Website traffic is nice, but sales are better.
Are you tired of creating content that does a lot for awareness but little for conversions?
Without the right strategy, you’re leaving money on the table while your competitors are turning clicks into customers.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the best tips for creating high-converting content. Discover how to optimize your blog content for conversions, structure your strategy around data, and refine your approach for ongoing growth.
We promise you’ll leave with a few more (knowledge) bucks in your pocket to implement.
- What Is High-Converting Content and Why Is It Non-Negotiable for Growth?
- How To Create Content that Converts
- Data-Driven Strategies for SEO Conversion Content
- Optimize With Data for Ongoing Performance
- Prepare To Make Your Content Convert
What Is High-Converting Content and Why Is It Non-Negotiable for Growth?
High-converting content is content specifically engineered to move your audience to take a desired action. This means it’s designed to actively persuade, build trust, and drive conversions — whether that’s a lead submission, a purchase, or a sign-up.
Think of it as a strategic blend of persuasive writing, compelling design, and insightful marketing techniques, all designed to compel a specific response from the reader.
The true power of high-converting content lies in its ability to directly impact your business’s bottom line. It serves as a powerful tool within your overall content strategy, actively guiding potential customers through every stage of their journey — from initial awareness all the way to the decision phase.
However, while 52% of B2B marketers believe their content drives leads, only 33% think it actually drives revenue. This highlights a serious challenge: Content that doesn’t lead to revenue isn’t just underperforming, it’s a missed opportunity.
Beyond that, this type of content is essential for robust SEO. Search engines reward websites demonstrating high user engagement and strong conversion rates.
By crafting compelling, SEO conversion content, you boost your website traffic and enhance your online visibility and credibility, so your digital marketing efforts translate into tangible business success rather than wasted spend.
How To Create Content That Converts
Many businesses mess up their conversion rate simply by treating their blog like a magazine. Your blog is not a magazine, it’s meant to drive sales.
With that mindset shift in place, you’re ready to actually drive real results and conversions from content you create.
1. Make Your CTA Pop With Sticky Navigation
The careful balance we have to walk on our blog is driving sales, but not being so aggressive it makes users bounce.
A narrow, sticky navigation with a classy, contrasting call-to-action (CTA) button is a perfect balance as users can convert at any time, but don’t have the experience impact their reading. On mobile, having this be sticky but minimalistic as well is recommended.
What the CTA is depends on your business type. Often, a free trial, sale, or shop now button can be used. Definitely, this is most natural for SaaS companies who have a single action you want users to take (sign up for the tool), but can be done for e-commerce companies as well.
Pro tip: Test different color contrasts for your sticky CTA. The goal isn’t just visibility but also standing out without clashing, guiding the eye directly to the conversion point.
2. Keep Blog UX Seamless With Main Navigation
Adding to the navigation being sticky, having the blog or content section share the main navigation is important as well.
This offers users a natural shopping experience with lower friction, as compared to only being shown blog categories. Additionally, this structure offers internal linking benefit as your blog will often be your most linked to section on the site.
This will send equity flow to your most important pages, helping them rank better. So even if your blog doesn’t drive sales directly, you’ll at least have a stronger argument that it will at least do that indirectly.
Pro tip: Don’t just include main navigation; audit your top-performing blog posts to ensure they link to relevant product and service pages within that main navigation structure. Make every click count.
3. Add Classy “Shop” Buttons on Middle-Funnel Content
Some content doesn’t make sense to live on a landing page, but is close to a conversion, such as REI’s “how to buy X” pages.
In these instances, classy “shop” buttons in-content make sense. They don’t push the sales too hard, but clearly draw the attention of the reader and because of that, are more likely to draw an action.
Pro tip: Conduct A/B testing on the button’s microcopy. “Learn More” might get clicks, but “See Pricing” or “Start Your Free Trial” on middle-funnel content often drives higher quality, decision-ready traffic.
4. Feature a Mid-to-Late Post Visual CTA
It doesn’t hurt, especially if it’s contextual, to include a visual call to action for your product. In an ideal world, it’s like the shop button of REI – it makes sense and is customized for the post, but that isn’t always possible.
The above example of Gusto walks a nice balance, not being too obtrusive, but still catching your attention. Having this appear 50% or more down the page is the right balance to still try to drive users, but not cause them to bounce by making your site feel like an ad.
Pro tip: Align the visual CTA’s image or graphic directly with the benefit the user is reading about in that section of the post. Contextual relevance boosts engagement significantly.
5. Isolate Text CTAs To Boost Clicks
Sometimes, a simple text link can be wildly effective. The key is to make that text link live on an island, so it still stands out to the user.
Many users will scan posts and not pay attention to links within paragraphs, or even read paragraphs. Using a simple sentence with a text link CTA will stand out. For maximum points, include one of these at the end of every post, and 1-2 more mid-post where it makes sense.
Pro tip: Beyond isolation, experiment with font weight and subtle background shading for these text CTAs. They should feel like a natural yet pointed next step in the reader’s journey, not just another link.
Data-Driven Strategies for SEO Conversion Content
High-converting content isn’t just a matter of setting your site up for conversion success. It’s also creating content that maps to actual buyer intent.
Beginner content marketers may look at high search volume terms with starry eyes, but the reality is nine times out of ten, these terms don’t convert. You want to go in the direction of conversion, which is often low search volume.
6. Prioritize Topics With a KOB Analysis
The first consideration to make is that you should use traffic value or an equivalent metric as your primary indicator of value. These metrics look at what people are bidding on the same traffic you’re receiving from search. So if you know it’s a true competitor, and you can also rank for it, there is a strong chance of conversion.
We go further with this via our Keyword Opposition to Benefit (KOB) Analysis. View the following video for a larger breakdown of how to use this to your advantage.
Pro tip: When assessing “Benefit,” go beyond direct revenue. Consider topics that generate high-quality leads that tend to close at a higher rate, even if the direct purchase isn’t immediate. It’s about long-term customer value.
7. Build Keyword Frameworks That Drive Revenue
Although traffic value and KOB analysis are great methodologies for driving conversions, it won’t always capture buyer intent that exists with low search volume terms. This is especially the case in niche B2B verticals.
For this reason, you want to lean on tried-and-true keyword frameworks that often convert. Here are some examples that consistently drive sales, as they map to when users are late in their purchase consideration journey.
- PRODUCT cost
- PRODUCT vs. PRODUCT
- KEYWORD template
- INDUSTRY JARGON
- COMPETITOR vs. you
- COMPETITOR alternatives
- What is INDUSTRY JARGON
The data in the above screenshot is one example of these frameworks in practice. Ahrefs or Semrush didn’t register search volume, but they generated real buyer intent.
Fun fact: The content Siege Media created for the client in the screenshot above had just 286 users but generated over $195,000 in sales — just one example of the impact content can have.
Pro tip: Don’t just identify revenue-driving keywords; map them to specific stages of your sales process. This allows your content to precisely address user intent, effectively pushing readers toward conversion.
8. Start With Audience Research To Match Intent
Many marketers make the mistake of starting with keyword research tools to come up with content ideas. As the tweet above describes, this will actually lead you to some of the worst outcomes.
The reason for this is that you are using words, not consumer psychology to drive your actions. Additionally, these tools will surface the highest volume terms, and these terms are the same things everyone sees. This leads to a high likelihood that these topics will both have high competition and low conversion rate.
By putting yourself in your users shoes before resorting to a keyword research tool, you can best replicate the actual conversion path they might take.
Get to know your users with some of the following processes:
- Deeply get to know your product to understand what problems it solves.
- Access or develop buyer persona documentation.
- Listen to sales calls or demos and read email form submissions to learn how customers think and talk.
- Ask for and/or record common questions you get in the sales process.
- Use Sparktoro for introductory research. Sparktoro allows you to quickly find relevant blogs, podcasts and influencers relevant to your industry.
Pro tip: Supplement traditional audience research with direct customer interviews. Ask them how they search for solutions to the problems your product solves. Their exact language is gold for conversion-focused keywords.
Optimize With Data for Ongoing Performance
Once you have your site setup to convert blog content and are creating content you think will convert, you can now take things further and make sure your content strategy is actually delivering what you expected.
Our general recommendation is to wait six or so months before going deep on adjusting strategy. You’ll need time to see things start to rank, and also time to get statistical significance.
The following are our recommended steps to analyze your data:
9. Set Up Goals in Analytics Properly
Before analyzing data, make sure you’re tracking the right data. For blog content, it’s not always as simple as tracking direct sales. Blog content can sometimes touch users dozens of times before they convert. As content marketers, we should take credit for that.
Complex attribution modeling is outside the scope of this post, but overall we would suggest tracking secondary sales intent such as interactions with sales pages or case studies, eBook downloads and email signups.
Pro tip: Beyond primary conversions, set up micro-conversion goals (e.g., scroll depth on key pages, video plays, time on product pages). These provide early indicators of engagement that precede macro conversions.
10. Analyze Data Trends Over Time
With content, it’s hard to get to true statistical significance given variable time ranges. However, you can get close with a solid sample size, but one that isn’t too long.
We’d generally suggest trying to get to three and a half months of data. Overall, if your content is receiving over 500 visits, you should be able to get some confidence in what you’re looking at.
Pro tip: Focus not just on what’s trending up or down, but why. Cross-reference traffic shifts with recent content updates, site changes, or even external market events to identify correlations.
11. Identify High-Impact Conversion Insights
Now that you have a good sample size, you can start looking at your data. Here are some questions you’ll want to ask yourself looking at it:
- What content is converting strongly despite low views?
- Are there any themes in successful content types?
- What content *isn’t* performing well that we thought would?
- Are there similar post frameworks with significantly different conversion data?
Recording these insights can help you better create an action plan for the next step.
Pro tip: Use a segment-first approach. Instead of looking at overall conversion rates, segment data by traffic source (organic, paid, referral) or device type. You’ll often uncover hidden conversion opportunities within specific user groups.
12. Refine Content Strategy Based on Results
These insights should give you several potential adjustments to make or look further into, including but not limited to:
- What content types should we prioritize doing more or less of?
Here, we may see certain content types are really converting poorly, and doing nothing else positive for us. For this reason, we may want to put future content plans for content of this type lower in our priority list.
- Are there any pages that look off (or on) in their conversion rate?
In looking at the aggregate data, we should see clear winners and losers in conversion rate. Using this information, dig deeper to see if there is something one post is doing that the other isn’t. This will be an educated guess, but it’s possible if you port over the successful structure of one post to another, you’ll see similar results.
Additionally, if you see a page with a conversion rate better than 10%, this is actually a solid signal that the page should be a landing page, not a blog post.
Consider moving the content to a landing page experience, as the data is telling you that users *want* to convert, but you’re not giving them a high-converting experience.
- What content should we prioritize in the site architecture?
If you know some content is performing especially well from a conversion standpoint, we want to get it front of users more often. To do that consistently, we can put it higher or more consistently in the site architecture.
This allows users to see it more often, with the thought process that more views equals more conversions. Additionally, better internal linking for this content also helps it rank higher, driving more views through search.
- Does any data in the KOB Analysis need to be adjusted?
Our initial KOB analysis process is great for identifying high value topics, but at the end of the day it is still an educated guess.
We should use the data from six months of work to adjust the traffic value numbers for content we plan to create to be closer to what we think actual value will be, once we have enough sample size to be confident in those adjustments.
Pro tip: Implement a regular content audit schedule (e.g., quarterly) where you not only review existing content performance but also identify new opportunities to update, consolidate, or even sunset underperforming assets to maximize ROI.
Prepare To Make Your Content Convert
Now that you have all the best tips to make high-converting content, it’s time to implement them and see the impact.
Make the changes, track performance, and refine your strategy based on the data. When done right, these optimizations drive higher conversions, stronger engagement, and measurable growth.
But what if you don’t have time to test and refine? Or if your content still isn’t delivering the results you need? That’s when expert help makes all the difference.
Siege Media has helped brands drive revenue with content for over a decade, and we can do the same for yours.
Explore our high-converting content marketing services.
