Grow and Convert has a four step process that we use for ourselves and for every client we work with to drive both keyword rankings and conversions. The four steps are content/SEO strategy, writing, content promotion and conversion optimization. Below you’ll find our top content marketing articles on each topic.

Table of Contents

Start Here → Recommended articles

If this is your first time on our site, we’d recommend reading these articles first

On strategy

Pain Point SEO – This is our foundational SEO strategy. When doing client work, we realized that the highest converting organic pages on a website were targeting keywords with the highest search intent. Pain Point SEO lays out a framework for coming up with the highest intent keyword ideas.

Disruption stories – Disruption stories are stories that aim to capture why your business exists. What makes them unique is that they’re highly shareable and can help sell your product or service.

Pain Point Copywriting – We share the process we use to do product copywriting inside of blog posts to help drive conversions.

Jobs-To-Be-Done Keywords – As an extension of our Pain Point SEO strategy, we share our JTBD keyword framework, which are the second highest converting types of keywords outside of category and alternatives posts.

Underdog SEO – This shares a strategy for smaller companies to beat big competitors when it comes to SEO.

Mini Volume Keywords – We share data behind why we target small search volumes with high intent over just going after higher keyword volume.

On writing

SEO Content Writing – We share our process for how to rank for keywords once you’ve identified which ones you want to target.

Mirage Content – This article points out major flaws in the way that most companies write content for search engines.

The Specificity Strategy – This post explains how specificity is the key to success when it comes to writing unique content that stands out from the competition.

The Detail Principle – This blog post shares all of the elements that are needed to create a compelling article

Originality Nuggets – We share a framework for producing great content that we like to call originality nuggets – ie. your content has something unique or interesting that other sites don’t have in it.

Outsourcing Content Creation — We share common mistakes people make when outsourcing content creation and how to solve them.

Content Marketing and SEO Case Studies

These case studies share how we’ve implemented the G&C process on different types of businesses.

SaaS – All-in-one SaaS Product Case Study – We share how to approach content strategy for a large SaaS platform that has numerous à la carte solutions inside of it.

SaaS SEO case study: Smartlook – We share how we helped Smartlook expand their marketshare outside of the EU and how we helped them bring in more advanced users.

SaaS – Geekbot Case Study – We share how we grew a self-service SaaS company Geekbot by starting with bottom of the funnel keywords and working our way up the funnel to mid/top of funnel keywords.

SaaS – Circuit Case Study – This article shares how we moved a blog from a subdomain to subfolder while following our SEO/content strategy and saw a huge increase in both leads and traffic.

SaaS- Rainforest QA Case Study – This case study shares how we approach doing content for a business in which we have little domain expertise in – and how we were still able to write and grow signups significantly despite not having the technical expertise.

SaaS – Growing A New Product Case Study – This case study shares how we think about doing SEO and content strategy for a product that does not have a well-defined category. It shares how we identified pain points and were able to grow the business that way.

SaaS – Leadfeeder Case Study – This case study shares the story about how we came up with Pain Point SEO and scaled Leadfeeder’s signups by implementing that strategy.

B2C – Cognitive FX Case Study – This case study shares how we grew the concussion clinic CognitiveFX using SEO and were able to outrank sites like WebMD, MayoClinic and more well known medical sites.

Pain Point SEO on eCommerce – This shares how Nat Eliason grew his ecommerce site Cup and Leaf by implementing our Pain Point SEO strategy.

Grow and Convert Course Review – One of our course members wrote this case study sharing how our course helped him grow his consulting business and solidified a process that he now uses to deliver content marketing services to others.

Grow and Convert Course Case Study – One of our course members shares how she grew an ADA compliance company using our process.

How Long Does It Take for Content Marketing to Work? – In this case study, we answer the question how long does it take content marketing to start getting results through a series of data points from our clients.

Content and SEO Strategy Articles

The foundation of what separates our process from typical SEO or typical content marketing is content and keyword strategy. Specifically, we build our strategy to maximize conversions (trials, demos, leads for SaaS; direct sales for ecommerce; lead form fills for services). That affects what keywords we target and what content topics we prioritize. Done properly this step changes content or SEO efforts from budget eating to revenue generating.

Content Marketing Strategy – This shares an overview of how we think about content marketing strategy.

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy – This shares how we would develop a SEO and content marketing strategy specifically for SaaS businesses.

Long-tail keyword strategy – This shares the difference between long-tail keywords and our strategy. Aka, not all long-tail keywords are equal.

How to Increase Organic Leads – We share our strategy to grow organic leads through content.

SaaS Keyword Research to Drive Leads – This shares 4 mistakes we see companies making when doing keyword research and what we’d do instead.

B2B Blog Strategy – We share common mistakes marketers make when it comes to B2B bloggin and how to fix them.

B2B SaaS SEO – We share how we’d approach creating a SEO strategy for a B2B SaaS company.

Deviant Keywords – Deviant Keywords are non-obvious keywords that drive conversions. We share how to identify them and some examples of how to use them in practice.

Bottoms up Content Strategy – We share the reasoning why we think SaaS businesses should focus on bottom of the funnel topics first and work they way up the funnel as opposed to the opposite strategy.

B2B Content Marketing Strategy – This shares how we would create a content marketing strategy specifically for B2B businesses.

B2C Content Marketing Strategy – This shares how we would create a content marketing strategy for B2C businesses.

How to Create Content that Converts – We share our 3-step framework to produce content that converts.

Content Ideation – A tactical guide for identifying high intent content ideas.

SEO Content Strategy – We share two factors that are often overlooked when creating a SEO focused content strategy.

Reclaim Rankings with Secondary Keywords – If you’ve recently lost rankings and conversions, here’s a process we came up with to get your rankings back using secondary keywords.

Healthcare Content Strategy – We’ve worked with healthcare companies and have seen great results for them. Here’s the strategy we’d use to grow a healthcare company.

How to Research Competitor Keywords – We share what most people do wrong when doing keyword research around competitors and our process to find hidden gems.

How often should you update website content? – We share our thoughts on how often you should update content on your website to maintain your ranking positions.

SEO Keyword Strategy – We share our process for coming up with keywords that will help a business drive high intent traffic and conversions.

SaaS SEO Strategy – We share how we would create a SEO strategy specifically for SaaS businesses.

Customer-Content Fit – We share a framework for knowing the right content to produce to attract your customers.

Blog Launch Strategy – We share how we would approach content marketing if we were starting a blog from scratch.

Does Ranking on Google Influence ChatGPT – We did a mini study to try to see if there is correlation between what ranks on Google and what ChatGPT recommends.

Why We Started Offering Paid Search – We explain the issues we’ve seen in how most brands setup their paid search campaigns and how we solve for those problems.

How to test and scale leads with Google ads – We share common mistakes people make when just getting started with Google ads and how to resolve them.

How We Reduced Cost Per Lead by 75% – A case study showing how we reduced cost per lead while increasing total leads per month from Google Ads for a client.

Content Writing Articles

After you know what topics and keywords to go after, the next step is to write content that will rank for keywords and convince customers to buy. In this section, we’ll share our process for writing content that both ranks and converts:

SEO Content Writing – We share how we write content for SEO.

How to Hire Ghostwriters – We share the process we’ve used to hire blog ghostwriters.

Thought Leadership Content – We share why most businesses can’t produce “thought leadership content” and what they should be doing instead.

Why Fully Outsourcing Content to Writers is Flawed – Most businesses try to hire writers, send them a short brief and expect the writer to be an expert on a topic. We share why the process most companies use to produce content is flawed.

How to Write Good Blog Posts – We share why all good blog posts need these 5 elements to be convincing.

How to Write Great Blog Introductions – If an introduction to a blog post doesn’t resonate, people won’t continue reading. We share how to write great blog introductions and examples of bad ones.

Content Promotion Articles

When it comes to promotion, most companies hit publish on their site, send out a few social media updates, and call it a day. Then they pray for organic traffic to start kicking in. In this section on our site, we share how we drive thousands of visitors to a blog post after it’s published – mainly using link building and some paid promotion– but we also share some of our other secrets behind how we promote content.

Content Distribution Strategy – This article shares our approach to driving traffic to blog posts through both paid ads and SEO.

Articles on Increasing Blog Conversions

Once you’ve figured out who to target, what content to create to attract them, and how to get your content in front of them, then the last step is to convert the traffic into signups, leads or purchases. We share some of our tested strategies to help you increase blog conversions. We take somewhat of a contrarian approach when it comes to conversions – instead of “nurturing” subscribers, we typically go directly for the sale. Learn more about our approach below.

What SEO keywords convert the highest? – We share our analysis of what types of keywords have the highest conversion rate.

How to improve your blog conversion rate – We share the two main factors that affect blog post conversion rate.

How to optimize content for conversions – We share 9 steps you should take to optimize your content for conversions

The #1 factor for improving your blog conversion rate – Improving your blog conversion rate has nothing to do with conversion optimization.

Landing Page vs. Blog Post: Which is better for conversions? – Most people think that landing pages are automatically better for conversions, but we share why this thinking isn’t true.

Lead Nurturing vs. Direct Conversions: Which is better? – Most people try to collect emails as their main conversion action, we share why that might not be the best way to optimize for conversions.

Using Your Thank You Page to Generate Leads – We share some ideas on how you can drive conversions from your thank you page.

Measuring Content Marketing and SEO Return on Investment

We share how to measure performance from content marketing and SEO

How to Set Up and Track GA4 Conversions – We share how to setup the same content conversion reports in GA4 as used in UA.

Most Companies Measure Content Marketing ROI Incorrectly – We share our process for determining the ROI of content marketing.

Content Marketing Attribution – We share our process for attributing leads to content marketing/SEO.

Content Marketing Cost of Acquisition – We share how to calculate the customer acquisition cost from content marketing.

How Long Does It Take to Rank on the First Page of Google? – We often get the questions how long does it take to rank, so we compiled data from all of our client engagements to try to answer that question.

Using GA goals – We share how you can use Google Analytics goals to measure conversions from content.

Marketing Strategy

In this section, we share our thoughts on general marketing strategy that you need to get right before you’re able to do content marketing/SEO.

Is SEO Worth It? – We answer the question is SEO worth it by showing how SEO by analyzing the costs and benefits of the channel.

How to Position your Business – We wrote this guide on what most companies get wrong when it comes to positioning their business and how we think about positioning.

Does Content Marketing Make Sense for Early Stage Companies? – We share why we think early stage companies should wait to do content marketing until they’ve figured out these two things.

How to Conduct User Research – We share the process we use to get customer feedback to help grow a business.

How to do influencer outreach and get a response – We share our cold outreach process that we’ve found gets a above 50% response rate.

Hiring for Marketing Roles

Hiring an SEO – In this guide, we share when it makes sense to hire an agency, freelancer or in-house hire when investing in SEO.

Hiring Ghostwriters – We share lessons we’ve learned from evaluation 200+ blog writers.

Hiring a Content Marketer – This guide shares how we would think about hiring for a content marketing role.

Why Marketing Has Become the Hardest Position to Hire for – This shares why hiring for marketing roles is so challenging and how to solve the problem.

How to Hire Writers – We wrote this guide that shares our learnings on how to hire freelance writers.

Growth Stories

In this section, we share growth stories from various businesses.

Scaling a Digital Agency in a Downturn – CPC Strategy Story – We interviewed our friends at CPC Strategy to share their story about how they grew their agency during the GFC.

Positioning Case Study: How We Created a Premium Content Marketing Service – We share the story and lessons from positioning our content marketing agency.

Profitwell Growth Story – We interviewed Patrick Cambell about how he’s building a company for scale over lifestyle.

Examine growth story – We interviewed Sol Orwell about how we built a 7-figure business off of Reddit.

How this Songwriter got Publicity – We share how this songwriter unknowingly executed a perfect influencer marketing campaign.

Growing a digital agency – We interview Jonathan Dane about how we grew his agency to $1.2M in year one.

How This Fitness Site Got 1,892 Hyper Targeted Subscribers With Facebook Ads That Cost (Less Than) Nothing – Growth story about how a fitness site grew traffic for free using FB ads.

Essays

Shorter thought provoking posts from Devesh and Benji

AI content and why originality will be more important going forward – Benji shares why he thinks AI content is a race to the bottom and how it will make originality in content more valuable.

Tools don’t solve problems – Benji was frustrated by people trying to buy tools to solve problems and he argues why people need to think of strategy first.

Shiny Object Syndrome – Benji writes about how marketers often switch from tactic to tactic instead of staying focused on one strategy.

Why Sales and Marketing Don’t Get Along – We share common conflicts between marketing and sales and how to resolve them.

How to Evaluate SEO and Content Marketing Agencies

In this section, we share how our agency is different from other agencies you could choose to do content marketing and SEO work for your business.

Best Content Marketing Agencies – We share 5 different agencies to consider if looking for content marketing services

Choosing an SEO agency – We share 5 factors companies should consider when choosing an agency to work with.

How to Evaluate the Best SaaS Content Marketing Agencies – We share how we would think about evaluating all of the options out there to help SaaS businesses do content marketing.

SaaS SEO Agency – This article shares how we define SaaS SEO and do it differently than other agencies you could choose.

What Separates the Best B2B Content Marketing Agencies? – We share 4 issues with the way that most agencies do content marketing for B2B businesses.

Beginnings of Grow and Convert

In this section, it shares our early blog posts about us growing our site and trying to figure out our business.

Pivoting from a course to an agency – This shares the story behind us failing with our first course launch and why we decided to start an agency instead.

How we turned a failed product business into a $34,000/month service business (GrowthLab) – More detailed story about the multiple pivots in our business that led to an agency.

Why we pivoted from our traffic goal to make money – When we started our site, we had a goal of hitting 40k monthly visitors from content. This post shares why we did away with that goal.

Growth model to predict traffic – We tried to forecast how much traffic we could drive using a growth model and shared how we did against the model.

How We Grew Traffic to 16,000 in 4.5 Months on $52/Month (And Every Tool We Use) – How we grew traffic to 16k in month 4 of our challenge.

Getting 76% Growth in Traffic in One (Leap) Month – How we grew traffic between month 3-4 of our live challenge.

Our 2015 Blog Stats Revealed – Traffic stats from the first 2 months of our live challenge.

Blog Traffic and List Building Update: November 2015 – Our first monthly update from our live challenge.

Our Plan to Grow to 40,000 Unique Visitors in 6 months – Outlines how we planned to grow our site when we started it.

The first Grow and Convert blog post – The first ever blog post at Grow and Convert – it outlines our vision for the site.