It happens too frequently for some businesses: you spend part of your day writing up a massive, well-researched blog post that you are certain is going to get you leads. You’ve attached your UTMs to your outbound links, have plenty of internal links, and you’re even going to have a friend backlink to it on his own blog once the post goes up.
Cut to a week later and you’re in Google Analytics scratching your head, because the bounce rate is over 80%, and the other 20% leave through one of your outbounds and don’t come back.
Don’t let your hard work go to waste. Here are five reasons why your blog post might not be converting like you think it should.
You’re not giving your readers what they want
You might have found a great title or attention-grabbing image for your blog, but your traffic might not be impressed with what you give them in return for their click. If your title is “How to Double Site Traffic By The Weekend,” and you say in your final paragraph that there’s no surefire way to increase traffic, your readers are going to just leave.
Your readers probably weren’t expecting a passcode to plug into Google Analytics to double their traffic, but they were at least looking for helpful advice.
Alternatively, if your title is, “The Best Trick To Boosting Your Site’s Ranking,” your readers are probably interested in learning something new about SEO. They probably won’t be pleased to find out you cleverly titled a 1200 word sales pitch for your agency.
You should certainly pitch your agency within your own content. But if you’re really concerned about conversions, you have to offer something up front. Deceiving them is not going to get a boatload of leads. Giving your visitors the content they came for is going to facilitate conversions far better.
Set up reasonable expectations for your readers, and you’ll be surprised how well honest content converts.
You’re asking for too much commitment
Are you reading this sentence? If so, you’re unlike most readers on the Internet. There are a variety of reading patterns when it comes to web articles, and none of them consist of reading every single word.
More often than not, your readers are probably skipping between your headers and reading the first sentence of your paragraphs. On average, they’ll only read 20% of the article.
The best conversions are those who are the busiest, and they won’t necessarily drop what they’re doing to read every word of your blog.
Your blog should be easy to read and skip through, and your content should be broken up into bite-sized chunks. Having paragraphs that extend an entire screen’s length on mobile – or worse, an entire screen’s worth on desktop – is a recipe for disaster. Good content or not, few will spend time with your content if they have to trudge through it.
Make sure your paragraphs are small and that you break up your content with plenty of images and subheadings.
You’re not trying to convert anyone
In contrast to the first point, you need to make sure your users have crumbs to follow if you want them to stay on your site. You can have fantastic content that a reader finds useful, and they might even share it on social media or link back to it in a blog post of their own.
But what are you doing to keep them on your site or to convert that session?
Having a call-to-action isn’t a bad thing. They make it easy for users to know where to go if they want to read more about a subject or to get in touch with you. They also help guide a user’s session and get them further down the funnel.
Putting a CTA at the end of your blog is usually a good idea, but consider putting a small, nonintrusive banner at the top of the content as well. Having a CTA button in your header also makes it easy for your users to find out where to go if they want to learn more.
For your readers that aren’t really at that stage, having internal links to related content help keep your readers from scrolling back up to check out that one case study you mentioned from Sumo, or jumping to the address bar to check out what another blog had to say on that topic. Link to other, related posts on your site towards the end of an article to help retain that traffic.
Making the most of your business’s blog
Writing a weekly blog shouldn’t be a one-dimensional process. It’s not just about being a good writer. To truly get the most out of your blog, you need to look at your site’s analytics and develop a content plan. You also need to know how to direct different social channels to view your articles in the first place. Learn more about driving traffic to your blog, or how to integrate your weekly content with your SEO strategy.
