About The Authors

Bryan Eisenberg is a New York Times-bestselling author, an award-winning blogger, an internationally acclaimed speaker and the recognized authority on improving online conversion rates.

Jay Baer is a hype-free social media and content strategist, and co-author of the social business book, “The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social.”

Pelin Thorogood is a new media marketer and entrepreneur, and was recently named one of the “20 Women to Watch” in sales lead management. She is also a guest lecturer and virtual Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Cornell.

Study Participants

eBeanstalk.com, an online toy retailer, boosted search engine traffic by 27 percent, and conversion to sale by 17 percent on product pages that were optimized with search data through InboundWriter. Paid search impressions, meanwhile, rose 45 percent without any confirmed additional increases in spend, which the study authors attributed to a higher Google Adwords Quality Score. Finally, time spent on pages rose 153 percent.		Social media expert Jay Baer, of ConvinceandConvert.com, saw traffic to five blog posts that were rewritten with InboundWriter increase 33 percent compared to the 30 days prior to the rewrite. In addition, six of seven new blog posts created using InboundWriter garnered Top 10 Google rankings within two days of publication for targeted terms.		LinkOrbit, a blog network, increased time spent on site for two new web site domains by 112 percent — compared to two control domains — by adding optimized content over a period of four weeks. The company also saw a 50 percent increase in page views per visit for the optimized domains.

Conclusion

Based on the study results, tapping into search and social intelligence during the content creation process appears to have a significant and consistent impact on search engine results, while also increasing reader engagement and conversion with improved content relevance.

Writers have the ability to create more compelling content when they know the words and phrases their readers use while searching or sharing, or when they can get guidance on how to best structure their content for online visibility. While it may not be surprising to observe the impact of such intelligence on audience reach and engagement, until now access to search and social intelligence has been limited to the SEO-savvy few, and not easily available (or usable!) for the broad spectrum of writers.

Thus, perhaps even more importantly, the study highlights how online content development is poised to change fundamentally. Whether writing a blog post, updating a web site, creating new landing page copy, or crafting a press release, easy, real-time access to search and social intelligence on their readers can enable any writer – regardless of level of SEO sophistication – to develop content that is both more discoverable online and more compelling to read.