick leave.

But when you look at search results for these two terms, the top results are different. 

Here are the results for “sick leave tracking”:

And here are results for “sick leave app”:

Although intent is very similar, Google is ranking different pages for these terms, which indicates an opportunity to create dedicated pages to go after each of these keywords.

As we discussed in our conversation with Bernard Huang of Clearscope, you only get one SEO title, one H1 heading, one meta description, etc. If you try to rank for multiple target keywords with one piece of content, often it will only end up ranking for one of them (or worse, you won’t match the intent of any individual keyword, and you won’t end up ranking for any of them).

Note: We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing.

3. Sell Your Product in Each Piece of Content

Many SEO’s and content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the blog content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a product or service page in their content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.) to “take care of conversions.”

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed above — the tendency to prioritize keywords with high traffic potential but low buying intent. The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your blog content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely). 

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Particularly if you focus on high buying intent keywords, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent. 

If someone is doing a Google search for “best employee scheduling software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. They want to know what’s better about this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. 

Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content of the page needs to discuss your product or service in-depth.

How to Track SEO Conversions in Google Analytics

At a high-level, there are 3 steps to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):

1. Create “Conversion Events”. In Universal Analytics (UA), the previous version of Google Analytics, conversions were typically tracked by setting up what were called “Conversion Goals.” However, in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), conversion tracking is based on “Conversion Events.” You do that by first creating events you want to track and then marking the ones of interest as a “Conversion” event. These must be set up in order to access or create custom reports to view conversion data for the specific events you want to track.
   
   
2. Consider which attribution models you’ll use in your reports. An attribution model is a conversion counting method that determines how credit for conversions is assigned to touchpoints on conversion paths. No single attribution model will give you a complete and accurate view of your conversion data, so we recommend setting up multiple reports that use different models to get the best understanding of your conversion data.
   
   
3. Access or create reports to view and track your conversion data. GA4 offers a default conversion report which can provide a high-level overview of conversion performance. However, it’s useful to leverage additional custom reports to build up a more holistic view of your conversion data. We use the model comparison tool as well as an any touchpoint report. 

We’ve created two long-form pieces of content that explain how to track and report on SEO conversions in GA4.  

First, we wrote a step by step tutorial on how to set up SEO conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Check that out for the full explanation.

Second, we created a long-form video walkthrough explaining the process:

What Is a Good SEO Conversion Rate?

Over the years, we’ve had a number of conversations with clients where they’ve expressed that they feel their organic conversion rate is low compared to what they thought was good. 

We think this is partially a result of companies using paid conversion rates as a benchmark for overall organic conversion rates. For example, they might see that their average conversion rate from Google Ads is ~3%, while their average overall conversion rate from organic search is somewhere in the 0.1%-0.3% range, and then conclude that their organic conversion rate is very low.

However, as we discussed at length in our deep dive video on average blog conversion rates, oftentimes the way companies look at their organic conversion rates is flawed. Specifically, they don’t segment out the different parts of their site and different mediums of traffic which skew conversion rates and make them seem higher or lower than they should be.

To gain a deeper understanding of what makes a good conversion rate, and how to more accurately measure your conversion rates from SEO, check out the video:

In the video we share conversion rate data from two different clients of ours — both a mid-market/enterprise demo based SaaS company and a B2SMB self service SaaS company — and show how we’re getting 2%+ average conversion rates on our blog posts and compare those stats to how their sites convert overall from organic.

We share data on what we’ve seen for average blog conversion rates and explain what we think a good conversion rate target should be for each individual blog post.

In general, as we share in the video, a good SEO conversion rate for pages ranking for bottom of funnel keywords is between 1% – 5%. Anything above that is great. And in general, for an entire blog or content operation that largely focuses on bottom of funnel pieces, a conversion rate of 0.5% to 2% from visitor to lead, trial start, or eCommerce sale is good. 

Lastly, we share 3 examples of us outranking landing pages with blog posts and debate why we think blog posts are usually better to go after high intent keywords with — and how we think they may have higher conversion rates (even if the landing page were to rank higher than our blog post). 

How to Measure the ROI of SEO

Most marketing agencies and in-house teams struggle to find answers to these questions:

• What’s our return on investment (ROI) from content? 
• What can we expect our ROI from content to be? 

In this post, we walk through our process for answering both of those questions. We also have YouTube videos on why you shouldn’t measure all content as a whole (you should instead measure ROI from individual pieces of content) and how to calculate the value of SEO.

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. 

Typically, it comes up when we’re discussing going after a bottom-of-funnel SEO keyword with a blog post. For example, a software category keyword like “proposal creation software.”

In this scenario, the client will often ask us, “shouldn’t we create a landing page instead of a blog post for that?” And in many cases, when we look at what’s already ranking for a keyword like that, product landing pages are one of the primary page types in the SERPs (alongside home pages and list-style blog posts).

Whether to target a keyword with a landing page or a blog post is a legitimate question.

The main argument for going after a keyword with a landing page (instead of a blog post) is that landing pages convert better. So they think you should use landing pages for bottom-of-funnel, product based keywords, which have high product conversion intent, and save blog posts for mid and top funnel keywords that are more informational.

On the surface, this sounds logical.

But, in our experience, when you get into the fine details, you realize this simple argument may not be true. In fact, we almost always target bottom-of-funnel keywords with blog posts, not landing pages, and have seen a lot of success doing so.

There are a number of reasons why:

1. Conversions: Conversion rates of product landing pages are not always higher than conversion rates of blog posts (even for equivalent types of BOF keywords). We think this misconception comes from thinking about landing pages in the context of paid ads (search and social), where conversion rates can sometimes be as high as 10% – 20%. But from what we’ve seen, in the context of ranking product landing pages for organic positions (what we’re referring to as a “product landing page”), it’s not automatic that they have a higher conversion rate than blog posts. We have anecdotal evidence to support this, which we’ll discuss below.
2. Ranking: It’s often much more difficult to get a landing page to rank highly in organic search. A blog post format gives you more room to include relevant SEO keywords and answer the intent of the searcher, so blog posts are often easier to get ranking highly. And ranking needs to take priority first, since if your page doesn’t rank, it won’t matter how high your conversion rate is.
3. Intent: Often the intent of a BOF product category keyword is to view options, in which case a blog list post will often rank more highly than product landing pages (like in the screenshot above) because they’re better at satisfying search intent.

In this post, we’re going to share data and examples backing up these claims. Specifically:

• Anecdotal data that indicates product landing pages don’t always convert better than blog posts, and in some cases, convert at a significantly lower rate.
• The framework we use to decide when to use one or the other.
• Examples of blog posts we’ve created for clients where they’re outranking product landing pages for BOF keywords.
• A hybrid strategy of combining landing pages and blog posts.

The Idea That Product Landing Pages Convert Better than Blog Posts Isn’t Always True

In 2020, we were working with a SaaS client and one of their team members stood firmly on the side of creating product landing pages for BOF software category keywords. It started our own internal debate around this topic of landing page versus blog post conversion rates.

Devesh, who has run a conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency for years, was initially sympathetic to the client’s perspective—he felt that in his experience, a landing page structure does generally convert at a higher rate than most blog posts. But we decided to look into the data (examples below) and found what was, at first, a surprising conclusion.

The Notion of “High Converting Landing Pages” Tends to Come from Paid Search, Not Organic

Devesh was thinking of PPC landing pages that are highly optimized for conversion (excluding the main site navigation, reducing the number of options users can click on the page, etc.) and for which people are often self-qualifying when they click on an ad (most commonly a Google search ad).

For example, if you Google “data analytics software” (the kind of B2B SaaS term where PPC landing pages abound), you’re met with not one, not two, but four ad spots, all of which go to dedicated landing pages for each product (yes, we clicked on all four, sorry to these brands and their PPC agencies):

All of them have the same structure—a very common and well tested structure—of information on the left and a demo request or trial start form on the right, all above the fold:

It’s a very aggressive, conversion-focused experience. And these landing pages can convert as high as double digits (10%+).

But think about the psychology of someone who clicks on that ad. They Googled a software related term and willingly clicked on one of the ads. They know what they are getting into.

Our hypothesis is that a larger fraction of these ad-clicking users are not in research mode but are ready to request demos or start trials—as evidenced by them willingly clicking those ads. In other words, if you click an ad, you are self-selecting as someone who is ready to be sold. As a result, conversion rates can be very high for these landing pages.

Organic Results Are Different: Blog Posts Can (And Have) Converted Better Than Product Landing Pages

But the organic listing spots can be a lot different. In the organic spots, as per data we’ll show below, we haven’t seen product landing pages convert much higher than blog posts.

There are a few reasons for why we think this is:

1. Way more people click on organic listings than ads (e.g. tens of thousands of visitors in the example we share below). Pages getting that kind of traffic aren’t going to convert at 10%+.
2. Someone scrolling down the SERP and clicking on an organic listing is slightly higher in the funnel and has less immediate purchase intent (i.e. they’re more in research mode) than someone who clicks on an ad.
3. Compared to a blog post, a product landing page format is typically thin on content, providing less room to discuss a product’s positioning at length, educate visitors on how it’s different and better than competitors, etc.

So, to show some anecdotal data that supports this, here’s what we found when we compared conversion rates of blog posts versus landing pages for the client we mentioned above:

We calculated the conversion rates from organic traffic for three product landing pages and blog posts targeting closely comparable BOF keywords.

The data set on top looks at conversion rates for their industry product landing pages, and the data set on bottom looks at our blog posts for three of those same industries—the only difference being that for industries #2 and #3, we were targeting keywords that included industry + software + a specific feature.

For industry #1, we were essentially targeting the exact same keyword as the “QuickBooks Integration” version of the landing page. That post outranks the equivalent product landing page shown above (Industry #1 + Software + QuickBooks Integration), drives more organic traffic, and also has converted at 1.27% on average since it’s been published.

On average, you can see their conversion rate hovers in the 0.4% range for the product landing pages we looked at, whereas our blog posts convert at 1.13%.

Yes, the traffic and conversion volume for the product landing pages is much higher overall. In part that’s a function of those pages having been published for a longer time period, and in part it’s due to those head target keywords (“industry + software” vs. “industry + software + feature”) having higher search volume. However, the purpose of gathering this data was to look specifically at conversion rates, because that’s the most common reasoning behind using landing pages over blog posts for BOF terms.

This is obviously a small data set and not a perfect comparison, but it’s illustrative of the fact that product landing pages do not always convert at a higher rate than blog posts. They usually do because most companies don’t write BOF blog posts that sell their product in a compelling way. But blog content that does this can convert just as high or higher than product landing pages.

And, blog posts are typically easier to get ranking highly in the SERPs, which we’ll discuss more in the next section.

Note: If you’d like to learn our content strategy and apply it to your business, we teach everything we do and give personalized feedback in our content marketing course and community.

Our Framework for Deciding When to Go After a Keyword with a Blog Post vs. a Landing Page

Now, just because we’ve dismissed the idea that landing pages generally convert better than blog posts doesn’t mean there is no decision to be made. It still may be the case that for a given keyword a landing page (or just a more product-focused page) is better than a blog post.

To help make that decision, we look to SERP analysis, which (among other steps) involves reviewing the titles, page types, and sources of existing page one results.

When we’re looking at search results for a BOF keyword, like a software category keyword, we’re first looking to understand:

• Which page types are showing up? (e.g. Software review lists? Competitor product home pages? Competitor product landing pages? Blog posts?)
• Would a blog post be an appropriate fit for satisfying search intent?
• Would a blog post have a good chance of ranking in the top 3 positions?
• What type of blog post would most closely satisfy search intent?

If all or a majority of the results are blog posts, the decision is easy. A blog post can rank highly and satisfy search intent.

However, often there’s a mix of product landing pages and product home pages with just a few blog posts (or sometimes none at all). This is when we need to figure out whether a) it’s still worth creating a blog post or b) our client would be better off going after that keyword with a product landing page.

Here’s how we think about this:

First, we take into consideration our client’s authority in their space. Are they a super well known brand that generally has an easy time getting product pages to rank for competitive BOF keywords?

If that’s the case, it may well make sense for them to create a product landing page due to the majority of the SERP being landing or product pages suggesting that perhaps that’s what the user is looking for—not a wordy blog post.

However, if they aren’t a super well known brand in the space that search engines recognize as an authority, it’s likely that client may have low chances of ranking a product page—which has less space for including relevant keywords, increasing time spent on site, and improving other ranking factors which Google takes into account when ranking web pages.

In this case, we’ll often choose to go ahead with a blog post because it gives our client a more realistic chance of ranking. (Which, again, has to take first priority because if a page doesn’t rank, the format of the page won’t make a difference.)

Then it becomes a question of which type of post we’ll write. We’ll often do a list post because as we mentioned above, these types of posts often rank highly for BOF product and service keywords where search intent is to view and weigh options against each other.

Note: A lot of companies feel hesitant or unwilling to write list-style posts because they don’t want to draw attention to their competitors. However, we’ve found that the advantages of leveraging that format—which in many cases increases the chances of ranking in a top spot—outweighs the disadvantages of mentioning their competitors. We’ve found that when list posts are done well, they’re very effective for ranking and producing conversions. And they can also aid your sales process by talking up your key value props relative to competitors upfront. Ultimately, if people are Googling a product related keyword and seeing lists of products and you’re not controlling that conversation, you’re just leaving those conversions and customers on the table. If what it takes to rank highly for one of these high-converting keywords (and capture the customers searching for it as a result) is listing products beyond just yours, we think it’s more than worth it.

Next, we’ll share examples where we’ve earned top positions in the SERPs for BOF keywords, where many of the search results are product landing pages.

Client Examples of Blog Posts Outranking Product Landing Pages for BOF Keywords

We rank #1 with a blog post—in a SERP of mostly product landing pages—for the keyword “clock in clock out app” for our client Buddy Punch, an employee time clock software and app:

We also rank #1 for Buddy Punch for “mobile time clock app” with a blog post where 7 of the results ranking below us are product landing pages and home pages:

We’re ranking #2 underneath G2 for the keyword “sales onboarding software” with this list post for our client Bigtincan:

Notice how results in positions #3 and #4 are product landing pages (there are also several others below).

We’re ranking #1 for the keyword “delivery mapping software” for our client Circuit, with two product home pages ranking below:

We’re ranking #1 for the keyword “video to text transcription software” for our client Reduct:

Notice the two results below—a product landing page and a home page. There are several other home pages lower on the page as well.

The above examples are just a sample, there are many more like this across dozens of clients.

We can see that there are many cases in which a list-style blog post can better satisfy search intent for BOF products or service keywords, and therefore outrank competitors’ product landing pages.

When you take into account that, on average, search results in position 1-3 receive ~60% of organic traffic, even if the list post does have a lower conversion rate—which as we showed above isn’t always true—the increased organic traffic can easily still produce a higher volume of conversions.

So, when you’re choosing whether to create a landing page or blog post for any given BOF keyword, it’s worth considering this in your decision making process.

Note: Interested in whether we can drive these types of results for your business? Learn more about our content marketing service here.

The Hybrid Strategy: Combining Landing Pages and Blog Posts

Some companies and marketers are beginning to use a hybrid strategy where they create a template that folds blog content into a traditional product landing page structure.

The thinking is that the editorial content from the blog post can help the page rank higher, while the landing page structure can increase conversion rates.

Our client ServiceTitan has been experimenting with this on their competitor comparison pages. We write comparison blog posts optimized for “[Competitor] vs. ServiceTitan”—and they place that editorial content within a landing page template.

The top of the page uses a common landing page format:

Beneath that, they use a comparison table, which is another common element of a product comparison landing page:

And beneath that, they place our blog post with a Table of Contents for easy navigation:

Below, you can see them ranking in position #1—above Software Advice, G2, and one of their top competitors, Housecall Pro:

Whereas, Ahrefs shows them ranking in position #3 (below Software Advice and Capterra) back in December 2020 prior to publishing the blog content on that page:

In ServiceTitan’s case, they had pre-existing (and already ranking) comparison landing pages that they added the blog content to which boosted the rankings even higher.

However, there are other ways you can consider approaching this. For example, you could create the blog post first to have the highest likelihood of ranking. And then once you’ve achieved that ranking, build a landing page-style template around it later to optimize the page for conversions.

Or, you could create a hybrid page from the get-go. Either way, based on what we’re seeing, it’s absolutely worth testing a hybrid strategy.

Get Help on Your SaaS Content Marketing

• Questions/Comments? If you have any questions or comments about what we’ve discussed in this post, please let us know in the comments section below.
• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.
• 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, taught via case studies. 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 or see this video walkthrough:

Here are two examples, from companies we’ve worked with recently, of how customer feedback was a game changer for their business.

A financial advisory company in the beta version of our upcoming content marketing training program used an email based customer feedback survey to learn the salary range and job titles of their existing customers (retirees). But also discovered a surprising insight: their customers hardly read about investing or financial planning. Their customers were getting financial recommendations from friends, the news and top publications. This is a breakthrough insight: it means that writing more content on financial tools, interest rates, 401(k)s and such wasn’t going to attract more of these customers. So they decided to switch their strategy to focus on customer success stories and guest posts.

A real estate software company in the same program learned that their ideal customers were real estate brokerages with the team size (2 – 3 people) and revenue range ($500k – $2MM).. This differed from their original hypothesis that companies they worked with ranged from 1-25 people and revenue from $500k-$25MM. It turns out that the problems of real estate agents with smaller (1 person) and larger (10+) teams are very different from this 2 – 3 person sweet spot. This was critical to developing a content strategy with a laser focus on this sweet spot.

A great content strategy starts and ends with a total obsession with knowing everything about your best customers so you can attract more of them.

Note: The word “best” in front of customers is intentional. Building a consistent customer generation machine from content takes work. So why spend that energy, time, and money only to attract low revenue, high churn, or simply bad-fit customers?

Now, email based surveys are great, but no tool is a panacea, and emailed surveys have limitations for many businesses. In particular:

• Limited “email capital” – You can only email your customers asking them to take a survey so often without starting to turn  them off. So if you want to ask a quick follow up question, you often have to wait weeks or months.
• Segmentation headache – For multi-product businesses like e-commerce, how do you ask specific questions to only customers interested in specific products? Or for any business, how do you ask questions to customers who arrived via certain channels? It’s possible, but tedious.

In this article, we’re going to dissect a different survey tool: on-site feedback surveys.

On-site surveys break open the two limitations above, and have other benefits like getting instant feedback on the copy, contents, and usability of your site. We discuss all of these in this article as well as how you can leverage the answers you get into content ideas.

I’ll briefly introduce what these are first, and then we’ll dive into the use cases and strategy.

What is an on-site customer feedback survey?

This is what we’re talking about:

You’ve likely seen them at the bottom of websites, such as our homepage:

They can be triggered by time on page, scroll amount, or exit intent.

We have zero affiliation with any of the dozens of companies that make this type of survey tool, but we use Hotjar and here are some more options from this Quora question where people discuss the competitors:

• Qualaroo
• Qeryz
• Survicate
• Usability Tools
• Informizely
• Webengage
• Free Survey Creator

Aside: Look at how competitive this space is. Isn’t it amusing that to stand out in the customer survey space, you’ll need to understand the pains, hopes, dreams, and fears of the customers better than everyone else? It’s the opposite of irony. What’s the word for that?

You apply this to your site the same way as most website tools: put their javascript snippet on every page and run everything else from the company’s dashboard.

That’s it. Check out any of the software company’s sites above for more info on how to set them up.

Now let’s talk strategy.

Using Customer Feedback Tools To Improve Sales: Find Out Why Customers Don’t Purchase

One of the biggest objections we hear to email based surveys is along the lines of:

We don’t want to over-email our customers.

Even after a company sends a survey and gets great insights, there’s a hesitation about when they can email again.

No single survey tells you every single thing you need to know about your customers, and often times, the answers you get spark additional questions that you’re dying to ask.

For example, a client of my conversion optimization agency sells swimsuits to women. To understand what content was missing from their product pages, we asked first this:

We were looking for responses that could help us build more persuasive product pages.

For example:

• Were they unsure about returns?
• Were they looking for certain features?
• Could they not find the products they were looking for?
• Did they want a discount?
• Etc.

We got some good insights on those fronts, but we also got a sizeable number of unexpected responses like these:

Hold the phone. They don’t have enough sizes? This is a plus size swimsuits site, the right size selection is a core part of the value proposition.

Obviously, that’s not a UI/UX issue, it’s a merchandizing issue. So it’s not something we can “fix” with an AB test, but it’s incredibly insightful.

But now, as a result of this one survey question, we wanted to ask another.

We wanted to know the exact products and sizes potential customers wanted, but that the store didn’t carry. We also wanted to know what percentage of users could find their size versus could not (how big of a problem was this?).

Asking this follow up question is simple with an on-site feedback survey: we just stopped the question above and turned on this two part question instead:

Despite the clunky and grammatically incorrect second question, we got exactly what we were looking for:

In addition to just “I want this product in this size” feedback, look at the subtleties we got from certain customers and their frustrations. Men may not understand this (I certainly didn’t) but buying a swimsuit as a woman isn’t as simple as finding one size number.

The last two responses in the sample screenshot above will show the product team (not just the marketing team) that there are customers with this frustration: for smaller swimsuits, women weren’t finding a bust size that worked for them.

What’s more, you get a sense from reading this feedback that these prospects want to find a solution that works. They want to buy. They’re just frustrated that the product offering is not quite right for them.

Our hypothesis: The company is losing these otherwise easy sales.

If you’re curious about how this “ended”, these are recent results, so merchandizing decisions to appease these complaints are still in the works.

Grow and Convert Monthly Coaching

We recently started asking a similar question on our coaching page:

And have a few responses already:

Even though we just have a few responses, we’ve already seen two people mention that they are just starting out, which is an interesting nugget about the type of people that are hitting that page and have some interest in the program.

After a dozen or more responses we should be able to uncover some more insights.

Hidden Content Opportunities

Finally, this benefit is not exclusive to on-site surveys, but is a benefit nonetheless: product frustrations can often be leveraged as content opportunities.

In this case of the plus size swimsuit site, we saw the frustration that many women had about finding unique combinations of top/bottom sizes when buying a swimsuit. A swimsuit sizing guide, an interactive swimsuit sizing “mini app” or something similar could be a great content or mega project opportunity.

Using On-Site Customer Feedback Surveys To Create Copy That Compels Customers To Purchase

Another wonderful page-specific use of on-site polls is getting direct customer quotes for copy on your marketing site. For example:

• How do you figure out what benefits are most interesting to your users?
• What features are making them sign up?
• What headline or sub-headline would resonate the most?

This use case can be really impactful for businesses such as SaaS, services (agencies), marketplaces (Upwork, Codeable, etc.), that generally have this onboarding flow:

1. User browses the marketing site, which usually consists of: homepage summary, features, product, services, pricing, case studies, etc.
2. If the user is persuaded, they “convert” by signing up for a demo, free trial, free plan, or purchasing the product outright.

These types of businesses are notorious for feature overload. For example, ask a founder of a SaaS company to explain what their company does and in 0.5 seconds you’ll be knee deep in feature minutiae.

But if you’re a marketing manager that wants to optimize the list of features, change messaging, optimize headlines, or focus more on benefits, it can be a fight (with executives, founders, product managers, engineers):

“No way Robbie, we HAVE to mention this feature…”

It’s easy to lecture your coworkers on persuasion best practices like the features vs. benefits principle. But the frustrating paradox is prospective customers of these businesses do want to know what features are available.

For example, the one reason I use Hotjar vs. others for our surveys is because of its features. In addition to on-site surveys, it also includes screen recording, form analytics, and heatmaps at a damn good price, so I don’t have to use 3 or 4 separate tools. (I promise we have no relationship with them, I’m just being honest.)

But what features are the most important to your business? What benefits should be mentioned at the top? How should you word your headline? Would more screenshots work better than more case studies?

These are hard questions to answer.

It often takes many iterations and months (or years) to get it right. That’s okay. We’re not here to oversimplify things and tell you to just follow these “15 best practices” and sales will go through the roof.

But what we are saying is that by asking your customers the right questions, it can help you figure out the right combination of words, features and benefits to make customers purchase.

For example, for a SaaS client that makes a communications app (web, iOS, and Android) for small business owners, we asked this question:

What more do you want to know about [PRODUCT] before signing up?

There were a huge number of users that wanted to know how it worked.

Interesting…we thought we already explained that!

Instead of asking follow up questions (after we asked this first question) and digging deep into their answers, we jumped to conclusions and started testing what we assumed would satisfy them.

We tested putting a bunch of features from the features page right on landing pages. Didn’t work.

Then we tested featuring the how it works video on the page more prominently. Didn’t work.

Doing this was a big mistake. Instead of assuming, we should’ve just asked our customers more questions to figure out what we didn’t explain well.

We went through numerous tests that took up a bunch of time and resources, and all of that could’ve been saved by asking the right questions.

We eventually found out that all customers wanted to know was that the product was easy to use and that we didn’t explicitly say that anywhere on the site. 

The customers of this company were small business owners, who are notoriously: busy, stressed out, and in this case, not tech savvy.

They didn’t want to waste time learning something complex. They needed a product that was intuitive and easy to use.

If we had asked the follow up questions needed to get to this conclusion early on, we would’ve found the answer to increasing sales much faster.

After numerous iterations, we finally changed the wording on the site to a simple section that explained how the product works in 3 steps (and got the results we were looking for).

The new copy subtly mentioned features, and wrapped them in benefit-heavy copy. This, along with some other minor changes we made to the page, increased signups 7.6%.

There are a bunch of ways we could have used on site polls to lead us in the right direction before running all of the previous failed tests:

• We could have asked users who just signed up what made them sign up
• We could have asked users inside the app what they like most about it.
• We could have asked an iterative question on the homepage about what one feature or benefit the prospects were hoping to get.
• We could have asked a myriad of questions about prospects’ pain points

I could go on and on…

Hidden Content Opportunities

Just like the e-commerce example above, these types of businesses can also leverage survey answers to create content that attracts their ideal customers.

For example, a todo list app may ask what users biggest frustrations with todo lists are and find a bunch of users complaining about saying yes to too many requests – not the mechanics of their actual to-do list. Not only can this be leveraged for on site copywriting (emphasize more free time, and de-emphasize some nerdy feature), but it can also make for content pieces that attract bottom of the funnel customers that are likely to convert: i.e. how to say no to requests, how to delegate tasks or projects, etc.

A mobile development agency could learn that most prospects have tried to develop the app “themselves” by finding solo contractors for each step of the process: interaction designer, visual designer, coder, etc.

So, the company could create content on ‘how to manage a remote mobile development team’, or ‘how to find the best Swift coders’. This could be a great way to attract middle of funnel customers.

Using Survey Tools to Simply Ask Customers What Resources to Create

I want to mention another simple way of getting continuous feedback on customer pain points and content ideas: ask your readers what else they want to read on your blog.

We recently installed this poll on our homepage:

Response rates are low right now, but we’ve begun receiving responses:

There are other ways that we’re hoping to increase responses. In particular we’re keen on these two ideas:

1. We can trigger a question like this when a reader reaches the end of a post (and they are very engaged, as opposed to on our homepage).
2. We can ask topic specific questions to get more ideas and insights into readers’ pain points on specific posts, such as hiring writers, conversions, user research, etc.

We’ll be testing these methods soon.

Advantages of using instant, on-site, page specific surveys

Above we covered the tactics of what questions you can ask where for different business types. Now, let’s step back and understand, from a strategy perspective, the advantages of on-site surveys.

Instant responses are more detailed responses

For ecommerce companies with many products (like apparel), it’s very hard to get product specific feedback like the first use case over email. We were asking the size question at the exact moment the customers had the frustration.

Ask them a week later over email? They may not remember exactly what product details were frustrating them. They may have looked at 10 products on your site then another 10 on your competitor’s site. Information can get muddled and you lose the insight.

Stops you from jumping to conclusions

Let’s just put this out there: we marketers are experts at jumping to conclusions.

The last half decade of “growth” and “lean startup” trends help push us towards this:

“Iterate quickly!”

“Fail fast!”

“High throughput growth experiments!”

Look, there is a lot of value in this philosophy, and by and large, I agree with it. But like anything, the devil is in the details.

In this case, not understanding why an idea “failed” is the devil.

And this “why” is very often qualitative, not quantitative. That is, you need your customer to talk about their reasoning, not just look at some analytics numbers yourself.

In the swimsuits example above, a rash decision would be to pull a new product from the store because it wasn’t selling well. But you wouldn’t even know that a simple thing like a few size combinations could be the difference between low selling and high selling.

(To be fair to the lean startup movement, they emphasize this customer feedback step extensively. But most people just don’t do it.)

Your Turn: Prep Your Own On Site Polls

We want to help you take action on this, even if it’s a tiny step. So we’ve prepared this action item. It doesn’t take long and like you saw above, the results can be transformative:

Stop for 5 minutes and brainstorm two things that could pay big dividends for your company’s site-based lead generation.

1. First, what are the three most high impact or high traffic pages on your site?
2. Second, think of 5 questions for each page that, if you got the answers to, could help validate, invalidate, or totally change assumptions you are making on that page about what your users want.
3. Finally, pick one question to start with for each page.

The resulting list is your initial on-site customer feedback survey plan. (Think of how impactful getting all 15 questions answered would be.)

Or, take the very first step right now by mentioning in the comment what the #1 most critical conversion page (or page category) on your site is — this is the page where insights from on site polls would be most useful. Is it your homepage? Product page? Signup page? Pricing page?

Want us to write an in depth case study or story like this about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

What brings higher ROI for companies, nurturing leads through an email list or going for direct conversions?

Let me explain.

Some people think it’s more effective to ask readers to join an email list first, then nurture these “email leads” by dripping content to them. Once the lead has been properly nurtured, the company will finally get the prospect to convert into a “real lead” by taking the first step in becoming a customer: start a trial, request a demo, buy some products (ecommerce), talk to a sales rep (B2B sales).

Others think it’s best to go directly for the sale and skip the email list nurturing altogether.

In this article, we’re going to answer the question “Which strategy is better: Lead nurturing or direct conversions?” with simple arithmetic.

We’ll walk through some typical conversion funnels for a few common business types, run through some example conversion rates, and see why, for most businesses, getting blog readers to directly start the purchase process makes more sense from a conversion perspective than having blog readers first join an email list.

Let’s get started.

The Funnel Options: Email List Nurturing vs. Direct Conversions

To anchor this discussion, let’s create a hypothetical SaaS company: account.ly, that makes small business accounting software (like Quickbooks or Xero).

Note: I love making fun of the fact that every other startup these days ends with .ly. Runner up was accountant.io. If you have other ideas for cliche startup names, please let me know in comments, it’ll make my day.

Let’s say account.ly has built a blog for small businesses owners as part of their demand generation efforts. In it, they discuss financial tips, accounting tips, and other useful strategies for small businesses (their target audience).

After some hard work doing user research to understand their audience, coming up with a unique angle to content strategy based on what they know about their customers, then promoting their content well, they start to get some good traffic to their blog: 30,000 unique visitors a month.

How can account.ly most efficiently turn blog readers into paying users for their software platform?

Strategy 1: Join Email List, Nurture to a Lead. Ask blog readers to join an email list; send drip emails to nurture these “leads”.

Joining your email list can happen in a few different ways. We’ve talked about content upgrades inside individual blog posts before, there are also popups and other forms, as well as the traditional (some say, outdated) method of offering a whitepaper or ebook.

Then, eventually, after these email subscribers are warmed up, the company will pitch them their product or service a few times, and some fraction of their email list will convert into a fully grown up, grade A, full-fledged, lead. Again, a lead being defined as: someone who has expressed interest in your product or service.

In the case of account.ly, a SaaS company, that means they sign up for a free trial of the software. (In the case of agencies or B2B services businesses, that usually means they sign up to talk to a sales rep.)

Strategy 2: Direct to Trial. Ask blog readers to start their trial directly from the blog.

This is more straightforward. In this option, the reader is simply asked to signup to become a lead directly (that means starting a trial, talking a salesperson, or somehow being asked to express interest in the product).

How to Decide Which Conversion Strategy Is Best for Your Business

Deciding which lead generation strategy is better for your company is a matter of measuring and multiplying the conversion rate percentages in the two strategies presented above.

Here’s the key difference.

Note that Strategy 1, “Lead Nurturing”, has two conversion rate percentages:

1. Percent that join the email list
2. Percent that become leads from the email list.

But, Strategy 2, “Direct Conversion”, has only one conversion rate percentage.

Deciding which is the most efficient conversion strategy for you is simply a matter of measuring these conversion rates and multiplying them. (Note, we’ve created a simple spreadsheet to do this. You can get it free, here.)

Example Conversion Rates for a SaaS Company

Here are example numbers for our hypothetical accounting SaaS company: account.ly.

I’ve put in example numbers that I think are typical based on my experience optimizing conversion rates for clients via my agency.

The three key inputs are lines 4, 5, and 7.

Line 4: Email Conversion Rate

This is your conversion rate from reader to email subscriber. It varies wildly from blog to blog, and in our experience is a heavy function of content quality and email optin tactics.

I put in 3% because it’s achievable for most good blogs with 5 figures in traffic a month in unique visitors. That should be your benchmark for email conversion rates for 5 figure traffic blogs.

For example, here are our conversion rates to email in the last 30 days for our top 10 landing pages:

Most posts convert higher than 3%, with the highest at 12% (that’s this post on getting traffic from Medium, in case you want to dissect why), and we achieve an average of 4.6% across all of them.

In my experience, if a blog exceeds 100,000 uniques a month, then it becomes hard to crack 2% in conversion rate to email. I’ve had clients that have done it, but they are special cases and most blogs can’t do that.

If you’ve been measuring this number via GA or another tool, put that into line 4 of the conversion calculator. If you haven’t, look up how many email subscribers you got in the last 30 days from your company blog, then divide this number by your unique visitors (users) in the last 30 days on your company blog, that’s your blog-reader to email-subscriber conversion rate.

Note: We’ll release another post soon on how to measure these conversion rates via Google Analytics. If you are on our email list, you’ll get it first. If not, you can join for free here and you’ll also get the spreadsheet that we’re talking about in this article.

Line 5: Direct to Lead Conversion Rate

This is the conversion rate from blog readers to actual leads.

I’ve defined what an actual lead is above, but in short it’s the first step in the funnel to buying your product or service. In the case of account.ly, it’s starting a free trial.

I know, most companies at this point want to know “What is a typical conversion rate?”. Sadly, this is even more tough to give a sweeping generality.

Remember though:

• We’re not talking about conversion rates from a landing page.
• We’re not talking about conversion rate from your homepage.
• We’re talking about conversion rates from content (i.e., blog posts).

I’ve seen single SaaS blog articles convert from just above zero to 5%+ to a free trial. So, I think for an entire blog, half a percent is average/achievable when traffic is in the 5-figure uniques per month range. (As usual, as traffic increases, expect for there to be a decrease in conversion rates.)

So, for the sake of the calculation below, we’ll use 0.5% as the direct to lead conversion rate because it should be very achievable for most businesses.

Note: If your business is B2B Enterprise, an agency, a subscription service, or even e-commerce, your conversion rate on this step may vary wildly. You have to measure.

If you don’t have any idea what your direct to lead conversion rate is, you can simply put in an initial guess and flip the use of this calculation around and ask:

“What would my direct conversion rate have to be in order to beat the email lead nurturing strategy?”

Line 7: Email to Lead Conversion Rate

Finally, the 3rd key input is the percentage of email subscribers you can convert into leads per month. This is arguably the hardest to measure because most companies don’t have clarity on whether an email subscriber is also a product/service lead (e.g. has started a trial or talked to a sales rep) due to improper reporting in their analytics and CRM.

For example, most companies don’t know if the prospect became a lead first or an email subscriber first. (So, how can you figure out if the nurture emails are converting email subscribers into leads if you’re not sure if they were already leads when they subscribed or not?)

The majority of companies in our beta Customers from Content Program told us the leads that convert from their email list were near zero. Most could not recall the last time they got a paying customer from their email list.

So, I’m being (rather) generous here and saying 8% of account.ly email subscribers will eventually start a trial. (We’ll discuss some more scenarios for this number below).

Compare Rates to Decide The Optimal Conversion Strategy

After you’ve input the above 3 conversion rates into the model, simply multiply the blog-to-email (Line 4) and email-to-lead (Line 7) rates and compare it to your direct conversion rate (Line 5).

Our little conversion calculator does this for you on Line 10:

So in the case of our hypothetical SaaS startup, account.ly, even though they can capture email opt-ins at 600% the rate that they get direct leads (3% vs. 0.5%), it makes more sense to get direct leads.

In our experience, these numbers are extremely typical.

Note: If you skipped down to this section and are wondering where 3%, 5% and 8% came from, scroll up to the Example Conversion Rates for a SaaS Company section.

Although the vast majority of companies can capture email subscribers far more efficiently than leads for their product or service, when you factor in the difficulty of converting potential prospects twice — once to email subscriber, then from email subscriber to lead — the direct conversion route typically wins.

Let’s explore a few more “typical” scenarios.

Other Common Conversion Scenarios For Businesses

Scenario 1: “No one from our email list becomes an actual lead”

Like I briefly mentioned above, not getting an email subscriber to convert to a customer for your business, is extremely common. For many businesses, it’s really hard to convert email subscribers, who joined to consume content, to actual leads for their business.

We see this with development agencies, enterprise software companies that have a high touch B2B sales process, and more.

There are many factors involved, but typically this due to:

• An undeveloped drip email strategy (Having literally zero strategy.)

• Infrequent emailing (“We email once a month.”)

• The best customers self-selecting to fill out a lead form instead of join an email list.

In this case, the email-to-lead conversion rate (Line 7) is nearly zero, so it doesn’t matter how many emails you collect (Line 4), they’ll never become customers.

For example, here’s a typical case:

This may look like an exaggeration, but this is extremely typical for many businesses. 900 email subscribers a month but only 1.8 leads from the email list a month on average.

If this example relates to your business, you should think very carefully before investing in expensive “marketing automation” software that promote dripping emails to “nurture leads”.

Focusing instead on careful user research, and writing bottom of the funnel content, and converting them directly into leads will likely let you enjoy much higher conversion rates.

Scenario 2: A very high direct to lead conversion rate

Another common scenario, seen often in B2C companies is a high direct to lead conversion rate. Apps like Buffer would likely fall into this category. If it’s trivial for users to sign up for your service (for example with Buffer, you just login with Twitter and schedule a few tweets, not a huge ask), then just asking them to sign up will be hard to beat by a two step email nurturing process.

Here’s what that could look like:

If you can collect a ton of leads or signups directly off of blog posts, it just doesn’t make sense to waste your time with email.

I’ve picked Buffer as an example not just because it’s an easy ask to ask someone to join their email list, but they actually switched their blog CTAs from email signups to Buffer app signups a while back and Kevan Lee wrote a great extensive post about it.

Some things in his post stand out to me:

What do you do with the list?

They are transparent about the fact that they had no idea what to do with emails once they collected them. I love this. Kevan even coins (I believe he coined it) the term “zero sell” to describe how they were neither hard selling nor soft selling to their email list. Amusing. Indeed it’s tough to get signups when you don’t ask for them.

Who is on the list?

He has an interesting discussion on email list segmentation, where he talks about the difficulty of not knowing who on your email list is already a customer, as I alluded to above.

Conversion Rates!

Most importantly, he (in typical transparent Buffer fashion) reveals their conversion rates, and we learn that reader to blog is 2.81%, and reader to Buffer app signup is 2.27%.

Now, I don’t know the details of those numbers and whether they are measuring conversion rates from the same sources/traffic/pages.

But, if they are, it’s a no brainer to go straight to Buffer signups. We can use our conversion calculator to see how high the email to Buffer app signups would need to be for this 2.81% vs. 2.27% difference to tilt the scales in favor of collecting emails first.

Their email “nurturing” would need to convert 81% of email subscribers in to app signups to beat the 2.27% direct to signup rate they have now!

That’s not easy. I want to say impossible, but I won’t say it, because who knows. But a trying to get 80% of your email list to open your emails is next to impossible…forget about getting that many to sign up for your app.

Exception: Blog and launch based businesses

Finally, if you’re a “blogger” or have a “launch” based businesses that is driven off of your email list, then congrats for making it this far, because this article didn’t really apply to you. For these businesses, there is no direct conversion, customers can only purchase via select product launches that have set open and close dates and are promoted through the email list. For such businesses, of course it makes sense to build an email list first. Grow and Convert is one example.

More Complex Models

Finally, I’d like to note that, yes, there are far more complexities that one could model than what we’ve done in this article. I’m fully aware that our little calculator is just multiplying a few numbers.

The reason we’ve belabored this multiplication, however, is to outline the concept.

In our experience working with multiple companies building content marketing engines that produces customers reliably, we’ve found that analytics and measuring conversion rates effectively were huge pain points.

Marketer after marketer had little clarity on this.

So walking through a simple calculation like this in a methodical way helps marketers understand this concept.

Two additional complexities that have not been modeled in this article include:

• What happens when there are calls to action for both joining your email list and signing up for your product? Our current spreadsheet doesn’t account for “and”, it just shows you “or”.

• What if free to paid conversion rates differ between the two strategies? The model currently doesn’t delve into how email lead nurturing could affect how many trials or leads convert into paying customers.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into questions like these, or others, you can do a few things.

First, you can get a link to our spreadsheet by joining our email list (or if you’re already on it, just re-enter your email), fill it in and reply to the email with your question and we’ll do our best to discuss your specific scenario as time allows.

Second, 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 About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about 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.

Today we’re profiling a fitness site that grew traffic and subscribers with Facebook Ads that made them money.

We’re going to see how Erika of Erika Volk Fitness added 1,892 email subscribers and got 11,850 unique visitors in one month with a Facebook ad campaign that hasn’t cost her a dime. In fact, she’s come out of the campaign ROI positive.

The best part is, Erika did this:

• without any prior Facebook ad knowledge (this was her very first campaign)
• without a massive budget (she started with $20/day)
• without a massive Facebook following (her Facebook page had 551 likes).

Because this is paid advertising driven customer acquisition, these aren’t one off numbers, they’re rates. Until she exhausts her target audience on Facebook, she can continue serving up ads and keep getting results like this month after month.

In true Grow and Convert style, we’re going to walk through exactly what she did, step by step, sharing every single detail and screenshot Erika was willing to share with us.

Let’s start by looking at her results in more detail.

Erika’s Results: 1,892 Email Subscribers and 11,850 Pageviews While Making Money on Facebook Ads

We’ll learn more about Erika and uncover the details of how this campaign was executed shortly, but first let’s see what kind of results Erika Volk Fitness (EVF) got with their Facebook campaign.

Over almost 2 months running the ad EVF received 11,850 unique visitors to their landing page.

Erika didn’t put her Google Analytics snippet onto her Leadpage but to put that in perspective, her main site received 6,484 users in that same time frame

So, that’s a 82% more targeted visitors being exposed to her brand from this campaign.

And did they take action? Yes, 1,892 of them signed up for her email list, for a conversion rate of 16%.

This skyrocketed her email list growth starting in January, when she pushed start on the ads. Here’s a plot of new email subscribers added each month:

For any small business, a step change in an important metric like that (email subscribers in this case) is transformative.

So how much did this traffic and subscribers cost EVF? $492

For 1892 subscribers, that comes out to an unbelievable $0.26 per subscriber.

For anyone who has used Facebook ads to collect leads before, they know this is a low number. (For example, compare this with the 43 cents per subscriber that this marketer got.) Below is more discussion as to why this could be.

But here’s the kicker: These email subscribers were sent through an autoresponder sequence where they could buy one of two full exercise programs.

And some bought almost immediately. To date, Erika has sold $632 of ebooks, enough to pay for the ads, and then some.

So that’s 82% extra traffic per month and 1892 leads into the top of her funnel that cost a net -$140.

And, like I mentioned before, the best part of this is that this isn’t a “one off” campaign. Erika Volk Fitness can continue running these ads for a long time (we’ll look at how long it would take to exhaust their target demographic on Facebook below).

So it’s a steady, predictable, and insanely affordable source of customer acquisition.

Now let’s dive into the meaty details, and start by learning more about Erika and her business.

Let’s meet Erika, owner of Erika Volk Fitness, and Learn Why She Turned to Facebook Ads for More Predictable Growth

Erika runs ErikaVolkFitness.com, a site that helps women with PCOS fight the symptoms, lose weight, and become healthier.

If you don’t know what PCOS is, just know it throws women’s hormones out of balance, so they gain a ton of weight, have a lot of trouble losing it, can often have trouble getting pregnant, get diabetes and heart problems.

In other words, it’s crippling. And the weight gain is a foundational part of the problem.

Erika beat PCOS with an exercise routine she crafted and honed over years, to a point where when she goes to the doctor now, her hormone profile almost show no signs of symptoms.

Her transformation is inspiring:

Those photos are impressive for anyone trying to lose weight, but even more impressive when you know she was fighting a hormone altering disease along the way.

Beating PCOS for a woman with the disease is, no exaggeration, life changing.

And that’s what her company, Erika Volk Fitness, is aiming to do: help women beat PCOS just like Erika did:

Revenue comes from ebooks, coaching, and (soon) a monthly membership program.

Quite frankly, Erika has a business that many entrepreneurs we’ve talked to aspire to have: make money and genuinely help people at the same time.

Although she spent 1.5  years growing her blog to 6000 monthly uniques and 3596 email subscribers, she wanted a more predictable, steady way to target her ideal customers (women with PCOS) and get them onto her email list (the online channel with the highest engagement, by far).

So, after being inspired by Videofruit’sFacebook Ad Experiment, she decided to give Facebook ads a shot.

The first step, of course, was laying out the funnel.

The Facebook Funnel For Capturing Leads

This was her funnel:

(1) Facebook ad promoting an email course; (2) Linked to a LeadPages landing page; (3) Opting in triggers an 8 email series delivering the material; (4) Occasional upsells during the course for premium workout routines and plans.

We’ll dive into the details of each step and show the creative and the numbers of each step.

Step 1: Facebook Ads

Facebook Ad Creative

This was the Facebook ad creative:

She made the image with Canva for $1.

As a peak into ad performance, which we will discuss shortly, you can see the kind of engagement this ad has received: 566 reactions, 59 comments, and a whopping 219 shares.

The shares are particularly powerful, because every time someone shares your promoted post, it’s exposed to their friends for free. That is, views and clicks on the shared post by the sharer’s friends cost nothing to you.

Facebook Ad Targeting and Budget

She set the ad to display on:

• Desktop news feed
• Desktop right column
• Mobile news feed
• Audience network.

She didn’t include Instagram.

Targeting is critical to her performance. She targeted women ages 24 – 54 with interest in PCOS in a few countries.

(We’re blurring out her interest categories because she’s worked hard refining that list.)

Her daily budget is $20 per day.

All of this gives her a estimated reach of 730,000, which Facebook characterizes as “fairly broad”.

This is interesting to note: the raw number of people in her “Potential Reach” is pretty large from a Facebook ad campaign perspective.

But qualitatively, we know that what she is promoting is highly specific to one of the biggest “pain points” of their lives: PCOS. Keep this in mind in the next section.

Now let’s look at the good stuff.

Facebook Ad Performance

Here are the overall campaign stats from January 17th to March 13th:

Note that a “conversion” in this case is just a click to the landing page. The ad pixel was not placed on the Thank You page, so Facebook isn’t tracking conversions from landing page to opt-in. (We are using LeadPages’ stats for that.)

The most notable stat is the insanely low cost per conversion (cost per visitor to her landing page): 6 cents!

Obviously, this is a critical component of what made this entire campaign ROI positive. The mysteries of the Facebook algorithms aren’t totally clear to anyone, but you’ll get low cost per click (CPC) if:

1. There isn’t a lot of competition from other advertisers to show ads to your target audience
2. Your ad gets a high click through rates (CTRs); showing Facebook that  the audience likes it.

Facebook doesn’t publish average CTR stats, but various private companies do analyses and a quick survey of a European study of 3 million Facebook ad impressions showed an average newsfeed CTR of around 2%

and Quora answers by various professional Facebook advertisers suggests that newsfeed CTRs range from 1% – 3% between desktop and mobile newsfeeds, and anything above a 2.5% CTR is “rocking it.”

Erika’s campaign is averaging 6.37% CTR on clicks anywhere on the ad and 3.84% on the link to her landing page:

So by all accounts those CTRs are incredible. In other words, she found “ad-market-fit”: her target audience loves her ads. Like I mentioned above, the fact that she’s targeting women with a specific disease and offering a solution to that pain is, I’m sure, critical to this high CTR and low cost per click.

Another metric to mention is reach. A key benefit to uncovering a profitable paid advertising funnel is the ability to keep it running all the time, so your customer acquisition is on autopilot. Of course, anyone who has run ads knows this is not really true. You have to keep monitoring performance as it degrades over time.

Why?

In this case, mostly because of ad fatigue. If you show the same ad to the same people over and over, eventually they stop clicking or engaging with it. Not surprising. You can look for this by observing when your CTR starts dipping and your CPC starts rising. Or in general by looking at frequency: on average how often the ad has been shown to the same person.

Perry Marshall, in his book Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising has this table of Facebook ad fatigue rules based on frequency:

• 0 to 3: Very Low Risk
• 3 – 6: Low Risk
• 6 – 9: Moderate Risk
• 9 – 12: High Risk
• 12+: Very High Risk

Erika’s ads, so far, are at a frequency of 2.27 and she’s reached 96,000 of her total audience of 700,000, so she still hasn’t come close to exhausting her audience with this ad. Great news.

So in summary, she’s had over 8,165 people click over to her landing page (depending on who you ask, more on that below) at around $0.06 per click, for a total spend for January to march of $492.01.

The ads have shown to only 14% of her target audience of 700,000. And been shown an average of 2.3 times for each person.

Now let’s see how her funnel has performed once people reach her landing page.

Step 2: Landing Page to Collect Leads

People who clicked on the Facebook ad were taken to this page:

This was made from a LeadPages template and took Erika about 30 minutes.

It’s pretty simple, but qualitatively, it has a few things going for it.

First, it has one (and only one) CTA. Some people send PPC ads to home pages or product pages with a full navbar and a bunch of choices. Erika didn’t make that mistake and sent them to a simple Landing page with only one choice: optin or not.

Second, it has message and design consistency with the Facebook ad. This is a topic all its own and you can read a nice article from ConversionXL about it. Erika has done this well. The visual of the woman working out is the same and the title is (almost) the same.

Third, it has some social proof. Although the testimonials just have first names so it’s unclear how legitimate they are, they are natural, not over the top, and most importantly, they exist.

Quantitatively the LeadPage has been converting at 16%:

That said, I typically see landing pages with simple asks (name, email) convert between 10 – 20%. With 10% being way more common (I can’t think of any 20%+ PPC landing pages I’ve seen off the top of my head).

Finally, recently I tried to create a Facebook to email funnel for a real estate agent and got 40 views on the page without a single optin, and I immediately shut it off. Even if the next click would have converted 1 email out of 41 clicks (2.4%) was way too low for it to work for us financially. Maybe for your business, that’s acceptable.

Landing Page vs. Facebook Ad Stat Differences

Notice that Leadpages says it got 11,850 unique visitors above. If you scroll up you’ll see Facebook says she got 8,395 clicks.

We’re not entirely sure why this is. Surely it’s in Facebook’s financial interest to make sure it counts every last click on the ads since it charges by the click (or in CPM, it wants advertisers to feel like they’re getting as low of a CPC as possible).

Our best guess is that this has to do with the 220 shares of her post that she received:

Once a post is shared, it’s on the sharer’s timeline and further clicks on it aren’t charged to Erika, so she gets those clicks for free (of course, she was charged for the click to share it).

Step 3: The Email Funnel

This step is pretty simple, she simply created the email course that she promised and made sure it was good.

She sent users through an 5 – 8 email autoresponder (she kept experimenting with longer and longer series and has currently settled at 8).

She created these Mailchimp, and they took time. She started from a series she had been using for over a year and she estimates she put in 2 solid days, or 15 additional hours in turning it into this.

But this step should take time, this is where value is being given to your subscribers. If you plan on building enough trust to eventually make an ask, you have to make sure what you’ve given is damn good.

Here’s an excerpt from one of her emails, so you can see the level of detail:

If you’re thinking “Well this doesn’t look extravagant…” Remember this isn’t an email from Old Navy. It’s not meant to razzle dazzle the customer with photos.

Her entire brand is based on a 1-on-1 relationship between her and the reader. So emails are conversational, mostly text, and most important of all actionable. Above she doesn’t just say “HIIT is great, go do it. Here’s a Wikipedia link.” She give them an exact 5 step routine.

The #1 “leadgen” goal in her business is for a lead to take her advice before purchasing anything and see results, so emails like this help tremendously.

Speaking of purchases…now for the fun part, recovering the ad spend by selling product immediately.

Step 4: The paid offers to recover ad cost

Here is how the Facebook ad campaign was (less than) free.

In emails 1, 4 and 6, of her eight email autoresponder, she mentions to the reader that she has some premium workout plans already made and points them to the link. She does it in a non-pushy way and doesn’t really “sell” it until email 6, after they’ve received nearly a week’s worth of value.

Let’s look more closely.

Email 1 – is a welcome email that gets sent immediately after opting in. She shows people her transformation, gets them pumped about the course and says the first lesson will come tomorrow.

But there are always some customers who, after they opt in or take any action with a company (purchase, etc.) are on a high and want more. She gives them a chance to do that here:

The video introduces her “Just Start” Workout program, which is a downloadable PDF and costs only $15.

Email 2 – 3 deliver straight value like I showed you above. They make no ask and the customer doesn’t hear about the premium workouts at all. These two emails cover the foundation of her PCOS workout strategy: strength conditioning and cardio.

Email 4 discusses active rest, and how you should orchestrate the week and fit in the workouts outlined in emails 2 and 3. So continuing on that theme, at the bottom of the email, Erika once again gently mentions that she has workouts that “put it all together”:

Email 5 ads more value with a discussion on belly fat – a key pain point of the customer.

Email 6 is the first “hard sell” email. At this point the customer has received almost a week’s worth of lessons with someone finally speaking to them about beating the disease that is affecting their entire life and that they think about every day.

Email 7 then talks about willpower and reminds them of the guide in the PS and Email 8 closes the course.

Overall she has sold $632 dollars of workout programs from the Facebook campaign, $140 more than the $492 she spent while collecting around 2000 email subscribers and over 11,000 unique visitors to her site.

Could this apply to your business?

While working on this case study, I’ve thought a lot about how it may or may not apply to other businesses.

Here is a framework I’ve come up with:

(1) Importance of Lead Collection – Erika Volk Fitness, as a business, has a funnel that relies on building trust by sending a lot of content to the leads and occasionally pitching a product, so lead collection is very important. If on the other hand you’re selling low priced ecommerce goods that are flippant decisions and email subscribers are difficult to monetize, maybe it’s less important.

(2) Cash Flow Restriction – If preserving cash (on the order of what you’d spend on FB ads) isn’t important, than covering your ad spend with a small sale upfront is irrelevant. You might as well just run ads, collect leads, and just minimize your cost per acquisition (CPA) without worrying about making instant sales. But for startups or early bootstrapped businesses, where cash flow is important, this can be a lot more effective.

So for example, if you’re selling a product or service to SMBs that (1) requires nurturing leads and (2) you’re bootstrapping the business, it could be great for acquiring early clients if you found a small product to offer in your nurture sequence that covered ad expense.

On the other hand if you’ve just raised VC money and or you’re rather profitable, it doesn’t matter if you recover the ad spend immediately because you can take the cash hit while you spend time turning the leads into full blown customers.

Here’s a schematic to help visualize what I’m talking about:

Erika Volk Fitness is a bootstrapped business, so that negative cash flow to acquire customers is very real and covering that in near realtime with early sales helps a lot while she nurtures these leads until she launches major products. No, she’s not going to starve without that $492, that’s not the point. It’s knowing that she can cover FB ad costs if she scales this operation that is a big deal.

For businesses with lots of cash or profitability

The cost to acquire a customer isn’t a big deal if you’ve been given a chunk of VC money or are already profitable. You just funnel that cash or profits into that cost and have plenty of cash left over to keep the lights on as you work your way up that blue curve to profitability.

For businesses with similar smaller priced items (e.g. ecommerce)

Lastly, for businesses that don’t have a “major” product that requires nurturing, this also may not apply. For example, if you’re selling menswear from your newly minted ecommerce store, the shirts and jeans are your final products. There isn’t some “major” sale that you’re waiting to make after you nurture the lead (e.g. a large B2B service contract). In this case you may learn that just sending ad traffic to a category page makes more money in the short and long term versus capturing their email first and nurturing them.

That said, if you’re finding it hard to run ads profitably, but you know that email list subscribers are worth a lot in lifetime value, consider running ads to get people on an email list and offer a tiny upsell for an inexpensive but popular item just to cover the cost of the ad spend.

Questions on whether this applies to you? Ask away in the comments.

———-

Special thanks to William Harris, Growth Marketer at Elumynt.com and Facebook ads afficianado for reviewing this article.

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