How to Optimize Your Blog for Conversions and Generate More Leads?

Maintaining a blog is a great way to rank for more keywords and generate quality organic traffic to your website. Knowing how to optimize your blog for conversions will help you turn that traffic into leads for your business.

By creating quality content focused around a single selling point supported by a call to action can boost the number of conversions your generate from your blog. Focus on adding value to your readers and keep their attention to increase your conversion rate.

In this blog post, we will talk about how you can generate traffic and hold you visitors attention before you convert them into clients. The upcoming content is packed with all the information you need to optimize your blog for conversions.

1. Attract Relevant Traffic 

If you sell android apps, you don’t want Apple aficionados to visit your blog. They are not the right audience, you won’t make a single sale, even if you get a million blog visits.

It may sound obvious, but a lot of bloggers ignore this simple fact. They write tons of articles, not keeping their target audience in mind and wonder why they have such high bounce rates.

One of the best ways to generate relevant traffic is to speak to a specific few, instead of yelling out to a crowd. You need to niche down your audience, for every single blog post.

For example, If you blog about Android Apps, your post on dating apps will have a far different crowd than you post on time-management apps. Even though the generic audience can be categorized as Android app enthusiasts, the specific audience can be subcategorized into smaller segments.

Write content for those smaller segments. When you fine-tune your content to be more specific, you get a high-quality audience that converts better.

To get relevant traffic, you must do a thorough keyword research that aligns with the search intent and then place keywords strategically in your blog posts to enhance search engine visibility.

2. Align your Content with Search Intent

Bloggers emphasize so much on keyword optimization, but it’s alarming how often they ignore the search intent of information seekers.

Going back to the example of Android apps, the search query – Do dating apps work? – indicates that the searcher is in an information seeking stage. They want to figure out if they should even download dating  apps. However, another query – Best dating apps – signals that the searcher wants to download an app, and is looking for the best fit.

Both the above search queries are related to Android dating apps, but their search intent is so different! Are you catering to the search intent of your target audience? If not, you have to start doing that. Otherwise, even if you win traffic, your bounce rate will shoot up and the average time on page will drop drastically.

There is no tool to align content with search intent but this tip may help:

When you write blog posts, ask this one question – Will the reader think: “This! This is exactly what I was looking for?”

Edit your content till the answer is yes, of course.

The better you meet the search intent, the more time visitors spend on your blog, and convert at a higher rate.

3. Optimize your Page Speed

By now, you nailed keyword optimization and aligned your blogs with search intent. As a result, you rank for quality keywords and your click through rate (CTR) is off the charts!

But all is not right, you still have low monthly traffic. What happened?

People are clicking on your search engine listing, but your blog loads so slow that they leave before visiting it. If this happens too often, search engines will sniff your slow pages and drop their rankings.

Imagine putting so much effort in crafting top quality content that gets tons of clicks, but barely any visits, only because your website is slow! You can avoid this mess by optimizing your page load speed.

It sure is a time consuming campaign, but worth the effort.

A slow website will bounce your traffic back to search engines and negatively impact your blog conversion rate.

4. Delight your Visitors Before Converting Them

No one likes to be sold to. People want to believe that they made a conscious, well-informed choice that justifies their spending and lessens buyer’s remorse. This was true a century back when options were few, and it’s true today when people are spoilt for choice.

If your blog posts do not delight your visitors, you can’t sell them anything, not even free resources.

Think about it, when was the last time you purchased anything from a website on the first visit. Probably never! That’s because the website has not provided any value that justifies your spending. Your new visitors hold the same belief.

You have to provide them top quality content that addresses their pain points. They should be able to implement your suggestion and see real results for you to win their trust and business.

The way to that is writing how-to articles that give away quality information for free. Effectively, it’s not free because you are selling your value proposition, which may or may not convert into monetary benefits.

Kill them with value. For every money post you write, make sure you craft at least three informative posts.

It’s worth noting that money posts rarely ever rank on Google because they don’t solve a problem. What does rank are your How-to articles because that’s what people search for.

It’s worth mentioning that a sales pitch or a direct link to your sales pages from your blog post is never a good idea. You can link to those pages in your header menu. People will click on it when they are ready.

If at all, gently nudge them to check-out your money pages, but don’t do it too often. 

5. Use Visual Content to Engage your Readers

Text can get highly monotonous, especially on smaller devices like mobile phones. It’s not easy to scroll and get a bird’s eye view of the blog on a mobile device. Once people get bored, they bounce. 

One good way to break the monotony of text is to use images, videos, gifs, etc, in your blog posts.

Visual media gives a gentle nudge to visitors to keep reading your content.

This reduces your bounce rate and maximizes the time people spend on your domain. Embedding a video into your blog can do wonders to your average time on page metric.

Remember, the more time people spend on your page, the more ready they are to purchase. Plus, search engines get the signal that you offer top quality content, so you rank up and get even more organic traffic.

6. Check Where your Readers Lose Interest

There are many distractions in today’s world. What was the last time you read a 3000-word blog post in one go? 

Reader attention is a precious asset that must be tracked.

They are looking for every chance to stop reading your content and start scrolling through their Facebook feed.

You can’t stop that, but you sure can give them an incentive to keep reading when they lose interest. For that, you need to check how far, on an average, people scroll. And, where on the blog do they click. You can do that by setting up heatmaps.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how heatmaps can help you optimize your blog for conversions.

Heatmaps can give key insights into user behaviour. They help you determine if important sections of your blog posts, like CTAs and forms, get maximum visibility.

For example, if people bounce after reading 1500 words out of 3000 words, you can consider adding visual media there or giving them an option to download the blog as PDF to read later. This way, you can use it as a lead magnet and build your email subscriber list.

7. Improve Content Quality

Do you write every sentence that seamlessly segues into the next? Each paragraph tells a story that forms the narrative of your blog post? If you do, you are on track.

Even business articles need a narrative that holds the copy together. Everyone likes a story over slabs of text with nothing binding them.

You must write content that holds readers captive to improve visitor engagement on your blogs.

You need not be a poet, but if you are a storyteller, you will have more conversions because people invest more time enjoying your content.

Here is a helpful resource on best practices for content writing that will enhance your blog from meh to a WOW!

8. Divert Blog Traffic to your Money Pages

Unless you are blogging for passion, you will have something to sell. It could be your services, products, affiliate products, etc. You probably have some landing pages where you sell them.

These pages where you convert your visitors into paying clients are called money pages. They can be your contact pages, demo pages, affiliate income focussed blog posts, etc.

Your Money pages might be well optimized for conversions, but if no one visits them, they are practically worthless.

And since you already drive relevant blog traffic from your blog, you want to send it to your money pages. Adding internal links is a good way to do that.

When your blog readers, already impressed by the value you offer, notice a contextual link, they are highly motivated to click on it.

But, there’s a caveat, you should not add internal links randomly, they should be relevant and contextual to the landing page. For example, if you want to divert traffic to your affiliate blog post on best running shoes, add internal links to it from informative posts on shoes, not from other product categories posts.

This way, the visitors will be more motivated to make a purchase.

9. Go for Subscription Over sales

Did you know that people take 4 visits on an average before buying something? This means, 

If you focus on getting repeat visitors to your website, you increase the chances of conversion. 

Probably the way to get repeat visitors is email marketing. Every week, you can send them your newsletter to attract them back to your website. The first step to that is getting their email IDs through a subscription form.

Remember, the probability of conversion is very low at the first visit, even if you are an established website. People like to take time before spending money and putting their trust in you. So, don’t go for the kill upfront, don’t push your sales pitch or sales CTA. 

Rather, focus on getting subscriptions to your blog, getting their contact information, and sending one-off sales emails amid tons of useful newsletter that cost them nothing.

In short, win the battles before you win the war.

10. Use Lead Magnets

Subscription forms are a good way to collect contact information but it relies heavily on visitor engagement. For example, a reader usually reads multiple blog posts before they find value and subscribe to your newsletter.

But there’s a way to speed up this process. 

What if you offer a useful resource in return for contact information? 

That’s what lead magnets do.

Put yourself in the shoes of your readers. They have a compelling reason to be on your blog, a pain point that keeps them up at night. What if you offer them a step-by-step guide that is packed with information? They just need to download and implement it to see positive results. They will be happy to share their email details.

Gate your lead magnets behind an attractive CTA and collect emails. Each submission is a potential lead for your business.

11. Make your CTAs Stand Out

CTAs and Subscription forms are the means to generate leads. They should not hide in plain sight. A lot of bloggers make the mistake of keeping the design of CTAs consistent with the blog design.

Using the same colors for your CTA might be aesthetically pleasing, but functionally catastrophic. If you want to stick to the same design, consider adding animation to your CTA boxes. Essentially, you want them to attract readers attention.

Alternatively, you can add a GIF to your CTA as a moving object on a stationary screen stands out. You can also add a CTA button in the header menu to give it more exposure.

The more your CTAs stand out, the more leads and conversions you generate.

12. Engage with your audience

Throughout this blog post, we have talked about the importance of getting your visitors to engage with your content. But what happens when people engage? They ask questions, and get disappointed when they don’t get answers.

Make sure you enable comments on your blog and respond to user comments. 

Make them feel valued and appreciated for writing to you. 

When you engage with your visitors, you create human interactions. They don’t want to talk to a website or a chatbot, they want to talk to you, another human being. That’s what forges relationships that lead to conversions.

It’s surprising how so many bloggers see email as an outbound marketing channel, they send automated emails asking the recipients not to reply! Whereas, email marketing offers a great source of inbound traffic too.

Imagine if someone has a pressing concern that your blog post could not answer. They write to you seeking more information not expecting a response. But if you do reply, you get a long-term fan and potential business.

13. Backlinking for referral traffic

Till now, we have discussed only organic traffic as it forms the biggest chunk of website visitors for most blogs. But referral traffic has potential to generate quality inbound traffic.

When a reputed blog links to you, the readers and subscribers trust the link and visit your website. 

You can then nurture them with more valuable content and eventually send them to your sales funnel.

There are many ways to build backlinks, here’s how you build backlinks naturally, without outreach.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we covered 13 ways to optimize your blog for conversion. We covered in detail how to attract relevant traffic to your website, how to keep visitors engaged, and motivate them to subscribe to your newsletter.

Which tip did you like the most?