SEO
Top-of-the-Funnel Marketing Explained: How to Attract Customers
Marketing funnels are visual representations of the stages a customer goes through, from first learning about your brand to becoming a customer.
Each marketing funnel is split into three stages:
- Top of the funnel (TOFU)
- Middle of the funnel (MOFU)
- Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)
Today, we’ll be talking about top-of-the-funnel marketing.
Top-of-the-funnel marketing refers to the marketing strategies and tactics used to create awareness of your brand or product.
TOFU is the content you create—be it a PPC ad or a blog article—that gets your brand in front of new potential customers.
TOFU content is important because it’s often the broadest marketing strategy, i.e., the more prospects at the top, the more customers at the bottom (usually). Additionally, generating awareness about your product/service helps to generate the need for it.
For example, let’s say you sell wild-caught canned tuna. Your TOFU content can be a blog post about the issues with farm-raised tuna, sharing why it’s a problem and why wild-caught tuna is better for you and the environment.
This blog post plants the seed in potential customers’ minds that they may want to start buying wild-caught tuna over farm-raised ones.
From there, MOFU content can be a blog post discussing the different companies that catch wild tuna and their practices, and BOFU content can be a post talking about why your company has the best tuna and fixes the problems other companies create.
With MOFU and BOFU content, you’re competing with other companies for the customers’ attention. But with TOFU content, you’re catching them before they’re even aware of your competitors and building trust with them before they get to the research and purchase stages, increasing your chances of capturing the final sale.
That’s why TOFU content is so important—it’s the first chain in the link.
Ready to add TOFU to your marketing menu? Here are five TOFU marketing tactics worth implementing in your business:
1. Writing blog posts
I already mentioned how a blog post can be an important TOFU content piece with the tuna example. But that’s just one of many—nearly every business can benefit from writing blog posts as TOFU content.
Let’s look at a real example. I run a blog called Adventures On The Rock, which makes money by reviewing and promoting overlanding and camping products. My goal is to get my readers to purchase my recommended products so I can make a commission.
At the top of the funnel, I need to make people aware of what overlanding even is and why people might like to try it. So I wrote this article, explaining it all in detail:
From there, that article leads to other stages of the funnel by talking about what kind of gear you need and where to buy that gear.
I found this topic through keyword research.
I started by researching the keyword “overlanding” on Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and found that most of the websites ranking for this keyword wrote an article explaining what overlanding is and how to get started.
You can find TOFU article ideas in the same way. Enter a broad seed keyword into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer (or our free keyword generator tool) and peruse the results.
2. Utilizing SEO
Pushing the blog post tactic a step further, you can use SEO to get your TOFU content in front of new people every month—for free and automatically.
For example, I wrote a TOFU article about SEO writing on this blog. It ranks on the first page for keywords like “what is seo writing,” “writing for seo,” and over 100 others:
This single article brings over 1,500 new visitors to our site every month and leads the readers toward using Ahrefs to assist them in their SEO tasks.
Other examples of TOFU SEO include:
Want to learn more? Review our SEO basics guide.
3. Posting to social media
Social media is an obvious marketing channel for any business—and it is perfect for spreading brand awareness (i.e., TOFU content).
There are a lot of social media platforms and a lot of ways to use them. I can’t possibly cover them all in one article, but I can give you a few examples.
1. TacomaBeast: Instagram
TacomaBeast uses Instagram (and other social platforms) extremely well. It has a highly targeted niche audience (Toyota Tacoma owners) and posts TOFU content on a near-daily basis.
Its posts often appeal to the niche as a whole—people who own Tacomas and want to see cool Tacoma mods and builds in action, and those who don’t yet know the brand.
These posts are shown to its existing audience but are also shown to many accounts that don’t currently follow it, building brand awareness. This is especially true with Instagram Reels and TikTok videos.
2. Duolingo: TikTok
Speaking of TikTok, few brands use it as well as Duolingo. It is an app that teaches you how to speak other languages—but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from its TikTok videos.
It embraces the idea of virality and simply getting its brand in front of people over trying to sell its product with its videos. Because of this, its videos are seen by hundreds of thousands and even millions of people—people who could potentially become users of the app.
3. The Wandering RV: Pinterest
The Wandering RV gets thousands of new visitors every month from Pinterest. It has Pinterest-sized graphics on every blog post on its site and always shares them when they’re published.
For example, it has posted pins about RV meal ideas. Once a person reads this article, they see links to RV cooking gear and accessories. These push them further down the funnel.
You can do the same by grabbing a free Canva account and using the “Pinterest pin” template. Canva has thousands of templates you can easily modify to fit your brand.
4. Running PPC ads
Sometimes, you need to pay to play, and running PPC ads is one of the best ways to get your brand in front of new audiences.
You can run ads in many places:
- Search engine ads
- Social media ads
- Display ads
- Etc
One of the easiest ways to start doing this is by copying what’s working for your competitors. Head to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, plug in a competitor’s website, then click the Paid keywords report in the left-hand menu.
You’ll often see a lot of branded keywords and MOFU/BOFU keywords in here, but sometimes you’ll come across non-branded TOFU keywords you can put a competing bid on.
Better still, TOFU keywords are often very cheap to bid on, since not as many people are running ads for them.
For example, we occasionally run PPC ads for keywords like “crawl a website” and “content idea,” which have virtually no competition and are TOFU queries.
These also happen to have a very high Keyword Difficulty (KD), meaning they are tough to rank for organically on Google’s first page. By running ads to these keywords, we can bypass the competition without spending a lot of money.
Check out our guide to PPC marketing to learn more about this tactic.
5. Direct outreach
Last but not least, you can use direct outreach as a TOFU marketing tactic. These include:
- Email outreach
- Direct mail
- Phone calls
While direct mail and phone calls can work great to find new clients, email outreach is the most scalable for the majority of online businesses because it requires the least in terms of time and money.
I use direct outreach to build links to my content, promote my articles, and find marketing partners and new customers. It’s a versatile and effective tactic.
For example, I recently ran a study ranking the top states in America to go camping, then used email outreach to get journalists to publish news articles with my findings. This study resulted in over 40 new backlinks to my site, including some from MSN, Yahoo, and TimeOut Magazine.
In addition to these high-powered links, the study also sent thousands of new visitors to my website.
If you want to learn how you can do something similar, check out our guide to digital PR and read up on how to send a good outreach email.
Final thoughts
The top of the funnel is typically where the widest-reaching marketing tactics lie. But because it’s so far from where consumers make their final purchase, it’s not the most obvious marketing choice.
However, TOFU content is where you plant the seeds that can scale your business in the future. While it shouldn’t be the first area you put time and money into, it shouldn’t be ignored either.
Questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
8 SEO Hiring Managers Share Their #1 Interview Question
Are you frantically Googling “SEO interview questions” because you’ve got an upcoming interview like… tomorrow? If so, don’t panic—I’ve got you covered.
As research for this article, I’ve asked eight top hiring managers to share the #1 SEO interview question they’re asking candidates right now, so you can understand what types of questions hiring managers are asking.
The hiring managers I talked to came from a range of different backgrounds: agency, in-house, and enterprise businesses.
It’s impossible to prepare for every question ahead of the interview, but it’s important to put yourself in their shoes and diligently do your research.
At a minimum, you should consider:
- What’s important to them and their business?
- Why should they hire you?
- Can you demonstrate a thorough understanding of SEO and bring the receipts to prove it?
Ok, that’s enough from me—let’s see what the hiring managers had to say.
This question comes from Sam Page, Director of SEO, Slack:
A competitor has implemented a new SEO strategy. How do you analyze their strategy and when do you consider implementing something similar?
How to answer
Here’s how Sam would answer this question:
I look at how the competitor uses the strategy to grow keywords, traffic, or engagement. If it makes sense and falls within best practices, I would consider implementing something similar (ideally, finding a way to improve upon it).
I analyze the success of their strategy with SEO tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Page Speed Insights (I am open to other tool ideas like GTMetrix).
I also want to consider whether the strategy is appropriate for our customer base.
Tip
As Sam mentioned, you can use Ahrefs to help with this.
I’d suggest checking out the Content changes filter in Site Explorer’s Overview to understand whether the content changes you or your competitors have made have had a positive or negative impact. You can use this information to help inform your SEO and content strategy.
This question came from Jimisha Thakrar, Head of Organic Performance at MG OMD:
“How would you handle a situation where someone in leadership wants immediate SEO results?”
How to answer
Jimisha gave an example of how to answer:
SEO is a long-term strategy, but I understand the pressure for quick wins. In these situations, I would focus on setting clear expectations early on within the business by showing realistic timelines for SEO impact and comparing it to other channels like paid search.
It’s also important to realize how key resource for implementation is going to be and that this is also going to have an impact. There are things you can do, such as identify low-hanging fruit that can provide quicker results, such as optimizing underperforming pages that are ranking on page 2 or fixing technical SEO issues that are limiting visibility (resource dependent).
Next, if leadership is eager for quick traffic due to seasonality/campaign deadlines, I would suggest they leverage paid channels for immediate impact while building on the SEO with a hybrid approach, combining short-term paid search with longer-term SEO efforts. This approach could provide the immediate visibility they seek while SEO efforts lay the groundwork for sustainable, organic traffic growth.
Finally, I would communicate the importance of patience and long-term investment in SEO, perhaps showing examples of how it contributes to sustainable traffic and revenue growth over time and work with them to focus on developing a robust SEO strategy that ensures long-term visibility.
Tip
SEO is usually a long-term marketing strategy, as Jimisha says, and you need to communicate this clearly to stakeholders, but there are a few things you can do to accelerate your SEO results.
Check out my article on Quick SEO, for eight ways to accelerate your results from months to days.
The next question comes courtesy of Fabrizio Ballarini, Organic Growth at Wise:
If you could create any page you want on your current website, what would you create?
How to answer
Often, candidates are blocked by resources and buy-in from stakeholders. I want to assess what they would do if given the freedom to execute.
Sidenote.
In my opinion, it sounds like Fabrizio is keen to find independent, creative thinkers with this type of question. This is a good example of where it is useful to have a personal website so you can say, “This is what I would do—and this is what I have done on my website.”
Even if the website is still relatively small, if the quality of the pages you mention is good, it may catch the attention of the hiring manager.
This question came from Itamar Blauer, Senior SEO Director at StudioHawk:
What do you think the most significant Google update has been in the past two years, and why?
How to answer
Itamar said he’s looking for three things when asking this question:
Firstly, I want to understand whether the candidate keeps up to date with the SEO industry and search landscape.
Secondly, I want to see how the candidate can prioritize and be critical.
Lastly, I want to get an insight into how the candidate sees different SEO areas and their significance.
I’d look for answers around the various Helpful Content Updates over the past year or so, as these have been fairly significant. Mentions of broad core algorithm updates are also fine but (generally) not as significant.
Tip
To answer this, you need to make sure you’re very extremely familiar with all the latest Google algorithm updates and be able to critically evaluate their significance.
You can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Google updates overlay to see whether updates correlate to traffic increases or decreases for the website you’re analyzing.
Here’s the question Daniel Foley Carter, Director at SEO Stack, likes to ask candidates:
How would you perform SEO testing, and why is it so important?
How to answer
This is how Daniel would like a prospective candidate to answer it:
SEO testing is important within an SEO strategy because there are so many nuances to ranking and ranking factors that we have to find that “happy medium” by testing.
Testing allows us to scratch under the surface of what our pages need to have in respect of content (including information priority, content coverage, depth, and quality of information) alongside traditional things such as tech compliance, internal & external anchors, and more.
Effectively, testing allows us to find out what’s right on a case-by-case basis – as typically, each page on a domain will be aimed at different queries where, ultimately, ranking factors are likely to vary.
Therefore, sequential and persistent testing would allow us to find what works best to establish rank and drive revenue/traffic.
Tip
You can monitor your performance of SEO tests using the Portfolios feature in Ahrefs.
This question comes from Rachel Walton, Head of SEO at Quirky Digital:
How do you prioritize which SEO work should be completed first?
How to answer
Here’s why Rachel likes asking this question, and what she’s looking for in an answer:
I love this question because the candidate will reveal a lot about both their soft skills (time and resource management) and their hard skills (specific SEO red flags) in the answer.
Candidates who interpret this as a question about their soft skills will often talk about prioritizing work that has the highest impact for the lowest resource input, or they might talk about using the first month to complete work that they know is the most important to the client.
The candidates who approach the question with an answer about their hard skills will usually talk through some key issues that they like to ensure are resolved quickly, such as poor information architecture (IA), poor technical setup, and indexing issues.
I’m always impressed with candidates who demonstrate their understanding of what foundations a client needs to perform well – this usually indicates that they have a great combination of both soft and hard skills.
For example, they realize that it’s going to be a lot easier for us to manage cannibalization issues before we move on to producing new content to save ourselves the hassle of needing to amend tons of internal linking later down the line when we cull useless or duplicated content.
This kind of response shows me that the candidate understands SEO concepts, is a forward thinker, and likely has some practical experience of messing it up once or twice and needing to rectify their mistakes — because the best growth often comes from getting it wrong, but learning from it!
Next up, here’s a question from David Schulhof, Director of Digital at PHA Group:
What should be the main priority for brands investing in SEO today, and why?
How to answer
Here’s why David likes this question and how he expects someone to answer it:
I like this broad question because it highlights what area of SEO the person is focused on and how open-minded they are to the broader SEO spectrum.
It usually ignites a good discussion and talking points to explore experience and knowledge further and also leads to lots of follow up questions.
As with any interview question, I want to hear validation for detail behind the answer, why they think it’s a priority, and how that could vary for different clients.
I would usually follow up with specific sectors or types of brands to see if the answer would change.
Our final (and very big) question comes from Philip Gamble, Head of SEO at Zenith:
What do you think the impact of AI Overviews will be on SEO as a channel?
How to answer
Philip provides an example answer below but interestingly suggests that there isn’t a right answer here.
The question is there to test the candidate’s general understanding of SEO and explore their ability to justify their SEO opinions and communicate them succinctly—essential for working agency-side.
At the moment, AI Overviews have not had a significant impact on most of my clients.
Their presence is fairly minimal compared to the early beta, and I see them predominantly on the upper funnel informational terms, mostly longer question queries.
I’ve seen a few useful AI Overviews, for example, when searching for a grammar-related question. Still, in a few cases, they just seem to duplicate information already in featured snippets. I’ve also seen some examples where the generated result wasn’t helpful.
Final thoughts
If you want to ace the interview, you need to get into the brain of the hiring manager. This is often easier said than done. As you can see from this post, every hiring manager is looking for something slightly different. You can only do this by understanding what’s important to them—and by understanding who they’re looking for.
Are you an SEO hiring manager and want to contribute to this article? If so, share your favorite SEO interview questions here or contact me on LinkedIn.
SEO
Yoast Co-Founder Suggests A WordPress Contributor Board
Joost de Valk, co-founder of the Yoast SEO plugin, published an article calling for more equitable contributions from large WordPress companies, greater financial transparency, and a new board that represents the voices of contributors and companies.
Joost de Valk Supports Matt Mullenweg
Joost de Valk’s article is supportive of WordPress and agrees with Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg that WP Engine should contribute more to WordPress. He praises Mullenweg and Automattic for the amount of contributions they make to WordPress, contrasting Mullenweg’s example against those who are financially benefiting the most from WordPress but don’t contribute on a level that’s reflective of their rewards.
He writes:
“I agree with Matt about his opinion that a big hosting company such as WPEngine should contribute more. It is the right thing to do.”
Joost writes that these aren’t just words to him, that they reflect his values and actions, sharing that his organization contributed so much time to the Gutenberg Project that it was literally at the expense of his own for-profit venture in that, while they “still made a lot of money” their revenue did experience a dip.
He thus envisions creating a board that’s representative of stakeholders as a way to encourage a healthy sustainable open source ecosystem with greater transparency and community representation.
Business Success Informs His Opinion
His idea for cultivating a health self-perpetuating open source community has been his guiding principle and is what he credits for his business success. In a 2013 WordCamp presentation he shared his experience of spending many years contributing to WordPress and creating a wildly popular plugin while not yet making any money. He reached a point where he had a day job to support his WordPress hobby and had to decide how to flip that so that they hobby became his day job.
In that presentation (The Victory Of The Commons) he described two ways of thinking about his situation, one in which he just goes all-in and focuses on doing what’s best for him and another path where he does what’s best for him and the WordPress community.
Joost credits his wife with suggesting to solve his problem by looking at it within the framework of the Tragedy Of The Commons. The Tragedy Of The Commons is a concept of how individuals can decide to either manage a shared resource to create a sustainable living for the community or behave in self-interest and eventually deplete the resource, thus harming the entire community.
He shared the following in that 2013 WordCamp presentation:
“So, if everyone in the WordPress community, if we all looked at it like this, we can make money and make sure that we reinvest that money, we’d grow.”
He said that creating something and giving it away is not necessarily good. He said it’s better for everyone to make “piles and piles of money” with the work but giving some of that back supports you and the community in a self-sustaining circle. He insisted that reinvesting “in the pasture” was paramount to working within the WordPress open source community.
“Reinvest some of that profit into all of our main pasture, WordPress. We all benefit.”
New WordPress Foundation Board
One of the solutions that Joost suggests is the creation of a board that provides representation to those who contribute to WordPress. Joost uses the analogy of taxation with representation as the basis for a WordPress Foundation board so that those who contribute can also be heard as part of the decision making process.
What he envisions isn’t a governing board with decision making power but one that serves in an advisory position that can participate as part of a dialogue within the decision-making structure.
He writes:
“I think this could actually help Matt, as I do understand that it’s very lonely at the top.
With such a group, we could also discuss how to better highlight companies that are contributing and how to encourage others to do so.”
The three main points he makes are:
1. Representation Of Stakeholders
“In my opinion, we all should get a say in how we spend those contributions. I understand that core contributors are very important, but so are the organizers of our (flagship) events, the leadership of hosting companies, etc. We need to find a way to have a group of people who represent the community and the contributing corporations.”
2. Facilitation Of Transparent Discussions
“Now I don’t mean to say that Matt should no longer be project leader. I just think that we should more transparently discuss with a ‘board’ of some sorts, about the roadmap and the future of WordPress as many people and companies depend on it.”
3. Encouragement And Recognition Of Contributions
“With such a group, we could also discuss how to better highlight companies that are contributing and how to encourage others to do so.”
Transparency With Money
One of the points that Joost brings up is somewhat separate from the creation of a contributor board and it’s about the payments made to Automattic for trademark deals. He says that thing mingling of money creates a situation where it’s uncertain how much of it is used by Automattic as contributions to WordPress.
He writes:
“…let everybody see how the money flows.
Currently the way it works is that the money for trademark deals flows to Automattic, but we don’t know how much of the contributions Automattic does are paid for by Newfold, whom we now all know are paying for the use of the trademark. Maybe the money should go directly into the foundation? If not, I think we should at least see how many of the hours contributed by Automattic are actually contributed by Newfold.”
WordPress May Be At A Crossroad
WordPress may be at a historic crossroad that could lead to different outcomes. Joost suggests doubling down on open source by engaging with the entire WordPress community, returning to the ideal of reinvesting in “the pasture” to create a sustainable system that allows everyone to make “piles and piles of money” and achieve the goals users are working toward.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator
SEO
WordPress Gives WP Engine Users A Reprieve
Matt Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org that WP Engine users have been granted a reprieve from the block on the WordPress plugin and theme repository until October 1st, allowing them to access updates as usual.
WordPress Versus WP Engine
Matt Mullenweg and popular web host WP Engine have been locked in a conflict for the past week over a commercial licensing fee that other web hosts pay but WP Engine does not. The issue between them stems from the frustrations on Mullenweg’s side with the perception that WP Engine is not giving back enough to WordPress in the way that they should. Prominent figures in the WordPress industry like Joost de Valk agree with Mullenweg that companies, including WP Engine, should give back more to WordPress.
WP Engine has offered their side of the story have gone as far as to send a formal cease and desist letter for what they perceive as an unfair attack on their business.
Regardless of who is right or wrong, WordPress users on WP Engine are caught in the middle of this conflict, with their businesses disrupted by Mullenweg’s decision to block WP Engine from accessing the WordPress.org plugin and theme repository, preventing them from updating plugins and themes.
Temporary Reprieve
Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org that he has heard from WordPress users and has decided to give the WordPress users a chance for WP Engine to set up a solution so that they won’t be inconvenienced. WP Engine has until October 1st to engineer a workaround.
He wrote:
“I’ve heard from WP Engine customers that they are frustrated that WP Engine hasn’t been able to make updates, plugin directory, theme directory, and Openverse work on their sites. It saddens me that they’ve been negatively impacted by Silver Lake‘s commercial decisions.
WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access when they chose to ignore our efforts to resolve our differences and enter into a commercial licensing agreement. Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk.
…We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.”
Read more at WordPress.org:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Vladimka production
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