Table of Contents
After Reading This Guide, You’ll Understand 🡭
- Planning BOFU content strategy
- Content organization
- Optimizing BOFU pages for conversion
About The Business 🡭
Shopify is an eCommerce platform for online stores and individuals to run and grow their online businesses. The primary CTA used on the website, product pages, and blog posts are ‘Start free trial.’
Results Achieved 🡭
Shopify has created 240+ landing pages selling the same product (a paid eCommerce platform).
And all of these bottom-of-the-funnel landing pages are published under the subfolder ‘sell’ (https://www.shopify.com/sell).
Here are some of the stats of this subfolder:
- Getting over 11k organic visits per month
- 16k+ backlinks from almost 1.6k different domains
Even though the monthly visit is only 11k per month, the value of these pages is very high.
Why?
These are all bottom-of-the-funnel content. That means users landing on these pages are more likely to convert for a ‘Shopify free trial‘ than to read an informative blog post.
Most of all, these landing pages are highly targeted to drive conversions. As a result, pages only from this subfolder are ranking on the first page (0th-10th position) for more than 1,000 buying-intent keywords.
Some of these keywords are:
- Sell shoes online
- Sell makeup
- how to start an online clothing store
- sell cbd online
Content Strategy Breakdown 🡭
Let’s breakdown the key strategies of Shopify that you can use too.
1/ Creating Multiple Landing Pages
One of the biggest mistakes most businesses make is not creating enough landing pages. But here, Shopify did the opposite. They have 240+ product pages with the same CTA, which is ‘Start free trial.’
Here are the key reasons:
REASON 1. Providing Personalized User Experience
Assume that you want to start and grow an online t-shirt store.
Now, tell me which of the following titles you’re more likely to visit?
- Start, Run, And Grow Your T‑shirt Business
- Start A Business, Grow Your Business – Shopify 14-Day Free Trial
Obviously, the first option seems more personalized and made for your specific requirement. Not only the title, but Shopify personalize the entire landing page for the t-shirt selling businesses.
This way, the conversion rate goes up.
This is just one example. In reality, Shopify has created this personalized experience for 200+ industries.
This small change in the BOFU-content strategy ultimately leads to higher conversions.
REASON 2. Rank For More High-Intent Keywords
In SEO, the game is to rank higher for important and relevant keywords.
When you have one or two landing pages or product pages, you limit your chance to rank for thousands of keywords from different industries.
Better approach?
Create service/product pages targeting different industries, use cases, audience personas, and so on.
In this way, you’ll have a list of multiple landing page ideas that provide a personalized user experience and drive qualified traffic.
Here’s how Shopify has created landing pages for 240+ different eCommerce industries:
As a result, Shopify is getting 11k+ monthly organic visits which wouldn’t have been possible with 1 or 2 product landing pages.
2/ Organized Content Structure
When you build a large content hub with hundreds of pages, you have to deal with the content organization.
This is where the internal linking strategy plays a critical role here.
Here, Shopify did a great job at building a content hub where these landing pages are internally linked with each other.
At the bottom of each landing page, you’ll find a section called ‘Starting a different type of business?’.
And, when you click on the ‘view more things to sell,’ you’ll get to see the entire list of landing pages under the ‘Sell’ subfolder.
Here’s what it looks like:
The benefits of this approach:
- Every landing page is Internally linked with each other
- Google can easily crawl and index these pages.
- Passes PageRank from one page to another. Hence, help in ranking higher for competitive terms.
Let me help you visualize the internal linking of this specific subfolder of Shopify:
This helps in maintaining a flat site architecture where the pages are only 1 or 2 clicks away from the home page.
3/ Scale The Content Creation Process
When there are hundreds or thousands of possible page ideas, you need to think of scaling the process.
Building each page manually will take a lot of time and effort.
Better approach?
Create page templates and use that for all other relevant page ideas.
For example, Shopify has used the same landing page structure for all of its pages.
This helps in maintaining brand consistency, reduces effort, and saves time for your content team.
Do This Now 🡭
Follow these steps to find and execute BOFU Content ideas to drive qualified traffic and improve conversions.
STEP 1. Find BOFU Content Ideas
First, open a spreadsheet and create different columns for industries, product features, audience personas, and so on.
Next, list down all the possible target industries, features, and user profiles depending on the business model.
This will look like this:
Make a copy of the above template
Once you’re done with the list, you’ll have page ideas for the bottom-of-the-funnel stage.
STEP 2. Prioritize The Content Ideas
Content prioritization is important to focus on the most important page ideas first. The good approach will be to prioritize the content list by demand (not just organic but also from social media channels), the business value of the keywords, and relevancy.
Here’s an example:
STEP 3. Create Template To Scale The Content Creation
Don’t create each landing page from scratch. Instead, develop a template and use it for all other pages.
STEP 4. Plan Internal Linking Strategy
Here are a few ways you can plan the linking strategy for these cluster pages:
- Add links from the footer like Shopify did with their content hub.
- Use site navigation. If the number of pages is huge, you may use categories and sub-categories.
- If the above ideas aren’t suitable because of the number of pages, create a hub page and link to all the landing pages (with descriptive anchor text). Next, you may either add the hub page from navigation or the footer.
Related Examples On Finding BOFU Landing Page Ideas 🡭
Some of the examples of
1. Notion
Notion has categorized its BOFU content inventory by:
- Team size
- Team function
- Industry
2. ActiveCampaign
The site navigation of the ActiveCampaign website has highlighted their important product pages by:
- Product features
- Need
- Industry
2. FoundationInc
This BOFU content strategy doesn’t only apply to SaaS product businesses. Service businesses can also use this strategy like FoundtionInc (a content marketing agency) did.
They have targeted:
- Software companies
- Manufacturing companies
- B2B industry
Optional Assignment 🡭
Pick a SaaS business or any other online business and list down all the possible landing page ideas by:
- Industry
- Audience personas
- Product use cases
Prioritize the landing page ideas by traffic, relevancy, and business value and eliminate what’s not needed.
Next, plan the internal linking strategy (required for a large number of pages).
