While you can invest time – or money – into strategic SEO to improve your visibility online, there are a few more things to consider when attempting to sell your offers. Outside of ensuring you’re targeting the right audience with your content and keywords, the structure, setup, and even the way you market can affect your conversion rate. Sadly, high-traffic websites that can’t convert don’t create the profitable business we need.
How do you improve your blog conversions? Improving your blog conversions rely on your ability to prepare your content in the most optimal and effective way – including the ability to easily see/access your offers, capture leads, and provide a simple way to navigate your website.
Many businesses who invest or start a blog to improve their SEO typically focus on the content – which is great – but neglect smooth integration and publish content for content’s sake.
Sure, the CTA at the end of your blog post can help convert your site visitors to clients – but how many others are landing on your page and leaving after they’ve read your post? Here are my top tips to improve your blog conversions:
Tip #1: Add Blog Banners or Personal Business Ads
Whether you’re offering your signature service or promoting your digital products, create and use blog banners! I recommend having two different styles, a thicker, bolder style, and a sleek, smaller style. Personally, I create mine in Canva with these two sizes:
- 1,800 x 600 pixels
- 1,200 x 600 pixels
Any size is good as long as it is aligned with your content, offer, and branding. Here are a few examples from popular sites:
As you can see, each site’s banners are different. While there is no “wrong” way to style a blog banner per se, the only thing you need to consider is the same SEO best practices that apply to images apply to blog banners created in this way.
This means making sure you’re utilizing image titles and alt. Descriptions along with ensuring your image are high quality and easily readable by your audience.
Tip #2: Identify Your Promotional Objectives Before Writing
While this tip is not easily integrated into previously written blog content, it can be added to any content you write in the future. When I work with clients, we identify the offers that we want to promote and focus on one main offer per blog post – although that doesn’t mean that a second one is not mentioned. Typically, this allows you to craft content that allows your offer to become the solution or at least one of the solutions for the problem.
For example, for this blog post my main offer – or solution – is to invest in SEO Support, a signature offer that audits your site and creates solutions for backend, frontend, and even content problems to help your site start ranking on Google. It fits because the SEO Support service would handle all six of these tips for you – and use them in your SEO and marketing efforts.
The offer you pick could be your lead magnet, masterclass, digital product, service, or even an affiliate product.
RELATED POST: How to Write an SEO-Friendly Blog Post
Tip #3: Add a Sidebar
The sidebar – the tool that bloggers use for easy navigation, marketing, and a quick introduction for visitors to their site that come straight to their blog without passing through “home.”
Sidebars are for all blog writers, not just lifestyle and DIY bloggers. Adding a sidebar is the difference between a visitor simply reading your blog post and actually learning something about your brand.
There is no specific way to style your sidebar, you can choose whatever feels best for you and your audience. Here are a few examples of sidebars that help improve your blog conversions:
Sidebars are easy to utilize to gain new leads, keep new visitors on-site by utilizing recent posts or categories, and introduce yourself through a short bio and quick picture. If you’re not a service provider that shows their face, adding your logo to the top of your sidebar increases brand awareness and trust as they associate your brand with your content.
Tip #4: Check Your Site Speed and Mobility
Site speed and mobility are often neglected when you’re thinking about how SEO-friendly your blog is – it seems like something that should naturally be handled by your website. And, if your designer or template came with a blog, you don’t need to worry. But, if you decided to DIY a blog yourself, there’s a chance that your blog is not properly optimized – in a technical sense, not necessarily content-wise – for SEO.
Luckily, Google offers a free tool to utilize to test your page speeds. You should also be able to check your mobility or mobile site issues in your Google Analytics dashboard.
Tip #5. Structure Your Blog Post for Easy Readability and Navigation
It’s so easy to write when you’re feeling inspired or write like you’re giving tips to your best friend – which you can still do when you structure your blog post.
Structuring your blog post includes using clear headers, sub headers, paragraphs, text size, image size, and spacing… it’s a lot. But, it all comes together in a way that allows your audience to easily read and navigate your blog post.
They’ll be able to quickly identify the information they’re looking for along with noticing your tips right away – without the explanation which they may not have time for at the moment.
Structuring your content also gives Google a chance to recognize what topics you cover and what information you provide. This is a great way to showcase the keywords you want to rank for, in a natural manner, and help Google push you towards that spot on the first page.
RELATED POST: How to Optimize Blog Images for SEO
Tip #6: Check Your Content for Broken Links
It happens to the best of us – broken links. Dead links, links that go nowhere, links that take us to the 404 page of your website. It’s a reality that all business owners have to face, broken links are just a part of existing on the web.
Broken links happen for a few reasons, sometimes it’s because the page no longer exists, you’ve altered the URL, you mistyped when writing your blog post, or maybe you even moved your website over and the link broke in the process.
It’s important to go back and check your posts for these broken links – a visitor cannot sign up for your service if, according to the link, it doesn’t exist.
I recommended self-auditing your website every three months, but lightly. Comb through your recent blog posts, check your links, and ensure everything is functioning smoothly. You should do a more thorough check at six months and a full site and blog audit every year – although every six months would help, it’s just not always financially possible.
How to Improve Your Blog Conversion Rate as a Service Provider
Outside of the tips mentioned above, improving your blog conversion rate takes a thorough understanding of your audience.
Ensure that you have a clear idea of who your ideal client is and how your service can help them, or, if it’s a digital product, ensure that the product is aligned with the content of your post – it wouldn’t make sense to offer your Pinterest Marketing services if you’re talking about how great Instagram is.
Blogs are amazing ways to grow online. They can work to improve your website’s SEO performance, attract new customers and clients, and generate new leads. But, when you’re putting time and effort into something that’s not converting to sales (or leads), it’s time to step back and evaluate. Try the easy tips mentioned above to improve your blog conversions and grow your business.
