What “no leads” usually turns out to mean
Three different problems produce the same complaint. They need different fixes, so separate them first.
The first is no traffic. Most pages on the web get no search traffic from Google at all, and we worked through what that does to a content plan in how much B2B content is enough. Open Search Console and sort the posts by clicks over 90 days: if the bottom half of the list reads 0, you don’t have a conversion problem yet. You have a visibility problem, and it’s a different job.
The second is traffic from people who were never going to buy. Students, competitors, job seekers, and buyers who are 3 years out. That traffic is real and it converts at zero. No amount of rewriting changes it.
The third is the expensive one. The right reader arrives, reads the whole page, and leaves no trace. That’s a chain of 5 links, and 1 of them is usually broken.
Link one: the reader was never in the market this month
B2B buying groups are large and slow, and most of the work happens before you hear from anyone.
Take any purchase with a budget line behind it. The buying group is everyone who can say no: the budget holder, the user, IT, procurement and whoever has to sign, which is a room rather than a person. The cycle runs for quarters rather than weeks. And the first contact with any vendor comes late in it, because the group spends the front of the cycle agreeing what it needs.
Your own pipeline report gives the exact numbers for your market: how many people were on the last 10 deals, and how many months each took from first visit to signature. Those are the shape of the thing, and they’re a measurement of your market rather than somebody else’s.
By the time a buyer talks to anyone, most of the requirements list is already written. So a reader who takes your article and leaves is behaving normally. They’re building that list. You’re one of the inputs.
That isn’t a broken link. We treat it as the baseline the other 4 sit on top of.
Link two: the query brings the wrong half of the audience
Search intent decides who arrives. It decides that before your writing gets a vote.
A page that ranks for “what is warehouse slotting” collects everyone who typed a definition question. Some are buyers. Most are not. A page that ranks for “warehouse slotting software pricing” collects a much smaller group with a budget line.
Both pages can be good. Only one produces an enquiry this quarter. If your plan is full of the first kind, the arithmetic is already settled.
Buyers do start with search. Ask any of them where they went first and web search comes before vendor websites, review sites or analyst reports. Which is why the query a page ranks for decides who arrives on it.
Check which of your pages rank for a question a person with a budget would type. It’s the first thing we do when we’re handed a keyword list, and it belongs in the brief rather than in the edit.
Link three: the page answers the question and stops
A reader finishes your slotting article knowing how slotting works. Nothing on the page tells them what to do next, so they go back to Google. This is the cheapest link to fix, and the one we’d check first.
A good article ends when the question is answered. That’s a fine rule for a magazine. It’s a bad rule for a vendor’s site. The reader now has an answer, and no reason to think you’re the one who should supply the thing.
The fix isn’t a pitch bolted onto the end. When we write a page, the last third belongs to the decision that follows the question. We name that decision in the outline you approve, before the draft exists. Someone who has just learned how slotting works next wants to know what it costs to do badly, what to ask a supplier, and what the switch involves.
Stop at the definition and you’ve handed them a fact they’ll use on someone else’s proposal.
Link four: nothing on the page can be forwarded
In B2B the person who reads you rarely signs anything. Count who could say no on your last deal: the budget holder, the user, IT, procurement and the signer, and that’s 5 before anyone from legal joins. Your reader carries your argument to the other 4 or more.
So the page has a second job. Some part of it has to survive being pasted into an internal thread. By a person who is not you, and who can’t answer questions about it.
We ask that about every page we write. A table of criteria, a cost comparison, a one-page customer story, a checklist with the source next to each line. If the answer is “the whole article, I suppose”, the answer is nothing. What your sales team actually forwards is a test you can run on the pages you already have.
The stakes: the winning vendor’s content is usually part of why it won, and it’s less decisive on average than it was a few years ago, because every vendor now has some. The part that still works is the part a buyer can use internally.
A case study built to be forwarded does this job better than an article, because it survives being read cold. We publish a worked example in full, a composite scenario labelled as one, so you can judge the structure before you commission the real thing.
Link five: the ask is sized for a different stage
The last link is the one people fix first, usually by making it bigger.
A reader who arrived on a definition query is a whole buying cycle from signing. “Book a demo” asks them to skip the cycle. Most won’t. The ones who do are often the least qualified people on the page.
Size the ask to the stage. We set it in the outline rather than after the draft. On an early page, the honest ask is a smaller one: the criteria list, the spreadsheet, a 2-line answer to their specific version of the question. On a comparison or pricing page, ask for the call.
There’s a benchmark-shaped hole here, and we’re leaving it visible instead of filling it with someone’s blog figure. The conversion rates you’ll find published are for landing pages built to convert, across all industries. Your blog posts are not that, and a blog post measured against a landing-page number will look broken when it’s normal. Measure a post against its own last 90 days, and against the other 20 posts on the same site.
What to measure while the chain is being repaired
Enquiries are a bad weekly metric in a market where a deal takes most of a year. They’re too rare. They also arrive too late to tell you what you changed.
Four proxies move faster, and we ask for them when we plan a set of topics rather than one at a time:
- Impressions on commercial queries, not total impressions. Track the subset with a budget behind it.
- Returning readers. A buying group that comes back 3 times is working. It’s the earliest honest signal you get.
- Pages your sales team sends. Ask them monthly which link they pasted into a thread. It’s the first thing we want to know about an existing blog. If the answer is the pricing page and nothing else, your blog isn’t in the sale.
- Requests that name the article. These are worth more than form fills, and they get logged nowhere by default.
None of the 4 is a lead. All 4 move inside a month.
The check to run on three pages this week
Take your 3 highest-traffic posts and go through them in order. Each step is a question you can answer from the page itself:
- Write down the query each one actually ranks for. Would a person with a budget type it?
- Read the last third. Does it move the reader toward a decision, or does it stop at the answer?
- Find the forwardable block. Name it out loud. If you can’t, that’s the fix.
- Check the ask against the stage. A demo request on a definition page is a mismatch, not a conversion problem.
- Ask one salesperson whether they’ve ever sent that page to anyone.
Steps 2 and 3 are where we’d expect most breaks to sit. Both are rewrites of a page you already have rather than a new article, which makes them the cheapest work in your plan.
Send us the page that gets the most traffic and produces nothing. We send back the link we think is broken, and a price to rewrite it if you want that, within one working day.