Most people assume that ranking in positions #1–3 for a high-intent keyword automatically leads to conversions.
In fact, we ourselves are responsible for a lot of that thinking since we published Pain Point SEO. Since then, we’ve been touting the massive conversion rate benefits of bottom-of-funnel, high-intent keywords.
It’s true that high-intent keywords convert obscenely higher than everything else. But what we haven’t discussed much is the writing needed to unlock those conversion benefits.
In short, the writing matters. Content written just for ranking misses key nuances, which can hurt your conversion rate. This case study highlights that.
We had a client come to us who had previously taken our course and produced content targeting various bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. Despite ranking in the topmost positions for several high-value keywords and driving traffic, their content wasn’t converting at the levels that we typically see for other clients.
We’ve seen this happen before when a product doesn’t compete well in the market or when the audience isn’t a good fit, so we considered that possibility.
However, after reviewing their ranking blog posts, we hypothesized the issue stemmed from content quality and how the product was positioned and sold in the articles.
The content lacked flow — it was written more for the SERP than for the target customer — and the product positioning wasn’t tailored to the intended reader. It felt like generic, templated content.
After updating the articles, we saw conversion rate increases ranging from 66% to 950%.
In this article, we’ll share:
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Our approach to writing bottom-of-the-funnel content and how we use SERP analysis to guide our writing
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Data showing the conversion rate increases from improving bottom-of-funnel content
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Before-and-after writing examples
Our Best Practices for Writing Bottom-of-Funnel, Conversion-Oriented Content
Write for the reader, not for search engines.
1. Consider the nuance of the keyword & know your reader
The specific query — what the person types into Google — is crucial. Small language variations offer insights into the Googler’s search intent.
What problem are they trying to solve? What’s the goal of their search?
A really basic example here is “accounting software” vs. “enterprise accounting software.”
The “enterprise” clarifier tells you the Googler works for a large company, likely interested in scalability, multi-entity/currency support, security, compliance, and a more flexible budget.
You can swap “enterprise” with other qualifiers like “small business,” “medical,” or “free,” each reflecting different search intent.
Most writers would approach these keywords in the same way — explaining basic accounting software and listing options. However, the product positioning should differ based on intent (small business vs. enterprise vs. medical accounting software).
Another example: “accounting software” vs. “accounting software with inventory management” — the latter shows the Googler prioritizes inventory management features. Offering the same generic accounting software content won’t cut it here.
Another language variance to pay attention to is “software” vs. “app” — if someone searches accounting apps, it’s likely they’re looking for mobile apps, and in our experience, Google will prioritize pages talking about or linking to iOS or Android apps.
While considering the reader’s search intent, also think about their knowledge level and where they are in the buying process. Tailor your content to meet them where they are, avoiding too much backstory or diving too deep into advanced topics.
Try to step into the reader’s shoes as you outline, draft, and edit.
2. Identify your product’s features & benefits that solve your reader’s pain points
Once you understand your reader, the next step is to align your product or solution with their specific needs. Ask yourself:
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What are the readers’ pain points?
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What solutions are they looking for, and which ones would work best for them?
Part of positioning your product is understanding that readers want practical, implementable (and, ideally, convenient) solutions. If they have to jump through too many hoops or exert too much effort, you risk losing them.
We’re assuming at this stage that the keyword you’ve chosen is a good fit. If you reach this point and realize your product isn’t the best solution for the audience, it may be time to revisit the keyword and target something else.
You can read more about that in our guides here and here.
It’s useful to map out pain points alongside corresponding product features and benefits. This will clarify the main points to cover and help you structure your content outline.
This insight can help you explain product features and create relatable examples, adding personality to your content. It also helps make your content feel original and unique.
3. Align your pitch to the keyword
Now you can start bringing together all the pieces from your earlier brainstorming to create your pitch and positioning.
While this may seem straightforward, it can be challenging for many teams.
First, it might not always be clear what the best positioning for your product is relative to a specific keyword. We’ve also seen debates within client organizations about whether their product fits a specific audience or which features should be emphasized.
It’s your job to navigate these discussions, but here’s an important point we remind clients of: the positioning in each article doesn’t need to drastically change how you present your brand or content across all channels.
Clients often get caught up in remixing small details, worrying that if they sell a feature one way in one post, they need to update sales copy everywhere else. That’s not necessary.
Your core selling and messaging points can remain consistent across all channels, even when you tailor content for specific keywords and audiences. Highlighting small business accounting features in one blog post doesn’t mean your entire brand is now targeted toward small businesses.
Readers coming across your content via search engines are seeing it within the context of their specific query. Other readers will encounter your brand through different channels and searches.
Some of the most effective ways to implement your strategy and write for the reader include:
#1. Focus your introduction on the reader’s pain points and your proposed solution.
This can be the hardest part of writing and setting up the flow of your post, and you might go through multiple iterations until you land on what’s best.
The goal is to relate and resonate with the reader immediately, showing you understand their search intent and have the answers they need. Content should be at a higher knowledge level, offering valuable insights that teach the reader something.
You should also prepare the reader for what’s covered in the article. A clear table of contents helps guide them, making it easy to see your article addresses their interests and allows them to find the information they need quickly.
#2. Choose a content structure that aligns with the keyword and engages the reader.
For example, if you’re writing a how-to guide, break it down into a clear, step-by-step list to make it easy for readers to follow.
If you’re writing a product review guide, list the products and maintain a consistent format for each review (with extra emphasis on your product, of course).
#3. Introduce and sell your solution where it fits naturally in your content.
In a step-by-step guide, you could explain how your product supports each step.
In a review guide, list your product at the top and provide a detailed walkthrough of its features, showing how they solve readers’ specific pain points. This allows you to convey your core value propositions and help the customer decide if what you’re selling is right for them.
#4. Don’t be afraid to sell your product.
Many businesses hesitate to promote their product, fearing it feels too self-serving. We believe this stems from the dominance of top-of-funnel content, where the norm is to “give” rather than “ask.”
While avoiding a pitch in educational pieces makes sense (“What is a cash flow statement?”), bottom-of-funnel queries (“enterprise accounting software”) signal clear purchase intent. Here, selling isn’t awkward — it’s expected.
Providing feature details, real customer examples, and supporting media can be more valuable than a generic landing page or a software review site like G2.
This approach acts as a “mini-demo,” helping readers see how your product fits their needs — which drives engagement and conversions.
Our Results from Updates
We updated several of our client’s top-ranking posts and tracked conversions month-by-month after the updates.
To prioritize which posts to update, we analyzed historical conversion data. We started this experiment in mid-2024 (April/May), tracking conversions from January 2023 to mid-2024, gathering over 12 months of data.
As shown in the left-side columns of our sheet, these posts averaged less than one demo per month before the updates, with some seeing only one or two conversions every few months.
After our updates, we were seeing posts convert multiple times per month — with average monthly conversion increases between 36% to 900%!
We saw a significant win right away with Post #1 — converting less than once per month before updates, then bringing in five, three, and 11 conversions in the three months after. This resulted in a 622% increase in average monthly conversions for Post #1.
We did notice a couple of outliers: one post saw a 1600% increase due to extremely low conversions before updates, while another post experienced a -50% drop in average conversions. However, this drop is likely noise since the post had less than one conversion every other month before updates and followed a similar pattern afterward. If it converts next month, it should return to normal levels.
It’s also worth noting that we’ve only recorded six months of post-update data, so our dataset is limited. However, these early results and emerging patterns are promising and support our original hypothesis.
Specific Writing Examples from Our Updates
Now, let’s dive into some of the updates we made to our client’s product review guides to better target the specific reader.
Starting with the introduction, many of the posts followed a “Wirecutter-esque” approach, positioning the content as an independent third-party review of products.
For example, one post intro read:
“Today, there are 168 different purchase order software for construction companies. In this guide, we spent 40 hours comparing the top 5 purchase order software to find the five best you can use to improve your purchasing process and track purchase orders.”
While this may seem like it helps to build credibility, it often comes across as overwhelming and hard to believe. Additionally, readers finding this content on our client’s site likely already know whose product they’re reading about, so posing as a third party feels disingenuous. They probably expect some mention of the client’s product.
Here’s what our update looked like:
This speaks directly to where the reader is in the purchasing process, and provides information on how to comparison shop for this type of software in the construction industry, which teaches them something. It also shows readers that we know their industry and have experience with other construction companies, building that credibility the original intro was going for.
We provide background on the relevant features and benefits to look for when shopping — the ones we mapped during keyword research above — and gear our language and examples to the construction industry. This is a perfect example of how selling in a blog post can be married to giving value just fine — those two things don’t have to conflict.
At the end, we prep readers for a pitch on our product while telling them we’ll also cover key details about other top-rated competitors. The client’s site also includes an embedded table of contents so readers can preview sections and skip to the one(s) they’re most interested in.
Another update we made across client posts was expanding upon their product sections. In many of these review guide posts, they’d provide a quick bulleted list of features, not really emphasizing one over another or explaining how features work in the context of the workflow.
We included dedicated sections within our client’s product review to discuss and show an image or GIF of each feature, and we presented features in the order of the typical workflow. More so “showing” (vs. telling) readers how they’d use our client’s product to solve their specific pain points. Painting that picture, as discussed above.
We prioritize the features and considerations discussed in our intro — also going back to our map above — and explain how other features support those key points and the overall product functionality. Constantly dropping examples and bringing content back to our reader’s pain points.
It’s important to note: this format gives our clients ample real estate on the page, and we don’t shy away from the opportunity to wholly pitch our client’s product to these readers. Googlers searching product category keywords, like “purchase order software for construction,” are looking to learn about and be sold products. We have the natural opportunity to go all in here.
While on this note, we should also mention how we handle competitor sections. Instead of pushing readers to the client’s product alone, we provide ample detail about competitors so readers can truly comparison shop.
Googlers searching for products are in a buying mode — but still need to get a lay of the land. Shoving one product at them is too biased. It’s natural for buyers to consider multiple products before making a decision, so you can lend in that process.
We compile all of the most common names readers will encounter in their search — other names ranking on the first page, other names mentioned in software review lists, etc. Then we provide a brief explainer of each one, a bulleted list of features, pricing details, and links to competitors’ websites, so readers can get the gist of each product.
We follow a consistent format here so readers can easily move from one product to the next and compare the key details between solutions.
Here’s an example of a competitor section from the same post we mentioned above:
This less-than-biased, helpful approach can build reliability with readers. When they see you understand their search intent and are there to help, they’re more likely to spend more time on your content and trust you. Which can ultimately lead to conversions.
Another key change we made was updating our client’s positioning in which audience or user they best suit. Most posts included a “Best For” section with a very specific type of user listed.
For example, in this “purchase order for construction” post, they listed their product as best for: construction companies with a job costing model that wants to associate cost with granular job-level budgets.
While this specific detail might resonate with a small fraction of readers, it’s limiting, confusing, and most importantly untrue. One of the main USPs of this client’s product is its flexibility and customization options, and white-glove onboarding to set the software up to your specifications. This lets them work with various industries and business sizes.
So instead of trying to hone in on one specific reader vs. another, we discuss this benefit and drop a few examples of how the software can be customized for the specific industry at hand (in this case, construction).
This sells our solution to a broader set of readers, touts the benefits and convenience of choosing our client’s product (personalized to you, set up for you), and encourages a higher volume of conversions.
Our post also includes a variety of CTAs where we encourage customers to start a demo and convert. We make it easy for readers to take the next steps with our client directly from the post.
What to Avoid (What We Hypothesize Writers Are Doing to Rank)
Now that we’ve covered best practices for updating content to drive conversions, let’s explain what we believe is happening in top-ranking content that isn’t converting.
SERP research is essential for guiding keyword research and identifying viable opportunities. It’s important to search the keyword you plan to target, see what’s ranking, and assess whether it makes sense to enter that conversation. However, we believe many writers are over-relying on SERP results to shape their outlines.
For example, here’s a look below at the search results for “e-procurement software” and our client’s initial outline for this keyword:
You can see that most of the H2s in the article map exactly to questions people had in the SERP or the key topics around the parent topic. Then the article was written in a Q&A format, just answering these questions in a 2000+ word article.
Many people in SEO or content marketing who read this may think, “What’s the problem here? They’re just fulfilling search intent.”
Yes, to a large extent, that’s true. But the challenge with writing things this way is that the content doesn’t flow well and doesn’t help the reader get the answer they’re looking for around the topic. It’s also not really personalized or tailored to the reader — which is critical to encouraging conversions per our best practices.
So although it’s a good idea to look at SERP features, like People Also Ask and related searches, when doing SERP analysis, this analysis should only help inform key points to make in the article. It shouldn’t just become your outline.
Originality and differentiation of ideas, brands, and products are what convert SEO traffic into leads and customers. Without that, you have rankings and organic traffic that doesn’t convert.
Final Notes
Many clients hesitate to update content ranking on the first page, especially in the top spots, even if it’s not converting, for fear of “breaking what’s working.” However, rankings aren’t the ultimate performance metric.
Yes, tracking rankings is important, but if content isn’t converting or bringing in new business, it’s not fulfilling its purpose. It’s broken. When this happens, it’s crucial to investigate the cause and update content to better appeal to your readers.
