So you invested hundreds and perhaps even thousands of dollars on SEO. Your blog is attracting traffic like public transit during rush hour. Your traffic stats are high, and so is the bounce rate. Apparently, people who visit are not hanging around to read your posts, subscribe or follow. Essentially, despite the traffic, your conversion rate is embarrassingly low.
The cold hard truth is that spending money solely on generating web traffic does not automatically convert into readers and ad revenue. You must also invest in techniques to drive conversion. A good majority of the time, blog owners only need to avoid making the following mistakes:
1. Your Blog Doesn’t Have a Compelling Headline
The traffic that comes to your site is redirected from places like search engines that often offer web users some options. Therefore, your blog must be capable of grabbing the attention of a potential reader immediately with the headline, subheading, and titles of posts. The subtitle that appears below the name of your blog should be able to communicate your unique selling proposition in a handful of words.
Recommended Reading: You Should Test That: Conversion Optimization for More Leads, Sales and Profit or The Art and Science of Optimized Marketing
If the titles shown on your blog are not that impressive, visitors will simply leave. Think about what makes your blog stand out from the rest. That will be your unique selling proposition. Then spend some time crafting a headline and a subheading that can immediately hook potential readers.
2. Your Blog’s Theme is Not Optimized to Improve User Experience
Are you using a design theme that’s outdated, cluttered or laid out for your convenience rather than a reader's? If so, that is a major reason why your conversation rate sucks. The theme of your page should be easy to navigate. Don’t make it so that users have to scroll down forever to find the information they need.
Find a stylish theme that is clean, visually appealing and is easy to navigate. Components like subscription forms or follow buttons should be very easy to find. It is also important to make it easy for potential readers to browse your blog posts without a hassle.
3. Your Blog Takes Forever to Load
Have you ever counted the seconds it takes for your blog to load? You really should because your conversion rate could suffer if your blog takes longer than 2 seconds to load. Each second that adds to the blog loading time takes a significant percentage off the conversion rate.
Your blog could load slowly because you have cluttered it with bulky and unnecessary plugins and widgets. Also, if you do not compress your images, that will increase the loading time. Choosing a minimalist layout and compressing images before uploading will bring your blog’s loading time down to normal.
4. Your CTA Buttons are Not Convincing
You need compelling call-to-action buttons on your blog to convince visitors to become followers. If you do not keep adding followers, your blog will fade into insignificant. Therefore, you need to get to work and start designing highly convincing CTA buttons.
The CTA buttons on your blog should stand out from the rest of the content. If you give the button a bold color and leave some white space on it, visitors will immediately notice the CTA button. Then, you should have short, simple but to-the-point CTA button copy to drive conversions.
5. Your Landing Page Content is Weak
When a potential reader first lands on your long, what does he or she see? Is it a blog post you wrote five years ago that is not at all any good? The content on your blog's home page must be absorbing. A new visitor will evaluate the rest of the content by the first two or three posts he or she sees.
Your blog's life will depend on how compelling, well-written, timely and error-free the content is. So, if your conversion rate is bad, it could simply be because the stuff you post is subpar. You can quickly improve the content of your blog by committing to writing high-quality posts instead of spending all your time doing SEO.
6. You Have Never Actually Tested Your Landing Page
You will never know which changes work for your blog and which don't if you never check it! You must collect customer feedback data to improve the user experience. Otherwise, you are running a blog blindly.
Testing is the best solution to find what's ailing your blog that keeps the conversion rate so slow. There are several ways to test your blog and your landing page, including conducting surveys as mentioned above. You can also try sampling different design layouts with audiences.
7. You do not Have an Email Marketing Campaign
What does email have to do with your blog’s conversion rate? Well, a lot. Email marketing is the best way to engage with people who are already your readers. At the end of the day, these are the people who are truly driving conversions.
You must be in touch with all your readers via email. Send new post notifications and greetings whenever necessary. The point is to keep readers engaged, so they are compelled to return to your blog.
Making even one of the mistakes listed above can make your blog's conversion rate suffer. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, merely driving traffic to your blog is not enough. You need to increase the conversions to profit.