It’s not that search engine optimization doesn’t work. It’s that the way most companies do SEO doesn’t work. There’s a difference. 

In our experience working with over 100 clients at Grow and Convert, the reasons fall into the same three categories almost every time: 

• They’re targeting the wrong keywords
• The content itself doesn’t convert
• They’re measuring the wrong things

Let me break down each one. Then I’ll show you what it looks like when you fix all three, using real conversion data from one of our clients.

Problem 1: You’re Targeting the Wrong Keywords

This is the most common reason SEO “doesn’t work.” Most companies miss it because, on the surface, their keyword strategy looks fine.

Here’s what typically happens: a company hires an SEO agency or brings someone in-house. That person does keyword research in Ahrefs or Semrush, sorts by search volume, and picks keywords with the highest numbers. They target terms like “what is time tracking” or “best practices for employee scheduling” or “how to improve productivity.” These are real searches. They have volume. They look like opportunities.

The problem is that the person searching “what is time tracking” isn’t looking to buy time tracking software. They might be a student writing a paper, a manager doing preliminary research, or someone who just wants a definition. There’s no buying intent behind the search.

Yet SEO firm after SEO firm prioritizes keywords this way: by search volume over buying intent. So brands end up with a library of content that may drive traffic (sometimes a lot of traffic) but has extremely low conversion rates to leads, pipeline, or revenue. 

Our approach is different. Instead of prioritizing keywords by search volume, we prioritize by buying intent. We ask: 

Which keywords indicate that the searcher has a problem our product or service solves? 

Those are the keywords that convert.

We call this Pain Point SEO. 

The difference in results isn’t small. Across our client base, high buying-intent keywords convert at 10x–20x the rate of top-of-funnel informational keywords. 

I’ll show you the data later in the piece — and the gap is striking.

The Other Keyword Mistake: Spreading Too Thin

There’s a second keyword problem I see constantly, especially from agencies. Instead of focusing each article around one keyword and writing the best possible piece for that specific search intent, they try to stuff multiple keywords into a single article. The logic is tempting: “If we target five keywords instead of one, we’ll rank for more things.”

But when you do this, the opposite happens. The article doesn’t rank well for any of them because it’s not focused enough to satisfy any single searcher’s intent. Search engines can tell when a piece is trying to be about five things at once. So can readers.

Each article should target one primary keyword. Build the entire piece around what that specific searcher needs to know — and how your product solves their problem. Search engines reward that kind of focus. 

Do that one thing well.

Problem 2: Your Content Doesn’t Convert (Even If It Ranks for High-Intent Keywords)

You can do everything right on the keyword side — rank high for high buying-intent keywords, get real traffic — and still generate almost no leads from your blog. Why? Because the content itself isn’t written to convert.

Most blog content reads like Mirage Content. It looks good when you skim it, but when you actually read it, there’s nothing there that a competitor couldn’t say. Nothing that shows the reader why this company, specifically, is the one to solve their problem. 

Here are the typical problems we see on the content side:

• The writer lacks subject matter expertise. Most content is written by freelancers or generalists who Google the topic for 30 minutes before writing (we call content like this “Google Research Papers”). The result is surface-level content because the writer doesn’t know enough to go deep. Your target customer, who has been in their industry for years, can tell immediately. They’ll read two paragraphs, realize the writer doesn’t actually understand the space, and leave.
  
• The content doesn’t sell the product. There’s a widespread belief in content marketing that blog posts shouldn’t be “salesy.” We disagree. Your blog posts should demonstrate how your product solves the reader’s problem. Not with a hard pitch, but with specificity. Show your product in action. Walk through real use cases. Include screenshots. The reader is searching for a solution. If your content doesn’t show them that you have one, you’re leaving conversions on the table.
  
• AI is making this worse. These content problems existed long before AI (we wrote about Mirage Content in 2017), but they’re now being amplified by it. As our survey of marketers about AI writing showed, the vast majority of in-house teams and agencies are using AI assistance to produce content. We do too. But most are using it the wrong way and just producing more low-quality Google Research Papers. AI isn’t the problem. It’s just speeding up how fast teams can produce mediocre content. 

The fix is writing content that demonstrates real expertise. That means interviewing subject matter experts inside the company (founders, product leads, salespeople), outlining the piece around the specific searcher’s problem, and writing at the depth level of someone who actually works in the space.

Problem 3: You’re Measuring the Wrong Things

Many in-house content marketers and digital marketing teams focus on metrics like pageviews, number of pieces published per month, and keyword rankings. Why? Because if they were measured by leads, demos, or pipeline, the numbers wouldn’t look good. So they focus on metrics that prove “success” without actually moving the needle for the business.

Here’s a real example. One of our clients, a time and attendance software company, came to us after working with another agency for over a year. The business owners told us their SEO wasn’t working. But when they showed us the reports the previous agency had been sending, the agency’s metrics told a different story. Rankings were improving. Organic traffic was growing. Articles were being published on schedule.

The problem? The agency had never set up proper analytics to track conversions. They were reporting on rankings and traffic, sending polished monthly decks that showed upward-trending charts, and counting how many pieces they published each month. But they weren’t measuring how many trial signups or paid conversions the content was actually driving. 

The founders couldn’t see business impact from SEO because no one was tracking business impact.

This pattern is more common than people think. A lot of agencies and in-house teams measure SEO performance by:

• How many articles we published this month
• How much organic traffic the blog is getting
• What keywords we’re ranking for
• The domain authority of the backlinks we built
• Bounce rate and page speed scores

None of these are business metrics. They’re activity metrics. They tell you whether your SEO efforts are happening, not whether they’re working.

The metrics that actually matter are: 

• How many conversions (demo requests, trial signups, contact form submissions) did each blog post and landing page drive this month? 
• What’s the conversion rate by article? 
• Which pieces are generating real pipeline? 

If you can’t answer those questions, you don’t actually know whether your SEO is working. You just know you’re publishing content. And publishing content doesn’t mean SEO is working.

What Happens When You Fix All Three: A Case Study

Here’s what happens when you get all three of these right. This is the same time and attendance software client mentioned above.

When we started working with them, we did three things differently from their previous agency.

First, we identified their highest-intent keywords. Instead of targeting broad terms or stuffing multiple keywords into each article, we focused each piece around one bottom-of-funnel keyword where the searcher had a real problem the software solves. Category keywords like “[product type] app,” category keywords with a specificity layer like “[product type] for [industry]” or “[product type] with [feature],” and use-case keywords like “apps to [job to be done].”

Second, we produced the content by interviewing their founders. We didn’t hand topics to freelancers. We interviewed the company’s founders and small business operators to capture their actual expertise about the time clock software space. The content reflected real industry knowledge, specific product details, and the kind of depth that only comes from people who’ve built the product and talked to thousands of customers.

Third, we invested in link building and set up analytics tracking to measure conversions by article. Every blog post was tracked individually for trial signups, paid conversions, and conversion rate. This allowed us to see exactly which pieces were driving business results and double down on what worked.

The Results

We worked with this client for about three years. Here’s how the numbers progressed:

• Organic traffic: 69 visitors/month → 11,555 visitors/month
• Free trial signups from the blog: 0/month → 295/month (at peak)
• Paid signups from the blog: 0/month → 55/month (at peak)
• Blog conversion rate: 1.7% → 3.9% (visitor-to-trial)

Over the full engagement, we published 111 blog posts that collectively drove 6,680 trial signups. But here’s where it gets interesting.

Not All Keywords Are Created Equal

When you look at the conversion data across all 111 articles, the distribution is extreme.

15% of the articles drove 80% of all conversions.

And those top-performing articles were almost exclusively targeting high buying-intent keywords: core category keywords and category keywords with a specificity layer.

Here’s the breakdown by keyword type:

Look at that last row: 16 informational articles. 40 total conversions. An average of 2 per article. 

This is the data behind why your SEO isn’t working. If your content strategy is built around informational, top-of-funnel keywords, you could publish content for years and barely move the needle on leads. It’s not that SEO is broken. It’s that your keyword strategy doesn’t match your business goal.

What’s the value of going after more keywords if 15% of the articles drove 80% of conversions?

Fair question. If 15% of articles drove 80% of conversions, what’s the point of the other 85%?

Two things. 

First, you can’t predict which articles will be top performers before you publish them. Some keywords you’d expect to perform well (like broad category terms) underperform, while narrower, long-tail terms you’d consider secondary end up driving hundreds of conversions. The only way to find your winners is to publish a portfolio of high-intent pieces and let the data tell you.

Second, the other 85% of articles aren’t worthless. They still drive incremental conversions that add up over time. They build topical authority, which helps the entire domain rank better in search engines. They support link building and earn quality backlinks. Internal linking strengthens the whole site. And they cover the full range of ways your prospects search for solutions. 

You get to a total of 295 trial signups per month (our all-time high for this client) from dozens of articles working together, not from a single post.

The takeaway isn’t to publish fewer articles. It’s to make sure every article you publish targets the right keywords — ones with real buying intent. 

How to Diagnose If Your SEO Isn’t Working

If you read this and thought “Ok, our SEO probably isn’t working,” and you want a specific checklist to figure out which of these problems is the cause, here it is. 

Step 1: Look at your keyword list. 

Pull up every keyword you’re targeting. For each one, ask: is the person searching this keyword looking to buy or evaluate a product like mine? If the majority of your keywords are informational (“what is X,” “how to Y,” “best practices for Z”), that’s likely your primary problem.

Step 2: Read your content as if you’re a buyer. 

Pick your top five posts by traffic. Read them. Ask yourself: does this article show how a specific product solves a specific problem? Or does it read like a Google research paper that could appear on any competitor’s blog? If it’s the latter, your content isn’t converting because it isn’t written to convert.

Step 3: Check your analytics setup. 

Can you tell me, right now, how many conversions each individual blog post drove last month? If you can’t, you don’t actually know whether SEO is working. Use Google Search Console to monitor search performance, and set up goal tracking in Google Analytics or HubSpot so you can measure conversions at the article level.

Step 4: Look at the results through the right lens. 

Once you have conversion data by article, sort by conversions instead of traffic. The posts driving the most traffic and the posts driving the most conversions are almost certainly different lists. That gap tells you everything you need to know about your keyword strategy.

If you’re looking for SEO experts to fix your strategy, you can learn more about our process and inquire here.

You see the same AI-generated LinkedIn posts with the same structure and the same lazy arguments. AI-generated comments that add nothing. AI slop blog posts that say what every other blog says, just reworded slightly. It feels like the entire internet is getting worse.

But I think the reason people have such a negative view of AI is because of how most people are using it. They’re using it to try to think less and get out of putting in hard work.

That’s not the best use of AI.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gone down the AI rabbit hole and I’ve gone from an “AI skeptic” to thinking it’s going to create a renaissance in marketing.

From what I’ve seen, AI is most powerful when you already have expertise, you already know what you want the outcome to be, and you use it as a tool to get there faster or build something you couldn’t have built before. 

The marketers who will win with AI aren’t the ones trying to remove themselves from the process. They’re the ones asking:

What can I create now that I couldn’t before?

And this is where it gets interesting for marketers.

AI Accelerates Whatever You Already Are

Here’s a key thing I don’t see enough people talking about: AI accelerates what you do well and what you do poorly.

If you’re an agency producing bad content with no real strategy, AI will happily help you produce bad content at scale. Congratulations, you can now publish 10x more mediocre blog posts per month.

But if you already have a great process, smart people, and creative ideas, AI unlocks things you simply couldn’t do before. It doesn’t replace thinking. It removes the bottlenecks that used to prevent your thinking from coming to life.

Here’s an example:

I recently wrote a case study we’ll be publishing on Grow and Convert. We like to make our case studies data-driven, not just “traffic went up,” but digging into the data to uncover patterns that actually make the story compelling.

For this particular case study, we had spreadsheets full of conversion data broken out by month and by individual article. In the past, I would have needed someone on my team to help me analyze all of that data, find the interesting patterns, and build the charts and data visualizations. That’s at least two or three people involved: an analyst, a designer, and me writing.

Instead, I did the entire thing myself using AI. 

I had it analyze the conversion data and surface patterns I wouldn’t have spotted manually. I built data visualizations that previously would have required our designer. I queried Ahrefs to compare the keywords the client ranked for before we started working with them versus after, and used AI to help analyze the shift in keyword strategy. 

The result was clear: AI identified that every single keyword they ranked for previously was informational and top-of-funnel, while the keywords we helped them rank for were almost entirely buying-intent. Pairing that with conversion data to quantify the business impact made the case study dramatically stronger.

Had I done this without AI, the analysis wouldn’t have been as thorough, the arguments wouldn’t have been as sharp, and it would have taken me significantly longer to complete.

I didn’t ask AI to “write me a case study about X client” (which is how most people are using it right now). It didn’t know what story to tell or what arguments would resonate. I did. AI just removed the resource constraints that would have made that level of depth impractical.

We’re Entering the Age of the Creative Marketer

For as long as I can remember, creative marketers have been severely undervalued compared to performance and data-driven marketers.

They’d have great ideas but sometimes had challenges bringing them to life. Because to execute anything interesting, you needed other stakeholders involved. A designer, a developer, or multiple people on the team. The ideas were sometimes costly and resource intensive, and the great ideas would die in a Google Doc because there was no way to build them.

AI changes that. If you can dream it, you can build it.

And I think that’s going to unlock a new era of marketing, almost like a marketing renaissance, where the most creative ideas drive the most attention. Not the biggest budgets. Not the largest teams. The best ideas.

The marketers to win in this era will be the ones creating the coolest, most original stuff. Not the ones publishing the most AI-generated volume.

Constraints Have Shifted From “Can I Build This?” to “What Can I Build?”

We used to be constrained by resources. We had more ideas than people or time to execute them.

With AI, that constraint has shifted. We’re no longer limited by execution capacity. We’re limited by the quality of our ideas and our creativity.

That’s a fundamental change, and most people haven’t caught up to it yet.

If all you bring to the table is execution speed — writing fast, designing fast, shipping fast — AI is going to be a problem for you. Because it can do that too.

But when you contribute original thinking, creative ideas, a deep understanding of your customer, and a clear point of view, AI makes you 10x more dangerous. You can bring those ideas to life without waiting on anyone else.

The age of the creative marketer is here. 

The marketers who build the coolest stuff win.

We’re not seeing such extreme declines in organic traffic across our 20+ clients, but yes, there’s been some drop.

So in this post, we want to report on that data and answer two key questions:

• What’s actually causing this decline — AI Overviews, ChatGPT, or something else?
• Should marketing teams be worried? And if so, what should they do? 

The Data: Traffic Is Down but Rankings and Conversions Are Growing

We’re seeing a consistent pattern across several clients: more rankings but less traffic. 

Here’s a typical example from one client’s Ahrefs rankings in October 2023, 2024, and 2025:

And here’s that same data shown in a bar graph, so you can easily see the growth in rankings:

But look at this client’s traffic, measured by clicks in Google Search Console (displayed via SEO Gets). The blue line represents clicks:

There’s a slight decline in clicks from mid-2024 to October 2025. 

Notably, impressions (purple line) are trending up. That means our organic listings on the Google SERP are showing up more often now than before, but earning fewer clicks (blue line). The green line, click-through rate (CTR), confirms this with a sharp drop around March 2025. 

We’ll discuss why that date is important below, but this is the trend we’re seeing across multiple clients. 

For instance, here are two more clients’ Search Console graphs showing impressions (purple) increasing while clicks (blue) decrease: 

Finally, what’s interesting is that despite the drop in traffic, clients are seeing steady growth in conversions. 

Here’s data on free-trial conversions attributed to our content for a SaaS client from early 2025 to now:

What’s going on? 

How are businesses seeing record-high rankings, declining traffic, yet steady (or even growing) conversions?

In all our years running Grow and Convert, rankings, traffic, and conversions have always grown together — when rankings and traffic were down, conversions were also down.

But now we’re seeing two metrics rising (rankings and conversions) while traffic falls.

So, why is that?

Why We Think It’s AI Overviews, Not ChatGPT, Causing the Traffic Decrease 

We believe the decline in clicks and site traffic is due to Google’s AI Overviews having more prominence in search, not from users moving off Google for ChatGPT. 

Why ChatGPT Is Likely Not Causing the Traffic Drop

First, in the Search Console data above, impressions are holding steady — and for many clients, they’re actually growing. If the organic traffic decline was caused by users shifting from Google to ChatGPT, we’d expect to see overall impressions drop too. We don’t.

Second, in our clients’ analytics data, traffic coming from ChatGPT is less than 5% of what they get from Google Organic. 

Here’s that same data as a bar graph, to make the difference visually clear:

Ahrefs created a site called ChatGPT vs. Google, and they’re largely seeing the same thing — traffic from ChatGPT remains minimal compared to Google, Bing, and other traditional search engines.

A study from Semrush also shows that ChatGPT is now used as one step in the search process. People might start their search in ChatGPT, but they still turn to Google to complete their searches. So ChatGPT usage alone doesn’t explain the traffic decline.

You can read the full study here.

So if ChatGPT isn’t the cause, what about Google’s AI Overviews?

Why Google AI Overviews Is Likely Causing the Traffic Drop

Notice in the graphs above there’s a sharp drop in clicks (blue line) and CTR (green line) around March 2025. 

I was curious about that timing, so I asked Google about the rollout of AI overviews, and March 2025 seems to be when they rolled it out more broadly:

This strongly suggests that the drop in clicks (and traffic) starting around March 2025 is related to AI Overviews. 

The next question is how and why AI Overviews can reduce traffic without hurting impressions, even as rankings continue to rise.

Why AI Overviews Cause a Decline in Organic Traffic Even as Rankings and Conversions Grow

First, for top-of-funnel queries you used to rank for, AI overviews now answer the user’s question directly — so they no longer need to click into your article. That’s likely the primary reason brands are reporting drops in organic traffic. 

It also explains why we at Grow & Convert are seeing smaller declines in traffic (10%–20%) compared to others reporting 40%–50%. We focus on ranking clients for bottom-of-funnel search terms, meaning queries where users are looking for a product or service like theirs. For those terms, even if an SEO article doesn’t get as much traffic as before, the brand still gets mentioned in the AI overview itself. 

For example, here’s the AI Overview for the term “best call center quality assurance software,” where our client Level AI is mentioned in the AI Overview, and a page on their site is one of the cited sources on the right:

A user looking for software like this isn’t really incentivized to click on the articles on the right — the AI Overview already summarizes which brands are popular. That’s the simple, obvious explanation for the drop in traffic. But there’s also something more subtle happening here. 

Specifically, notice how Level AI is mentioned multiple times in the AI Overview. That means several different user paths could unfold.

Scenario 1: New Tab

The user might just open a new tab, Google “Level AI,” click into the homepage, and request a demo or convert. That conversion would appear as organic traffic to the homepage — not the article — even though the article was instrumental in getting Level AI featured in the AI Overview in the first place. As we’ll discuss below, that creates a major attribution problem. 

Note that if the user’s eyes go to the second bolded “Level AI” mention under “top call center QA software”, there’s no link, which makes it even more likely they’ll just open a new tab and search “Level AI.” 

Scenario 2: Dotted Line Link

Notice how the first mention of Level AI in the AI Overview introduction has a thin dotted underline. When you click that link, it triggers a “disguised” branded search. 

It looks like a normal branded search, but if you check the URL and the “showing results for” line, you’ll see it actually searches for “Level AI call center quality assurance software.” 

As a result, the Level AI homepage isn’t the top result — instead their Quality Assurance Software page appears first, followed by a related blog post, and then the homepage. And all three of those organic links are preceded by a sponsored spot because, well, Google’s gotta make money. 

When this happens, traffic from that search term can show up as any of the following: 

• Branded paid (if the user clicks any of the sponsored links)
• Organic to the feature page 
• Organic to the blog post
• Organic to the homepage

It’s confusing! 

What this means is that traffic that used to be easy to attribute (one search term corresponding to one URL) is now spread across a mishmash of possibilities: users might go to the homepage, a feature page, a paid ad, or a blog post. 

Which brings us to the real consequence for marketers: attribution is getting even harder. 

Attribution Needs to Change Because You’re Not Measuring the Full Benefit of SEO Anymore

SEO attribution has always been tricky, and since the start of our agency, we’ve aimed to fix that. We’ve made a deliberate effort to track leads all the way through the funnel so we can see which blog posts convert best.

We’ve always said our attribution represents a lower-limit estimate of the actual number of conversions our services generate, mainly because there are a number of scenarios where you can’t measure traffic all the way through conversion.

Specifically:

• If a user comes in through SEO but has cookies blocked, your SEO/content efforts won’t be attributed to that lead.
  
• If someone discovers your brand through SEO but switches devices before converting, that conversion won’t be attributed to SEO.
  
• If someone finds your brand through SEO and tells a coworker or friend who later searches for it separately, that lead won’t be attributed to SEO.

Now, with the rise of AI overviews, there’s yet another attribution challenge. If people discover your company through an AI overview, what was previously attributed to organic search now often appears as direct or branded traffic.

Why?

Because, as shown above, AI overviews display company names as clickable links that open branded searches. Many users might also open a new tab and type your domain directly or search for your brand manually. 

In other words, SEO is still driving visibility — it’s what gets your brand mentioned in the AI overview — but the resulting increase in branded and direct conversions isn’t being credited to SEO, even though it originates there.

What’s the Best Way to Account for This Change in SEO?

We’re advising clients to add a “How did you hear about us?” field to their lead forms. This lets prospects self-report whether they came from Google, AI, referrals, or another channel — providing another way to attribute leads. We’re also encouraging sales teams to ask the same question during qualification calls.

In addition to tracking organic traffic to our articles, we’ve started measuring organic homepage traffic as well. We’ve also created additional reports that identify referral sources from LLM platforms to see how much traffic is coming from LLMs.

Overall, we’re resetting expectations around traditional organic leads and traffic metrics and looking at organic leads more holistically — across both homepage and article traffic.

To confirm this, you can set up events in Google Analytics, which will let you measure product or service conversions that come directly from content.

What’s interesting, though, is that often the posts with the highest volume of traffic don’t have the highest volume of conversions.

So what’s the disconnect?

It’s that head terms (or high volume queries) are typically terms that target the top of funnel for your product or service — they have more people searching for them, but less of the searches have buying intent.

In contrast, terms that target the middle or bottom of the funnel usually have fewer people searching for them but higher buying intent.

There are cases where you can go after keywords that have both high volume and have buying intent. If you can find those, they are obviously ideal, but typically there aren’t too many of these.

While many companies are focused on ranking for high-volume keywords in their content marketing and SEO efforts because of the traffic potential, we prioritize lower-volume, high-buying-intent keywords because the conversion potential is much greater than going after high volume keywords.

You can see that the non-highlighted (top of funnel) posts in that screenshot are converting between 0.03% and 0.19% and many of them haven’t even generated a single conversion in months (this is extremely common!). In contrast, the three highlighted bottom of funnel posts are converting at 0.3%, 0.4% or the last one a whopping 4.3% (also common for bottom of funnel, Pain Point SEO posts). 

Building on that screenshot here is the 16th highest traffic article in a particular time period for another client, which brought in only 1,612 pageviews, but an amazing 39 product signups.

In addition to their much higher conversion rates,  the lower-volume, high-intent keywords are often easier to rank for since most of your competition is focused on the high-volume lower converting keywords.

Ranking for high-volume keywords may work well if your main goal is to generate traffic (ad or impression based content sites; media), newsletter or email signups (personal or email list based blogs; course sites), or any other business where top of funnel traffic is valuable. So in this article, when we say “conversions” we mean product-related signup or form fills, not an email or newsletter opt-in.

In this post, I’m going to explain how we come up with pain point driven content ideas for SEO that generate leads and signups instead of just going after high volume keywords. I’ll share some examples of frameworks that tend to do well from a conversion perspective and I’ll share some examples from blogs that we run that show why we take this approach vs. the approach that most agencies and content marketers take.

Learn more: We created a bonus PDF for subscribers to our newsletter with examples of how we’d implement Pain Point SEO for Slack, Quickbooks, Ecwid and Simplisafe. Plus we included 2 client case studies. Get that by joining our newsletter here.

What is Pain Point SEO?

Pain Point SEO is a strategy that we coined describing how to prioritize content ideas around high-intent keywords over high-volume keywords with the goal of driving conversions.

Our Keyword Strategy = Pain Point Driven SEO Instead of Volume-Driven SEO

Let’s say that you’re doing content marketing for a SaaS company that targets salespeople as the customer (broad target audience, I know, but it’s just for the sake of the example).

Many marketers take a keyword-first approach to content marketing.

They research some keywords that they think salespeople would be interested in and end up coming up with a keyword list that looks something like this:

Then they prioritize what keywords to target based on which keywords have the highest volume (traffic potential) and which ones are easiest to rank for (low competition).

They do this because oftentimes their metric of success is a % increase in traffic, not leads/signups growth. The why behind this is a discussion for another post :).

Then blog posts start being produced that go after these high-volume keywords and if everything works you may notice that traffic starts to increase.

But what about the leads and signups from those posts?

Oftentimes, you don’t see a measurable amount of leads and signups coming from those blog posts topics because this strategy is designed to increase traffic, but doesn’t take the intent of the searcher into account.

We think this volume-based keywords strategy for content marketing is backwards.

Instead, the approach that we use to come up with SEO-driven content inverts the typical process. We start with the intent of a buyer (the pain point of a customer), then we find keywords and topics that discuss solutions to the problem the searcher is trying to solve.

By taking a pain point first approach vs. a keyword-first approach, we can map the intent of the search to the buyer’s journey and have a better predictor of which SEO posts will generate leads and signups, instead of just measuring which posts will generate traffic.

Our Process for Coming up with SEO Topics That Drive Leads and Signups

Now that you understand the differences between going after high-volume keywords vs. pain point driven SEO, let’s dive into our exact process for ideating topics that generate leads.

The content frameworks we’ve found are the highest converting for SEO content

We’ve been applying Pain Point SEO to clients for years now (see case studies), and we’ve found it’s useful to think of Pain Point SEO in three tiers:

1. Category Keywords: These are search terms that directly correspond to the product or service category you are in. For example: “best crm software”, “shopify development agency”, or “women’s hiking boots”. These are the most obvious keywords for your brand and are not hard to figure out – they’re just different ways to phrase what you sell. People searching these terms do not need to be led down any “buyer’s journey” or be made “problem aware” or anything of that sort. They’re already in the market for what you sell. It’s your job to show up for these searches and convince them your solution is worth trying. It’s borderline inexcusable not to very intentionally have pages on your site aimed to rank for these keywords, even if it’s your homepage. That said, you need to think of all of the variations that people could call your product or service, and some of the interview questions below can help. For us, some might call us an “SEO agency”, others might call us a “content marketing agency” or a “SaaS content marketing agency.” You should try and rank for all the synonyms of what people might call your category. You can find many examples of keywords like this in our case studies.
   
   
2. Comparison and Alternatives: These are keywords that indicate the searcher is comparing your or your competitors’ products. They include terms like “salesforce vs hubspot”, “salesforce alternatives” and more. Like category keywords, people who search for these are indicating they are deep down the buying funnel and are ready to try or buy a product in your category. Many of them may be looking at switching from a competitive product or are comparing options to decide what to buy. As such they are also very high converting. When we first started going after these comparison keywords years ago, they weren’t as popular and therefore easier to rank for. Now, they have grown in popularity in the SEO community so some of these keywords have more competition but they are still, in our opinion, an under-utilized content type that most brands would benefit greatly from targeting.  This case study includes several examples.
   
   
3. Jobs-To-Be-Done Keywords: Finally we have the bulk of what Pain Point SEO will unveil for you, which are Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) keywords. This is a term we coined playing off of the popular JTBD framework that encompasses all the keywords that indicate the searcher has a problem your product or service solves without them explicitly searching for the solution like in frameworks #1 and #2 above. Continuing on the examples above these include how to queries like “how to manage sales leads”, “how to migrate from bigcommerce to shopify”, and more. For these keywords you should provide helpful advice but also present your product or service as a possible solution (often the best solution). This highlights the most essential trait of JTBD keywords: they still have buying intent despite not being as bottom of funnel as the first two frameworks. This is what separates JTBD keywords from top of funnel keywords that don’t lead to conversions: they  have buying intent. We have an entire article about JTBD keywords.

It can be helpful to visualize the Pain Point SEO in the context of a marketing funnel: 

At the bottom of the funnel are frameworks #1 and #2, category and comparison keywords. It’s hard to say which are higher converting because we’ve seen keywords in both categories be extremely high converting for different clients, so we put them both equally in the “extreme bottom of funnel” camp. 

But there is a limited set of these, indicated by them taking up less area in the triangle (although for some clients, we’ve spent years exclusively going after keywords just in these two frameworks). 

Then, above that is the framework #3, JTBD keywords. You can consider these “mid-funnel” keywords (this is a subjective designation but can be helpful for understanding) since these are typically lower converting than frameworks #1 and #2. But these keywords still have buying intent because you can reasonably assume some fraction of searchers are open to the idea of using your product or service to solve their problem. 

And finally, above these are top of funnel keywords, distinguished by a different color, which typically have very little buying intent. We rarely if ever produce these for clients. They’re good for building traffic but, based on our data, they barely convert (see analytics screenshot at the top of this article). 

Note that this schematic is simply a helpful way to think about these keywords, it’s not meant to be taken literally. For example, although it shows sharp lines separating these categories, in reality, lines can be blurred and there are always keywords where it’s not clear if they are in bucket or the other. But that doesn’t matter. If you stick to finding keywords in these three buckets and prioritizing by buying-intent you’ll see great results from content and SEO.

We recently did an in-depth analysis of 95 blog posts to see how the conversion rates of each of these types of keywords compare. Check that out here.

Ideating on high-converting topics for SEO

Now that you know the frameworks that you should be thinking about, I want to share how you get the ideas that fit into the frameworks.

Essentially, all of the ideas should come from your prospects and your customers. If you’ve been a follower of our site for a long time, you’ll know our entire strategy starts with having a in-depth understanding of your customers. If you know your customers inside and out, you’ll be able to come up with content ideas that your competitors won’t target because they’ll be focused on traffic while you’ll be focused on helping your customers and future customers solve problems.

By knowing who your prospects/customers view as your competitors (#2), what problems your prospects/customers think your product or service solves (#3), what features or parts of your service your customers get the most value from (#1), how your customers describe your product or service and the value they get from it (#1, #3), you should be able to come up with plenty of these high converting content ideas.

Survey questions to ask to identify conversion focused SEO topics to write about

Below are some questions to ask your customers via in-person interviews, phone calls, and surveys to help you identify high intent keywords to target.

Note: a shortcut to talking directly with your customers is to talk to your sales team or other employees in customer facing roles and ask them variations of the same questions below. This is in fact what we do with all of our clients.

1. What was the problem you were looking to solve before stumbling across our product or service?

This question helps you identify what keywords to target when someone is researching for a solution to the problem that your product or service solves.

2. If our product/service were no longer to exist, what product/service would you use as an alternative?

This question helps you identify who your customers view as your competition.

3. How would you describe our product/service to a friend who knew nothing about us?

This question helps you identify how your customers would describe your product to a friend — maybe they describe what you do differently than you describe it — it’s important to figure this out so you can capture search volume for terms you might not be thinking of.

4. What are the top 3 benefits that you receive from our product/service?

This question helps you identify the top use cases and benefits that customers get from your product or service.

5. If you were to research our product or service, what would you search for?

This question helps you identify the terms that your customers would search for to find your product/service.

[su_note] Make sure that all of these questions have open ended responses. You don’t want to lead people to an answer, you want them to share their thoughts with you. You should see a wide range of responses and then you want to prioritize responses that you get multiple times.[/su_note]

Once you have the answers to these questions, it’ll help you figure out the specific ideas to apply to each framework.

For example, if a majority of respondents say the biggest benefits they get from your product or service are increasing qualified leads to sales teams, increasing sales pipeline, and closing more deals, then you might want to create articles on those topics that walk people in-depth through various ways they can accomplish those things (your product or service might be one solution to their problem — you’ll need to include other valuable ones as well).

Another example, if a majority of respondents say that if your product was no longer to exist, they’d use Hubspot or Marketo, then you might want to create blog posts that compare your product to Hubspot and Marketo, and weigh the pros and cons of using your product vs. theres.

Hopefully you get how this works from here… (if not, feel free to leave a question/comment below)

Case Study: Going After Long-Tail High Intent Keywords Beats Out High-Volume Keywords

(Note: If you want to read more case studies beyond the example below, you can find them here.)

Now for some proof that this approach works.

Over the past year, we’ve been testing different frameworks across clients — narratives (stories), case studies, data posts, as well as the five frameworks above. Across multiple clients, we’ve seen these frameworks outperform some of the other content from a conversion perspective.

Because we started seeing these trends emerge, we thought we’d share the strategy with you.

The following analytics screenshot is from one of the SaaS companies we work with. This report is looking at organic traffic, the page that they landed on from organic search and the number of last-click conversions to that article.

To protect our client’s data, I’ve grayed out the URL of the article and in its place, I’ve put a description of the article.

All of the other numbers are left as is.

Now what’s important to note here is that not all organic traffic is created equal from a conversion perspective. If you look at blog post #1 and #2 here, you’ll notice that they get almost the identical level of traffic, but #2 gets far lower conversions.

This is because the blog post #2 ranks for a keyword the target audience would search for, in this case a sales related keyword, however, the post doesn’t follow one of our three Pain Point SEO frameworks, so it’s a classic low-converting top of funnel post.

What’s also important to note is that to help increase conversions for each of our blog posts, we use in-article CTAs that are contextual to the post.

For example, if we were to write a post about best CRM tools, the post would have a CTA that says something to the effect of “Looking for a CRM tool for your small business? Try a free trial of X tool for 30 days, free.”

Another thing to note is that, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, the highest converting blog post also has the lowest  traffic, but that post uses one of the highest intent frameworks: comparing competitive products. When we originally did keyword research for this comparison term, multiple SEO tools showed zero search volume behind this particular long-tail keyword.

Let me repeat this point because it’s important: The post with the largest number of conversions in the screenshot below targeted a keyword that tools like Ahrefs and Moz showed as having zero search volume.

Most marketers would just move on and not write a post on this topic.

But while the traffic doesn’t compare to the rest of the posts on the list here, the post dwarfs most others from a conversion standpoint. We have written more about targeting these in our article about “mini-volume keywords”.

Now, let’s look at GA’s model comparison tool to see the top converting blog posts that we’ve produced from January 1 – August 29th, to see which of the content frameworks yield the highest amount of new trial signups, when also factoring in first-click conversions.

We can see here that the highest converting posts use the frameworks above. Only three of the top 10 posts are what we consider “top of funnel” articles and they make up only 10% of conversions.

That’s crazy. 90% of the conversions from these top 10 articles are from one of the 5 simple high-product-intent frameworks we listed above.

You can read a more exhaustive analysis of 60+ posts categorized as bottom of top of funnel, and their differences in traffic and conversion rate here.

What you should take away from this

We’re not saying that you have to only produce SEO content that falls within those three frameworks, but what we are saying is that we’ve noticed trends across multiple clients, that when you produce pain point driven content that use these three frameworks to target long-tail keywords, we’ve seen conversion numbers that are much higher than other content that ranks.

Therefore, we think you should prioritize producing those pieces of content before going after terms that are high volume / low competition in your category or that your target audience would potentially be interested in reading about.

Once you feel like you’ve exhausted all of the potential long-tail keywords using the five frameworks, then it makes sense to take a broader approach to finding higher volume keywords in your category and that your target audience would potentially read.

In addition, using this strategy effectively also depends on writing really good posts that fulfill the search intent of the searcher. If you want to learn more about this, we wrote detailed articles about our process for SEO content writing and SaaS content writing. 

If you want further strategy articles on this topic, in addition to the case studies linked to above, we’ve also written detailed articles on SEO keyword strategy, SaaS SEO strategy, B2B content marketing strategy, and B2C content marketing strategy. You can find our full slate of strategy based articles here.  

Finally, since we originally published this article, we have also applied similar conversion-focused principles to improving client’s paid search campaigns. We wrote about that extensively here.

Newsletter Bonus: Extra Examples of Pain Point SEO

We created a bonus PDF for subscribers to our newsletter with examples of how we’d implement Pain Point SEO for Slack, Quickbooks, Ecwid and Simplisafe. Plus we included 2 client case studies. Get that by joining our newsletter here.

Work With Us

• Our Agency – Have us implement our pain point SEO strategy and drive results for you here.
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In the past month alone, 71% of our new leads came through ChatGPT.

Our clients are noticing the same shift — mentioning it in emails and bringing it up on our monthly calls.

So the natural questions we’re asking are:

• How do we scale this?

• What’s influencing whether we’re a recommended solution in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs, and how does that differ from ranking on Google?

There’s a strong correlation between ranking on Google and being mentioned by AI tools, but there’s also an important difference.

Specifically, we think chatting with an AI tool leads these platforms to recommend brands and products far more based on the details of their content — and far less on superficial SEO metrics like backlinks.

We’ll spend the rest of this post explaining what we mean and why we think this has real implications for how brands should execute content strategy and what they should focus on writing and publishing.

In AI Search, Top-of-Funnel Content is Dead

Back in 2018, we wrote a blog post called Pain Point SEO. We argued that companies should focus first on bottom-of-the-funnel, pain-point-focused keywords, then work their way up.

In our experience, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords convert 10x to 25x better.

The thought process behind this SEO strategy is that customers search around problems they’re trying to solve:

• “What’s the best way to measure conversions?” (JTBD keyword)

• “What are the best content marketing agencies?” (Category keyword)

• “What are the best alternatives to X?” (Competitor/Alternative keyword)

Showing up as a solution to those pain-point searches is far more likely to drive conversions than the top-of-funnel queries many content teams were targeting to grow traffic. Since then, we’ve published multiple case studies with data to back this up.

Now, in the world of AI search, we think this bottom-of-funnel strategy is paramount.

If you search a large language model (LLM) or Google for a top-of-funnel query, there’s no incentive for the AI to mention your business. So going forward, there’s little to no value in writing about those topics. In that world, top-of-funnel content is essentially dead.

Take a typical top-of-funnel query in our space:

What is content marketing?

In the old SEO world, this is a classic keyword that companies in content marketing target (despite us talking about Pain Point SEO since 2018).

Ahrefs shows 8,000+ searches a month and a keyword difficulty of 85, meaning it’s competitive — tons of big-name sites are ranking already:

But look what happens when you ask ChatGPT:

ChatGPT answers your question but doesn’t link to anything.

In a world where people are using AI search instead of Google, top-of-funnel content like this gets zero traffic.

Plus, Google’s starting to answer these queries itself and push organic results further down:

The first organic result doesn’t even appear above the fold. In this case, Google gives a dictionary definition. In others, you get the dreaded “Google AI overview.”

Both ChatGPT and Google now default to answering the question themselves instead of sending traffic to a blog post. For top-of-funnel queries, Google might still toss you some traffic, but ChatGPT won’t. Either way, using top-of-funnel content as a traffic driver is a dying strategy.

Why don’t these AI tools link to sources for top-of-funnel topics? Because they don’t need to. The information is commoditized. There’s little to no differentiation between one definition and the next, so there’s no reason to send users to a page when they all say the same thing.

But with true bottom-of-funnel queries, the user is actively seeking product recommendations — and that’s where AI fulfills intent by naming brands or linking to products. The marketer’s goal is to figure out how to get their brand into that response.

And here’s the key: information commoditization fades as you move down the funnel.

AI is built to tailor answers based on context, using conversation history to deliver relevant, specific information. It doesn’t just serve generic pages like Google, hoping to answer the user’s question.

We’ll dive into that next.

With AI Search, People Search Specifically, Not Broadly

People used to type short, broad queries into Google and get a list of pages covering that topic in more depth:

It was up to you to click through each page, read the content, and decide what seemed like the best fit based on what you read and what aligned with your goals. But you never gave Google the full context of your query.

For example, you wouldn’t type in your company size, marketing budget, which channels you’ve already tried, or other relevant details. Yet we all have that context — and it matters when making a purchase decision. We just don’t type it into Google. Instead, we click in and out of results, scanning for signs that someone understands us and our problems, and might be a good fit.

But with AI search, people do give it their context. It’s a conversation, not a search. That’s the whole point.

For example, someone might start by searching “What is the best SaaS content marketing agency?” They’re then presented with a list, and from there, they refine their query — adding context about who they are, what they’re trying to achieve, and ultimately asking for the best fit based on that information.

For these bottom-of-funnel queries, AI recommends products and services — but it does so with deep context about the user’s needs and pain points.

To get recommended, your brand needs to be clearly connected to those pain points.

How You Communicate Your Company’s Value Props Will Dictate When & How You’re Recommended

In the new AI search world, it’s not just about showing up for a topic and driving someone to your website, where the site does the selling like it did in the Google search era. The first sales touchpoint has now moved to AI chat — where AI is now the one selling your solution.

You need to provide it with the content it needs to sell your solution to the right people, in the right way.

When someone prompts an LLM, it scans the web and tries to find the best answer to that person’s highly specific question — pulling from the full context of the conversation — and then delivers the solution that best fits the need.

The companies that get recommended the most will be those that have published content that clearly articulates who they’re best for, what they’re best at, and why they’re better than the competition.

And this content has to be highly specific because the conversations people have with LLMs are highly specific. It can’t be generic. If your marketing site has similar copy, benefits, and use cases as every other competitor in your space, expect to stay lost in the shuffle.

As mentioned above, information that looks and sounds like everything else won’t be presented in AI answers. Differentiated information that helps people solve specific problems will be presented as potential solutions when someone is discussing that problem with an LLM or in Google (as it continues to evolve for AI search).

For example, when I asked ChatGPT for the best SaaS marketing agencies, how did it know we specialize in content strategies that drive demos and signups, not just traffic? That we have transparent reporting and tons of case studies?

Because it scanned all of the content we’ve published on our website and surfaced the differentiators we’ve communicated to the user.

For example, check out the copy in the first “Problem we solve” right under the hero unit:

It’s eerily similar to what ChatGPT says about us above.

To boost your chances in AI results, create content that clearly states who you serve, why you’re better than the competition, and backs it up with case studies and examples.

A ChatGPT Conversation from One of Our Clients

We asked a new client to share the ChatGPT conversation where we got mentioned.

Here’s her prompt:

What are the best SEO companies in your opinion who have driven massive results with endless leads for people in our kind of space?

Here’s the start of its response, where it recommends us first:

Great question — especially for a business funding company like yours, where ranking for high-intent keywords (e.g., “business loans,” “fast working capital,” “MCA for contractors”) can drive serious deal flow.

Here are some SEO agencies that have delivered real, high-volume results — especially for financial services, lending, or other lead-gen heavy industries:

1. Grow & Convert

• Specialty: High-intent content marketing and SEO for lead-gen businesses.

• Strength: They focus on bottom-of-funnel content that converts, not fluff. Real case studies where they 10X’d lead volume for SaaS and B2B.

• Why it works for MCA: They understand how to create pages that rank and convert — especially for niche financial verticals.

Notice how it knows exactly the type of business she runs: “especially for a business funding company like yours.” It even throws out examples of “high-intent keywords” that will “drive serious deal flow.”

That might sound like a small detail, but it’s a huge difference from Google. If she Googled “best SEO agencies” or some equivalent, Google would have no context about her business or her goals — it would just serve up the usual suspects with high domain authority who’ve optimized their “best SEO agency” pages.

But here, the “search engine” is ChatGPT. It knows her business, knows she wants an agency that focuses on getting leads from SEO, and is smart enough to understand that means ranking for high-intent keywords.

Given all that context, it’s no surprise it recommends Grow and Convert — we’ve spent 8 years talking about this exact topic, namely, driving leads from content through high-intent keywords.

This is exactly why your content needs to be highly specific about what you offer.

How Will Our SEO Strategy Evolve in the World of AI Search?

We believe our process is already built for AI search — we create in-depth content that clearly explains our clients’ features, benefits, differentiators, and use cases.

As we reported here, we’re already seeing 70%–80% coverage in ChatGPT and Perplexity for keywords where our clients rank in Google’s top 10 or top 3 spots.

To keep that momentum going, we built Traqer.ai, an AI search tracking tool that automatically checks rankings each week:

Looking ahead, we’re exploring more specific category keywords, testing disruption stories that highlight a brand’s pain points and solutions in greater detail, and helping clients better communicate their core differentiators in marketing copy and on their homepages.

Reach out here to work with us on a content strategy built for AI search.

But before that, we discuss 4 questions you should ask an agency to determine if it’s a fit. Why is this important? Because it can be difficult to find a B2B content marketing agency that will actually produce the results you want since many of them offer similar services and claim to produce “valuable business results”.

In our experience working with dozens of different B2B companies, the number one result B2B companies are looking for is to increase high-quality leads. And yet, most marketing agencies focus on growing traffic. As we’ll discuss below, those two things aren’t the same. Growing your traffic doesn’t automatically result in more leads.

Note: Many companies wonder if they should hire an in-house marketer instead of an agency. We discuss the pros and cons of both options in this post.

Best B2B Content Marketing Agencies

1. Grow and Convert
2. Animalz
3. Siege Media
4. Optimist
5. Codeless
6. Omniscient Digital
7. Seer Interactive
8. Graphite
9. Intrepid Digital
10. Power Digital
11. Fractl

If you’re interested in working with us, get in touch. You can also learn how to run our process yourself by signing up for our course. 

Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best B2B Content Marketing Agency for Your Business

Factor #1: Do they prioritize buying intent or traffic when choosing which topics to target?

The number one reason why most content marketers and B2B content agencies don’t produce leads for their clients is that they focus content efforts on topics and keywords with low to zero purchase intent. 

This is due to a mindset that says traffic potential should take priority, and with enough traffic, conversions will follow. But we’ve seen time and time again why this isn’t true:

When agencies prioritize traffic first, they choose topics and keywords that have the highest search volume. They look up terms related to their client’s category in SEO tools, sort by search volume, and that’s how they prioritize the order in which to tackle keywords. They tend to focus on “top of funnel” topics. 

Top of funnel (TOF) topics are topics that presumably could be interesting to your target audience, but have little or nothing to do with the actual product or service you sell. They lack any indication that someone reading has intent to buy (or even do research about) your product or service. And as a result, conversion rates for this type of content are miniscule. 

While this may be an effective strategy for certain “lifestyle” or B2C brands, it’s often a distraction for B2B companies who want to see measurable ROI and leads from their content marketing efforts — especially when there are people actively looking to buy right now. 

It also misunderstands the breadth of different high-intent search terms and how many prospective customers of B2B products are actively searching for and researching products at any given time. 

In our opinion, a B2B content strategy that does not prioritize showing up in those discussions is leaving extremely qualified leads on the table and is therefore inadequate. 

Our strategy, explained below, goes after those ready-to-buy-now prospects first before moving up the funnel. 

Note: This tendency to focus on TOF topics also stems from a cultural trait of content marketing which says that the role of content isn’t to sell — that it should only be about getting “brand awareness,” capturing people at the top of the funnel and nurturing them over months or years (through email marketing automations, remarketing ads, etc.), hoping they’ll one day become a customer. We think this “don’t sell” culture is completely misguided.

Factor #2: What’s their process for writing content that satisfies search intent and converts? 

Most B2B content is often too basic to appeal to or resonate with advanced business-to-business prospects.

There are two layers to this problem. The first stems from the TOF topic issue discussed above.

As an example, say you have a B2B SaaS company that sells an IT product to chief technology or information officers. If you write a piece on “10 tips to improve your B2B tech stack,” what veteran CTO is going to read that?

First, they don’t have the time to read generic pieces like that. Second, they likely know more than the writer who wrote about that. Third, their social feeds and email inboxes are filled with titles like that, so the chances of them reading yours are slim. Finally, the beginner-ness of topics like this mean that the content inside is also bound to be too beginner. So even if they do read it, it’s not likely to impress them enough to drive them to explore your product, start a trial, or request a demo.

The second layer has to do with the way most B2B content is actually written. Typically, a marketing manager hands freelancers or agencies a list of keywords or topics, and the writer, who is rarely a subject matter expert on the topic at hand, ends up writing what we call “Google research papers.” Like a high school student doing a research paper, they Google around the topic they were given and regurgitate what everyone else is saying on a given topic. (In their defense, what else are they supposed to do? The process itself is what’s broken. Below we explain how we have gone about solving this.)

As a result, even if content marketers get topics right, the content inside the article is still undifferentiated and ineffective at generating actual leads.

Factor #3: Do they promote the content they produce?

Outside of topic selection, another common issue we have seen is that most content “marketing” agencies don’t actually promote or distribute content — they are actually just glorified writing services. 

At best, they might share the content they write via your own brand’s social media marketing channels (tweet it out for you, share it on your LinkedIn page, etc.). But outside of that, if you ask them how they promote content, they’ll often just say, “We publish it and wait for it to rank in Google.” 

This leaves businesses waiting around for articles to rank while their content sits on their site doing very little. And because search engine optimization (SEO) takes time to work, that often means several months pass by before content even begins getting traffic, let alone conversions. 

Factor #4: Do they report on leads?

Finally, all of this culminates in arguably the biggest issue for us in our past experiences working with content agencies: They are unwilling to hold themselves accountable for generating leads. 

They’ll report on metrics like pageviews and traffic, or impressions in organic search (or worse, simply wordcount and number of pieces published). But when it comes to getting actual ROI from content marketing, all the pageviews or impressions in the world mean nothing if that content isn’t producing any measurable leads.

These are the key problems we set out to solve when we decided to start our agency. Now, let’s look at how we’ve done that.

1. Grow and Convert

We Legitimately Measure Our Performance on Leads Generated

The number one differentiator of our agency — and the thing that should matter most to any B2B company hiring a content marketing company — is that we measure our performance on leads generated. 

That is our benchmark. And that is the goal that our entire strategy and content creation process is based on. 

It’s not based on traffic volume or other vanity metrics. It’s based on driving qualified leads.

For every one of our clients, we create an ROI graph like this one (a live graph from a B2B SaaS client we’ve been working with for over 2 years):

The horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph. Then we report on our progress in relation to that break even number so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI. 

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here. Before we started our agency, this is the type of thing we were looking for but could never find. 

Now, because leads are our main goal, the steps of our content production process — and our solutions that correspond to the issues we discussed above — are optimized for this. And that begins with the topics we prioritize.

We Prioritize Bottom of Funnel Topics with High Purchase Intent First to Drive Faster Results

In our experience, we’ve learned that the best content marketing strategy for B2B businesses is to begin by targeting topics and keywords that indicate people searching are ready to buy.

For example, in B2B SaaS, that’s keywords such as:

• Top/Best product category keywords: Keywords like “Best marketing analytics software,” “Best visitor identification software,” “Best video transcription software.” 

• Brand/Product comparison keywords: Keywords like “HubSpot vs. Pipedrive” or “QuickBooks alternatives.” 

In contrast to TOF topics, where readers generally aren’t in purchase-mode, most people searching these types of terms are actively looking to buy. As a result, conversion rates are much higher — in some cases like 10X higher (a finding that led us to develop our foundational Pain Point SEO strategy).

B2B service businesses can take the same approach by targeting equivalent types of high-intent terms. For example, “best virtual assistant service,” or “business book ghostwriting service” as we’ve tackled for B2B service clients. 

Our strategy is to tackle BOF terms first because they convert at a significantly higher rate — allowing us to drive results faster. Then, once we begin exhausting BOF keyword opportunities, we’ll begin working our way up the funnel. We do this very strategically, focusing on pain point-focused topics where there’s a direct product tie-in.

Note: Related to our BOF-first content strategy is our constant emphasis on intent over keyword volume. We’ll happily go after keywords that show minimal search volume in SEO tools if they indicate the searcher has really high intent. And in fact, as we’ve explained in this post, that often results in some of our highest converting pieces for clients. 

You can read any of the articles linked above for in-depth discussions of these topics, or see the impact of this strategy via these case studies: 

• How We Scaled Leadfeeder’s Signups to Over 200/Month

• Scaling Content: Expanding from Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)

• Mini-Volume Keywords: Why Targeting Small Search Volumes Makes Sense

• Scaling SEO Traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months (Circuit Case Study)

We Interview Experts at Our Clients’ Companies to Write at the Advanced Level of B2B Audiences

Because these BOF topics are very product-centric — and because B2B decision-makers need to be communicated with at an industry expert-level — we don’t produce articles in the “Google research paper” style we described above (where we just self-research a topic and write up what we found, trying ourselves to become the experts). 

Instead, our writers start by interviewing people inside your organization who have the know-how and expertise to speak on that topic and convey their ideas into the article.

Thus the writer is not asked to pretend to be an expert themselves. This is a massive shift from traditional content services and is essential to producing genuinely high-quality content.

We’re not talking about grabbing a few quotes from experts to throw into an article. We’re talking about hour long recorded interviews where we shape an entire article around the viewpoint and knowledge of an expert.

This changes everything. It creates true thought leadership content, and adds genuine product expertise into our BOTF pieces discussed above because we’re able to include all the detail and nuance of how your product is differentiated, what it replaces, why features were designed in certain ways, and more that only product experts inside your company would know.

We Have a Two Pronged Content Promotion Process

Finally, we don’t just publish pieces and wait for them to rank in Google. We use a two pronged promotion strategy to drive both short and long term traffic. Specifically:

1. Paid Ads / PPC Marketing Campaigns (Short Term Traffic): We use paid ads to promote content using two targeting methods: Cold audiences (using interest and demographic based targeting) and lookalike audiences (based on the client’s existing customer list or website visitors). We test paid channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Ads based on each client and where we’re most likely to reach their audience. 
   
   
2. Manual Link Building (Long Term Traffic): When certain pieces start ranking for keywords, we strategically deploy link building to boost them to page 1 or the top of page 1 in Google.

The combination of these 2 steps gives our pieces a short term boost in traffic followed by long term sustainable organic traffic that adds up from different articles and grows over time. 

Companies also promote the content we create for them through email marketing, sales enablement material, paid ads, etc. — but regardless of how else they use it, we’re actively promoting it for them. 

We do all of the above from our own budget, with no extra spend for our clients, making us a truly full-service agency. This is markedly different from other marketing agencies and something we’re very proud of offering our clients. 

Further Reading

If you want to learn more, here is a summary of articles linked to above and others where we explain our process in depth: 

• Pain Point SEO: Our Foundational Process

• SaaS Content Marketing: Why You Should Focus on Bottom of the Funnel First to Drive Signups

• How Long Does it Take to Rank on the First Page of Google (Aggregate Case Study of Client Data)

• SEO Content Writing: High Level Explanation of Our Writing Process

Finally, if you’re interested, you can reach out about working with us here. 

Other B2B Content Marketing Agencies Whose Names We Hear Often

To help B2B businesses weigh different agency options, here are a few other content marketing agencies whose names we’ve heard repeatedly — either through clients having worked with them in the past or just through colleagues in the marketing agency.

Note: We haven’t worked directly with any of these agencies, so we can’t independently vouch for the quality of their work. But that’s why we outlined our 4 criteria of evaluating a B2B content marketing agency above. If you want to reach out to these agencies, we recommend you ask them about each of these 4 B2B content marketing challenges and evaluate for yourself if and how they have a process to solve for them. 

2. Animalz

According to their website, Animalz provides content marketing services to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms. 

They list having worked with companies such as Google, Amazon, Airtable, and others. They provide a variety of services including SEO consulting, brand awareness, lead generation, product marketing, and promotion and distribution. 

Visit their site for more information about their services, team, podcast, and more.=

3. Siege Media

Siege Media is an SEO-focused content marketing agency that offers SEO, content creation, graphic design, and link building services to businesses. 

They list having worked with companies such as Zillow, Shutterfly, Tripadvisor, and others. And they say their marketing solutions have generated over $86,856,000 in yearly client traffic value.

Visit their site for more information.

4. Optimist

Optimist is an SEO-focused content marketing agency for startups and growth-stage businesses. 

They specialize in working with product-led companies, and list having worked with companies such as Contentstack, FairShake, and HelloSign. Their services are broken out into startup content marketing, SaaS content marketing, and B2B content marketing. 

Visit their site for more information.

5. Codeless

Codeless is a content production company offering a variety of SEO, content, and PR services. 

They say they create a proven, customized workflow for every client, and list having worked with companies such as Monday, Zapier, ActiveCampaign, and others. 

Visit their site for more information. 

6. Omniscient Digital

Omniscient is a digital marketing agency that primarily serves fast growing B2B software companies. They claim to tailor their approach to your specific goals, however, they offer a few standard services including strategy consultations, content creation, optimization of existing content, link building, and technical SEO audits. 

Visit their site for more information.

7. Seer Interactive

Seer Interactive claims to be a full-service digital marketing agency with a wide variety of services including digital strategy, paid media, content creation (including white papers, infographics, blog posts, and video production), and more. They also offer a data analytics platform to help you identify and track business KPIs.

Visit their site for more information. 

8. Graphite

Graphite uses AI to identify groups of keywords with similar intent and to guide the writing process. When it comes to writing, Graphite’s AI will produce an outline and a list of keywords to get your writers started. They also have a proprietary tool to help you with internal link building.

Visit their site for more information. 

9. Intrepid Digital

Intrepid Digital gives you direct access to SEO marketing experts and data analytics. They also offer paid media, search engine marketing, UX website design, content creation and strategy, conversion rate optimization that aligns with a great user experience, and more.

Visit their site for more information. 

10. Power Digital

Power Digital is a robust digital agency whose services include web development, web design, influencer marketing, email marketing, and much more. They serve B2B, B2C, fashion, retail media, and private equity companies.

Visit their site for more information

11. Fractl

Fractl offers digital PR services, organic growth consulting, content development, and technical SEO. However, they mainly focus on data posts for PR link building in order to increase rankings and media coverage. 

Visit their site for more information.

Want to work with us or learn how to implement our B2B content strategy?

• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn how to grow their SaaS business with content can join our private course, taught via case studies, here. We include lots of detail and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we (along with other members) give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: Alternatively, if this style of B2B content marketing appeals to you, consider joining our content marketing team as a writer or content strategist. We have awesome clients. We’re a remote company. We pay well. And you won’t have to stress about getting your own clients or spend a bunch of time doing outreach to get them.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to share them in the comments below and we’ll respond.

Can we grow our site to 40,000 users/month in six months? (You can read that piece here.)

There were two main reasons behind launching this challenge and setting this goal:

1. We were unknown entities in the content marketing world. We thought that instead of sharing content marketing strategies, the best way to build trust and show people that we knew what we were doing would be to publicly pursue the challenge of growing a site from scratch.
   
   
2. In addition, this would force us to work hard from day one to grow the site. Mind you, we both had other jobs then, and it’s easy to let new side projects fall by the wayside. This forced us not to.

While we didn’t hit the 40,000 number, we hit 16,000 users (24k sessions) in 4.5 months (mostly without SEO traffic, too). We felt like we did achieve Part 1 of our goal: building an audience and building trust. We had tons of people following along our journey, rooting us on and sharing their thoughts and best wishes with us. People kept saying they loved the transparency of the challenge and were hooked on our journey. They wanted us to keep going, and they wanted to keep following our journey. 

However, candidly, I needed money. A few months into the challenge, I quit my job and moved abroad. But by the end, I was running out of the little savings I had, so with an audience built, we felt like we now needed to figure out how to turn the site into a business.

We went through multiple iterations of our business publicly. We tried a phone course, an in-person training program, and an online course. None of them worked, meaning none of them got enough interest or customers to turn into a business. But after extremely poor course sales, a glimmer of hope emerged. Several newsletter subscribers emailed us and asked if, instead of buying our course, they could just hire us to do their content marketing for them.  

(Note: All posts chronicling this early journey can be found here.)

After some initial resistance (Devesh had an agency already and I had no desire to start one), we realized we sort of had no choice but to say yes. What other business model did we have? So, we began taking on content marketing clients. 

Fast forward seven years, and now we run a seven-figure content marketing agency that employs over 15 people and has built some brand recognition in our space. 

Why Share Our Journey Publicly Again?

Towards the end of 2023, for the reasons we outline below, we felt like this business was ready to be scaled, and we were ready, as founders, to do it. So naturally, the next question is how? As Devesh and I thought about how to double our business, we felt like we needed to add a marketing channel on top of what we’ve been doing so far to help accelerate our growth. 

Let’s look at why.

To date, our main driver of leads has, of course, been our content. This content can be bucketed into two categories: 

1. SEO content
   
   
2. Non-SEO content (or content that is not targeting a keyword, but rather that makes an interesting point and that we distribute through Twitter ads and organic social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter).

To be clear, we’re going to continue doing both of these things. They worked, and they’ll continue to work. But since we have a team helping with a lot of this now, we asked ourselves what else we personally could do to help accelerate growth. 

Our minds definitely gravitated to how we could utilize our content brand framework, in other words, content that could really get our brand more notoriety and get the G&C name out there, beyond just showing up when someone Googles “SaaS content strategy” or “best content agency.” This is because a lot of buying decisions for hiring an agency don’t happen via Google search. 

Hiring an agency isn’t the same as buying sneakers (eCommerce SEO) or searching for a new CRM or accounting software (SaaS SEO). Most people hire agencies based on word of mouth. They ask their colleagues, friends, and followers on Twitter. So even if you theoretically dominated all possible SEO keywords as an agency, you still can never get this word-of-mouth business unless you’ve built the brand recognition that leads to word-of-mouth referrals. 

We talked about doing YouTube SEO, a podcast, a marketing meme account, and a few other options, but none of those seemed on-brand or interesting to us. 

What about ads? We do do some Twitter and Google ads now, but even then, we just use those to get extra traffic to our high converting articles. We never seriously talked about scaling with lots of ads or “media buying.” That sounds costly, the lead quality is poorer than those that read your content because they know nothing about you, and frankly, it just isn’t us. Our whole goal is to be remembered as the premier content agency to hire. Content helps do that; ads don’t really do that.

So we asked ourselves: How can we do something like this again? 

Then, we thought: What if this time, instead of focusing on how to start a business from scratch, we shared how to scale a business that is already at seven-figures and already has a team of employees? We liked that idea. We feel like there’s already been a ton of content produced about how someone is starting a business or a site (including many self-case studies about growing “from 0 to X”). But we haven’t seen a lot of these transparent growth journeys chronicled about businesses that are already established and trying to scale. 

And the problems aren’t the same between starting and scaling. In the early stages, it’s all about getting product market fit and hustling to just get your first few customers. But when you’re scaling a business that already has product market fit, already has inbound channels, and already has a team and processes to execute, what do you do then? What are the challenges then? 

For us, they include things like:

• How do we continue to scale hiring and training? This is one of our biggest challenges, and many times we’ve had to turn away clients because we didn’t have the people to execute on it. We’ve made progress and plan to create videos. 

• What do we delegate versus what do we do ourselves? When is it okay to step in and fight a fire versus letting the team handle it and possibly fail or upset a client?

• How do we scale lead generation? 

• How do we evolve our organizational structure? Do we need managers? When?

• How do we handle various tricky client situations?

• How do we deal with burnout and the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship?

You can watch our first episode here:

Where Our Business Is Right Now — And Why We Feel It’s Time to Scale

We’ve always been hesitant to grow our agency too quickly. We’ve seen the mistakes that other agencies make: They sacrificed quality of work for revenue, hired a bunch of junior people that aren’t trained well, and then their quality of service declined. It’s our belief that as an agency, all you have is the quality of your service and reputation, so we’ve purposely taken the slow growth route, making sure that we could execute well and get results across all of our clients. This may be to our detriment; who knows? 

Now, we feel like we have a solid foundation from which to scale. Specifically, we feel really good about a few key aspects of the business:

1. Our product: We can reliably grow leads from content for our clients using our Pain Point SEO process. This is our product, we’ve proven to ourselves it can work over and over again across a number of different clients, and we’re proud of it. We didn’t start G&C with this process in hand. It took years of iteration and tweaking to get this to where it is now.
   
   
2. Our target client: We know who this works for. We’ve gotten really good at sniffing out what kinds of companies are a good fit for our process and which are not. We learned it the hard way by taking on all kinds of clients that weren’t a good fit, something we’ll likely outline in future content, as per what we’ll explain below.
   
   
3. Our operations: We’ve made a lot of mistakes in hiring, managing, assigning roles, and general team architecture. And when I say a lot of mistakes, I mean a lot, including some really boneheaded moves. But we’ve learned from them and ironed out operations:
   
   • We know the team structure that works for servicing clients.
   • We have supporting roles hired.
     
4. Our recruiting: This was a tough challenge for a long time. In many ways, it still is our biggest challenge. We have frustratingly high writing standards, and finding writers that meet them has been really hard. But thanks to an amazing employee on our team who took on recruiting, we have a process for testing, filtering, and training new writers now.  There were many times in the past where we lost clients because we didn’t have the people to take them on. Now that’s a lot less likely. 
   
   
5. Our marketing: After some hiccups in trying to position ourselves as an SEO agency, we know our positioning as a content agency, and our content continues to bring in qualified leads, so we have a way of reliably getting new customers in the door. 

Those are all the components of a good business: a good product, the right customer, a team and a process to reliably reproduce the product, and a channel for getting customers. So why not scale at that point? 

That’s what we want to do. 

Our Public Goal and What We Plan on Sharing

Currently, we’re at 17 clients. We want to get to 40 clients by January 2026 (two years from writing this).

On a monthly basis, we’ll share an update covering:

• Our monthly client count
• How many leads we got in a given month
• What percentage closed
• Patterns in what they told us they wanted
• How many clients we lost that month and why

Every week, we’ll share new videos on our YouTube channel on a unique challenge or issue we’re having and/or a new strategy we’re trying to help solve some current problem. We’d love to have you join us on this journey. We’ll be sending updates whenever a new video drops to our email list, which you can join here. 

Any comments or requests? Let us know in the comments. 

In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023, the top 500 companies amassed a staggering $41 trillion in revenue, yielding a profound $2.9 trillion in profits. The U.S. emerged as a profit behemoth, with its 136 Fortune 500 companies contributing a massive 38% to the global profit pool.

This study meticulously examines sector-wise profitability, country comparisons, and the highs and lows within the Fortune 500, offering a panoramic view of the world’s economic powerhouses.

Key Findings

• Global Giants: Fortune 500 companies amassed a colossal $41 trillion in revenue, with $2.9 trillion in profit.

• Top Global Profit Makers: The top 10 companies globally amassed $689.8B (24%) in profit, with Saudi Aramco leading at $159.1B.

• Global Losses: The bottom 10 companies worldwide incurred a collective loss of nearly $126B.

• U.S. Dominance: U.S. companies (136) secured a remarkable $1.1T profit, overshadowing China’s $528B, despite similar company numbers.

• The U.S. and China jointly generate 56% of the global 500 companies’ profit.

• Sector Powerhouses: Technology, Finance, and Energy sectors claimed 63% of the $2.9 trillion global profit.

• U.S. Sector Standouts: The Technology sector in the U.S. emerged as the most profitable, generating $306B, constituting 28% of the country’s total profit.

• Top U.S. Performers: The top 10 U.S. companies contributed 46% of the $1.1 trillion total profit, led by Apple.

• Sectoral Disparities: Media, Wholesaler, and Retail sectors in the U.S. lagged behind with profit margins of 0.76%, 1.53%, and 2.60%, respectively.

Top 500 Most Profitable Companies: U.S. vs. the World [Infographic]

10 Most Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

The elite league of the world’s 10 most profitable companies in 2023 showcases a powerhouse of financial success. These industry giants, representing the Energy, Technology, Transportation, and Financial sectors, collectively amassed a jaw-dropping $689.8 billion in profits, constituting 24% of the total profit from the analyzed Fortune 500 companies. 

The average profit per company within this elite group is an impressive $69 billion.

Notably, half of the top 10 are U.S.-based corporations, underlining the economic dominance of American businesses on the global stage. 

Each of these companies showcases the diverse financial prowess across sectors in 2023. Saudi Aramco steals the spotlight with an unparalleled profit of $159.1 billion, accounting for a remarkable 5.49% of the global 500 total profit — emphasizing the dominant role the energy sector plays in generating substantial financial gains.  

The U.S. Postal Service surprises as the only representative in the transportation sector, boasting a remarkable profit of $56 billion (71.29%) with a revenue of $78.6 billion, outshining all of its peers with ease. 

In the technology realm, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet secure top positions, collectively contributing $232.5 billion in profit. Microsoft stands out with an impressive profit margin of 36.69%, underscoring the profitability potential in software and technological solutions.

In the financial realm, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank secured their spots by contributing a combined profit of $107.7 billion. 

The energy sector, represented by Exxon Mobil and Shell, contributes significantly too, with both companies together accounting for $98 billion in profit. 

Overall, this top 10 ensemble underscores the global impact of varied industries, from energy giants to technology titans, that shape the financial landscape with substantial profits.

10 Least Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

The bottom 10 companies in 2023, however, collectively faced significant financial challenges, accumulating a staggering combined loss of almost $126 billion during the analyzed fiscal year. 

Notably, industry giants Berkshire Hathaway and Uniper, ranked 14th and 16th in Fortune’s official ranking with huge revenues of $302.1 billion and $288.3 billion, respectively, found themselves among the least profitable.

The average loss per company within this group amounted to -$12.6 billion, reflecting the significant financial challenges these companies encountered.

The energy sector, represented by Uniper, Korea Electric Power, Electricité de France, and CPC, dominates the list, collectively contributing to a substantial $53.2 billion in losses. 

Meanwhile, technology and telecommunications companies, such as Uber Technologies, AT&T, Warner Bros. Discovery, and SoftBank Group, have also had to grapple with substantial losses, emphasizing the many challenges faced across diverse sectors. 

The inclusion of well-known names like AT&T and Uber in the least profitable list helps to highlight the wild unpredictability and volatility inherent in today’s global business landscape.

Most Profitable Sectors for the World’s Largest Companies, 2023

The top 3 sectors — energy, finance, and technology — emerge as the most profitable among the world’s largest companies in 2023, collectively contributing to a massive 63% of the total global profit, amounting to $1.8 trillion. 

With a profit share of 24.56%, the energy sector takes the lead, bolstering $711.6 billion in profit by 88 companies within the Fortune 500. 

Finance follows closely, with 101 companies and a 23.07% profit share, showcasing it still holds considerable financial dominance. 

Technology, represented by 35 companies, secures a notable 15.54% profit share, underlining its continued significance in the profit landscape.

Healthcare, represented by 30 companies, holds a 7.51% profit share with $217.6 billion in profit and significantly contributes to the profitability of the world’s largest companies. 

Transportation, with 22 companies, secures a notable 5.54% of total profit, amounting to $160.5 billion in profit. The sector’s role in facilitating global movement is evident in its substantial profit share.

Motor Vehicle and Parts, encompassing 34 companies, contribute a noteworthy 5.36% to the global profit, generating $155.4 billion. The automotive industry’s impact is still substantial, albeit with a slightly lower profit margin compared to other leading sectors.

The remaining sectors, including Food, Beverages and Tobacco, Telecommunications, Retail, Materials, Wholesaler, Industrial, Engineering and Construction, Household Products, Aerospace and Defence, Chemicals, Food and Drug Stores, Apparel, and Hotels, Restaurants, Leisure, collectively make valuable contributions to the global profit landscape, showcasing the diverse strengths and importance of each individual sector.

This analysis helps to highlight the diverse strengths and contributions of various sectors across the globe, with energy, finance, and technology leading the charge in shaping the financial landscape of the largest global enterprises.

Ranking Countries by Total Corporate Profit, 2023

In the dynamic landscape of global corporate giants, the United States and China emerge as titans, each housing a near-equal number of companies on the Fortune 500 list with revenues totaling $13 trillion and $11.2 trillion, respectively. 

Despite this similarity, the U.S. outshines all nations, with its 136 companies generating a staggering $1.1 trillion in profit, representing 37.56% of the total global profit. China follows closely, with 135 companies contributing $528 billion, comprising just under half of the U.S.’s global profit pool with 18.22%.

The combined force of the U.S. and China stands out, jointly accounting for $1.6 trillion (56%) of the total profit, surpassing all other countries combined, which contribute $1.3 trillion (44%) in total. 

Saudi Arabia secures the third position with a single company generating $159.1 billion in profit, making it 5.49% of the total global profit. 

Continental Analysis

In the global landscape of corporate profitability, North America takes the top spot as the foremost economic powerhouse, contributing an impressive $1.18 trillion in profit and commanding a substantial 40.75% share of the global profit. The United States emerges as the major player within the continent, underscoring its unparalleled economic influence.

Venturing across the pond into Europe, the continent collectively generates $629.9 billion in profit, claiming a notable 21.74% share of the global profit. The UK and Germany take the lead among European nations, showcasing their economic strength and significant corporate contributions.

Across the expansive and diverse Asian continent, encompassing China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the combined profit amounts to $974 billion, representing a formidable 33.62% share of the global profit. China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia emerge as major contributors, collectively illustrating Asia’s substantial economic influence.

Brazil is the only South American country. Their corporate entities contribute significantly to the global profit pool, generating $76.2 billion and holding a 2.63% share. 

Australia, positioned in the Asia-Pacific region, makes a notable impact with $36.7 billion in profit, constituting a modest 1.26% share of the global profit. 

This continental analysis provides a comprehensive and clear overview of corporate profitability, showcasing the major players and their contributions within each region.

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Profit, 2023

In the dynamic landscape of corporate profitability within the United States, the top 10 companies among the Fortune 500 elite emerge as extremely formidable contributors. 

These 10 corporations, out of a total of 136 U.S. companies, collectively generate a staggering $499.5 billion in profit, comprising an impressive 46% of the total profits amassed by all 136 U.S. entities. 

Apple leads the pack, commanding a lion’s share with $99.8 billion in profit, constituting 9.17% of the overall profits among U.S. companies.

The composition of the top 10 reflects a diverse range of sectors, with technology taking the lead. Following Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet secured the second and third positions, contributing $72.7 billion and $60 billion in profit, respectively.

The U.S. Postal Service, representing the transportation sector, stands out with a remarkable profit of $56 billion.

Continuing down the list, energy giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron contribute significantly, with profits of $55.7 billion and $35.5 billion, respectively. 

Financial institutions JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America showcase their dominance, with profits amounting to $37.7 billion and $27.5 billion, respectively. 

Meta Platforms, a technology giant, rounds out the top 10, contributing an impressive $23.2 billion in profit. 

This collective dominance underscores the significant role played by these select few in steering the economic trajectory of the nation.

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Loss, 2023

In the realm of corporate challenges, the top 10 U.S. companies with the highest losses faced a combined setback of $66.9 billion. 

Notable among the highest losers are Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, ranking as the 4th and 14th largest global companies, with massive revenues of $514 billion and $302.1 billion, respectively. Despite their prominent positions, both companies incurred significant losses during the analyzed period, with Amazon reporting a surprising loss of $2.7 billion, and Berkshire Hathaway facing a substantial loss of $22.8 billion.

Uber Technologies and Warner Bros. Discovery experienced the most significant percentage losses, with 28.68% and 21.80%, respectively. 

Intriguingly, four out of the top 10 least profitable companies in the U.S. belong to the Financials sector—Berkshire Hathaway, State Farm Insurance, Prudential Financial, and Allstate. 

These challenges illuminate the diverse landscape of corporate performance, emphasizing the sectoral variations within the top companies experiencing losses.

Most Profitable Sectors for the Top U.S. Companies, 2023

The technology sector emerges as the powerhouse for the top U.S. companies, contributing significantly to the country’s total profit of $1.3 trillion. 

With a remarkable $306 billion in profit, the technology sector commands a substantial 28% share of the overall profit generated by all sectors. Impressively, the Technology sector also showcases a robust profit margin of 19.76%, underscoring the efficiency and profitability of tech companies within the U.S. corporate landscape.

The top four sectors—Technology, Energy, Healthcare, and Financials—stand out as major contributors, collectively accounting for 75 companies and generating a substantial $779 billion in profit, representing 72% of the total profit across all sectors in the United States.

Healthcare, with the highest total revenue of $2.5 trillion, further solidifies its prominence. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the Media, Wholesaler, and Retail sectors exhibit the least profitability, with profit margins of only 0.76%, 1.53%, and 2.60%, respectively, highlighting the modern-day challenges faced by these sectors in the specified fiscal year.

Methodology

Our comprehensive analysis delved into the profitability of companies listed in the Fortune 500, a globally recognized list comprising companies with the highest revenue. Our objective was to shed light on the most profitable companies and sectors worldwide, with a particular emphasis on how U.S. companies fare in comparison to their international counterparts.

Approach to Analysis

• Data Source: We sourced our data from the Fortune 500 list, ensuring that we based our insights on a reliable and respected global business ranking.

• Profitability Focus: The primary focus of our analysis was profitability. We evaluated not just the revenues but more importantly, the profits of these companies to gauge their financial health and performance.

• Sector-Wise Analysis: We categorized companies based on their operational sectors, allowing us to identify which industries are leading in terms of profitability and which are facing challenges.

• U.S. vs. Global Comparison: A significant part of our analysis involved comparing the performance of U.S.-based companies against those from other parts of the world. This comparison provided a broader understanding of the global business landscape.

• Interpretation of Data: By reorganizing and scrutinizing the data from multiple perspectives, we aimed to extract valuable insights into the financial health and market positioning of these leading entities.

The methodology employed in this analysis enabled us to gain a nuanced understanding of the financial dynamics at play within the Fortune 500 companies. It highlighted the sectors and regions that are leading in profitability, providing a clear picture of the current state of global business and economic trends.

Some brands have been able to do this successfully, for example:

Drift was able to separate itself from all of the other “chatbots” by creating the concept of conversational marketing and evangelizing it through content.

Clearscope was able to set itself apart from other SEO tools by sharing long-form webinars and videos, where their founder analyzed detailed examples and case studies around search intent, which search queries had overlapping results, and what that meant for on-page optimization and content optimization (what their tool does).

These are two examples of companies that have managed to create a “content brand,” or in other words, a brand that differentiates itself through the content that they produce. 

At Grow and Convert, we differentiated ourselves from the commoditized content marketing and SEO world when we coined the term Pain Point SEO. The term is now synonymous with a bottom-of-the-funnel first content strategy and has gained popularity over the past five years.

When companies are able to create a content brand, they benefit from prospects viewing their product or service as differentiated (even if their product or service from a feature perspective isn’t that differentiated). The quality of their content can differentiate their brand and build trust. 

The reasoning: Prospects know the brand, like the brand, and trust the brand because of the content, and therefore assume that the product or service must be good, too. 

In other words, even if you think all chatbots are the same, you might buy into Drift’s narrative on conversational marketing, and that might make you want to buy their product over the rest of the companies in that category. Or, if you’ve watched a Clearscope webinar with smart insights on SERP analysis, a part of you assumes that those strategies are baked into their product and will also help you to rank well.

Obviously, this is a massive advantage to a brand trying to differentiate itself in a commoditized space.

Additional benefits of creating a content brand:

• Prospects come in educated and have already bought into what you do
  
  
• Sales cycles are shortened 
  
  
• You reduce the number of competitors that prospects are considering

In this article, we’re going to share what a content brand is and how we think about creating one.

What Is a Content Brand?

A content brand is a company that has been able to differentiate itself, grow awareness, and change the perception of its business through content. Oftentimes content brands are in categories that are heavily commoditized, but a big reason they stand out is because of the content that they produce. 

Examples of B2C content brands are Redbull, Yeti, Nike, Liquid Death, and Patagonia. 

Examples of B2B content brands are HubSpot, Drift, Gong, Moz (via Rand Fishkin), and Basecamp.

Notably, most of the examples we listed are larger brands. We’ve noticed that smaller brands either don’t try or struggle to execute in building a content brand.

Why? 

We think it’s because there’s an important precursor to successfully building a content brand: a crystal clear understanding of your positioning.

The Foundation of Building a Content Brand: What Makes Your Company Unique?

Step one in creating a content brand is understanding the reasoning behind what makes your company unique, or in other words, your positioning.

This isn’t just about what features your product has that others don’t have. It’s bigger than that. It includes elements of why you exist, what hole in the market you fill, and how you make your customers’ lives better. 

To figure out what makes you unique, these are the sorts of questions you need to ask yourself (or your customers):

• Why was your company created?
  
  
• What’s different about the strategic approach you take vs. the way that everyone else in the industry does things?
  
  
• Does your product or service have any unique features that other businesses don’t have?
  
  
• Do you approach solving any problems in your business in a unique way?
  
  
• Does much of your industry believe in something you think is wrong or false?

We ask every single client questions like these in our sales conversations and in extensive interviews at the start of the engagement because we also need to deeply understand their positioning in order to pitch their brand at a high level in their content. And we’ve found that these questions do a great job in developing concepts that differentiate a brand from its competition. They often lead to lively discussions that reveal that different folks at the company even have disagreements on these answers, and they’re forced to do the hard but rewarding work of resolving those differences. 

The answers to these questions will be the foundation or the seedlings of the core concepts that we discuss below. They’re the original seedlings of how your brand is different or what you’re disrupting or changing that’s broken in your space. These ideas will lead to the foundational content pieces that will differentiate your brand. 

Case Study: Figuring Out What Makes Grow and Convert Unique

Here’s an example of what answering these questions can lead to from our own positioning case study. This is a summary of the problems we set out to solve that were rampant in the content and SEO marketing agency world.

In short, agencies weren’t good at measuring or holding themselves accountable to leads generated, they often didn’t promote the content they produced (and if they did, they just shared from social accounts without any real strategy), and content production was farmed out to freelance writers that had no experience on the topic they were writing about. All of these things led to subpar results.

Our solution to the above three problems was to create an agency that (1) held itself accountable to leads generated, (2) actually promoted the content it produced, and (3) could write on very advanced topics in wide-ranging fields (such as concussion and cancer treatment and software development) because we interview subject matter experts inside of the business rather than farm out writing to people that don’t have expertise on a topic.

Having a clear understanding of what separates your business from its competitors is what allows you to create core concepts for your brand that all of your content ties back to.

Coming Up with Core Concepts for Your Brand

We think that every business has around 3–5 core concepts that are unique to them. (At the start, it may be just one or two, which you can build on over time.) 

These core concepts are your “thought leadership” — concepts that push the thinking in your industry forward. These are opinions, stories, data, and/or strategies that share how you approach solving a problem core to your industry that’s different from the way that everyone else does things. 

You formulate these core concepts over time as you start to come up with ideas that truly set yourself apart from the way others are doing things. These concepts should map to the problems you solve in the section above. Almost every business should have some sort of differentiation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be from a feature perspective, but it can be a philosophical difference in the way that you approach things, a strategic difference, a process difference, or a cultural difference.

We’ll use Grow and Convert as a running example throughout this post because we feel that most people reading this are familiar with our company, so it should make it easy to understand.

Grow and Convert’s Core Concepts

Pain Point SEO (Strategic Difference) 

We came up with Pain Point SEO when we were trying to figure out how to drive more leads from the content we produced for our clients. If we hadn’t initially set out to solve the problem of lead attribution of content marketing, we might not have come up with this strategic difference. 

After measuring and figuring out what the highest converting articles we published on behalf of clients were, we noticed that posts that ranked for search queries that had high buying-intent had the highest conversion rates. Contrary to industry norms that prioritized top-of-funnel content, keywords with high volume, and an idea of not selling too much in content, we realized that producing more articles around these bottom-of-the-funnel, high buying-intent keywords (that pitched the client’s product) produced results much faster than the typical top-of-funnel approach. This core concept differentiated us strategically from the way most businesses did content marketing.

Pain Point Copywriting (Process Difference) 

Pain point copywriting came from us trying to solve the problem of how to write advanced content that converts for our clients’ businesses. The industry norm for agencies is to hire a bunch of freelance writers, send them a topic and/or content brief, have them self-research the topic, and then write the article. This leads to content that doesn’t sell the value props of your product or service and a lot of surface level content that’s the same as what everyone else writes. The difference in our ability to write advanced content has to do with our process. We interview subject matter experts inside of businesses and use their expertise to write product-focused sales copy. 

Content Distribution Strategy (Strategic and Process Difference)

We came up with this differentiator when trying to figure out the best way to drive targeted traffic for our clients. Many agencies just published content and then waited for content to rank. Or, they’d schedule some tweets or LinkedIn posts in Buffer. We figured out an approach to content promotion that was different from how most agencies or in-house brands were doing it, and we shared the strategy in this blog post.

Content Brand (Philosophical and Strategic Difference) 

This post is meant to be a core concept for Grow and Convert going forward. There are many companies looking to distinguish themselves with content, but few know how to produce thought leadership content. We created this article to guide people through a framework to produce content that differentiates themselves from their competition.

You can see that all of our core concept examples map to our positioning differences. These articles share how we approach things differently than the status quo and back our core thesis up with evidence, data, stories, and examples that prove the concept to be true.

The next part of building a content brand is to produce supporting content that maps back to these core concepts.

Produce Content That Maps to Core Concepts

Once you’ve come up with a core concept, you need content that explains and supports that core thesis.

You should produce case studies, data posts, strategy guides, and more that help prove the validity of your core concept. 

For example, if you look through a bunch of our case studies or strategy articles, you’ll see that they all serve to show how Pain Point SEO was implemented in different types of businesses. 

Even large data pieces like this recent analysis of SEO conversion rates adds a ton of original data backing our Pain Point SEO approach. We could’ve just analyzed SEO conversion rates broadly, but instead we chose to tie the conversion rates to the content frameworks we share in our post on Pain Point SEO. 

A piece like this not only supports our Pain Point SEO core concept, but it’s unique. (Most other sites in the content marketing space aren’t publishing data on conversion rates across 90+ posts; it’s hard to find data like this.) It’s also extremely hard to replicate since you can’t just hire a freelance writer to go publish a post like this one. 

What we’re trying to do here is to provide further proof that our core concepts are a better way to approach things than the status quo or industry norms and that we best understand (or are leading the way on) this core concept in our industry. 

Also, original, hard-to-replicate content that maps to your core concepts like this is what starts to get your brand known for its content. In this case, people will start to know that if you want detailed analysis content and SEO conversion rates, you go to Grow and Convert. 

Examples of Drift Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

Let’s also look at some of Drift’s content that backed their conversational marketing core concept.

First off, Drift wrote a book on conversational marketing which outlines their core concept. This is the equivalent of our post on Pain Point SEO; it just goes way more in depth.

Drift started a State of the Conversational Marketing Report that surveyed 503 B2B companies to find data and trends on how people benefitted from conversational marketing.

You can find some of those here:

• 2021 State of Conversational Marketing
• 2022 State of Conversational Marketing

When you create a state of the industry report and use your own branded term to share the data, it’s hard for other companies to argue that they do the same thing.

Not only did they do that, but they also developed a conversational marketing certification program. Again, if you’re certifying people on conversational marketing, it’s going to be hard for someone who has gone through that program to want to buy another tool because they won’t think that the other tool does “conversational marketing,” even if the tool is the same from a feature perspective.

Lastly, Drift has created a number of case studies and JTBD pieces that share how companies have successfully implemented conversational marketing into their sales process.

All of these supporting pieces build on the case for why companies should sell with conversational marketing and follow the Drift process rather than use another tool that has a similar feature set.

Examples of Clearscope Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

I want to include Clearscope examples because they’re different in two ways from us and Drift. 

1. They’ve developed a content brand without creating a branded concept like “pain point SEO” or “conversational marketing.” 
   
   
2. Their content goes beyond written content and includes a heavy dose of webinars and video.

Clearscope founder Bernard Huang has really compelling beliefs that he shares in webinars about how Google’s algorithm figures out search intent and what content to rank. Then, he supports it with data, analysis, and examples. These beliefs are the basis for how the Clearscope tool was built and why it gets rankings better than other tools that help with on-page SEO.

Essentially, if you buy into what he’s saying in his videos about how search works and why you should create content in specific ways, then you’ll also buy into his tool being able to help you get results from SEO.

Here are some examples of webinars he’s done:

• How to rank SEO content in the era of generative AI
• How to get your content to rank for keywords you’re targeting

They also have written content that supports the idea of ranking on the first page of Google:

• How to get on the first page of Google

While Clearscope uses a different approach than the two examples above (both Grow and Convert and Drift), if you’ve read or watched any of their content, you probably immediately bought into their strategic difference and the value of using Clearscope over many of the other tools that do similar things.

How to Integrate the Content Brand Framework with Your Existing Content Strategy

The content brand framework and your existing content strategy should go hand in hand. The idea is to create a number of pieces around core concepts that are not SEO focused but that can be promoted via paid social (Twitter, LinkedIn), shared through newsletters, and shared through organic social. 

Then, you can create supporting pieces that help build on that core thesis. The content type doesn’t matter. You can create YouTube videos that are focused around SEO keywords, webinars, a podcast, eBooks, or pain point SEO focused articles like we do. 

The key to differentiating yourself as a content brand is having something unique to say. Hopefully, the content brand framework will help you discover your company’s uniqueness.

How We’re Helping Clients Build Content Brands

We help clients build content brands in two of our services. 

First, in our core content service, when it makes sense, we often start the engagement off by publishing a disruption story that is not SEO based (it doesn’t target any SEO keyword) but rather explains what the company and product or service is disrupting. It’s the equivalent of our Pain Point SEO piece or a blog post version of Drift’s Conversational Marketing book. Then, the majority of the SEO-focused pieces we publish after that in our standard engagement harken back to the disruption story and its core concepts. That way, our SEO pieces build this foundation of organic traffic that helps lead prospects that are Googling various high buying-intent phrases to a core concept of the brand. 

Here are some examples of disruption stories that we’ve produced:

Rainforest QA

Rainforest QA is a client who has a really innovative product in the software quality assurance (QA) space. Most QA is done using code-based software, so it has to be managed and run by developers. Their product is visual, so other departments can own the QA process as well. This piece talks about how that concept can transform product development processes for the better. 

Asking Developers to Own QA Is Broken. Here’s a Better Way.

Vocal Video

Vocal Video has built a really easy-to-use software for collecting video testimonials. Instead of hiring a video production crew and meeting on-site somewhere, marketing teams can send happy customers a single link that allows customers to walk through a simple guided process to record their thoughts using their own phone or computer camera. This piece goes into what that ease of producing testimonial videos enables for marketing teams. 

Producing Video Testimonials Used to Be a Huge Pain. Here’s How We’re Fixing It.

Lawclerk

Lawclerk is a marketplace of lawyers available for other law firms to hire when they need extra legal help. That sounds simple, but behind the idea is some really provocative thinking around how the business model of large law firms is broken. Here, we helped Greg German, a co-founder of Lawclerk, get those ideas across via their founding story. Note how the piece also sells Lawclerk in addition to the commentary on large law firm business models and their issues. 

Why the Large Law Firm Business Model Is Dying and What We’re Doing Instead

Second, we also offer a one-time project based engagement where we help brands figure out their foundational core concept(s) and positioning via interviews. We expand upon the questions above to uncover what the brand is disrupting, what differentiates them in their space, what core customer pain points they are solving, and more. Then, we publish one or two disruption story pieces that convey that core concept in an engaging and educational way. You can learn more about this service here. 

• “AI is going to remove the need for writers”
• “You’re going to be able to produce 10X the content with AI”
• “Search is going to become so much more competitive because companies will be able to churn out 100s of blog posts in the amount of time it takes a human to produce 1 blog post”
• “Keyword strategy won’t be important because you can produce so much content that you’ll be able to rank for any keyword you want to target”
• “Writers will become prompt engineers – all you need to be good at is telling AI what to write for you”

All of the arguments center around the theme of companies being able to do way more with less resources, but none of the conversation has focused around the quality of AI written content and if your customers will actually want to read anything produced with AI.

To me, that’s where the center of the conversation should be.

Here are some of the questions that I’ve been asking myself:

• Can AI produce the content that we produce better than a human on our team can?
• Can it educate customers on a product or industry better than a human can? 
• Does it have unique and compelling arguments that are different from what everyone else writes on the subject?

The answer to all of those questions at this point is no. This is why we haven’t been as bullish on AI as other content agencies and vendors pushing the AI narrative. 

It’s not to say that AI can’t get there, but I think people are focusing too much on the speed of work instead of the quality of work and that’s a dangerous game to play if you’re wanting results from your content investment.

Let me explain why I think this.

ChatGPT Content is Mirage Content 2.0

In 2016, I wrote an article called Mirage Content, it argued that most of the long form content produced by marketing departments looked, on the surface, like it was well-written, but if you actually read the details it was just high-level fluff. Specifically, when you do a Google search on a topic, many of the articles on the first page have interesting titles, but when you click into them, they all just regurgitate versions of the same few talking points.

I argued in that piece that this problem stemmed from two flaws in the content production process:

1. Most companies would hire freelance writers to write on a subject they had no expertise in. That writer would “research” the topic by Googling it and reading the top 10 results and then rehashing what those articles already said. We coined this The Google Research Paper approach, as it mimics a high school student producing a research paper where you can clearly tell the person doesn’t have expertise on the topic they’re writing about.
   
   
2. The second flaw was that most articles weren’t specific enough. They would cover broad concepts, which forces them to cover them at a high level. They never got deep enough into the details that people actually care about. This specificity problem is also a function of the writer not having expertise on the topic they were writing about.

Now if we think about what AI does, it basically mimics the flawed approach outlined above. AI is trained from a large portion of the web, books, and articles written on a topic, so when you ask it about anything, it simply rehashes what’s been written on a topic (in grammatically pristine English, to be fair).

But what is the “correct” answer? How does AI decide what to say? What does it say on topics where there is no right answer? Does it ever take a strong stance on a topic? 

The answer is that AI writers are biased towards saying the most average thing because that’s how they’re built. They’re programmed to produce a response that is as similar to the information they were trained on. All AI-writing tools know is what they’ve been trained on, which is by definition, things that people have already said. They are literally programmed to find the most likely word that goes after the word it just wrote, over and over again.

This is why AI content feels so much like what I defined as Mirage Content 7 years ago: when you first read it, it sounds really articulate and well-written, but when you stop to really dissect the arguments, you realize it’s just stating the same generic arguments in different ways.

So as a content marketing tool, AI is effectively just making it easier to produce mirage content at scale. Many companies and agencies are taking the same flawed approach they used before to produce content and are now doing it faster with technology. Instead of hiring freelancers to Google a topic for an hour and regurgitate what the top 5 results are saying into their own blog post, they can now just use AI to do the exact same thing, but faster.

So if this is the type of “content marketing” you do (largely surface-level coverage of introductory topics), I absolutely agree that AI could be a good replacement for this type of writing. This is writing where you don’t care about selling your personal or company’s expertise to someone else, and where you don’t care about having your company or CEO’s opinion on the topic woven into the pieces. There’s a large number of writers and agencies who produce mirage content that will get replaced because their approach and strategy was flawed to begin with.

But most companies don’t want to produce content that says the same thing as everyone else. They want to share unique, original, or provocative opinions. They want to explain why the approach their competitors are taking to solve the industry problems are wrong, and why their approach is better. They want to be known for their thoughts and their opinions and be considered “thought leaders” in their industry (easier said than done).

This kind of high-quality content is effective. It helps convince customers about your product over competitors and it helps your brand and ideas stand out from the rest. But if your process to produce great content starts with getting the argumentation on a topic from AI, you’ve already lost. You’re just going to end up with the same unoriginal content as everyone else.

Going forward, I think that AI written content will be a race to the bottom. Companies are going to experiment with it, the web is going to get flooded with more bad content, and I think in a year or two the content that will be most valued will be the ones produced by humans. People have always wanted to read something that challenges their thinking, educates them on something new, or has a differing opinion. The way to produce content like that going forward isn’t with AI, it’s with humans.

There are many people that might disagree with this opinion, but I have yet to see anyone show me an example of a good piece of content produced with AI. So if you have one, feel free to share a link to it below.