In managing SEO, you have to think more than just about getting great rankings for targeted keywords and scalable traffic. You should to expense some time and energy into optimizing your SEO funnel, from when the visitor clicks your link in the SERPs and comes on over to your highly ranked blog posts because rankings and traffic mean nothing without conversions and sales.
Here are 4 ways to optimize your funnel for when people come through the search engines and stumble upon your blog posts
1. Add Email Captures at the end of blog posts
After you’ve given them some free value, which comes from your awesome blog posts, you can create an email capture box and offer your visitor some more value in exchange for their email, whether it be a whitepaper, case study, or even a discount on your product since you’ll have had a warm lead that appreciated the value you offered them first, which was your informative blog post, and they would be more likely to bite if the offer is relevant to what they searched for and what they’re hoping to get.
2. Plugging Ads to specific products your business offers in your sidebar
This won’t seem too spammy, considering you would be placing ads to your own site rather than other products sold by third parties, and a little self-promotion doesn’t hurt anyone. So, when people clickthrough from the SERPs to your blog post, they’ll see the nice ads in the sidebar for products related to the blog post they’re about to read, which is related to their original search query.
3. Strategic Internal Linking within your posts
This is a less obvious method of funneling them through to what your business offers, because you can be sneaky and insert links readers will want to click within your posts, which will lead them to product pages or email capture pages so they can either explore your products and purchase, or so they can give up their personal information in exchange for some more free value.
4. Having an in-frame Pop-Up Offer in exchange for emails
This is a bit different from just adding email captures since it’s a far bolder move that might be seen as a bit invasive and forward, but it works really well when you have incredibly compelling offers like steep discounts on product, free things, or the promise of tremendous value in some other form.
With these different methods, you can ensure you’re capturing more leads and are converting more sales, rather than having visitors read your blog posts, think, “I learned a lot just now,” and exiting out and moving on with their lives since you didn’t funnel them to share their email or make a purchase.
Does anyone else have recommendations for ways to optimize the long-tail SEO funnel?
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
4 Ways to Optimize the SEO Funnel for your Long Tail Keywords
