SEO
How Do You Explain the Value of SEO? I Asked 100 Experts
This article is for anyone who wants to convince their boss to invest in SEO, or those who want to sell SEO services.
SEO is a well-known and widely used marketing tactic, but convincing your boss—or a room full of skeptics—can be tough.
So, to make this easier for you, I reached out to over 100 SEO pros and asked what arguments they used and how they overcame objections. I even got some answers from entrepreneurs who shared what convinced them to use SEO.
Out of the many good reasons to invest in SEO, based on our experience and the responses from over 100 people, I’d say these four benefits are the strongest and universal to all types of businesses.
Let’s unpack this:
- Targeted means that you attract people who are likely to become your customers by targeting keywords that are relevant to the problems your business solves.
- Evergreen means that as long as you rank, you get traffic. Even if your content is years old.
- Compounding means that traffic from optimized pages (such as blog posts) adds up, creating gradual, cumulative growth.
These traits are not unique to SEO, but what makes SEO truly hard to ignore is that it possesses all these characteristics simultaneously.
Let’s look at an example. Below you will see the performance of a few blog articles we wrote years ago. Notice how their traffic grows over time and cumulates.
Here’s the first article published in 2016 and its “humble” beginnings — only 71 monthly visits.
Fast forward to 2024: not only the traffic from that same article grew to over 10K monthly visits, but other articles written along the way added over 100K visits on top that.
And of course, this is not “just traffic”. These articles target keywords tightly related to our product allowing us to naturally feature our product.
The more popular a niche is, the more searchers can come your way. But a less popular niche can be good too — it means less competition and higher conversion rates. Highlighting the size of this opportunity is key to getting buy-in.
If the opportunity is big enough (must be data-driven, of course), then the organization will move mountains to make it happen.
According to Daniel E. Lofaso, what helps to seal the deal are traffic forecasts:
We persuade clients to invest in SEO by providing a forecasting model based on their customer lifetime value, average sale amount, or traffic and compare to competitor data using, in part, Ahrefs Top Pages report. When the forecast looks good, and the client is agreeable to the time horizon, the persuasion can be pretty strong.
Finally, the longevity of SEO can create a psychological effect of reassurance that there’s a marketing tactic constantly working for you:
When business owners work on SEO, it’s like starting another marketing machine running in the background. With SEO on their side, they don’t have to feel as pressured to show up on social media every single day.
SEO content allows for uniquely specific targeting of your audience: when they just want to be entertained, when they want to solve a problem, when they’re considering a purchase, when they’re actively comparing you to competitors, and so on.
It’s all about the keywords and their search intent. Jon Morgan from Venture Smarter leverages the intent behind keywords to demonstrate how SEO can target people who are ready to make a purchase.
SEO can sound complex and, frankly, expensive for a small business. But I explained it like this: imagine every time someone searches for “best pastries nearby,” their bakery pops right up on the first page of Google. That’s potential customers walking through your door!
Here’s an example from our blog. When people search for something like “keyword monitoring” they’re clearly in need of an app that tracks keywords — according to our Identify intents feature, 75% of the traffic for this keyword goes to pages about those tools.
This allows us to feature our Rank Tracker in the content and promote it naturally, without any “hard selling”.
SEO content lets you reach buyers for globally distributed products and local services alike. Many lawyer websites use this approach by providing basic information about common legal problems and the types of services needed to solve them, effectively capturing demand for their services.
In SEO, increasing visibility in search engines simultaneously decreases your competitor’s visibility — your gain is their loss.
To illustrate, here’s a graph of organic traffic to our article and some competing articles. You can see the exact moment when updating our article resulted in a traffic increase (blue line) with a simultaneous traffic decrease of articles that used to rank above us.
That said, this benefit is a double edged sword — missing out on SEO creates more space to grow for others. But you can turn it into a compelling argument by using competitor data:
Pointing out specific examples of competitors’ articles that are generating significant organic traffic and ranking above the client for relevant searches makes the opportunity cost of not investing in content painfully apparent.
In the long term, SEO is cheaper than most marketing tactics. Compared to search ads, the cost of investment in creating SEO content is often lower, and you don’t need to pay for every click.
Take our blog for example. If we were to “buy” this traffic with search ads, we’d have to spend $543,000 each month. Instead, SEO allows us to generate it passively, and we can spend resources to write new content and add to the traffic we’re already getting.
But that’s not all — the longer a blog exists and drives traffic, the better value it becomes because it generates more revenue for the same initial investment. In other words, the customer acquisition cost (CAC) of SEO improves over time. We can clearly see this in the correlation between organic traffic to our blog and the traffic’s value.
We got an interesting response from a “past doubter”, a CEO invested in SEO and now advises how to convince people like him:
If you’re bumping heads with someone who used to be like me, connect the dots behind how SEO drives sales and increases net earnings. Money talks. Explain how it complements existing sales funnels and how it can even reduce costs and burdens on a sales staff or production itself, which are likely huge operational expenses. Drive home cost savings, and the ROI confusion will take care of itself.
And since SEO can reduce the cost of customer acquisition, Lee Moskovitz points out the opportunity cost of not investing in SEO.
I explain that by neglecting organic traffic as a channel, you will make yourself too reliant on paid channels and other tactics that aren’t sustainable or may stop working well one day. (…) One of the most impactful ways I’ve overcome this barrier is by running competitor reports in Ahrefs and comparing website metrics to those of competitors’ websites.
Based on our experience and feedback from other SEOs, there are at least seven common objections you might encounter. Don’t worry, though — we’ve also gathered some excellent responses to address each of them.
This argument is built around the fact that it takes time to rank high on Google. And it’s true, SEO takes time to show effects; according to our poll, it takes three months on average.
But that’s only one side of the coin. It’s also true, and perhaps more important, that the results SEO delivers are sustainable and have a lasting impact — we’ve already demonstrated that in the examples above.
So it’s not really that SEO is slow; it’s just a long-term strategy that may seem like a worse choice compared to a faster tactic like PPC. But that’s like comparing a waterfall to a tap.
Besides, some keywords will bring results faster. Generally speaking, when the top 10 pages ranking for a keyword have a weak link profile (low number of pages from unique domains), that keyword will need fewer backlinks to rank, and therefore less time to rank.
You can find those keywords easily with Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty metric.
Also, updating content where you already rank in positions 4 – 15 tends to bring results fast. In Ahrefs there’s a pre-made report that collects those keywords for you, just head on to Opportunities in Site Explorer.
So let’s hear how some of our experts react to this objection:
I address this by breaking it down into realistic milestones — improvements in three to four months with significant traffic increases by month six. For instance, at Kiddom, we saw webpage engagement rise by 35% within six months. This demonstrates that while SEO requires patience, the benefits compound and provide a substantial ROI.
We offered a grace period with our services at a discounted rate, allowing them to demonstrate the effectiveness of our work internally. In the first three months with us, they saw a 75% increase in sales from organic search compared to the same period the previous year.
One of the biggest things you can do is show momentum quickly with quick wins. Once a business owner sees these, you will have less of an issue bringing forward other use cases for further work.”
This objection to SEO is built around the sentiment that Google changes too much too often for any serious business to safely invest in a search engine as a traffic source.
Google does introduce changes to their ranking systems quite often (some bigger, some smaller), but they are not drastic “revolutions” that move the search engine in to a new direction each time. They are rather coherent, incremental improvements towards the same goal — a better experience for users, harder to spam and cheat.
Because of the nature of Google algorithm changes, the principles of SEO don’t really change. It’s still about quality content, quality links and having a technically healthy site — and it’s been proven many times.
For instance, we once studied the impact of backlinks by removing them. Result: rankings went down, links are still important just like years ago.
As for the role of content quality, this hasn’t changed either.
Case in point: we regularly update old content, each time making slight improvements. We do this consistently because it yields significant results. For example, we saw an improvement from 100 to 2200 visits with just a single content update that took less than a day to complete.
So when the instability objection enters the scene, you can do what Luke Hickman from Bird does:
To address this issue, I’ll simplify the process and focus on the fundamentals of SEO, removing any jargon and reassuring them that, even with core changes, the core principles and benefits of SEO will stay the same.
This is an objection I’ve heard a lot — the return on investment (ROI) in SEO is so hard to measure that it’s always going to be dubious even if someone attempts to measure it.
But the thing is, I’ve heard the same about other marketing tactics. Even digital advertising has its challenges for accurately assessing ROI.
Measuring ROI is a big and not entirely solved problem for marketing as a whole. The challenge lies in attribution within a multi-touch buyer journey. The pricier the product or service, the longer the journey, making it even harder to measure ROI. In other words, determining which dollar spent is wasted and which dollar generates more revenue is complex.
But the good news is that there is more than one good way of proving that SEO impacts the bottom line of the business:
- Use Google Analytics to track the value of organic traffic conversions and assisted conversions (this guide explains how).
- Calculate the correlation between additional traffic from organic search and revenue/signups (ChatGPT will help you do the math).
- Show how much money SEO saves by calculating the lifetime traffic value (see here for the formula and details).
- Show testimonials from clients or marketing leaders who have seen positive results of SEO to strengthen your arguments.
SEO is full of jargon, and it’s all based on sophisticated algorithms that nobody in the industry has the manual for. It’s no wonder many people think SEO is too complicated to work with.
That said, SEO is not as complicated as it seems when we break it down to the basics.
Many clients are unfamiliar with how SEO works and its importance. I take an educational approach, explaining the fundamentals of SEO, how search engines rank websites, and the critical role of content, keywords, and backlinks. This education helps demystify SEO and builds trust.
But some people take a different approach — they avoid explaining too much, and shift the focus on what matters to businesses the most.
Avoid overwhelming jargon, focusing instead on the high level. Highlight quick wins: apply the 80/20 rule to prioritize impactful, easy-to-achieve SEO that shows immediate value.
Our respondents pointed out that even though SEO generates extremely cheap traffic, with an overall cost significantly lower than ads, there’s an upfront cost that may seem daunting to some.
Obviously, you can explain that “it’s not a cost but an investment” and long-term SEO actually helps to save money but that may not be enough to break the psychological barrier. In this case, this advice may help:
It also doesn’t need to be a yes or no situation. You can gradually carve out budget from other channels to work on low-hanging fruit SEO opportunities without taking away from those tactics.
What if people tell you they don’t need SEO? Well, they may be right. I’ve seen many companies doing just fine without search engine optimization.
But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t benefit from SEO — it could help them protect their market share or even help them do even better.
I emphasize that even if their business is currently doing well, SEO can help maintain and improve their market position. I explain that competitors are likely investing in SEO, and staying ahead requires continuous effort. I also point out that consumer behavior is increasingly driven by online searches, and capturing a larger share of organic traffic can protect and grow their market share.
I respectfully clarify the difference between having someone “check the box” on SEO by installing a plugin versus investing in a comprehensive strategy. Auditing their current SEO efforts often reveals critical technical issues, thin content, and spammy link building tactics.
Your boss/client may even think that their target audience doesn’t use search. But the chances they are wrong are still quite high.
Some clients, especially in B2B industries, believe their buyers only find them through word-of-mouth and existing relationships. I counter this notion by presenting data on how a growing share of their audience, especially younger generations, turn to search engines first when seeking solutions.
I’ve heard a lot of objections to SEO in my time. This was one of the more unusual ones: “I don’t believe the main purpose of our website is to generate new business.” I’d not come across this one before. With every objection, it’s important to understand the events or presumptions that have led to it. So, I always ask plenty of questions first to find out why they’re thinking the way they are.
Finally, your stakeholders, clients or even you may have had bad experiences with SEO, maybe even multiple times, and prefer to avoid it.
Many small businesses fall prey to rogues, who often undercut the market so that they appear to offer good value. (.…) We are also surprised, from time to time, to see outdated methods being implemented by both big and small agencies. This generally just results in the business wasting money, since the work that is implemented does not yield any results.
In cases like this, it’s crucial to identify the reason it didn’t work in the past. As our next expert says, just because you had a bad haircut…
I dig into their past efforts to pinpoint why it failed — maybe it was poor strategy, black-hat techniques, or lack of persistence. I propose a revamped, ethical strategy with a transparent roadmap, saying, “Just because you had a bad haircut once doesn’t mean you stop cutting your hair. You just need a better barber.”
A tip for agencies from Michael Sandford from SEO Works: when you hear that SEO failed before, it’s a good time to play your “reputation card” and tell a bit about how you work to earn trust.
In such cases, we have to rely on our expertise and our reputation, built over many years, and start to build trust from there. As we educate clients by explaining things in their language, by being transparent about our processes, and by demonstrating progress in a consistent and accountable way, we often win such clients round.
Final thoughts
Investing in search has one final benefit, and it’s a big one: it makes people trust you more.
We found persuading clients to invest in SEO often boils down to one fundamental value proposition – higher ranking websites convert better. It’s a simple equation: users inherently trust and purchase from businesses that dominate the organic search landscape. (…) When prospects are vetting potential vendors, subconsciously equating high rankings with subject matter mastery is human nature. A robust SEO footprint elevates the perception of expertise.
A common objection is that businesses rely on social media and don’t see the need for SEO. I explain that ranking high on Google gives a business credibility and trust that social media cannot match. People tend to trust companies they find through Google search results more because it feels like Google has vetted them.
On a final note, I’d like to thank over one hundred SEO experts who answered our call to contribute to this article!
SEO
Google Warns Of Soft 404 Errors And Their Impact On SEO
In a recent LinkedIn post, Google Analyst Gary Illyes raised awareness about two issues plaguing web crawlers: soft 404 and other “crypto” errors.
These seemingly innocuous mistakes can negatively affect SEO efforts.
Understanding Soft 404s
Soft 404 errors occur when a web server returns a standard “200 OK” HTTP status code for pages that don’t exist or contain error messages. This misleads web crawlers, causing them to waste resources on non-existent or unhelpful content.
Illyes likened the experience to visiting a coffee shop where every item is unavailable despite being listed on the menu. While this scenario might be frustrating for human customers, it poses a more serious problem for web crawlers.
As Illyes explains:
“Crawlers use the status codes to interpret whether a fetch was successful, even if the contents of the page is basically just an error message. They might happily go back to the same page again and again wasting your resources, and if there are many such pages, exponentially more resources.”
The Hidden Costs Of Soft Errors
The consequences of soft 404 errors extend beyond the inefficient use of crawler resources.
According to Illyes, these pages are unlikely to appear in search results because they are filtered out during indexing.
To combat this issue, Illyes advises serving the appropriate HTTP status code when the server or client encounters an error.
This allows crawlers to understand the situation and allocate their resources more effectively.
Illyes also cautioned against rate-limiting crawlers with messages like “TOO MANY REQUESTS SLOW DOWN,” as crawlers cannot interpret such text-based instructions.
Why SEJ Cares
Soft 404 errors can impact a website’s crawlability and indexing.
By addressing these issues, crawlers can focus on fetching and indexing pages with valuable content, potentially improving the site’s visibility in search results.
Eliminating soft 404 errors can also lead to more efficient use of server resources, as crawlers won’t waste bandwidth repeatedly visiting error pages.
How This Can Help You
To identify and resolve soft 404 errors on your website, consider the following steps:
- Regularly monitor your website’s crawl reports and logs to identify pages returning HTTP 200 status codes despite containing error messages.
- Implement proper error handling on your server to ensure that error pages are served with the appropriate HTTP status codes (e.g., 404 for not found, 410 for permanently removed).
- Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor your site’s coverage and identify any pages flagged as soft 404 errors.
Proactively addressing soft 404 errors can improve your website’s crawlability, indexing, and SEO.
Featured Image: Julia Tim/Shutterstock
SEO
SEO Reporting for Agencies (With Real Report Examples)
SEO agencies obsess over their SEO reporting process. It’s their main method to share their achievements with their clients. Without it, clients could be left in the dark about their SEO progress—and trust me, you don’t want that.
In this article, I’ll share the structures of some real-world agency reports that have been shared with me and how different size agencies approach SEO reporting.
SEO agencies juggle multiple clients, so time spent on a fixed task like reporting can quickly add up.
For example, let’s say your agency has five clients and spends two hours per month on the entire SEO reporting process.
That’s over one day per month just spent on SEO reporting.
For this reason, as an agency owner, you want your clients to be high-paying with standardized reporting deliverables, but this is often far from reality.
And it can often look something like this:
And often, the higher the budget, the more tailored your reporting becomes.
Let’s face it: An enterprise client probably won’t be impressed by a basic PDF report you generated in 10 seconds using a third-party tool if they’re paying $XX,000 per month.
Likewise, a client paying $1000 per month would probably not know where to start if you gave them a 60-page SEO report and hooked them up with a Tableau dashboard.
So, based on this, we can say that there are two main types of client reports:
- Small-medium business (SMB) SEO reports
- Enterprise businesses’ SEO reports
But before we discuss the details, let’s explore the main differences between SMB and enterprise SEO reporting.
Element | Small-medium business (SMB) SEO reporting | Enterprise business SEO reporting |
---|---|---|
Scope | Usually, one domain in one business category | Can have multiple domains, multiple territories, and multiple business categories |
Target audience | Site owners, marketing team | Marketing team, development team, senior stakeholders, other teams |
KPIs | ROI, website traffic, conversions, leads | Different teams may have different KPIs for SEO |
Recommendations | High-impact changes that are easy to implement | Incremental changes that provide long-term growth |
In my experience, SEO reporting for SMBs usually consists of three elements:
- SEO dashboards – Allows the client to check their SEO performance or KPIs at any time—usually fully automated
- SEO report – Periodic update on the total SEO campaign, usually monthly. Focuses on commentary and insights, and the format of the report can vary
- Presentation – Often, a video call with the client to run through the report and get feedback on the SEO performance
Sidenote.
Sometimes dashboards and SEO reports are combined, creating a hybrid format.
Agencies can automate their SEO reporting easily by using a free and easy-to-use solution like Google Looker Studio (GLS).
With Google Looker Studio, there are three options:
Option | Difficulty | Time investment |
---|---|---|
Set up your own dashboard | Medium | Time-consuming |
Use existing templates | Easy | Less time-consuming |
Use Ahrefs GLS templates | Easiest | Minimum |
If you don’t want to create your own dashboards, we’ve done the hard work for you and have three Google Looker Studio connectors that pull the best bits from Ahrefs.
If you aren’t confident with APIs, this is one of the best ways to get data out of Ahrefs so your clients can see it without time-consuming manual reporting.
SEO reports for SMBs are usually a document that gives a periodic update on a website’s performance.
So what’s normally included in an SMB SEO report? In my experience, it can cover some or all of the following topics—depending on the focus of the client.
Tip
Not sure how to tweak it? Here are some real SEO agency report structure examples you can take inspiration from.
SEO agency report structure #1
With this report a lot of the detail was in the organic visibility section, where it split out visibility by sector.
Also interestingly, it detailed the links acquired during the month for the agency in a classic link report—at the enterprise level, this is less common as enterprise clients acquire links all the time without lifting a finger.
SEO agency report structure #2
This is a delivery-focused report. The “impact analysis” section is interesting as it details the impact that their landing page optimization work has had, concluding with two growth figures.
This is a good way to communicate to the client the value of the work you are doing.
Clients like to have their say when it comes to the SEO calls—after all, they’re paying for it. For SMBs, ensuring they get a good ROI is usually top of their minds.
At an SMB level, the agency should be able to provide a comprehensive assessment of the SEO status of the website and get feedback from the client.
For most SMB clients, the usual format is this:
- Weekly status update call
- Monthly report call following delivery of the monthly report
In my experience, it rarely deviates from this format.
The first rule of enterprise SEO reporting is that there are no rules. So, generally speaking, what the client wants, the client (usually) gets.
Here are a few examples of scenarios that can happen when enterprise clients come on board at your agency and start talking about SEO reporting:
- “We already have our own in-house report. You can use our template [sends you horrible looking template].”
- “Our old agency had this report, can you do something similar?”
- “We want dashboard reporting so we can monitor results in real-time.”
- “Integrate your SEO reporting with our existing tools.”
- “We want the SEO report to be integrated with PPC.”
- “We want SEO to be included in a regular performance report.”
As enterprise SEO reporting is often just a chapter of the bigger performance marketing report, the SEO section has to be tailored to exactly what the client wants, with zero fluff.
When it comes to dashboard reporting, enterprise clients will usually expect a Tableau, PowerBI, or a custom-built solution, plus some data from Google Looker Studio.
Here’s a snapshot of what that can look like:
I used Tableau when I was working with enterprise clients and found it hugely useful for SEO reporting.
The deliverables for enterprise SEO reports are broadly the same as those for SMB reports, but as always, the devil is in the details.
In short, there’s usually:
- More personalization to the client’s business
- More tools used – Rather than having one or two trusted tools for SEO reporting, a “big six” agency will have access to most, if not all, of the best enterprise SEO tools in the market
- More reports created and shared with different teams
Here are three examples of enterprise SEO reporting for inspiration.
Media agency report structure #1
This report example shows that it’s mostly focused on performance and technical SEO. This agency report had a separate content report that they shared with the content team.
Media agency report structure #2
In this example, the client already had Tableau and Google Looker Studio dashboards set up and got most of their data from these two sources.
The report was created to communicate SEO activity within the business and educate stakeholders about its value.
As you can see, the focus of this report was organic performance, technical SEO, competitor performance, and dissuading clients from self-sabotage (AMP).
Another thing to notice: there is no executive summary.
The client just wanted to drop straight into the organic performance, and this was a screenshot directly from a Tableau dashboard with commentary.
This client operated in ~20 major international markets and needed a summary of the most important movements within those markets.
This report was mainly used to educate other stakeholders on SEO’s benefits and gain buy-in for further SEO improvements to the website. The “industry updates” section helped to do this.
Media agency report structure #3
Although reporting with a spreadsheet may seem archaic to some, it was what this enterprise SEO client had always done—and they weren’t prepared to change.
In this example, the spreadsheet report was a weekly requirement, and the client also requested a monthly and quarterly report in slide format.
Presenting your reports to enterprise clients is a big deal, and you’ll often present your findings to more than one team during the month.
Here are three examples of the reporting presentation schedules that I had with some of my previous clients. As you can see, a single report or dashboard is rarely enough for most enterprise SEO clients.
Client 1
- Daily performance reports on core KPIs from Adobe Analytics/GA 360 with a call if necessary
- Weekly commentary update with SEO performance highlights using Ahrefs, Pi Datametrics, GSC, and other tools
- Weekly performance call to discuss performance for the week
- Bi-weekly call with the development team to discuss priorities, notes written up using Confluence and Jira tickets submitted
- Monthly multi-channel performance report slides presented in person to highlight key wins and discuss strategy
Client 2
- Weekly report with call notes taken on Trello for the marketing team
- Weekly report spreadsheet, data from Adobe Analytics, discussed in call
- Monthly multi-channel performance report in person or video call
- Quarterly business review in person to discuss strategy
Client 3
- Weekly call with notes written on Confluence and submitting JIRA tickets for development requests
- Monthly report using slides and presented through video call
Final thoughts
The type of SEO reporting an agency delivers usually depends on your client’s budget. At SMB level, it’s easier to standardize elements of SEO reporting, but at enterprise level, sometimes you have to throw your trusty templates out the window and start from scratch. As every client is different, their reporting needs will differ too.
SEO reporting is an art for many SEO agencies. Do it well, and clients will give even poor-performing SEO campaigns a second chance. But do it badly, and you’ll almost certainly get the chop when it comes to contract renewal time.
Got more questions? Ping me on X. 🙂
SEO
How Mid-funnel Content Can Be Your Secret SEO Weapon
Recent changes to Google’s user interface have affected the volume and quality of organic website traffic.
For instance, AI Overviews and the commoditized answers Google serves directly in search results mean fewer top-of-funnel clicks reach websites.
There are also fewer clicks for bottom-of-funnel keywords as Google inserts itself in the conversion process. For example, if you look for any product-related search, it’s likely you’ll see features that would typically belong on an ecommerce product category page, like:
- Filters
- Product tiles
- Price information
- Discounts and deals
- Reviews
What’s worse, clicks on these product tiles don’t go to merchants. They open up a panel in Google with multiple sellers, including large marketplaces, instead:
These changes mean that as top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel opportunities diminish, the mid-funnel can become your secret SEO weapon instead. I’ll explain how below, but first…
What makes mid-funnel marketing different from top-of-funnel or bottom-of-funnel?
As a quick refresher, top-of-funnel (TOFU) content is educational in nature and fulfills an informational search intent. This content is the furthest from a sale in a typical conversion journey.
Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content is the content a user interacts with immediately before a sale. It fulfills a transactional intent and typically consists of sales pages and product landing pages.
Middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content is the murky in-between.
The goals of mid-funnel content are to:
- Transition searchers from being problem-aware to solution-aware
- Help searchers make a decision on the right solution
- Improve brand awareness by increasing your brand’s touchpoints with searchers
- Build trust in your brand so that when folks are ready to buy, they think of you first
It’s also where searchers may prefer information from other humans, not AI. For instance, in the words of Eli Schwartz:
While [Google’s AI] answers could appear on these keywords, the user will potentially still click search results because those answers will not be satisfying enough.
This is why it’s an excellent opportunity for SEO. It’s the type of content that cannot easily be commoditized in many industries, especially B2B.
6 creative mid-funnel content ideas and how to find them
When done well, MOFU content can deliver a higher return on SEO investment than either TOFU or BOFU content.
Here are six ideas that will spice up your strategy and leverage opportunities most other SEOs don’t even consider. I’ve used all of these with great success on client campaigns, especially for B2B brands in narrow verticals.
1. Feature roundups
Roundups are a type of list post. They’re commonly used in affiliate marketing to compare products by different brands for keywords like “best air fryers” or “best wireless headphones.”
Sites like The Wirecutter use such posts as a staple in their content strategies.
However, most affiliate sites only focus on comparing products by different brands, which is why this type of content is underutilized by other businesses, like e-commerce and SaaS brands, that don’t want to feature competing products in their editorial content.
The mid-funnel opportunity for e-commerce and SaaS companies is to think past brand vs. brand comparisons and instead create feature vs. feature or product vs. product roundups.
To find these opportunities, search for your main topic or product category in Keywords Explorer and then apply a filter to include words like:
- Ideas
- Best
- Vs
- And
- Or
- Types
- Alternatives
- Comparison
Sidenote.
The exact words that will be relevant to your niche may differ.
Look for opportunities to compare your own products or solutions. For instance, the costume store Fancy Dress has a listicle targeting the keyword “group costume ideas,” and each idea is a product they sell.
You can also compare features of your solution against each other. This can work well for SaaS businesses. For instance, consider a keyword like “best mobile banking app features.”
It’s not the lowest difficulty score but rankings are achievable for a banking brand with some authority behind it.
This is especially true when we consider that there’s only one post that’s loosely optimized for “best features” and a 403 post ranking in position three:
In either scenario, product vs. product or feature vs. feature, it’s about positioning your brand as the only option so that when readers become ready to buy, they choose you over a competitor.
2. Solution hijacking
One of my favorite MOFU content ideas is solution hijacking. It works by converting people who are already solution-aware… but for the wrong solution.
Your content should influence them to favor your product instead of the solution they already decided on.
For example, Freshbooks used this tactic to convert people using Excel for accounting and bookkeeping. It created many pages offering Excel-based solutions and templates but with calls to action to try out their tool for free.
In total, these pages deliver around 6,400 monthly organic traffic sessions.
To try this out for your website, look for keywords that are about an alternative solution to yours but do not have a clear purchase intent (e.g., “excel invoice template” if you run an accounting app). The intent bit is important, so don’t skip it.
If you’re unsure of a particular keyword’s intent, check out our AI-based “Identify Intents” feature. It will give you a percentage breakdown of the keyword’s dominant intents in the SERPs.
Here’s why intent is an important qualifier.
Let’s consider Purple. It sells hybrid mattresses but also once had the following pages for other mattress types on its website:
These URLs have since been redirected but the fact remains, they wrote about stuff they don’t sell.
At first glance, these pages seem like a decent example of solution hijacking. However, they target commercial intent keywords that are too far down the funnel.
For example, let’s look at the keyword “waterbed.” When you check out the SERP for it, it’s clear that Google treats this as a bottom-of-funnel keyword. Shopping results are at the very top of the screen, and 92% of results are targeted at searchers looking to buy waterbeds.
So, looking at the performance of these pages, including the new ones they now redirect to, there’s a big decline.
It’s unlikely Purple will be able to recover this traffic for these keywords unless it starts selling these types of mattresses.
Key takeaway: Find keywords for alternative solutions to what you offer. But make sure they don’t have such a strong purchase intent. Instead, you want to see a mixture of content types ranking, like a handful of blog posts and some product pages. That’s a decent opportunity to consider.
3. Quizzes
Quizzes are a type of interactive content that provides answers or recommends solutions to users based on their responses to specific questions.
Not all quizzes are part of the mid-funnel. For example, consider a skincare quiz.
It’s TOFU if it focuses on identifying your skin type. It’s MOFU if it recommends the perfect skincare routine for your skin type.
To find relevant opportunities, follow the same steps as above. Pop your main topic into Keywords Explorer, but this time filter for keywords including things like:
- Quiz
- Test
- What’s my…
- Find your…
- Finder
- Recommended
The few brands that do create quizzes usually don’t know how to optimize them for SEO. For example, the current top-ranking page for “skincare quiz” has fewer than 100 words of optimized content:
So optimizing the landing page is a very quick and easy win in most cases.
As for creating the quiz itself, there are so many no-code platforms, like Outgrow, that can make quiz-building a simple process. Or you can follow an infographic-style design, similar to this piece from Healthline.
Either way, quizzes can attract thousands of visitors monthly and help them decide which of your products to buy!
4. Niche calculators
Like quizzes, calculators are a great MOFU strategy that can often be created with no-code tools. They’re a great angle for MOFU content if the answer delivered by a calculator is essential for helping a searcher make a purchase decision.
Finding opportunities is straightforward, per the above process. But this time, filter for words like:
- Calculate
- Calculator
- Ratio
- How much
- Formula
- Estimate
- Estimator
It’s crazy just how underutilized this strategy is, especially by small businesses or niche websites.
For example, the keyword “neck injury settlement calculator” has all the makings of a great SEO opportunity:
- Very low difficulty score
- Very few links are needed to rank
- Loads of search volume, especially on mobile
- Projected increase in searches
- Traffic potential is about 6x the monthly search volume
- Aaaaand the top-ranking page is not well-optimized for this keyword
What a find!
If your calculator is helpful enough and provides a great user experience, you may not even need to create all that much supporting content or build many links to help it rank.
For example, let’s check out this flooring calculator:
It’s simple, provides a great user experience, and is very helpful since you can calculate the floor space of multiple rooms in one go.
It also doesn’t have much content by traditional SEO standards (~100 words) or very many links (only 16) and yet, it brings in over 8,500 visitors a month.
A helpful calculator like this gets people one step closer to purchasing, which makes it a great MOFU content asset to consider. There are so many untapped opportunities worth looking into, even for small or niche businesses.
5. Scorecards
Scorecards are another type of interactive content designed to give the searcher a performance grade.
For example, they start by asking questions, similar to a quiz, but the goal isn’t to offer an immediate solution. It’s to provide a score that helps a searcher identify potential problems they may need to fix.
In other words, quizzes are great for developing solution-awareness, while scorecards are for people who may first need to develop problem-awareness and be eased into finding the right solution.
Unlike quizzes and calculators, which both have very obvious search patterns, there are more nuances for finding scorecard-related keywords. You often can’t filter for “scorecard” or similar. So try things like:
- Rate my
- How good is my
- How bad is my
- Checker
- Grader
Anything that indicates the user wants their performance rated will suit a scorecard.
For example, consider a keyword like “rate my resume”:
It’s a great MOFU asset for a resume-building SaaS company or a resume services marketplace.
If you have a PC-related ecommerce store, you could create a scorecard for “rate my PC” searches where you recommend better components or mods to improve the user’s current computer.
The opportunities are right there for the taking if you know where to look.
6. Alternative assets
It’s clear by now that content can take many forms. In many cases, the solution someone is looking for can’t be delivered in a blog post, social post, or audiovisual format.
That’s where alternative assets can be a great solution.
These are my favorite assets to create for most B2B SEO campaigns, especially if they’re in a small vertical with few TOFU or BOFU searches. The mid-funnel becomes very lucrative in such cases.
For example, you can consider alternative assets like spreadsheet templates for knowledge workers, CAD blocks for engineers, or wiring diagrams for electricians.
There are many ways to find these types of opportunities. You can start by filtering your keyword list for:
- Common file extensions in your industry, like .jpg, .svg, .png, .psd, or .ai for designers.
- Words like spreadsheet, diagram, file, or blueprint.
- Industry-specific software like Revit for engineers, Canva for designers, and so on.
For example, in a narrow B2B vertical like personal access door manufacturing, traditional keyword research techniques may not be enough. This is the entire list of keywords about the product, for instance:
We can also forget TOFU blog posts. Answering questions like “what is a personal access door” that can now be handled by Google is often not worth the budget.
And that’s where creative thinking will be rewarded because, in this example, there’s a hidden goldmine of opportunity for CAD blocks and design files for builders and architects.
They often need CAD blocks for doors and surrounding elements like walls and windows.
Not only are there thousands of searches for stuff like this, but these are assets a door manufacturer probably already has on hand. And they may already share them with architects in their network anyway.
So why not optimize its site for such opportunities with the goal of connecting to more architects?
It’s all about solving your audience’s daily frustrations and building multiple touchpoints with them as you do so. When they’re ready to buy, they’ll likely think of you first before they even turn to Google.
Key takeaways
SEO opportunities have fundamentally changed and will continue to evolve as Google changes its interface.
With fewer clicks going to websites from top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel searches, there’s an untapped opportunity for SEO professionals to use the middle-of-the-funnel instead.
But, to do so takes far more creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, especially if you’re seeking opportunities your competitors haven’t yet considered!
If you have any examples of mid-funnel strategies that have worked wonders, feel free to share them with me on LinkedIn anytime.
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