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.

But the point of determining search intent isn’t just to fill in a column in your keyword spreadsheet or the content brief document, it’s to understand what you actually need to create to rank for a term and drive business results from that content.

The problem with relying on those labels is that a keyword labeled “informational” might just require a definition or a glossary page, a detailed guide or product tutorial, or a comparison of different products and approaches. If you treat all “informational” keywords the same way, you’ll end up creating generic content for broad intent categories and mostly beginner-level “what is” posts when your users actually need expert-level guidance that can help them solve a specific pain point.

If you’re working with a SaaS or B2B company, the goal of determining search intent should be to understand what type of content Google wants to rank for a given keyword, and whether that keyword is even worth targeting based on its potential to drive conversions, not just traffic. This also matters for AI search visibility, as understanding search intent helps you identify queries that LLMs might reference when generating responses about your product category.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What the four types of search intent actually mean and where most marketers go wrong when using them
• How to determine search intent so you know what kind of content to create for your target keywords
• How to optimize for search intent to rank your target keywords and drive conversions from the content

What is Search Intent (and Where Most Marketers Go Wrong)

Search intent (also known as user intent or keyword intent) is the reason behind why someone searches a keyword or a phrase on a search engine like Google. It can be anything from trying to find an answer to a question, comparing different products and services, making a purchase or signing up for a service. 

The concept of search intent traces back to information retrieval research, most notably Andrei Broder’s 2002 taxonomy of informational, navigational, and transactional queries. Google and the SEO community later adopted and expanded this framework, and today most SEOs recognize four main types of search intent:

• Informational intent: searchers want to find an answer or learn something. These are mostly the “how to,” “what is,” and “why does” queries, where the searcher might not necessarily be looking to buy anything.
• Navigational intent: searchers are looking for a specific website or page. These are keywords like “Facebook login” or “Ahrefs pricing page” where a user already knows where they want to go and is searching for the URL or a link to get to the website or a page.
• Commercial intent: searchers are comparing products or services to make a purchase. These are keywords like “best CRM software” or “Mailchimp vs Convertkit” where a user wants to evaluate different options but hasn’t made a decision yet.
• Transactional intent: searchers are ready to take an action, like signing up for a service or making a purchase. These can be keywords like “buy iPhone 15 case” or “sign up for Notion” because they’ve already decided what they want and are looking for a way to complete the action.

This simple four-category framework is useful as a starting point if you are learning how to do keyword research, write content or create a content strategy, but they miss critical differences in intent within one of the four categories. Most marketers simply pass these labels to their writers without much additional context, which is required to determine whether to produce an article, a landing page or a product page and what content format or depth the page needs to be. This leads to several problems.

We already mentioned earlier that there can be two keywords with the same intent that might require completely different types of pages or content. For example, “What is a CRM” and “How to choose a CRM for a sales team” are both “informational” intent keywords on the surface, but the first one simply requires a definition to fulfill user intent, while the second keyword needs a detailed guide that walks through criteria, CRM options, and tradeoffs.

If there’s no additional context provided about these keywords, writers could treat them the same, and you might end up wasting resources in producing content that doesn’t rank or convert.

We have also noticed that a lot of marketers assume that the same keyword modifiers always indicate the same intent.  Or, similarly, SEO tools often misclassify intent based on keyword patterns. A keyword with “how to” might get labeled as informational even when the top results are product pages, or a keyword might be labeled commercial when Google is actually ranking educational content. The patterns these tools use to assign labels don’t always reflect what’s actually ranking in SERPs. 

Even though the keyword modifier is the same, two keywords can have completely different intent and conversion potential depending on the context, which is why you can not really shortcut this by matching keyword modifier patterns.

It’s also important not to rely just on SEO tools when classifying search intent and to actually do SERP analysis yourself.  Keyword research and SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush use automated systems to assign intent labels, which they might often get wrong, especially when the keywords have mixed, ambiguous, or dual intent or when the keywords have very low search volume (in such cases, these tools might not have any data). 

We have also noticed that most content that does not rank well on traditional search only focuses on the primary intent when there might be mixed motivations for the searchers. 

For example, when a user is searching for a keyword like “how to choose CRM software,” they are mostly looking for different factors and ways to evaluate other tools, but product recommendations are also extremely helpful for them. If you only focus on the educational part without mentioning any specific tools, you might not be able to fully satisfy what the searcher needs. The pages that rank well on Google and other search engines for these kinds of queries usually address both.

How to determine search intent for your target keywords

The process of determining search intent should go beyond just checking what an SEO tool says or matching keyword modifiers into different intent categories. 

Here’s how we approach it:

1. Do SERP Analysis

The most reliable way to determine search intent is to look at what is already ranking, so that you can see all the naunces of what search engines have decided are the best results for a query, based on their data on how millions of users have interacted with those search results.

We have written a complete guide on how we do SERP analysis, but in short, we recommend you start by reading the titles of the search results that are ranking on page 1. This alone will give you a lot of ideas about what Google might be thinking is best for the users. 

For example, if you’re an accounting software company, you might think “accounting best practices” would be a good keyword to target. But if you look at the titles, you’ll see a mix of tips posts, GAAP compliance discussions, and podcasts — there’s mixed intent and not much buying intent. Compare that to “best accounting software” where almost every result is a list of software options. The intent is clear, and you know exactly what you need to create to rank.

Titles also help you catch nuances that matter for your content. For a keyword like “tree care techniques,” you might notice that half the titles mention pruning specifically, which tells you that your content should probably address pruning as a significant component even though the keyword doesn’t explicitly mention it.

After you’ve scanned the titles, read through the top results and take notes on what they’re covering. Look at what topics they all have in common, what they’re doing well, what’s missing, and how they’ve organized their content. Most keywords have multiple layers of intent — someone searching “best accounting software” wants a list of options, but they also want to understand what makes one option better than another. Your job is to identify all the layers and address each one.

You should also pay attention to the SERP features Google includes as well. People Also Ask and Related Searches show you what other questions searchers have around your keyword, which can inform both what to cover in your content and what other keywords might be worth targeting. 

Featured snippets tell you that Google wants a clear, direct answer to a specific question, often a definition or a list of steps. If you see videos ranking prominently, that suggests searchers may prefer video content for that topic; however, if they’re lower on the page, you can likely rank with a detailed post instead.

SERP analysis helps you understand the baseline requirements for rankings (format, depth, and structure) that search engines expect. You can use this analysis to precisely determine what searches are needed and combine it with original insights, specific expertise, or perspective that comes from your company, and not copy what everyone else has written so your content can stand out. 

2. Use SEO or keyword research tools (with caution)

As we mentioned above, if you need a quick and dirty way of assessing search intent, SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can show you an intent label for most keywords, which can be a helpful starting point if you’re working through a long list of keywords and need to sort them quickly. 

If you are using Ahrefs, you can find the intent of any keyword by searching it on the Keyword Explorer tool. Once you enter a keyword, look for the “Intents” column in the “Keywords” table.  

If you are using Semrush, you can go to the “Keyword Magic Tool” and search for your keyword. You’ll also see an “Intent” column where you’ll be able to find what intent the tool says the keyword might be. 

Note that these labels are generated by automated systems that look at keyword patterns more than search results, and as we showed with examples at the top of this article, they can often get it wrong, not really show you any intent, or show different intent depending on what tool you are using. This is especially true for bottom of the funnel keywords or keywords that might have low search volume or those that might have mixed intent. 

We suggest you only use the intent labels as a starting guide to get a rough sense of a keyword if you are working through a list of a lot of keywords, but make sure to always verify it with SERP analysis before you decide what kind of page or content to create for your target keyword. 

How to optimize for search intent?

Once you’ve determined the search intent for a keyword, the next step is to create content that can satisfy that intent so that it can rank and generate results you created the page for. This is where most content fails — not because the writers didn’t understand what searchers wanted, but because they didn’t execute on that understanding in a way that search engines want.

When you are optimizing for search intent, you should be able to decide on the format, depth, angle, and structure based on what you learned from analyzing the SERP. It also means being deliberate about what pages you create and how you position them to rank for specific queries rather than trying to make one page do too many things at once.

Here’s how we approach it:

1. Match content type and format to what’s ranking

If the top results for a keyword are all landing pages or product pages, the safest approach is to create a similar page type. But that doesn’t mean a blog post can’t rank. We’ve helped clients rank with articles and blog posts on keywords where most of page one consisted of landing pages. What matters is whether your content addresses the searcher’s actual intent.

The more common mistake isn’t choosing the wrong format but creating content that doesn’t address what the searcher actually wants. This may seem obvious, but it’s a mistake we often see. A company wants to rank for a keyword like “project management software,” so they write a blog post about project management best practices. But when you look at the SERP, the top results are all product category pages and comparison lists. The blog post never had a chance because it was the wrong content type for that query.

When it comes to content format (listicle vs guide, comparison post vs tutorial), focus on what the user needs and present it in a way that makes sense. If they want to compare different product options, a list with pros and cons about each option works. If they need to understand a process, a step-by-step guide is probably better. The format should follow from what the searcher is trying to accomplish, not from copying whatever structure the top results happen to use.

2. Address all layers of intent

Most keywords have more than one layer of intent, and the content that ranks the highest usually addresses all of them.

Someone searching “best CRM software” wants a list of options, but they also want to understand what makes one CRM better than another. They might also want to know how much these tools cost, what features matter most for their use case, and how the options compare to each other. If your content only provides a list of names without addressing these secondary questions, you’re leaving gaps that competitors will fill.

The People Also Ask boxes and Related Searches at the bottom of the SERP are useful signals for what these secondary layers might be. If you see questions like “What is the easiest CRM to use?” or “How much does CRM software cost?” showing up, that tells you searchers care about those things and your content should probably address them.

The goal is to fully satisfy what the searcher came for so they don’t need to go back to Google and click on another result. If you can do that better than the pages currently ranking, you have a good chance of outranking them.

3. Use the right content angle

Content angle is about the specific perspective or hook that makes your content relevant to the searcher. It’s not just about covering the right topics — it’s about framing them in a way that matches what searchers actually care about.

For example, if you look at a keyword like “best project management tools” and notice that most of the top results emphasize “for small teams” or “for remote work” in their titles, that tells you something about who’s searching and what they’re looking for. If you write a generic comparison that doesn’t speak to a specific audience, you might struggle to compete with content that does.

Freshness is another angle that matters for certain queries. If the top results all include the current year in their titles, that’s a signal that searchers want up-to-date information and Google is prioritizing recent content. For keywords like “best laptops” or “top marketing tools,” outdated content often drops in rankings as newer posts get published.

When you’re deciding on your angle, think about what would make someone click on your result over the others. If you’re writing for a SaaS or B2B audience, consider whether there’s a specific segment or use case you can speak to more directly than the generic posts that already exist.

4. Create dedicated pages for specific intents

If a keyword has a specific intent, it usually needs its own dedicated page. Trying to rank one page for multiple different intents rarely works because you end up with content that doesn’t fully satisfy any of them.

For example, “what is CRM software” and “best CRM software” have different intents. The first one needs an explainer that defines what CRM is and how it works. The second one needs a comparison of options with recommendations. If you try to combine both into a single page, you’ll end up with an awkward hybrid that doesn’t do either job well — and Google will likely rank dedicated pages from competitors above yours for both queries.

This also applies to keywords that seem similar but have subtle differences in intent. “CRM for small business” and “enterprise CRM software” might both be commercial intent keywords, but the searchers have different needs and are evaluating different criteria. Creating separate pages for each allows you to match the specific intent more closely and rank for both.

5. Align Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Schema with Intent

Your title tag should align with what searchers expect to see based on the intent. If the top results for a keyword all include specific phrases like “2024” or “for beginners” or a number of items in a list, consider whether including something similar would help your result stand out and get clicked. The title is often the first thing a searcher sees, and if it doesn’t match what they’re looking for, they’ll skip it regardless of how good your content is.

Meta descriptions don’t directly affect rankings, but they do affect click-through rate. Use the description to reinforce that your page delivers on the intent — if someone is searching for a comparison, mention that you compare the top options; if they want a step-by-step guide, say that’s what they’ll get.

Schema markup can also help Google understand your content and display it with rich features in the search results. If you’re publishing a how-to guide, recipe, FAQ, or product review, adding the appropriate schema can make your result more visible and informative in the SERP.

6. Include relevant visuals and media

If videos or images are ranking prominently for a keyword, that’s a signal that searchers want visual content, and including it can help your page perform better.

For some queries, Google shows a video carousel near the top of the results. If you’re targeting one of these keywords, creating a video or embedding a relevant one can help you capture that space. For other queries, image packs or featured images are prominent, which suggests that visual assets are important to searchers.

Even when the SERP doesn’t show dedicated media features, visuals can improve engagement with your content. Screenshots, diagrams, comparison tables, and infographics help break up text and make information easier to digest. If you’re writing a tutorial, step-by-step screenshots can be the difference between content that’s actually useful and content that leaves readers confused.

The key is to look at what the top results are doing and consider whether adding similar visual elements would help your content better satisfy the intent.

Using Search Intent Analysis to Drive Conversions, Not Just Traffic

Finally, most guides on search intent focus on how to create content that ranks. But ranking is only useful if the content generates business results — and that depends on which keywords you’re targeting in the first place.

At Grow and Convert, we use search intent analysis not just to figure out what content to create, but to identify which keywords are worth creating content for. This is the foundation of our Pain Point SEO framework, which prioritizes keywords based on conversion potential rather than search volume.

The traditional approach to keyword research is to (1) find high-volume terms, (2) determine their intent, and (3) create content that matches. The problem is that most high-volume keywords are top-of-funnel queries where the searcher isn’t anywhere close to making a purchase decision. You can rank for these terms and still see almost no leads from the content.

Our approach flips the order of these steps. We start by identifying keywords where the searcher has a problem our client’s product solves — what we call Category, Comparison, and Jobs-to-be-Done keywords. Then, we do a detailed SERP analysis to understand exactly what type of content, format, and angle is required to rank. The result is content that satisfies search intent and drives conversions, not just traffic.

This is also why we use interview-based content creation. When you’re targeting high-intent keywords, generic content doesn’t cut it. Searchers evaluating products or solutions need specific, expert-level information that helps them make a decision. If someone is searching for “Best IT security software for SMBs” they want nuanced and techncial discussion of product differences. Just regurgitating what everyone else is saying on a topic (i.e. a “Google research paper”) isn’t going to cut it. By interviewing our clients’ internal experts, we create content that satisfies search intent in a way that competitors copying surface-level information can’t match.

The difference shows up in the numbers. Across 64 articles we produced for Geekbot, bottom of the funnel content converted at 4.78% compared to 0.19% for top-of-funnel content, a 25x difference in conversion rate. Despite receiving 7x less traffic, the bottom of the funnel posts generated more than 3x the total conversions. This is why we prioritize keywords where the intent aligns with buying, not just browsing.

If you want to learn more about how we approach content marketing and SEO, you can read about our Pain Point SEO framework or see case studies from clients we’ve worked with.

At Grow and Convert, our primary goal for doing SEO for B2B SaaS companies is to generate more demo requests, trial signups, and pipeline—not just to grow traffic or website authority.

We’ve demonstrated how we drive pipeline growth in numerous case studies:

• All-in-one SaaS Product Case Study – We share how we grew demo signups to 150+/month for a large SaaS platform that has numerous à la carte solutions inside of it.
• Geekbot Case Study – We share how we drove 1,700+ signups for the self-service SaaS company Geekbot by starting with bottom of the funnel keywords and working our way up the funnel to mid/top of the funnel keywords. We also show how conversion rates differ. 
• Circuit Case Study – This article shares how we moved a blog from a subdomain to subfolder while following our SEO content strategy and grew trial signups to 250+/month.

So, in this post, we’re going to share the key factors B2B SaaS companies should consider when evaluating SEO agencies, explain how we’ve addressed each at our own agency (including case studies showing the results we’ve achieved), and share a list of other SaaS SEO agencies whose names we hear come up often.

If you’d like us to apply our SEO content marketing strategy to your SaaS business, you can learn more about our service here.

Key Factors to Consider When Evaluating B2B SaaS SEO Agencies

Below are the key factors we’ve found that separate effective B2B SaaS SEO agencies from those that don’t work out. These are based on directly seeing the work produced by agencies our clients have previously worked with, seeing what results those agencies achieved (or didn’t achieve), and hearing the frustrations our clients have voiced about those engagements.

• Factor 1: Do they prioritize ranking for high buying-intent keywords over technical SEO fixes?
• Factor 2: Do they actually create content, or just deliver keyword lists and briefs?
• Factor 3: Do they prioritize conversions over traffic?
• Factor 4: Do they have a process for writing product-focused content that converts?
• Factor 5: Do they have an actual AI search strategy?

Factor 1: Do they prioritize ranking for high buying-intent keywords over endless technical SEO audits or general-purpose linkbuilding? 

We’ve noticed that SaaS marketing agencies (as well as in-house SEO teams) often focus the majority of their SEO efforts on “on-site SEO” (e.g. technical SEO audits, sitemaps, site structure, internal linking, etc.) and general purpose link building (links built to the homepage or some key pages aimed at increasing overall domain authority), while giving a lot less focus, priority, and effort to what we feel is the most important part of SaaS SEO strategy: Identifying high buying-intent keywords and creating content or pages designed to rank for those keywords. 

We think this is backwards. 

In our view, technical SEO audits are something you do once at the start of an engagement and then revisit maybe once a year or when a major change happens to the site architecture, which is rare for most B2B SaaS companies. Internal linking should be part of your content strategy, not a standalone SEO activity, and link building should only be done as a means of ranking for your highest value keywords, not as an end in itself.

Because otherwise, what’s the point? If you (1) haven’t identified what your highest value keywords are and (2) don’t have pages on your site specifically created to fulfill the search intent of those keywords, then what are you possibly hoping to achieve with technical SEO or link building? 

What use is high domain authority (the goal of most efforts to acquire backlinks) if you don’t have pages on your site created specifically to rank for your highest value keywords? Do you know what your highest value keywords are?

These may sound like obvious mistakes that no one would make, but it’s shockingly common. We see this backwards approach to SEO all the time. A ton of effort is spent on technical SEO and “cleaning up the site,” while a lot less effort is spent on identifying highest value keywords and creating content aimed specifically at ranking for them. 

Inevitably, in these scenarios, SaaS companies become frustrated when all the budget and time spent on SEO fails to produce any measurable increase in qualified leads or product signups.

It’s also worth noting that most B2B SaaS companies that can afford to hire an SEO agency already have a decent website. Technical SEO fixes, if needed at all, shouldn’t take months to complete. At our agency, we handle any necessary technical cleanup in month one of an engagement so we can move on to what actually drives results—ranking for high-intent keywords.

Factor 2: Do they actually create content, or just deliver keyword lists and briefs?

When we have seen keyword lists from SEO consulting services or agencies, there are often several issues with them. 

First, they’re often just massive lists of hundreds of keywords that B2B SaaS companies could get for themselves from any SEO tool. Some agencies do the hard work of categorizing or prioritizing these keywords by buying intent, but from what we’ve seen, most do not. And these SEO tools (where most agencies are getting these lists) almost always suggest tons of low buying-intent, high search volume keywords. 

They don’t interview sales, product, or customer support to deeply understand pain points of the target audience and uncover non-obvious but high converting, high buying-intent keyword ideas. You need humans to do this hard work. 

Second, these lists aren’t actionable. The vast majority of companies don’t have the resources to produce over 200 articles that are high-quality and crafted well enough to actually have a shot at ranking. So while this kind of keyword research may make the SEO agency feel productive, it leaves the client overwhelmed and wondering how they can possibly rank for all of those keywords. 

Compounding this issue is that most of the time, the SEO agency that provided the list will only create “content briefs” for each keyword, but they won’t actually write and publish the pieces. (Or, if they do, they’ll charge an enormous amount to do so.) 

Unfortunately, content briefs don’t rank. Pages published on the site that match search intent rank. These take time and effort to produce. So, it’s no wonder many agencies don’t do this. Heck, many SaaS brands don’t even do this. If an agency isn’t producing the actual content, they’re leaving the hardest part of SEO to you.

Factor 3: Do they prioritize conversions over traffic?

Next, in addition to emailing their clients unreasonably large keyword lists produced by an SEO tool, most B2B SaaS SEO agencies prioritize keywords by chasing traffic over conversions.  

We’ve talked a lot about why this is a problem, but in short, these agencies tend to spend a lot of their efforts trying to rank for top of funnel keywords that have high search volume but low buying intent.

By our measures, these keywords have very low conversion rates — a point that is neatly summarized in this Google analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO content strategy): 

The right-most column shows new user signups for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying-intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying-intent keyword. 

The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

We also showed this at a larger scale in an analysis of 60+ posts for our client Geekbot:

The posts targeting high buying-intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. 

Within that case study, you can read about how the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

This is why, in our experience, prioritizing keywords by intent — not search volume and traffic potential — is far more effective for driving conversions. But most B2B SaaS SEO agencies don’t use strategies that follow this logic.

Factor 4: Do they have a process for writing product-focused content that converts?

Next, in order to rank for high buying-intent keywords (e.g., “best accounting software,” “social media management software,”) and convert that traffic into leads, you need to be good at product copywriting. 

Pages ranking for high buying-intent keywords usually talk a lot about products. So, if you want to rank for these keywords, your pages need to talk about products in-depth, including, for example, an explanation of key features, the use cases for each feature, and what differentiates your product from others in your space. 

This requires a different writing skill set than traditional “blog writing.” First, most blog writing is self-researched, but product copywriting shouldn’t be. The traditional blog writing workflow involves handing a writer a keyword and asking them to come up with what to write on their own. Sometimes the writer is given a “content brief”, but even those are mostly dictating the subheaders based on what the existing ranked pages are already saying. 

That may be fine for introductory, top-of-funnel keywords like “accounting tips for startups,” where most of the articles ranking say the same thing, so a reasonably smart writer could digest the tips in a couple of hours and produce something similar but professional. But if you’re going after a buying-intent keyword like “accounting software for startups,” then you need to actually discuss the details of your software: 

• Outline your features and benefits
  • Why does your feature set look the way it does?
  • What are the most important benefits?
  • Are there any design details that are important? 
• Compare your software with others
  • What differentiates yours from others?
  • Where in the market do you sit? 
  • Are there certain use cases where a competitor might be better?

No freelance writer is going to be able to write this on their own. 

First, they’re going to need to interview product experts at your company to get this information. Most B2B SaaS SEO agencies don’t have these interviews as part of their content creation process. 

Second, they need to be able to write this kind of content well. How do you sell the features without being too salesy? How do you contrast with competitors without being too aggressive or trashing them? These are hard skills to learn. Some writers on our team have told me that our writing is more like landing page copywriting than blog content writing. They’re not wrong.

Factor 5: Do they have an actual AI search strategy?

With the rise of AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, many B2B SaaS companies are asking whether their SEO agency has a strategy for showing up in these platforms.

The problem is that most agencies don’t have a clear AI search strategy yet. Instead, most SEO agencies just test random tactics they see online, such as adding llms.txt files to the site, changing headings to questions, adding FAQs to every page, or commenting on Reddit threads. These tactics may or may not help, but they aren’t a real AI search strategy.

Our approach to AI search visibility at Grow and Convert is what we call Prioritized GEO, and the pyramid below shows how we recommend brands prioritize their efforts to improve their visibility in LLMs and AI engines:

The foundation of any AI search strategy is showing up in traditional SEO searches for topics where you want visibility. This is because LLMs search the web to formulate their responses, particularly when users ask for product recommendations. In our research, we have also found a 72% correlation between ranking on the first page of Google and being mentioned by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. When our clients ranked in the top three positions in traditional search, that correlation increased to 77%. We do this through the bottom two sections of our pyramid: Content on your site that tanks for relevant keywords (Tier 1) and getting mentions of your brand on other people’s content that also ranks for these keywords and topics (Tier 2). 

So when evaluating B2B SaaS SEO agencies, it’s worth asking whether they have a strategy for AI search visibility, and whether that strategy is grounded in creating content that ranks for bottom-of-funnel keywords.

Best B2B SaaS SEO Agencies

Below, we cover the best B2B SaaS SEO agencies to consider, starting with our own. For each, we’ll explain their approach to doing SEO, what they specialize in, and what types of companies they have worked with.

Since we outlined the key factors for evaluating B2B SaaS SEO agencies above, we’ll also share how we’ve addressed each of these factors at our agency, including case studies showing the results we’ve achieved.

1. Grow and Convert

Grow and Convert is our SEO and GEO-focused content marketing agency. We’ve spent over 10 years doing SEO and executing content marketing strategies that drive trial signups and demo requests for B2B SaaS companies, not just traffic.

Unlike agencies that optimize for top of the funnel metrics like traffic or rankings, we focus on bottom of the funnel content that generates qualified leads and measurable ROI through our Pain Point SEO and Prioritized GEO frameworks.

We have worked with B2B SaaS companies at various stages, from startups starting their first scalable content strategy to growth-stage companies looking to scale growth through content, SEO, and AI search.

Fundamentally, we feel our process is better aligned with B2B SaaS clients’ desired outcomes (rankings for high buying-intent search terms) and is more likely to actually achieve those outcomes because of what we prioritize. 

Below is each step of our process, listed in order of priority. 

Priority 1: Finding the Most Valuable Keywords to Target

Unlike traditional SEO firms that launch headfirst into technical SEO or link building without a keyword strategy in place, our focus starts with the keywords for which we want to rank. 

Ranking for target keywords that can drive meaningful results is literally the entire point of SEO. Nothing matters if you don’t know which keywords you’re targeting. Link building doesn’t matter. Technical SEO doesn’t matter. Yet, as we said above, we’ve had many clients who’ve spent months on all kinds of SEO activities without an agreed upon list of their most valuable keywords. Or, only slightly better, their target keyword list is only one or two keywords. 

Also, a crucial detail is that both the words “valuable” and “keywords” are equally important. Who cares about ranking for keywords loosely related to your product if they don’t bring you any business? Sure, your organic traffic will increase, and you can post that on Twitter and brag about it, but if the keywords aren’t ultimately leading to sales, then it doesn’t give clients what they want.

We’ve linked to these articles already, but to recap, you can read more about our high-value keyword strategy here and here. A case study quantifying the value of high buying-intent (bottom of funnel) keywords can be found here. 

To emphasize my point about priority, every other SEO activity we do (listed below) is in the service of ranking for these high-value keywords. This is our entire goal for clients. 

Priority 2: Creating Product-Focused Content Aimed to Rank for These Keywords

Second, and equally as important as the first priority, we produce individual pages to rank for each high-value keyword we are targeting. We don’t use the sprinkle method, meaning we don’t produce a single “small business accounting guide” that’s aimed at ranking for 10 different accounting keywords. 

We analyze the existing search engine results page (SERP) for each keyword, determine search intent, and produce a unique piece of B2B SaaS content that (a) has the necessary on-page optimization to rank and (b) better fulfills search intent than the existing results. 

And because most of our keywords are high buying-intent (“best accounting software,” for example), we sell the heck out of our client’s products and services in these articles. 

We get into the details of features, we explain the nuance of benefits, we weave in testimonials and case studies, and we differentiate our client’s products from those of their competitors (sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively). 

We base all of this on extensive interviews with product experts, product demos, and sometimes demo accounts (so we can use the product ourselves). We have been doing this for years and have an extensive writer training process that has helped us build a tight-knit team of product copywriters. 

This product-focused content is also the foundation of our AI search/Prioritized GEO strategy. LLMs search the web when users ask for product recommendations, and your content is how they understand what you offer, who you serve, and how you’re different from competitors. If your content doesn’t clearly communicate your product’s features, use cases, and differentiators, LLMs won’t know when or how to recommend you.

Priority 3: Site Cleanup and Technical SEO

You may be wondering, “How could this be third in the priority list? If the technical SEO isn’t in order, won’t you have trouble ranking for those high value keywords?!” Our answer is, “Yes, you would.” In fact, we start every client engagement with an SEO audit precisely to check for technical issues with the site that may hurt our ability to rank. Then, we either fix or suggest fixing the technical issues before we get started publishing.

So, like I said above, just because we list this as our third priority doesn’t mean it happens third chronologically. 

But, it’s third on our priority list by importance. Meaning, for us, site cleanup and technical SEO is only important insofar as it helps our content (Priority #2) rank for the most valuable keywords (Priority #1). Yes, if there are glaring technical issues, such as multiple H1s on a page, thousands of no-value, no traffic pages eating crawl budget, the entire site randomly no-indexed (you’d be surprised!), etc. — we’ll fix those problems immediately. 

But many times, there are no problems with the site! 

Contrary to what most SEO agencies will tell you, most B2B SaaS websites of decently sized companies that can afford to hire these agencies aren’t a hot mess. Take, for example, the marketing sites of most B2B SaaS companies: they’re not even that big. They usually have something like 10–20 largely static pages (product, solution, pricing, etc.). So why are these companies being sold months of SEO audits and technical SEO “cleanup” by SEO agencies? It makes no sense to us. 

We do technical SEO and site cleanup fixes; we’ve done a lot of it for our clients. We do a site audit, and we prioritize issues by importance and severity. But for us, it’s just something to get out of the way so that our content (#2) can rank for our high value target keywords (#1), not something to extend for as long as possible to keep charging the client.  

Priority #4: Link Building and Off-site Mentions

The final part of our SEO process is getting your brand mentioned on other sites. This includes both traditional link building and off-site mentions for AI search visibility.

For traditional SEO, link building works. But like technical SEO, it doesn’t pay the bills without high-quality content (#2) aimed at the right keywords (#1). It’s just a means to an end.

For AI search, off-site mentions matter because LLMs search the web to formulate their responses. Getting your brand mentioned on sites that rank for your target keywords can increase the likelihood that AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend you. This is the second tier of our Prioritized GEO framework — it supports AI visibility, but only after you have the foundation of owned content that ranks.

In both cases, we’ve seen clients come to us after spending years paying untold sums on link building or PR without even having a clear set of high value keywords for which they’re trying to rank, much less the content they need to actually achieve those rankings. When we ask, “Why are you building links?”, they tell us, “Our SEO agency said it was important to get rankings.”

What rankings are these exactly? No one knows.

If you’d like us to apply our SEO content marketing strategy to your SaaS business, you can learn more about our service here. 

2. Siege Media

Siege Media is an SEO-focused content marketing agency founded in 2012 that works with both B2B and B2C SaaS companies. They specialize in content creation, link building, and digital PR, with a particular emphasis on design-heavy content and data-driven strategies.

Their services include content strategy, SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), link building, digital PR, technical SEO, and graphic design. They are known for creating visual and interactive content such as infographics, quizzes, maps, and calculators that attract backlinks from authoritative publications.

Their approach centers on SERP analysis to identify high traffic value keywords, after which they build content assets designed to rank for those opportunities. They also conduct and publish original data studies, which they use to generate backlinks and establish thought leadership.

They’ve worked with companies including Zapier, Figma, Zoom, Zendesk, and Shutterstock.

Visit their site for more information.

3. Omniscient Digital

Omniscient Digital is an organic growth agency founded in 2019 that works primarily with B2B software companies. Their leadership team includes former growth leaders from HubSpot, Shopify, and Workato who have built and scaled organic search programs at major tech companies.

They position themselves as focused on revenue-driving outcomes like qualified leads, pipeline, and conversions rather than traffic volume. Their services include SEO strategy, content strategy and production, link building, digital PR, technical SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), programmatic SEO, and analytics.

Their approach combines thought leadership content with SEO, and they have been early movers in optimizing content for AI search platforms. Just like our agency, they also interview subject matter experts and produce content that speaks directly to ICP pain points, though they are mostly focused on high-volume production than quality and differentiation.

They’ve worked with companies including Jasper, Loom, HotJar, Adobe, SAP, Asana, and BetterUp.

Visit their site for more information.

4. Skale

Skale is a B2B SaaS SEO agency founded in 2020 and based in London. They focus on driving revenue outcomes for SaaS companies rather than traditional SEO metrics like traffic or rankings.

Just like our agency, they also focus on KPIs like SQLs, qualified signups, and MRR rather than vanity metrics. They work with SaaS companies through long sales cycles and understand the need to target both decision-makers and influencers within organizations.

Their services include SEO strategy and execution, content marketing, technical SEO, link building, and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to help brands stay visible across AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

They’ve worked with companies including HubSpot, Lightspeed, and Freshworks.

Visit their site for more information.

5. GrowSERP

GrowSERP is an organic growth marketing and SEO agency based in Vancouver, Canada that works with B2B and SaaS companies. They focus on generating leads and revenue through editorial content, programmatic SEO, and product-led SEO strategies.

They approach SEO from a bottom of the funnel perspective where they help rank for keywords and topics that can generate more leads, signups and revenue rather than high-volume, low-intent traffic. Their content production process relies on expert writers who specialize in specific industries rather than generalist writers who research a topic before writing.

Their services include content strategy, content writing, technical SEO, link building, and AI search optimization. They track client visibility across AI platforms using proprietary internal tools and position themselves as a full-service organic growth and SEO partner for companies looking to show up in both traditional and AI-driven search.

Visit their site for more information.

6. Animalz

Animalz is a content marketing agency that works primarily with B2B SaaS companies. They focus on building authority through thought leadership content and emphasize heavily on editorial quality.

Their services include content strategy, blog articles, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, thought leadership content, technical SEO, content audits and refreshes, LinkedIn campaigns, and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). They also developed Revive, a free tool that helps marketers identify content decay and find opportunities to refresh outdated articles.

Their content production process involves deep interviews with subject matter experts rather than surface-level research. On the AI search side, they conduct AEO audits to map visibility across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overview, including competitive benchmarking and entity mapping to show who LLMs trust in your space. They then build content restructuring plans that include summaries, FAQs, comparison tables, and schema implementation.

They’ve worked with companies like Wistia, GoDaddy, Zendesk, Intercom, Retool, and Amplitude.

Visit their site for more information.

7. Powered by Search

Powered by Search is a demand generation agency based in Toronto, Canada that works with B2B technology and SaaS companies, particularly those with long sales cycles and high ACVs.

They integrate SEO with demand generation, content marketing, paid advertising, and ABM rather than treating it as a siloed channel. They map buyer journeys across multiple stakeholders and build SEO strategies tailored to each.

They have built a Predictable Growth System specifically for high-ACV SaaS companies. Their services include SEO, content marketing, demand generation, paid media, and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

For AI SEO, they have developed what they call the RAISE framework, which is focused on helping clients show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews by structuring content to directly answer questions, ensuring AI crawlers can access your site, building contextually rich content, establishing third-party validation through digital PR, and leveraging user behavior that can influence AI results.

They’ve worked with companies including Varonis, Fortra, and Collibra.

Visit their site for more information.

8. Organic Growth Marketing (OGM)

Organic Growth Marketing (OGM) is an SEO and content agency that works with growth-stage SaaS companies. They embed a growth advisor directly into client teams, and execute with a back-end team of specialists.

Their approach focuses on understanding each client’s ICP and building organic growth programs tied to revenue outcomes rather than traffic volume. They position themselves as working best with post-product-market-fit companies that already have at least one channel working and have some brand momentum in the market.

They emphasize the importance of buyer intent over top-line traffic numbers. On the AI SEO side, they note that success in AI search depends on having a brand with signals across the web, and they execute their strategies around off-site signals.

They’ve worked with companies like Hotjar, Intercom, Ramp, ProfitWell, Matterport, Klaviyo, Twilio, Unsplash, and ActiveCampaign.

Visit their site for more information.

9. Omnius

Omnius is a B2B SEO agency based in Europe that works exclusively with SaaS and Fintech companies. They believe that narrow focus and deep expertise in specific industries yield better results than being a generalist agency.

Their services include SEO strategy, technical SEO, content production, link building, programmatic SEO, and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). On the AI search side, they optimize websites for visibility in LLM-generated answers through AI crawler optimization, content scoring and rewriting, source citation monitoring, and schema implementation.

Their approach covers both traditional search engine optimization and AI search visibility, with a focus on positioning B2B companies everywhere people search, not just Google.

They’ve worked with companies including TextCortex, Airbnb, WorldFirst, Meniga, and Native Teams.

Visit their site for more information.

10. SimpleTiger

SimpleTiger is an SEO agency that works exclusively with SaaS companies. They focus on building search strategies that generate business outcomes like qualified leads and building predictable, recurring revenue over time.

They provides services including SEO strategy, technical SEO audits, content strategy and production, link building, digital PR, paid search, web design, and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) for AI-powered search. They position themselves as a unified system across search, content, design, and paid channels rather than offering these as separate services.

Their approach emphasizes speed, execution, and scale. They work with both early-stage SaaS companies and enterprise brands. On the AI search side, they focus on content structure, clarity, and credibility to help SaaS brands stay visible in both traditional search and AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews.

They’ve worked with companies including Segment, Gelato, JotForm, Bitly, Unsplash, and Invoca.

Visit their site for more information.

Want to work with us or learn how to implement our B2B SaaS SEO 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 SEO and content strategy can join our private course, taught via case studies, here. We include a lot of information 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 and 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 SEO Team: Alternatively, if this style of B2B SEO and content marketing appeals to you, consider joining our 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.

This rise in demand for AI search visibility has created a flood of agencies and consultants offering “AI SEO” or “GEO” services. What we’ve noticed is that many of these marketers are pushing tactics like adding llms.txt files, FAQ schema, rewriting headings as questions, and running marketing campaigns on Reddit.

In our experience, most of these tactics are unproven or have actually been proven (via our testing or others) to not make any measurable difference in AI search visibility. As a result, it’s our strong belief that these short-term tactics shouldn’t be your top priority if you really want to be mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other LLMs.

We’ve spent the last year studying what actually drives AI visibility for SaaS and B2B brands. We analyzed 400+ keywords across 16 of our own clients, built our own AI tracking tool (Traqer.ai), and developed a framework called Prioritized GEO to separate what works from what doesn’t.

So, to help you find the right agency for AI search, we’re going to share what we’ve learned and the key factors you should consider when evaluating AI SEO agencies.

Then, we’ll share how we’ve addressed each of these factors at our agency. And since most companies like to evaluate multiple options, we’ll cover other AI SEO agencies we’ve seen that are publishing actual strategies and studies to improve AI visibility, not just pushing tactics to justify higher retainers.

Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best AI SEO Agency for Your Business

To begin, we’ll cover the 4 biggest factors you need to consider when evaluating AI SEO agencies:

• Factor 1: Do they understand the connection between traditional SEO and AI visibility? 
• Factor 2: Do they prioritize bottom of funnel content over top of funnel?
• Factor 3: Is their content process human-led or AI-led?
• Factor 4: How do they measure AI visibility?

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Factor 1: Do they have a clear AI optimization strategy?

This is the most important factor because it determines whether an agency actually understands how AI search works or is just capitalizing on the hype.

As we said above, there’s a flood of GEO tactics being promoted across the internet right now, like adding llms.txt files to your site, rewriting your headings as questions, adding content summaries or key takeaways, creating FAQ sections on every page, and implementing structured data markup specifically for AI.

The problem is that these are random tactics, not a strategy.

If an agency’s approach is creating content without a clear framework, then sprinkling on some FAQs or changing headings to questions and calling that their GEO strategy, they don’t have a strategy. They’re just throwing tactics at the wall.

Similarly, if they’re doing their normal content process and then using some AI visibility tool to report a single visibility percentage to you, as if that number alone constitutes a GEO strategy, it means they fundamentally don’t understand what drives AI visibility.

Trying random tactics isn’t a strategy. Doing business as usual and then reporting on a single metric isn’t a strategy either.

Instead, look for an agency that can clearly separate tactics from strategy. That means they understand prioritization, and specifically, they know what doesn’t matter so they can focus on what actually does. 

Strategy is an overarching framework that determines which tactics deserve your time and budget, and which ones are distractions. A real AI search optimization strategy explains why certain approaches work and why others don’t, based on how LLMs actually gather and process information.

In fact, knowing what doesn’t matter is often the clearest indicator that an agency has developed a thoughtful strategy rather than just being willing to try anything that sounds promising.

You can see what our GEO strategy looks like through our Prioritized GEO framework below. This pyramid clearly deprioritizes on-page tactics like bullet points and FAQ creation because we understand that what’s far more important is getting exposure to LLMs by showing up in the web searches they perform when generating responses.

This kind of strategic thinking, where an agency can explain not just what they do but what they deliberately don’t do and why, is what separates real AI optimization expertise from agencies that are just repackaging their existing services with AI buzzwords.

Factor 2: Do they prioritize bottom of the funnel content over top of the funnel?

Most traditional SEO agencies prioritize top of the funnel topics because they have the highest search volume. They do keyword research using SEO tools, sort by volume, and build content calendars around the biggest numbers. The assumption is that with enough traffic, conversions will follow.

But generating more traffic doesn’t automatically result in more leads. We’ve been writing about this since 2018 when we published our Pain Point SEO framework. Top of the funnel visitors usually aren’t looking to buy. They want a definition or a quick answer, and then they leave. 

Conversion rates on this type of content are minimal compared to bottom of the funnel content where the reader is actively researching solutions.

In our experience, bottom of the funnel keywords convert 10x to 25x better than top of the funnel. We’ve documented this across multiple case studies, including our Geekbot case study, where we showed the difference in conversion rates between content targeting different parts of the funnel:

So even in traditional SEO, we’ve argued for years that companies should focus first on bottom of the funnel, pain-point-focused keywords, then work their way up. If an agency is still building content calendars filled with “What is X” and “Beginner’s Guide to Y” posts, they’re operating on an outdated playbook.

But now, in AI search, this becomes even more critical.

Top of the funnel content doesn’t just have low conversion rates in AI search. It drives almost no traffic. When you ask ChatGPT, “What is content marketing?”, it just gives you the answer. No links. No sources. No reason for the user to click through to your site. Google is heading in the same direction with Google AI overviews, answering the query and occupying most of the top fold in the search results page. 

In contrast, for bottom of the funnel queries or prompts, LLMs do 2 things differently. 

1. They actually list brands. For example, when someone asks ChatGPT “What’s the best project management software for a small marketing team?” or “What are the best alternatives to HubSpot?”, ChatGPT, for example, literally lists tools in its outputs. That’s because it knows that the user is actively looking for product recommendations. Your goal is to be one of these recommended brands or products.
2. They cite sources (and link to them) a lot more often than for TOF prompts. Note below how each tool has a link associated with it. We didn’t have to even click “web search” to do this, ChatGPT just does that automatically.

Factor 3: Is their content writing process expert-led or AI-led?

A lot of agencies have started using AI to write content for clients because it allows them to produce more content at a faster pace and lower cost. But 100% AI-generated content is too generic to stand out, and if done at scale, it can also be impacted by Google’s scaled content abuse policies.

LLMs are trained on what already exists online, and they’re programmed to produce responses that match the patterns in their training data. They find the most likely word that goes after the word they just wrote, over and over again. The result is content that sounds articulate on first read but says the same thing as everything else, with no original argument, no unique perspective, and no reason for an LLM to recommend it.

We wrote about this back in 2016 and called it Mirage Content. On the surface, it looks well-written. But when you actually dissect the arguments, it’s just stating generic points in different ways. AI content is essentially Mirage Content 2.0, making it easier to produce undifferentiated content at scale.

If an agency uses AI to generate your articles, they’re just regurgitating the average of what already exists. Generative engines have no incentive to recommend content that looks and sounds like everything else on the web.

The agencies doing this well use a human-led process. They interview subject matter experts inside your organization to understand your product, your differentiators, and your point of view. They create content that’s original, specific to your company, and worth citing. This is the kind of content that gets recommended by LLMs. 

To be clear, we’re not against using AI in the writing process. It can be useful for research, creating briefs, fleshing out sentences, and other parts of the workflow. But if you want to produce content that actually stands out, you need to spend a lot of time providing the prompts and details that are specific to your business. That specificity is what makes content worth recommending. The agencies that just feed a topic into ChatGPT and publish whatever comes out are producing content that looks and sounds like everything else on the web.

When we asked ChatGPT for the best SaaS marketing agencies, it knew we specialize in content strategies that drive demos and signups, not just traffic. It pulled that information directly from the content we’ve published on our site.

If the content on your site has the same copy, benefits, and use cases as every competitor in your space, your SEO strategy will also be lost in the shuffle.

Factor 4: How do they measure AI visibility?

Traditional SEO tools can tell you where you rank on Google. They can show you traffic, impressions, and click-through rates, but they don’t know you if you’re being mentioned in ChatGPT, cited by Perplexity, or appearing in Google AI Overviews.

This is a real problem because these are different outcomes. You can rank on page one of Google and still not show up when someone asks ChatGPT for recommendations. You can appear in Perplexity but not in Google AI Overviews. Without a way to track this, you’re blind to whether an agency’s work is actually producing AI visibility.

Some agencies have started using AI visibility tools to track this. But there’s a problem with how most of them use these tools.

A lot of AI visibility tools work by generating a list of prompts and telling you which ones you’re “ranking” for. But these prompts are often random and made up by the tool. You have no idea if anyone is actually typing them into ChatGPT, or if they’re even relevant to your business.

For example, we’ve seen many AI visibility tracking tools generate prompts that have nothing to do with what a company actually sells or the topics their customers care about. That’s letting the tool lead the strategy instead of the other way around.

In contrast, a good AI SEO agency will decide which topic areas matter for your business first, then measure visibility for prompts related to those topics. They decide the prompts and topic, not some tool. You and the agency need to agree on what’s important, and then track visibility against that. Otherwise, you’re just looking at data on random AI generated prompts that your real customers may or may not ever be searching.

We start by identifying the bottom of the funnel topics that matter for each client, then track visibility across multiple prompts related to those topics in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews week over week. This lets us see what’s actually working and adjust accordingly.

When evaluating agencies, ask them how they measure AI visibility. If they don’t have a clear answer, or if they’re just pointing to traditional SEO metrics, they’re not set up to deliver on what they’re promising.And if they’re using a tool but can’t explain how they decide which prompts to track, they’re letting the tool lead them instead of leading the tool.

Now, let’s walk through how our agency addresses each of these factors, including our AI visibility strategy, content and promotion processes, and the research we’ve published on what actually drives results in AI search.

Then, since most companies like to evaluate multiple options, we’ll profile other agencies that are publishing real strategies and data around AI visibility.

Best AI SEO Agencies

Here are the best AI SEO agencies to consider, starting with our own. For each, we’ll explain their approach, what they specialize in, and how they address the factors above.

1. Grow and Convert

Grow and Convert is our SEO and GEO-focused content marketing agency, and we’ve spent over 10 years specializing in content strategies that drive leads and revenue for B2B companies, not just traffic. Unlike agencies that optimize for top of the funnel metrics, we focus on bottom of the funnel content that generates qualified leads and produces measurable ROI.

We’ve done this for years with traditional SEO and over the past year, we’ve extended this approach to AI search. We developed our Prioritized GEO framework, built Traqer.ai to track AI visibility the right way, and published the research we referenced throughout this article, including our study of 400+ keywords that showed a 77% correlation between Google rankings and AI mentions.

We work with companies at various stages, from startups looking to build their first scalable content strategy to growth-stage companies that are looking to expand their visibility in both traditional search and AI engines.

Our approach is built around the four factors we outlined above, and we’ve documented our entire process publicly through detailed case studies and research.

Here’s how we address each factor:

1. Our Strategy Is Built on Exposing Your Brand to LLMs (By Showing up in Web Searches Those LLMs Conduct)

Our Prioritized GEO framework prioritizes getting exposure to LLMs first, (Tiers 1 and 2) and only then testing on site tactics (Tier 3) which are only meant to help LLMs better undrstand your content (less important). 

The foundation of our pyramid is Tier 1 – Owned Content that Ranks on Google. This is based on the fact that SEO is the #1 way to influence LLM outputs. LLMs search the web to supplement their responses, a process known as grounding. They do this very often, in particular, for bottom of funnel or product related prompts, which are the only prompts that really matter for GEO, as we established above. And the absolute most efficient way to get exposure to LLMs via traditional SEO is to have content on your site that is aimed at ranking for SEO keywrods that are related to the topics you want AI visibility for. 

Related to this is Tier 2 – Off-Site Mentions. This is getting exposed to LLMs via other sites’ content that is ranking on Google. We do this for clients through citation outreach, where we see what sites are ranking for the prompts you care about and reach out to them to try to get placement in their articles. 

Only after those have been exhausted do we test on-site tactics (Tier 3). 

This has resulted in great AI visibility for our clients like the following for a client in the innovation management software space: 

Or workflow management: 

2. We Prioritize Bottom-of-Funnel Content That Gets Recommended by AI

We’ve been focused on bottom-of-funnel content since 2018, when we published the Pain Point SEO framework. We argued that companies should focus first on keywords with high buying intent, then work their way up the funnel. 

In our experience over 10 years of working with 100+ clients and tracking conversion rates across thousands of keywords, we’ve seen bottom-of-funnel keywords convert 10x to 25x better than top of the funnel.

In AI search, this strategy is even more important. Top-of-funnel queries don’t drive any traffic because ChatGPT just answers them directly. Bottom-of-funnel queries are where LLMs actually recommend products and services.

When someone asks ChatGPT for the best software in your category or alternatives to a competitor, your goal is to be one of the brands it names. Our content strategy is built around making that happen.

3. We Use an Interview-Based, Human-Led Writing Process

We don’t produce articles by feeding topics into AI or having writers do Google research and regurgitate what’s already ranking. Instead, our writers start by interviewing people inside your organization who have the expertise to speak on the topic and explain how your product is differentiated.

We’re not talking about grabbing a few quotes 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 inside your company. This creates content that’s original, specific, and worth citing. Here’s a case study showing how this even lets us produce detailed technical content without prior domain expertise. 

This matters for AI visibility because LLMs recommend brands based on how clearly their content articulates who they serve, what pain points they solve, and how they’re different. Generic content that sounds like everything else on the web doesn’t get recommended.

4. We Track AI Visibility with Traqer.ai

Traditional SEO tools can’t tell you if you’re being mentioned in ChatGPT or appearing in Google AI Overviews. And most AI visibility tools focus on prompts they randomly generate and hide the details in single visibility % numbers. This is not a proper AI search strategy, which is why we built our own tool, Traqer.ai.

Traqer is based on topics, not prompts. Since none of us know what users are actually typing into ChatGPT, Traqer flips the script and gets you, the brand, to first decide what topics matter to you and then it comes up with multiple prompts that get at that topic in different angles.

You can then see how often your brand gets mentioned across a variety of prompts on that topic. If you’re mentioned every time, you’re likely to be mentioned when a real user asks about that topic. If you’re hardly mentioned at all, you have work to do for visibility on that topic. 

We also use Traqer to identify which domains are being cited most frequently for queries relevant to our clients’ industries. This informs our citation outreach, so we’re targeting the sites that AI tools are actually pulling from.

Our Content Promotion Process

To drive traffic to your articles as we wait for them to rank in organic search, we use a three-pronged promotion strategy:

• Paid Ads (short-term traffic): We use paid ads to promote content using cold audiences and lookalike audiences based on your existing customer list or website visitors. We test channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads based on where we’re most likely to reach your audience.
• Manual Link Building (long-term traffic): When certain pieces start ranking, we strategically build backlinks to boost them to page 1 or the top of page 1 in Google.
• Citation Outreach (AI visibility): We track which sources AI tools are citing when answering queries relevant to your industry, then work to get your content mentioned by those same sources. This ensures that when AI tools answer questions in your space, they’re more likely to cite content that mentions your brand.

We do all of the above from our own budget, with no extra spend for our clients.

Case Studies and Research

Here are some of the case studies and research we’ve published that demonstrate our approach:

• Does Google SEO Affect LLM Optimization? We Analyzed 400+ Keywords to Find Out
• Prioritized GEO: How Brands Should Focus Resources on AI Visibility
• AI Search: How Content Strategy Needs to Change
• How we scaled Leadfeeder’s signups to over 200/month
• Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 sessions in 6 months (Circuit Case Study)

If you’re interested, you can learn more about our agency, pricing, and reach out about working with us here.

2. Siege Media 

Siege Media is an SEO-focused content marketing agency founded in 2012 that has expanded into GEO and AEO services. They specialize in content creation, link building, and digital PR, with an emphasis on creating design-heavy, interactive content assets.

They offer comprehensive services, including content strategy, SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), link building, digital PR, technical SEO, and graphic design. They are mostly known for creating unique data studies and interactive content like quizzes, maps, and calculators that earn backlinks and citations from authoritative sources.

Just like our agency, their GEO methodology centers on creating owned assets. Their research found an 83% lift in traffic value when content includes unique data, and they report that companies publishing proprietary data gain 45% more AI citations than those using traditional content formats. They also have a proprietary tool, DataFlywheel, to automatically refresh existing content with new data and updated information on a quarterly basis.

For AI visibility tracking, they use third-party tools like Profound and Knowatoa to monitor brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

They’ve worked with companies including Zapier, Figma, Zendesk, Shutterstock, and Zillow.

Visit their site for more information.

3. iPullRank

iPullRank is a New York-based enterprise SEO agency known for its technical SEO services and a data-driven approach to search. They offer Generative Engine Optimization services through their proprietary framework called Relevance Engineering.

They provide comprehensive services, including technical SEO, content strategy, audience research, digital PR, and GEO. Their work focuses on enterprise and mid-market clients with complex sites, particularly in finance, media, and e-commerce.

Their GEO methodology is centered around information retrieval, content strategy, UX, and AI to optimize content for visibility across traditional and AI-powered search platforms. The framework focuses on understanding how LLMs retrieve and synthesize content, including concepts like query fan-out, passage retrieval, and vector embeddings. They’ve published a comprehensive resource called The AI Search Manual that covers their entire approach to GEO, from strategy to measurement.

iPullRank emphasizes structuring content so it can be retrieved and cited by AI systems, not just ranked in traditional search. They focus on semantic chunking, entity optimization, and creating content that LLMs can easily parse and include in generated responses.

They’ve worked with companies including LG, DocSend, and Citi and report delivering $2B+ in results across their client base.

Visit their site for more information.

4. GrowSERP

GrowSERP is an organic growth marketing agency based in Canada that helps B2B and SaaS companies generate leads and revenue through editorial content, programmatic SEO, and product-led SEO strategies. The agency prioritizes bottom of the funnel keywords and topics and focuses on scaling traffic, authority and qualified leads.

Their content production model relies on expert writers who specialize in specific industries rather than generalist writers who research a topic before writing. 

On the AI visibility side, GrowSERP offers AI search optimization services and tracks client visibility across AI platforms using their own proprietary internal tools. They combine their traditional SEO capabilities in content writing, technical SEO and link building, and position themselves as a full-service organic growth partner for companies looking to show up in both traditional and AI-driven search.

GrowSERP primarily works with B2B companies and SaaS platforms who want to scale their traffic and customer acquisition.

Visit their site for more information. 

5. Spicy Margarita

Spicy Margarita is a UK-based SEO and content agency that works with B2B services and SaaS companies. They’ve built specialist services in generative engine optimization alongside their core SEO offering.

They offer SEO strategy, content production, digital PR, and GEO services. The agency is intentionally small, working with no more than 10 clients at a time, and positions itself as an extension of in-house marketing teams rather than a traditional agency.

Like our agency, Spicy Margarita focuses on bottom-of-funnel strategies designed to drive revenue rather than traffic. Their GEO approach centers on making brands visible when buyers are actively researching solutions in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. They run AI SEO audits and build playbooks for getting brands cited in AI-generated answers.

Founder Ben Goodey is active in the GEO space, sharing experiments and strategy breakdowns on LinkedIn and running How the F*ck, an SEO publication with case studies and interviews. The agency emphasizes ongoing experimentation in AI SEO as the field evolves.

They’ve worked with Series A and Series B tech startups, financial services companies, and other fast-growing B2B businesses.

Visit their site for more information.

6. Omniscient Digital

Omniscient Digital is an organic growth agency founded in 2019 that helps B2B software companies turn SEO and content into growth channels. Their leadership team includes former growth leaders from HubSpot, Shopify, and Workato.

They offer comprehensive services, including SEO strategy, content production, content optimization, technical SEO, programmatic SEO, link building, digital PR, and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). 

Their GEO approach focuses on making content that LLMs can retrieve, understand, and cite. They emphasize building authority signals through backlinks and PR placements and creating structured content that’s easy for AI systems to parse, and positioning brands as trusted sources across third-party sites that LLMs reference.

Omniscient publishes research on AI search trends, including studies on how SEO roles are changing with AI search and how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) influences which content gets surfaced by LLMs.

They’ve worked with companies including Jasper, Loom, HotJar, Lokalise, and GatherContent.

Visit their site for more information.

7. Avenue Z

Avenue Z is a Miami-based marketing, PR, and communications agency with offices in New York City and Orlando. Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Herzog, the agency blends PR, content strategy, and AI search optimization into an integrated offering. Their model works particularly well for founder-led brands focused on building thought leadership and brand authority.

Their AEO approach connects technical SEO, content, digital PR, and analytics to position brands to be cited and recommended by AI systems. Rather than relying on isolated tactics, Avenue Z starts with prioritization by building strong owned assets, reinforcing them with off-site authority through media placements in authoritative publications, and focusing on decision-stage content that clearly explains who the brand serves and why it’s credible. On the technical side, they focus on citation optimization and structured data deployment that enhances brand recognition on AI platforms.

Avenue Z measures AI search visibility at the topic level and ties it to business outcomes like qualified demand and brand trust. They track visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The agency serves industries focused on growth and innovation, including fintech, emerging technology, B2B SaaS, venture capital, health and healthtech, and DTC ecommerce.

They’ve worked with companies including Acorns, Better, Dave, e2open, and April.

Visit their site for more information.

8. Omnius

Omnius is a Europe-based B2B SEO and LLMO agency that works exclusively with SaaS, fintech, and AI companies. Their approach treats GEO as an added layer to SEO rather than a separate discipline. 

On the technical side, their services include AI crawler optimization, schema markup, llms.txt file creation, and reducing JavaScript to improve crawlability. On the content side, they focus on structuring content for citation, embedding what they call “citation triggers” that prompt AI systems to treat information as authoritative. They also build authority across platforms that AI engines tend to favor, including Reddit, Quora, G2, and LinkedIn.

They frequently publish research on GEO topics, including a GEO Industry Report and case studies on AI visibility experiments. 

They’ve worked with companies like AuthoredUp, TextCortex AI, Zencoder, and Anna Money.

Visit their site for more information. 

9. Skale

Skale is a SaaS-focused organic growth agency that has expanded into GEO services alongside their core SEO, content, and link building offerings. They position themselves around revenue metrics like MRR, pipeline, and CAC payback rather than traffic and rankings alone.

They focus on making content citable by AI platforms through structured formatting, entity-rich language, and what they describe as “passage-level optimization” since LLMs pull from specific sections of content rather than evaluating entire pages. 

The agency has published research analyzing citation drivers across AI platforms, including a study of six million LLM answer snapshots that identified factors like citation density and link breadth as predictors of AI visibility.

Skale works primarily with B2B SaaS and fintech companies and has worked with companies like Maze, Rezi, Holded, Pitch, TravelPerk, and HubSpot.

Visit their site for more information.

10. Digital Elevator

Digital Elevator is a B2B content marketing agency that specializes in technical verticals, particularly healthcare, biotech, and medtech. They provide SEO-driven content strategy, content marketing, product-led SEO, UX/UI, and PR services.

They offer Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) services built around owned content optimization through product-led SEO content. They focus most on bottom of the funnel content that appeals to both search engines and LLMs.

They also get their clients featured in high-authority articles and directories that LLMs cite and use strategic PR and media placements to build the authority signals that AI models use to determine credibility. They track visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot.

They’ve worked with companies like McKesson BPS, Solvias, Champions Oncology, and Halo Labs.

Visit their site for more information.

11. First Page Sage

First Page Sage is a San Francisco-based SEO and thought leadership marketing agency that positions itself as an early mover in the GEO space. 

Their methodology centers on what they call Thought Leadership SEO, which involves ghostwriting approximately 80 pieces of content per client over 12 months. They focus on ranking the content they produce in traditional search while also meeting the technical requirements for AI citation. 

They position their clients as subject matter experts which they believe is what leads AI systems to recommend the brands they work with when users ask questions in their category. The agency combines content production with technical optimization, conversion funnel setup, and tracking. They also offer online reputation management and outreach to authoritative publications as part of their broader GEO service.

First Page Sage works primarily with B2B companies in technology, healthcare, medtech, manufacturing, and professional services. Some of their notable clients include Salesforce, Logitech, Microsoft, Verisign, LinkedIn, and US Bank.

Visit their site for more information. 

Want to Work with Us or Learn How to Implement Our AI SEO Strategy?

• Conversion-Focused Content Marketing for SEO & GEO: 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 a lot of information 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 and 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.

During that time, particularly in the last two years, we’ve also seen the SEO landscape shift significantly. AI Overviews now appear for a large percentage of searches, zero-click searches continue to rise, and the top of the funnel content strategies that once drove traffic are producing diminishing returns for many companies.

These changes have made it even more critical to focus SEO efforts on the right keywords and the right content approach. And yet, through speaking with many different software companies who’ve done SEO previously (either in-house or through an agency), we’ve learned that companies and SaaS marketers often struggle to achieve the SEO results they’re seeking. 

Specifically:

• They focus too heavily on top of the funnel, high-volume keywords that drive traffic but rarely convert (an approach that’s become even less effective as AI engines absorb informational queries).
• Their feature and solutions pages often don’t end up ranking for their intended keywords.
• They don’t see meaningful increases in trials, demos, and product signups as a result of their SEO efforts.

In our opinion, these are strategy problems, not issues at the tactical level (e.g. fixing broken links or doing on-page SEO). To fix these problems, you need to fix your SEO strategy. 

In this article, we explain why these problems are so common among B2B SaaS businesses that try to do SEO. And then we walk through a 5-step process that you can follow to create a SaaS SEO strategy that solves these problems, based on the process we use at our agency.

The 5-step process we’ll cover includes:

1. Identifying high-intent keywords: Prioritize finding keywords with high buying-intent, that is, those that indicate people searching are looking to buy or solve a problem your product solves — instead of only prioritizing search volume.
   
2. Producing a unique piece of content to rank for each keyword: Create dedicated pages or blog posts for each keyword that deeply satisfies search intent instead of simply sprinkling SEO keywords throughout a bunch of blog posts.
   
3. Selling your product through your content: Talk about your product extensively in these articles including outlining your unique product features and differentiators. Don’t worry about common content marketing myths about not selling your product.
   
4. Technical SEO: Fix and monitor for technical SEO errors.
   
5. External link building: Generate backlinks to boost domain authority and keyword rankings.

Curious about having us do SEO for your business? You can learn more here. Or, if you’d like to learn the SaaS SEO strategy that we share below, we also teach our content marketing strategy and process in our course and community.

How Most Businesses and Agencies Approach B2B SaaS SEO Strategy 

As we mentioned above, we’ve spoken to many B2B SaaS companies about their past experiences doing SEO. And through those conversations, as well as what we see in our day-to-day work at the agency, we’ve observed that the typical SaaS SEO strategy consists of two key parts:

• Optimizing core website pages: Optimizing the core pages of their marketing website (i.e. home, feature, solutions, pages) for high-intent, software category keywords (e.g. “accounting software”).
  
• Producing blog content: Creating and publishing some form of blog content on an ongoing basis, and often prioritizing keywords based on search volume rather than buying intent.

There may also be some link building or technical SEO tactics that happen. But these are really the two key parts to the strategy. 

Let’s take a closer look at each, and then below we’ll discuss the flaws of how this approach is typically executed in practice.

1. Optimize Home, Feature, and Solutions Pages for High-Intent Keywords

Most SEO agencies and SaaS businesses focus the majority of their SEO efforts on optimizing their core web pages — homepage, feature pages, and solutions pages — for a handful of target keywords. 

The standard process for this involves:

• Selecting primary target keywords for each page. These are generally the most obvious, high-value keywords that describe exactly what your product is (or what we call “software category keywords”) like “accounting software” or “enterprise CRM”. 

• Selecting supporting keywords for each page. These are generally pulled from a list of keywords that keyword research tools suggest including in your page in order to rank for the primary target keyword.

• Optimizing each page for their target keyword. Adding the target keyword or keywords into the title tag, page headings, and page subheadings throughout each page. And then using on-page SEO tools and sprinkling the supporting keywords throughout the body copy, or creating FAQs at the end of the page to include those keywords.

For feature pages, they’ll often optimize for software category keywords (e.g. lead generation software, social media management software, etc.). 

For solutions pages, they’ll often optimize for a particular industry or vertical they serve (e.g. marketing agency operations software, enterprise CRM software, etc.). 

Homepages will often be optimized for either a brand keyword, a software category keyword, or a mix of both (e.g. QuickBooks accounting software). 

This is the base-level strategy that B2B SaaS companies and SEO agencies implement. Once these pages are optimized, they build links to them in an effort to boost their rankings. But often they don’t end up ranking, for reasons we’ll explain below.

2. Create and Publish Some Form of SEO Blog Content

The second core part of the typical SaaS SEO strategy is to publish some regular cadence of blog content. And there are a few common ways that companies approach this:

• Outsource to freelance writers 
• Outsource to content agencies
• Using AI writing tools to create content at scale
• Hire an in-house writer or content marketer

We’ve written extensively about the pitfalls involved with each of these, which you can read about here and here. 

Outsourcing content is more common for SaaS startups, while larger and more established SaaS companies often opt to hire in-house. More recently, many companies have turned to AI writing tools to produce content faster and cheaper. But regardless of which option you choose,  we usually see one of the following two problems:

• The keyword strategy prioritizes traffic over conversion.  The predominant approach we see is what we call the “Top of the Funnel” volume-driven method:intentionally choose and prioritize keywords based on those that have the highest search volume, and write articles to rank for those keywords. These keywords are typically loosely related to the business’s target audience, but have no buying intent (and do not indicate people searching are looking to buy).
• The content lacks depth and differentiation. Whether it’s written by freelancers who don’t deeply understand your product, generated by AI tools, or produced by agencies doing surface-level research, the result is often the same. Most B2B SaaS content reads too generic with very little to no differentiation from the competitors. It might be factually accurate but it usually doesn’t offer unique insights, speak to specific pain points your product solves, and doesn’t give readers a compelling reason to choose you over competitors. We call content like this “Google Research Papers” because they resemble students writing a paper by Googling a topic and regurgitating what’s already been written without adding genuine expertise.

In our experience, neither of these methods are effective at generating trial or demo signups. 

To be fair, many agencies have improved their practices in recent years, and many B2B SaaS SEO agencies now talk about “high buying intent keywords” and “conversion-focused content.” But in our experience, even when the language has evolved, the execution often prioritizes traffic over conversions.

Let’s look at why.

3 Flaws with the Typical Approach to B2B SaaS SEO Strategy

Flaw #1: It’s Difficult to Rank Home, Feature, and Solutions Pages for High-Value Software Category Keywords

As we mentioned above, SEO agencies and SaaS companies tend to focus the majority of their SEO efforts into optimizing the core pages of their marketing website for high-intent, software category keywords.

But there are fundamental attributes of these pages that make it difficult for them to rank for highly competitive, purchase-intent software keywords.

Namely:

• Core website pages have limited space to include relevant SEO keywords. It often takes including 50+ supporting keywords (worked in naturally — not “stuffed” in) to rank for a given target keyword. And typical home, feature, and solutions pages don’t offer enough space in the headings and body copy to naturally include this volume of keywords.

• Core website pages are first and foremost meant to explain your features and solutions (not meet the search intent of specific keywords). The purpose of feature and solutions pages are to explain your features and solutions! There’s only so much you can modify them to address search intent. And yet, satisfying search intent is the key ranking factor used by Google and other search engine algorithms. Therefore, these pages have difficulty competing with other page types, such as dedicated landing pages or in-depth blog posts, which can leverage longer form content to deeply address topics and better satisfy search intent.

• Core website pages do not typically mention competitors, but ranking for software category keywords often requires including lists of software options. The intent of people searching for SaaS category keywords is often to see lists of SaaS solutions. And most SaaS businesses aren’t going to include lists of their competitors on their core website pages (that would make no sense!). So their pages aren’t going to outrank the SaaS review sites and list-style blog posts (often from direct competitors) that better meet search intent.

This is why, despite their efforts, many companies never see their core website pages rank for their intended keywords. 

Note: We’ve talked to (or are actively working with) multiple SaaS companies who have had such bad experiences working with SEO agencies that they’ve concluded they simply “can’t rank” for their top keywords. They’ve concluded that “Google just won’t rank us” on the first page. This is obviously not true and a shame.

By all means, companies should be strategic about optimizing these marketing site pages. But they should be aware that, as we’ve explained, they can be difficult to rank. And if these are the pages you put the majority of your SEO efforts into, you’re unlikely to see great results from SEO.

In addition, as we’ll demonstrate next, you’ll leave a ton of high-value keyword opportunities on the table — even if you get those pages ranking for their intended target keywords.

Flaw #2: There Are Way More High-Intent Keyword Opportunities Than You Can Reasonably Rank for with Feature and Solutions Pages

How many feature and solutions pages does a B2B SaaS marketing site typically have? In our experience, with the exception of “all-in-one” platforms that offer extremely large feature sets, it’s less than ten. 

Of those, maybe 2–5 of them have enough relevant content to be morphable into something that could rank for a valuable, competitive target keyword (per the issues we discussed above).

So, at best, most SaaS websites can only rank for a handful of “Bottom of the Funnel” SaaS category keywords with their feature and solutions pages. And yet, as our work has shown, there are often dozens upon dozens of keywords with good conversion potential in your space! 

Many of our SaaS clients have 50+ keywords that indicate people searching are potential customers looking to buy. And if you only use your feature and solutions pages to target high-intent keywords, you’ll leave all of those remaining opportunities on the table.

This is where companies can leverage blog content to go after these additional high-intent opportunities (as we do at our agency), but most do not. 

Flaw #3: Blog Content Isn’t Used Strategically to Rank for Valuable Keywords and Drive SaaS Product Signups

As we discussed above, the predominant approach to SaaS blog content, whether produced by freelancers, agencies, AI tools, or in-house teams, tends to prioritize traffic over conversions. Companies choose keywords based on search volume rather than buying intent, and the content itself often lacks the depth and product expertise needed to actually convert readers.

As we’ve explained in our post on SEO content writing, ranking for keywords with blog content requires a much more strategic approach than simply “sprinkling” in keywords. So the “Sprinkle” method is wholly insufficient when it comes to ranking for keywords that have actual business value. 

The “Top of Funnel” (TOF) method — which is the predominant method used by agencies and companies that are genuinely trying to be strategic about content — can work great for driving organic traffic. But as we’ve argued in many articles such as those linked below, it often doesn’t end up producing many leads.

Companies and agencies using the TOF method don’t choose keywords based on searchers’ intent to buy. They choose keywords based on how much traffic a given search query can drive to their site. And as a result, the majority of traffic they receive isn’t from people who are in the market looking to buy the type of software they sell, and conversion rates from their content tend to be very low. We’ve had countless conversations with companies who say “We have all this blog traffic but it barely converts” — this is why. 

You might think, “Well, even if the conversion rates are lower, doesn’t the increased search traffic make up for that?” It’s a good question, but in our experience, the theory that TOF traffic eventually leads to conversions down the line (through email marketing, PPC remarketing ads, etc.) isn’t always true.

And this problem has gotten worse. With the rise of AI Overviews and zero-click searches, top of funnel informational content is increasingly being summarized directly in search results. The traffic that TOF content used to generate is shrinking, while bottom of the funnel, high-intent content remains largely unaffected because searchers with buying intent still need to click through and land on your website to sign up and use the service.

In fact, as we’ve explained and demonstrated in numerous articles and B2B SaaS case studies — such as our foundational article on SaaS content marketing, our article on Pain Point SEO, and our Geekbot case study — not only do BOF, high-intent keywords produce significantly higher conversion rates, they also tend to produce a higher volume of overall conversions. 

By choosing and prioritizing keywords based on purchase intent instead of search volume, companies can: 

• Strategically go after all of the remaining high-intent keyword opportunities that their core website pages don’t rank for.
• See significantly higher conversion rates and conversions from their blog content.
• Drive meaningful increases in trial, demo, and product signups as a result of their SEO efforts.
• Build an SEO strategy that’s more resilient to AI-driven changes in search.

In the next section, we’re going to walk through how you can execute this for your business and how we approach this at our agency.

Our 5-Step B2B SaaS SEO Strategy

We have written at length about every step of our SaaS SEO strategy. So here we’re going to list and describe each step in our process, and link out to the individual articles that dive deeper into each step.

At Grow & Convert, our B2B SaaS SEO strategy consists of the following:

• Step 1: Do keyword research to identify high-intent keywords.
• Step 2: Create a dedicated blog post for each keyword that deeply satisfies search intent.
• Step 3: Sell your product in each piece of content.
• Step 4: Fix and monitor for technical SEO errors.
• Step 5: External link building and citation outreach.

Let’s look at each.

Step 1: Do Keyword Research to Identify High-Intent Keywords

The most fundamental part of a SaaS SEO strategy is keyword selection. If you don’t pick the right keywords (ones that, if ranked for, will drive demos and trials), then nothing else in your SEO strategy matters:

• Your technical SEO doesn’t matter. (It doesn’t matter how well your site is optimized if it’s not ranking for keywords that bring in customers.)
• Your link building doesn’t matter (same reason).
• The number of blog articles you write doesn’t matter.

Thus, keyword selection is the most important thing to get right. 

We’ve written about how you can approach this step effectively in our article on SaaS content strategy where we . classify high buying-intent keywords into three categories. Any SaaS company can use this framework to identify the keywords most likely to drive conversions.

Software Category Keywords

These are keywords where someone is literally searching for your product or service, which means they’re in the market right now.

The obvious ones are easy to think of: “project management software,” “help desk software,” “CRM for small business.” But there are usually far more variations than you’d initially expect, and exploring all of them is where you find opportunities your competitors have missed.

• Use case variations: “[Use case] software,” “[Use case] tools,” “[Use case] apps”
• Industry variations: “[Industry] software,” “[Use case] software for [industry]”
• Business size variations: “[Use case] software for small business,” “enterprise [use case] tools”
• Integration variations: “[Use case] software for QuickBooks,” “[Use case] tools with Slack integration”
• Feature variations: “time clock app with GPS,” “[use case] software with [specific feature]”

The more use cases you have or verticals you serve, the more keyword opportunities exist in this category alone. A company with four use cases serving three verticals could have 12+ variations just from combining those dimensions.

Competitor Comparison Keywords

These keywords indicate someone is actively evaluating solutions, which means they’re in buying mode and close to making a decision.

• “[Competitor] alternatives”: Searchers who are either using a competitor and want to switch, or who are aware of that brand and exploring what else is out there.
• “[Brand] vs. [Competitor]”: Direct comparison searches where you can make your case head-to-head against a specific competitor.
• “[Competitor 1] vs. [Competitor 2]”: Even when your brand isn’t mentioned, you can create content comparing all three options and insert yourself into the conversation.

These keywords often have lower search volume but extremely high conversion rates because the searcher has unmistakable purchase intent.

Jobs-to-be-Done Keywords

These keywords describe problems your product solves, even if the searcher isn’t explicitly looking for software yet. The reason they still indicate buying intent is that the searcher needs a solution to a current problem, and your product is one of the best ways to solve it.

• “How to” keywords: “how to track employee time off,” “how to automate customer follow-ups,” “how to plan delivery routes”
• Template and checklist keywords: “[use case] template,” “free [use case] spreadsheet”
• Process keywords: “best way to manage multiple projects,” “ways to automate invoicing”

JTBD keywords are different from pure top of the funnel content because the searcher has a specific problem requiring a solution, not just idle curiosity about a topic. 

For example, “What is project management” has no buying intent because the searcher is just learning about a concept. But “how to manage a team inbox” suggests someone actively trying to solve a problem, and that person may be ready to buy software that solves it better than their current approach.

We don’t prioritize high-volume, top of the funnel keywords like “what is CRM,” “customer service tips,” or “project management best practices.” We also avoid keywords where the SERP indicates purely informational intent. If all the top results are Wikipedia, encyclopedias, and scholarly articles, the searcher isn’t looking to buy anything.

That said, these keywords aren’t useless. They can be valuable for building topical authority with search engines, increase overall traffic, and create internal linking opportunities to your core pages that target bottom of the funnel keywords. We just don’t recommend starting here because the conversion rates are so much lower, and in an environment where AI tools increasingly answer these informational queries directly, the traffic payoff is shrinking as well.

Once you’ve exhausted the high-intent opportunities, top of the funnel content makes more sense as a way to strengthen your overall SEO foundation.

Step 2: Create a Single, Dedicated Blog Post for Each Keyword That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

As we mentioned earlier, ranking on the first page for a high-intent keyword requires a very strategic approach to content creation. You can’t just sprinkle in keywords and hope that your post will rank, especially for high-intent terms which are valuable and highly competitive. 

When it comes to Step 2 of creating your content, there are two key factors to be successful:

1. Create a dedicated page for each keyword.
2. Deeply match search intent with each piece of content.

Create a Dedicated Page for Each Keyword

One of our key learnings (and a differentiator of our agency’s strategy) is that the best way to get top positions for high-intent keywords is to create a dedicated page for each one — even when keywords are nearly identical and have similar meanings. 

As we discussed in our conversation with Bernard Huang of Clearscope, you only get one SEO title, one H1 heading, one meta description, etc. — and these are key ranking factors for getting top positions.

If you try to rank for multiple target keywords with one piece of content, it will often only end up ranking for one of them (or worse, you won’t match the intent of any individual keyword, and you won’t rank for any of them).

This is especially important for high buying intent keywords where competition is usually fierce. Your competitors are likely creating dedicated pages for these terms, and if you’re trying to cover multiple keywords with one piece of content, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage from the start.

Deeply Satisfy Search Intent with Each Piece of Content

Satisfying search intent begins with analyzing the search engine results page (SERP) for your target keyword to understand a) which topics need to be covered in your article for it to rank and b) how you can differentiate or improve on existing results to get a top ranking position.

The problem is that most marketers stop at high-level intent categories like “commercial” or “informational,” and in our experience, that’s nowhere near enough. You need to understand the specific layers of intent for each keyword, which requires analyzing what’s already ranking and figuring out why Google chose those particular results.

We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine rankings for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing. Before writing any piece of content, we spend time analyzing the SERP for the target keyword to understand what Google thinks searchers want. While the keyword research stage involves a quick SERP scan (a minute or two per keyword just to verify buying intent), the content creation stage requires a much deeper analysis. Here’s what that process looks like in practice.

1. Review the titles, page types, and sources of existing page one results

The titles and page types of currently ranking content reveal what format Google expects for your target keyword. You’re looking to understand whether the top results are mostly list posts (“10 Best…”), step-by-step guides, comparison articles, landing pages, or something else entirely.

For example, if you’re targeting “project management software for agencies” and the top results are all listicles comparing different tools, that tells you searchers want options to evaluate rather than a landing page pitching a single product. 

If you create a landing page when Google is ranking listicles, you’re unlikely to break onto page one because you’re not matching what searchers (and therefore Google) expect to see.

2. Identify the subtopics and sections covered in top-ranking articles

After you understand the format, click into the top 3-5 results and examine what topics they actually cover. What questions do they answer? What sections do they include? What information do they provide that seems essential to the topic? 

If every top result includes a section on pricing, that’s a strong signal that searchers expect pricing information and you should include it. If they all feature comparison tables, you probably need one to stay competitive.

This doesn’t mean you should copy your competitors’ structure exactly (in fact, doing so would make it hard to differentiate), but you do need to cover the topics that searchers expect. In our experience, missing a key subtopic that all the top results include can signal to Google that your content is incomplete, which makes it much harder to rank.

3. Look for gaps and opportunities to differentiate

While you need to cover the expected topics, you also need to give Google (and searchers) a reason to rank your content over what already exists. This is where you look for gaps in the current results. 

Are there questions that aren’t being answered thoroughly? Are the existing articles generic and surface-level, full of advice that could apply to any industry? Are they missing specific examples, real data, or expert insights that would make the content more useful?

The goal should be to create something that’s genuinely better and more useful than what currently ranks on page one. If you can’t articulate a clear reason why your piece would be more valuable than what’s already there, you probably need to rethink your approach before you start writing.

4. Analyze the sources that are ranking

Understanding who is currently ranking gives you a sense of how difficult it will be to compete for that keyword. If the top results are dominated by high-authority sites like G2, Capterra, and major industry publications, you’ll likely need to invest more heavily in content quality, promotion, and link building to have a shot at page one. If smaller blogs and direct competitors are ranking, the barrier to entry is lower.

You should also pay attention to whether any of your direct competitors are ranking for the keyword. If they are, study what they’re doing well and where they’re falling short so you can create something better. 

If none of your direct competitors are ranking, that might signal an opportunity where you can establish a presence in the SERP before they do.

This SERP analysis process is essential because when you nail search intent, two important things happen. First, readers spend more time on your post, click into different sections, and display on-page behavior signals that tell Google your piece is fulfilling their search intent, which leads to higher rankings over time. Second, the searcher feels like your brand actually understands their problem, which makes them significantly more likely to trust you, explore your product, and eventually convert.

The companies that skip this step and just start writing based on their assumptions about what the keyword means almost always underperform compared to those who take the time to understand what’s already working.

Step 3: Sell Your Product in Each Piece of Content

In search engine optimization and content marketing, there tends to be an aversion to selling products and services through blog content. Blogs are considered to be primarily for generating traffic and brand awareness, and most marketers think that you shouldn’t be too salesy.

But when you design your content strategy to go after high-intent keywords, where people are at the purchase stage of the buyer’s journey, a key part of meeting search intent is discussing your product! This is what people are literally searching for. They want to know about what your product does, how it solves their problems, and how it’s different from other products and services on the market.

Therefore, an additional key step to writing your content is that you need to discuss the details of your product features and differentiators. And this has implications on how your content is produced — the person writing the content needs to know these things. 

If you want to see actual ROI from your content marketing, you need to adopt the perspective that it’s okay to sell your product through your content, especially when you’re targeting bottom of the funnel keywords where selling is exactly what the searcher expects.

The key is that selling through content looks different than selling on a landing page. In content, you’re selling through demonstration and education. You’re showing how your product solves specific problems, walking through features in the context of real use cases, and explaining why your approach is different or better than alternatives. When done well, this doesn’t feel “salesy” at all because it’s genuinely useful information that the reader came looking for.

This is why we urge companies not to fully outsource their content to freelance writers or agencies, unless those freelance writers or agencies have a process for developing deep expertise in your product or service and its differentiators (most do not).

Think about what it takes to write a truly compelling piece of content that sells your product. The writer needs to understand the nuances of how your product is positioned in the market, why it’s better than competitors for certain use cases, and what specific features solve which customer pain points. A freelance writer does not know these things if they’ve never worked at your company, talked to your customers, or deeply used your product.

Some companies try to solve this by hiring writers with industry expertise, but that doesn’t fix the problem either. Outside experts may have general industry knowledge, but that doesn’t mean they think about the nuances of your space in the way you do. If you rely on their perspective, you’ll end up with a blog full of their ideas, not yours, and your company won’t have a distinctive voice or point of view.

At Grow & Convert, we solve this by interviewing the experts at our clients’ companies for each piece of content we create. This allows us to express the company’s expertise on each topic to create truly high-quality content. 

Before we write anything, we get on a call with someone at the client’s company who has deep knowledge of the topic (a founder, product manager, sales lead, or customer success manager depending on the subject matter) and we ask them detailed questions about the problem, how the product solves it, what makes their approach different, and what specific features or capabilities matter most.

This is in contrast to doing what we call “Google Research Papers” — learning about topics in Google and regurgitating what everyone else is saying (what many digital marketing agencies and freelancers do). 

With our interview-based approach, we’re not making things up or relying on surface-level research but capturing the actual expertise and perspective of people who know the product inside and out, and then expressing that in clear, well-structured content.

For example, in a piece targeting “help desk software for small business,” we wouldn’t just list generic features that all help desk software has. We’d explain what makes our client’s specific product better suited for small businesses, whether that’s pricing structure, ease of setup, specific integrations, or a particular approach to ticket management. This level of specificity is what converts readers, and it’s only possible when the person writing the content has access to real product expertise.

If you’re targeting high-intent keywords where people are actively looking for solutions, you need to actually present your product as a solution. Generic advice that avoids mentioning your product will not convert, no matter how well-written it is or how much traffic it gets.

To better understand how you can approach selling your product through your content, check out our post on SaaS content writing which walks through an example. 

Also, check out the SaaS content strategy post we shared above, which has links to a bunch of articles we’ve written for our clients. (We discuss our clients’ products in every article we produce.) 

Step 4: Fix and Monitor for Technical SEO Errors

Technical SEO — the process of resolving any technical website issues that might hurt your organic search performance — is a necessary part of SaaS SEO. 

However, while we occasionally run into larger site architecture issues with our SaaS clients, the need for ongoing technical SEO support is more common in eCommerce where sites can have hundreds of product pages that target tons of long-tail keywords (very specific product queries).

For SaaS companies with largely static marketing sites, technical SEO is less about ongoing optimization and more about getting the fundamentals right from the start, then monitoring to make sure nothing breaks. If you notice sudden drops in rankings (which can be monitored in tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, along with other SEO metrics), then it’s worth looking into whether technical SEO might be present. But otherwise, technical SEO for SaaS websites can usually be taken care of with a one-time SEO audit and occasional follow-up.

That said, there are several technical SEO fundamentals that we see SaaS companies get wrong, and these mistakes can significantly limit the ability to rank even if the content is excellent. 

Here are the key areas to get right: 

Host Your Blog on a Subfolder, Not a Subdomain

One of the most common technical SEO mistakes we see SaaS companies make is hosting their blog on a subdomain (blog.yourcompany.com) rather than a subfolder (yourcompany.com/blog). 

This matters because search engines treat subdomains as separate websites, which means the authority you build through your blog content doesn’t fully transfer to your main domain, and vice versa.

When your blog lives on a subfolder, every backlink you earn to a blog post strengthens the authority of your entire domain, including your homepage and product pages. When it’s on a subdomain, that link equity is siloed. 

We’ve seen companies make significant ranking improvements simply by migrating their blog from a subdomain to a subfolder (though the migration itself needs to be handled carefully with proper redirects to avoid losing existing rankings).

Set Up Proper Canonical Tags

Canonical tags tell search engines which version of a page is the “official” version when duplicate or very similar content exists across multiple URLs. This is important for SaaS sites because the same content can often be accessible through different URL variations (with or without trailing slashes, with different query parameters, through HTTP and HTTPS, etc.).

Without proper canonical tags, search engines might split the ranking signals between multiple versions of the same page, or worse, choose the wrong version to index. 

Most modern CMS platforms handle basic canonicalization automatically, but it’s worth auditing your site to make sure canonical tags are implemented correctly, especially if you have pagination, filtered views, or content that appears in multiple places on your site.

Submit and Maintain Your XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is essentially a roadmap of your website that helps search engines discover and understand the structure of your content. For SaaS blogs, this means making sure your sitemap includes all your blog posts, is updated automatically when new content is published, and is submitted to Google Search Console.

While Google will eventually find most of your content through crawling, a properly configured sitemap helps new content get indexed faster and ensures that nothing important is missed. 

If you’re publishing content regularly, check periodically to confirm that your sitemap is updating correctly and that there are no errors showing in Google Search Console.

Check for JavaScript Rendering Issues

This is particularly important for SaaS companies because many SaaS marketing sites are built on custom platforms, React-based frameworks, or other JavaScript-heavy technologies that can cause rendering issues for search engines. If your content is loaded dynamically through JavaScript, Google may not be able to see or index it properly.

You can check for rendering issues by using Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool, which shows you how Google sees your pages.

If the rendered HTML is missing content that you expect to be there, you have a rendering problem that needs to be fixed, either by implementing server-side rendering, using dynamic rendering for search engine bots, or restructuring how your content is loaded.

Configure Your Robots.txt Correctly

The robots.txt file tells search engines which pages or sections of your site they should and shouldn’t crawl. For most SaaS sites, the main concern is making sure you’re not accidentally blocking important pages from being crawled. 

We’ve seen cases where a robots.txt file left over from a staging environment was blocking the entire blog, or where overly aggressive rules were preventing search engines from accessing key content.

Review your robots.txt file to make sure it’s not blocking anything that should be indexed (your blog, landing pages, etc.), and that it is blocking things that shouldn’t be indexed (admin pages, internal search results, duplicate filtered views, etc.).

Ensure Your Site Loads Quickly

Slow-loading pages hurt both your search rankings and your conversion rates because users will leave before the page finishes loading. For SaaS sites, the biggest opportunities are usually unoptimized images, too many third-party scripts (analytics, chat widgets, marketing tools), and render-blocking JavaScript.

Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to identify specific issues on your site and prioritize fixes based on impact. You don’t need a perfect score, but you should aim to pass Core Web Vitals thresholds and ensure your pages load quickly on mobile.

Implement Proper Internal Linking

Internal linking is one of the most overlooked aspects of technical SEO, but it’s also one of the easiest to fix. When you link from one page on your site to another, you’re passing authority and helping search engines understand the relationship between your content. 

For SaaS blogs, this means linking from newer blog posts to your most important pages (product pages, pillar content, high-converting articles) and making sure no valuable pages are orphaned without any internal links pointing to them.

As you build out your content library, develop a habit of going back to older posts and adding links to newer relevant content. This helps distribute authority throughout your site and can give newer posts a ranking boost.

For most SaaS companies, technical SEO is not something you need to obsess over or hire a dedicated specialist for. Get the fundamentals right, monitor for issues using Google Search Console and your SEO tools, and then focus the majority of your energy on creating great content and building links and citations which we’ll discuss next.

Step 5: Link Building

Link building — the process of generating backlinks to pages on your site — is helpful for supporting your website’s domain authority and keyword rankings. 

However, it’s key to understand that link building is a supporting element of a good SaaS SEO strategy. Sometimes agencies or companies think that link building is the thing that gets content ranking. But in our experience, it’s not. 

If you don’t get the key steps of creating your content right (i.e. creating dedicated pages for each keyword, and deeply matching search intent), no amount of outreach, link building, or internal links will get your content up to the first page. So, link building is something to do and pay attention to, but don’t expect it to be a magic bullet for your SEO campaign.

We’ve found that building links to individual articles can often give them a boost in rankings and help support content in getting up to the first page. Each month, we build links to different articles we’ve published as an ongoing effort.

There are several ways to build links, and the right approach depends on your resources and goals. Here are the primary methods we use and recommend for SaaS companies.

Guest Posting

Guest posting involves writing articles for other websites in your industry (or adjacent industries) that include links back to your content. This is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to build high-quality backlinks because you control the context in which your link appears and can ensure it points to the specific pages you want to rank.

To make your guest posting campaign effective, make sure that you are targeting sites that are relevant to your industry and have real audiences, not just sites that exist solely for link building purposes. Links from sites with genuine readerships carry more weight with search engines and can also drive referral traffic directly.

Digital PR and Media Mentions

As search is getting more competitive, you should also try to get your company, product, or expertise mentioned in news articles, industry publications, and other media outlets. This can include contributing expert quotes to journalists, publishing original research that gets picked up by other sites, or simply being newsworthy enough that publications want to write about you.

The advantage of PR-driven links is that they often come from high-authority domains like major publications and industry news sites, which can have a significant impact on your domain authority. The challenge is that PR is less predictable than guest posting, and you have less control over where links point.

Resource and Listicle Inclusion

Many high-ranking articles in your space are listicles or resource pages that mention multiple tools, products, or solutions. Getting your product included in these existing articles can be an effective way to build links and also drive referral traffic from readers who are actively evaluating options.

This approach involves identifying articles that rank for keywords relevant to your product (like “best project management software” or “top CRM tools”), then reaching out to the authors or site owners to request inclusion. 

The success rate depends heavily on the quality and relevance of your product, but when it works, you get a link from a page that’s already ranking and driving traffic. Having an affiliate marketing program significantly increases your success rate with this approach, since many of these listicle sites are monetized through affiliate commissions. If you can offer the site owner a way to earn revenue when their readers click through and convert, they have a much stronger incentive to include your product and keep the listing updated.

We prioritize link building based on which articles have already shown they can convert. When we run paid promotion to articles and see that certain pieces are generating conversions through ads, we prioritize those articles for link building because they’ve already demonstrated business value. If we can get them ranking organically for their target keywords, we’re confident they’ll continue to convert.

This approach ensures we’re not just building links to random articles, but rather investing our link building resources in content that we know will drive results once it ranks.

Citation Outreach for AI Visibility

Beyond traditional link building, there’s an additional tactic we offer clients who want to accelerate their AI visibility: citation outreach. This involves identifying which articles and sources are appearing most frequently in AI-generated answers for topics relevant to your product, then reaching out to those sources to get your product mentioned or included.

For example, if ChatGPT and Perplexity are consistently citing a particular “best project management software” article when answering product recommendation queries, getting your product added to that article (with accurate information about features and use cases) can directly improve your visibility in AI answers. 

This is essentially the same concept as getting included in listicles for SEO purposes, but with the added benefit of directly influencing AI-generated recommendations.

For most SaaS companies, we recommend treating GEO as an extension of your SEO strategy rather than a separate initiative. If you’re doing Pain Point SEO well, you’re already building the foundation for AI visibility. The additional tactics (citation outreach, content structure optimization) can amplify those results, but they’re not a replacement for ranking in traditional search.

To learn more about our approach to link building, check out our content distribution strategy article. 

Measuring Traffic, Keyword Rankings, and Conversions 

To measure B2B SaaS SEO performance, see what’s working and not working, and spot additional keyword opportunities, we track and report on a variety of metrics for our clients with the following tools:

• Conversions: We track and report on conversions using the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics. 
• Keyword Rankings: We use Ahrefs rank tracker to monitor rankings progress for each article’s target keyword. (You could also use Semrush, Google Search Console, etc.)
• Overall Pageviews and Organic Traffic: We set up traffic dashboards in Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) that measure overall pageviews and organic traffic to our articles.

The most notable of these three KPIs is conversion tracking. Most SEO teams (in-house or agencies) don’t hold themselves accountable to leads generated from content. In fact, most don’t even report on this. But without conversion data, you are essentially conceding that your SEO strategy is traffic focused (because everyone tracks traffic). 

Check out our article on tracking conversions in Google Analytics 4 to learn more about how to measure conversions from SEO content. 

Want to Work with Us or Learn More About How We Approach Content Marketing?

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute content marketing in this way, you can learn more about our service and pricing here.
• Join Our Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team. 
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details 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. Learn more here or watch our video walkthrough here.

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.

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.
• Our Content Marketing Course – Individuals looking to learn pain point SEO and our entire content strategy, taught via case studies, learn more here or see this video walkthrough:

Category keywords make up one of the three main buckets that we think of for high buying-intent, or “bottom of the funnel”, keywords. The other two being jobs-to-be-done and comparison and alternatives keywords. 

The defining characteristic of category keywords are their extremely high buying intent — users are actively looking to buy your type of product or service. They don’t need to be educated on the problem or led through a buyer’s journey; they’re ready to buy now. 

Due to their high buying-intent, category keywords tend to convert at much higher rates than most SEO keywords. In our study of 90+ rankings across dozens of clients’ accounts, category keywords had an average conversion rate of 4.85%, whereas most blog posts that target more informational (“top-of-funnel”) keywords typically convert at 0.5% or less (many don’t convert traffic to product leads at all). This is nearly 10x the difference. 

However, from talking to and seeing the analytics of over a hundred companies over the years, we’ve noticed that the vast majority of companies only target one or two category keywords with their homepage or product pages.

This gross underutilization of category keywords is problematic for several reasons:

• Companies typically only focus on one or two category keywords and think that’s it, when in reality there are usually dozens of high converting terms to target.
  
  
• Companies often rely exclusively on their homepage or product/service pages to target these keywords. However, search engine results pages (SERPs) typically favor comprehensive blog posts. As a result, these pages rarely achieve high rankings.
  
  
• Companies don’t thoughtfully prioritize the order in which they target these keywords, which often leads to slower results.

All of this leads to brands leaving tons of conversions on the table in their SEO and content strategy. 

In this post, we’ll cover how we solve these issues and have approached targeting hundreds of category keywords for dozens of clients. Specifically, we’ll cover:

• Types of category keywords and their average conversion rates
  
  
• Effective strategies for discovering a wide range of category keywords
  
  
• Best practices for targeting these keywords
  
  
• A framework for prioritizing keywords to optimize your SEO efforts

Types of Category Keywords

At Grow and Convert, we think of category keywords as falling into one of three main types: 

1. Main category keywords
2. Side category keywords
3. Category keywords with a layer of specificity 

Understanding these distinctions will help you identify  which are the most valuable for your company in terms of conversion potential, so you can focus your efforts.

Main Category Keywords

Main category keywords are the most straightforward. These keywords directly describe the core product or service your business offers. For instance, if you sell accounting software, your main category keywords would be  “accounting software” and variants like “best accounting software”. 

Keep in mind that while synonyms may appear interchangeable to us, Google displays different search results for each variant.

Note that there are many synonyms that seem to mean the same thing to a human, that Google ranks different results for. Therefore, you’ll need to target each separately to rank for both.

For example, people might also search for accounting software using terms like“bookkeeping software” or “financial management software.” 

If Google is ranking the same web pages for both your main category keyword and one of its synonyms, it means you don’t need to create a unique page for each keyword. Google is viewing them as having the same intent. 

However, if the SERPs for each keyword show different web pages ranking, it suggests the intent behind the keywords differs, meaning Google won’t rank the same pages for both. In this case, you’ll need to create separate pages to cater to each specific intent and rank for each.

Finally, note that a single company, brand, or even product may have multiple category keywords to target, not due to synonyms, but because the product or service has distinct features or use cases that correspond to different categories. 

For example, we’ve had web analytics software clients whose products serve as “heat mapping tools”, “website visitor tracking software”, “visitor recording software” and “funnel analysis software” — all valid category keywords. 

Note that these are different from side category keywords (discussed below) because these companies have multiple main offerings, whereas side category keywords are not part of the main offering. 

Our recommendation: Take the time to list every possible category keyword related to all features and use cases of your product(s). Cast a wide net and use keyword research tools to verify search volume and prioritize the order in which you target these keywords (more on that below). 

Average Conversion Rate for Main Category Keywords: 4.85%

In an analysis of 95 different articles across various clients (mentioned above), we found that main category keywords convert at a rate of 4.85% on average, which is significantly higher than the average blog post.

We find that typical blog posts focusing on high-volume, top-of-funnel keywords like “what is accounting” and “project management trends” tend to convert at a rate of 1% or less. We’ve even observed instances where clients’ blog posts, before implementing a conversion-focused strategy, converted at extremely low rates, like 0.03% to 0.19%, with some generating no conversions at all over extended periods.

Category Keywords with a Layer of Specificity

Category keywords with a layer of specificity target a particular niche within your broader category. Using our accounting software example, a layer of specificity could be “accounting software for freelancers” or “cloud-based accounting software.”

In our experience, these layers of specificity attract a more qualified audience because they target searchers who are looking for a solution tailored to their specific pain points. As a result, they provide an amazing conversion opportunity if your product has features that cater to those pain points. 

For example, say someone is searching for “accounting software for small businesses.” Searching for “accounting software” by itself shows high buying intent. But the addition of “small business” indicates a person motivated to solve specific pain points. So, if your accounting software has features that cater to small businesses, and you can create content that addresses those pain points — and show how your product solves them — you’re in a great position to convert the searcher into a customer.  

Because of this, in our past client data, we’ve seen that category keywords with a layer of specificity have the potential to convert at a much higher rate than broader category keywords. For instance, we wrote a post for a client targeting the keyword “marketing asset management software” which had a conversion rate of 15.2%. This was significantly higher than the average conversion rate of 4.85% for posts targeting general category keywords. 

Finally, we’ve noticed that these longer-tail category keywords often have less competition since most businesses focus on higher-volume keywords. So they can be a good option for getting fast results.  

Average Conversion Rate: 2.96%

Category keywords with a layer of specificity convert at a rate of 2.96% on average, but can convert as high as 15+%. 

Side Category Keywords

Side category keywords represent features or use cases that are closely related to your main offering, but not the primary focus. For example, that same accounting software might have a feature for invoicing so side category keywords would include “invoicing software” and “online invoicing tools”.

A common objection to targeting side keywords is that companies feel it narrowly defines their business and limits their perceived offerings (“We aren’t just invoicing software!”). They worry that focusing on a specific feature, like “email sequencing,” will make customers think that’s all they offer (“But we’re an entire marketing automation platform!”).

In our experience, this issue is easily addressed within the content. Specifically, the content should, of course, speak to the intent of the software (e.g. covering invoicing software needs and how you provide those features) while also showing how the targeted feature fits within the  larger product or service ecosystem, and explaining  the benefits of your entire product suite (e.g., why it’s convenient to have invoicing and accounting in the same software).

This way, you can use people’s demand for specific features or point solutions to expose them to your offering, even if it’s more comprehensive than what they searched for. Not everyone will need your larger solution, of course, but as we share below, these still convert decently well.  

Another objection we sometimes hear is that companies are hesitant to target certain side category keywords because that area isn’t their strong suit and they question whether or not it will actually convert customers on its own. For example, a company with an email marketing platform might have simple CRM capabilities, but they know they can’t replace a dedicated CRM platform like HubSpot.

This is a fair objection and one that warrants consideration. If you truly feel you aren’t strong in a specific feature category, then it’s fair to decide not to target it, even if there are keywords with good search volume. If your product isn’t strong in those categories, the chances of those customers being good long-term paying customers are low. Ultimately, it comes down to opportunity cost and prioritization. If you have other more valuable keywords to target, go after those first. (More on this later.) 

Average Conversion Rate: 1.94%

In the same study mentioned above, side category keywords convert at a rate of 1.94% on average. Although this is the lowest converting type of category keyword on average, it’s still about 2x the conversion rate of top-of-funnel blog posts. 

How to Find Category Keywords

The key to finding lots of different category keywords is understanding how your customers talk about the products or services you provide (main category keywords) and which aspects of your solutions get them most engaged (side category keywords, layers of specificity). You need firsthand data on how they perceive and talk about your products, how they describe their problems, and what language they use when searching for solutions.

The best approach is to have direct conversations with your customer-facing teams. We’ve talked about this extensively before, including: 

• What questions we ask to understand customers’ pain points
  
  
• How to conduct interviews even if you don’t have customers
  
  
• An example of how we surveyed G&C readers and what we learned

This step gives you a list of pain points. Then, you correlate those with  SEO keywords from keyword research tools (like Ahrefs, Semrush, or any others). These tools provide data on search volume, keyword difficulty, and can suggest variations and synonyms that you may not have considered.

You can also look at Google’s autofill suggestions that appear when you start typing a query, the “people also ask” sections, and related searches. These features can reveal common search patterns and variations that you can incorporate into your strategy.

Finally, you can utilize online communities and forums like Reddit to see how people phrase their pain points and describe solutions like yours.

By combining customer insights with a variety of keyword research methods, you can develop a comprehensive and targeted list of category keywords that are much more likely to resonate with your ideal audience and drive conversions.

How to Prioritize Which Category Keywords to Target First

Most SEO folks prioritize keywords based on search volume alone — the higher the volume, the better. Instead, we recommend starting with the category keywords that are most closely aligned with your product’s strengths because these will likely have the highest conversion rates.  

Then, consider your current domain authority and resources. It might be more strategic to initially target less competitive keywords and gradually build up to more challenging ones. Tools like Ahrefs and Clearscope can help assess keyword difficulty and provide insights into search volume and ranking potential.

For example, let’s say you offer a CRM platform known for being easy to use and budget-friendly. Rather than immediately targeting “CRM software,” you might start with terms like “affordable CRM platform” which align with your key differentiators and are less competitive. 

On the other hand, if it’s a particularly valuable keyword, it’s totally reasonable to decide to target it early on because it will likely take longer to rank. We typically start with a mix of both. 

Finally, you’ll need to monitor the performance of your targeted keywords and track conversion rates. This allows you to adjust your strategy so you can focus on keywords that deliver the best results and iterate on those that underperform. 

Targeting Category Keywords with Blog Posts vs Product or Homepages

Most companies target category keywords through their homepage and product pages and save their blog for top-of-funnel content. However, in our experience, blog posts often outperform product pages for category keywords because they: 

• Satisfy the searcher’s intent more thoroughly, which leads to higher rankings for a larger variety of keywords
  
  
• Allow for a stronger sales pitch, which leads to higher conversion rates

In many cases, the top-ranking results for category keywords are list posts or articles that thoroughly explore how a specific product addresses a pain point. This is because when someone searches for a category keyword, they’re often in the research phase and are looking for a range of options and how to choose the best one for their needs.

Unlike product pages which focus only on your solution, detailed blog content can discuss the benefits and use cases of the product or service, compare options, teach readers how to evaluate those options, and naturally lead readers to your offering. This comprehensive approach better serves searchers looking to understand the full landscape before making a decision. It also allows you to craft a more in-depth sales pitch around the specific pain points of that reader. 

Plus, because you have to deeply satisfy intent in order to rank, your homepage can only target a limited number of keywords effectively. In contrast, you can create numerous blog posts that each focus on a specific variation of the category keyword. 

For example, you could have one blog post targeting “accounting software for small businesses,” another targeting “accounting software for freelancers,” and yet another targeting “accounting software with time tracking.” 

This strategy allows you to cast a wider net and capture a larger share of organic traffic, while still maintaining a laser focus on satisfying the intent of each specific keyword. 

All of this helps you rank higher for more keywords and convert more of your readers to paying customers. 

Learn More About Our Agency

• SEO and Content Marketing Service: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us here.
  
  
• Paid Search Service: We started PPC services at Grow and Convert after seeing thousands of dollars of wasted spend in our client’s Google Ads accounts (full story). Specifically, we noticed that many paid search agencies focus their strategy around maximizing clicks and traffic and rely heavily on Google’s automation tools. In contrast, we applied our well honed bottom of funnel strategy from SEO to paid search, where we take an active, manual approach to ensuring every campaign maximizes lead generation instead of click generation.
  
  
• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
  
  
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details 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. Learn more here.
  
  
• Continue Learning: Find additional content on our blog and YouTube channel. 

• If you target too many keywords with a single page, it’s unlikely that you’ll rank high for any keywords because it’ll be hard to satisfy search intent for all of them.

• There are instances where you don’t need two different pages for similar keywords — one page can rank for both. So, creating two different ones is extra, unnecessary work.

The conclusion we’ve come to (based on 7+ years of helping clients rank on the first page for high converting keywords) is that you should only target one keyword per page and not worry about the exact number of times you’re using any given keyword. 

But, we’ve also found that this leads to a whole host of other questions such as…

• If two keywords are almost identical (e.g., accounting software vs accounting platform), how do I decide whether to create separate pages or target both with one page?

• Can I target the same keywords with multiple pages?

• Why type of content should I create to target various keywords (e.g., blog vs product page)?

• How many keywords should I track?

… and many more.

So in this guide, we’ll explain why we default to one keyword per page, share real client examples, and answer additional questions in a detailed FAQ section. 

Why We Only Target One Keyword per Page (+ How to Do It)

The main reason for only targeting one keyword per page is that Google is known to favor pages that deeply satisfy intent. In other words, Google is more likely to rank a blog post that is solely focused on the given keyword over a page that briefly covers lots of different topics.

For example, let’s look at the results for “types of pizza stone”:  

The first three results are reviews of different types of pizza stones, while the fourth includes a comparison of baking steel. Although we can’t know for sure why it ranks lower, one strong possibility is that it may struggle to reach the top 3 spots because it addresses both steel and ceramic alongside stones, whereas the top three results are solely focused on different pizza stones. 

While we can’t be certain, our experience with ranking clients for over 1,000 SEO keywords and updating old articles to improve rankings shows that these subtle differences in intent matter. An update to an article to fix a slight intent mismatch has historically improved rankings for us.  

But knowing the true intent behind a keyword can be tricky. 

For instance, the results above for ‘types of pizza stones’ are all detailed, first-hand reviews of specific pizza stones. But, it would also be reasonable to conclude that a blog post about types of pizza stones could simply be a summary of the different materials, shapes, and sizes that pizza stones come in. So, how do you determine which one searchers actually want? 

In our experience, the best way to determine the true intent behind a keyword is to conduct a detailed SERP analysis. 

Google’s algorithm has already done the work of determining intent by testing different types of content to see what readers click on and read after entering a specific keyword. So, you just need to look closely at what’s already ranking to figure what the reader is looking for. 

Then, you should shape an entire page (whether that’s a blog post, landing page, or something else) around addressing just that intent. In our experience, that maximizes your chance of ranking for that keyword. In contrast, if you try to rank for multiple keywords with that one page, unless their intents are all extremely similar, you risk diluting your page trying to fulfill multiple different search intents. 

Here are some more resources for how to write SEO content that ranks: 

• 40+ Content Writing Samples That Companies Can Mimic

• “Mirage Content” Is the Reason Your Company Blog Isn’t Generating Leads

• Content Creation Process: How to Produce Unique Content

How Many Times Should You Use Your Target Keyword on a Page? 

If you target one keyword per page, as described above, it generally doesn’t matter how many times you use that exact keyword throughout the content. 

In fact, we don’t track the number of times the target keyword is used when writing our articles. 

Don’t get us wrong; we do use on-page optimization tools (like Clearscope). However, the frequency of the target keyword in the content is not something we’ve ever worried about or counted. Despite this, we’ve helped a wide variety of clients (e.g., B2B, B2C, ecommerce, services) rank number one for hundreds of different keywords. 

To help illustrate this point, we went back through some of the articles we’ve written that are ranking #1 for their target keyword and counted how many times the full keyword was used. Below are two examples from two wildly different clients — one selling a low priced self-serve SaaS product to small businesses and the other offering a healthcare service to consumers for thousands of dollars. 

Note: Keyword density, which we mention below, is the number of times a keyword is used, divided by total word count. Most SEO and marketing advice will tell you to use the keyword once or twice for every hundred words, which is a keyword density of 1%–2%.

Example #1: 

• Target keyword: time clock app for multiple employees
• Number of times the keyword was used: 2
• Word count: 2906
• Keyword density: 0.0006%

Example #2: 

• Target keyword: feeling cold after a head injury
• Number of times the keyword was used: 1
• Word count: 4851
• Keyword density: 0.0002%

And these are just two examples. We were quickly able to find several different articles that are ranking number one for their target keyword with a keyword density of less than one percent.

Note: We talk about what to do when two keywords are almost identical below.

Why We Don’t Add Secondary Keywords (at Least Not Initially) To Content

A lot of SEO advice suggests targeting one primary keyword per page (as we do) but also recommends including 5–50 secondary keywords in your content. 

Secondary keywords are those that aren’t the primary keyword you’re targeting, but you include on a page to:

• Try to rank for multiple keywords with one page because the keywords are closely related to the primary keyword.

• Help rank for the primary keyword by adding a thoroughness in covering its intent.

But as we argued above, in our experience, simply adding a keyword to a page isn’t enough to rank for that keyword (even if you add it multiple times), and using secondary keywords to rank for the primary keyword isn’t the most effective method for getting high rankings. 

Let’s look at each of these in detail. 

#1. You Won’t Likely Rank for Multiple Keywords Just by Sprinkling Them In

Many people believe that inserting a specific keyword a certain number of times on a page will increase the chance of ranking for it. But this is an outdated method from the early days of SEO when Google’s algorithm was less sophisticated.

In our experience, this approach no longer works — Google tends to rank content that fully satisfies the intent of the target keyword. Simply adding secondary keywords to content focused on a different intent (i.e., the primary keyword’s intent) is unlikely to satisfy the intent of the secondary keyword, making it insufficient for ranking well. 

Note: Sprinkling in secondary keywords might help you rank somewhere on Google, but it’s rarely sufficient to reach the first page, let alone the top three positions, which are essential for achieving results. 

There is one caveat: If two keywords have the same intent, i.e., the SERP is nearly identical, you can rank for two keywords with one page. Below, we talk about how to determine if you can do this or if you need separate pages. 

Keep in mind that you don’t need to worry about this initially. After publishing, we check if we naturally rank for any closely related keywords. If we do, we’ll start tracking our position for those keywords as well. 

For the most promising secondary keywords, we’ll add relevant text and optimize the content for those keywords in addition to the primary one.

You can learn about how to recover lost rankings for secondary keywords here:
How to Find and Use Secondary Keywords to Increase Conversions: A Case Study 

#2. Using Secondary Keywords to Help You Rank for Your Primary Keyword is Unnecessary 

Another common belief about including secondary keywords is that they help address the intent of the primary keyword more thoroughly, which can improve your ranking. 

While this approach seems reasonable, we’ve found it easier to just look at the SERP to determine what needs to be covered. You don’t need to go through the extra effort of identifying all these closely related keywords that may or may not align with the intent. 

How We Decide Whether or Not to Create Separate Posts for Close Keyword Variations

One of the most common concerns about focusing on just one keyword per page is how to handle situations where two keywords are closely related. Should you still create separate pages targeting each one or is this a special case where you can target both with one page? 

In short, if the intent is the same for both keywords, you can target both with one page. If not, create separate pages. An obvious question is, “How do you determine if the intent is the same for two keywords?”

The first page of the SERP will indicate intent. If Google ranks the same web pages for both keywords on the first page, you can rank for both with one page. If the first page results are different for each keyword, you’ll need different pages. 

But even that isn’t always clear cut. 

Often, the first-page results for two keywords will overlap partially but not entirely. For example, maybe three out of ten results on page 1 are the same. In this case, it’s largely a judgment call. Look carefully at the ranking pages that aren’t the same to see where the intent differs. Then determine whether you can cover both variations and their overlap with one page or if it makes more sense to create two separate pages. 

Note that it’s not the end of the world if you make the wrong decision. For instance, if you choose to publish just one page and it doesn’t rank high enough for both keywords, you can always add a second page later. Conversely, if you create two pages but one of them just ranks for both, that’s fine too. 

Many SEOs really shy away from publishing two similar pages for closely related keywords because they’re concerned about keyword cannibalization (i.e., the idea that if multiple pages on your site compete for the same SERP position, Google may rank them both lower because it can’t determine which one to prioritize).

We don’t worry about this for two reasons: 

• If the intent is different, which is often the case, this won’t happen — even if the keywords are very similar.
  

• If Google determines that both posts are relevant for the given keyword, we typically see both achieve top rankings (see the example below).

We rarely encounter a case where Google won’t rank us because we have multiple similar posts. In fact, after discussing it with our team, we couldn’t find a single example of this happening in our client work.  

FAQs

Can I target the same keyword(s) with multiple pages? 

In short, we don’t recommend it. 

If you’re thoroughly satisfying intent as we suggest, the pages would essentially repeat the same information, providing no additional benefit. 

Can a secondary keyword in one page be the primary keyword of another page? 

Yes, if the intent is different (see our discussion above for more details). 

Should I target keywords with a web page or blog post?

The decision to create a product page or a blog post will depend on the intent behind the keyword. 

In our experience, blog posts provide a great (but often underutilized) opportunity to go more in-depth into the topic than a product page. This level of detail often satisfies intent more thoroughly and allows for a more compelling sales pitch which generates more leads. 

We’ve written about this topic in more detail here:
Landing Pages vs. Blog Posts: What’s better for ranking and conversion? 

How many keywords should I track for an effective SEO strategy? 

When starting out with SEO, many people think that you have to track the rankings for all the keywords that your web pages show up for or that you have to track a certain number of keywords to have an effective SEO strategy. 

For our clients, we track the keywords that we’re specifically targeting (i.e., the primary keywords). We’ll sometimes track secondary keywords if we find that we’re ranking well for them already. 

As for how many keywords to target, we target 3–5 keywords per month for each client. We’ve found this is a good pace that allows us to produce quality content that deeply matches intent and get results in a timely manner. 

What tools do I need for SEO? 

You don’t need any tools to implement an effective SEO strategy. However, here are a few of the tools we find useful in our own process: 

• Ahrefs for keyword research, search volume, keyword difficulty, and rank tracking.

• Clearscope for keyword research, search volume, keyword difficulty, and knowing which terms to include to help meet intent.

• Keyword Insights to see at a glance how similar the SERPs are for two different keywords.

How do I find secondary keywords?

To find secondary keywords, you can either:  

• Use a tool: Most SEO tools have a keyword finder tool where you can enter a keyword and it will generate tons of related keywords.
  

• Find them by looking at the SERP: For example, you can look at the ‘People also ask’ section, the autofill suggestions for the search bar, and, most importantly, web pages that are already ranking to see what they’re covering (e.g., headers, titles, common topics).

What are primary vs secondary keywords?

Primary keywords are the main keyword that you’re targeting with any web page.

Secondary keywords are any keywords that you add in addition to your primary keywords in order to: 

• Try to get additional rankings
• Rank more easily for your primary keyword

We discuss in detail, above, why we don’t think it’s necessary to include secondary keywords for either of these reasons. 

What are SEO keywords? 

Keywords are terms or phrases that users type into search engines like Google. SEO refers to the strategies marketers use to get their content rank organically (i.e., without paying) for these keywords.  

Learn More About Our Agency

• SEO and Content Marketing Service: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about working with us here.
  

• Paid Search Service: We started PPC services at Grow and Convert after seeing thousands of dollars of wasted spend in our client’s Google Ads accounts (full story). Specifically, we noticed that many paid search agencies focus their strategy around maximizing clicks and traffic and rely heavily on Google’s automation tools. In contrast, we applied our well honed bottom of funnel strategy from SEO to paid search, where we take an active, manual approach to ensuring every campaign maximizes lead generation instead of click generation.
  

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
  

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details 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. Learn more here.
  

• Continue Learning: Find additional content on our blog and YouTube channel.

From what we’ve noticed, most marketers’ process for SERP analysis looks something like this: 

• Determine high level intent (i.e., is it commercial, informational, transactional, or navigational) 
  
  
• Determine how difficult it will be to rank (e.g., use a tool to check keyword difficulty, consider the domain authority of the top ranking content)
  
  
• Find gaps in the existing content (e.g., are they missing key topics)
  
  
• Find new keywords to target

While this is a great place to start, in our experience, it doesn’t dig deep enough to uncover the information you need in order to rank (which is the main goal of SERP analysis). 

SERP analysis is first and foremost about determining the intent behind the search because Google’s algorithm is designed to surface content that fulfills intent. So, the more you align with intent, the better your chances of ranking high.

But the simple high level “intent” categories most SEOs stop at — e.g., is the keyword commercial or informational — is not enough. Those simple categories don’t give you detailed enough answers to questions such as:

• What knowledge level are these searchers? (For example, are these high school students writing a paper or an industry expert searching for thought leadership content?)
  
  
• Do the top ranking articles offer video content? If not, would the searcher be interested in video content, and could this be an opportunity for you to provide more value? 
  
  
• Is ranking for this specific keyword actually going to help you accomplish your goals? (Yes, SERP analysis helps you figure this out — more on this below.)

These are the types of questions you need to be able to answer in order to rank well on Google — especially for keywords that will drive customer acquisition, not just hollow traffic. 

Below, we walk you through our step-by-step process for conducting a SERP analysis. But first, we’ll talk about why it’s important to differentiate between the two stages of SERP analysis:  keyword research vs creating content.  

The Two Stages of SERP Analysis: Keyword Research vs. Creating Content

We’ve noticed that most people just refer to SERP analysis as one thing but in practice there’s actually two different stages of SERP analysis:

• Keyword research to determine if a keyword is worth targeting.
  
  
• Content creation to determine what you’ll need in order to rank (i.e., topics that need to be covered, what level of expertise to write for, etc.). Note: Nine times out of ten a new post needs to be created in order to rank because it’s often impossible to fully match intent with content that was created for a different purpose. 

Although there will be some overlap, how you conduct your SERP analysis actually differs between those two stages. 

For example, you’ll look at the top ten titles of the SERP during keyword research and when outlining your content. However, during keyword research, you’ll simply be trying to determine the underlying intent of the keyword and whether or not that intent will help you reach your goals (i.e. if the keyword has buying intent). Whereas, during the outline stage, you’ll take a closer look to determine what type of post you’ll need to write (e.g., list of options, step-by-step guide), what angle is the most compelling for readers, how your title can stand out, and more. 

In general, the keyword research stage will simply include an abbreviated SERP analysis (think, a minute or two per keyword), whereas you’ll need to spend a lot more time analyzing the SERP and the details inside each of the top-ranking pages, for example, when you create SEO content (think, an hour or more).

With that in mind, here are the steps we use to analyze the SERP for any given keyword.  

5 Steps for Conducting a SERP Analysis

1. Read the Titles of the Top Results

As we covered in the example above, this first step will look different depending on whether you’re doing keyword research or creating content. 

As you’re brainstorming different keywords to target, you’ll need to verify that your intent is in line with Google’s intent. 

For example, one of our clients, Cognitive FX, specializes in treating post concussion syndrome, which is typically abbreviated ‘PCS’. So, we thought ‘pcs diagnosis’ would be a great keyword to target for them. However, if you look at Google’s results for that keyword, you’ll actually find posts on pelvic congestion syndrome. 

So, this clearly isn’t a great keyword for them as a good fraction of searchers (or most, in this case) aren’t looking for help with a previous concussion. 

That’s obviously an extreme example of a totally different definition than intended. But there are more nuanced examples where scanning the titles can tell you if a keyword has the intent you want to accomplish your goal. 

Scanning Titles to Determine Buying Intent and Whether a Query Fits Your Goals

We’ve emphasized the importance of buying intent in your content and SEO strategy a lot at Grow and Convert. In short, our data across dozens of clients clearly shows that going after high buying-intent, bottom-of-funnel keywords produces far greater ROI in terms of customer acquisition than more common top-of-funnel content (see our Pain Point SEO article or scaling content case study for more information). 

The number one way we determine the level of buying intent is to scan titles. 

For example, say you’re an accounting software company utilizing SEO to acquire new users. Many marketers would think about targeting “accounting best practices,” since it’s a common SEO piece for a company like that. 

But just scanning the titles reveals a bunch of issues with that keyword: 

Right off the bat, you see a variety of mixed intent here. There’s a typical list of tips from QuickBooks, followed by a discussion of GAAP compliance, then a podcast on accounting. This tells you that the searchers themselves aren’t that clear on what they want. 

You can also see from these results that there doesn’t seem to be much buying intent. So if your goal of SEO in this case was to get more signups for your accounting software, this likely isn’t the keyword to target. 

In contrast, take the query “best accounting software”:

Here the intent is extremely clear — almost every ranking piece is a list of accounting software. You know exactly what you need to produce to rank and you know that there’s high buying-intent (as the goal is to buy or try an accounting software). 

Finally, here’s a common example between the two extremes: 

Let’s say your accounting software has a nice feature around automatically uploading receipts to create expense reports for employees. 

You can scan the titles of queries like “automatically upload receipts” to see if the searchers of that phrase are looking for the features of your product: 

In this case, they probably are. You see Zoho, an accounting suite, ranking with their autoscan receipts help page, you also see a Google Play store page for a receipt scanner app ranking. 

It looks like a decent percentage of users are looking for apps that let them automatically upload receipts. There’s clear buying intent here, so if your app does this too, this could be a good keyword to target. 

Tip: Be sure to use incognito mode so that the results aren’t affected by your search history. 

Using Titles to Determine Nuances of Intent

Finally, titles can also help you figure out what you’ll need in the body of the content in order to rank. Knowing what Google wants within the content can also help you decide if it’s a good keyword for your company to target.

For example, let’s consider the SERP for ‘tree care techniques’. 

(The SERP has been visually condensed for better viewability but is accurate at the time of writing.)

The top organically ranking posts include slight variations of the keyword but half of the titles include some mention of pruning techniques. This tells you that your title should include both the keyword phrase and some mention of pruning. For example, “Tree Care Techniques and Tips: Pruning, Watering, and More”. 

But if we compare this to a slight variation of the keyword, ‘tree care tips’, you’ll see that the intent for the latter is more generalized. 

This reader wants an overview of what needs to be considered when it comes to tree care rather than specific techniques for pruning. 

So if pruning is a key strength of your landscaping service or your brand likes to talk about pruning for whatever reason, the former keyword (‘tree care techniques’) would be better to go after versus the latter (‘tree care tips’), even though at face value it doesn’t seem like the intent is that different. 

As you can see, just one word can change the intent behind a keyphrase and therefore the angle you need to take. 

2. Read Through the Top Results and Take Detailed Notes

Although the titles themselves give you an indication of intent, when you’re ready to dive deeper into a few of the keywords you’ve shortlisted, it helps to start reading or scanning the content inside the top few web page results. 

For example, in the screenshot below, the title is “Choosing the Right Ad Network for You (Checklist)”. However, both advertisers and publishers use ad networks.

If you only serve advertisers, you’ll need to make sure there’s intent for ad networks for advertisers not publishers, which you can’t determine just by reading the title. Instead, you’ll need to click in and scan through the content to see which audience they’re writing for.  

In our work for clients, we typically read through the top 10 results. Here are some of the things we look for and take note of: 

• What is done well (style of writing, topics that are covered, thoroughness of examples, etc.)
  
  
• What needs improvement
  
  
• Common themes/topics that all the top results cover
  
  
• Themes/topics that the top results don’t cover that’d be helpful
  
  
• What the top results are saying about certain topics
  
  
• How the information is organized (e.g., are high-level definitions covered at the beginning of the content or in a frequently asked questions section?)

With each of these points, you have to decide if you agree with how they’ve structured their content or if you want to take a different approach. The overall goal here is to create high-quality content that satisfies user intent.

3. Look for Other Google SERP Features (e.g., People also ask, Local Packs) 

It’s fairly obvious that if Google decides to include shopping results (i.e., links to products that stores are selling now), you can safely assume that there’s buying-intent behind the keyword. However, there’s more to learn from the additional SERP features that Google’s algorithm decides to include. 

Here are the most common Google features and what they can tell you: 

AI (AI Overview + From Sources Across the Web)

Google uses AI to summarizes the results on the internet in two ways: 

#1: From Sources Across the Web

#2: AI Overview (Beta)

These features can be useful because they tell you what everyone else is saying without you having to read through every article. (However, we still recommend reading through the top results.) Essentially, Google is giving you a summary of what they think the intent behind the keyword is. 

If you can match this intent better than any of the existing results, your chances of ranking well will be pretty good. 

One caveat is that you still need unique content. Yes, if you cover all of the topics mentioned in the summary, you’ll be off to a good start. But, you can’t just write what everyone else is saying and expect to stand out — let alone rank. 

How you make unique content will depend on the type of content you’re trying to create and its purpose. 

If your goal is to write SEO content that drives leads for your business, here are a couple of articles to help get you started: 

• Why your content needs “originality nuggets” to be effective
  
  
• “Mirage content” is the reason your company blog isn’t generating leads

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets typically show up for definitions or lists of steps, categories, strategies, etc. They tell you one key aspect of the search intent, but not the entire intent. 

For example, the snippet in the screenshot above was actually pulled from one of the frequently asked questions we included at the end of that post.

The bulk of the article was an in-depth summary of the study we did to compare the average SEO conversion rates of different types of keywords. 

So, you’ll likely need to clearly state relevant definitions or include a condensed version of lists when applicable (typically under a dedicated heading) in order to get a featured snippet. However, the entire article rarely needs to be centered around the featured snippet. 

People Also Ask + People Also Search

These two features are great for brainstorming new keywords to target. As we saw in the previous section, even one word change can change the intent behind the keyword. So, ‘People also ask’ and ‘People also search for’ can help you find variations that people are actually searching for. 

This is where most marketers stop — they discover a few new search terms and move on. But these features are also helpful when creating your content.  

For example, in the screenshots below, you can see several mentions of free software. This tells us that at least some of the searchers are looking for free software:

Knowledge Panels

Google’s knowledge panel is what sometimes shows up on the right-hand of the search results. It’s similar to the AI features in that it summarizes what people search for and talk about in relation to the keyword. 

When you see this, you’ll know right away that the keyword likely has informational intent. 

This is a great way to find new keywords. 

While you may be able to cover all of the necessary topics with one blog post, chances are that you’ll get more organic traffic and better success by covering each topic with a different piece of content. 

From there, you can utilize internal linking where relevant. You could also have one summary post that very briefly mentions each topic and links out to your other posts.

Google Ads

When it comes to ranking organically, we ignore Google ads altogether. 

Since businesses are paying for these spots, taking them into consideration won’t help you rank organically. And, they can be misleading during keyword research. 

During keyword research, many marketers see Google ads showing up for a given keyword and think it must be valuable because their competitors are paying for a spot. However, you don’t know how good the click through rate for those ads are or if they’re driving high quality leads. 

You can’t even be sure that there’s buying intent — let alone buying intent for your specific product/service. 

We cover this topic in more detail here and here. 

The only thing you can learn from Google ads is what messaging other companies are using.

4. Take Note of Other Types of Media That Show Up

Sometimes Google will include the top results from one of their other search results tabs (i.e., images, news, videos, shopping, etc.). 

This gives you a clue as to what the high level intent is (i.e., commercial, informational, etc.) and what type of content the searcher is looking for (e.g., images, video, news article). 

In order to determine how important it is to include video, for example, you’ll want to look at where on the first page the videos are ranking (e.g., are they at the top of the SERP or near the end). If videos aren’t the first result, you may be able to rank with a detailed blog post that uses helpful images instead of a video.

5. Look at the Backlink Profile & Domain Rating of the Top Results

This step is more relevant during keyword research to help you prioritize which keywords to target first and less relevant when you go to create the content. 

There are various SERP analysis tools you can use to check keyword difficulty (KD), backlink profiles, and the domain ratings of the top ranking websites including Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush. 

If you don’t have access to these keyword research tools, you take a pretty good guess as to how hard it will be to rank by asking a few questions: 

• Who’s ranking? Are they a big name in the industry? Have they been around for a long time? 
  
  
• Are there any paid ads? 
  
  
• How well do the top results match intent? 

This last question is the most important and is where small businesses with low domain authority can outrank high performers. 

For example, we helped our client Cognitive FX — a clinic that specializes in post concussion treatment — outrank websites such as Mayo Clinic and WebMD:

Final Thoughts

Most keywords have multiple layers of intent. For example, a searcher may want to know what the ‘best accounting software’ is, but they also want to know what actually makes it the best. 

Your job is to identify and rank all the layers of intent for a given target keyword and then address each layer accordingly. 

Continuing with the accounting example, it might look something like this: 

1. Intent: Compare accounting software options — you’ll want to include a list of options.
   
   
2. Intent: Learn how to compare options — you’ll want to include a list of key features and factors to consider in order to choose the best option.
   
   
3. Intent: Cheap options — you’ll want to rank the list in order of cheapest to most expensive.

To a certain degree, you’ll need to copy what everyone else on the SERP is doing (if the searcher wants to know the definition of ‘SEO marketing’, you’re only going to rank if you include that definition).

However, creating great SEO content that actually ranks well is about marrying everything you gleaned from your SERP analysis with the idea of creating helpful and original content. 

You should use your SERP analysis to identify intent at a deep level and then provide a more helpful answer than any of the existing pieces of content. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is SERP analysis? 

SERP (search engine results page) analysis is the process of reading through organic search results on the first page of Google for a particular keyword in order to determine intent and what your content will need in order to rank well. 

What are the steps for conducting a SERP analysis?

Here are the five overarching steps for how to do a SERP analysis: 

1. Read the titles of the top results.
   
   
2. Look for other Google SERP features: People also ask, related searches, rich snippets, local packs, etc. 
   
   
3. Take note of other types of media (e.g., images, video, shopping).
   
   
4. Read through the top results.
   
   
5. Look at the backlink profile and domain rating of the top results.

What tools do you need for SERP analysis? 

Although you can conduct a SERP analysis simply by entering a keyword into Google’s search engine, it can be helpful to have a SEO tools, such as:

• Ahrefs (to track your SERP rankings).
• Clearscope (to help find relevant keywords to include in your content).
• Semrush (to determine keyword difficulty).

How to Work With Us or Learn More

• Work with our agency: If you want to hire us to create and execute an SEO strategy by identifying your best keywords, creating content that is laser-focused on ranking and driving conversions, and link building to improve your ranking positions, you can learn more about working with us here.
  
  
• Join our team: If you’re a content marketer or writer who wants to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
  
  
• Learn our methods in our content marketing course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details 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. Learn more here.

1. Targeting keywords that are easy to rank for because they have low search volume and therefore low competition, i.e., low keyword difficulty (KD).
   
   
2. Targeting more specific keywords because they tend to convert better.

But from what we’ve seen, most marketers seem to limit the benefits of long-tail keywords to the first item above: that you can rank more easily for them and therefore can build large amounts of traffic by targeting multiple long-tail keywords without the challenge of trying to rank for broad keywords with more traffic and competition. 

However, what so many overlook is the second benefit above: that long-tail keywords also tend to convert at a much higher rate. Since leads (not traffic) are the true end goal of most marketing strategies, we think it’s much more effective to focus on conversion rates and total leads rather than traffic.

With that in mind, in this article, we cover exactly how to get more conversions from SEO via long-tail keywords. 

Table of Contents

• What long-tail keywords are
• The benefits + challenges of a long-tail keyword strategy
• 4 tactics for identifying + prioritizing long-tail keywords
• How to use (and rank for) long-tail keywords

What Are Long-Tail Keywords?

The term “long-tail keywords” comes from looking at a graph with volume on the vertical axis and keyword specificity on the horizontal axis. 

Long-tail keywords have high specificity and low volume relative to more general, high search volume head terms (i.e., short-tail keywords). 

We acknowledge that this is a vague definition — i.e., what counts as low volume? How specific do they need to be to count as long-tail keywords? — but that’s one of the challenges of targeting long-tail keywords. What counts as low volume and highly specific will differ between industries. 

Some marketers try to define it further by saying that long-tail keywords need to be at least a certain number of words (i.e., 3+ words = long-tail), but those rules are arbitrary.

At the end of the day, if you think it’s a fairly specific keyword with lower volume than other obvious head terms in your industry, it probably counts as a long-tail keyword. And as we’ll cover next, it doesn’t really matter whether you call a keyword “long-tail” or not, what matters is that you use the principles of a long-tail keyword strategy to target keywords that are relatively easy to rank for and that generate high-converting traffic. 

What Is a Long-Tail Keyword Strategy?

An SEO strategy in general is any way of identifying and prioritizing keywords to target.

So, a long-tail keyword strategy simply means you’re trying to find and target long-tail keywords over other types of keywords, namely head terms. And the idea behind using a long-tail keyword strategy is what we covered in the intro:

• If you target keywords with lower search traffic (and therefore low competition/KD), it will be easier to get good rankings.
• If you target more specific keywords (in particular those specific to your product, features, and benefits) you’ll get more conversions.

While this sounds fairly straightforward, there are two issues: 

Issue #1: Not All Long-Tail Keywords Produce Useful Business Results

While we agree that keywords with less competition are by definition generally easier to rank for, this isn’t helpful unless those are actually keywords you want to rank for.

Most marketers choose keywords based on traffic (i.e., high search volume = keyword that’s useful for our business), however, one of the defining characteristics of long-tail keywords is that they have low search volume. 

So, how do you decide if these keywords are worth targeting and which ones to target first?

In our experience working with tons of SaaS, B2B, and B2C eCommerce companies, the end goal of investing in SEO for most businesses is to increase leads. 

So, you should prioritize the long-tail keywords with the highest conversion potential… which brings us to the next point. 

Issue #2: Higher Specificity Doesn’t Always Mean Higher Conversion Rates

When it comes to long-tail keywords, a common line of logic is that the more specific the keyword, the closer the reader is to making a buying decision, and therefore the better your conversion rates will be. 

For example, someone typing in “sneakers” hasn’t decided what type of sneakers they want, but someone typing in “blue nike look-alikes for women” knows exactly what they want. And, if you offer what they’re searching for, the chances are pretty good that they’ll buy from you. 

For the most part, we agree. But let’s look at another example.

The keyword “how to cook turkey tail mushroom kabobs over a fire” is very specific. However, nothing about it indicates that the searcher is looking to buy mushrooms. So, the chances of that searcher converting are quite low.  

On the other hand, “turkey tail mushroom spawn” is less specific but is still a long-tail keyword that shows that the searcher is looking for places that sell mushroom spores. In fact, that buying-intent is confirmed by the SERP — the top result is a product page from a company where you can buy mushroom spawn. 

So, while “turkey tail mushroom spawn” is less specific than “how to cook turkey tail mushroom kabobs over a fire”, it has much higher buying-intent and therefore much higher conversion potential. 

And there are many examples like this. For example, “car insurance”, “buy flowers”, or “baby stroller” are extremely competitive keywords with tons of search volume that most people would consider “head terms,” but they also have very high buying-intent. 

This illustrates our key point: Buying-intent and long-tail are two independent characteristics of a keyword. 

In our opinion, finding and targeting keywords with both of these characteristics is the most powerful keyword strategy for businesses to use. 

The Solution: Long-Tail Keywords + Buying-Intent = More Leads

The screenshot below shows a Google Analytics report of a past client of ours where each row is a unique blog post and the columns show stats for each post, including the number of new user signups for their software (far right column) and the conversion rate to those signups (second from right). 

You can see that the three boxed keywords generated far more conversions (30–50 trial signups each) than the rest (between 0–8 signups each).

All three of those articles had much higher buying-intent than the other seven articles. 

And, this isn’t true for just these ten articles or just that client. In a separate analysis, we compared the average conversion rate of different types of keywords across 95+ articles that generated thousands of conversions for multiple different clients. 

To pull one example out of that study: We looked at “jobs-to-be-done” keywords (what we call keywords that indicate the searcher is looking to solve a specific problem, rather than searching for the solution directly). In this category of keywords — which are almost always long-tail keywords — we often find both keywords with high buying intent and keywords without buying intent (e.g., ‘best tools for building a deck’ vs ‘how to build a deck’). 

When we compared the conversion rates of posts in either bucket, we found that keywords with high buying-intent convert at a much higher rate. 

We’ve noticed this trend across multiple clients for all types of keywords — high buying-intent keywords convert at a much higher rate and produce more total leads overall compared to low buying-intent keywords. 

So, while we often target long-tail keywords, we always prioritize keywords with high buying-intent over keywords with low buying-intent(even when those low buying-intent keywords have higher traffic). We call this Pain Point SEO. 

4 Tactics for Finding Long-Tail Keywords

With that in mind, your goal with long-tail keyword research should be to find search terms that:

• Indicate the searcher is in the market to buy your product.
• Highlights the strengths and/or differentiators of your product/service that make you stand out from your competitors. 

For example, if you offer HR software for large companies but small companies aren’t great clients for you, you might target ‘HR software for enterprise’ but not ‘HR software for startups’. 

While you might be able to list off what makes a good customer and what your differentiators are, we find that it’s very helpful to talk to your sales team and customer success team. They know first-hand what challenges your ideal customers face (that your product solves), what aspects of your product/service immediately resonate with your target audience, and what makes a good customer. 

The answers your sales/customer success teams give should be the foundation of your keyword research.

With that in mind, here are some ways to brainstorm and find long-tail keyword phrases. 

1. Add Layers of Specificity to Your Main Category Keywords

Your main “category keywords” are any keywords that indicate the searcher is looking for your exact type of product (think “time tracking software”, “time tracking platform”, etc.). 

For most products, those shouldn’t be too hard to come up with. 

To turn these into a long-tail variation, you would add adjectives or layers of specificity (…for ‘X’). 

For example:

• Time tracking software for personal use
• Time tracking software for construction sites
• Time tracking software for remote work
• Easy to use time tracking software
• Online time tracking software
• Secure time tracking software

You can usually find a lot more keywords than you think just by using this one tactic of brainstorming all your category keywords and then adding layers of specificity. 

To learn more, you can check out these articles: 

• SaaS Keyword Research: Choosing Keywords That Drive Leads

• How to Research Competitor Keywords (and Find Hidden Gems)

2. List Phrases That Indicate the Searcher Has a Question, Pain, or Job to Be Done That Your Product/Service Satisfies

If you don’t know exactly what the solution is but you want to solve a problem, you typically type in action keywords or ‘how to’ keywords (we call these “jobs-to-be-done” keywords). 

Here are some examples:

• How to transfer money securely
• How to get signatures remotely
• Track invoices and payments
• Meet CMMC compliance standards

As we cover in our jobs-to-be-done post, these keywords tend to have high buying-intent. 

What you learn from interviewing your sales and customer success teams (as we discussed above) is going to be particularly useful here. They can give you the exact phrases that potential customers use to describe their pain points.

3. Use Google Search Engine Features 

Google has three features that are helpful for brainstorming keywords: autocomplete, People also ask, and related searches. 

Google’s autocomplete feature for the search bar not only tells you what layers of specificity searchers often add to the main keyword, it also gives suggestions for other variations of those search queries (e.g., compliance strategy vs compliance guide). 

The ‘People also ask’ keys you into the exact words people use to talk about specific problems, and it tells you related problems they may be having. If you also solve those problems, it could open up a whole new bucket of long-tail keywords to target. 

Finally, ‘Related searches’ is another way to find additional variations of the long-tail keywords you’ve identified so far. And, it’s also a great way to find keyword suggestions that have volume when the keywords you’re coming up with don’t have volume. 

4. Use an SEO Tool

There are plenty of keyword research tools available — Semrush, Ahrefs, etc. — that will generate long lists of keywords based on a starting keyword phrase that you type in. 

Here’s an example of some of the suggestions from Ahrefs Free Keyword Generator tool for the phrase “accounting software for”:

But an important caveat: Not every keyword they suggest will be long-tail or relevant to your business, so you’ll have to filter by buying-intent and use your best judgment. 

Many of these have free plans and paid subscriptions, so you can find the option that suits you best.

We cover this in more detail in this article: How to Rank for Long-Tail Keywords

Note: Some marketers will use the broad match feature in Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) to find related keywords to use for organic search. While you may be able to find a few ideas with this tactic, Google’s broad match feature often strays too far from the original keyphrase to make it useful. That’s one of the reasons we don’t use the broad match feature in our PPC service.

Check Volume + Keyword Difficulty (KD)

Once you have a list of long-tail keyword ideas, you’ll need to check for volume and KD. Again, tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Clearscope can help with this. Before moving on, there are two things to note here. 

First, if the keywords you’re targeting have high buying-intent, the monthly search volume can be quite low. 

In this article on mini-volume keywords (i.e., what we call keywords with 20 estimated searches per month or less), we cover why keywords with low estimated search volumes can still produce a good number of leads. We also share real results from clients.

But the main takeaways are: 

• Estimated keyword search volume is almost always lower than actual search volumes.

• If the keyword has high enough buying-intent, the conversion rates will make up for the lower search volume. 

Second, while we agree that it’s typically easier to rank on the first page of Google for keywords with low KD, we’ve helped websites with low domain authority (DA) outrank websites with high DA. 

For example, in this case study, we show how we were able to help our client Cognitive FX (a post-concussion treatment center) outrank the likes of WebMD and Mayo Clinic. 

We do this by using the same process we use for any keywords we target, which brings us to the next section.

How to Rank for Long-Tail Keywords: Create Dedicated Pieces of Content for Each Keyword

Many marketers and marketing agencies will tell you to sprinkle your long-tail keywords into existing product pages and blog posts and invest in on-page SEO optimization. 

However, in our experience, that rarely works for getting high rankings — even for keywords with low KD. 

We go into more detail about why the “sprinkle” approach doesn’t work in this article on how to rank for long-tail keywords. The main takeaway is that Google’s algorithm ranks posts that satisfy the search intent. And in order to satisfy search intent, you need to create dedicated pages for each keyword. But most importantly, those dedicated pages also need to be well-written. 

Here are a few articles to help you get started:

• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

• The Specificity Strategy: How to Turn Generic Posts Into Stand Out Content

• “Mirage Content” Is the Reason Your Company Blog Isn’t Generating Leads

How to Work With Us or Learn More

• Work with our agency: If you want to hire us to create and execute an SEO strategy by identifying your best keywords, creating content that is laser-focused on ranking and driving conversions, and link building to improve your ranking positions, you can learn more about working with us here.

• Join our team: If you’re a content marketer or writer who wants to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Learn our methods in our content marketing course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details 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. Learn more here.