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7 Tools to Optimize Your Old Content for New Conversions

Is getting clicks your ultimate marketing goal?

Of course not, you want your site users to perform an action instead of just landing and moving on.

When it comes to informational content marketing, converting readers is not that easy. Site visitors came for answers, found them, and don’t have a point to stick around any longer.

An article doing well in terms of attracting (organic) traffic may still fail to make any difference to the business’s bottom line. In other words, you see clicks but few-to-no conversions (opt-ins, clicks-through to your product page, etc.) from your content.

When it comes to informational #contentmarketing, converting readers is not that easy, says @seosmarty. #SEO Click To Tweet

What can be done?

I recently wrote on how to boost organic rankings of your old content. But how do you also improve its conversions? Consider this process and these tools.

1. Set up conversion monitoring

Monitor your on-page clicks and interactions to understand your page visitors. How well you understand your site visitors determines your conversion optimization success. You need to know what they are looking for to serve them better.

How well you understand site visitors determines your conversion optimization success, says @seosmarty. Click To Tweet

Finteza is a free web analytics platform that makes conversion monitoring easy. You don’t have to set up complicated on-click events to track your on-page clicks. You can simply use URL attributes that carry the names of your events:

TIP: Don’t forget to name your events to easily identify them in the Finteza dashboard.

Once you create your events, you can build and save funnels to see how the traffic flows through your page and moves on to where you want it to:

2. Optimize in-content calls to action

The best way to increase conversions from within your content is to integrate calls to action into the article. In other words, don’t let CTAs interrupt your visitors’ reading. Your in-content CTAs should hook your page users by providing solutions and promising answers.

The best way to increase conversions from w/ in your #content is to integrate CTAs into the article. @seosmarty Click To Tweet

HubSpot does a great job blending CTAs into tightly related content. For example, an article on writing professional bios has an opt-in form promoting a downloadable list of bio examples as well as an in-content widget allowing readers to generate a bio template:

TextOptimizer is an intent optimization platform that can be of great help here. It has a separate section for “action words” to help you craft more actionable content.

TextOptimizer extracts action-oriented, monetizable concepts to help you create content that leads into action.

.@TextOptimizer extracts action-oriented, monetizable concepts for content that leads to action. @seosmarty Click To Tweet

This example of action words would work well if you were to write about essay writing:

Here are more generic words that can work well for in-content CTAs:

 

3. Look at your organic competitors

Often, simply scrolling through your competitors’ sites can be quite enlightening:

  • What are they doing to engage their visitors?
  • Are they implementing something ingenious or creative?
  • How are they prompting their visitors to pause and hang around? (This is a hard thing as web users are often accessing your site while in the middle of a task, from a mobile device or a smart speaker assistant.)
  • How do they structure their web pages to make them more readable as well as to pursue more ranking opportunities?
See what your successful #content competitors are doing to convert visitors, says @seosmarty. Click To Tweet

To better identify your organic competitors, use Serpstats’ Top Pages report: Type in your most important keyword and the tool will find URLs that rank for the most closely related queries:

Click to enlarge

Click on your most successful competitors to analyze how they are engaging their readers.

4. Come up with more ways to engage your users

People are increasingly wary of giving away their private information (including their email address). It takes more than an opt-in form or a free download to get them to leave some traces of their presence on your site.

Vimeo is a great example of successful user engagement. Instead of simply promoting its Vimeo On Demand product, it created an interactive widget allowing visitors to calculate how much more money they can make with their current YouTube views using Vimeo:

Luckily, there are various alternative solutions to engagement with which you can experiment. Here are a few creative ways to engage your site visitors without outright selling:

Intelligent chatbots

Artificial intelligence is quickly changing on-page interactions, helping you reach your site users at the moment they may need help and even assist them with finding solutions to their problems. There’s no need to hire a developer to create an intelligent chatbot for your website.

Using solutions like Botsociety or MobileMonkey, you can create a chatbot with easy visual interface programming and give smart answers to various customer questions. Let an intelligent chatbot direct your readers down your conversion funnel while providing answers to their problem in real time.

Speaker message

Would you like to hear more from your site visitors? Giving them an alternative way to get in touch may encourage them. Ever since I allowed visitors to leave me audio messages, many of them speak their messages to me “just out of curiosity,” but in most cases, those were qualified leads.

Somehow the ability to leave audio messages turns out to pre-qualify leads too.

SpeakPipe is the free service I use to add an alternative audio-message option to my contact details. You can play around with it and even turn it into an in-content gamification method, e.g., “Record your question here and win a prize.

Surveys

Surveys are usually used to get to know your customers better, but did you know you can use them as lead generation tools? If you create a survey that closely relates to the article, you can generate great leads from that content. Somehow surveys appear to engage more people than lead magnets.

Surveys appear to engage more people than lead magnets, says @seosmarty. Click To Tweet

A few years ago, we did an article on the history of Google’s Penguin updates and asked our readers whether they ever saw an impact from any of them (and what they expected from future updates). We put together the responses in a white paper and sent it to all survey takers. We earned quite a few solid leads from that survey and created a solid linkable asset (which helped in the long run).

Pointerpro has a bunch of lead generation survey templates to help with inspiration, but it all comes down to what your content is about and what your hook is.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Make the call for conversions

Auditing your old content involves more than monitoring your rankings. It requires analyzing traffic and conversion optimization over and over.

Working on existing content lets you work with your data – something your competitors don’t have – so you have a competitive advantage. Always keep improving your content and keep coming up with more and more ways to generate more conversions from it.

What if your existing content marketing program could convert into bigger and better results? Make plans to learn and connect for bigger success at Content Marketing World Sept. 3-6. Register today using code CMIBLOG100 to save $100. 

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used). 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute