The SEO ecosystem witnessed significant shifts in 2023, prompting industry leaders to reevaluate their strategies. Amidst these changes, the team at BUZWIT DIGITAL STUDIO introduced articles that reflect these transformations, setting the stage for a comprehensive review of the standout insights from 2023 and their implications for 2024 and beyond.
Crucial Elements Shaping Rankings
Understanding search intent is fundamental to SEO, guiding marketers in tailoring content to meet user needs. While conventional advice suggests diversifying content across different search intents, BUZWIT DIGITAL STUDIO diverges from this narrative, advocating for prioritizing bottom-of-the-funnel content over an even spread across the SEO funnel.
Why this shift in perspective?
The finite nature of SEO resources poses a challenge. With limitations in manpower and budget and the increasing relevance of content quality and backlinks, the strategy needs reconsideration.
Empirical evidence from working with various brands over extensive periods highlights a compelling argument: focusing efforts on bottom-of-the-funnel, transactional keywords yield substantially higher returns on SEO investments compared to a balanced approach across the funnel.
The reality of finite SEO resources necessitates a recalibration of keyword targeting strategies. Prioritizing SEO efforts towards generating optimal ROI, particularly through bottom-of-the-funnel keywords, emerges as the most logical approach.
The stark difference in conversion rates
The data reveals that pages ranking for bottom-of-the-funnel keywords significantly outperform those targeting top-of-the-funnel, informational keywords. This disparity underscores the pivotal role of transactional keywords in driving conversions.
The argument for targeting top-of-the-funnel keywords often rests on high search volumes, intending to expose brands to a broad audience potentially in need of their products or services. However, the complexity of converting top-of-the-funnel traffic into customers reveals its limitations. The journey from query to conversion involves multiple steps, each with minute conversion rates, leading to an overall minimal conversion rate.
The focus on bottom-of-the-funnel keywords raises crucial questions:
- Which keywords qualify as bottom-of-the-funnel?
- How many of these high-converting keywords exist within a specific niche?
Recalibration of SEO strategies
Prioritizing bottom-of-the-funnel content over the traditional SEO funnel approach marks a paradigm shift in maximizing ROI while efficiently utilizing finite SEO resources.
Shifting towards this approach demands a meticulous analysis of existing strategies and the identification of keywords aligning with bottom-of-the-funnel intent. This involves a comprehensive review of SEO tools and data to unearth hidden potential within the niche.
For instance, the category keywords, often acknowledged and targeted by most SEO and marketing teams, represent a vital segment. Yet, the tendency to focus solely on these keywords may limit exposure to other equally impactful keywords that can significantly contribute to conversions.
Moreover, the dynamism of search intent and user behavior necessitates ongoing adaptation. Keywords that may have previously been categorized as mid-funnel may exhibit characteristics of bottom-of-the-funnel intent as user behavior and search trends evolve.
Factors Influencing Page Rankings
Quality Content
The caliber of content greatly influences rankings, emphasizing originality, expertise, and relevance that align with user intent.
Backlink Strength
The presence and quality of backlinks significantly impact rankings, acting as a strong determinant for search engine algorithms.
Relevance to Search Intent
Ensuring alignment with user search intent is key; it affects how well a page resonates with the user’s query, playing a vital role in its ranking.
From our observation, there exist three primary groups of bottom-of-the-funnel keywords, with only the initial one widely acknowledged as such.
Category Keywords
Undoubtedly, these represent profoundly converting transactional keywords specific to SEO software brands, emphasizing their significance. Within our framework for BOTF SEO, termed Pain Point SEO, these are referred to as “category keywords,” given their direct reference to the product or service category by users through Google searches.
Optimizing Bottom-of-the-Funnel Content
The majority of SEO and marketing teams recognize these keywords and often direct their attention to them, typically concentrating efforts on the homepage or a couple of landing pages.
However, what we’ve observed is that several teams view these as the sole representation of bottom-of-the-funnel or transactional keywords. They aim for a handful of category-specific keywords and allocate their remaining resources towards crafting blog content aimed at ranking for top-of-the-funnel search terms.
Yet, numerous other highly converting search terms exist, which most brands tend to overlook. Instead, they prioritize creating content to target low-converting top-of-the-funnel keywords.
Comparison Keywords
These are search terms that indicate a user is evaluating multiple options, like “Salesforce vs. Pipedrive” or “Adidas vs. Nike women’s running shoes.”
While many discussions about search intent label this as a mid-funnel query, suggesting that the searcher might not be prepared for a transaction but is engaged in product research, our assessment of conversion rates from numerous pages ranking for comparison keywords reveals they often convert as effectively as the previously mentioned category keywords.
Hence, from our perspective, companies aiming to optimize SEO returns should actively prioritize and pursue these comparison keywords.
They need to identify every comparison keyword linked to their primary competitors that holds any level of search interest and make certain they have a dedicated webpage on their site optimized to rank for each of these.
Jobs To Be Done Keywords
This category stands as the most extensive among the three in terms of high-buying-intent keywords, implying there are usually more job-related keywords compared to category or comparison keywords.
This category often gets overlooked or undervalued by brands in terms of its potential for generating conversions because these keywords represent queries where users are not explicitly seeking or comparing product alternatives but are expressing an issue that their product can resolve.
Conclusion
The strategic recalibration of SEO efforts towards prioritizing bottom-of-the-funnel content presents a compelling opportunity for businesses to maximize ROI and harness the full potential of their SEO resources. Embracing this shift demands a nuanced understanding of search intent, diligent keyword analysis, and a willingness to adapt strategies to evolving user behaviors.