Here’s an interesting content strategy challenge: a relative young startup tries to maintain a healthy balance of top and bottom of the funnel content, but neglects the content flows / user journeys.

How does this happen?

They build their strategy around keywords, and prioritize topics with commercial and educational intent. They do this because they assume that users who search for educational topics want to learn about the topics they publish, and users who search for BOFU topics want to buy the product.

Image: Funnel coverage

So they assume that if they educate users well enough — by publishing a lot of content that teaches potential customers about their niche — those same users will (come back to) buy the product.

In theory, this could work. But what actually happens is that with this “strategy” they’re targeting two different segments with very different search intents.

People who want to learn don’t necessarily want to buy

Conversions at the top of the funnel are extremely low. This is generally expected — people who land on a website with the intent to learn will do just that — read and leave. Perhaps come back at a later point to review the information, but that likelihood of them buying the product — thus converting — is low.

Image: Conversion rates throughout the funnel stages

That’s not always a problem, but in the case of this particular company, the consumption patterns show that most users who come to their website to be educated rarely return.

The average consumption is a little under one page/session at the top of the funnel, although this is the stage that attracts most new users and accounts for the majority of page views.

Image: Content consumption: pages/session

Image: Content consumption: page views

Based on these numbers, we can form some initial hypotheses:

• Users who want to buy this product are finding what they need, as BOFU conversions look good, and most users only go through 1.5 pages.

• Users who go to this website to learn about the topic or solution have little interest in the product itself, as most of them read one page and leave.

Now if we dig a bit deeper, we uncover some additional problems with this approach: the time on page for TOFU is ok for the content length and depth, but the CTR is low.

Image: Time on page per funnel stage

Image: Click-through rate per funnel stage

This suggests that the top of the content is — very likely — missing the mark for a high percentage of visitors. Users who read this content spend on average one minute per page and never return. Moreover, very few of those who see the snippets in search engines click them.

So it’s very likely that the top of the funnel content doesn’t actually have the expected depth, specificity, or knowledge level, and is attracting mostly beginner users who know very little about the topic.

The next step here is therefore to dig deeper and look at segments (industry, use case, new vs returning, blog readers vs. the rest, leads vs. visitors, etc.), keywords, acquisition channels, and content paths, as well as at the on-page content (legibility, structure, readability, knowledge level, specificity and depth, CTAs, etc.) to understand what needs to be optimized and how.

No bridge between the top and middle of the funnel

An interesting situation in this case is the middle of the funnel. This company has quite some cases and stories, and the consumption and conversion metrics for MOFU content look good.

But there’s no bridge between the top and the middle of the funnel content. Users who land on a TOFU page — most frequently a blog article — read it and leave. They’re not encouraged to read anything else. There’s no CTA, no reference or link to a case study, customer story or social proof video.

Also, middle of the funnel pages have no other CTAs. Users who watch and read these stories can, of course, look for sign up buttons, but they’re not actively encouraged to do so. There’s a single CTA at the top of the page, and that’s all.

This company can achieve some quick wins by fixing the content path / flow problem and increasing the quality of the TOFU content.

If you’d like us to look at your content performance and help you get clarity for your content strategy, get in touch or book a free mentoring call.