Content Performance: 4 Ways to Optimize Content That Converts

Picture this: You have spent several months creating valuable content that can make waves in your industry. You have optimized the tags, added keywords and images, and have taken care of on-page SEO. But your content isn’t performing. 

You’re now in a fix. So, you turn to Google to figure out why your content isn’t performing. You are getting tons of results—some advise you to change your content, others to make it more engaging. 

Consequently, you’re stressed as you’ve spent days and nights creating the content.

But, you don’t have to. 

While creating engaging content is essential, the conversion is the metrics we must track. To ensure that your content converts, we need to keep a few points in mind. What are they? Let’s checkout! 

1. Use Keywords Based on the Target Audience’s Search Intent

The flip side to content is intent. You can’t write about oranges if your audience wants apples.

Having said that, you need to find keywords that your audience is searching for. You can use different keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to analyze the gaps and fill them with your content. As you’ll research, you’ll realize that there are four different search intent of your potential customers:

• Informational: to gain knowledge about something. For example:- How to purchase a laptop?

• Navigational: to search a specific company or website. They don’t have an intention to buy yet. They want to navigate the website to find out more about the products.
  For example, a nearby store with the name Madina has many electronics. You wish to check its timings. So your navigational intent would b to click on the website to check the timings.

• Investigational: to search more about the company\store. The customers do so to gauge whether buying from the store be a good option? For example, will purchase the laptop from “Madina” would be useful? What do others say about the stores?

• Transactional: to have the intention of buying. By now, searchers have made their mind to buy. Thus, they search with specific long-tail keywords to attain highly relevant results. For example:- MacBook Pro-13-inch silver color. 

You need to understand that every potential customer has a different search intent. Therefore, you need to optimize your content accordingly—target keywords based on the actions you want your audience to take. For example, if you wish to generate social proof, focus on investigational intent as it’ll give them in-depth information about your business. 

Hence, target the right keywords in your content to invoke the right search intent of your customers.

2. Create Click-Worthy Headlines

According to David Ogilvy,” On average, 5x as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

What is the first thing a person looks at when he lands on your blog or landing page? The headline.  If you’re able to garner your potential customer’s attention through your headline, they will likely read your content.

To write a click-worthy headline, you can use Tweak Your Biz’s Title generator or Portent’s Title Maker.

You can also use CoSchedule’s Headline Analyser to gauge the word balance, emotional quotient, and skimmability. 

To write click-worthy headlines, 

• Focus on what readers need – What do you want to offer to your readers? Will the information you’re sharing making your reader’s life any better? Ensure your headline focuses on your reader’s pain points. This way, you’ll instantly grab their attention.

• Be counter-intuitive—According to Blogtyrant, about 4000 blogs are going live every minute. How would you ensure your headlines are seen in such a saturated content world, let alone read?
  
  Well, you can make it possible by using a counter-intuitive approach. Write your headline in such a manner that it brings a new flavor to the old mundane information. This will make your headline and content look fresh and establish you as a thought leader.

3. Improve the Flow of Your Writing 

After creating click-worthy headlines, you must set the right hook to enable your readers to read your content till the end. But, how would you do that? By setting a writing flow. 

Based on the niche and type of audience you cater to, create a flow of your writing. For example, you have a startup related blog, and your audience is CTOs and CXOs. Thus, your writing has to be actionable, direct, and straightforward. 

Many content creators dig their own grave by making the following mistakes: 

• Writing long sentences: A long sentence is hard to read and harder to understand.

• Writing long paragraphs: Long paragraphs psychologically push away the reader from your content piece. It makes the content difficult to read.

• Writing bland content: If we detest bland food, why will we read bland content?

• Writing ramble content: Rambling is confusing the audience with your content. It simply shows you have not put in efforts to write content and want your reader to do the hardwork of reading and understanding your content. 

Avoid these mistakes and improve the flow of your content by doing the following:-

• Clear your objective in the introduction itself. It’ll help set the right expectation for your reader.
• Create an outline of your content. Jot down all the points you want to include in your article and decide a flow, i.e., what piece of information would come in the beginning, middle and end. This will hook the readers till the end of the article and entice them to take the action you want.
• Write from a value addition perspective. Showcase the value you’d be bringing up right from the beginning. If your readers don’t understand why they are reading the blog in the first 2-3 paragraphs, they would immediately bounce back from the article.
• If you write fluff or beat around the bush, you’re simply wasting their time. Therefore, give them ample reasons to read your blog right from the introduction. Explain to them about the topic and why they should read. Include stats, charts, and data to back up your point and GIFs, images, and videos to make it look exciting and presentable. 

Always keep in mind that your primary intention is to grab your potential customer’s attention. So, write in a way that suffices your objective.

4. Create an Enticing CTA

According to HubSpot, CTAs garner about 47% to 93% of leads from the posts where they are added.

Hence, keep CTAs at different positions of the blog, not just in the end.
Here’s a great example from Uplers. They put a CTA at every section of the website.

A highly compelling CTA invokes the audience to take some action. Hence, create one using strong action words like download, click, read, read, etc. 

Final Words 

Writing and optimizing content that converts results from many pieces put together. Right from using relevant keywords to optimizing headlines and from writing valuable content to adding alluring CTAs, you need to take care of everything. 

Once you have perfected all the pieces, nothing can hold back your content to perform like crazy. Follow the tips mentioned above to perfectly optimize your content.