Link the Content to the Product

Merchants should make it easy for her to convert before she gets frustrated and leaves. Put a "Buy" button and a details link right there. If the content is a video clip of a cat going crazy over a toy and the site sells that toy, for goodness sake put a bar of similar products with images and "Buy" buttons right there on the video page. Integrate the content with the products. Don’t just expect the visitor to be so excited that they’ll hunt until they find it. Years of experience tell us that visitors get frustrated and quickly leave.

Just because the content has been generated for SEO benefit, does not mean that there are somehow different rules around value and conversion. From an SEO perspective, think of another form of conversion: links. If the content generated lots of traffic, did it generate any links to that URL? Any Tweets or Facebook comments? Any Diggs or Stumbles? These are valuable forms of conversion as well. If one of the primary intentions of content generation is SEO, then conversion to links is an extremely important measure of success. Assuming the content is hosted on the same domain as the ecommerce site, the links to that content will serve to strengthen not just the SEO performance of the content piece, but the site overall. And that leads to increasing traffic and sales.