• Bucket #1: They want to use content as a marketing channel that drives increased traffic, leads, and sales (i.e. what our agency would traditionally refer to as content marketing).

• Bucket #2: They want to use content as more of a thought leadership and brand-building effort, and they’re not as concerned about measuring specific metrics related to business growth. Think: ghostwriting for the CEO, producing interesting story articles to share on social media, etc. 

If you’re in bucket #2, what you need is simply a good writer. Specifically, someone who can communicate your perspective and unique ideas in a writing style that matches your brand’s voice. You don’t need to worry about SEO strategy or the various other things that put the “marketing” in “content marketing”. 

Now, don’t get us wrong, finding a good writer isn’t easy. We’ve learned this the hard way after filtering through 1000+ writer applicants and testing hundreds of writers over the last seven years running our agency. But we have learned that the key to writer hiring is having a good filtering process. 

We’ve written extensively about this in our article on hiring freelance writers. If you’re in bucket #2, read that in addition to our posts on creating a Content Brand and producing thought leadership content. Those pieces will give you a good idea of mistakes to avoid, how to find writers to meet your content needs, and how to do this type of content well.

In this post, we’re going to focus on how to outsource content creation when you’re in bucket #1 and you want to use content as a marketing channel that drives measurable business results. 

We’ll cover:

• Common misconceptions about outsourcing content

• A step-by-step process for vetting content marketers and agencies

• How much does it cost to outsource content creation?

Common Misconceptions About Outsourcing Content Creation

Misconception #1: Hiring a content writer is equivalent to hiring a content marketer

When companies decide they want to invest in content marketing, they often mistakenly think that they just need to hire a writer. But there’s a lot more that goes into content marketing than just the writing.

Specifically, most content marketers make the mistake of producing exclusively top-of-funnel content — the common introductory guide-type posts you’re used to seeing. The problem with this, as we’ve argued in many articles over the years, is that these top-of-funnel articles don’t typically generate conversions and qualified leads. 

As a result, we strongly believe the key to good content marketing is content ideation and strategy (often with some focus on search engine optimization). In addition, content marketing also includes understanding content promotion, analytics and attribution, and more. This combination of skill sets is not common in most “writers”, and typically even a “content marketer” is only going to have some portion of these skills.

So, if you’re going to invest in content marketing, it’s essential to understand that hiring a writer alone is not enough. One way or another you need to figure out how to get those other aspects of content marketing into your process.

It could be building that expertise in-house, or finding an agency that has that expertise and puts emphasis on these non-writing aspects of the content marketing process. Specifically, at our agency, there are often 3 to 5 people with different areas of expertise working together on your account. We have SEO strategists, content writers, a PPC specialist, a project manager, and a designer ready to deploy for each client. We could not produce the results that we do for our clients without these teams in place. 

Misconception #2: Overemphasis on whether to hire in-house vs. outsource content

Companies often put a lot of emphasis on whether they should outsource or make a full-time hire such as an in-house writer or content marketing manager. But in our opinion, the most important thing to be concerned about is: Does the person or agency you’re considering have a good strategy? Are they a good fit for the type of content you want to do? And do they have a proven track record of driving the type of results you’re looking for?

We can tell you from experience that finding great writers, content strategists, and agencies is hard. So, if you find a good person to run your content marketing in-house, take it. If you find a good agency to do it, take it. It doesn’t actually matter that much whether they’re outsourced or in-house. 

Are there some differences between the two? Sure. The main difference from our perspective is that outside agencies will typically have workflows in place to get content production up and running faster. But for a long-term investment like content marketing, this is trivial in comparison to whether or not who you hire is actually good.

Misconception #3: Outsourcing content means you won’t need to be a part of the process

Some companies think that outsourcing content implies you can fully outsource content and not be a part of the process at all. However, while there are agencies and writers out there that will do content for you in this way, this is one of the biggest reasons why companies are regularly dissatisfied with the content they receive from third parties.

If you want to produce high quality content that your brand is actually proud of, that necessitates participating in the content creation process — even just a little bit to give your perspective on the content. Otherwise, how could the writer or agency accurately portray the nuances of your brand’s perspectives on each content topic (not to mention your product or service differentiators, positioning, value props, etc.)?

This is why it’s best to work with writers or agencies that include you in the process. At our agency, we use an interview-based process in which we interview subject matter experts from within our client’s company for each new content topic we write about (more on this below).

Now, with all of this in mind, in the rest of this post, we’re going to walk you through a 5 step process that you can follow to vet content marketers and agencies. This process is equally useful for outsourcing content marketing as it is for hiring someone to join your in-house team.

5 Steps for Vetting Content Marketers and Agencies

Step 1: Decide whether you want content to generate leads, traffic, or something else

Companies have different goals they hope to achieve from content marketing. In our experience, most want leads or sales — whether that be eCommerce purchases, sales call signups, or trials and demos in SaaS. They want measurable ROI out of all their marketing channels, including content. This makes sense. 

But there are some, for example, later-stage companies with existing large lead generation numbers, that may want to use content for traffic and email marketing growth. Others just have a vague idea that they want to do content, and may not even realize that this is a choice they can make (i.e. they assume content is solely for getting traffic and brand awareness). 

It’s important to understand that this is a choice. You can optimize content around metrics like traffic and email signups (what most digital marketing agencies do), or you can optimize content for generating leads and sales (what our agency does). 

If you just want traffic to grow your online presence, it will be much easier to find a content marketer or agency whose strategy aligns with your goal. However, most businesses ultimately want to see ROI from content, which means seeing leads or purchases attributable to content and meaningful increases in revenue over time. 

In our experience, this requires a very different content marketing strategy (like the one that we use and have explained at length in previous articles like this and this).

Whatever you decide, the first step is to be explicit with potential candidates about this goal and base the rest of your questions and vetting process around how they’d help you achieve this.

Step 2: Ask them to come up with content ideas and walk you through how the ideas would work to achieve that goal

Once you’ve explained your goal, ask the candidate to come up with content ideas (the #1 most important aspect of content marketing strategy) and explain how those ideas would work to achieve your goal.

If your goal is to drive leads and sales, have them walk you through each content idea and tell you the story of how that piece of content would bring in a new lead or customer. 

In our opinion, this story should not be a long multi-step narrative that’s hard to explain. When prospects ask us this on sales calls, we have a very simple explanation: we prioritize content topics that indicate people searching that topic have buying intent for the product or service our client sells. 

For example, if our client sells remote executive assistant services, we’re likely going to write about topics such as “best executive assistant services,” “how to hire an executive assistant,” “executive assistant vs. virtual assistant,” and other topics that indicate people are on the market for an executive assistant.

The story of how these topics would bring in new leads or customers is simple. People are either searching on Google for the exact service they offer, or indicating that they’re close to being on the market for that type of service, and we show up with a piece of content that explains:

• The pain points that prospects are likely experiencing

• How our client’s product or service solves those pain points

• How their product or service is different or better than other solutions on the market

This is the type of clear and concise story you should be looking for. This is in contrast to a typical explanation of how top-of-funnel content helps bring in customers that involve multiple conditional steps like a visitor landing, reading, remembering the brand, coming back, maybe downloading an ebook or whitepaper, opening nurture emails, and eventually when they need that product, reaching out. 

Remember: The longer the explanation, and the more steps required for the content to achieve your goal, the less likely it is that the content topics the candidate is presenting will get you results.

Step 3: Ask them to explain their content creation process (and how they go about expressing product and domain expertise through content)

Regardless of what your content marketing goal is, it’s important for whoever is producing your content to be able to express domain expertise in a way that feels native to your brand. 

This is especially true for B2B businesses whose target audiences are often advanced industry experts who need to be communicated with at an expert level. If you don’t speak to them at their level, you risk reputational damage and turning off potential customers.

Particularly if you choose to optimize your strategy for leads or sales, the topics you’ll write on will be very product or service-centric. As explained in our article on Pain Point Copywriting, this means the person doing your content writing will need in-depth knowledge of your product or service, the nuanced pain points that they solve for customers, and how your product is differentiated from competitors.

Most outside writing services or freelancers will not have this product and domain expertise and therefore need to have a process for getting this information out of the minds of the experts at your company and expressing it through your content.

With that said, what we’ve seen in the market is that many agencies and freelancers end up doing what we call “Google research papers.” Like a high school student doing a research paper, they Google around the topic they were given and regurgitate what everyone else is saying on a given topic.

This results in undifferentiated and generic content. So, particularly if you want to produce conversion-focused content, make sure you ask them: 

• What is their process for being able to write and convey your value props, benefits, messaging, and differentiators in a way that feels native to your brand? 

• Do they even have one? And if so, how does it work? 

Is it a one-off interview at the beginning of the engagement? Is it a few one-hour calls? Do they regularly interview experts at your company on a piece-by-piece basis? 

We have found the latter approach — doing interviews on a piece-by-piece basis — to be extremely rare when working with outside agencies, yet the most effective approach for expressing product and domain expertise through content. This is the approach we take at our agency, as we’ve demonstrated in this in-depth case study. 

Step 4: Ask them how they would drive traffic to your content (i.e. What’s their process for content promotion?)

For content marketing to work, someone needs to drive traffic to your articles. So, another key thing to understand is what the candidate offers with regard to content promotion. Is it included in their service? Sold separately? And what exactly do they do?

For example, do they just share the content they write via your own brand’s social media marketing channels (tweet it out for you, share it on your LinkedIn page, etc.)? Because that’s something you could easily do yourself. 

Or, if they rely strictly on SEO, is there anything they do in the short term to help drive traffic to articles during the time it takes for them to rank? Or do they help build links to speed up rankings?

This is a key issue to address because what an agency offers for promotion will determine how much you’ll need to do on your end to drive traffic to your articles.

At Grow and Convert, we use a two-pronged promotion strategy to drive both short and long-term traffic to your articles as we wait for them to rank in Google. Specifically, we use paid ads to drive short-term traffic and conversions to content, and manual link building to support SEO rankings which drive long-term organic traffic that grows over time. 

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

Step 5: Ask them to explain how they measure and report on results

Finally, it’s important to ensure that whoever you hire has a way to track and report on metrics that align with the goal of your content initiatives. 

Most commonly, companies and agencies track and report on traffic, keyword rankings, and email marketing signups. Fewer track and report on conversions from content, despite conversions being the key metric that most companies actually want to drive from their content efforts. 

At Grow and Convert, we track and report on the following for our clients:

• 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. 

• Overall pageviews and organic traffic: We set up traffic dashboards in Looker Studio that measure overall pageviews and organic traffic to our articles.

In tracking multiple metrics, particularly keyword rankings and conversions, we’re able to double down on the topics that produce the best results for our clients. 

How Much Does It Cost to Outsource Content Creation?

A natural question that companies have when considering outsourcing content is: how much does this cost? And how would the cost compare to hiring someone in-house?

The answer to these questions will vary depending on your business context. For example, do you have some resources to manage parts of the content marketing process in-house, and just need a writer to write the content? Or do you need someone to do your entire content marketing strategy, keyword research, content interviews, writing, etc.? Obviously, the latter is going to cost significantly more. 

In terms of ballpark numbers, if you’re hiring just a content writer, our stance is you shouldn’t pay less than $200 per piece of content. In our experience, we thought professional writers charging high rates would be really good, but that hasn’t been the case. We’ve paid more than $1,000 for a piece that we weren’t able to publish. Grow and Convert writers get paid $500 per article, and we have pretty high standards for content quality. 

If you’re looking to hire someone to run content marketing for you more broadly, including strategy, writing, promotion, and measuring results, this cost would be more akin to hiring a full-time team member that also hires contractors such as writers, designers, and developers to execute your content marketing.

In terms of how much you should expect to spend, it’s not going to cost you $50k per month, nor is it going to cost you $200 per month. Depending on what the makeup of your team looks like, you should expect to spend somewhere in the mid to high thousands per month. The most popular plan for our SEO content marketing agency, for example, is $10,000 per month.

How We Hold Ourselves Accountable

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

Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph (green being a particular product signup metric and blue being another one further down the funnel). The red and orange horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. This lets us and the client see progress in relation to that break-even number, so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI. 

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here, including more case studies and client data. Before we started our agency, this is the type of thing we were looking for but could never find. And we feel this is the number one differentiator of our agency.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.
  
• Join Our Content 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.

The flaws of the typical process, which we’ll discuss below, stem from issues related to who is tasked with writing, what information they’re given, feedback coming too late in the process, and an overreliance on SEO tools to drive the direction of content. As a result, brands end up with poor quality, beginner level content that lacks original ideas from the brand’s perspective.

So, in this post we’re going to explain why we think this is so common and share our process, which we feel produces better results.

Table of Contents

• Flaws of the typical content creation process
  • Writers are expected to come up with ideas and arguments on their own
  • Strategists and writers let SEO tools dictate the direction of their content
• Our step-by-step content creation process for producing unique or advanced content
  • Content Ideation: Generate topic ideas through in-depth interviews and keyword research
  • Content Interviews: Interview subject matter experts from within our client’s organization for each new content topic
  • Content Writing: Get feedback and align on content at multiple stages of the process
  • Measurement: Track content performance to see how it contributes towards your marketing goals (and make adjustments accordingly)

Note: While content creation can apply to many different content formats and channels ranging from podcasts and webinars, to infographics and templates, to social media content and video content, this post will focus on our agency’s process for creating long-form written content for blogs and SEO.

Flaws of the Typical Content Creation Process

Whether they’ve tried to hire writers in-house or worked with outside freelancers and agencies, very often companies are disappointed by the quality of content they receive.

This can take a number of forms, such as:

• The content is too beginner level for their target audience or industry (e.g., a brand selling to IT directors producing content with basic tips on IT that any long-time professional would certainly already know).
  
  
• The content fails to communicate the nuances of the brand’s actual perspective on the topic.
  
  
• The content lacks substance and is full of “fluff”.

Through working with dozens of brands, hearing about their experiences, and seeing direct work products of other content writers and agencies, there are two key reasons for why we think this is:

1. Writers are expected to come up with ideas and arguments on their own.
   
   
2. Strategists and writers let SEO tools dictate the direction of their content.

Let’s begin with digging deeper into each of these issues to help you understand what not to do when creating content.

1. Writers Are Expected to Come Up with Ideas and Arguments on Their Own

Particularly when companies outsource content to freelance writers or content marketing agencies, a common process involves writers being given a topic, and then tasked with coming up with all the arguments and ideas themselves for the piece of content. We call this “the Google Research Paper,” because it resembles a student writing a school paper by Googling a topic and summarizing or regurgitating what others say on that topic.

By definition, content produced this way lacks originality and fails to communicate any unique ideas or stances that a brand has on that subject, which is fundamentally misaligned with the goal that many brands have to be a thought leader in their space, impress readers, or generate leads and prospects from their content. 

Furthermore, there is often a lack of communication and feedback throughout the writing process, so by the time key topic experts from within the company see the content, they’re thoroughly dissatisfied because it fails to say anything unique, interesting, or representative of their thinking on that topic. 

As we’ll discuss below, at Grow & Convert we solve this by interviewing the experts at our clients’ companies for each content piece we create, and getting feedback at different stages throughout the process to ensure alignment. This allows us to express the company’s expertise on each topic to create unique and engaging content.

2. Strategists and Writers Let SEO Tools Dictate the Direction of Their Content

With the rise of on-page SEO tools, it has become common practice for writers and agencies to use these on-page optimization tools or even AI-based tools to dictate the outline structure and subtopics (i.e., content briefs) that are discussed in their content. 

The problem with this is similar and related to the problem of writers self-researching for their articles on Google. On-page SEO tools simply pull the topics and keywords that are being discussed in the content that’s already ranking for a keyword. Again, by definition this leads to discussing the same ideas (and in this case even the same subheading structure!) that everyone else is on that topic. 

Now, if you’re specifically doing SEO content — content that you optimize to rank for keywords in organic search — addressing these topics on some level is a necessary part of the process. But it shouldn’t dictate the entire direction of the piece. 

Instead, content creators should prioritize the unique ideas and perspectives of the brand on that topic first, and use on-page SEO or keyword research tools later in their workflow to support ranking performance. This is what we do at Grow & Convert to ensure the content we create for clients does not fall into the trap of saying what everyone else is saying on a topic. 

In the rest of this post we’ll walk through the content production process we use that avoids each of these flaws, and link out to in-depth articles that dive deeper on each step. 

Our Content Creation Process for Producing Unique or Advanced Content

1. Content Ideation: Generate Topic Ideas Through In-Depth Interviews and Keyword Research

When we start working with a new client, we begin the engagement with a series of calls where we chat with team members from different departments, some of whom have direct interaction with customers (e.g., sales team, customer success). 

The goal of these calls is to gain a holistic understanding of:

• The details, features, and use cases of their product or service.
  
  
• Their top competitors, competitive advantages, and unique differentiators.
  
  
• Their ideal customer personas (specific verticals, company sizes, decision makers, etc.) and the specific pain points that their product or service solves for those customers.

Outside of speaking directly with customers, which often isn’t an easy option, this is the best way to quickly identify topics that will (a) resonate with and be searched by potential customers and (b) have a tie-in that actually allows us to sell our client’s product or service through the content.

Note: The type of content we do for our clients is lead generation and conversion-focused, so this goal guides the questions we ask in our initial interviews. If the goal of your content marketing efforts is more focused on brand awareness, for example, the questions you ask could be more tailored to informing ideation for that. But regardless of the type of content you plan to create, interviews with people inside the company are the best way to get great content ideas.

Once we’ve completed these calls, we plug the most common use cases, questions, and problems that customers are trying to solve into keyword research tools to identify keywords that we’ll target with unique pieces of content. These keywords make up our SEO content strategy and, once agreed upon with our client, are added to an editorial calendar. 

For further reading on this step, check out the following articles:

• Content Ideation: How to Identify Content Ideas That Convert — This post shares examples of questions that we ask different departments during our series of kickoff interviews. It also shares additional tactics that will help you brainstorm ideas and aid in content planning.
  
  
• How to Create a Successful SEO Content Strategy: 2 Factors That Are Often Overlooked — This post discusses common (and critical) issues we see with the SEO content strategy used by most businesses, and summarizes our agency’s approach to SEO content for various business types (SaaS, B2B, B2C).

2. Content Interviews: Interview Subject Matter Experts from within Our Client’s Organization for Each New Content Topic

For each new content topic that we write about, we interview one or more subject matter experts from within our client’s organization. This is the key part of our process that solves the “Google Research Paper” problem discussed above, allowing us to:

• Include arguments and ideas that are above the knowledge level of the customer, not below.
  
  
• Get unique insights to include and guide the direction of the content.
  
  
• Communicate our client’s brand’s actual perspective on the topic.
  
  
• Cover the necessary SEO subtopics thoroughly in order to outrank competitors in search engines.

To prepare for content interviews, our strategists will perform a “SERP analysis” (a review of existing search results for the target keyword), so they know what others are already saying on the topic and they can draft a list of questions to guide the conversation to get information on what our client’s brand thinks about the relevant issues, how the client’s product or service approaches solving the problems at hand in a unique way, and more. Interviews are then recorded (Zoom) and transcribed (Otter.ai) for use during outlining and drafting of the piece. 

3. Content Writing: Get Feedback and Align on the Content at Multiple Stages of the Process

The next step is to have the writer digest or organize the information from the interview into ideas that can form the piece. The first step in our process for doing that is an outline. Despite resistance from some of our writers (lots of writers, including myself, like to jump right into drafting), we’re adamant about having a multi-stage writing process that includes an outline phase prior to drafting. 

At this step, the writer will summarize:

• The intent for the keyword and any relevant findings from their SERP analysis.
  
  
• Title ideas and the angle they plan to take for the article to differentiate it from existing top results.
  
  
• Any unique insights from the interview that they plan to include.

Then, they’ll outline the article in varying levels of detail, depending on the piece, at which point the account strategist or editor will review this document and provide feedback to ensure there aren’t any crucial gaps in topics getting covered, issues with the angle, etc. We find that this significantly reduces the need for lots of rewriting once drafts have been completed. 

Because of this pre-work, editing the draft typically focuses on ensuring we: 

• Get the introduction right (i.e., avoiding generic statements, including compelling details that entice readers to keep reading, etc.).
  
  
• Back up points made throughout the piece with appropriate depth and examples.
  
  
• Fix any grammatical errors.
  
  
• Maintain clarity, conciseness, and the appropriate tone and style. 

Note: Two additional aspects of our writing process are that we write unique pieces of content for each target keyword (one piece for one keyword), a strategy which you can learn more about here. And we use on-page SEO software to optimize our articles as a final step in the writing process, not as an initial step to determine the outline. 

4. Measurement: Track Content Performance to See How It Contributes towards Your Marketing Goals (and Make Adjustments Accordingly)

It isn’t necessarily intuitive to think of measurement as a part of the content creation process. But content creation without measurement is like cooking food that never gets tasted — you don’t know if it’s actually good or not.

From our perspective, tracking content performance is in fact essential to the creation process because: 

1. It’s what tells you whether or not what you’re doing in the previous steps is actually contributing towards your goals. 
   
   
2. It allows you to adjust your process, such as the kind of content topics you’re focusing on, to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not. 

The metrics that you choose to track will depend on the exact goals of your content efforts. Most commonly, companies and agencies track and report on metrics such as traffic, keyword rankings, and email marketing signups. Fewer track and report on conversions from content, although in our experience, conversions are something that many companies actually would like to see from their content efforts. 

At Grow & Convert, we track and report on the following for our clients:

• 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. 
  
  
• Overall Pageviews and Organic Traffic: We set up traffic dashboards in Looker Studio that measure overall pageviews and organic traffic to our articles.

In tracking multiple metrics, and particularly keyword rankings and conversions, we’re able to double down on the topics that produce the best results for our clients. 

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

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.
  
  
• Join Our Content 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.

In some cases, they’re not sure why they’re not ranking. In others, they attribute the issue to factors such as having a lower domain rating than their competitors, or not having enough budget to build sufficient backlinks to their content. 

In our experience, while domain rating and backlinks are important (i.e. you can’t have a DR of zero to rank and you usually need to do some link building), it is still possible to compete and outrank your competitors in Google even if you have a “low” DR (it’s relative) or minimal link building — even for high value, buying-intent keywords. 

In this post, we’re going to discuss the main reasons why companies often have difficulty outranking their competition (or even getting to the first page of search results). Then, we’ll share the 3-step process we use to help our clients outrank their competitors in organic search, even when they have less domain authority than their competitors.

Table of Contents

Why companies often have difficulty outranking their competition on Google

• Reason #1: They don’t create content that thoroughly satisfies search intent for their target keywords
  
  
• Reason #2: They just “sprinkle” keywords into their content, thinking that will get them to rank
  
  
• Reason #3: They try to rank for many different target keywords with individual posts
  
  
• Reason #4: They aren’t strategic enough when choosing target keywords

Our 3-step process for outranking competitors in organic search

1. Base every piece of content on an in-depth SERP analysis for a specific target keyword
   
   
2. Create dedicated blog posts or web pages that deeply satisfy search intent for each target keyword
   
   
3. Target a strategic mix of keywords with varying levels of competition

Note: If you’d like help outranking your competitors on Google using the process below, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

Why Companies Often Have Difficulty Outranking Their Competition on Google

Reason #1: They Don’t Create Content That Thoroughly Satisfies Search Intent for Their Target Keywords

One of the most important ranking factors of Google’s algorithm is fulfilling the search intent of the specific query someone has typed in. In other words, in order to rank highly for a keyword, you need to provide searchers with the most relevant answer or information to the question or topic they’ve searched for.

In our experience, doing this successfully requires two equally important parts:

• Doing an in-depth “SERP analysis.” This is the process of analyzing the search engine results page for your target keyword to see what topics are being discussed and what page types (e.g. list articles, how to posts, landing pages, etc.) are showing up in the existing top results. This information indicates the topics and page types that Google has determined are the best match for the intent of that search query.

• Creating content that is informed by that SERP analysis. Once you’ve determined the topics you need to cover and the type of page you need to use in order to match search intent for your target keyword, you need to create content that follows that framework and covers those topics (and ideally do so in a way that’s better or more thorough than existing results). 

Many companies lack the know-how or process to do one or both of these steps. As a result, they end up creating content that doesn’t sufficiently meet the search intent of their target keywords, and they fail to rank. 

Reason #2: They Just “Sprinkle” Keywords into Their Content, Thinking That Will Get Them to Rank

A common practice in SEO is to hand writers a list of keywords that they want to rank for and have them “sprinkle” those keywords throughout the articles they write, thinking this will get their site organic rankings for these keywords.

This doesn’t work. 

As we explained above, ranking for target keywords requires a much more strategic process of creating content that deeply meets search intent. If others are creating tailored content to rank for specific keywords, and you’re just sprinkling keywords in here or there, you have a slim shot at ranking.

Reason #3: They Try to Rank for Many Different Target Keywords with Individual Posts

Another common mistake that companies make is trying to rank for a number of competitive keywords with a single web page or blog post. (There was a time when this strategy worked, but for the most part, it doesn’t anymore.)

In doing so, their content gets outranked by competitors that are creating dedicated pages to go after each search term, allowing them to more deeply meet the search intent of each keyword. 

Reason #4: They Aren’t Strategic Enough When Choosing Target Keywords

A final mistake that we commonly see, discussed at length in our post on Underdog SEO, is companies investing heavily in ranking for a few of their highest buying-intent (but highest competition) category keywords, while ignoring their less competitive (but still high buying-intent) long-tail keywords.

For example:

• A hosting company spends all of their effort trying to rank for “web hosting,” while ignoring slightly lower competition opportunities such as “web hosting services for ecommerce” or “web hosting services with email.” 

• A content marketing agency focuses all of their effort trying to rank for “content marketing agency,” while ignoring opportunities such as “outsource content creation.”

• A CRM tool trying to rank for the term “CRM software,” but ignoring opportunities such as “CRM that integrates with QuickBooks.”

Don’t get us wrong. We support businesses going after their main product and service category terms. But companies ranking for these sorts of category-definition keywords usually have extremely strong domains, are well-known brands in their category, have spent tens of thousands of dollars to own and protect those keywords (mostly through building a ton of links to the ranking page), have more money to spend on content and SEO, and have spent years trying to rank for these terms. 

So, one way to outrank your competitors is to go after less competitive, long-tail keywords that they may not even be thinking of targeting. These variations will generally have lower search volume, but they can still drive significant conversions. And furthermore, ranking for them builds up your domain authority over time which can help you target and rank for those higher competition, category-definition keywords later. 

It is some combination of these mistakes that often cause companies to get outcompeted in organic search. By following the framework laid out below, you can give yourself a much better chance at outranking competitors, even when you have a less authoritative domain.

Our 3-Step Process for Outranking Competitors in Organic Search

1. Base Every Piece of Content on an In-Depth SERP Analysis for a Specific Target Keyword

For each individual keyword that we decide to target for a client, our process begins with doing an in-depth analysis of the existing Google search results for that term, including:

• Reviewing the titles, page types, and sources of existing page one results. SEO titles and page types reveal the types of content ranking for a given keyword (e.g. list posts, “how to” articles, guides, product landing pages, etc.).
  
  In general, what is ranking tells you what Google’s algorithm already thinks is best for this keyword, so typically we will use one of those content types for our piece of content. But that’s not a hard and fast rule. If we feel we can better meet search intent with another type of content, we may try it.
  
  We will also note the sources of the top results to understand who we’re competing against (e.g. Direct competitors? News sites? Adjacent products and services?, etc.). Our goal is to understand exactly what the existing results are doing and be intentional about what content type we’ll use.

• Reviewing the topics discussed inside of those posts or pages — identifying themes or topics that come up repeatedly. 
  
  Next, we’ll scan or read each of the results on the first page and pay attention to topics that are discussed (especially those listed in subheadings) throughout the page. As we go through the results, we’ll take note of topics that come up frequently. This indicates that they likely need to be covered in our post in order for it to rank.

• Identifying what individual pages or articles do well — and what they do poorly. 
  
  Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of existing top results allows us to incorporate elements that we think work well, and gives us insight into the ways in which we can differentiate our post to create a better piece of content.

• Determine the intent of searchers typing in this term. 
  
  Once we’ve gone through the results, we’ll summarize the core intent(s) of the users searching this keyword. 

You can check out our interview with Bernard Huang of Clearscope for an in-depth video tutorial on doing SERP analysis.

For more detail on how we approach this, check out our article on SEO content writing which walks through an in-depth example of a SERP analysis we did for our previous client, TapClicks.

2. Create Dedicated Blog Posts or Pages That Deeply Satisfy Search Intent for Each Target Keyword

We use a one-page-per-keyword strategy, targeting individual keywords with unique, dedicated pages. This enables us to meet search intent more thoroughly than competing content, and achieve more page one rankings (specifically position 1–3 rankings where the majority of search traffic comes from) for our clients.

Based on our SERP analysis, we’ll choose a post framework (e.g. “how to,” product list, comparison, etc.) that others are using to get top results for that keyword — unless we think we can beat existing results with a different format. 

Once that’s decided, we use an interview-based writing process, whereby we interview experts at our client’s company on the topic, ensuring that we get their perspective on all of the necessary subtopics (again, based on our SERP analysis) that we need to address in the article in order to rank, as well as any unique or original ideas that they have on the topic which can help us differentiate the article.

We then leverage any insights gleaned from the interview to come up with a unique angle for the post and write the piece, covering each of the necessary topics to satisfy search intent, while incorporating originality and differentiation wherever possible. This combination is what makes truly high-quality content.

Finally, once we have a completed draft, we use the SEO tool Clearscope to ensure we’re using enough related keywords in our post for on-page SEO, add internal links, and write our SEO title and meta description.

3. Target a Strategic Mix of Keywords with Varying Levels of Competition

We have written extensively about how and why our SEO strategy focuses on ranking for bottom of the funnel, high buying-intent keywords. 

Specifically, keywords that fall into three broad categories:

• Category Keywords: Terms that describe the exact category of the product or service our client sells (e.g. social media management software, digital marketing agency, user experience designer, etc.). 

• Comparison and Alternatives Keywords: Terms where potential customers are comparing products or services and looking at options on the market (e.g. Google Analytics alternatives, Ahrefs vs. Semrush, etc.).

• Jobs to Be Done Keywords: Keywords that indicate someone has a problem that your product helps solve (e.g. how to measure organic traffic, improve search engine rankings, etc.).

Within each of these categories, there is a wide array of keywords with varying levels of search volume, intent, and competition. So, when we’re doing keyword research and developing a keyword strategy for a client, especially if they have lower domain authority compared to their competitors, we don’t just focus solely on their highest competition, category-defining keywords.

We likely will target some of those, but we’ll look for longer tail opportunities like we discussed above. In particular, we’ll look for keywords that map to a competitive advantage that our client’s product/service has over their competition, per our specificity strategy.

For example, when working with a QA testing platform, we didn’t immediately target “qa testing.” We targeted keywords such as “automated web application testing” and “codeless test automation” which directly mapped to their core differentiator of being a codeless tool. 

These are examples of lower competition, but still high buying-intent category keywords. But these opportunities can be found in the other keyword categories as well. 

For example, we were working with a remote executive assistant service that had a domain rating of 28 (quite a low DR). And while many of the posts we produced for them were taking months to progress towards the first page of search results, the comparison keywords we targeted were getting onto the first page within weeks of publishing.

In looking in Ahrefs at their rankings today, we see that all 5 of the comparison keywords we went after are ranking in the top 3 positions of search results.

There are different factors that we think contributed to this. For one, we created in-depth dedicated pages targeting each of these keywords and optimized them very precisely in order to rank. But we also found that the competitors in their space hadn’t caught onto this strategy yet, leaving the door open for us to rank for these terms.

This strategy works and is the foundational principle behind Underdog SEO, as we’ve demonstrated in numerous case studies.

Here are a few to check out:

• Scaling content: Expanding from bottom of funnel content to top of funnel (Geekbot case study)

• Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 sessions in 6 months (Circuit case study)

• How to do B2B content marketing without domain expertise (Rainforest QA case study)

• How to create a keyword strategy for a new, innovative product (case study of a video editing software client)

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.

• 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. 

And for good reason. As we’ll show below, competitor comparison landing pages are some of the highest converting page types we have seen from the thousands of articles we’ve published for clients over the years.

So, in this post, we’re going to define what these pages are, discuss the main reasons why they’re worth creating for many businesses, and share three unique comparison page strategies that we’ve learned and used to drive significant conversions for our clients. 

Below, we cover:

• What is a competitor comparison landing page?
• Why should you create competitor comparison landing pages?
• 3 unique strategies for creating competitor comparison landing pages

Note: If you’d like help creating pages to rank for your competitor comparison keywords, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

What Is a Competitor Comparison Landing Page?

Competitor comparison landing pages are website pages in which you compare your product or service to a direct or peripheral competitor. Typically these pages include a feature comparison table, messaging about your service’s unique differentiators, social proof, and a call-to-action (CTA). 

Originally, comparison pages were primarily used by SaaS businesses for PPC advertising, such as Google Ads. However, many SaaS companies (as well as eCommerce businesses) now incorporate comparison pages into their SEO strategies, creating them to rank for brand comparison keywords in organic search. 

Why? Because if you can optimize your comparison pages to get organic search rankings for the same keywords you’d be bidding on through ads, you can generate conversions from that page over the long-term — without paying for every click. 

Why Should You Create Competitor Comparison Landing Pages?

1. Competitor Comparison Pages Have Some of the Highest Conversion Rates of Any Type of Content

Competitor comparison keywords, including “versus” keywords (e.g. QuickBooks vs. FreshBooks) and “alternatives” keywords (e.g. QuickBooks alternatives), is one of the three bottom of the funnel keyword categories that we focus on in our client work. 

In a recent analysis of 95 articles we’ve written for our clients — What SEO keywords convert the highest? — we found that comparison and alternative keywords had the highest average conversion rate of the posts that were measured.

Comparison and alternative keywords had a conversion rate over 7.5% and versus keywords had the second highest conversion rate at over 5%. 

To our surprise, both of these comparison keyword categories converted higher, on average, than even main product category keywords (e.g. best accounting software), which are some of the most common-sense, must-have keywords in a bottom of funnel SEO strategy. 

Furthermore, despite SEO tools often reporting these keywords as having a very low number of monthly searches, which might cause you to question whether these pages are worth creating, we have found that:

• These keywords almost always get more traffic than their monthly search volume estimates would suggest (often a lot more).

• With such high conversion rates, they can deliver significant conversion volume, even while generating less traffic than other pages.

For example, in our post on Mini-Volume Keywords, we show how 6 comparison articles (all with less than 20 searches per month) collectively drove 149 organic signups for a past client, with an average conversion rate of 2% and one post converting at 4.5%.

This is why competitor comparison pages are a high priority in our SEO content strategy, and, in our opinion, should be considered a valuable SEO asset for many businesses.

2. Competitor Comparison Keywords Can (at Times) Be Surprisingly Easy to Rank For

There are a number of accounts that we have worked on in which we’ve found comparison keywords to be some of the easiest and fastest keywords to rank for. We’ve seen this even in cases where a client’s domain rating was very low, and ranking for other buying-intent keywords was difficult and took a lot of time. 

For example, we were working with a remote executive assistant service that had a domain rating of 28 (quite a low DR). And while many of the posts we produced for them were taking months to progress towards the first page of search results, the comparison keywords we targeted were getting onto the first page within weeks of publishing.

In looking in Ahrefs at their rankings today, we see that 5 out of 5 comparison keywords we went after are ranking in the top 3 positions of search results.

There are different factors that we think contributed to this. For one, we created in-depth dedicated pages targeting each of these keywords and optimized them very precisely in order to rank. But we also found that the competitors in their space hadn’t caught onto this strategy yet, leaving the door open for us to rank for these terms.

This obviously will not be the case for every business. Depending on your space, it may be more competitive and challenging to rank for these keywords. But anecdotally, we’ve had experiences where it was relatively easy to rank for comparison keywords with clients who were in competitive spaces as well as clients who were not. 

Coupled with the high conversion rates discussed above, the potential for comparison keywords to be low hanging fruit from a rankings perspective is another reason they’re worth prioritizing.

3. Competitor Comparison Landing Pages Can Aid in the Sales Process

Lastly, the content and format of competitor comparison landing pages is well suited to inform potential customers about how a product or service differs from competitors’ products, and therefore can help prime prospects for sales conversations. 

We’ve also had clients remark that they like the ability to direct prospects to comparison pages to help them better understand their unique selling propositions (USP) and the concrete differences between their products and relevant competitors that prospects may also be considering.

3 Unique Strategies for Creating Competitor Comparison Landing Pages

There are 3 unique comparison page strategies that we’ve found to work well but haven’t commonly seen discussed by other brands and agencies. 

The first two strategies use long-form content to target comparison keywords instead of the usual short-form landing page format. The third strategy is to target different variations of competitor comparison keywords beyond just “brand vs. competitor.”

Let’s look at each.

1. Use Blog Posts Instead of the Usual Landing Page Format

The prevailing method for creating competitor comparison pages (as you have likely seen if you have ever looked at one) is to use a short-form landing page format. 

In other words, a concise, conversion-focused page with the elements we discussed above: a feature comparison table, bullet points or short paragraphs about the service’s differentiators, customer testimonials, pricing comparison, and CTAs. 

Here’s a SaaS comparison page example of Pipedrive vs. Salesforce that follows this usual format:

At first glance, there’s nothing overtly wrong with this page. But in our experience, there are a number of weaknesses with using this type of landing page format that blog posts or longer-form content can solve:

• These comparison landing pages are often too basic to be compelling to advanced prospects. We have looked at tons of comparison pages and too often they offer very little detail that is useful for helping (particularly advanced B2B SaaS) target audiences understand the true differences between competing products. This is especially true for prospects that have experience using products in your category, and are looking for an alternative that can solve their pain points better than their current solution.

• Landing page formats tend to be harder to get ranking. It’s often much more difficult to get a landing page to rank highly in search engines, especially for brands with lower domain ratings and authority in their space. A blog post format gives you more room to include relevant SEO keywords and answer the intent of the searcher, so blog posts often allow you to compete better with established competitors in the SERPs.

• Landing page formats are at times a mismatch for meeting search intent. There are cases in which top results for a comparison keyword are blog posts (not landing pages). This is Google signaling that searchers are looking for more in-depth content. In these scenarios, landing pages are unlikely to satisfy search intent and therefore unlikely to rank. And if a page doesn’t rank highly, it doesn’t matter how high its conversion rate is. 

Furthermore, conversion rates of landing pages are not always higher than conversion rates of blog posts, as we discussed and presented data to support in a previous post. So using a blog post doesn’t necessarily mean you need to sacrifice conversion rate, and in some cases, blog posts can actually convert better than a landing page. 

For all of these reasons, we typically use blog posts instead of landing pages when creating competitor comparisons, which can convert at an extremely high rate (as shown above) while solving all of these potential issues.

Check out our article on SEO content writing for an in-depth look at the writing process we use to create these pages. 

2. Use a Hybrid Landing Page + Blog Post Format

We have also had success with using a hybrid comparison page format that adds long-form blog-style copywriting at the bottom of a comparison landing page to help with SEO ranking and provide greater detail for prospects that want it. 

This can be approached in a number of ways. If you have pre-existing comparison landing pages and are having trouble getting them to rank, you can write longer form editorial content and add that to the bottom of those pages to help with SEO.

Alternatively, you could create the blog post first to have the highest likelihood of ranking. And then once you’ve achieved that ranking, build a landing page-style template around it later to optimize the page for conversions.

Lastly, you could create a hybrid page from the get-go. Either way, based on what we’re seeing, it’s absolutely worth testing a hybrid strategy.

You can find an example of us describing how we used this with a client in this post. 

3. Target ‘Competitor vs. Competitor’ or ‘Competitor Alternatives’ Keywords to Get Discovered by Prospects Looking at Other Brands

A final strategy we use that’s less common is to look for “competitor vs. competitor” and “competitor alternatives” keywords. By targeting these variations, you can reach prospects that are showing clear buying-intent but may not have heard about your solution yet.

‘Competitor vs. Competitor’ Keywords

“Competitor vs. competitor” keywords are search queries in which prospects want to understand the differences between two of your competitors, not including you! This can be especially useful for startups or lesser known brands that have less search demand. 

We’ll often use this approach when we search for our client’s brand versus competitor keywords in SEO tools and find there to be no registered search volume. For example, here’s a screenshot showing no registered search volume for “Circuit vs Onfleet” (Circuit being a past client of ours, Onfleet being one of their competitors). 

Meanwhile, we found that there was some registered search volume for “Postmates vs. Onfleet” (both solutions in which Circuit could be a viable alternative), as shown here:

So, we created a three-way SaaS product comparison — “Postmates vs. Onfleet vs. Circuit” — to piggyback off of that search demand, and insert our client into that conversation and consideration among prospects. 

At the time of this writing, that page ranks in position one for the query ‘postmates vs onfleet’ in Google:

There are a lot of instances in which these opportunities exist and are worth taking advantage of, especially for small businesses with lesser known brands.

‘Competitor Alternatives’ Keywords

While most people associate competitor comparison landing pages with only “versus” keywords, “competitor alternatives” keywords are a close cousin that many marketers ignore but that actually convert the highest out of all the buying-intent keyword categories we’ve measured. 

People often search these terms when they’re either (a) a competitor’s customer that’s unsatisfied with their current solution, or (b) wanting to compare the solution they’re considering to other options before making a purchase decision. In both cases, their buying-intent is high and these are valuable prospects to show up for in search results.

So, in addition to targeting “brand vs. competitor” and “competitor vs. competitor” keywords for our clients, we also look for opportunities where there is some search demand for their “competitor alternatives” keywords. 

As a hypothetical example, if we were working with Podia, a platform for building websites and digital products (online courses, webinars, etc.), and their sales team said that their top SaaS competitors were Wix, Squarespace, ClickFunnels, and WordPress — we’d plug “wix alternatives,” “squarespace alternatives,” etc. into our SEO tools, assess search volumes, analyze the search results for each term, and prioritize which ones to go after.

We’ll typically target these pieces with list-style blog posts because that is what search intent generally calls for. We put our client at the top of the list and walk through their unique differentiators in detail to clearly communicate the advantages they can offer over other solutions. Then, we include a call-to-action to reach out and learn more about their service before carrying on with the list of competitors. 

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a paid search service, which you can learn about here.

• 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.

In this post, we share data from our client work that demonstrates this, and cover everything you need to know about what bottom of funnel keywords are and what it takes to rank for them.

Table of Contents

• What are bottom of the funnel keywords?
  • Top of the funnel vs. bottom of the funnel keywords
• The main types of bottom of funnel keywords
  • Category Keywords
  • Comparison and Alternative Keywords
  • Jobs to Be Done Keywords
• Ways to find bottom of the funnel keywords
  • Start with brainstorming your Category, Comparison, and Jobs to Be Done Keywords
  • Begin Googling your BOFU keyword ideas
    • SEO titles
    • People Also Ask
    • Related searches
    • Google Suggested Search
  • Using keyword research tools
• How to rank for bottom of the funnel keywords

Note: If you’d like help identifying and ranking for your bottom of funnel keywords, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

What Are Bottom of the Funnel Keywords?

Bottom of the funnel keywords are search queries in which people indicate that they have intent to buy a product or service. They are also referred to as “buying-intent keywords.” 

Top of the Funnel vs. Bottom of the Funnel Keywords

In contrast, top of funnel keywords are keywords that could still be searched by a brand’s target audience, but do not directly indicate that searchers are in the market for their product or service.

In our analyses across dozens of clients, we have found that bottom of the funnel, high buying-intent keywords don’t just convert a little bit better than top of funnel, low buying-intent keywords, they often convert hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of percent better. Yes, it’s that dramatic.

This is summarized in this analytics screenshot from our article on Pain Point SEO (our agency’s foundational SEO strategy): 

The right most column shows new user signups from each page. The three boxed posts rank for bottom of funnel keywords (via our Pain Point SEO approach). The rest rank for top of funnel keywords, that is, 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 bottom of the funnel, high buying-intent keywords converted 2400% better. In 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 we very strongly feel businesses should spend far more effort and time creating bottom of funnel content to rank for their buying-intent keywords before moving up the funnel. But most don’t.

There’s a culture in SEO and content marketing where marketers think their company needs to be the one to educate all potential customers at every stage of the funnel, starting at the top. This is not true, and it results in a huge waste of resources on content marketing that does little to help get conversions. For almost every business, there are plenty of people in later stages of the buyer’s journey that are already searching for bottom of funnel search terms.

Therefore, we think a more effective SEO content strategy should prioritize bottom of the funnel topics to capture people who are ready (or getting close) to make a purchase decision. 

The Main Types of Bottom of Funnel Keywords

We view bottom of the funnel keywords as any that indicate the searcher has purchase intent (in that respect we don’t care too much about distinguishing between bottom and middle of funnel, anything with buying-intent can be thought of as bottom of funnel). And, as we define in our Pain Point SEO framework, these basically all fall into one of three categories: 

1. Category Keywords
2. Comparison and Alternative Keywords
3. Jobs to Be Done Keywords

Let’s define and look at examples of each.

#1. Category Keywords

Category keywords are search queries that describe exactly what you offer — i.e., the person searching is shopping for the specific products or services you offer. They’re the top terms that most businesses are bidding on through Google Ads, and the most obvious keywords that any business would want their website to rank for.

This includes keywords like “best accounting software” or “men’s running shoes.” If you sell accounting software or men’s running shoes, these are keywords you absolutely want to be ranking for. In our case study on What Blog Keywords Convert the Highest?, we found category keywords to have an average conversion rate of 4.85% (to be clear, this is very good — the majority of SEO content that brands publish converts to product related CTAs at less than half a percent). This is why we have long advised that brands prioritize these keywords, and our data presented in that case study further supports that assertion.

A key thing to keep in mind about category keywords is that there are often more category keywords that closely describe your business than many companies realize. For example, if you sell accounting software, you may have distinct category keywords pertaining to different features (e.g. invoicing, time tracking, etc.), industry verticals (e.g. small business, freelancer, etc.), or product category variations (e.g. software, app, tools). 

We find that many (if not most) of the clients we work with are in a similar situation where there are many different ways that people search for what they sell. As you begin your keyword research, it’s useful to find as many of these variations as possible. 

#2. Comparison and Alternative Keywords

Comparison and alternative keywords are queries that indicate the search intent is to learn about how different solutions compare, and which product or service would best suit their needs.

This includes alternative keywords like “Salesforce alternative” and versus keywords like “Salesforce vs. Pipedrive.” And one of the most interesting takeaways from the case study cited above is that comparison and alternatives keywords convert at a higher rate than any other keyword type. We found them to have an average conversion rate of 8.43%! This is not surprising. Anyone searching these terms knows what they want, even knows the options in this space, and is just comparing before trying or buying one — their buying-intent is very high. 

Tactic worth trying: ​​When working with new or smaller brands where there aren’t many searchers looking for their brand versus a competitor, we’ve had success creating content targeting “[competitor] vs. [other competitor]” keywords. We’ll create content for “[competitor] vs. [other competitor] vs. [our client’s brand]” to piggyback off the search volume of people comparing our clients’ competitors, and insert them into the list of options being weighed by prospects. We have found these terms to be relatively easy to rank for, even for clients with low domain authority. 

3. Jobs to Be Done Keywords

The final category in our Pain Point SEO framework is “Jobs To Be Done” keywords — queries that describe a job to be done (or pain, challenge) that is best solved with your product or service.  

These are slightly more middle of the funnel because they don’t explicitly say “software” or “service” (like category keywords) or mention competitors (like alternatives keywords) — these are mostly “how to” queries: how to organize design files, how to do a poll in Slack, how to get video testimonials from customers. 

Although these users may not be aware of your brand, or competitors, or precisely what they need for their problem, they still have the potential to buy because they have a job or problem that you solve. 

We insert our clients’ names in these conversations by creating content to specifically solve what the reader is searching for in the context of the client’s solution, and we’ve seen these convert at a ridiculously high rate. 

Ways to Find Bottom of the Funnel Keywords

1. Start With Brainstorming Your Category, Comparison, and Jobs to Be Done Keywords

Before you begin using search engines and keyword research tools, it’s worth listing out all of the search queries you can think of in the three bottom of funnel keyword frameworks discussed above:

• Category keywords: List all of the different ways that people might phrase your product or service.

• Comparison keywords: List out all of your top competitors in [Competitor brand vs. Your brand] and [Competitor brand + alternatives] formats. 

• Jobs to be done keywords: List out all of the phrases that indicate someone has a problem that your product helps solve. Read our JTBD post for guidance on how to do this. 

This brainstorming session will establish a foundation for the rest of your keyword research. You may not end up targeting all of these, but they’ll lead you to discovering your highest buying-intent target keywords.

Note: Check out our post on content ideation for additional guidance on this step. 

2. Begin Googling Your BOFU Keyword Ideas

Once you have a running list of bottom of funnel (BOFU) keyword ideas, you can begin analyzing the search engine results page (SERP) for each keyword. This will give you insight into the exact phrasing people are using when they search for that topic, as well as provide you with related searches and other valuable keyword ideas.

As you analyze the SERP for each keyword, here are some aspects to pay attention to.

SEO Titles

The exact phrasing that is used in the search result titles, known as SEO titles (i.e., the blue links), is a good indicator of the specific target keywords and phrasing people are using when they search that term.  

In some cases, the SEO titles throughout the page will use the exact phrase you typed in. For example, if you Google “accounting software,” all of the results use that exact phrase in the title. You can therefore feel confident that is the correct phrasing to use as your target keyword. 

In other cases, you might find that the SEO titles use a different variation of the phrase you typed in. For example, if we look at the SERP for the keyword “executive assistant service,” we see phrases such as “Remote executive assistants,” “Virtual executive assistants,” and “Virtual administrative assistants.” 

With that in mind, you might decide that a better keyword to target might be (or include) one of those variations.

People Also Ask

‘People also ask’ is a SERP feature that you can use to figure out subheadings and topics to cover in your page targeting that keyword, as well as find additional keywords that you could target with a dedicated page.

Related Searches

Likewise, the bottom of search engine results pages show related searches that can give you additional keyword ideas to target.

Google Suggested Search 

Finally, as you type in your keyword ideas, you can find great opportunities by paying attention to Google Suggested Search. For example, if you type in “accounting software,” you’ll find that people search for “accounting software for small business,” “accounting software for nonprofits,” and “accounting software with payroll.” These could all be potential keywords to target with dedicated pages.

3. Using Keyword Research Tools

By following the two steps above, you can make significant progress on finding bottom of the funnel keyword opportunities to go after. But, once you get this initial brainstorming done, it’s useful to plug them into keyword research tools to: 

1. See their search volumes
2. Find other similar ideas and long-tail keyword variations you didn’t think of

We use Clearscope and Ahrefs, but you can use SEMrush, Google Search Console, Moz Keyword Explorer, or any other keyword research tool. 

Here are some examples of how we use keyword research tools to find additional BOFU keyword opportunities:

• Keywords Explorer: Most SEO tools offer a keyword explorer feature that allows you to type in specific queries and find related keywords to that topic. You can use this much like you used Google in the above example: type in the BOFU keywords you brainstormed and find all the similar variations of that keyword. The key advantage of doing this in a keyword research tool, however, is that you get data on search volume and difficulty that can help you be strategic in how you prioritize keywords to go after. 

• Content Gap: Tools such as Ahrefs offer a “Content Gap” feature that allows you to review organic keywords for competitor domains compared to your own to see where your keyword gaps are. It’s important to note, however, that most companies are doing a terrible job of ranking for BOFU keywords, so you likely will see tons of top of funnel keywords in your competitors’ rankings. Don’t be scared or deterred from your BOFU strategy when you see this. We assure you, we have seen under the hood of so many brands’ analytics — they are not getting many conversions from these top of funnel rankings. So, it can be useful to filter for specific keyword modifiers, such as “software” or “service,” to find keywords in the various BOFU frameworks discussed above. Check out our post on researching competitor keywords for a deep dive on how to use this tool. 

• Organic Keywords: As you publish content to rank for your BOFU keywords, you can periodically plug that URL into your keyword research tool to see all the organic keywords it’s ranking for. Often you’ll find variations of your target keyword in which you’re ranking on some page below page one that also have high buying-intent, but that you could target with a separate, dedicated page to get a top ranking position for that variation of the query. 

How to Rank for Bottom of the Funnel Keywords

Understanding the various bottom of funnel keyword frameworks and how to find them for your business is necessary, but the difficult part is creating blog posts or landing pages that actually rank for these buying-intent keywords. 

We have written extensively about the in-depth process we use, and that we feel is needed, in order to create content that ranks for these highly competitive BOFU keywords. 

To understand what it takes, check out our post on SEO content writing, which covers the following 5 step process:

1. Topic: Come up with content ideas and identify target keywords that have business value.

2. SERP Analysis: Analyze the search engine results page for each of those keywords to understand which topics need to be covered in your article for it to rank.

3. Structure: Choose the angle and structure of your article based on that SERP analysis.

4. Writing: Write the content in a way that fills in that structure with compelling information to sell your product or service.

5. On-Page SEO: Optimize your content with on-page SEO.

We see content marketers make mistakes at every stage of this process. So, as we cover each step throughout that post, we discuss those and their implications so you can avoid them in your business.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a paid search service which you can learn about here.

• 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. 

In contrast to general purpose CRO, which often centers around doing A/B testing to improve a website’s conversion rate, content CRO has some key factors that precede (and are of greater importance than) running AB tests:

1. Targeting keywords that have buying intent. In our experience, as we’ll demonstrate below, this is by far the #1 driving factor that determines whether or not content converts.
   
   
2. Ranking highly for those keywords. To get sustainable traffic and conversions from content, you need to at least rank on page one of search results, ideally in the top three positions. 
   
   
3. Writing compelling content that sells your product or service. Converting readers into customers requires intelligent, thoughtful writing that demonstrates how your product or service solves the customer’s problem. Doing this well (while difficult) can significantly influence conversion rates.

With that said, there are aspects of general practice CRO that still apply to content. So, in this post we’re going to share 9 practices that — based on our experience measuring conversions of hundreds of blog posts for dozens of clients — every company should follow to optimize their content for conversion.

We’ve grouped these steps into three categories:

SEO

1. Focus on targeting high buying intent SEO keywords

2. Optimize content to rank for those keywords

Content Writing

3. Write non-generic blog introductions

4. Highlight customer pain points

5. Describe how your product or service solves those pain points

6. Emphasize your unique differentiators

Blog Design and CTAs

7. Have a clear call-to-action in your navigation bar

8. Optimize your blog design for readability

9. Use in-line contextualized CTAs throughout your blog copy

Note: If you’d like help improving your blog conversion rate, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) — the process of choosing keywords and optimizing content to rank for those keywords in organic search — plays a critical role in optimizing content for conversion because:

• Without sustainable traffic to your content, making CRO tweaks to your site won’t matter. (i.e. You can’t analyze and influence user behavior if there aren’t enough users on your site to begin with.)

• By intentionally targeting keywords that indicate searchers have buying intent, SEO offers a unique opportunity to bring in highly targeted website traffic which can drastically increase conversion rates.

For these reasons, the following two aspects of SEO are where we focus first when optimizing content for conversion.

1. Focus On Targeting High Buying Intent SEO Keywords

The logic behind this point is simple:

If a piece of content ranks for keywords in which people searching have intent to buy what you sell, it will convert at a higher rate than if it ranks for keywords in which people do not have intent to buy what you sell.

This point 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 number of conversions from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

We also showed this at a larger scale in a case study that analyzed 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 at 10%, 20% or even 50% better than the “top of funnel,” lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. And furthermore, the higher conversion rates more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets. 

No AB or split testing is going to get you a 2400% lift in average conversion rate. That’s why we say this is the #1 factor, by far, in content conversion optimization.  

If you do nothing else, simply ranking for keywords where people are actively looking to buy what you sell will inevitably increase conversions from your content. 

2. Optimize Content to Rank for Those Keywords

In addition to focusing on the right keywords (i.e. ones that can drive actual paying customers), you need to write content that’s optimized to rank highly for those keywords. Ideally, in the top half of page one of search results where the majority of traffic comes from.

This is nontrivial. You can’t just “sprinkle” keywords into an article and expect your post to rank for a competitive, valuable business keyword. For example, category keywords such as “social media management software” or “executive assistant service.” 

The process is much more involved than that.

We’ve written at length about how we approach content optimization here which breaks down our process into the following five steps:

1. Topic: Come up with content ideas and identify target keywords that have business value.
   
   
2. SERP Analysis: Analyze the search engine results page (SERP) for each of those keywords to understand which topics need to be covered in your article for it to rank.
   
   
3. Structure: Choose the angle and structure of your article based on that SERP analysis.
   
   
4. Writing: Write the content in a way that fills in that structure with compelling information to sell your product or service.
   
   
5. On-Page SEO: Polish off your content with on-page SEO.

Read our full post which provides detailed explanations and examples for each step: SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

Content Writing

Content writing itself is a highly underrated aspect of content CRO strategy because people tend to focus on general purpose CRO as we mentioned above. For example, using pop-ups, analyzing heatmaps, decreasing web page load times, or using social proof and customer testimonials.

But converting readers into customers requires selling your product or service inside blog posts, which is a very different style of blog writing than typical top of funnel how-to or intro-guide style posts. The following are the most important aspects of writing content that converts.

3. Write Non-Generic Blog Introductions 

The internet is fraught with generic, cliche blog introductions that can turn off potential customers and cause high bounce rates. This is particularly true in the B2B space where website visitors are often advanced in the topic area of the content. 

For example, for an article aimed at attracting sales managers and selling them on a CRM tool, if it starts off with descriptions about how CRMs are really important to tracking sales data, it’s an immediate turn offs to actual, experienced sales managers. These articles are written below the knowledge level of the target audience and the introduction is what gives that away. 

If you write generic introductions, you show the reader that you aren’t on their level, you fail to entice readers to keep reading, and you’ll lose a chunk of them, thereby reducing your conversion rate right out of the gate. So, getting your introductions right is essential.

This is a topic that one of our founders, Devesh, has written about at length in a previous piece: How to Write Great Blog Introductions (And Why Most Are Bad)

He compares and contrasts good introductions with bad ones, so you can learn how to write better introductions that hook readers and cause them to keep reading.

4. Highlight Customer Pain Points

In the same fashion that you would discuss customer pain points on a product page or sales landing page, highlighting pain points in your blog content is another key aspect of optimizing content for conversion. 

If you can hit on pain points that resonate with readers, particularly early on in a post (and in language that they use themselves to describe their problems), you can:

• Earn their trust and attention.
• Entice them to continue reading.
• Naturally transition into discussing how your product or service can solve those problems, and thus generate conversions.

Check out this post to learn how to identify customer pain points that you can highlight in your content: Content Ideation: How to Identify Content Ideas That Convert

5. Describe How Your Product or Service Solves Those Pain Points

Most blog content only glancingly mentions the company’s product or service, if it does so at all. This is in part due to the top of funnel, non product-centric topics that blogs often focus on. And in part due to a culture of content marketing that says you shouldn’t be too “salesy” in your content. This is a massive conversion mistake that many brands make. 

If you don’t discuss your product or service in your content, you’re guaranteeing it won’t convert well. Plus, if you’re not discussing your product, someone else will.

Particularly if you focus on buying intent topics as we discussed above, discussing your product or service is actually necessary to satisfy search intent. Searchers are looking to understand how your product works, whether it can solve their problems, and how it’s different from other solutions. So, this is exactly what you need to discuss in order to rank for buying intent keywords and convert readers into leads and customers. 

When writing content for our clients, significant portions of our copy (50%+) are dedicated to describing the features and benefits of the product or service, highlighting the key value propositions, and demonstrating the ways in which our client can solve the customer’s pain points.

For an in-depth tutorial on the pitfalls of writing product-focused content, and how to execute it well, check out: Pain Point Copywriting: How to Write Compelling Sales Copy Inside Blog Posts

6. Emphasize Your Unique Differentiators

Finally, as you discuss how your product or service solves customer pain points, it’s important to emphasize your unique differentiators. This is a key aspect of helping readers understand how your product or service is different and why they should choose you over your competitors.

In our experience evaluating thousands of applicants and reviewing hundreds of test projects, we’ve learned that hiring writers to do this type of Pain Point Copywriting is difficult. Learn more about how to solve that here.

If you want help doing this type of sales-focused content marketing, you can learn more about our service here. 

Blog Design and CTAs

Finally, after all of the above steps, we get to what most people think are the important aspects of “conversion optimization” for content: design, UX, call-to-action (CTA) placements and the like. For us, this bucket intentionally comes last. As we’ve argued before, blog design, CTAs, and other visual aspects of CRO are akin to the “window dressing” of conversion optimization, you should only focus on them after you take care of the fundamentals above. 

Why? Because the steps above ensure (a) the traffic to your content has a high intent to purchase (b) the content itself is written to compel them to purchase. If you have those two aspects in place, then these high-intent customers will figure out how to buy. It’s not hard to scroll up to your navbar and learn more about your product, sign up for a trial, reach out, or purchase. 

However, this isn’t to say that the aesthetic and user experience aspects of CRO aren’t important for conversion. 

What follows are the key aspects of blog design and CTAs that we recommend paying attention to and implementing.

7. Have a Clear Call-to-Action in Your Navigation Bar

Many modern website and blog designs offer the option to include CTA buttons in the top right corner of the page in the navigation bar. However, we’ll occasionally have leads with websites that are missing this element, and we’ll recommend that they fix that. 

Having a clear CTA button in the navigation bar makes it simple for readers to reach out if they want to learn more about your product or service; there’s only upside to having that option there. You might even experiment with making your navbar “sticky,” so that the CTA button remains visible to website visitors even as they scroll down the page.

8. Optimize Your Blog Design for Readability

We often see companies crowd their blog pages with graphical CTAs in their sidebars and even throughout their content. In our experience, these graphics can be counterproductive in a few ways:

• They hurt readability making it less likely that people continue reading your entire post.

• They distract readers from focusing on and learning about how your product or service can solve their problems.

• They look like ads which readers are often programmed to ignore anyway.

For these reasons, we recommend that you optimize your blog design for readability — particularly if you’re following the strategy we laid out above and writing compelling content that sells your product or service. 

This means using less graphical CTAs, email marketing opt-ins, etc., and using a more minimalist design with clear text that focuses the reader on the content itself. Remember, if you’ve followed the advice above, in particular steps 3–6, your content should be selling your product, so you don’t need graphical ad-looking CTAs in the first place. 

9. Use In-Line Contextualized CTAs Throughout the Copy of Your Blog Posts

Lastly, as an alternative to using graphical CTAs, we recommend using plain text, contextualized CTAs throughout your content. When doing this, keep in mind the following:

• Don’t just put CTAs at the end of the article. Many readers won’t make it to the end of your posts, so it’s useful to include CTAs in the introduction and body of the post. 

• Don’t use the same exact CTA for every article. Write CTAs that make sense contextually within your post. For example, if the topic of your post is on invoicing, and invoicing is one of a number of features offered by your software platform, make the CTA pertain specifically to your invoicing feature as opposed to your broader platform.

Keep in mind that the advice we’ve provided here on CTAs and design “best practices” are trivial in comparison to the sections on keyword selection and content writing above. 

For example, if someone is Googling a super high buying intent term, like “plumbing management app” and they go to a page that explains in detail the ways in which your plumbing management app works, and how it’s better (or different) than competitors, most modern blog layouts have plenty of call-to-action buttons for them to take your desired action (click to learn more, sign up for a demo or trial, etc.).

Get Help Driving Leads & Sales from Your Content Marketing Efforts

• Our Agency: 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 view our pricing and learn more about working with us here.

• 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 marketing 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. Difficult and technical writing: It’s difficult to find writers that can write clearly and accurately about the technical aspects of healthcare topics (describing concepts correctly, using the right terminology in the right contexts, etc.). At the same time, the consequences of putting out inaccurate information are especially high in the healthcare sector because doing so can severely diminish credibility or even have legal ramifications. So extremely precise yet nuanced writing is essential in healthcare but hard to come by. 
   
   
2. Compassionate selling: The selling of products and services in healthcare content needs to be done thoughtfully and with consideration for readers that are often under duress when searching for solutions to their medical problems. There needs to be a careful balance of educating versus selling that requires finesse to execute well. 
   
   
3. Nuanced SEO keyword strategy: The most effective form of content marketing is that which ranks for search terms that (a) your target audience would actually Google and (b) shows some buying intent for your offering. Executing this well for healthcare is tricky. You need a really deep understanding of customer or patient questions, what those questions indicate about the stage of the process the patient is in, when it’s appropriate to sell your product or service, and more.

Our healthcare clients have often remarked on how difficult it has been to solve these challenges both internally as well as with outside writers and agencies they’ve worked with. 

So, in this post, we’re going to discuss how we’ve approached solving these challenges in our work with healthcare organizations and product companies. As usual, we will share examples and case studies from our work to demonstrate and support the methods we discuss.

If you’re in the healthcare or med tech space and looking to build a content marketing or SEO operation, feel free to reach out to us here.

What Is Healthcare Content Marketing?

Before we get into the key challenges below, let’s first define how we think about healthcare content marketing at our agency.

From our perspective, healthcare content marketing is the process of creating content that’s designed to a) reach potential patients or customers, b) help them better understand their health-related problems and answer their health-related questions, and c) share with them how our clients’ products and services can help them solve those problems.

Broadly speaking, healthcare content can include many different content formats: blog posts, infographics, webinars with healthcare professionals, podcast interviews with industry experts, quizzes, video content, white papers, etc. 

However, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on search engine optimization (SEO) focused blog content, because that’s what we do at our agency, and that’s fundamentally what many marketers and businesses have in mind when they think about content marketing.

Now, let’s dive into the key challenges of healthcare content marketing we shared above, and discuss how we’ve approached solving them.

Challenge #1: Finding Content Writers That Can Accurately Express Subject Matter Expertise 

The ability to express subject matter expertise through content is a critical, but often under-emphasized, aspect of effective content marketing (especially in the B2B space where content is aimed at advanced target audiences). However, this need is taken to the extreme in healthcare content marketing which often involves discussing medical conditions or providing medical advice to consumers, and therefore requires the utmost accuracy from both an ethical and a brand credibility standpoint. 

Now, like other industries, finding agencies or writers that have processes to gain and express subject matter expertise through content turns out to be quite hard because it’s common practice in content marketing for writers to self-research topics to produce their articles. This is problematic in most industries, but for healthcare products and services that need to discuss and portray medical-related topics clearly and accurately, it’s simply unacceptable. 

Healthcare content must be informed and vetted by subject matter experts within your organization (often doctors, licensed care providers, or scientific researchers).

Furthermore, for most healthcare organizations or companies, it’s important that the views of their care providers, founders, or leadership are expressed, not that of any expert on the topic. 

Why? 

Because their organization and brand often has a unique process or product to solve a common healthcare problem. That unique twist is almost always extremely important to their brand. It’s why customers should choose them, what they innovated, and how they’re differentiated. 

So, the writer or agency can’t just interview some random expert or doctor (for example using a tool like HARO) on a topic. They need to understand the importance of interviewing your company’s employees. Then, they need to be able to deftly craft narratives that accurately express the company’s brand positioning. It’s not trivial to find people who can do this (trust us, hiring writers is one of our biggest challenges).

As an example, our client Cognitive FX (discussed below) built their entire brand and business on a new, cutting edge way of treating concussions. Specifically, they developed a process to identify where in your brain you’re experiencing changes from a concussion, and a multidisciplinary team of doctors and therapists that tailor treatment based on each patient’s individual case. Paired together, what they offer is unlike what anyone else in the world can provide. And content for them will never be right unless the team producing it has a process to get their viewpoint on every piece they write.  

The bottom line: If you’re going to do healthcare content marketing, you need to ensure that whoever you hire has a process for gaining and expressing subject matter expertise from inside your own organization for every piece of content they produce.

At Grow and Convert, we solve this by doing in-depth interviews with experts at our clients’ organizations for the articles we write.

To demonstrate what this looks like, let’s walk through an example of our process of writing an article for the healthcare client mentioned above, Cognitive FX (a world-renowned concussion treatment center based in Provo, Utah). 

Expressing Subject Matter Expertise in an Article for Cognitive FX

The Target Keyword: “post-concussion headaches”

Each article we produce for our clients begins with a specific keyword that we’re targeting. Below, we’ll share more about how we select and prioritize keywords. But, for the purposes of this example, we’re going to focus on our writing process for a keyword that we’d already selected for Cognitive FX. Specifically, “post-concussion headaches.”

The Interview Preparation Process

Per our SEO content writing process, our content strategist for Cognitive FX, Olivia Seitz, began her interview preparation by reviewing the existing search results for the target keyword “post-concussion headaches” in order to figure out what topics she would need to cover in the article (and therefore ask about during her interview) in order for it to rank. 

She read the top articles to see what they were saying and which subtopics they were covering. And she sought to understand the specific questions that patients have around this topic by reviewing queries from “People also ask”:

That was one part of her interview preparation. The other part was doing a simple but important thought exercise — putting herself in the mindset of a person that has this problem, and considering their concerns. For example:

• What’s causing this problem?

• What are the different ways that I might experience this condition?

• Do my symptoms line up with the symptom profile for this condition?

• How is this treated? 

• What are the treatment options?

• How long does it take to recover?

• Etc. etc. etc.

So, these were the sorts of questions she used to guide the conversation during her interview, discussed next.

Technical Topics Covered in the Interview and Discussed in the Article

For this post (and many others), Olivia interviewed Dr. Jaycie Loewen, a Clinical Neuroscientist whose deep expertise informed many treatment improvements at Cognitive FX. Dr. Loewen explained a number of complex topics during the interview, which Olivia later translated into the article. For example:

• How autonomic nervous system dysfunction leads to post-concussion headaches

• How neurovascular coupling dysfunction contributes to post-concussion headaches

• Vestibular issues that can lead to headaches

Had Olivia tried to self-research concussion headaches, or interview some random neurologist about this topic, she almost certainly would not have even come across these topics or this terminology. 

Other top ranking posts she likely would have read, such as posts by Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, or WebMD, say nothing of these specific types of headaches. It was only by interviewing Dr. Loewen that these subtopics came up. 

This is what gave the article more depth, and led it to ranking in position #1 for the target keyword (as well as many other keywords) for several years.

Data from Ahrefs showing this post ranking for a cool 8.4K organic keywords with 165 in the top 3 positions. This type of reach, compounded over many articles, has led Cognitive FX to become a true thought leader in their space (as they deserve to be, given their unique approach to treating concussions).

Unique Insights Gleaned From the Interview That Differentiated the Article and Made an Impact on Readers

Because Dr. Loewen had extensive, direct experiences talking to patients on a daily basis about their concussion symptoms, she had a much more nuanced and detailed understanding of how post-concussion patients experience (and importantly, describe) headaches than what any existing articles on this topic were discussing.

For example, one unique concept that came out during the interview was the common ways in which headaches feel different to different patients. Dr. Loewen was able to break down and categorize post-concussion headaches into six different types of headaches which, remarkably, can sometimes be linked to what might actually be causing the headache. This gave us a whole new layer of information that none of the existing articles on this topic at the time were acknowledging or discussing.

Furthermore, she was also able to share the exact words and phrases that her patients use to describe their headaches, which can make an article really resonate with the searcher. 

• “I feel like there’s a tight band around my head.” 
• “My head feels like it’s blowing up like a balloon.” 
• “I have a constant pressure headache.” 
• “I feel like my head is being pulled apart between the eyes.”

In the first paragraph of the piece, we opened with these phrases about how Cognitive FX patients describe their concussion symptoms:

This ended up having a profound effect on the article’s ability to resonate with readers (and, downstream from that, produce many leads for CFX as we’ll show below). Just look at this comment left by one reader:

“I almost cried when I started to read this article.”

Again, had Olivia tried to self-research this topic, there’s no way that she would have been able to understand and share the nuanced ways in which post-concussion patients describe their headaches. 

These details matter a lot in healthcare content writing, and the interview-based process we use at Grow and Convert is what allows us to translate these insights into content.

Now, let’s move onto a second key aspect of content writing: selling through your content in a considerate, compassionate way.

Challenge #2: Striking the Right Balance of Educating vs. Selling Compassionately Through Content

A key mistake that most businesses make when doing content marketing is that they don’t actually sell their products or services directly through their content. This is due to a misguided, long standing view that content is a top of funnel, strictly-educational marketing channel — not a channel for selling to readers for risk of turning them off. So blog content often only glancingly mentions their product or service (if it says anything about it at all). We disagree with this “don’t sell” approach, and we’ve long argued that it’s one of the key reasons why content fails to convert readers into customers for most businesses.

With that said, selling healthcare products and services through content requires finesse because people searching for information about health or medical issues are commonly in a vulnerable or worried state. They’re often looking to learn about or diagnose some problem they’re experiencing, and understandably healthcare businesses want to be respectful and careful about not coming off too salesy. 

You can’t just push your product in the pieces as directly as you may with a less emotionally charged topic like business operations software or IT services.

This concern often leads healthcare companies to stay even further away from discussing their product or services through their content which is counterproductive to marketing goals. Content marketing is only effective insomuch as it reaches potential patients, drives lead generation, or acquires new patients or customers.

So, the ability to strike an appropriate balance with this is a second key challenge of doing content marketing for healthcare products and services. 

At Grow and Convert, we navigate this first and foremost by focusing on topics (discussed more below) where it actually makes sense and would be appropriate to share about our client’s product or service. The basis of our approach still involves creating long-form, quality content pieces that thoroughly answer the queries of the reader on that particular topic. But in addition to that, the pain point and jobs to be done topics we focus on tend to offer natural, appropriate opportunities to include details of our client’s product or service. 

Continuing with the example from above, let’s look at how we approach this.

Selling Cognitive FX Services Appropriately Through Content

The Article Introduction

In the introduction to the article, we share that the information discussed in the piece is based on Cognitive FX’s first-hand experiences treating concussion patients. This has a dual purpose.

On the one hand, it helps establish credibility in the eyes of readers. “Oh, these people treat concussions including concussion headaches. They’re speaking from first-hand experiences.”

On the other hand, it explicitly states that Cognitive FX has a service to treat these symptoms, which, because of the intent of the keyword (i.e., “I have this problem”) is a perfectly reasonable thing to share, even right at the beginning of the article.

If we were targeting a broader keyword that didn’t signal that searchers had this pain point that Cognitive FX’s service solves, it probably wouldn’t have made sense or been appropriate to discuss their service in the introduction. But, by focusing on a pain point topic, it made a lot of sense.

Discussion of Treatment Options

After the introduction, the majority of the piece is educational, covering in detail the key topics and queries that searchers want to understand about their concussion headaches. Throughout, the level of unique detail continues working to build trust with readers. And, because treatment options are one of the subtopics that readers are interested in and wanting to understand, again the topic presents a natural opportunity and bridge into sharing about Cognitive FX’s service.

In the post, Olivia sets this up by first discussing some of the key misconceptions about treating concussions and headache symptoms, which directly relates to the core differentiation and positioning of Cognitive FX’s service. Then, she concludes the article with an explanation about Cognitive FX’s approach of treating the root causes of concussion symptoms, versus the symptoms themselves. 

This is an approach that we’ve applied across all of the content we’ve produced for Cognitive FX. We don’t shy away from sharing about their service, and just cross our fingers that readers will appreciate the information provided and feel compelled to go digging into what their service offers. We share about their service in the post itself, including what makes it different and better than other treatment options, which is crucial for producing actual leads and new patients from our content. 

Challenge #3: Identifying and Ranking for SEO Keywords That Will Result in New Patients or Customers

A final key challenge is understanding which SEO keywords to target that will drive high-quality leads and sustainable conversions from your content. 

When it comes to keyword strategy, a key mistake that many healthcare brands make (as well as the marketing agencies and consultants that work with them) is that they focus their content creation around keywords that have the highest search volume. But as we’ve demonstrated many times before, this often isn’t the most effective approach if your objective is conversions or lead generation. Why? 

Because high search volume keywords are, inevitably, broad, introductory level topics. For example, here is the broadest, most high volume keywords you can get in Cognitive FX’s space:

135,000 monthly searches is really tempting. But who is Googling “concussion”? Anyone!

• Students writing a paper on concussions

• Reporters getting background info on concussions

• Anyone having any conversation about concussions and stopping to learn more

Could some of the people Googling “concussion” be a potential customer of Cognitive FX? Sure, but in our experience measuring conversion rates, it’s likely a tiny, tiny fraction.

Do you want to go through the massive content marketing effort needed to rank in the top 5 of that keyword only to risk potentially never ranking and even if you do, converting only a tiny percent of those visitors into leads or sales? We don’t.

If you want to build a healthcare content marketing strategy that is focused on business results (i.e., conversions), then you need to prioritize your blog post topics and SEO keywords by conversion intent instead of search volume. That requires knowing the real pain points of a company’s ideal customer.

Of course, if a particular keyword is pain point based, has conversion or buying intent, and has high search volume, by all means go after it. But it’s a matter of prioritizing content ideas based on conversion intent first, then search volume second.

For the full discussion on this, you can read our original Pain Point SEO article here, or our accompanying article on content ideation.

Now, let’s look at some examples of specific types of keywords we targeted for Cognitive FX.

Conversion-Focused Keywords We Targeted and Types of Content We Prioritized for Cognitive FX

As per our Pain Point SEO framework, the solution for solving the keyword problems mentioned above is to target high buying intent keywords which usually come in three buckets: 

1. Category keywords
2. Competitor and alternatives keywords
3. Jobs to be done keywords

The content strategy that we’ve executed for CFX has consisted of 2 of those 3 keyword categories as well as patient stories:

• Pain point related posts (targeting pain point or Jobs to Be Done keywords)
  
  
• Direct service-related keywords
  
  
• Patient stories

Let’s look at an example of each.

Pain Point Keyword: Post-Concussion Headaches (Cont. From Above)

On why we chose “post-concussion headaches” as a topic to begin with: From our discussions with the doctors at Cognitive FX, we learned that headaches were one of the most common recurring, long lasting symptoms of a concussion. Many patients that Cognitive FX treats have had these for years and as we state in the intro of this post, they feel different than normal headaches.

Curiously enough, the search term “what does a concussion headache feel like” gets 1600 monthly searches (according to Ahrefs) so it felt like a great fit with their ideal patient profile.

As of this writing (2023) we rank #2 for that term, ahead of the Mayo Clinic and the CDC. 

Furthermore, just in the first year of being published, that single post brought in 32 leads — defined for Cognitive FX as a consultation request form fill for their service, which costs $13,000 for a week of in-person treatment at their center in Utah.

To put that in perspective, that’s equal to 4% of the leads they got from their homepage in that same time span, from a single blog post. That’s a lot from a single blog post! Many companies’ entire blogs don’t generate that percentage of attributable leads.

Direct Service-Related Buying Keyword: Best Concussion Clinics

For almost every business we’ve worked with, there are a handful of even higher intent keywords than the pain point based ones: direct product or service related keywords.

People interested in these topics have the highest possible intent in that they are literally Googling for the best option for the known solution.

For Cognitive FX, this includes terms like “best concussion clinic”, which we targeted with a blog post: How to Find the Best Concussion Clinics Near You.

At the time of this writing (2023), we rank #1 for that term.

Patient Stories: Figure Skating Concussions

Cognitive FX’s customer stories are amazing and a content strategy that didn’t incorporate them would have been a shame. And we knew it would have some value in their social media marketing.

The most amazing story we wrote for them was that of our own Grow and Convert content strategist, Olivia Seitz, who during the course of being the content strategist for Cognitive FX thought “Hmm, maybe some of the symptoms I’ve been dealing with for years could be related to a concussion or TBI (traumatic brain injury)”, talked to the Cognitive FX team, decided to give it a shot, got treatment for a week in Utah, and had an amazing transformation herself:

How 14 Years of Unexplained Chronic Illness Turned Out to Be Concussion-Related: A Former Figure Skater’s Story

These stories are not SEO motivated, so it’s not essential that they rank, but some still do. The story above, for example, sits in position #2 for “figure skating concussion”:

So, if you do customer stories like this, it can be helpful to pair them with some SEO keywords, even if they are lower in search volume. We typically do this after the story is conceptualized. Telling a great story takes precedence over what search engines want.

Results of Our Work With Cognitive FX

Ultimately, our work for Cognitive FX has resulted in 200,000+ page views per month, 180+ page one search engine rankings, and has grown to produce over 50% of all leads on their site. 

Read an in-depth case study that dives deeper into our work with Cognitive FX here.

Closing Thoughts: A Key Lesson & Challenge of Healthcare Content Marketing in 2023

One key takeaway from our work with multiple healthcare providers and product companies is that, compared to other industries where ranking in search results is a relatively even playing field, Google and other search engines tend to heavily favor certain web domains when it comes to ranking for keywords in the healthcare space.

This presents a unique challenge for companies that want to do healthcare content marketing — one that has only gotten more difficult with recent search engine algorithm updates. 

In our experience, even when we’ve produced a far better and more in depth article than, say, Mayo Clinic has on a particular topic, it can sometimes be difficult to outrank them simply because Google has evolved to heavily favor their domain. 

With that said, there are still many cases in which, using the strategy and approach we laid out throughout this post, we’ve been able to beat those heavily favored domains for high intent keywords that are highly valuable to our clients. And, when we haven’t, we’ve often been able to rank just beneath those favored domains, giving our clients a leg up on their competitors which are also trying to rank for those keywords.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: 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.
  
  
• 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. 

While most articles on GA4 conversion tracking focus on the relatively basic step of setting up conversion events, the events alone aren’t enough to really understand your site’s conversions and what’s leading to them. For that, you need to build and understand reports.

So, in addition to showing you how to set up conversion events this article will also cover: (a) how and why you should leverage multiple attribution models to get a more holistic view of your conversion data, and, (b) how to access and create reports to track and analyze your conversions.

Below, we cover:

• Part 1: Set Up Conversion Events in GA4
• Part 2: Consider Which Attribution Models You’ll Use in Your Reports
• Part 3: Access and Create the Reports to Track Conversions

If you want help setting up conversion tracking in GA4, you can reach out about that here.

Part 1: Set Up Conversion Events in GA4 

In UA, Google Analytics conversions were typically tracked by setting up what were called conversion goals. Conversion tracking in GA4, however, is exclusively based on Conversion Events. 

Here’s step by step instructions on how to set these up:

Step 1: Select Admin in the bottom left corner.

Step 2: In the GA4 Property column, select Events.

Step 3: Select Create event.

Note: GA4 automatically creates existing events such as page_view events, scroll, click, etc. However, to measure other specific metrics as conversions, you need to create a new event.

Step 4: Select Create.

Step 5: Fill out the Configuration form.

5.1. Define your Custom event name. This name is what you will use to designate this event as a conversion in step 8. The standard format for this is to use an underscore between each word. For example, we use “Agency_Lead.” A SaaS business might use “Demo_Signup,” an ecommerce business might use “Product_Purchase”, etc. 

5.2. Select an event Parameter. There is a dropdown list of defined parameters that you can choose from. In our case, we use “page_location” because we want to track when a user lands on a specific page: our “Thank You” page after completing a form submission.

5.3. Select an Operator. For example, “equals” or “starts with”.

Note: Using “Equals” requires exactly matching what’s pasted in the following field titled Value (in our case a URL) for the event to count. So, it may be a safer choice to use “Starts With” which will include people that have UTMs (such as from Calendly) attached to their landing page. 

5.4. Define a Value. In our case, the URL of our “Work With Us” thank you page.

5.5. Leave the Copy parameters from the source event box checked.

5.6. Click Save.

5.7. In the right hand column of the new event you’ve created, ensure the Mark as conversion setting is toggled to the on position.

Step 6: In the Property column to the left, select Conversions (underneath Events).

Step 7: Select New conversion event.

Step 8: Type in your New event name. This must match the exact Event name that you selected when creating your conversion event in step 5.1. And, click Save.

Step 9: In the right hand column of the new conversion event you’ve created, ensure the Mark as conversion setting is toggled to the on position.

Once you’ve completed this step, your conversion event is set up to begin tracking. You can repeat this process for any other conversion events you want to measure.

Now, this is where most articles on setting up GA4 conversions stop. But the next part of the process — choosing attribution models and setting up reports — is what you need in order to functionally track those conversions.

The reports you use, and more specifically, the attribution models you choose that determine how your conversions are counted, matter a lot. No single report or attribution model will give you a complete and accurate view of your conversion data, but setting up multiple reports that use different models can at least get you closer to understanding what your actual conversion data is.

So, before we explain how to access and set up reports, we need to briefly discuss the attribution models that are available in GA4.

Alternatively, we created this video that walks through both attribution models and how to set up the conversion tracking reports if it’s easier for you to watch rather than read:

Part 2: Consider Which Attribution Models You’ll Use in Your Reports

Attribution is the act of assigning credit for conversions to different ads, clicks, and factors along a user’s path to completing a conversion. An attribution model is a conversion counting method which can be a rule, a set of rules, or a data-driven algorithm that determines how credit for conversions is assigned to touchpoints on conversion paths.

There are three types of attribution models available in the Attribution reports in Google Analytics 4 properties (which you can learn more about here): 

1. Paid and organic rules-based models
2. Google paid channels rules-based model
3. Data-driven attribution

By default, GA4 uses data-driven attribution, which uses machine learning algorithms to distribute credit for conversions based on data for each conversion event. It’s different from the other models because it uses your account’s data to calculate the contribution of each click interaction. 

In theory, this could provide more accurate conversion attribution compared to rules-based models. However, there are some potential drawbacks to consider with data-driven attribution:

• Drawback #1: We don’t know exactly how these algorithms work, so we don’t know how they’re deciding which channels or pages get which conversion values. You can read how Google describes their data-driven model here, but their explanation is esoteric and hard to understand. You’re left to sort of blindly trust that the algorithm is giving you accurate numbers. It’s not as concrete as rules-based models. 
  
  
• Drawback #2: Depending on how many events occur on your site in a given month — which by default includes all of GA4’s automatically created events like scrolls, clicks, page views, etc. (small actions that can easily add up on many sites) — the algorithms will provide conversion numbers based only on a sample of your data as opposed to your raw data, which can also potentially skew your conversion numbers.

For these reasons, we think relying on data-driven attribution models alone is risky and insufficient for understanding your true conversion numbers. 

So, in addition to explaining how to access GA4’s default conversion report below (which uses data-driven attribution), we’re also going to discuss the custom, rules-based reports we’re using at our agency to report on conversions to our clients (essentially recreating the reports we’ve been using for years in Universal Analytics, as outlined in this past article on content attribution). 

Note: You can change your default attribution model by going to Admin> Attribution Settings. This would change your reports to default to whichever attribution model you choose. However, we have left our default setting as data-driven attribution, and are simply using custom reports (explained below) with other models to get the most accurate picture we can.

Part 3: Access and Create Reports to Track Conversions

Access GA4’s Default Conversion Report

GA4 automatically offers a conversion report called Conversion Events by Name. Here’s how you can access it:

Step 1: In the left sidebar menu, select Reports.

Step 2: Go to Life cycle > Engagement > Conversions.

This page displays two graphs and a table that provide a high-level overview of how your various conversion events are performing, which you can view by date range.

In the table under Event name, you can click into individual conversion events to drill down and view data for that specific event.

This will display conversions for that event by Default channel group, which allows you to answer one of the key questions that most businesses want to understand when looking at their data: which channels are driving the most conversions?

You can also adjust the table to view conversion data by Source, Medium, or Campaign, by adjusting the drop down menu at the top left of the report table.

For further detail, you can add a secondary dimension by clicking the plus sign on the top right of the left column and selecting from the dropdown menu. 

So, for example, you could filter for Source as your primary dimension and Medium as your secondary dimension to get a more granular view of where your conversions are coming from. 

Or, you could filter for Landing page + query string as your secondary dimension to see which page + channel pairs are driving conversions — the second key question most businesses and marketers want to answer.

All in all, this report can provide a decent high-level view of your conversion volume and channel performance. However, keep in mind that this report uses the default attribution model from your attribution settings, which is automatically set to data-driven attribution unless you adjust that manually. 

So, be aware that (a) the numbers reported may not be entirely accurate for the reasons we discussed above, and (b) it’s worth setting up additional reports with rules-based attribution models to build up a more complete picture of your conversion data.

The following two reports are what we’re using to track conversions for our clients.

Set Up the Model Comparison Tool (MCT) to Measure Last Touch Attribution

Historically at our agency we have leveraged the model comparison tool to measure first and last touch attribution (also known as First click and Last click). Doing so has allowed us to get a more holistic view of the way our SEO content contributes to our client’s conversion goals. 

Last click would show conversions where our blog post was the landing page (i.e., the first page seen) of the session in which a website visitor converted (i.e., their “last” session before converting). First click would show conversions where our blog post was the first page viewed in a user’s first session — the page that brought the visitor to our client’s site in the first place (what content is supposed to do) — and where that user converted at some point later within the next 90 days.

While this was not a perfect measurement for a variety of reasons that we’ve explained previously, it was very good and provided a more holistic view of conversions compared to the UA’s landing pages report (what we saw most marketers using to measure conversions). 

Compared to GA4’s data-driven attribution models, First and Last click rules-based models provide more concrete data that businesses can rely on. They’re not based on an algorithm in which we can’t exactly know how conversions are being counted. If you see a First click conversion, you can be confident that the channel (Google Ads, organic search, etc.) or page the report is listing brough in a user, and that user converted sometime int eh subsequent 90 days. If you see a Last click conversion, you know a user landed on your page and converted later in that very session. This is useful, concrete conversion data for a business. To measure this, we use the Model Comparison Tool.

Here’s step by step instructions on how to set up the model comparison tool in GA4:

Step 1: Select Advertising from the menu in the left hand column.

Step 2: Under Attribution, select Model Comparison.

Step 3: Select the Conversion Events you want to filter for and click Apply.

Note: By default, all conversion events will be selected. You need to uncheck whichever conversions you do not want to view in the report, and leave check marks for the events you want to view data for. 

Step 4: Change the left column of the table to filter for Source / medium and Landing page + query string. 

4.1. Select Default Channel Group at the top left of the report table. 

4.2. Set to Source / medium.

4.3. Click the plus sign next to Source / medium.

4.4. Search for and select Landing page + query string.

Step 5: Adjust the third column of the table, titled Attribution model (non-direct), to measure First click.

5.1. Click the dropdown arrow in the third column titled Attribution model (non-direct).  

5.2. Select First click.

Step 6: Adjust the Date range to the time period you want to look at conversions for and click Apply.

Step 7: Add filters to look at your first and last click conversions in different ways, such as by page/screen, platform/device, or traffic source, among others.

7.1. Click Add filter +.

7.2. Select desired Dimension and Dimension values.

When using this report, we add a filter to view conversions that specifically came from blog posts we’ve created for our clients (excluding conversions from all other pages). 

To do this, we add the Dimension: Landing page + query string, and then under Dimension values we individually select the URLs of our blog posts. URLs will appear in this value section once GA4 has indexed them. As far as we can tell, this usually occurs after a conversion has taken place. This step allows us to see and report on just the conversions our agency is contributing.

Step 8: Create a link to Share this report and make a copy of the Share Link. 

In the GA4 Model Comparison tool, there is not an option to click “Save” like you could in the UA MCT. So, to avoid needing to go through this process every time you want to see your data in this way, you can click the Share this report button, copy the link to this report, and use that link to access that report in the future. 

Now, one key limitation of this Model Comparison report is that it will not attribute conversion credit for cases in which one of our blog posts was viewed at some point along a user’s journey, but not in the first or last session. This is another data point that’s useful, particularly in B2B contexts where multiple stakeholders are often viewing pages over periods of weeks or months prior to converting. 

To measure these influenced conversions, where one of our blog posts was a landing page at some point along the path to conversion (which could include first click, last click, or any session in between), we’re using the Any Touchpoint Report, discussed next.

Note: In May of 2023, Google announced that they’d start sunsetting functionality for first click, linear, time decay, and position-based attribution models. We will continue using the MCT to measure Last Click conversions, and rely on the Any Touchpoint report to account for First Click, Last Click, and influenced conversions that happen along the conversion path.

Set Up an Any Touchpoint Report

This particular method fits our specific needs at our agency. Namely, the ability to measure influenced conversions just from the pages we’ve created for our clients. So, if you’re an agency, freelancer, or individual consultant that needs to report to clients as we do, the following report may be useful to you. 

However, this can also be useful for in-house marketers or business owners that want to see, for example, how a particular part of their site such as their blog is contributing from a conversion perspective. 

In essence, what we’re going to do is create a segment that includes users who landed on our blog posts and at some point later converted. Then we’re going to create a table of landing page URLs versus conversions for people in that segment so we can see how many conversions each landing page generated. 

Here’s step by step instructions on how to set this up:

Step 1: Select Explore from the menu in the left hand column.

Step 2: Create a new Blank report.

Step 3: Create a name for your report under Exploration Name.

Step 4: Add and set up a Segment.

4.1. Select User segment.

4.2. Delete the Include users when module.

4.3. Select Add sequence to include.

4.4. Select Add new condition.

4.5. Search and select Landing page + query string from the dropdown menu.

4.6. Select Add filter.

4.7. Select matches regex. (Not familiar with regex, i.e., “regular expression”? Learn more here.)

4.8. Paste your regex into the field provided and click Apply.

In our case, this is the regex of the set of URLs we want to measure (the URLS of each blog post we’ve created for a client). 

4.9. Select Add step to add a secondary step.

4.10. Select Add new condition and select the conversion event you want to track from the Events dropdown.

4.11. Name your segment and click Save and apply.

Step 5: Add the Dimensions you want to view in your report. 

Similar to the reports we’ve covered above, here we use Landing page + query string, First user source / medium, and Session source / medium — all of which you can find by using the search bar at the top of the Dimensions module. 

Once you’ve selected your dimensions, click Import. 

Step 6: Add the Metrics you want to view in your report.

Here we use Total users and Conversions, both of which you can select from the Metrics menu.

Once this is complete, you’re done setting up your report Variables, and you can begin defining your Tab Settings which determine which dimensions and metrics become visible in your report table to the right.

Step 7: Add your Dimensions and Metrics to your Tab Settings.

7.1. Double click Landing page + query string, First user source / medium, and Session source / medium (or drag and drop each to Rows section). 

7.2. Double click Total Users and Conversions (or drag and drop them to the Values section). 

At this point, you’ll now have a table to the right that displays your conversion data based on these dimensions and metrics. 

Interpreting this table can be a little tricky, so let’s walk through it carefully:

What’s most important to understanding this table is to separate the total numbers from the table below it, that’s why we’ve boxed them separately above. 

Let’s understand the totals first (smaller rectangle in above image). 

• Understanding the Total users metric: The number shown at the top of the Total users column is arguably the most important number in this entire table because it tells the number of users who fulfill your segment conditions for the date range you’ve selected. In other words, that’s the number of people who converted after landing on whatever pages you specified in your segment. In the example screenshotted above, we created a segment for people who, (1) started a session on one of the blog posts we created for our client, and, (2) signed up for their SaaS product. So, in this case, 42 users met this segment criteria in our date range.
  
  
• Understanding the Conversions metric: The number shown at the top of the Conversions column tells you the number of times that users who satisfy your segment conditions triggered a conversion event. So, in the example above, there were 228 conversion events triggered by the 42 users that met our segment criteria for the selected date range.

Note: The reason the number of conversion events is so much higher than the number of total users is because this metric shows data for any conversion event that was completed by those users, not just the conversion event that we defined in our segment. As we mentioned earlier, GA4 automatically has conversion events turned on for small actions such as page views, scrolls, etc. — so if you haven’t turned these off, this conversion number will inflate to include those conversion events as well. Bottom line: whichever conversion events you have switched on in your conversion settings will be included here, so if you want to be more focused on a particular conversion event or subset of conversion events, you should make sure that those are the only conversion events switched on in your settings. You can turn these on or off by going to Admin (the gear icon on the bottom left), then Events under the Property column.

Now, what about the table underneath? The best way to understand this table is to think of it as a list of all the landing pages in all the sessions from the users in your segment… because that’s literally what it is. It’s not a list of only the URLs you listed in your segment. It’s just listing any and all landing pages that the users who fulfilled your segment conditions visited and counting the number of users who landed on each URL and the number of conversion events that those users triggered in those sessions. 

If you add up the number of users in each row of your table it’ll almost always add up to be larger than the total number of users because naturally most users have more than one session. 

So, let’s tie this all together with a plain English interpretation of the first row of the table, including the secondary dimensions of First user source / medium and Session source / medium. The first row tells us that:

1. 10 users happened to have sessions where the landing page was that first row’s URL (which we’ve redacted for client privacy) and they came from google/organic in that session and in their very first session.
   
   
2. During those sessions, those 10 users triggered 34 conversion events (which could include the conversion event we were measuring in our segment, in addition to other conversion events that our client has switched on in their settings). 

So, how do we use this to help understand what content brought in the conversions? We’re still getting used to this, but how we’re using it now is to scan the table for our blog URLs. Because when you see a URL of interest in this table and it has conversions in that row — in particular if your conversion events are limited to really important conversions of interest, then that row is showing you the number of “last click” or “same session” conversions that that URL generated in your date range. 

In the case of the first row of the above table, we are ranking in position #1 of organic search for a high buying intent “app” keyword. So, this row is telling us that 10 of our 42 users landed on that blog post from Google and had some conversions in those very sessions. This client has a ton of events defined as conversions (hence 43 conversions in that row) so we can’t tell much about the conversions that happened in those sessions (except that there were 43 of them), but if we had limited the conversions to just “app signups” for example, we could have seen how many signups those sessions to our blog post generated.  

And, that’s a key detail about how to make this table more useful: if you want to be precise about defining a conversion as a single event, such as a trial or demo signup, you should make sure that is the only event toggled on in your conversion settings. Then, you can be sure that the conversion events being shown in the Conversions column correspond with the exact same conversion event that you defined in your segment. 

Note: You can adjust the date range to view conversion data over different time periods. And unlike the MCT, this report will automatically save when you exit back to the Exploration reports page, where you can come back to access your report.

If this all sounds difficult and complicated, we get it, we’ve lived through it to get to this point and be able to create these reports and understand them. To help, we’re offering a unique mini-service of helping companies setup conversion tracking in GA4 and teaching their team how to use the generate and interpret the reports above. If you’re interested, you can read about it and reach out here.

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.
  
• Our GA4 conversion setup service: We get that executing the steps outlined above and then understanding what the reports mean is not easy. To help, we’re offering a unique mini-service of helping companies setup conversion tracking in GA4 and teaching their team how to use the generate and interpret the reports above.
  
  
• 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. 

However, the fact that high-buying intent keywords generate far more SEO ROI than top of funnel keywords is taken to the extreme in all-in-one software products that are massively feature rich. 

By “all-in-one” software, we mean software that does what numerous à la carte solutions do, but in one platform.

For these products, there is a massive opportunity cost to not prioritizing bottom of funnel keywords because, compared to à la carte products, there aren’t just 5, 10, or even 50 high-buying-intent keywords — there are often 200+. So it’s borderline inexcusable to focus on top of funnel, traffic-chasing, brand awareness SEO (e.g. ultimate guides, general how to’s, 10 tips, etc.). Just high-buying-intent keywords alone can satisfy years of content production.

We wanted to write a case study that drives this point home. Specifically, we’ll walk through how we’ve implemented Pain Point SEO for an all-in-one SaaS client that we’ve been working with for almost 3 years. Today, the pages we’ve created are driving 150+ demo requests/month for their business.

Below, we cover:

• Why Pain Point SEO is a great fit for all-in-one SaaS businesses
• Flaws with the typical approach to SEO for all-in-one SaaS products
• A detailed analysis of how we’ve grown demo signups to 150+/month for our client
• A summary of our keyword rankings and conversions to date

Why Pain Point SEO Is a Great Fit for All-In-One SaaS Businesses

Grow and Convert’s approach to SEO is to focus on high-buying-intent (bottom of the funnel) keywords first and create dedicated pages to rank for each keyword. This is in contrast to what most companies and agencies do:

• Spend most of their SEO effort prioritizing high search volume, but low buying intent keywords that barely convert.
• Try to rank for many different keywords with individual pages using what we call “The Sprinkle Method” (i.e. sprinkling keywords into pages hoping to rank for several terms).

We cover our approach at length in our original Pain Point SEO post, as well as our posts on SaaS content marketing and SaaS SEO strategy.

But these articles haven’t specifically discussed the value and relevance of this strategy for all-in-one SaaS platforms. Since these platforms have so many features, they have a huge number of buying intent keywords to go after!

For example, this client has a platform with 100+ features, essentially creating a one-stop-shop where their customers can run their entire business from one place. And each feature they offer has numerous high-buying-intent keywords associated with it — e.g. feature + software keywords, feature + app keywords, and long tail variations.

They also serve a variety of different industries (not uncommon for all-in-one SaaS products). This opens up even more keywords because if they go after “industry #1 + accounting software,” they can also go after equivalent keywords for the other industries they serve — and that keeps compounding because they can do that with every feature offered.

Furthermore, every feature has associated pain points, so there’s naturally more pain point keywords to go after, as well.

This is in contrast to à la carte SaaS products (or “point solutions”) that only do a handful of things, and therefore may have a much more limited set of high-buying-intent keywords to target. For example, in the SEO space itself, you can think of this as the difference between an   à la carte keyword research tool versus an all-in-one SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. Obviously the latter have a lot more buying keywords to go after.

Don’t get us wrong, we’ve had many à la carte SaaS clients, and Pain Point SEO has worked wonders for them. Most businesses simply underestimate the sheer number of high-buying-intent, bottom of funnel keywords that are available to them. But for all-in-one tools, the value of this approach compounds significantly.

The bottom line: If you’re a SaaS company with a large feature set or all-in-one style platform, Pain Point SEO strategy is a huge opportunity. Yet, as we’ll discuss next, the typical approach for SaaS companies or SaaS SEO agencies does not capitalize on this.

Flaws with the Typical Approach to SEO for All-In-One SaaS Products

Having worked with dozens of clients over the years, we’ve learned that the usual approach to SaaS SEO strategy (that other agencies and in-house teams use) consists of 2 key parts:

1. 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”).
   
   
2. Producing Blog Content: Creating and publishing some form of blog content on an ongoing basis loosely guided by SEO keywords or using the “sprinkle” method (asking writers to sprinkle certain keywords throughout the posts).

There may also be some link building or technical SEO tactics that happen. But these are generally the 2 key parts to their strategy.

As we discussed at length in a previous article, there are 3 core flaws with this approach:

• Flaw #1: Core site pages may rank for a couple of important keywords, but it’s difficult to rank home, feature, and solutions pages for many high-value software category keywords because these pages:
  • Have limited space to include relevant SEO keywords.
  • Are first and foremost meant to explain your features and solutions (not meet the search intent of specific keywords).
  • Don’t typically mention competitors, however, ranking in the top few spots for software category keywords often requires including lists of software options.

• Flaw #2: There are way more high-intent keyword opportunities than you can reasonably rank for with your features and solutions pages.
• Flaw #3: Blog content isn’t used strategically to rank for valuable keywords and drive product signups. (It’s typically used for chasing top of funnel traffic that results in low to zero attributable conversions).

The implications and opportunity costs of this approach are particularly significant for all-in-one SaaS products because they have so many more valuable keywords to go after.

Let’s take a look at what can be achieved when using our Pain Point SEO strategy through the lens of our work with an all-in-one SaaS client.

How We’ve Grown Demo Signups to 150+/Month for Our Client

For context, this client is an all-in-one SaaS platform valued at over $5B. They offer a comprehensive feature set including scheduling, CRM, mobile app, time tracking, payroll, invoicing, payments, reporting, marketing, and more.

They serve 20+ industries, but we’ve focused almost entirely on their three highest priority verticals. This means that for most keywords we’ve gone after, we’ve created dedicated pages to target the equivalent version of that keyword for each of the 3 core verticals.

For example, if we went after “[industry #1] invoicing app”, we’d also go after “[industry #2] invoicing app” and “[industry #3] invoicing app.” As you can imagine, this opened up a huge number of keyword opportunities.

There are several competitors in their space, so we’ve also had many competitor comparison keywords to go after.

While we usually prioritize going after software category keywords (e.g. “CRM software”, “time tracking software”, etc.), in this case, our client has targeted these keywords with product landing pages built in-house.

Important note: Many SaaS websites don’t have the domain or topical authority to rank for these types of buying-intent software category keywords with product pages for reasons we discussed above. This particular client does have the domain and topical authority to rank for these; for many businesses that don’t, blog posts will likely get you to rank higher or faster (or both) for these keywords.

The Types of Keywords We’ve Prioritized

Ultimately, we’ve focused on the following 4 types of keywords:

1. Template keywords
2. Competitor comparison keywords
3. Apps keywords
4. Mid and top of funnel pain point keywords

Let’s look at examples of each.

Template Keywords

In SaaS, it’s well known that almost every software product replaces a clunky, patched together system of Google Docs, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, and miscellaneous apps that customers have been using to get by. And very often, these people search online for templates to help their patchwork system (for example, “Excel CRM template” or “PDF template for invoicing”).

These turn out to be really valuable keywords to rank for because people searching for them have a problem that your software happens to solve. (They’re just using a patchwork system to solve it right now.)

If your product does that particular thing the person is searching for, it presents a valuable opportunity to show up in search results, provide them with a free template, and explain how your product makes this process even easier and more effective.

In this particular client’s space, there is huge demand and search volume for business document templates from their customers.

For example, their customers are searching for templates, such as:

• [industry] invoice template
• [industry] estimate template
• [industry] proposal template
• [industry] price list template

Several months into working with this client, we began testing out some template keywords in the following format: “[industry] [feature that our client’s product offers] [template]”. Hypothetically, we’re talking about keywords like “real estate contract template” or “freelance invoice template”.

We’d offer a free template that our client would create, point out the shortcomings and process-related issues of relying on a static PDF template to perform that business function, and provide an in-depth walkthrough of how our client’s product solves those issues.

From both rankings and a conversion standpoint, the results have been incredible. At the time of this writing, we have:

• 10 templates ranking in positions 1-3
• 23 templates ranking on page 1

And, as you can see below in this sample of our top 10 converting template pieces, these posts have driven a significant number of demo requests over the course of our engagement:

Competitor Comparison Keywords

Competitor comparison keywords are some of the highest-buying-intent keywords.

If someone is searching for your brand versus a competitor — or competitor alternatives — they’re clearly indicating they’re in the market for what you sell. This is a crucial time to show up, tastefully discuss the differences between your product and your competitors, and to sell to prospects right before they make a purchase decision.

As we mentioned above, this client has several competitors in their space. So, we’ve gone after competitor keywords in a variety of ways, including:

• Head-to-head comparisons: We’ve gone after “[Our client] vs. [competitor]” keywords with long-form pieces that walk through our client’s strengths and unique differentiators compared to that competitor (based on interviews with their sales, product, or competitive intelligence teams).

• Three-way comparisons: We’ve targeted keywords where people are searching for “[Competitor] vs. [Competitor]” and added in “vs. [our client]”. This allows us to insert ourselves into that discussion and sell our client’s unique strengths compared to those services.

• Alternatives pieces: We’ve gone after “[competitor] alternatives” keywords with list articles that feature our client at the beginning. Within those pieces, we link to the in-depth comparison pieces we’ve written on each of the other competitors.

These have also been some of our highest performing keywords. Of our head-to-head and three-way comparisons, we have:

• 11 pages ranking in the top 3 positions
• 14 pages ranking on page 1

And despite many of these comparison keywords having relatively low search volume, we see a significant volume of demo signups from these pages due to the high buying intent.

Here’s a look at our top 10 highest converting comparison pages in Google Analytics:

Apps Keywords

When people search for SaaS products, sometimes they use the word “software”, but other times they use the words “apps” or “tools”. In many cases, there are opportunities to go after the “apps” and “tools” equivalents of software category keywords like those we discussed above (e.g. feature + software, industry + software, etc.).

Important note: You can sometimes target these keywords with a single page, but we often find that dedicated pages work better for getting top positions for each variation. To decide whether it’s necessary to create a separate page, take a look at the top SERPs: see if search results show different results in the top rankings for those keyword variations. If they do, it’s an indication that a dedicated page would likely work better for ranking for each term.

More recently in our engagement, we’ve begun tackling several “[feature/use case] + apps” keywords and have been seeing great results from a rankings perspective.

Here’s a look at our apps keywords ranking in the top 5 positions:

These posts are increasingly beginning to contribute to demo signups.

For example, in February 2023, our apps pieces resulted in 12 demo signups (a small but growing number of demo requests):

Mid and Top of Funnel Pain Point Keywords

The nature of a multi-year engagement (particularly with a client that’s ranking for many of their highest buying intent software category keywords) is that over time, we’ll inevitably tackle mid and top of funnel keywords.

Yes, we still tackle top of funnel keywords, as discussed in our case study on scaling content. We just don’t prioritize them over bottom of the funnel, high-buying-intent keywords (particularly in early stages of an engagement) for reasons we’ve discussed for years.

However, the key differences in how we choose these are that we: (a) ensure the keyword has a direct feature tie-in and (b) incorporate and sell the heck out of the product throughout the piece.

Here’s an example of a top of funnel keyword we targeted:

[Industry] pricing guide

Pricing services correctly is one of the biggest pain points for our client’s customers. So we created a pricing guide that walked through the pain points of pricing services in this industry, and how our client’s product helped solve those.

Despite being a lower intent top of funnel piece, this has ranked in position #1 and produced 150+ demo signups to date:

Importantly, even though these pieces are what we call “top of funnel” — in that the act of googling that term doesn’t automatically indicate the reader is in the market for our client’s product — we still sell our client’s software (and its benefits and differentiators) in these articles.

This is a big shift away from the standard content marketing advice of “give, don’t ask” where you shy away from “being too salesy”. We lean into being salesy, not in a cheesy or pushy way, but in a helpful and authentic way. We tie in the product to the topic at-hand and show how, in this case, it can help with pricing, invoicing, and more.

Summary of Results: Keyword Rankings and Conversions

Since the beginning of our engagement with this client, we’ve produced 120+ pieces of content —  each tailored to rank for a specific, valuable keyword.

Today, around 80% of these pages rank on page 1 for their target keyword, with the remaining pages mostly ranking on page 2:

It’s also important to keep in mind that the keywords ranking on pages 2 and further are mostly recently published pieces that just need time (or links) to make it to page 1.

The key takeaway? The vast majority of pages we create for this client end up on page 1 for their target keyword. 

Furthermore, a significant share of the pieces we publish end up in the top 3 positions, as shown here:

This is meaningful because, in our experience, the top 3 positions are where the majority of conversions come from, and the ability to show up there makes a huge difference in lead generation and ROI from SEO.

Finally, as shown in this graph, these rankings and content have resulted in significant demo signups (in green) and MQLs (in blue) over time:

As you can see, our content is now producing over 150 demo signups/month, and somewhere between 30-50% of these are considered good, qualified leads (MQLs) by our client.

Furthermore, one interesting takeaway from this graph is the inflection point that happened around the two year mark — demo signups spiked over 100/month and have continued to grow ever since.

Despite having been working together for nearly 3 years, we are still finding tons of valuable high-buying-intent and mid funnel pain point keywords to go after. As we tackle and rank for these keywords, our clients’ monthly and net ROI will continue to grow, demonstrating the compounding value of SEO over time, particularly for all-in-one SaaS products.

More Grow and Convert Case Studies

Here are 5 other case studies, each with unique insights, that you can read to see how we’ve executed our SEO strategy for other businesses:

1. How We Scaled Leadfeeder’s Signups to Over 200/month
2. Scaling Content: Expanding from Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)
3. Scaling SEO Traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months: Circuit Case Study
4. How to Do B2B Content Marketing without Domain Expertise (Rainforest QA Case Study)
5. How to Create a Keyword Strategy for a New, Innovative Product (Case Study of a video editing software client)

How to Work With Us or Learn More

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy, learn more about working with us 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 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.

Specifically, we’re going to answer some key questions on the minds of marketers and companies who want to get familiar with content marketing or are considering developing a content marketing strategy for their business.

Below, we cover:

• What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?
• The Business Case for Content Marketing: Why Content Versus Other Digital Marketing Channels?
• How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy: 5 Steps That Any Business Can Follow
• Content Marketing Strategy Examples: How to Approach Content for Different Business Types (SaaS, B2B, B2C)
• Content Marketing Case Studies: In-Depth Client Case Studies That Demonstrate Successful Content Marketing

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

What Is a Content Marketing Strategy? (3 Core Elements)

From our perspective, there are 3 fundamental elements that make up a content marketing strategy:

1. The Goal: Be clear on which of these two you’re shooting for: (1) traffic and brand awareness growth or (2) leads and sales growth
2. The Topics: What topics will you focus on that help you achieve that goal?
3. The Execution: What content format will you use? And how will you create content and execute your strategy?

Let’s look at each.

1. What’s the Business Goal That You Want to Achieve with Content Marketing?

In general, content marketing can serve one of two purposes. It can be used to (1) generate traffic and brand awareness, or (2) generate leads and sales. Yes, of course, there can be overlap but this is an important distinction to think about. The reason is that these two content marketing goals require very different strategies to achieve (as we’ll explain below).

Most businesses and content marketers primarily focus on the first goal: traffic and brand awareness. However, the tradeoff or implication of that focus is that their content often doesn’t lead to many measurable leads and sales.

Why do most companies deploy a content strategy that doesn’t generate many leads or sales? On the surface this sounds nonsensical. It’s because of a common belief that if you focus on goal #1, the traffic and awareness you receive will eventually lead to accomplishing goal #2.

For example, it’s thought that some portion of the traffic you generate will continue coming back to your site, or you’ll be able to reach them through email marketing and social media ads, and eventually some of those people will become customers.

But over the last 5+ years of doing content marketing for dozens of businesses, we’ve found that this often isn’t true (as we’ve demonstrated in previous articles like our post on Pain Point SEO). Often content that’s focused primarily on driving traffic ultimately drives very few actual customers.

Now, this doesn’t mean that creating content with a primary goal of driving traffic isn’t a reasonable decision and investment for certain businesses (for example large brands with existing market dominance). But if you’re a small business with limited resources, or you’re expecting to see measurable ROI from your content (i.e. lead generation and sales are what you ultimately want from the channel), it’s essential to understand that you can design your content strategy to achieve this goal by choosing the right topics and executing accordingly.

In our experience, the majority of businesses investing in content and SEO strategy do want to see measurable ROI (leads and sales) from this content — they don’t have the luxury of spending budget on content for hard-to-quantify brand building.

2. What Topics Will You Focus On That Will Help You Achieve That Goal?

In our experience, once you decide on your business goal for content marketing, choosing content topics that serve that goal is the most important part of your content strategy. Because if you choose topics that don’t serve your goal, then it won’t matter how good your content is — it won’t help you achieve the results you’re looking for.

Generally speaking, if your primary goal is to generate traffic and brand awareness, you’ll best achieve this by focusing on content topics that appeal to a broad target audience and have high search volume (the number of people searching for that topic on a monthly basis). This is what will help drive the most traffic to your website and expose the most people to your brand.

In contrast, if your primary goal is to generate leads and sales, you’ll best achieve this by focusing on more specific content topics that are closely related to the product or service you sell (and naturally have lower search volume). This is what will help drive the highest qualified traffic from people who are in later stages of the buyer’s journey, looking for the type of product or service you sell (or to solve problems your product/service solves).

3. What Content Format Will You Use? And How Will You Create Content and Execute Your Strategy?

Finally, you’ll need to choose the content format you’ll focus on. Most notably, will you focus on written content, video content, or both?

Once you’ve decided on your content format, you’ll need to decide how you’ll go about creating your content and carrying out your strategy. The three most common ways of this being:

• Agencies: Hiring video or blog content agencies to create your content.
• Freelancers: Hiring freelance writers or video content editors to create your content.
• In-House: Hiring in-house content writers, video content creators, or content marketers to create your content (or building an internal content team).

Depending on which of these options you choose, or whether you use a combination of them, you’ll need to determine who is responsible for each step of creating and executing your content marketing plan: topic selection, content creation, content promotion and distribution, and measuring content performance.

It’s key to understand that these steps often require different skill sets, and thus you often need multiple people involved in order to execute content marketing effectively.

The Business Case for Content Marketing: Why Content Versus Other Digital Marketing Channels?

Understandably, one of the biggest questions people have when they set out to learn about content marketing is whether or not content is worth the investment. There are a lot of different channels where you can allocate time and budget, so why content over other channels like paid advertising?

From our perspective, there are a few key reasons:

Reason #1: You Don’t Pay for Clicks with Organic Traffic

First, along with promotion through email and social media channels, content marketing almost always involves a search engine optimization (SEO) component that’s designed to drive traffic through organic search (primarily through Google and YouTube — the two biggest search engines for written and video content respectively).

The huge advantage of organic traffic is that you don’t pay for clicks. Once you have content ranking for a particular keyword, that piece of content can continue driving free traffic for as long as it’s ranking. And if you’re using a sales-driven content strategy, that content can also continue generating leads (in the case of B2B businesses) or sales (in the case of B2C businesses).

Reason #2: SEO Results Compound Over Time and Your Costs Come Down

In addition, SEO content marketing has a compounding effect. As you stack pieces of content and acquire keyword rankings, your monthly investment can stay relatively the same, but the body of web pages you have that drive traffic and/or leads continues to grow. Therefore, your costs come down over time.

The same is not true of paid channels where the traffic and leads you get for your monthly budget is more fixed.

Reason #3: Search-Based Traffic Is Highly Targeted Compared to Other Channels

And lastly, the nature of search-based traffic is that it’s highly targeted compared to alternatives like Display ads or paid social media ads. In those channels, people are passively seeing (or, let’s be honest, often just ignoring) your ads. Whereas in search, people are actively looking for the topics you’re producing content on. This is particularly relevant and beneficial when you’re using a sales-focused content strategy (because you can show up in front of potential customers right when they’re ready to buy!).

For all of these reasons, compared to paid channels where you need to continue paying for clicks, traffic, and leads, this type of SEO content has a huge advantage from an ROI standpoint.

Again, that’s if you can get your content ranking. So let’s discuss how you can go about doing that by walking through our 5-step content marketing process.

A 5-Step Process You Can Follow to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

At our agency, we do SEO-based content marketing, so this is what we’ll focus on as we describe our process below. While this strategy is specific to written content, the steps also largely apply to video and other types of content (e.g. webinars, podcasts, templates, infographics, white papers, etc.), with the exception of steps 3 & 5 which are blog-specific.

Step 1: Understanding Your Customer & Why They Buy

Understanding your customer (or your client’s customer) and why they buy helps to inform everything you do in content marketing, but most importantly, it helps you produce content topics that are most likely to appeal to your ideal customers.

If you get this wrong, or simply ignore it and write or create videos on, well, anything, then you’re likely to waste a lot of time and effort on content that doesn’t really bring in your ideal customer or at least doesn’t bring them in when they’re ready to buy. You’ll end up in the common position of having a ton of content, which, when you sit and measure it, doesn’t actually generate that much business for you (leads, sales, demos, trials, add to carts, etc.).

This step can be broken down into 3 parts:

• Identify your audience’s product or service-related pain points
• Think through your product or service’s unique advantages and differentiators
• Factor in other characteristics of your target audience that might be useful (e.g. company size, industry verticals, etc.)

Let’s look at each.

Identify Your Audience’s Product or Service-Related Pain Points

Identifying your audience’s pain points is key for understanding why customers buy (particularly important if you intend to use a sales-focused content strategy). By listing out the challenges that you solve for customers, these pain points can inform the topics and keywords you choose to focus on.

For example, we previously worked with a client that sold book ghostwriting services and one of their customers’ biggest pain points is grappling with whether or not their book idea is original. So, we looked for and identified keyword opportunities around that and created a dedicated piece of content to rank for that term.

Because we knew that a decent percent of customers were asking this question, we knew that if we ranked for this term, some fraction of searchers were likely ready to become customers.

In addition, we use pain points in every piece of content we produce as a way to a) grab readers’ attention by showing them we deeply understand their problems and b) explain in-depth how our client’s product or service solves those pain points. This is key for compelling people to buy.

Think Through Your Product or Service’s Unique Advantages and Differentiators

Similarly, thinking through your product or service’s unique advantages and differentiators can also inform the keywords you target and the way you sell your product or service inside your content.

For example, if you sell a plant-based pre-workout mix (and being “natural” or “plant-based” is one of your competitive advantages), you’d benefit from searching for and targeting keywords with those specific phrases.

In doing so, you’ll have the advantage of reaching people who closely match your ideal buyer persona, while also teeing up the opportunity to speak to the strengths of what makes your product different or better than other pre workout drinks.

Factor In Other Characteristics of Your Target Audience That Might Be Useful

Once you’ve found keywords based on product or service-related pain points and prioritized topics based on your unique differentiators and strengths, you may also factor in a final layer of defining characteristics of your audience.

For example, at the keyword level, in B2B, you might consider going after keywords that include company size (e.g. “enterprise CRM software”), specific industry verticals (e.g. “HVAC scheduling software”), or key stakeholders (e.g. “executive assistant service for startup founders”). In B2C, you might consider targeting keywords that incorporate certain demographics, such as “running shoes for women.”

By thoroughly thinking through each of the factors we’ve discussed in this section — customer pain points, your unique differentiators, and other relevant audience characteristics — you’ll have the foundation you need to begin choosing keywords to prioritize and formulating your strategy.

Note: Our article on Pain Point SEO is a good jumping off point for getting familiar with pain point keywords, how to come up with them, and pain point content frameworks that we’ve found convert well.

Step 2: Content Ideation & Keyword Research

Once you’ve clearly defined your customer and why they buy, you can begin the process of content ideation and keyword research. This will look different depending on the primary goal you choose to focus on with your content marketing, as we discussed above.

For example, if traffic and brand awareness is your primary goal, you’ll focus on topics and keywords that a) have broad appeal to your audience and b) have relatively high search volume for your space.

If generating leads and sales is your primary goal, you’ll focus on topics and keywords that indicate people searching have intent to buy what you sell, or intent to solve a problem that your product or service solves.

In our article on content ideation, we share a number of specific marketing tactics for coming up with topic ideas and keywords, including:

• Hold a meeting with different departments that communicate with the customer directly and ask them what the most relevant product-related pain points are.
• Create an email autoresponder that provides a feedback loop that lets you know your customer’s biggest challenges.
• Join social media communities where your customers would hang out and pay attention to the questions and challenges they have.
• Look inside of your Google Adwords account and see what keywords are converting — and create blog posts around those keywords.
• Use competitor research tools (SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc. offer a number of competitor research features to help with this).
• Get a list of commonly asked questions that your sales team receives on phone calls.

Learn about each of these tactics and how you can approach them by reading the article here.

Once you have a bunch of topic and keyword ideas, you can organize and prioritize them based on your content marketing goal, and create your content calendar.

Step 3: Content Production

Once you’ve identified your target keywords, an equally critical step is of course, creating content that has a good chance of ranking for them. At Grow and Convert, we use a 4-step process to create each piece of new content. Our workflow includes:

• SERP Analysis: Analyze the search engine results page (SERP) for the target keyword to understand which topics need to be covered in your article for it to rank.
• Content Interview: Interview a subject-matter expert within the company to learn about the topic and express product/domain expertise within the piece of content (this is what makes truly high-quality content).
• Content Writing: Structuring the article and writing it in a way that fills the piece with relevant content and compelling information about the topic and your product or service (including a call-to-action to take some desired next step).
• On-Page SEO: Optimizing the article to rank for its target keyword by including relevant keywords in the headings, subheadings, and body copy.

We’ve written about this process at length previously. Check out our article on SEO content writing for a detailed explanation of how to execute this process.

When it comes to producing quality SEO content, the best way to rank for your desired keywords is to create a dedicated landing page or blog post to go after each individual keyword. Many content marketers try to target several keywords with each piece of content, but in our experience, this is a less effective content strategy.

Search engines rank content based on how well it satisfies search intent for that specific query. So, by creating a unique piece of content (or strategically updating existing content) for each keyword, you can beat out other content in the SERPs that is less specific, and therefore doesn’t meet search intent as effectively.

Step 4: Content Promotion

There are 3 main categories of content promotion:

• Promoting to your existing audience
• Promoting through paid channels
• Promoting through SEO

The most effective content strategies leverage all 3. Let’s look at each.

Promoting Content to Your Existing Audience

The easiest way to drive traffic to your content is to share it directly with your existing audience. Specifically, when you publish each new piece of content, you should share it throughout your company, via your email list (if you have one), and via your social media pages as an organic posting. These are the quickest and cheapest ways to get eyes on your content.

Note, however, that this will not produce sustainable traffic growth, meaning you will get a spike when you promote the piece but not much after that.

Promoting Content Through Paid Channels

In addition, you can promote your content through paid ads. At our agency, we leverage paid promotion as a way to drive traffic to our clients’ articles while we wait for them to rank in search engines (which can take periods of weeks to months, depending on a variety of factors such as competitiveness of the keyword). This allows us to drive some conversions from targeted audiences in the short term, before the content begins receiving organic traffic and conversions. This traffic can be evergreen, of course, but you have to continue to pay for each click.

Promoting Content Through SEO

As we explained above, content should ultimately rank organically in search engines where it can pull in traffic and conversions over the long term without an incremental cost for every click. This involves 2 parts — optimizing your content (discussed above) and link building.

Link building is the process of doing outreach (or hiring services to do outreach for you) and acquiring backlinks to your content from other website domains. Backlinks signal to search engines that other people find your content to be relevant and credible, which helps your website domain authority and keyword rankings.

For a more in-depth understanding of how you can approach content promotion, check out our article on content distribution strategy.

Step 5: Measuring Performance of Your Content Marketing Efforts

Leveraging tools and creating systems to track key metrics and measure the performance of your content is the final key step to executing a successful content marketing campaign. Without measurement, you have no way to know what’s working, and thus no way to optimize your strategy as you progress.

At our agency, we focus on the following when it comes to measuring performance:

• Conversions: We track and report on conversions using the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics. Specifically, we measure leads and sales for our clients (this is very uncommon among agencies). However, you can also measure conversions such as email signups or other actions which are farther from the purchase stage (what most agencies and content marketers measure). Check out our article on content attribution to learn how you can set up the Model Comparison Tool.
• 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 Google Data Studio that measure overall pageviews and organic traffic to our articles. (You can also set up reports in Google Analytics to measure this.)

By tracking these metrics, you can see what’s working and double down on those insights. For example, if you see a particular category of keywords is driving a high percentage of overall conversions, you might prioritize more of those keywords.

Or, if you see in Google Search Console that a certain piece of content is converting well and ranking on page 2 or 3 for a bunch of different keyword variations, you might choose to create dedicated pages to go after those terms.

Now, let’s look at how the general content marketing strategy we’ve explained here can be adjusted and tailored depending on the type of business you’re doing content for.

Content Marketing Strategy Examples: How to Approach Content for Different Business Types (SaaS, B2B, B2C)

Although the 5-step process we’ve shared above is broadly applicable to any business that wants to develop a content marketing strategy, there are nuances to content strategy depending on the type of business you’re doing content for.

For example, in SaaS content strategy, there are specific, high-intent keyword frameworks that can reliably drive trial and demo sign ups through content. In B2B content marketing, there’s a necessity to understand how to produce content that speaks to advanced B2B audiences. And in B2C (or eCommerce) content marketing, there are nuances related to the product keywords you choose to target.

Previously, we’ve written detailed posts on how we approach content strategy for each of these types of businesses. To learn more about particular one, check out these pieces:

How to Create a SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

• How to Create a SaaS Content Strategy That Drives Product Signups
• SaaS Content Writing: How to Write Content That Gets Leads & Signups

How to Create a B2B Content Marketing Strategy

• A B2B Content Marketing Strategy Designed to Generate Leads & Sales

How to Create a B2C Content Marketing Strategy

• B2C Content Marketing: A Guide to Drive Sales with Content

How to Create an SEO Content Marketing Strategy (Non-Business-Specific Posts That Are Also Worth Reading)

• How to Create a Successful SEO Content Strategy: 2 Factors That Are Often Overlooked
• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

Content Marketing Case Studies: In-Depth Client Case Studies That Demonstrate Successful Content Marketing

Here are 6 long-form case studies you can read to see how we’ve executed our content strategy for real businesses:

1. B2C Content Marketing Example: How We Grew Cognitive FX to 70,000 Pageviews in 14 Months
2. Content Marketing Case Study: How We Scaled Leadfeeder’s Signups to Over 200/month
3. Scaling Content: Expanding From Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)
4. Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months: Circuit Case Study
5. How to Do B2B Content Marketing without Domain Expertise (Rainforest QA Case Study)
6. How to Create a Keyword Strategy for a New, Innovative Product (Case Study of a video editing software client)

Want to Learn More About Our Agency?

Finally, you can learn more about our agency, joining our team, or taking our course below:

• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn how to grow their SaaS business with content can join our private course, taught via case studies, here. We include 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 (along with other members) give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses.
• Join Our SEO Content Marketing Team: Alternatively, if this style of SEO-based content marketing appeals to you, consider joining our content marketing team as a writer or content strategist. We have awesome clients. We’re a remote company. We pay well. And you won’t have to stress about getting your own clients or spend a bunch of time doing outreach to get them.

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