Blogging remains a powerful tool for businesses, but for 2025, the challenge isn't just driving traffic—it's converting that traffic into tangible results. Too many companies celebrate high blog traffic but fail to turn visitors into leads or customers. Here's how to rethink your blogging strategy to maximize conversions while keeping your audience engaged.
The Common Challenge: Traffic Without Conversions
Traffic is a great metric, but as Khalil, founder of Kanbar Digital, puts it:
"Traffic isn’t your wallet. It doesn’t drive the conversions you need to make blogging sustainable."
The key lies in optimizing your blogs to guide users along the buyer’s journey from awareness to action. This requires aligning blog goals with specific funnel stages and designing content to meet those goals.
Step 1: Audit Your Blog Content
The first step Khalil outlines for improving conversions is conducting a content audit. Use tools like Excel to map out metrics such as:
- Blog traffic
- Conversion rates
- Keywords rankings
- Backlinks
Identify blogs with high traffic but low conversions as key candidates for improvement. For example:
"If you have high traffic but low conversions, those are blogs that you need to improve."
Additionally, consider redirecting or combining similar blogs to consolidate traffic and optimize for conversions. Seasonal blogs that are no longer relevant? Remove them to streamline your strategy.
Before you remove old content, it’s important to know what Google says about this practice. Some experts believe that deleting content keeps a site fresh, but Google says it doesn’t matter. These pages may still combine valuable information that could be helpful to users.
Google Search Liasion Danny Sullivan posted in August 2023 stating that Google’s guidance doesn’t encourage deleting old posts because “Google doesn’t like old content.”
Does this mean you should never delete old content? No! Google’s John Mueller says,
“Delete what you don't want to keep - regular maintenance and cleaning up is always good. Just don't assume that deleting something only because it's old will improve your site's SEO magically.”
Before deleting outdated content, we recommend evaluating it to determine if it still offers valuable information to users. If it does, consider updating the article to reflect current trends or linking to the old blog post within a newer article.
Step 2: Map Content to the Buyer’s Journey
A successful blog strategy considers the four stages of the buyer’s journey: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.
- Awareness Stage: Focus on educational, non-sales content that introduces key topics. Khalil states that these blogs set the buyer’s journey, helping them understand your brand and answering common questions.
- Interest Stage: Compare solutions, showcase pros and cons, and highlight your offerings as valuable. Khalil advises using blog content to build curiosity and drive users deeper into the funnel.
- Desire Stage: Build trust with real-life examples or success stories. Khalil states this is not an SEO-friendly blog; it’s about connecting emotionally with your audience.
- Action Stage: Seal the deal with concise, conversion-focused content.
At Page One Power, we call these types of content top, middle, and bottom-funnel content. Each content stage has different goals and, therefore, distinct characteristics.
Top-funnel content is used to reach a large audience and address broad topics regarding your product or services. Since it encompasses a larger target audience, this type of content is also typically used to gain backlinks to your site. Top-funnel content normally has no advertorial language and reaches readers who are initially introduced to your company and want to learn more.
Mid-funnel content typically focuses on a narrower subject matter, such as comparing products or the pros and cons of a service. People who read this content generally are in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey and need more information before they make a final purchase.
Bottom-funnel content is created for people who are ready to make a purchase. This type of content could be a landing page, a homepage, or a service page. They cater to a smaller, more qualified audience and typically have various calls to action to sign up, talk to a salesperson, or buy.
Each type of content has its place on your website to help turn your site visitors into customers.
Step 3: Set Micro and Macro Goals
To track success, define micro-conversions (small steps toward engagement) and macro-conversions (end goals like purchases or form submissions). Examples include:
- Micro: Social shares, newsletter signups, product clicks.
- Macro: Purchases, appointments, or demo requests.
Khalil states:
"Designate which blog tracks which KPI, or you risk ruining a blog’s effectiveness by optimizing for the wrong metric."
We like to think of blog content as a long-term solution. Often, people view blog posts singularly instead of considering how they fit into the larger website framework. A topic you may not think is valuable in its own right may, in fact, support your larger SEO strategy.
Step 4: Optimize Blog Layout for Conversions
A well-structured blog guides users seamlessly through the funnel. Key elements include:
- Captivating Introductions: Highlight estimated reading time and key takeaways upfront.
- Visual Breaks: Use imagery, videos, or interactive elements to re-engage readers.
- Early CTAs: Place calls-to-action (CTAs) early throughout the blog, not just at the end.
Khalil states:
"Most blogs place CTAs at the end, but less than 30% of users get that far. Hit them early."
While CTA’s closer to the top may be seen by readers, SEOS must prioritize the reader’s page experience before sales. Google implemented the page experience update in 2020, which includes a range of metrics to evaluate a user’s experience of a page.
One of the questions Google provides to help SEOs determine their page’s experience is: Do pages lack intrusive interstitials? Intrusive interstitials obstruct a user’s view of the content (think a pop-up ad or sign-up form). These elements make it hard for Google and users to understand your content and make your site hard to use.
We are not against CTAs but believe they have a certain place on your website.
Let’s take an example. Say you want to learn how to improve your website speed for better SEO. You click on a blog that promises to give you tips, but before you can read the first paragraph, you are hit with a CTA to sign up for an SEO audit.
You don’t know this company and they haven’t built trust with you yet. You’re just looking for high-level information. The CTA feels pushy and unrelated to the blog.
Khalil states:
“[The main points are] making sure that we understand what our blogs are trying to convey to the user and use that information to put the call to actions there.”
Before you add a CTA to your blog post, it’s important to ask, “Does this make sense here?” If it’s top-funnel content, maybe not, unless it’s a CTA that guides the user to more top-funnel information.
Conclusion: Transform Traffic Into Results
To convert blog traffic, Khalil states that SEOs need to rethink their strategy to focus on the buyer’s journey. Implement actionable goals that let you understand how your blog is performing, and create clear CTAs that help guide the reader through the buyer’s journey.
Khalil’s advice in a nutshell:
"Audit your blog calendar, align content with user intent, and focus on driving conversions at every stage."
Our advice? We agree, but integrate the user’s intent at every stage to ensure an optimal user experience.
