How to Strategically Integrate SEO Into Your Online Sales Funnel
When most people think about funnel marketing, they think about a paid search, paid social, or even an email strategy. Although these are key elements to building out your funnel, SEO often gets left in the dust. Although SEO is a long-term play, with time and relevant content for all stages of the funnel, it can prove to have a substantial ROI for your business.
By strategically incorporating an SEO strategy that caters to all stages of the funnel, you are maximizing market share by capturing users in the various stages of the funnel rather than just one step. From the blog to core landing pages, an on-page SEO strategy can establish your company as a thought leader online while also organically driving qualified traffic to your website.
Integrating SEO Into Your Funnel in 3 Steps
SEO takes patience and ongoing optimization. In order for SEO to provide a long-term ROI for your website, the crucial steps to building out your SEO Strategy into all areas of the funnel are:
- Understanding your user’s search intent
- Having a blog that further helps to answer the most frequently asked questions, problems, and topics in the specific industry
- Having relevant, evergreen content that pushes people throughout all stages of the customer journey housed on the main navigation of your website.
We typically find that businesses miss out on step #3. Creating content that plays a strategic role at each stage of the buyer’s journey is essential to pushing prospects from research to becoming loyal, paying customers. What is the best place to house this content? On conversion-oriented landing pages within the main navigation of your website. These pages help answer questions and drive your user’s decision-making about using your service. This can instantly help improve the content on your site and assist in your users’ journey as they browse your landing pages.
When backed by an SEO and content strategy, this type of content will not only help drive traffic but will also cater to the people who are closer to making a purchase or decision – the middle and bottom of the funnel. Ultimately, the purpose of creating these strategic SEO landing pages on a website is to help increase qualified organic traffic likely to convert. By providing them with the answers they are looking to get answered, they are more likely to trust you as a credible source and eventually use you as the solution to their problem.
Why Evergreen SEO Landing Pages?
Main-level navigation pages tend to hold more sales-oriented content. However, through a collaborative SEO and content strategy, we can create our funnel on the website by auditing the existing content on the website and identifying which funnel stages we are content-rich and which steps we are more content-poor.
Typically, the blog is catered to top-of-funnel traffic, while product or service pages are more transactional and sales-oriented. However, we have identified an opportunity to create informational evergreen pages that will truly guide someone throughout the entire purchasing funnel and aim to answer common questions that the user might have.
The strategy behind this type of landing page is to have your company or website show up on page one of Google for relevant topics and keywords that prospective clients or customers are searching for before they’ve even heard about your company.
Top-of-the-Funnel Traffic
The first element of building a strong SEO and content strategy is understanding your user’s search intent. This step takes some research and understanding of various trends and topics in your industry and asking yourself some of the following questions: What are our users searching for? What are the common problems that our users have? What topics are our competitors discussing?
More often than not, a blog serves to answer these top-of-the-funnel questions that users are searching for. These users know that they have a problem, but they don’t know that you can provide the solution yet. However, when a potential client or customer is doing their research on Google and your blog is not showing up on the first page, then what’s the use of your information if it’s not generating traffic?
This could mean that your blog post is not relevant to a topic that your users are searching for or that you don’t have an SEO strategy to reinforce your blog content in order for it to rank on page one of Google. However, suppose a researched SEO strategy backs those top-of-the-funnel questions, topics, and trends. In that case, it will help the pages rank organically from a search perspective and ultimately help drive qualified traffic. Examples of the funnel questions include: “What are the causes for insomnia?” or “Does stress cause insomnia?” which might lead your user to land on a blog post: “Top 10 Causes of Insomnia”.
Middle-of-the-Funnel Traffic
So, what about incorporating an SEO Strategy for the top and middle of your funnel? Do our users even know that there are solutions to these problems? What solutions can we provide our users? What are common questions people are asking about our service or offering? Most of the time, it appears that websites have a gap in their SEO Strategy in more of the middle-of-the-funnel questions and topics that people are searching for.
This is where there is an opportunity to create strategic SEO evergreen landing pages on the main level navigation that explain HOW your product or service helps solve these problems or answers these questions. Examples of these middle-of-the-funnel keywords are “natural insomnia remedies” or “benefits of insomnia remedies,” which would lead a user to a category page with a natural remedy for insomnia. In most cases, for this page to rank organically for these middle-of-the-funnel keywords, there needs to be content that lives at the top or bottom of the page that reinforces the user’s search intent and relevancy.
Having an SEO and content strategy behind these pages, from a keyword ranking standpoint, can help to explain the offering or services to someone who is already on your website while also helping those pages show up on page one of Google for non-branded search terms. For example, User 1 searches “power digital marketing SEO,” and the SEO category page for Power Digital Marketing shows up as the first result on Google. User 2 searches “SEO strategy for my website,” and the same page shows up on Google’s first result. Both users 1 and 2 want to know more about SEO. However, User 1 had previous knowledge that Power Digital Marketing provides SEO services, while User 2 had just discovered Power Digital Marketing can help them learn more about SEO.
