I Studied 1,000 Pages. These Five Things Kill 99% of Conversions

Recently, we noticed something that might concern you if you're investing in publishing content on your website. You see, some posts rank beautifully. You know, they've got position one, position two on Google, featured snippet, all the stuff that is supposed to matter. But when we looked at what's actually converting, you know, generating leads and sales, we noticed that it's not always these golden child posts. When we dug into why, we identified five things that were separating the content that was doing really well, generating leads and sales and being financially valuable for the business and the stuff that just ranked. So, of course, we started building these principles into everything that we do. And the results spoke for themselves. In today's video, I'm going to show you some examples. We've got an e-commerce store that's grown its revenue 288% and now outranks Amazon. We've got a mortgage business that we generated 11,000 leads for over the course of a year. And we've got cosmetics brand, The Ordinary, who we helped generate a 451% increase in revenue from the content section on their website. So whether you're spending 5,000 a year or 500,000 a year on your content, if it's not doing these five things, you might just be generating traffic and rankings for the sake of it and not actually impacting your bottom line. But fear not, we're going to walk you through each of these five steps and show you some real examples, including some massive global brands getting this stuff embarrassingly wrong. And stay tuned till the end because of course, ranking your content on Google is only half of the battle. Now, you also need to make sure it's visible on AI overviews, chat, GPT, Perplexity. So, we're going to give you some bonus tips on how to do that as well. Okay, the first conversion killer is the most frustrating because it is so blindingly obvious. Let's take a look. Here we are on the Stanley website. You know Stanley cups, the big insulated cups that everyone's carrying around. Well, they've got this content section on their website and it's, you know, it's reasonable. This is an article on how many ounces are in a gallon. Your simple ounce to gallon conversion guide. It looks like a fairly decent post, but I will predict that the revenue generated by this post is so low as to be almost insignificant. Even if this post is ranking at the top of Google, I think it would generate virtually nothing for them. And here's why. Have a look at what they want you to do next when you land on this page. You've got the information here. It's fairly simple conversion guide sort of content. Exactly the sort of stuff that gets pulled through into AI overviews. But what do you notice about what would happen if anyone actually lands on this page? There are no next steps. Sure, if you squint, then you might see a link through to a product category page, but it's really uncompelling. It doesn't really match where I'm at in my user journey. I'm looking for conversion guides and it doesn't try and capture an email. It doesn't show me any products. From a conversion perspective, this is dead content. Unfortunately for Stanley, this isn't the only example. Their site is packed full of content that just doesn't ask for the sale. So, here's a DIY homemade pumpkin spice latte recipe. Make your own PSL hot or iced. Now, to be fair, we've got pictures of Stanley Cup, so at least we know what website we're on now. But there is no attempt to [music] connect the dots here. There's no this cup here is perfect. Click here to buy it or sign up for the Stanley Cup recipe club and get loads of recipes for your new Stanley Cup. There's none of that. They're not trying to capture emails. They're just hoping that you happen to click on one of these deep links, which are, by the way, black links in black text. So, they're not even particularly visible and take the decision on your own to buy a Stanley Cup. And we know that hope is not a marketing strategy. Now, they've got the makings of a decent content strategy, and they're actually doing well at some of the other topics that we're going to talk about today. Like, they've identified that they could target brides who are getting married. They could target brides with customization. But unfortunately, the content doesn't really specify that. It just hopes that people take the decision to do this. And therefore, it's suboptimal. There is room for improvement here. We learned this lesson at Exposure Ninja, many many years ago. We were working on campaigns like this one for Dr. Patino from Patino Law Firm. They initially came to us with some really sort of thin lowquality content. We rewrote all of it. We made it very topical. We based it on EAT. We did all the right things to get it ranking and it was ranking really well, getting loads of traffic. The client was like, "Yeah, cool. I can see all the traffic going up." But we were like, "Yeah, but the conversions just aren't there. We're getting traffic, but it's not generating the leads and sales that we ninjas live by." So, we carried out a conversion rate optimization audit across the whole content section of the site, understanding what CTAs would people most respond to. CTA, by the way, call to action, the thing that you want people to do next. As a result of this, we started embedding CTAs throughout the blog that were relevant to the people that were going to be reading that type of blog. For example, we ended up putting a sitewide little call us button, the little live chat widget. We offered people a free case review. We embedded CTAs in the blogs themselves. Now, this is kind of lowhanging fruit and the results are pretty rapid. In the first three months of doing this, we improved the number of calls from blogs by 125%. And the total conversion rate from blogs by 144%. Just by asking people to do the next step. All right. Now, right now, you're thinking either, yeah, Tim, that's the obvious stuff. Or you're thinking, right, more CTAs equals good. Got it. The danger here is that people go hell for the other, flood their websites with CTAs, make it really confusing and overwhelming. So tip number two is to actually simplify the choices that you're giving people as a next step. Here's the thing. When people are unfamiliar with a product category or the thing that you're selling, giving them too many options, can actually lead to decision fatigue. If we say, "Oh, here there are five things that you could buy right now." They start looking at those trying to compare them and go, "Oh, okay, right, this is a bigger thing. I'm just going to do this later." What we instead want to do is guide them and focus them on exactly the thing that they need to do next. And that's where focusing the number of CTAs, but making sure they're super relevant comes in. Let me show you an example. This is Golf Course Lawnto. Now, you've heard us talk about Golf Course Lawn Store for a long time. They're not our biggest client, but the great thing about Ron is that over the years, he's let us test a whole bunch of different things on his website, and it's worked out really well. And by the way, Golf Course Lawn Store sells products to help you make your lawn amazing. Not like good, like amazing. Ron's an absolute boss. He's a total influencer in this space. And one of the things that we did on the website is add this knowledge base. This knowledge base is packed full of information on how to make your lawn the best it can possibly be. One of the sections is seasonal lawn care. This is what to do with your lawn over the different seasons during the course of the year. If we just check out the full lawn care tips and guides. One of the dangers with an area like this is that there are so many different options of products to buy that people can get completely overwhelmed. And that's really one of the value propositions of Golf Course Lawnto is Ron just tells you what to focus on. And we took this approach with the content on this site as well. So as you're going through this really detailed guide, it's recommending specific products, full fungicide. So you need to make sure that you're laying down some sort of fungicide to prevent lawn disease. And you need to buy this one, not here's 250 different fungicides. Here's the fungicide that you need to buy right now. Click to add it to your cart. Now, there are multiple products that you need to buy as part of your full lawn care regimen, but rather than just giving you them all straight away, we talk about why each one is important, maybe embed a video from Ron as well, and then we link to the product. So, as you're going through the article, you're adding these products to your cart, knowing what they do, knowing why they're important, ready to make the purchase. One of the results of this is that this type of content now outranks Amazon for a whole bunch of high commercial intent keywords, which is no mean feat. This led to 149% increase year-on-year in organic traffic and a 940% spike in seasonal traffic. But most importantly, by embedding these CTAs throughout the site and giving people clear, logical next steps, we're able to generate a 288% increase in organic revenue. We're not just giving people a whole product category page and say, "Yeah, go have at it. Figure out what you need." We're giving people specific recommendations and linking to those products there and then. The takeaway here, the easier the choice, the higher conversion rate. And by the way, this type of content, the here's what to buy content is really useful for AI search optimization as well. AI tools like Chat GBT love this type of thing because they can take those recommendations back to their searchers and say, "Here, this website, which looks like it's real authority on the topic, recommends that you buy this thing." And by the way, if you want help with this, if you want to figure out what your content needs to do to improve its visibility and the conversion rates from search, then check out the team at Exposure Ninja's free website and digital marketing review. We'll take a look at all the content on your site. We'll analyze it. What's it good at? What's it really terrible at? and we'll map you out a prioritized action plan and we'll be gentle, we'll be kind. Don't worry. The review is fantastic and it's completely free of charge. So, go to exposurinja.com/re. But before you do, just be aware, not everybody is eligible for this. So, you do need to apply for the review at exposurinja.com/re. Okay. So, you've got your CTAs and you're channeling people through to the right CTA. But, there is a trap here. All of this assumes that you know who you're talking to and a lot of content really doesn't. And this is particularly common for businesses that cater to lots of sub audiences. They try and produce content that addresses all of these sub audiences at the same time. And the danger there is that it ends up speaking to no one. This leads us to tactic number three. Tailor your content to the right audience. Now, you might have seen this at play on your own website. If you've got content that's technically well written, it's really well structured. You think, "Why isn't this working, but it's just not converting?" This can often be the silent killer behind that phenomenon. Think about it. A firsttime buyer and a seasoned experienced professional, they might be shopping for the same product, but they have a completely different frame. They have different levels of prior experience. They have different questions, different objections. If we try and produce one piece of content that caters to the beginner and the expert, just as an example, we're going to end up with something that feels too jargony for the beginner and feels too basic for the expert and therefore neither of them are going to take action. What we need to do, therefore, is we need to be really conscious about the sub audiences that we're talking to and make sure our content is targeted to them. Some brands understand this really well and particularly in B2B SAS. So, let's go and have a look at some examples. Now, Monday.com is a software company that essentially sells spreadsheets but with add-on functionality. They categorize their products as CRM or project management. And that makes it quite a difficult marketing challenge. Their marketing message could get really muddy and really confusing because are they talking to project managers? Are they talking to sales and marketing teams? Or are they just trying to talk to everyone? But one thing that Monday does really well is they categorize the content on their site to make sure it really speaks to each of these different audiences individually. For example, here's the marketing section on their blog. So, they've got an entire section on their blog purely focused about marketing. All of the topics are about marketing. And when they're posting this marketing content, they can build in marketing specific use cases for monday.com, meaning it's much more relevant to a marketing type audience. So, here's an example guide. Creative Asset Management Guide to Building Efficient Workflows for 2027. Wait, 2027? I'm filming this in January 2026. Anyway, they seem to be really steaming ahead with their content calendar, but there we go. But this is an article which is all about basically monday.com's core functionality, right? This is project management software, but it's all viewed through the marketing lens. So, the examples are much more tailored to marketing. They're not asking me to think about project management. They're just showing me a world where all of my marketing tasks are managed better. Another example of a business that does a great job of this is Salesforce. Salesforce is a CRM and sort of general content platform. They actually segment their audience two ways. Firstly, by role. So I'm in the admin section. So this is for administrators, people who identify as administrators. All of this content is about how Salesforce can help admins. So if I think of myself first and foremost as an admin, I feel at home here. Ah, they're speaking my language. They're talking about admin type stuff. But Salesforce also has a different categorization according to industry. So if I think of myself as financial, well, there's a whole section of the website here about how I use Salesforce in finance. And this means I don't have to wade through a whole bunch of stuff about admin or retail commerce. I'm I'm just seeing stuff that's relevant to me. And the pattern here is really simple. The more specific you can be about who you're talking to, the more you can focus your content so it feels like a conversation that's hyperargeted rather than just a broadcast to everyone that never really lands. Now, I'll give you a client example, age care bathrooms. This is a company we worked with for many years which installs bathrooms for well, it's sort of self-evident from the name, right? This is accessible bathrooms. Now, you might think a business like this only really has one audience, right? People who want accessible bathrooms. But actually, there's separate sub audiences here. You've got children who are buying for elderly parents. You've got people who are planning a long-term in the future. Or you've got people who've just had a fall or a diagnosis and they need a solution right now. So, we took this approach that we're talking about not only on their website content but also in their email marketing. Because if you think about it, when you segment your email audience to these different categories, you can have a very different conversation. the people who are thinking long term in the future, you can send a nurture sequence that educates them and builds up trust and credibility over time. Whereas the people who need a solution right now, they don't want to learn about the benefits and learn about all of these different things. They need to talk to someone and they need to make a decision. So the email sequence for that type of person is much more focused on short timelines directly taking action. By doing this and taking this segmented approach to different sub audiences, we were able to drive 127% increase in emailled revenue, which is massive. And remember, once these sequences for these different sub audiences are built, they run. They don't need changing. They don't need tweaking. Some of these things can run for years, even a decade or longer once they're established, which is why email marketing and this type of content marketing can have such high leverage. But anyway, the takeaway is to match the message to the audience that you're going after. And if you're thinking about your whole audience as one homogeneous blob, you might be missing an opportunity here. Okay, so you've got your CTA, you've made the choice easy, and you're talking to the right audiences. There's still one area that your content can hemorrhage conversions, though, and it's the gap between, "Yeah, I'm interested and yeah, I've bought." And that tactic is to make shopping seamless. Now, in this section, we're going to look at things from an e-commerce perspective, but these principles apply just as much to lead generation and service businesses as well. But here's what happens. Someone finds your content, they're engaged, they're learning, they're interested in taking the next step. They click on a button that says, "Go to the store to buy this product." They go to the store, they see this category page, they're like, "Oh, okay. There's lots of different options here." They start comparing the options. Wait, is that the right thing for this thing I'm trying to do? Let me go back to the blog post and check myself. Okay. Right. Yeah, I need that thing. Right. Back to the store. Okay. Is that the right one? What size do I need? Okay, back to each of these steps adds friction. And every time you add a different step to the buying process, you risk drop off. If there's one thing that we want to do in digital marketing is remove the number of steps between someone being ready to buy and someone being able to actually buy. And a lot of this comes from this sort of weird belief in marketing that content is for awareness and product pages are for purchase and they are separate pages for separate stages of the funnel and they can't mix. But why? Why can't content itself close the sale? So, let's look at some examples of doing exactly that. So, here we are on the Sue Chef website. Now, Sue Chef is a an e-commerce store that sells sort of specialty ingredients. They've got this great recipe content strategy where we've got some pistachio viene wells which look really good. Now, there's standard recipe content, beautiful imagery, all of that stuff. Exactly what you would expect. The great thing about this site, though, is that you can shop the recipe right from the sidebar. So, they've got this sidebar on the blog that allows you to add things to the basket. If you're feeling particularly lazy and you can't even click three buttons, you can always just click the one button and add all of it to your basket straight away. Here's another example. Healthspan, they sell supplements. I'm on a page about magnesium glycinate. So, this is a type of definition or use case post that will rank well for what does magnesium glycinate do or when should I take magnesium glycinate. This is the sort of phrase or search that this content would target. So, you land on this page learning about magnesium glycine. Oh, is it right for me? You read, you learn more. Oh yeah, okay. This looks pretty good. CTA at the end, buy our magnesium glycinate. They're not forcing you to go to the shop. They're not saying, "Hey, by the way, you can just go to our shop and buy some magnesium glycinate." You click the shop and you're like, "Magnesium glycinate everywhere. Which strength do I need? How much do I need? How often do I need to take it? Which one? I don't know. Oh, this sounds complicated. I'll go back later." Or maybe I'll just search Google for magnesium glycinate. No, it's learn about the thing, buy the thing. Job done. We actually implemented this exact strategy for The Ordinary. And the ordinary is fantastic brand, really well-known, loads of amazing products, really high quality ingredients, sciencebacked information on their website. The trouble was the product section on the website and the content section on the website were completely separate and that led to a lot of missed opportunities. So let's say that we're searching for something like what do cleansers do? Well, we help the ordinary get ranking and AI overviews with this what is a cleanser page, which is this one just here. And this is a really good high quality page which has all the definition stuff. It has all the next steps. But rather than just giving people this page and hoping that they find their way to a product, what we wanted instead to do was direct them through to the right products for them. So you'll see links in the content here to different product subcategories, but you'll also see specific links to the shop and of course links to individual cleansers. So you can just buy straight from this page without having to go through a whole shopping experience first. Now this was part of a whole larger strategy of helping that content perform better with signposting and guiding people through the steps that they needed to go through in order to be able to make a purchase to get them ready for that to remove the objections to answer the questions that they might have had. And this all contributed to a 451% increase in revenue driven by the blog, by the content section of their website, which for a brand like The Ordinary is absolutely massive. So the takeaway here is to remove the friction between learning and buying. Now, of course, all of this assumes that people are actually going to spend time reading your content. But what if they're not? What if they've just got a really specific question and they need an answer? What if it's the type of question where they don't want to be learning at all? they actually don't really want to spend any time on this topic whatsoever. What if it's something like mortgages or insurance where they just want to go, what do I need? How much is it going to cost me? What do I need to do next? And they don't want to have to become educated in mortgages or insurance in order to answer those questions. Well, that's where a lot of content falls over. And it's also where tactic number five comes in. Create interactive tools. So, think about the last time that you were researching a big purchase or an important decision, something like a mortgage. Did you want a 2,000word guide on affordability and which mortgage type to get and how to calculate what your monthly repayments would be? Or did you just want to put some of your information into a thing and it just spits the answer out at you so you can get on with your life? Well, a lot of people just have a specific question and they want the answer. But traditional content can't really do this. It can just give you the information so that you can figure out the answer. So, you end up reading eight paragraphs about stuff that's completely irrelevant to you, trying to dig through to find the stuff that you actually need. You have to do the work. And in 2026, people don't want to do the work. So, you give up or you go somewhere else that can just give you a straight answer. And that's where interactive content comes in. Now, this study of 244 marketers between 10 million and $1 billion in revenue found that interactive content on average generated two times more conversions than passive content. But that doesn't mean you just need to make any old interactive content, you know, like, oh, write a blog and make people click to go to the next step or scrub away so they can see the words. Like, that's just junk. What you really need is tools that help people solve specific problems which prevent them from converting with you. Let me give you an example. DSLD is a mortgage client that we helped explode their leads. And when I say explode their leads, I'm going to give you the number in a minute. What we help them do is build a suite of interactive tools on their website that help people answer specific questions about their mortgage. So DSLRD has a number of specialist mortgages or loans that they offer to people and sometimes these have eligibility criteria. One example is the USDA loan. A lot of the time people just want to know am I eligible for this loan? So if I go on the USDA eligibility map, I can see a map of the US. I can just put in maybe I'm in California, right? I'm eligible for my USDA loan. Fantastic. So, I can click to get a free loan consultation. Happy days. But what if I'm in New York? Well, if I'm in New York City, I'm not eligible for a USDA loan. Sad times. But I may qualify for an FHA loan. So, the CTA is tailored for that. I can learn more about FHA loans if I want to go and do a bit of research, or I can just skip all of that and talk to someone. Now, this is just one example, but we built a whole suite of these tools which are tailored to answer specific questions that people would have during the mortgage or loan application process. And the important thing is that the next step that we offered with each of these tools is tailored to the question that that tool answers. All right, you want the numbers, don't you? 11,000 leads generated in 12 months. That's not traffic. That's not email signups. That's 11,000 leads. That's qualified leads. people who've like been through one of these tools to pre-qualify themselves and identify that this is the right thing for them and now they want to talk to someone. Come on, 11,000. So, the takeaway here is give users something useful to use, not just read. All right, so those are the five things that separate content that converts from content that just ranks. We've got clear next steps, simplified choices, talking to the right audience, making it very seamless, and giving them interactive tools. But here's the thing, none of this matters if nobody finds it. And increasingly online, people are using AI tools to find content, to find information that they need. If you're only visible in regular organic search on Google, you're going to be missing out on the future growth here. And it's not just Google anymore. It's chat GPT. It's Perplexity. It's Google's AI overviews, AI mode, Gemini. All of these are growing consistently. And if your content isn't consistently showing up in these tools, you're not going to be getting the eyeballs from the people that are moving over to these tools as their primary search methods. Okay? Okay, so let's talk about how to fix that because creating content that converts is not going to be that much use if nobody is actually on that content. And by the way, there was a stat that came out yesterday at the time of filming this about Google search. Now, it's only in the US, but US Google users numbers of searches have dropped 20% in the last 12 months. Now, this isn't that fewer people are using Google. Actually, on the contrary, Google's market share is remaining remarkably static, but it's actually the number of searches being done per person has dropped 20%. Why is this? It's not because Google isn't as useful. It's actually because Google has become more useful in its search response. Because of AI overviews, it's giving people all the information that they need. So, they're not having to do follow-up searches. This trend towards AI overviews is only continuing. Google has just announced that it's going to be making Gemini 3, its most powerful model, which is frankly genius level, the default for AI overviews. Meaning, these AI overviews are only going to get better. Now, here at Exposure Ninja, we've been deconstructing what it takes to get in the AI overviews since before they were even a thing. We started playing with them and figuring out how to get ranked in them a year before they were officially released. And this is what we do for clients. We eat our own dog food. We get ranked in AI overviews. For example, if you search for best AI search optimization agencies, what do you get? You get exposure ninja. If you search chat GPT for best agencies for AI optimization, you get exposure ninja. What about perplexity? If you ask who are the best AI search optimization agencies, it gives you a definition of an AI search optimization agency based on the exposure ninja website and then it gives exposure ninja as a consistently recommended specialist. If you ask Google's AI mode, what AI search trend should I know for 2026, it gives you exposure ninja. Best healthcare digital marketing strategy. Exposure Ninja Chat GPT. What are some of the AI search trends for 2026? Exposure Ninja. Exposure Ninja. If you want to generate some leads from SEO and you want an agency that has case studies, guess what? Exposure Ninja. What about if you're a law firm and you want a digital marketing strategy? Exposure Ninja. So, we know what we're talking about. We know how to get high converting content ranked across all of these AI platforms and cited in the answers. So, how do we do it? What are the three principles behind this? First up, you need to write for the search intent, not just for keywords. These AI tools want to cover a topic very broadly. They want to look at all of the subqueries in that topic and make sure all of them are being answered in their response. So, you need to make sure that you've covered each of the topics on your website in enough detail to have that information pulled through. Let me give an example. Let's say that you want to get visibility for a phrase like how does a beginner train for a marathon? Well, the AI tool will take that question and break it down into lots of background web searches. What's the right training regimen? What are the right trainers to wear? What's the right food and nutrition scheme to run through? So, if you answer all of these individual questions on your site, either in one massive piece of content or ideally in lots of individual smaller pieces of content which are tied in to a pillar piece which is the ultimate guide to beginner marathon training, then you've got a much better chance of ranking than if you've got one thin very specific keyword targeted piece which you're hoping gets ranked for this term and gets pulled through to the answers. Because if the AI tool when it's going off and doing all this background research consistently sees your website coming up with useful information to share, you just increase the number of entries that you have in the contest to get shown in the answer quite significantly. The second thing is about being the authority that the AI wants to site. If you're just posting very thin, lowquality information that's just generic on your website, well, the AI tools don't need you for that. They've already got that thing nailed, right? [laughter] They're amazing at thin, low authority content with absolutely no topical experience whatsoever. What you need to do instead is provide that deep level of expertise. The story, the data, the statistics, the case studies, the quotes. If your content is just opinions and generalizations, there's absolutely no reason for the AI tools to site you. Whereas, if you can provide the data that the AI tool can take back to its user and say, "Here you go, master. Here is a really highquality answer. Look at all this data I found." then you've got a much better chance of being cited. And this is why the content that we create for our clients shows up so often in AI search. Not just because we've gamed it, but because we've created content that has real substance, the sort of thing that these AI tools love to feature. The third thing you need to do is ensure AI and human readability. The old story used to be, don't write for search engines, just write for humans. Well, that was fine until the search engines started visiting your website and taking actions on behalf of the user, at which point you most definitely need to write and optimize for AI tools and search engines, too. AI tools are reading your website just like humans. Well, not just like humans, but they benefit from the same thing. So, schema markup, tables, lists, a clear subheading structure. This helps humans understand the shape of your content and where to find the information that they need. And it also happens to work really well for AI tools as well. So if your content is just one long wall of text with no structure, that's really difficult for a human to penetrate and really difficult for an AI tool to penetrate as well. So there you have it. Great content that converts does five things. Clear CTA, simplified choice, target audience, integrating the shopping or the lead generating experience right into that post and solving real problems by interactive tools. So, if you want to see how your content stacks up, we've put together this guide on how to do an AI search optimization audit, which you can check out next. And of course, if you want help from the team here at Exposure Ninja to take this to the next level for your business, you can request your free website and digital marketing review. Until next time, see you soon.