7 Steps to Write Content that Converts

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

How do you write content that is informative, entertaining, authoritative and advertises your product? All at the same time, and usually without the reader knowing they are being moved through a conversion funnel. Creating good copy can be one of the most difficult parts of a marketer’s job. Even if your content ranks well in search engines, there’s no guarantee it will convince a reader to complete a purchase, email signup, contact form or whatever conversion you measure. The good news is that we’ve come up with a 7 step process to discover what content your audience likes, what keywords they use to find that content, and how you can create your articles to encourage more sales.

Get Strategic

One of the hardest parts of writing good content is figuring out where to start. You can start by just writing, figuring out what you want to say as you go. But then how do you know if your messaging will resonate with your audience? Or if people are even looking for that sort of content to begin with? As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So, step one in writing content that converts is to plan.

1. Track the Conversation

Start by finding what people are currently sharing and linking to. People share and link to content they find useful, entertaining, informative or all three. Learning what’s currently being shared will give you insight into what resonates with your potential customers. You can use Buzzsumo or Ahrefs to search for your industry, products or topic and find pages that have been shared via social media platforms and backlinks.

Shares don’t tell the whole story, though. You also need to tune into the conversations people are having online. Twitter’s new dashboard feature, custom feeds, is a really useful tool for this. You already get notified by Twitter whenever someone mentions your Twitter @username, but you’re still missing out on the majority of the conversation. Your custom feed lets you track mentions for any words, phrases or hashtags that are relevant to your content marketing. So at WooRank, we can learn what people are saying about SEO and marketing tool needs and tailor our messaging to meet those needs.

Finally, set up a Google Alert for your company, product and/or industry. As the name suggests, Google Alerts will send you notifications with articles or pages that mention your keyword. This is also great for brand and reputation management.

2. Get In Front of Your Audience

The second part of planning your content is to make sure you’re building it around words and phrases that people are actually using to find information on your topic. That means our friend, keyword research. Start by gathering information from your Google Search Console account to find your most successful keywords — keywords that currently rank well and/or send the most clicks.

WooRank’s SERP Checker will help you determine which of your keywords get enough search volume to bother targeting. Add up to three competitors so you can find where you can beat them, and identify any gaps in their keyword strategy you can exploit.

Once you have that list, there are lots of good free tools you can use to find more ideas for keywords to target.

3. Segment Your Audience

One message is not going to be effective for all of your potential customers. You’re better off creating content that sends different messages, each aimed at a different buyer persona (also known as a marketing persona). Buyer personas are generalized, fictionalized versions of your various types of customers. They represent who’s interested in your business and the different ways they use your product.

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by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint