Focus on full funnel SEO not just the top
SEO has focused on becoming experts at leading people to the front door and then ignoring everything that happens after that.
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Typically, an SEO dashboard presents a story of success that is, in reality, a story half-told. It will highlight keyword rankings, AI prompts, sessions, and possibly conversions, but this narrative, focused solely on acquisition, represents a failure of imagination and eventually hurts the SEO team. It’s a strategy that treats people like traffic to be captured, not customers to be served. SEO has focused on becoming experts at leading people to the front door and then ignoring everything that happens after that. This needs to change.
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Unfortunately, the obsession with acquisition relegates SEO to a tactical silo. A focus only on acquisition as a measure of its value by its ability to fill the sales pipeline, not by the long-term success of the users we bring in. This is a fatal mistake and a big reason why CMOs are rushing to purchase AI visibility tools, which will show that, somehow, their SEO efforts are still relevant. This caps SEO's potential and disconnects our work from the ultimate goal of any healthy business: creating loyal and valuable customers as measured by LTV, not just the first conversion.
Think long term
Instead, SEO should integrate a full funnel focus with an acknowledgement that SEO is a constant companion throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It shouldn’t matter whether this is a brand new customer coming from a competitor, a user who is experiencing an issue with the product, or a user who’s about to cancel. In any stage of the customer’s lifecycle, if they search for solutions, SEO must be present to capture their attention, regardless of the monthly search volume.
A full-funnel SEO strategy aims to own these moments. It transforms SEO into an engine for user success, activation, and retention. To make this shift, we must redefine our role, especially in an AI-driven world. A strategic SEO professional is not just a traffic acquirer; they are a user success and lifecycle partner for all product lines. SEO never ends at conversion. Every search related to your products is an opportunity to engage.
Activation SEO
Activation is the “aha!” moment that determines whether they become an engaged customer or a churn statistic. That aha moment is when the user experiences the value of the product. The speed at which a user reaches this point will have a significant impact on success. Every product that you use regularly has likely had an aha moment for you. SEO can influence this aha moment. Once that moment is defined, don’t neglect coming up with a strategy on how SEO can play a role here. Contact me if I can help with this strategy.
A new user, unfamiliar with your interface and terminology, will get stuck. Their first move isn't to read your entire knowledge base; it's to Google their problem. They search for pointed questions like, “how to import contacts into [your product]” , “where to find the API key in [your product].”, or even “how to upgrade”.
Product-led SEO efforts treat these queries with the same intensity as high-value commercial keywords because they have high user value. The landing page for these activation intents is just as important as any other page on the site.
By optimizing for these activation-focused search intents, you directly reduce friction in the onboarding experience. You are not just building traffic but increasing trial-to-paid conversion rates, increasing usage, and starting every customer relationship with a successful interaction.
Retention
With a customer activated, the focus shifts to keeping them. The most significant driver of churn is frustration. Whenever a user is frustrated before reaching out to complain, they turn to Google. If they find Reddit as a ranking result, they are being helped by Reddit users, not you.
Your customer support data is a goldmine for your SEO strategy. At SurveyMonkey, I analyzed customer data to understand what users wanted to do with the product and what frustrations they faced. On the former, I created landing pages, but for the latter, I decreased support calls by creating pages that scalably answered common user issues.
By mining customer support data, you can identify common friction points and build a library of content to resolve them preemptively. While these queries might not be as fun as those acquisition queries, in absolute value, they potentially could lead to more revenue and especially lifetime revenue than any of the more top-of-funnel keywords.
Note how Xfinity has built a retention page specifically for people who search for cancelling their service. These are the types of search queries most SEO teams ignore because there is no acquisition credit.
Additionally, instead of just measuring SEO by revenue, other KPI’s can be added, like NPS scores or net customer support queries. If these numbers move in the right direction, SEO might be deserving of some of the credit. You should be tracking this.
Expansion
The most efficient growth comes from an existing customer base. These are the freemium customers that might want to upgrade or the paying users who wish to refer their friends. In each of these cases, the revenue might not be direct acquisition, but the intent behind these queries certainly lends itself to revenue.
A mature, full-funnel SEO strategy targets these terms directly. This means creating clear comparisons of your pricing tiers and their features. It is about building a clear, search-driven path that shows a customer how to grow with your platform. By optimizing for these expansion-focused searches, you create new revenue streams from your most valuable asset: your current customers.
SEO is bigger than acquisition
Executing this strategy requires the SEO team to break out of its silo. This is not a solo mission. It demands deep collaboration with the product team to ensure user documentation is built for search visibility from the start. You must have a data-sharing pact with the customer success team to turn support trends into a content strategy.
This involves collaborating with data analysts to develop attribution models that track SEO’s impact on activation, churn, and expansion. Most fail at this and are forced to defend why their budgets matter when top-of-funnel clicks decline.
This is the accurate measure of SEO excellence. SEO success is not found in the raw volume of traffic you generate, but in your ability to be present with a helpful answer at every critical stage of the customer journey. By expanding our vision beyond acquisition, we transform SEO from a simple marketing tactic into an essential pillar of a company’s product and customer success strategy.
If you are struggling to stay relevant when search clicks decline, it's time to shift your focus. You'll then realize that SEO remains valuable as long as your customers continue to search.
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This is really good Eli! Totally nailed it how SEO is very much a lifecycle marketing play. Loved this one 💛