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The concept of search intent and the advice for marketers to pay attention to organic keyword targeting is well established in search engine optimization.
But while many SEO writings describe search intent (like these great SEJ articles about creating content that meets search intent and understanding how people search), most brands don't clearly state that they prioritize keywords should.
Specifically, most searches are informational (people who want to learn more about a topic), comparative (people who compare solutions to their problems), and transactional (people who want to make purchases).
This is often viewed as a marketing line.
However, when it comes to tips on using search intent to your SEO advantage, the most common tip is to make sure you have a variety of content to “cover” all search intent. They have informational content, media content and marketing content.
We don't agree.
While dozens of brands have worked for years to create SEO-focused content, most companies don't need to ensure even distribution of content, but rather prioritize that distribution. Mushroom contents and proceed slowly.
Why?
The fact that the SEO resources are complete and that the bottom of the funnel content (e.g. “marketing” focused business inquiries) results in the return on investment (ROI) far exceeding the SEO costs. All the others
In this article, we explain our reasoning and share the data that supports this thesis.
SEO resources are limited: not all keywords can be targeted
If companies had unlimited SEO resources, i.e. unlimited writers for content creation, unlimited SEO strategists for keyword selection and SERPs, the general advice “make sure you have content for all stages of the funnel” would be accepted. Analysis and unlimited link building budget.
But no brand offers this.
Even the idea that AI-powered writing will make it easier to produce more content doesn't negate this fact.
Of course, AI tools can produce thousands of parts in a fraction of the time it takes a human, but that doesn't mean they're all capable or good at attracting and converting customers.
If a group of websites use AI to create identical content to target the same keywords, Google needs to differentiate them somehow to decide who they rank for. Two sure factors for decision making are content quality and previews. The links
In terms of content quality, the best pieces for a keyword may be those that are more original and offer a different personal experience, which Google clearly prefers, and features that require human involvement.
And backlinks are always a popular ranking factor in SEO. In a world where many websites are producing similar AI-generated assets targeting the same keywords, one can imagine this becoming even more, if not more, important.
No matter how much content is created, everyone's SEO resources are limited. There are limited hours, a limited writing budget (regardless of whether the writers use AI or not), and a limited link building budget.
This means you need to prioritize the keywords you want to target.
And the most logical way to prioritize is to focus your SEO efforts on what generates the highest ROI (i.e. leads and sales for SEO).
In our experience, this is the bottom of the funnel, marketing jargon.
The bottom line is that keywords convert more than anything else.
In summary, the bottom of the funnel converts better than any other type of content. The first step is to measure and track SEO conversions.
This may seem obvious, but the reality is that most content and SEO teams don't do this; Simply put, more traffic is better, and their entire strategy is focused on increasing traffic.
You can measure SEO conversion in different ways using different analytics tools, but generally the process requires the following steps.
- Define conversion. This typically involves filling out a form or starting an actual transaction for SaaS or sales-based businesses or e-commerce companies.
- Create a goal in your analytics platform to measure this conversion event.
- Generate reports on how many conversions your website's landing pages generated. This can be done with different attribution models such as first or last click depending on the analytics platform, but here all data is better than no data.
This way you will inevitably find dozens of brands and hundreds of SEO articles that we have been working with for over 5 years.
Specifically, the pages of your website at the bottom of the keywords convert at a high percentage (1-5%), while the pages at the top of the funnel convert at a high percentage (1%). . up to 5%) when changing the sides on the top of the fan. Data keywords typically change by a fraction of a percent (0.01% – 0.5%).
In other words, the difference in conversion rate between the low and high end keywords is not 10%, 20%, or even 50%, it is very large.
This is proven by data from over 60 of our software customers, where low-funnel queries target an average of 25x lower content rank than low-funnel queries. The top of the funnel.
Posts at the bottom of the funnel had a conversion rate of 4.78%, compared to 0.19% for posts at the top of the funnel. Based on over 60 prints from one customer.
Even when accounting for the funnel elements that generate the most traffic, the bottom 20 funnel elements' overall conversions were three times higher than the top 40 elements.
The bottom 20 posts in the fund generated 1,348 conversions, while the top 40 posts in the fund generated 397 conversions.
Note that the 1,350 conversions for the BOTF content above only came from 22 articles, while the 400 conversions for TOF came from 42 articles.
Additionally, we must mention that the items we marked as “top of the funnel” in this study still had some purchasing interest. We conducted a search after exhausting most of the funnel keywords and then strategically selected the keywords to ensure they still had a chance of converting.
In this sense, it is appropriate to call it “the middle of the funnel.” For many companies, most of their content and SEO efforts are focused on keywords that attract attention and have low conversion rates or low conversions or sales.
In our opinion, this SEO effort is a sad loss.
Why do informative and mainstream keywords convert so poorly?
An argument for high-funnel keyword research is usually a high search volume.
Based on the story, you can promote your brand to more people in the future who are looking for a product or service like yours.
But as the data above shows and our collective experience confirms, converting from the top of the phone requires more steps, so the conversion rate is low.
More specifically, the information query at the top of the page turns someone searching on Google into a customer:
- Search for the query on Google.
- They click on their results.
- You have read the article.
- Some of these users return to your website with a note or provide their email address to download a white paper or personal resource.
- A fraction of these users open subsequent drip emails.
- Then at some point a user will search for your product or service and find you.
Each of these steps has a low conversion rate, so the entire journey together has a low conversion rate.
Based on the information above, higher search volume does not necessarily mean lower conversion rates compared to marketing queries.
There are more keywords under the hood than you might think.
So targeting bottom-of-the-funnel keywords is a better use of limited SEO resources than evenly distributing SEO content across the search intent spectrum. So the next question is, “What are my keywords?” Position? Does it have a high conversion rate?” “At the bottom of the funnel, and how many are there?”
We've found that many SEO experts and marketers have a limited view of bottom-of-funnel keywords, which signify a certain level of transactional or purchasing interest. .
In our experience, there are three categories: Funnel keywords, only the first of which is considered the bottom of the funnel.
1. Category keywords
If we use a hypothetical company that we all know, SEO software, the obvious marketing terms are “SEO software” or “the best SEO tools”.
Yes, these are very high conversions at the bottom of the fund or key transactions that every software brand should definitely consider.
In our framework for BOTF SEO, Pain Point SEO, we call these “category keywords” because the user searches for the category name of the product or service on Google.
Most SEO and marketing teams know these keywords and target them, usually on the homepage or a landing page or two.
However, we found that many teams think these are the entire funnel or marketing keywords. They target a few category keywords and spend the rest of their time creating blog content to rank at the top of the funnel for search terms.
The reality is that there are so many other top search terms that most brands don't think about and tend to ignore, preferring to create content at the top of the songbook for keywords that are too far down.
2. Compare words
In particular, there is another category that we call comparative keywords.
These are keywords that the search engine displays when comparing different options such as “Salesforce vs. Pipedrive” or “Adidas vs. Nike women’s running shoes.”
Many search intent queries are classified as mid-funnel queries because the searcher may not be ready to make a purchase but may actually be searching for the product.
But with hundreds of comparison keywords in the page rank metrics, they usually rank with keywords in the above category.
This is why, in my opinion, companies that want to maximize SEO ROI should be aggressive with their relative keywords.
You should identify all of your competitors' key comparison keywords that look like search volume and make sure they have a dedicated page on the site to rank for each keyword.
3. Keywords of the work to be done
The last of the three keyword categories we found are job keywords, which can increase SEO conversions.
This is the most demanding of the three keyword categories, meaning a lot more work needs to be done within keywords than in category-to-category or category-to-category comparisons.
However, brands often ignore or deprioritize this category as a conversion driver because these are questions that consumers are not clearly searching for or comparing product options, but are simply indicating that they have a problem that you Product solves.
Examples of our SEO software include “How to conduct keyword research on competitors”, “How to get keyword search volume” or “How to rank a website for which keywords?”.
In our experience, if you have SEO software with features that allow users to do these things, it will drive conversions for such keywords.
Typically, these keywords have a slightly lower conversion rate than category or comparison keywords.
However, they are still much better than the usual top keywords like “SEO strategy,” “best SEO tips,” or even “digital marketing strategy.” . , but very little desire to buy.
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