What is a good website conversion rate? This is the million-dollar question.
Ask any marketer and they will tell you that the industry standard 2-4% site conversion rate isn’t good enough. Decreasing your bounce rate, increase the time spent on pages, and moving users into a trackable marketing funnel is the ultimate goal.
Unfortunately, many content marketers spend too much time producing, developing, and churning out content rather than focus on quality or how that content will play a role in boosting overall site conversion rates.
In this article, we will review the difference between content marketing and content strategy, what a solid content strategy looks like, and our top five favorite tools for increasing website traffic and boosting conversion rates.
Content strategy vs. content marketing: What is the difference?
Yes, there is a difference between content marketing and content strategy. The key differences between the two really come down to how outputs are measured.
Content strategy measures the number of user sessions, bounce rates, conversion rates, and overall readability scores.
Content marketing measures the number of outbound links, inbound links, domain authority, and overall market reach.
Because your content strategy ultimately measures conversion rates, we are going to look at five tools that you should consider using in your content strategy to help increase and convert website traffic.
5 tools to help convert website traffic
1. HubSpot
The first tool on the list is HubSpot, and for good reason. HubSpot offers everything that sales and marketing teams need in one, comprehensive platform. HubSpot offers both a Sales and Marketing dashboard that allows sales and marketers to track and nurture leads through the funnel, create and share content (including emails, blogs, and landing pages), build call-to-actions (CTAs), and even publish on social.
The Marketing Hub dashboard is a great tool for marketers to monitor website traffic sources, build automated workflows, send emails, and track data and analytics to help increase traffic and also measure conversion rates.
HubSpot offers a range of pricing models, beginning with the “Starter” through their “Enterprise” model. The “Starter” hubs are $50 monthly a piece, which is definitely within many startups’ and small business’ budgets. However, in order to take advantage of the full suite of useful marketing tools, users will have to pay for a somewhat costly upgrade.
2. Pardot
Pardot is another platform similar to HubSpot in terms of user interface and some functionalities, such as marketing automation and email marketing. However, Pardot, with its ownership by CRM leader, Salesforce, is more focused on providing tools related to business intelligence and sales insights, reporting, and maximizing ROI.
In terms of pricing, Pardot is a bit more expensive and is designed for more medium-sized businesses to enterprises. Therefore, it may not be the best tool for startups or small businesses that are on shoestring budgets. Furthermore, Pardot is also a tool designed for B2B marketing. So, it may not be the best option for B2C businesses.
We wanted to add this platform to our list as Pardot does offer a wide range of reporting, which is crucial for marketers who want to measure website traffic, conversion rates, and make more informed decisions based on quantitative data.
3. ClearVoice
I know… You’re on the ClearVoice blog so you may already know how awesome of a tool/platform this is for helping with traffic conversion… But in case you aren’t using ClearVoice, I’d like to tell you a little bit about how it can help with improving your site conversion with better content marketing. If you’d like a little deeper purview into how I use ClearVoice, check out my blog post where I illustrate why it is the best platform for creating content marketing content.
ClearVoice offers a wealth of content creation, management, and optimization tools — and a number of helpful resources to help marketers reach their content marketing goals and boost ROI, including website traffic and conversion rates.
One of the content strategies that works best is to build up an inventory of content and to continuously repurpose and re-optimize it. And ClearVoice offers a dynamic editorial calendar that helps organize your content for better optimization. It also offers a number of other helpful tools, such as an automated content workflow, collaborative editing, revision and approval tracking, and integrated publishing so you can push your optimized content straight into WordPress, HubSpot or Medium.
By optimizing and re-optimizing content with keywords and key phrases, you will ultimately increase your SEO ranking, which increases your website traffic and boosts conversion rates — all in one shot.
4. Moz
As you may have seen from reading my other articles, I’m a big fan of Moz, so I had to include it our list of top tools to help drive website traffic and convert that traffic. While SEMRush often shines brighter than Moz, Moz has a great focus on traffic conversion, in both their product and their very helpful blog posts.
Moz is an SEO tool that offers a wide range of features related to keyword research, keyword rankings, site crawling, page optimization, and more. These are all important for boosting the reach of your content, how well it ranks and its placement on Google, and its overall effectiveness for attracting users and readers and driving them back to your website.
Moz does offer a number of training courses, tools, and resources. Moz offers online, on-demand courses, tips, and tricks; live, in-person training; and even enterprise-wide training, which is a great opportunity to train teams. All in all, Moz boasts a 97 percent customer satisfaction rate.
5. OptinMonster
OptinMonster offers a number of helpful features and tools that are useful to have in any marketer’s toolbox. Additionally, OptinMonster offers a conversion rate optimization tool specifically to help marketers improve website traffic conversion rates.
OptinMonster offers features such as their Two-Step Optins, which helps users convert links or images into optin forms. This method has proven to help boost conversions by 785 percent! Optinmonster also offers geo-location targeting services, which helps improve conversions by personalizing campaigns based on a particular visitor’s location.
Quality over quantity
You could use the best content marketing tools in the world to help you build stellar landing pages, perform insightful A/B tests, and implement proven funnels; however, if you don’t have quality content to drive your initiatives, then your efforts are wasted.
In the world of content marketing, quality matters over quantity. Even if you have a full content inventory, packed with blog posts, white papers, articles, slide decks, infographics, and so on, none of them will matter if they aren’t written well or they aren’t relevant to your audience.
If you aren’t sure what types of content are working for you or are resonating well with your audience, take a look at your analytics, and also your content marketing budget. If you are still in the early phases of creating content and building an inventory, then it may take some time to generate hard data that you can use when adapting your content strategy.
One tried and true method of improving conversion rates is doing simple A/B testing of key landing pages. Many of the tools listed above offer A/B test features, which allow you to conduct simple A/B tests, review key results, and make improvements based on those insights and results.
By understanding how your traffic responds to specific elements of your landing pages (this could be the CTA text, the position of your CTA, the page headline, the lead magnet or offer, or even the color of the CTA button), you will also understand your audience’s behavior and boost your landing pages to align with those behaviors, driving them to make a purchase or take an action.
Converting website traffic just got easier…
Increasing website traffic and improving web conversion rates might seem frustrating and impossible. After all, many businesses invest a great deal of money in planning, designing, and building a website that accurately represents and promotes their brands. Therefore, you want to ensure that your business is seeing a return on its marketing investment.
As we mentioned above, the good news is with marketing technology available today, increasing conversion rates is a little easier. The best way to do this is to implement strategies that boost your website’s overall conversation rates. And selecting one of the tools above is the best place to start.
