Win at SGE with midfunnel SEO
Here's how you can protect against an SGE decline.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Digital PR agency Search Intelligence, which uses PR methods to grow a link portfolio and North Star Inbound, which is a recommended agency for penalty recovery. See their case studies linked in the newsletter.
This week’s recommended resources:
{Sponsored} Upcoming Virtual Event from TheWordsmith.ai on April 17th: Maintaining Brand Consistency and Quality in AI-augmented Marketing. Register to save your spot
I am speaking at SEO Square next week. Register here for free.
If you are looking for a new role, check out SEOJobs.com, and if you are hiring, please let me know as I know some great people.
I shared in last week’s newsletter update that SGE is launching very soon, and most websites on the Internet will discover that their traffic will be impacted. The scale of that impact will depend on the vertical, how the website is monetized, and the buyer’s journey that they target with their SEO strategies.
AI is excellent at informational searches
As anyone who has tried AI lookup tools over the last year knows, these engines are great at producing information, although the accuracy is sometimes questioned. If your SEO strategy is currently targeted at the types of queries where the answer your website gives is entirely commoditized, meaning that the core information is the same across any website and the user is agnostic to which website provides that information, this is where AI will shine, and you might lose traffic.
[SPONSORED by Search Intelligence]
We built 300 PR links for his betting client, and their visibility exploded on Google.
But it’s not just our links that made their website chart look like NVIDIA stock.
Links in some of the world's largest publications: NBC, NY Post, Express, Mirror, and hundreds more.
This is in addition to the super-relevant links they are also building via other methods.
SEO is changing.
Link building is changing.
Instead, your SEO strategies should focus on the midfunnel of a buyer’s journey.
While you may have seen elaborate multi-phase funnels in a marketing class, I believe there are only three significant stages of any funnel.
Top
Mid
Bottom
At the top of the funnel, users are just exploring ideas about what they might want. This is where AI lookups shine.
The bottom is where users are essentially ready to buy. In e-commerce, they will be checking out. For SaaS, they are prepared to either negotiate a contract or put in a credit card. For a service, they are ready to buy when they find the right fit.
The midfunnel is where the real competition is.
The middle of the funnel, or the consideration stage, is where users evaluate their options and decide which solution best suits their needs.
The audience is warming up to their needs but evaluating their options, not necessarily considering your specific product/service.
This stage aims to nurture the user to build purchase intent, identify if they are a good fit for your solutions, and then bring them to the bottom of the funnel.
The marketing approach should be persuasive, educational, and targeted to the buyer's needs and interests. At this point, the buyer is aware of what they might want but is still not ready to make a purchase.
Mid-funnel content will assume the user already has context, so the goal is to add even more context.
The goal is to shepherd the audience from the consideration stage towards the decision stage, where they are ready to purchase.
How to do Mid-Funnel SEO?
SEO for the mid-funnel means that your strategies will assume that the user already has top-of-funnel awareness. In an SGE first world, they may get this awareness from a top-of-funnel search that is answered by an SGE answer. This SGE answer may contain brand and product suggestions so that the follow-up searches will be more specific to those brands and products.
(As an aside, the focus of link building should migrate to brand and citation building because this is likely how brands and products will end up in those SGE answers. As always, message me if you need an introduction to a great agency.)
Mid-funnel SEO aims to position your products and services as the most relevant and valuable solution for these potential customers.
It is important to note that keyword research and forecasting will be less relevant for the mid-funnel because the guiding force will be purchase intent rather than monthly search volume. Additionally, while there will be significantly less traffic, the traffic that does arrive on the site will be far more qualified and valuable.
If you use traffic as a success metric for SEO, immediately move to another business KPI, such as conversion or revenue.
Here are some key aspects and pointers for mid-funnel SEO:
Targeting Commercial and Consideration Keywords
Mid-funnel SEO focuses on targeting keywords that indicate a user's intent to make a purchase, such as "best [product] for [use case]", " [product A] vs [product B]", or "[product] reviews". These keywords suggest the user is actively considering their options and is closer to buying.
Keywords like these will be far less competitive than top-of-funnel keywords, making you more likely to see success in your visibility efforts. Also, while SGE answers could appear on these keywords, the user will potentially still click search results because those answers will not be satisfying enough.
The content should be persuasive
As I shared in the mid-funnel background, the content created for the mid-funnel stage should be more detailed and solution-oriented, addressing your target audience's specific pain points and needs.
FAQs are great content types for this user because rather than attempting to “rank” this content, the intent is actually to answer those frequently asked questions. Midfunel content can include product pages, case studies, comparison guides, and other content that helps potential customers understand how your offering can solve their problems.
Feature pages as an opportunity
I once consulted for a company that had not bothered to create pages describing its package features. Since they missed this opportunity, many “parasite SEO” sites filled in the gap. After I persuaded the company to prioritize feature pages on their site, they immediately rose to the top of the search results for branded searches related to their features, capturing a meaningful amount of new revenue.
I have also seen websites allow parasite websites to be more visible for their pricing brand terms because the brand itself did a subpar job. This might be another place to build SEO efforts if this is you.
Nurturing the user
Mid-funnel SEO is about attracting new visitors and nurturing the users you've already generated through your top-of-funnel efforts. If your company does offline advertising, it informs users of your products and services. SEO should pick up the baton on that awareness by focusing on what the user now knows.
If you measure SEO with weighted attribution, you don’t need to convert every user to an organic channel. Consider how this mid-funnel SEO user could be brought to a lower point in the funnel if you utilized all other marketing channels.
This can involve strategies like retargeting ads, email marketing, and lead magnets to keep your brand top-of-mind and guide potential customers toward purchasing decisions.
If the user converts, the business wins. It’s not about just channel wins.
Measuring and optimizing
In the mid-funnel stage, it's important to track metrics that indicate user engagement and interest, such as time on site, bounce rate, and conversion rates. (Important note: the engagement rates should be benchmarked against YOUR own data. There is no perfect time on site, but there may be an ideal time on site for your website. Pages that don’t meet this benchmark might need to be adjusted.) This data can help you understand which content and strategies are most effective at moving potential customers through the funnel.
Invest in weighted attribution, and you will know that the channel is working even if you don’t have those direct conversion metrics. The focus is on nurturing that user to a lower point in the funnel and then to buy, so build the measurement to know that it is working.
Go forth and pivot
Each company, brand, and service will define midfunnel SEO differently. My intent was not to give you a strategy but a point of view of how you can build one. I hope this post changes how you view SGE because I firmly believe it is a massive opportunity for those brands that embrace this new approach to the user. Get in touch if I can help!
[Sponsored by North Star Inbound ]
How to shrink your site and double your traffic.
Most of us are familiar with the basic content audit. We analyze and place pages into one of four categories: remove, replace, redirect, and combine.
But simple ≠ easy.
If you’re categorizing based solely on quantitative data like traffic and rankings, you’re likely oversimplifying and may hurt yourself more than you help.
Qualitative factors are crucial to good content audits.
Here’s why.
Each page should be analyzed qualitatively before being categorized.
Look at the low-performing pages as a group. What can you learn from the high performers? Are there any patterns?
Recently, Google has narrowed the authority of many sites. Has Google narrowed your expertise?
Sometimes the SERP has changed. So, pages need to be updated to match.
We’ve leveraged content audits to help sites achieve a quick ROI as well as a crucial step in recovering from core updates.
Contact us here to get yours today.
