How does one write SEO friendly content that also converts?

[JohnSheppard]

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Hello there,

Today I was contemplating writing some good content. When I say good, I mean genuine, accurate non biased, informative, innocent and pure content, the stuff you would take to home to your mother.

It seems to me however that writing good content that also converts visitors into paying customers is kind of pretty hard.

For example, if I was to write a highly informative document on the health benefits green tea has over pink tea , this is unlikely to convert me any customers even if I did sell green tea.

The green tea consumer might appreciate my free info, indeed they may even think i’m a wholesome guru….but would not all the masses just read my info and run?

I would love to hear how the resident seo/copywriters guru’s achieve conversions? Or at least techniques that one might apply to corrupt my idealist content into tools for personal gain.

Thank you

[Aidan]

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Hi John,

at the risk of sounding a bit self promoting (but no I’m not selling anything) I think the missing part is often the lack of a Call To Action and as it happens wrote a long overdue post on that topic, landing pages and conversion just this evening on a personal site.

Seriously there are so many sites out there with great content but they kind of leave things hanging there without prompting the visitor as to what to do next.

Write something unique, it does not have to be Pulitzer prize material but make it informative and include the CTA!

My two cents…

Aidan

[JohnSheppard]

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Thanks Aiden,

I considered putting a call to action such as “We know green tea, check out our other products.” down the bottom and I think that’s probably the approach I will take. However…it seems to me that that is more or less a numbers game. Get lots of traffic and hope that a percentage of them really does want green tea and that they are also your ideal customer…..that’s ok, but…..

Consider this hypothetical scenario;
What if my main product was green tea and getting to the top of Google for green tea sales was a hyper-competitive area. Being a bright spark and general lover of green tea, I instead write about the process of how green tea is made and optimise my page for people to find that (because it’s less competitive). So…people arriving at that page are not really in the market for buying green tea, they just want to know how it’s made.

What can one do in that scenario to convert sales? or is writing those kinds of articles an exercise in futility? Will writing articles like this help me at all, in any way?

[Cesar]

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JohnSheppard, post: 58215 wrote:

Consider this hypothetical scenario;
What if my main product was green tea and getting to the top of Google for green tea sales was a hyper-competitive area. Being a bright spark and general lover of green tea, I instead write about the process of how green tea is made and optimise my page for people to find that (because it’s less competitive). So…people arriving at that page are not really in the market for buying green tea, they just want to know how it’s made.

Hey John,

Considering tea is classified as a health beverage, people in general would be more interested in the health benefits of green tea as opposed to how they make it. So, I’m thinking it would be more productive to pin-point the benefits of green tea and would not hurt to mention how green tea has benefited you too health wise.

Describing the aromas, colours and the taste of various green tea leaves can also do wonders to make customers buy from you.

Once they know the benefits you can then place a call-to-action phrase without sounding too pushy.

[Aidan]

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Hi John,

Those articles need not be futile at all. Sure they will attract info seekers rather than buyers but they can at least help establish you as an authority on the topic so that when those info seekers become potential buyers (i.e. some of them will likely become ‘tryers’ after the info seeking stage) you are already in mind as the green tea man!

Not to mention by having all that content on green tea on your site you should start to attract more search engine love for all things green tea.

Each article can have a CTA for those who just might try and of course each article can be the source of an internal link to your sales page or home page. You might also consider using an article or two at other sites with a link back to your site to boost external backlinks and further boost your SEO.

I too like the idea of pushing the health benefits more than the processes, it gives the articles more of a personal/emotional slant and a chance to talk about the benefits of the product. Those angles are of course more likely to trigger sales as WAHE mentioned.

[mike_allen]

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Hi John,
I think you’ve got half the answer, if you have people reading your article ,you then need to progress them in your sales pipeline. You should take the unique qualities of your product and introduce them into you article. I fact, Aidan gave a good example of that in his own response. Don’t just write, push your product as an exemplar of it’s type. Also remember that unique content is very important so make yourself a cup of green tea and start writing about it!

I like a green tea with a touch of vanilla, can you offer me something more interesting?

[JohnSheppard]

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Thanks guys, that is all logical and good advice.

So more questions My understanding is that Google more or less likes links, preferably from authority sites. If I have adulterated my content, who is going to link to my information? (other than me or someone on my payroll)

With high grade good content one presumes that Internet strangers in love with my green tea know how will do my link building for me (after some of my own initial advertisement). Of course the articles would have to be of the ultra heavy duty quality variety for them to do this (the garden variety does not inspire such behavior).

Aidan, post: 58227 wrote:

Those articles need not be futile at all. Sure they will attract info seekers rather than buyers but they can at least help establish you as an authority on the topic so that when those info seekers become potential buyers (i.e. some of them will likely become ‘tryers’ after the info seeking stage) you are already in mind as the green tea man!

Not to mention by having all that content on green tea on your site you should start to attract more search engine love for all things green tea.

This second bit I guess is what interests me the most. Putting the conversion issue aside, if I have a gazillion back links to quality information that has no intention of selling anything (hence hoping to have my back linking done for me). Can I point all that juice at my real hard core sales page, the one that talks directly to my audience (the guys with the big bucks using different key words)?….Kind of like the death star (my sales page being Alderaan)?

The intention being to catapulting my sales page to the top of google with my chosen keywords?

[The Copy Chick]

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Hi John,

I know a lot of this has been touched on already, but I’ll throw my 2c in.

Whatever your product:

• Find your USP (unique sales proposition) – what can you offer that your competitors can’t? (maybe recipes that include green tea)
• Sell the benefits – what will your customers gain from your product besides green tea? (no caffeine improves sleep, health benefits, etc).
• Back up your claims – link to research showing the antioxidants in green tea have proven health benefits.. that kind of thing
• Include a call to action – eg. buy more than [x amount] receive free delivery

Of course, you could always get a professional copywriter to write this for you, but if you’re trying to keep it cost effective, these tips should help. I’ve also written some articles here if you need some more ideas.

Cheers,
Anna

[seocourse]

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People that right Copyright are like Jedi Masters… making people buy things after reading a page is pretty amazing.

So my position is…

It is easier to put some “SEO gravy” on a good copy than to put some “great copy writing” in some SEO content .

[Aidan]

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JohnSheppard, post: 58260 wrote:

… if I have a gazillion back links to quality information that has no intention of selling anything (hence hoping to have my back linking done for me). Can I point all that juice at my real hard core sales page, the one that talks directly to my audience (the guys with the big bucks using different key words)?….Kind of like the death star (my sales page being Alderaan)?

The intention being to catapulting my sales page to the top of google with my chosen keywords?

Hi again John,

Getting all those backlinks from varied sources to several different article pages on your site will help give your site more domain authority as well as help increase your internal pageranks.

Your site as a whole gains from the first of those, in that the entire domain becomes more ‘likeable’ though this is a separate concept from that of trustrank which comes more from trusted sites (i.e WHO is linking to you).

The article pages will individually gain some pagerank from those backlinks which makes their internal links to your other pages more powerful.

So yes getting those backlinks to non selling pages is a fine idea, by all means put a CTA on each in case you catch a sale by chance but also link all those article pages to your most important page(s) using good anchor text and you will be passing the ranking juice (i.e. pagerank and anchor text) to those important pages.

You will still need good informative text and optimisation on those important pages but using your proposed article strategy will make ranking them waaay easier!

Don’t forget that just having lots of good indexable articles on a site is a good idea anyway even if you do not get all the backlinks to them – they can still draw SE traffic!

Hope that helps.

[JohnSheppard]

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seocourse, post: 58379 wrote:

It is easier to put some “SEO gravy” on a good copy than to put some “great copy writing” in some SEO content .

Sounds logical to me. I’m all for that approach.

Aidan, post: 58387 wrote:

Getting all those backlinks from varied sources to several different article pages on your site will help give your site more domain authority as well as help increase your internal pageranks.

Your site as a whole gains from the first of those, in that the entire domain becomes more ‘likeable’ though this is a separate concept from that of trustrank which comes more from trusted sites (i.e WHO is linking to you).

The article pages will individually gain some pagerank from those backlinks which makes their internal links to your other pages more powerful.

So yes getting those backlinks to non selling pages is a fine idea, by all means put a CTA on each in case you catch a sale by chance but also link all those article pages to your most important page(s) using good anchor text and you will be passing the ranking juice (i.e. pagerank and anchor text) to those important pages.

You will still need good informative text and optimisation on those important pages but using your proposed article strategy will make ranking them waaay easier!

Don’t forget that just having lots of good indexable articles on a site is a good idea anyway even if you do not get all the backlinks to them – they can still draw SE traffic!

Hope that helps.

Thanks Aiden, yes that helps a great deal. It at the minimum gives me confidence that I can write my articles and put them to use when I need to without having to overly corrupt them. (I’ll save that for my sales pages)

I don’t know if I have the talent to write articles that encourage others to link build for me, I suspect that’s a hard one. My intuition tells me that quality is far better than quantity though (if it wasn’t Google would be spitting out rubbish).

Will soon see I guess

[Author]

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