Your business blog is one of the most valuable tools you have for improving brand reach and attracting potential opportunities for conversion. However, it’s not enough to simply create content and wait for your business to grow. The best marketing campaigns involve carefully considering the needs and interest of your target audience and figuring out what you can do to boost your relationship with possible customers.
For many companies, the path to bigger sales and a better brand reputation starts with Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a complex marketing solution that involves optimizing various parts of your website and your content strategy to appeal to both the search algorithms and your customers at the same time. One of the most important things you can optimize for in today’s marketplace is the right intent. Here’s your guide to optimizing your blog for transactional intent.
Appealing to the Right Intent
There are many different kinds of intent involved in a standard customer journey. Knowing how to optimize certain parts of your website, or different aspects of your blog strategy to suit certain kinds of intent is absolutely crucial. The more you know about your customers and how they interact with your brand when they have certain purposes in mind, the better your optimization efforts will become. Get your plan for intent right, and you can hurdle bigger competitors, and outshine other companies in your industry in no time.
Optimizing Your Blog for Transactions
The intent is one of the main things that the current search engine algorithms consider when determining where to place your blogs in the search engine results pages. To properly understand how to place your blogs in the results, the search engines try to understand what your customers are looking for, and what kind of purpose your content serves.
If you’re trying to optimize for transactional intent, then you aim to connect with customers who are actually looking to engage in a transaction. Keep in mind that a transaction doesn’t have to be financial in nature, you can also transact with a customer who offers their email address in exchange for a free download or signs up to your newsletter.
The key to optimizing your business blog for this kind of intent is to show your audience how they can convert, and what they’ll get in return for their action. For instance, your blog would usually include a clear call to action, where you can direct the customer to the next stage in their purchasing journey. The call-to-action should be clear and eye-catching, and ideally, it will stand out for the rest of the page.
Optimizing for transaction also means that you take your time to carefully highlight the values and benefits of a transaction for the customer. Everything from the design of the page, to the copy you use, should be targeted towards pushing your customers in a certain direction. Using copy that includes keywords optimized for transactions can help too, such as “get your free” or “sign up to”.
