From several years of experience, as well as countless conversations with other businesses doing content marketing (both in-house and with agencies), we’ve developed a good sense of what businesses are looking for when they hire content marketing agencies, what they’re disappointed by in the ones that don’t work out, and what true growth looks like in a successful content marketing engagement. 

So, to help businesses choose the best content marketing agency, we’re going to share our most important learnings and the key factors that you should consider when evaluating different content marketing services.

We’ll also share how we’ve addressed these factors at our agency and discuss the pros and cons of hiring a content marketing agency versus building a team in-house.

And lastly, since most companies like to evaluate multiple agencies, we’ll share the best content marketing agencies we’ve heard come up over the years (including ours).

Below, we cover:

• 4 factors to consider when evaluating content marketing agencies
• Our agency’s process: How we’ve addressed each of these factors
• Should you hire a content marketing agency or build a team in-house?
• Best content marketing agencies to consider

If you’re interested in hiring our agency to do content marketing for your business, visit our work with us page.

If you’re interested in working for our agency as a content writer or strategist, check out our careers page (we’re hiring).

And if you’re interested in learning the strategy and processes we use to do content marketing, check out our course and community.

4 Factors to Consider When Evaluating Content Marketing Agencies

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

• Factor #1: What’s your content marketing goal?
  
  For example: website traffic growth, email newsletter growth, leads and sales — e.g., calls to discuss your service, trials/demos for SaaS companies, product purchases in eCommerce.
  
  And is the agency’s content strategy optimized to achieve that business goal?
  
  This is the #1 factor you need to be clear on. In our experience, most companies want leads and sales — i.e. real customers and measurable ROI! — while most content agencies are built to grow traffic and email marketing lists. This mismatch causes problems.

• Factor #2: Do they have a process for gaining product and domain expertise, and expressing that through content?

• Factor #3: Do they have processes to actively promote the content they produce?

• Factor #4: Do they have detailed case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of their strategy?

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

1. What’s Your Goal From Content (Traffic, Emails, or Leads and Purchases)? And Is Their Content Strategy Optimized to Achieve That Goal?

Companies have different mindsets regarding the goal 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 — because 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 signup growth. Others just have a vague idea that they want to do inbound marketing, 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).

The first thing to understand is that this is a choice. You can optimize content around metrics like website 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 website traffic to grow your online presence, it will be much easier to find an 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).

That’s why we think this is the first and most important consideration when evaluating content agencies: Know your goal and figure out if the agency’s strategy and process is built to satisfy it.

If your goal is customer acquisition, then ask the agencies you evaluate if that’s what their strategy is optimized for. Ask them to be very explicit about this:

• Is their process designed to produce content that gets leads and sales?
• How does it work to actually achieve that goal?
• Are they data-driven and can they prove that their process works?

If an agency is asked if their process produces leads and sales, they’re obviously going to say yes, so you have to be very specific in your questioning. Focus on the second and third questions above, see if they can explain exactly how their process generates service signups or product purchases (not email signups, those are very different). Use your gut instinct — if you can’t figure out how their process will get leads or sales to increase, it probably won’t.

The biggest complaint we hear from companies who’ve had bad experiences with agencies — and frankly, the biggest complaint we had in our past experiences working with agencies — comes down to misalignment between what the agency optimizes content for, and what the company actually wants. So don’t skip this factor.

2. Do They Have a Process for Expressing Product and Domain Expertise Through Content?

Second, 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.

However, expressing product and domain expertise is important in B2C, too. Particularly if you choose to optimize your strategy for leads and/or sales, the topics you’ll write on will be very product or service-centric. This means whoever is writing your content will need in-depth knowledge of your product or service, the nuanced pain points that they solve for customers, and the ways in which your product is differentiated from competitors.

Most outside agencies or freelance writers 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.

Instead of producing engaging content, this is undifferentiated and generic. So, when evaluating agencies, 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 both 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 and what we think differentiates good and great content, which we’ll discuss more below.

3. Do They Actively Promote the Content They Produce?

Content writing is just one facet of the content marketing process. For content marketing to work, it’s also necessary to do content promotion. This is what drives actual traffic to your articles.

So, another key thing to understand is what the agency offers with regards 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 search engine optimization (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?

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.

Ensure They Don’t Use a “Keyword Sprinkling” Strategy and Call That SEO

We’ve spoken with several clients who’ve had bad past experiences with SEO agencies. And after digging into the content those agencies were producing, we’ve learned that they often use a “keyword sprinkling” strategy.

Essentially, they’ll create “SEO” articles by simply “sprinkling” a bunch of keywords throughout their articles. But as we’ve explained in our article on SEO content writing, ranking highly for valuable keywords takes a significantly more strategic approach than this. Specifically, for the most valuable and competitive keywords, you need to have one single article or landing page completely optimized for a single keyword.

If an agency says that they primarily rely on SEO to drive traffic, be sure to have them explain to you how they go about ranking content for specific keywords. Ask them:

• What’s your process for doing keyword research?
• How do you choose keywords to target?
• What’s your process for analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs)?
• How do you reflect those analyses in your writing to get articles to rank?
• Can you show us examples of articles you’ve written that are ranking highly in Google?
• Are you doing digital PR or building high-authority backlinks to the articles?

Content or SEO services worth hiring will be able to answer these questions in detail and show you results they’ve gotten for other clients.

Note: We’ve published a detailed article on our SEO writing process, which you can read here. We’ve also published a detailed case study on SEO rankings data from 20 active and former clients, which you can read here.

4. Do They Have Detailed Case Studies That Demonstrate the Effectiveness of Their Strategy?

It’s very common for content marketing companies to share a lot of theoretical advice and information, but show little to no data or case studies that back up what they say and prove that their strategies work. It’s also common for them to put up badges about having “award winning” digital marketing services, quotes from past clients, or random stats like “we grew X company’s organic traffic by 200%.”

These types of testimonials and unsupported claims are not reliable proof that an agency can do what they say. So, an essential thing to look for is whether or not an agency has published the results they’ve achieved for clients, and specifically explained the details behind how they achieved those results.

Otherwise, you just have to blindly trust their level of competency, which leads to very inconsistent experiences with agencies.

When reviewing agency case studies, look for details about the work behind the results. For example, if they’re claiming they increased traffic by some percentage for a past client, figure out:

• How many articles did it take?
• Did one article produce most of that or was it spread out?
• What keywords did they rank for?
• How and why did they choose those keywords?
• How long did it take to rank?
• What was the domain authority of that client at the start and end? Did they do link building?
• What didn’t work?

The more transparent agencies are with the results they’ve achieved and the ways in which they got those results, the more you can trust them to be able to replicate those types of results for your business.

Now, let’s walk through how our agency has addressed each of these factors, including the details of our content marketing strategy, our writing and promotion processes, and 6 long-form case studies we’ve published to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy.

Grow and Convert’s Process: How We’ve Addressed Each of These Factors

1. Our Content Strategy Is Optimized to Drive Leads and Sales

We’ve optimized our content marketing strategy to drive leads and sales (versus traffic and email signups) for two key reasons:

1. Most Companies Want to See ROI from Content: Sooner or later, most brands that invest in a content agency want to see some form of measurable ROI. We learned early on that if we can show ROI to clients (in particular management and executive teams), the engagements last longer, allowing results to compound while making everyone happy.
2. There’s Likely a Significant Volume of People Actively Looking to Buy the Product or Service You Sell: For almost every business, outside of rare category-creating products, there is some significant volume of people who are actively looking to buy that type of product or service — or solve pain points that product or service solves. These people are Googling terms that indicate they are ready to buy. Our perspective is that it makes way more sense from a business standpoint that a content strategy goes after these ready-to-buy-now people first (where conversion rates are much higher), before trying to reach the people higher in the funnel.

We’ve written at length about how we drive leads and sales through content for different business types. Check out these articles for detailed walkthroughs on our philosophy and our process:

Our Philosophy on Content Marketing Strategy

• Pain-Point SEO: How to Produce SEO Content That Drives Conversions
• Mini-Volume Keywords: Why Targeting Small Search Volumes Makes Sense
• How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy: A 5-Step Guide

B2B Content Marketing Strategy

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

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

• How to Create a SaaS Content Strategy That Drives Product Signups

B2C Content Marketing Strategy

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

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):

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

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here, 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.

2. We Use an Interview-Based Writing Process to Express Product and Domain Expertise Through Content

We don’t produce articles in the “Google research paper” style we described above (self-researching a topic and writing what you find).

Instead, our writers start by interviewing people inside your organization who have the know-how and expertise to speak on that topic and convey how your product and your company has innovated or differentiated itself in the topic area of the article.

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

We’re not talking about grabbing a few quotes from experts to throw into an article. We’re talking about hour-long recorded interviews where we shape an entire article around the viewpoint and knowledge of an expert inside your company, who can not only speak to the topic area but also tie-in your product.

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

3. We Use a Two Pronged Content Promotion Process

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:

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

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

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

4. We Publish Detailed Case Studies to Demonstrate and Prove the Effectiveness of Our Content Strategy

Here are 6 in-depth case studies we’ve written to demonstrate 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)

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

Below, we’re going to share 4 other content marketing agencies we’ve seen or heard come up over the years, so you can weigh other options. But before we get to that, let’s briefly cover a question looming in the minds of businesses and decision makers that are considering hiring an agency: Should you even hire one or would you be better off hiring in-house?

Should You Hire a Content Marketing Agency or Build a Team In-House?

Over the years, we’ve spoken to many companies who are considering hiring us and at the same time considering bringing someone in-house. And very often, companies lean toward making an in-house hire.

We think the biggest reason for this is that by hiring someone in-house, they feel the content marketer will more deeply understand the details of their product and their company — and therefore be more trusted and capable of acquiring the product and domain expertise we discussed above. This is in contrast to agencies, where most of them assign articles to writers without domain knowledge or any process to acquire and express expertise through their content.

However, because of the interview-based content writing process we use at Grow and Convert, this isn’t a problem when you work with our agency. And in fact, if this problem is solved, there are actually many additional benefits of hiring an agency compared to an in-house employee.

Specifically:

• Speed to Get Up and Running: If you hire an in-house content marketer, it may take 3 to 6 months for them to create a content marketing plan and get content production up and running, let alone the time it will take for that content to begin producing results. Whereas, an agency has processes in place to get up and running immediately, speeding up the time it takes to get results from content. As shown in our post on how long it takes to rank in Google, we typically have 25-35 articles ranking on page 1 of their intended keywords in the first 12 months.

• A Team vs. an Individual: Effective content marketing takes a variety of digital marketing skills and areas of expertise, and often one person won’t have all of the skills to execute the strategy, the writing, and the promotion, etc. Companies often think they can hire just a writer, or just a strategist, and later realize that they actually need more than one individual to carry out their content marketing efforts. In contrast, when working with our agency, there are often 3 to 5 people with different areas of expertise working together on your account — which has distinct advantages over relying on a single person. For example, we have content strategists, writers, a paid ads specialist, project manager, and designer ready to deploy for each client.

• Strategy & Deep Expertise: Particularly for companies that want to optimize their strategy for driving product signups, it’s difficult to find and hire an in-house content marketer with experience developing that type of content strategy and writing pieces that both rank for valuable keywords and sell products. This is in part due to a culture in content marketing — most content marketers subscribe to the belief that content is just for driving traffic and brand awareness, and so that’s how they operate and what they know. In contrast, when working with our agency, we have established hiring and training processes that ensure our strategists and writers have the expertise to execute signup-driven content strategies.

It’s perfectly understandable to want to hire an in-house content marketer instead of an agency, but it is worth considering the advantages that agencies can offer.

Other Content Marketing Agencies to Consider

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

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

1. Animalz

According to their website, Animalz provides content marketing services to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms. They list having worked with companies such as Google, Amazon, Airtable, and others. And they provide a variety of services including SEO consulting, brand awareness, lead generation, product marketing, and promotion and distribution.

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

2. Siege Media

Siege Media is an SEO-focused content marketing agency that offers SEO, content creation, graphic design, and link building services to businesses. They list having worked with companies such as Zillow, Shutterfly, and Tripadvisor. And they say their marketing solutions have generated over $148,646,000 in yearly client traffic value.

Visit their site for more information. 

3. Optimist

Optimist is an SEO-focused content marketing agency for startups and growth-stage businesses. They specialize in working with product-led companies, and list having worked with companies such as Contentstack, FairShake, and HelloSign. Their services are broken out into startup content marketing, SaaS content marketing, and B2B content marketing.

Visit their site for more information.

4. Codeless

Codeless is a content production company offering a variety of SEO, content, and PR services. They say they create a proven, customized workflow for every client, and list having worked with companies such as Monday, Zapier, ActiveCampaign, and others.

Visit their site for more information. 

Want to Work with Us or Learn How to Implement Our Content Marketing Strategy?

• Our Content Marketing 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 and other members give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses.

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

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

Over the past 6+ years running our agency, we’ve helped to create and implement SEO strategies for dozens of B2B SaaS businesses and acquired page one rankings for hundreds of valuable keywords for our clients (as we’ve demonstrated in case studies like this).

During that time, through speaking with many different software companies who’ve done SEO previously (either in-house or through an agency), we’ve learned that companies and SaaS marketers often struggle to achieve the SEO results they’re seeking. 

Specifically:

• They (usually unknowingly) don’t go after the most high-buying-intent keywords.

• Their feature and solutions pages often don’t end up ranking for their intended keywords.

• They don’t see meaningful increases in trials, demos, and product signups as a result of their SEO efforts.

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

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

The 5-step process we’ll cover includes:

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

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

How Most Businesses and Agencies Approach B2B SaaS SEO Strategy 

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

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 by using the “sprinkle” method of 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 really the two key parts to the strategy. 

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

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

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

The standard process for this involves:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Create and Publish Some Form of SEO Blog Content

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

• Outsource to freelance writers 
• Outsource to content agencies
• Hire an in-house writer or content marketer

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

Outsourcing content is more common for SaaS startups, while larger and more established SaaS companies often opt to hire in-house. But regardless of which option you choose, usually one of the following two content strategies is used:

1. The “Sprinkle” Method: Create blog posts haphazardly and “sprinkle” keywords throughout the articles, hoping they’ll rank for something. (Note: We’ve learned from speaking to clients that a lot of SEO agencies do this. This is not an effective way to create content.)
   
   
2. The “Top of the Funnel” Volume-Driven Method: Intentionally choose and prioritize keywords based on those that have the highest search volume, and write articles to rank for those keywords. These keywords are typically loosely related to the business’s target audience, but have no buying intent (and do not indicate people searching are looking to buy).

The second method is the more strategic of the two approaches. However, in our experience, neither of these methods are effective at generating trial or demo signups. 

Let’s look at why.

3 Flaws with the Typical Approach to SaaS SEO Strategy

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

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

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

Namely:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of the two common methods to SaaS SEO content that we mentioned above, the “Sprinkle” method and the “Top of Funnel” method, neither are well-suited (or even intended) to rank for high-intent keywords (i.e. all of the purchase-intent keywords that your core website pages don’t end up ranking for). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Strategically go after all of the remaining high-intent keyword opportunities that their core website pages don’t rank for.

• See significantly higher conversion rates and conversions from their blog content.

• Drive meaningful increases in trial, demo, and product signups as a result of their SEO efforts.

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

Our 5-Step B2B SaaS SEO Strategy: Use Blog Content to Tackle All of the High-Intent Keywords That Your Core Site Pages Won’t Rank For

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

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

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

Let’s look at each.

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

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

• Your technical SEO doesn’t matter. (It doesn’t matter how well your site is optimized if it’s not ranking for keywords that bring in customers.)

• Your link building doesn’t matter (same reason).

• The number of blog articles you write doesn’t matter.

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

We’ve written about how you can approach this step effectively in our article on SaaS content strategy. 

In that piece, we cover:

• High-converting SaaS keywords: The specific types of keywords we choose and content we create to drive customer acquisition for our SaaS clients (e.g. product category keywords, competitor comparison keywords, template keywords, etc.).

• Live article examples: For each content type, we link to examples of live articles we’ve written for clients that you can go and read, find ranking in Google, and use as inspiration to build your own equivalent content (following the structures used in those articles).

• Topics we prioritize for our SaaS clients: The mix of content that we typically prioritize for our SaaS clients in the first 3 months of an engagement.

Check that article out here to kickstart your keyword research.

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

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

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

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

Create a Dedicated Page for Each Keyword

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

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

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

Deeply Satisfy Search Intent with Each Piece of Content

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

We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine rankings for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing. Check that out to view examples and learn how you can approach this.

Step 3: Sell Your Product in Each Piece of Content

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

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

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

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

At Grow & Convert, we solve this by interviewing the experts at our clients’ companies for each piece of content we create. This allows us to express the company’s expertise on each topic to create truly high-quality content. This is in contrast to doing what we call “Google Research Papers” — learning about topics in Google and regurgitating what everyone else is saying (what many digital marketing agencies and freelancers do). 

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

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

Step 4: Fix and Monitor for Technical SEO Errors

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

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

For SaaS companies with largely static marketing sites, you should think of technical SEO as a baseline housekeeping item. If you notice sudden drops in rankings (which can be monitored in tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, along with other SEO metrics), then it’s worth looking into whether technical SEO might be present. But otherwise, technical SEO for SaaS websites can usually be taken care of with a one-time SEO audit and occasional follow up.

Step 5: Link Building

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

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

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

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

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

Measuring Traffic, Keyword Rankings, and Conversions 

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

• Conversions: We track and report on conversions using the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics. 

• Keyword Rankings: We use Ahrefs rank tracker to monitor rankings progress for each article’s target keyword. (You could also use Semrush, Google Search Console, etc.)

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

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

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

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

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute content marketing in this way, you can learn more about our service and pricing here.

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

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here or watch our video walkthrough here.

1. Prioritizing ranking for SEO keywords with high buying intent
2. Selling your product or service through your blog content

Below we’ll explain why focusing on these two things will improve your conversion rates more than typical CRO “tips and tricks” that marketers discuss (e.g. A/B testing, analyzing heatmaps, adding social proof and testimonials, etc.).

Then, before we wrap up, we’ll share some additional resources and factors to consider for execution, including: 

• Why you should target individual keywords with dedicated blog posts
• How to measure blog conversion rates in Google Analytics 4
• What a good blog conversion rate is

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.

Action #1: Prioritize Ranking for SEO Keywords with High Buying Intent

Most businesses, in-house marketers, content marketing agencies, and SEO agencies view blogs strictly as a channel for getting potential customers in their “conversion funnel,” not as an asset for directly selling products and services.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but little buying intent. For example, if you sell social media management software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “how to stand out on Twitter” or “social media ad trends.”

This approach is based on the assumption that with enough traffic — and by implementing conversion rate optimization practices such as providing a good user experience, including calls to action, etc. — conversions will inevitably follow. 

However, having measured conversion rates for hundreds of blog posts for dozens of clients, this assumption is flawed and untrue.

Specifically, while these keywords could potentially be searched for by your audience and may have high search volumes, searchers of these terms show no clear indication that they have intent to buy social media management software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best social media management software” or “social media management app.”) 

As a result, by our measures, these top of funnel keywords have very low conversion rates. And trying to solve that by making CRO tweaks to your site (e.g. adding popups with CTAs, offering a lead magnet, adding long sections selling your product or service,  etc.) is unlikely to make much of a difference because the website visitors coming in from those keywords are either a) too early in the customer journey to convert or b) flat-out not on the market for what you sell. 

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

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

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

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

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. 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, in our experience, prioritizing high buying intent keywords is by far the most impactful way to boost conversion rates. If you do nothing else — and frankly, even if you don’t have super high-quality content — simply ranking for keywords where people are actively looking to buy what you sell will inevitably drive more conversions than ranking for low intent keywords. 

Regarding how you can actually execute this, check out these two articles which lay out our agencies processes in detail:

1. Choosing keywords — SEO Keyword Strategy: How to Prioritize Based on Buying Intent to Drive More Conversions
   
2. Ranking for those keywords — SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

Once you have that down, the other key part of improving website conversion rates is writing compelling product or sales copy to convert visitors into customers (this includes blog posts).

Action #2: Sell Your Product or Service In Each Piece of Content

Many SEO’s and content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the blog content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a service or product page in their content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.) to “take care of conversions.”

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed above — the tendency to prioritize keywords with high traffic potential but low buying intent. The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your blog content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely). 

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Particularly if you focus on high buying intent keywords, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent. 

If someone is searching for “best social media management software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. These are potential customers that want to understand the value propositions of this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. 

Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this type of search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content needs to discuss your product or service in-depth, much like a sales page.

We’ve written at length about the challenges of doing this well, and how we execute this for our clients. Check out our post on Pain Point Copywriting for a deep dive on writing copy that converts.

Additional Resources and Factors to Keep In Mind

Target Each High Intent Keyword with a Single, Dedicated Page That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

People in search engine optimization often try to target many different keywords with a single web page. But search engines don’t reward this approach like they used to. As algorithms have evolved, the approach of trying to rank for a bunch of keywords (especially competitive buying intent keywords) with a single blog post rarely works.

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

For example, consider the keywords “sick leave tracking” and “sick leave app.” You can imagine that the intent behind these two search terms is nearly identical: searchers are looking for a tool to track employee sick leave.

But when you look at search results for these two terms, the top results are different. 

Here are the results for “sick leave tracking”:

And here are results for “sick leave app”:

Although intent is very similar, Google is ranking different pages for these terms, which indicates an opportunity to create dedicated pages to go after each of these keywords.

As we discussed in our conversation with Bernard Huang of Clearscope, you only get one SEO title, one H1 heading, one meta description, etc. If you try to rank for multiple target keywords with one piece of content, often it will only end up ranking for one of those keywords (or worse, you won’t match the intent of any individual keyword, and you won’t end up ranking for any of them).

Note: We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing.

Measuring Blog Conversions in Google Analytics

Clients and the companies we speak with ask us all the time about how we track conversions in Google Analytics, so we’ve created two long-form pieces of content that explain how to do this.  

First, we wrote a step by step tutorial on how to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Check that out for the full explanation.

Second, we created a long-form video walkthrough explaining the process:

What Is a Good Blog Conversion Rate?

Over the years, we’ve had a number of conversations with clients where they’ve expressed that they feel their organic conversion rate is low compared to what they thought was good. 

We think this is partially a result of companies using paid conversion rates as a benchmark for overall organic conversion rates. For example, they might see that their average conversion rate from Google Ads is ~3%, while their average overall conversion rate from organic search is somewhere in the 0.1%-0.3% range, and then conclude that their organic conversion rate is very low.

However, as we discussed at length in our deep dive video on average blog conversion rates, oftentimes the way companies look at their organic conversion rates is flawed. Specifically, they don’t segment out the different parts of their site and different mediums of traffic which skew conversion rates and make them seem higher or lower than they should be.

To gain a deeper understanding of what makes a good conversion rate, and how to more accurately measure your conversion rates from SEO, check out the video:

In the video, we share conversion rate data from two different clients of ours — both a mid-market/enterprise demo based SaaS company and a B2SMB self service SaaS company — and show how we’re getting 2%+ average conversion rates on our blog posts and compare those stats to how their sites convert overall from organic.

We share data on what we’ve seen for average blog conversion rates and explain what we think a good conversion rate target should be for each individual blog post.

In general, a good SEO conversion rate for pages ranking for bottom of funnel keywords is between 1%–5%. Anything above that is great. And in general, for an entire blog or content operation that largely focuses on bottom of funnel pieces, a conversion rate of 0.5%– 2% from visitor to lead, trial start, or eCommerce sale is good. 

Lastly, we share 3 examples of us outranking landing pages with blog posts and debate why we think blog posts are usually the better approach for high intent keywords — and why we think they may have higher conversion rates (even if the landing page were to rank higher than our blog post). 

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute an SEO-focused content 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 would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team as a content strategist or writer.

• 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. 

But less-discussed is the other side of ChatGPT and SEO: What happens if people start using ChatGPT to search instead of Google?

For those of us in SEO, that’s a scary thought. We’ve built our careers by ranking clients on Google. How do we rank on ChatGPT? Can you even control that? What does “ranking” on ChatGPT even mean? How does ChatGPT decide what products to recommend when users ask for recommendations? 

That’s what this study seeks to explore. 

We looked at product recommendations from ChatGPT across 7 different B2B SaaS product categories and compared them to what products were most popular on Google’s first page  in those same categories. 

The results give us insights into the differences between how ChatGPT and Google rank products or websites and whether there is a correlation between what ChatGPT recommends and what’s already ranking on Google. 

Why We Studied ChatGPT vs. Google

Ultimately, we want to know if we can predict which products ChatGPT is going to recommend by seeing what ranks on Google. Closely tied to that, and a bit of a “stretch” question is: If I rank on Google for a product related query, does that increase my chances of having ChatGPT recommend me for similar queries?

Why focus on product recommendations?

As we’ve written about extensively and built our service on: bottom of funnel, product related queries are the highest ROI searches that a brand can show up for. As a result, they are the most valuable queries to understand with respect to ChatGPT. When someone asks ChatGPT for product recommendations, it means they are very motivated to buy. So showing up in ChatGPT’s recommendations is very valuable. 

Why compare ChatGPT to Google? 

We’re comparing ChatGPT to Google because Google is how most people search for products. We want to understand: Is the SEO work we’re doing for clients on Google going to help them get recommended by ChatGPT? Are they correlated at all?

How We Did This Study

We focused this study on B2B SaaS products because that’s what we know best. (We may do a follow up study on consumer product searches.)

We Googled 6 different phrases: 

1. Best time clock software
2. Inventory management software
3. Best crm
4. Best heatmapping tools
5. Best ecommerce platforms
6. Best accounting software for small businesses

Then, we asked the same thing of ChatGPT but in natural language:

1. “What are the best time clock software options?”
2. “What are some good inventory software options?”
3. “What are the best CRM options?
4. “What are some of the best heatmapping tools?”
5. “What are the best ecommerce platforms?”
6. “What are the best accounting software options for small businesses?”

We recorded every single product recommended by both Google and ChatGPT in a spreadsheet. 

Recording ChatGPT’s results is easy because it just lists 6–8 tools: 

Note: ChatGPT doesn’t recommend the same tools every time (even if you ask it the exact same question). It swaps in 1–3 new tools in its answer every time you ask. To keep things simple, we just used the first answer from ChatGPT.

On Google, however, there are pages and pages of results, each of which is typically a list of 10–30+ products. So we recorded every single product mentioned in each result on the first page, which was typically around 100 products.

Since the goal of this study is to see if ranking on Google can predict whether a product will be recommended by ChatGPT, we counted how many times each product mentioned by either tool was found on Google’s first page— that is, how many times it was repeated inside the list posts and software recommendation sites on the first page. We can call this the Page One Popularity number. That’s what you see in the right most column of the screenshot above (color formatted so we can see patterns visually).

So if there is some correlation with ChatGPT’s results and Google’s, we should, in theory, see high page one popularity numbers in ChatGPT’s recommendations.

ChatGPT Does Tend to Mention the Most Popular Products on Google’s First Page

Here are the average page one popularity numbers from Google (blue) and ChatGPT’s (red) product recommendations in each category.

For every query besides “best time clock software”, ChatGPT recommends products that are mentioned more often on Google’s first page than the average product listed by Google itself. In other words, ChatGPT tends to recommend the most popular products from Google’s first page results. 

So there is some correlation between the products listed in the page one results on Google and what ChatGPT recommends. Remember, of course, that correlation does not equal causation — it doesn’t mean ChatGPT is “reading” Google and listing products mentioned there, it just means the two tools have some overlap (sometimes a decent overlap) in the products they recommend when users ask for recommendations. 

Why does Google, on average, list less popular products than ChatGPT?

Why are Google’s products on average mentioned less times on its first page results than ChatGPT’s? 

The answer is not that Google doesn’t list popular products. It absolutely does. We’re literally defining popularity by how many times a product is mentioned on Page 1 of Google. 

The reason it’s page one popularity numbers are lower is because the list posts on page one of Google are so full of random obscure products that it’s bringing Google’s averages down. 

In contrast, ChatGPT doesn’t waste time listing as many lesser known products. When you ask ChatGPT for product recommendations, it only lists 7–8, and it biases those towards genuinely popular products. 

You can see this extremely clearly when we visualize the results for the query “best CRM”:

Every product is shown above as a blue line (if Google listed it) or red line (if ChatGPT listed it). The height of the line is how many times it appeared inside Google’s page one results. 

First, note that Google also lists the most popular products. The most popular products on the right side are in order of popularity: Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Freshsales, and Zendesk Sell. They’re all there on Google’s first page. 

But the key takeaway is on the left side: The articles on Google’s first page list dozens of obscure, lesser known, products. That’s what’s bringing the average popularity of Google’s product suggestions down in the earlier graphs. 

In contrast, all of ChatGPT’s red lines are clustered on the right, meaning it’s listing the most popular CRMs, as defined by how many times they show up on Google. That’s notable. It means that ChatGPT is biased towards recommending genuinely more popular products.

ChatGPT fans could even argue that these results show how ChatGPT is more useful than Google — you don’t have to sift through pages of nonsense, you can get the heart of the answer more quickly. But that’s a debate we’re not getting into here. 

Instead, we can start to answer the main question we set out to explore.

Does this mean ranking on Google helps you rank on ChatGPT?

Let’s be honest, it would be extremely convenient if the above data meant that you could “rank” on ChatGPT by simply ranking on Google. Those of us in the SEO space know how to rank on Google already, so this would let us sort of “hack” the process of ranking on ChatGPT. 

But can we really get on ChatGPT by just ranking on Google? The data above gives a mixed answer. 

Yes, on average, ChatGPT is recommending the more popular products on Google’s first page. But by no means is the correlation perfect! We saw plenty of instances of:

1. ChatGPT not listing the popular products on Google.
   
2. ChatGPT listing products that are barely mentioned on Google.

For example, here are the 8 products recommended by ChatGPT for “best heatmapping tools” next to how many times they were mentioned on Google’s first page: 

Here is that same data, presented visually, in the same away we did for “best CRM” above: 

Indeed, ChatGPT mentions the three most popular heatmapping tools: Hotjar, Mouseflow, and Lucky Orange. After that, Crazy Egg and FullStory are also very well known tools in this space and are mentioned 6 and 7 times on Google’s first page. So those five products make sense. 

But then ChatGPT also lists Matomo and Yandex Metrica, which were only listed once out of 117 tools (42 unique tools) listed on the first page of Google. Once! These tools are not popular heatmapping tools by any means. I, personally, have been in the UX space for nearly a decade and have used multiple heatmapping tools for many clients and have never heard of Matomo or Yandex Metrica for heatmapping. Yet, ChatGPT recommends them. 

On the other hand, Smartlook, a former client of ours, is mentioned 9 times on page one of Google for “best heatmapping tools”. Some of that is due to our SEO work, sure, but we don’t own all of the sites on the first page, so it means they are genuinely popular in this space as well. But Smartlook wasn’t mentioned by ChatGPT at all when we asked it about the best heatmapping tools. 

This goes to show that being one of the most popular tools in Google’s results does not guarantee that ChatGPT will also mention you. 

This pattern of ChatGPT also throwing in a few obscure products in its recommendations wasn’t limited to heatmapping tools. When asked about “best inventory management software”, it recommended TradeGecko, among others, which is not mentioned even a single time out of 97 products listed on the first page of Google!

How can we make sense of this? Why is ChatGPT usually listing the most popular products on Google, but also throwing in some less popular products? How is ChatGPT getting its recommendations in the first place? Is the correlation with Google’s results just random chance or is it expected based on how the two products work? 

Reasons Why We Can Expect Some Overlap Between Google and ChatGPT’s Results

ChatGPT is a language model, meaning it ingests a bunch of text — such as articles on the internet, books, sites like Reddit, and more — and it learns what patterns or sequences of words most commonly appear together. It’s then trained to put words together in a sequence that closely matches those patterns. 

(See OpenAI’s original paper explaining how GPT-2 works.) 

For example if you ask it to complete the sentence “A large ecommerce platform based in Canada is ____”, its model, based on all of the text it’s “read” or been trained on, guesses the word that is most likely to come next. That word, in this case is, of course, “Shopify”. 

At a high level, that’s largely all ChatGPT does. It puts words together in ways that most closely match patterns in everything it’s read (which is terabytes worth of data). 

So, for our question of how to get ChatGPT to recommend your product, if nothing has been written about your product in books or on the web before, it’s impossible for ChatGPT to mention you. It won’t associate your product’s name with sequences of words about your product category because no one has done that already. 

That means, by its very nature, ChatGPT isn’t likely to mention brand new products in a category. 

Inversely, this means that if a bunch of text on the internet has talked about your product, you have a good shot at being mentioned by ChatGPT. In fact, the more your product is talked about on the internet, the higher your chances of being mentioned by ChatGPT. 

And, specifically, since it’s a language model, the more your product is mentioned in the context of the category-related words you want to show up for, like “CRM” or “small business accounting tools”, the higher the chances that ChatGPT’s language model will associate your product’s name with those words.  

But the details matter. Specifically, as marketers, knowing exactly what ChatGPT has been trained on would help us understand how to get it to mention our company or our products. 

Exactly what information is ChatGPT trained on? Does it “read” Google?

OpenAI is intentionally vague about exactly what material its latest model, GPT-4, is trained on — as this article in the New Yorker says — in order to not help their competition. 

They just say it’s trained on both publicly available data and private data they license:

In terms of what this “publicly available data” could be, one of the original papers from OpenAI about how GPT-2 worked said they devised their own version of a web crawler, focusing specifically on pages that were linked to by humans, on sites such as Reddit: 

Again, this paper was about GPT-2, but based on this, we can say it’s unlikely that GPT-4 was trained by literally Googling things. So we can’t explain the correlation between Google’s results and ChatGPT’s recommendations in our data above by saying “ChatGPT reads Google.” But rather, the correlation likely comes at a more general, higher level: 

Google scrapes the web and links to pages based on what it decides is most relevant to a search query. ChatGPT also scrapes the web (among other materials) and writes natural language answers based on what it thinks is the most common sequence of words on a topic. 

Both tools are scraping the web and determining, in their own ways, what’s most relevant, popular, or likely to be said by others when you ask it a question. So it’s not totally surprising that they have overlap! 

At a high level, that means the goal of marketing teams should be more or less similar for both: be mentioned as much as possible in content around the internet to increase your chances of being mentioned on Google or by ChatGPT. 

Google is Easier to Manipulate or Hack Your Way Into

Google is just an index of websites (we’re not talking about Google Bard here, just the regular Google that millions of people use daily). It ranks them based on a bunch of factors, including, notably, how many times other sites link to them. These two characteristics of Google…

1. Google just links to websites, as opposed to generating its own content 
2. Google chooses those websites in large part by how many other sites link to it 

…make it relatively easy to get onto Page 1 of Google even if you aren’t really that popular. 

Specifically, you can hack your way onto Google’s first page in two notable ways:

First, you can just pay one of the sites already ranking on page one to list your tool. This sounds nefarious but it’s actually extremely common. One of the most obvious examples in software are review sites like G2 and Capterra. G2’s pages say they are listing the “best [insert space] software” but everyone knows the top products on those lists are just paying G2 the most. And yes, you can also just pay Google to show up in one of the ad spots, but we’re just talking about ranking organically for now because ChatGPT could, in theory, also serve contextual ads if they wanted. 

Second, you can “SEO” your way onto the first page. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long established field, with a set of best practices around getting on the first page of Google for a given search term, in particular (1) good on page content and (2) backlinks. 

What’s important here is that you can rank your site on the first page, even if you aren’t the most popular — that is, your tool hasn’t been mentioned all over the internet. Trust me, we’ve done this for many clients who didn’t come to us as the market leader in their space. You absolutely don’t need to be Salesforce to get on page one for “best CRM”, or you don’t need to be QuickBooks to get on page 1 for “accounting software”. You do have to know how to do SEO, of course, but that’s knowable (you can hire an agency like us, build an in-house team, contract freelancers, etc.). 

Why Ranking on ChatGPT Seems Harder: You Genuinely Have to Be Popular

In contrast, based on the results of this study and how ChatGPT works, getting ChatGPT to suggest your product seems harder. This is for the same two reasons that make Google easier. 

First, ChatGPT is generating its responses by itself word for word. It’s not linking to other people’s content. So its results are a lot more concise. Look at our study above, ChatGPT recommended 7–8 tools for each query, whereas there were over 100 tools listed in the 8–10 results on Page 1 of Google for the same query. For one, that’s just a much smaller list you need to get onto. Second, you can’t use the typical SEO tactic where you create a page that fulfills most of Google’s criteria, but also throw in a mention of your client’s tool. ChatGPT isn’t linking to your page where you can write whatever you want, you need it to literally write about you. 

Second, their language model doesn’t seem to have obvious factors you can control and manipulate (like backlinks for Google). As we detailed above, these GPT models read a ton of text, and then predict word for word what that text would likely say in response to a question. So it’s spitting back a sort of “average” or “most probable” list of words based on the terabytes of text it’s been trained on. How do you hack that? There isn’t some clear action you can take like “building links” to get its algorithm to mention you. You kind of genuinely have to be mentioned a lot in its training text (which we don’t even really know the identity of). This is harder. 

Nonetheless, the core takeaway from above still holds: you need to be mentioned in as many places and as many times as possible to increase the chances that ChatGPT mentions you to its users. In the end, that’s marketing. And you could even argue it’s more honest marketing than trying to “game” Google by buying a favorable domain or building a bunch of links — you have to actually get popular. 

How Ranking on Google Can Increase the Chances of ChatGPT Mentioning You

Ranking on Google is one (great) way of becoming popular. Google is still the #1 portal into the internet for the majority of the world, by a wide margin (93% vs 3% for Bing). 

If you get a bunch of SEO traffic from useful, relevant keywords in your niche, then it’ll naturally expose you to other people who may also write about you. 

In other words, SEO is just a great evergreen marketing channel (yes, we’re biased, but it’s true). Paid ads, the other dominant inbound channel, can also work, as can influencer marketing, going on podcasts, or a bunch of other marketing tactics. But SEO has the advantages of (1) showing up for the exact right terms and (2) giving you free traffic for as long as you’re ranking — you don’t have to keep paying for every click. 

Ranking on Google for relevant terms in your industry is a way to get more people on the internet to write about you, which increases the chances that ChatGPT or other AI tools will read about you when being trained. 

All of This Only Matters If ChatGPT Becomes a Popular Search Engine

Of course, all of this is only relevant if a significant percent of the public starts using ChatGPT or equivalent AI to do product searches. From the searchers’ side, there are pros and cons to ChatGPT vs. Google. 

On the pro side, the analysis above shows that ChatGPT on average, for product queries, suggests more genuinely popular products. You don’t have to sift through pages of obscure products no one has heard of to get to the actually popular products in a category. You don’t have to wonder “did they just pay ChatGPT to get listed?” like you do with G2 or Capterra lists. 

But there are also cons to using ChatGPT for product searches. If you actually do want a long list, ChatGPT is more of a pain. You have to keep asking for more. Second, you can’t verify sources or citations like you can on Google. If you want to ignore G2’s list on Google, for example, you just don’t click on it. You can also more easily search for recommendations from a particular source on Google (e.g. “best tax software pcmag” or “best blender wirecutter”). 

With ChatGPT, if it mentions an obscure product (like the heatmap examples above), you’re sort of at a loss as to why. Finally, the propensity of ChatGPT to make up random facts could just hurt people’s overall confidence in its results, causing them to use it less as a search engine replacement. 

None of us can predict the future, but in June 2023, ChatGPT saw its first decline in users — almost 10% — which is somewhat significant. 

We’ll see how Google’s AI equivalent, Bard, does in popularity once it’s released to the wider public. 

Future Studies

In this study, we only looked at the correlation of how many times ChatGPT’s recommended products were mentioned in Google’s first page results. 

But there are a lot of other proxies for popularity in society that we could also look into to see if ChatGPT’s recommendations are more strongly correlated with other factors. 

For example: 

• Domain rating or domain authority — These metrics from SEO tools are largely a measure of how many backlinks a site gets, that could also be an indication of the likelihood that ChatGPT will run into that product in its training text. 

• Reddit — We know ChatGPT uses Reddit as one of its training sources, so we can try to find a way to correlate its recommended products with popularity on Reddit. 

• Size of company — We could even look at whether ChatGPT biases towards large or public companies since it’s likely that those companies are just mentioned more in society and literature than smaller private ones. 

Any other ideas, questions, or requests for us to study? Ask us in the comments. 

For example, they discuss how “hiring ghostwriters saves you time on writing,” or state steps of the hiring process (“find the ghostwriter,” “interview the ghostwriter,” etc.), but don’t provide many helpful details or examples on how to actually execute the steps. 

Everybody knows (or can figure out) these things. So we wanted to provide a more detailed article about hiring blog ghostwriters that answers important, real life questions, including: 

• Do you really need a ghostwriter? Or are you looking instead for a content marketer? What’s the difference?

• Should you hire a freelancer, an agency, or an in-house writer?

• How do you filter for the best writers?

• Where are you likely to find the highest quality ghostwriters?

• How much should you expect to pay them? 

We’ve filtered through 1000+ writer applications and tested and hired dozens of writers for our agency. We’ve ghostwritten for clients or put our own names on the by-line. And we’ve had many conversations with clients about their experiences working with in-house writers, other agencies, or other freelancers. We’ve seen it all, and in this article, we’ll relay as much of that experience as possible.

(Aside: If you’re actually looking for someone to manage the entire content marketing process — i.e., including picking keywords, tracking results, building links, etc. — rather than just writing, you may actually be looking for a content marketing agency and not just a writer. If so, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.) 

What Is a Blog Ghostwriter?

A ghostwriter is simply a writer who doesn’t put their own name on the byline, they put yours. But the reality is there is no such thing as a “ghostwriter.” A ghostwriter is just a writer. 

At our content agency, sometimes our writers use their own name as the byline for a client article, while other times we use our client’s founder’s name as the byline (or someone else at the company, or the company brand name, etc.). It usually just depends on the preference of our client or the context of the article. 

So, with this said, the dynamics of hiring a ghostwriter are the same as hiring a writer: you just want to find the best, with maybe an added requirement that their style is a natural fit for your voice. 

Are You Really Just Looking for a Writer? Or Are You Actually Looking for a Content Marketer?

Something we see all the time is companies looking to hire a writer but in reality wanting them to take on every role from search engine optimization (SEO) to data analysis: 

Writers and content marketing strategists are not the same! A content strategist (common titles for this role include “Content Marketing Manager” and “SEO manager”) focuses on how to drive long term organic traffic to your business — they think about SEO, keyword research, page rankings, analytics, and more. Writers focus on content creation — the actual article writing.

It’s unrealistic to expect your writer to produce your content strategy, yet many, many businesses do that. Most will not do a good job with both. 

If you do find someone who is skilled in both areas, don’t expect to pay them the same rates as you would someone who is exclusively a writer. Again, if you’re looking for full content marketing and SEO strategy (not just blog writing services), you need more than a professional writer. You can look to hire a content marketing manager or SEO consultant or even see if we may be a fit for what you want.

Additional Consideration: Is the Goal of Your Content to Sell a Product or Service?

Asking a writer to produce blog content that’s intended to sell a product or service requires a different skill set than asking them to ghostwrite opinion or thought leadership content, for example. 

Specifically, whoever creates your content needs to have the know-how to understand and express your competitive advantages, value propositions, benefits, features, and more. We can tell you from experience that this is a unique skill set, akin to product copywriting, that many freelance writers do not possess. 

So, if the type of content you want to create involves selling your product or service, you need to ensure you hire someone that can demonstrate their ability in this area. The hiring process we share below will discuss how you can approach this.

Should You Hire a Freelancer, an Agency, or an In-House Writer?

Typically, these are the three main ways of hiring blog ghostwriters. All have pros and cons, depending on your situation. 

Freelance Writers

Hiring a freelance writer is the cheapest option and gives you the potential to flex and scale as you need. Obviously most companies do this and we suggest starting out with freelance bloggers if you haven’t hired writers before. The downside is that you will need someone on your team who can coordinate their freelance writing work and provide editing feedback, although that can often be done with other freelancers as well. We cover our detailed process on how to find and filter for the best ones below.

In-House Writers

Having a full-time, in-house writer can work well for a larger company, if you have the resources. The advantage is that they can become a subject matter expert and are at your disposal whenever you need them. They also can sometimes start crossing the line into being more of a content marketer or SEO if you want and if they’re capable. (Note: Developing subject matter expertise can also be achieved by contractors that do in-depth interviews with their clients when creating content, as we do at our agency.)

The disadvantage, of course, is the salary + benefits + payroll taxes (and other employee overhead costs), which, depending on where your company is located, can be as much as double the base salary of a freelance writer.

Content Marketing Agencies

As we’ve alluded to above, many companies that say they want to “hire writers” are actually looking for a lot more than just writing. They need content marketing or content-based SEO done. They want to open up content and SEO as a lead generating channel. Almost no “freelance writer” is going to single-handedly unlock content as a channel for you. 

If this is you, you’re not just looking for a writer, you’re looking to build an entire content marketing operation. As we’ve said above, the key role you need in addition to writing for this, is strategy. We call it ‘content strategy’. It could also be called ‘SEO strategy’. The point is someone needs to manage the process of: 

• Picking keywords and topics.

• Coordinating subject matter expert interviews.

• Being a final pass on article quality, proofreading, and on-page SEO.

• Measuring results (leads ascribed to each piece).

Many companies hire an in-house “content marketing manager” or “SEO manager” for this, and that can work. Alternatively, you can hire an agency like ours for this as well. We discuss how we differentiate in this space here. 

The Step by Step Process We Use to Hire Writers for Our Agency

Hiring writers is easy. Hiring good writers is hard. And this is even more true when you’re looking specifically for someone to ghostwrite for you because you really need them to nail your voice exactly. So the filtering process below is really important. 

Most writer hiring processes involve looking at a few portfolio pieces, and, if someone looks good, immediately putting them on a real piece that will be published on your or your client’s site. 

Yes, we look at portfolio pieces too (discussed immediately below) but portfolio pieces aren’t enough. We’ve learned the hard way that you need multiple filters to find the best writers. 

Here’s our process:

Step #1: The Application

In the writer application, we…

Ask for Writing Samples (A Portfolio) 

Portfolio pieces — while only a start — are the first insight you have into whether this writer is a fit. This is where the vast majority (maybe 80%) of writer applicants are filtered out in our hiring process.

The key, though, is what you look for. 

For us, as we’ve mentioned so many times on our blog, we focus on bottom-of-the-funnel, product related content — SEO content that ranks for keywords like, “best accounting software” or “Google Analytics alternatives.” This type of content writing needs to discuss products and features in a detailed and specific way.

So, for us, a good writer needs to be able to contrast value propositions clearly. They need to understand and communicate differentiators between one product and another clearly and persuasively. So that’s what we look for. 

For you, it may be that you’re looking to write more top of funnel pieces or thought leadership pieces (don’t mess those up, though). Or that you have a particular style or voice you want the writer to be able to imitate. That’s fine. You’ll have your own criteria. 

It doesn’t mean an applicant needs to have a piece that is exactly what you, or we, would publish — most writers don’t. Instead we look for signs in the writing that they can write like you. For us, it’s questions like: 

• Have they written about advanced, complex topics? 
• Can they sell a product or feature well?
• Do they use a lot of filler, fluff sentences or words?
• Do they start pieces with needless quotes and stats?
• Etc. 

We note the applicants that answer these questions well with promising portfolio pieces, and then we look at the next filter.

Ask Applicants to Write a “Mini Sample” on the Fly (Portfolio Pieces Can Sometimes Lie)

Years ago, we used to only use the portfolio piece as the gauge of whether to move a candidate to the test project (Filter #2), but we started to get frustrated at how many writers (some with years of experience) had awesome portfolio pieces but did terribly in the test project. We think this is probably due to the uncertainty of knowing how much of a portfolio piece was actually written by the writer versus edited by their client. 

So, to help filter more out at the application stage, we added a final question to the application that acts as a mini test project. We call it the “mini sample”. It asks them to write a few sentences on the fly. Yes, of course they could take the time to study it and carefully write each word. If they do, that’s great — it shows even more dedication. The point is, it’s unlikely anyone will be editing it. So it’s a much more accurate representation of the writer’s ability. They submit it and we see how they think and write. 

This has helped a lot.  

Make this question as similar to the work you want them to do as possible — just a really short version of it (to respect their time). For example, our question asks applicants to look at a client’s SaaS website and write a short paragraph highlighting the software’s key selling points. We look to see if they can write in our style. You’ll do the same. Most writers should be able to do this in ~15 minutes.

For example, here is a short but good submission for this step from a writer who made it all the way to our team:

Video testimonials convert 25% more buyers, but traditional video production requires a lot of time and money. Vocal Video makes it seamless and easy to record video testimonials, all without a pro. Simply share a link and collect audio and video responses with expertly crafted templates. Vocal Video automatically generates a complete video with your brand’s logo and colors that you can easily embed and share. Sign up for Vocal Video today!

In contrast, here is a submission that immediately told us this write isn’t a fit for us: 

Vidyard’s study (https://www.vidyard.com/blog/case-study-videos/) exposed how 89% of marketers experienced video testimonials as the most result-oriented marketing approach.

Have you wondered why people google reviews or alternatives for software? Trust issues! 

Will they trust your offer’s attractive promises? They won’t. Only testimonials solve trust issues better, and VIDEO TESTIMONIALS best endorse your offer. 

Vocal Video is super easy to use – ZERO editing stress. Generate simple links they’ll only tap on to share your sweet wonders! 

So here’s the real question: Are you still letting doubt stop you?

After this step, you can filter applicants by those that have both (a) good portfolio pieces and (b) good mini samples. 

But, as we’ve learned the hard way, these applicants still aren’t ready to be put on a “real” client piece. Next comes a more formal, paid test project.  

Step #2: The Paid Test Project

For writers who make it through the first step, we have them go through a paid test project that is an exact replica of our actual client work, except it’s a shortened version and won’t actually be used for anything.

It’s important that this be as close to exactly what you need as possible. We use a previously written content piece, one we’ve already published for a client, and give them the same inputs we had when writing it. Then, at the end, we can compare their work to what we produced. We try to use the same one for all applicants so we can benchmark their responses against other applicants as well.

For our test projects, we typically share the angle of the article and ask the writer to produce a list of pain points, a full introduction, and an outline. We don’t need them to write the entire piece because we just don’t need that much written to gauge if they’re a fit. These elements give us enough to evaluate:

• How do they position the client’s product? 
• Is it specific?
• Is it in line with our style? 

For example, if we asked for a piece on “best accounting software” (for a specific client), we’re looking for something along the lines of, “Most accounting software has X issues which fail to solve Y pain points. Our software solves those pain points in Z way.” 

We’re not looking for, “Running a business is hard. After you’ve done HR and sold to customers, you sit down after a long day, and now you’ve got to do the books.” 

The first response is specific. The second is general “fluff” content.

But don’t imitate our exact process. You’ll need to provide your writers with the exact same prompt and level of info you give to writers you are currently working with. Again, you want to see exactly how they’d perform “in real life”. 

Next, we see how they respond to feedback. We provide one round of revisions via comments or a recorded video, giving detailed explanations of what we’re looking for. We do this even if the applicant’s attempt is poor because, sometimes, they respond really well to our feedback (which is a key characteristic we’re looking for) and their revised version is solid.

The test project should be paid. If it’s not, most good writers will pass on working with you. Right now, we pay $200 per test project. We talk more about how we pay writers below. 

Step #3: Writing Real Pieces

Finally, if we’re happy with the test project, we’ll ask the writer to work on several real pieces.

At this stage, only writers that are close to what we need are left, so it should go pretty well but the hit rate even at this stage is not 100%. 

Despite all the filters before this, there are still a decent number of writers who don’t work out after working on a real piece. From our experience, that’s just the reality of hiring writers. There is a level of “it’s a numbers game” here. But. if you implement all of these filters, you should be in a lot better shape than the standard, “Portfolio pieces look good, here’s a real piece I need by this date” scenario.

Ongoing Training 

Lastly, we should mention that ongoing training and coaching is critical to helping your writers produce great content consistently. 

It’s possible to find writers who perfectly match your brand voice and content needs from the beginning, but it’s extremely rare. It’s more likely that you’ll find a talented writer who can ace your projects after some coaching. 

At Grow and Convert, our requirements are specific. We’re looking for:

• Clarity of thought in structuring the piece and reasoning through arguments.

• Simple writing style without “fluff”.

• Compelling sales copywriting that’s direct but not over the top.

So, we provide detailed feedback and coaching to all our writers. An experienced content strategist works closely with the writer at every stage, reviewing the questionnaire, giving guidance and providing feedback to the writer. All our content strategists have been writers for Grow and Convert, so they know exactly what they’re looking for. This coaching is obviously heavier in the early stages and tapers down as they get more experience, but almost every writer on our team has been heavily coached by us. We don’t have this false belief that some folks online seem to have: that you can find writers who just happen to write exactly the way you want from day one. 

As you’re going through this process, ask yourself whether the writer can:

• Respond well to feedback.

• Make sensible revisions.

• Write on multiple types of brands/topics (if that’s important to your business).

• Hit deadlines.

If they display these characteristics, they will likely work out long-term. 

Learn more about our journey by watching our video on How to Hire Great Blog Writers.

Where Can You Find Quality Ghostwriters?

Remember ghostwriters are just writers, so where you source them is the same as where you’d source any writer. We’ve tried every popular route to find writers over the years, with varying success. 

Typically, people use one or more of the following:

Writer Marketplace Platforms

Writer platforms such as Upwork, Fiverr, or Crowd Content are popular places for finding writers. While they may include a small number of high quality writers (who will be harder to find), they don’t have a strict filter for freelancers so you have to really implement a strict filter system (like we outlined above) to find quality writers from these pools. 

Job Boards

Posting a job listing on jobs boards such as Remote OK, Craigslist, and Wellfound (previously AngelList Talent), can yield some good freelance blog writers, but these are hit and miss. We’ve had more success from dedicated writing job boards (ProBlogger is one of the more established ones).  

Social Media

Reaching out on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter with a job posting can also work as you can get some useful referrals to good writers. 

These platforms and routes vary considerably. You’ll certainly find writers but it depends on the dynamics of your particular network on these platforms. We are obviously in the content marketing space so those are the people who follow us and vice versa. Many of them are writers, many more work with writers, so it helps. If you don’t have a network of writers, it may not yield as much. But it’s definitely worth trying. 

Writer Job Link on Your Site

Surprisingly, this has been the most effective method of finding good writers for us — more than job boards or marketplace sites. Most of our best team members came from hearing about us through something we wrote or a podcast we were on and saw our “Write for Us” link. Yes, of course, we are a content agency, so we’re more likely to even have writers browsing our site in the first place. But this can still be utilized by product companies or folks not in the marketing space. Writers are people, they check out companies they find interesting. If someone is already on your site for some other reason and happens to be a writer, that’s a pretty qualified candidate — they know, or even may like your company or what you do. Make it easy for those people to see that you’re hiring, in particular hiring writers. 

Employee Referrals

Lots of people are writers so lots of people know writers. Referrals of new writers from existing members of our team have arguably been the #1 source of good writers for us. We offer a referral bonus to our team if they refer a candidate that works out as a long term writer for us and we suggest you do the same. 

Just remember that whichever platform or sourcing method you use to find candidates, the most important thing is that you implement a good process to evaluate them before they write for your blog.

How Much Should You Pay a Blog Ghostwriter?

Over the last six years, we’ve tried different ways of paying writers. This is what we learned:

• Don’t pay writers by the hour or word count — it may incentivize the writer to string out the project or be unnecessarily verbose so you end up paying more.
  
  
• Don’t pay super-expensive rates — we thought writers charging high rates would be really good, but that hasn’t been the case. We’ve paid as much as $1,000 for a piece that we weren’t able to publish. Avoid this costly mistake!
  
  
• Don’t pay a writer less than $200 to produce a top blog post — you won’t get what you need. If you’re also expecting them to do content marketing strategy, keyword research, subject matter research, and interviews, you should pay significantly more. We pay $500 for every article.

Our writers are given:

• The keyword — writers don’t have to do content strategy. Our content strategists (who all started off as writers) do that.
  
  
• An interview, typically with the subject matter expert — writers aren’t asked to research and become experts themselves. We think that’s nonsensical. They base their pieces on what an actual expert tells us about the topic.
  
  
• A kick-off from the content strategist for guidance — writers aren’t left to “get on with it” on their own.
  
  
• Supportive coaching and editing expertise from their content strategist — writers can continue to develop their writing skills.

Learn more about how we pay and motivate writers in this article.

P.S. Are you a writer? We’re hiring! Learn more on our ‘write for us’ page.

Working with Grow and Convert

We have an amazing team of content strategists, in-house writers, and freelance writers who all meet our rigorous standards. We can produce product-focused BOTF content that ranks for buying-intent keywords and is optimized to generate conversions and leads, not just traffic.

If you’re a freelance writer and our process and style of SEO, conversion-focused writing 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.

If you’re a business looking for writing services, you can hire our agency to do SEO-focused content marketing for you. Learn more about our service and pricing here.

You can also learn more from our course which teaches you about our process in greater detail.

While these user experience (UX) design tweaks and conversion optimization tactics are fine, in our experience they aren’t nearly as impactful as prioritizing and ranking for keywords where the people searching indicate they’re on the market looking to buy what you sell — we call these “high buying intent keywords.” 

In this article we’re going to share examples and data — based on the last 5 years tracking conversions of hundreds of blog posts for our clients — to back this up. Then, we’ll share other key learnings that have helped us maximize SEO conversions for our clients, as we’ve demonstrated in numerous in-depth case studies.

Below, we cover:

• Why ranking for high buying intent keywords is the most important aspect of improving SEO conversion rates

• 3 key factors to keep in mind for executing a conversion-focused SEO strategy

• How to track SEO conversions in Google Analytics

• What is a good SEO conversion rate?

Why Ranking for High Buying Intent Keywords Is the Most Important Aspect of Improving SEO Conversion Rates

As we’ve discussed at length many times, most businesses, in-house marketers, content marketing agencies, and SEO agencies use traffic-focused SEO strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that with enough website traffic, conversions will inevitably follow.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but low to zero buying intent. For example, if you sell employee scheduling software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “how to become a better manager” or “minimum wage by state.”

While these keywords could potentially be searched for by your audience and likely have high search volumes that could drive substantial organic traffic, searchers of these terms show no indication that they have intent to buy employee scheduling software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best employee scheduling software” or “employee scheduling app for small business.”) 

As a result, by our measures, these keywords have very low conversion rates. And trying to solve that by making CRO tweaks or UX improvements to your site is unlikely to make much of a difference because the website visitors coming in from those keywords aren’t even on the market for what you sell in the first place. 

If you’re a B2B or enterprise SaaS company selling employee scheduling software, is a pop-up or side bar CTA really going to convince someone that they all of the sudden need your product? In our experience, no. 

Could these tactics work for generating email subscriptions or selling low cost eCommerce products? Maybe (because these are much smaller asks) — but they’re still unlikely to impact conversion rates in the way that ranking for high buying intent keywords will.

This point is neatly 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 for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. 

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

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

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

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. 

By all means, follow CRO best practices, but don’t expect that to be the thing that will improve your conversion rates. Instead, focus on ranking for as many high buying intent keywords as possible.

As you do, take into consideration the following 3 factors:

3 Key Factors to Consider When Developing and Executing a Conversion-Focused SEO Strategy

1. There’s Way More Buying Intent Keywords Than Most Businesses Realize

For many companies, the basic approach to SEO looks something like this:

1. Homepage: Optimize the homepage for one or two product or service category keywords. These are high buying intent keywords that describe what the company sells. For example, “executive assistant service” or “PPC reporting software.”
   
   
2. Service or product pages: Optimize a small handful of product or service pages (or feature and solutions pages in SaaS) for similar high buying intent keywords that describe the product or service. 
   
   
3. Blog: Use the blog to go after high search volume but low buying intent keywords as we discussed above. The blog is considered a tool for generating brand awareness and getting potential customers in your “conversion funnel,” not an asset for ranking for buying intent keywords and selling your service (more on this below).

In this scenario, companies are only targeting a small handful of buying intent keywords (maybe 5 to 10). But in our experience, this typically leaves a ton of buying intent keywords on the table.

Why?

First off, people often describe products and services in many different ways. For example, any given software may be described as:

• “Software” (e.g. “small business accounting software”)
• “Tool” (e.g. “project management tool”)
• “Platform” (e.g. “marketing analytics platform”)
• “App” (e.g. “field service app”)

It’s common for there to be several different keyword variations for your product or service. And if a business serves multiple industries or verticals, the list of variations grows longer. As we’ll discuss below, you simply won’t rank for all of these with your homepage and a small handful of product or service pages.

Furthermore, there are two other high intent keyword frameworks — competitor and alternatives keywords, and jobs to be done keywords — that can drive significant conversions, but are not going to be ranked for with home and product or service pages.

Companies should leverage blog content to go after all of these additional high intent opportunities — as we do at our agency — but most do not. 

Note: Pair this post with our article on SEO keyword strategy to aid you in your own keyword research.

2. Target Each High Intent Keyword with a Single, Dedicated Page That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

People in search engine optimization often try to target many different keywords with a single web page. But search engines don’t reward this approach like they used to. As algorithms have evolved, the approach of trying to rank for a bunch of keywords (especially competitive buying intent keywords) with a single page rarely works.

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

For example, consider the keywords “sick leave tracking” and “sick leave app.” You can imagine that the intent behind these two search terms is nearly identical: searchers are looking for a tool to track employee sick leave.

But when you look at search results for these two terms, the top results are different. 

Here are the results for “sick leave tracking”:

And here are results for “sick leave app”:

Although intent is very similar, Google is ranking different pages for these terms, which indicates an opportunity to create dedicated pages to go after each of these keywords.

As we discussed in our conversation with Bernard Huang of Clearscope, you only get one SEO title, one H1 heading, one meta description, etc. If you try to rank for multiple target keywords with one piece of content, often it will only end up ranking for one of them (or worse, you won’t match the intent of any individual keyword, and you won’t end up ranking for any of them).

Note: We’ve documented the exact process we use when analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) for target keywords in our post on SEO content writing.

3. Sell Your Product in Each Piece of Content

Many SEO’s and content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the blog content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a product or service page in their content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.) to “take care of conversions.”

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed above — the tendency to prioritize keywords with high traffic potential but low buying intent. The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your blog content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely). 

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Particularly if you focus on high buying intent keywords, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent. 

If someone is doing a Google search for “best employee scheduling software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. They want to know what’s better about this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. 

Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content of the page needs to discuss your product or service in-depth.

How to Track SEO Conversions in Google Analytics

At a high-level, there are 3 steps to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):

1. Create “Conversion Events”. In Universal Analytics (UA), the previous version of Google Analytics, conversions were typically tracked by setting up what were called “Conversion Goals.” However, in Google Analytics 4 (GA4), conversion tracking is based on “Conversion Events.” You do that by first creating events you want to track and then marking the ones of interest as a “Conversion” event. These must be set up in order to access or create custom reports to view conversion data for the specific events you want to track.
   
   
2. Consider which attribution models you’ll use in your reports. An attribution model is a conversion counting method that determines how credit for conversions is assigned to touchpoints on conversion paths. No single attribution model will give you a complete and accurate view of your conversion data, so we recommend setting up multiple reports that use different models to get the best understanding of your conversion data.
   
   
3. Access or create reports to view and track your conversion data. GA4 offers a default conversion report which can provide a high-level overview of conversion performance. However, it’s useful to leverage additional custom reports to build up a more holistic view of your conversion data. We use the model comparison tool as well as an any touchpoint report. 

We’ve created two long-form pieces of content that explain how to track and report on SEO conversions in GA4.  

First, we wrote a step by step tutorial on how to set up SEO conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Check that out for the full explanation.

Second, we created a long-form video walkthrough explaining the process:

What Is a Good SEO Conversion Rate?

Over the years, we’ve had a number of conversations with clients where they’ve expressed that they feel their organic conversion rate is low compared to what they thought was good. 

We think this is partially a result of companies using paid conversion rates as a benchmark for overall organic conversion rates. For example, they might see that their average conversion rate from Google Ads is ~3%, while their average overall conversion rate from organic search is somewhere in the 0.1%-0.3% range, and then conclude that their organic conversion rate is very low.

However, as we discussed at length in our deep dive video on average blog conversion rates, oftentimes the way companies look at their organic conversion rates is flawed. Specifically, they don’t segment out the different parts of their site and different mediums of traffic which skew conversion rates and make them seem higher or lower than they should be.

To gain a deeper understanding of what makes a good conversion rate, and how to more accurately measure your conversion rates from SEO, check out the video:

In the video we share conversion rate data from two different clients of ours — both a mid-market/enterprise demo based SaaS company and a B2SMB self service SaaS company — and show how we’re getting 2%+ average conversion rates on our blog posts and compare those stats to how their sites convert overall from organic.

We share data on what we’ve seen for average blog conversion rates and explain what we think a good conversion rate target should be for each individual blog post.

In general, as we share in the video, a good SEO conversion rate for pages ranking for bottom of funnel keywords is between 1% – 5%. Anything above that is great. And in general, for an entire blog or content operation that largely focuses on bottom of funnel pieces, a conversion rate of 0.5% to 2% from visitor to lead, trial start, or eCommerce sale is good. 

Lastly, we share 3 examples of us outranking landing pages with blog posts and debate why we think blog posts are usually better to go after high intent keywords with — and how we think they may have higher conversion rates (even if the landing page were to rank higher than our blog post). 

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. 

1. Target high-buying-intent search terms (Pain Point SEO).
   
   
2. Rank for them by fulfilling search intent (SEO content writing).
   
   
3. Write compelling product or sales copy to convert visitors into customers (this post).

Converting readers into customers requires intelligent, thoughtful writing that demonstrates how your product or service solves the customer’s problem. You need to be able to sell 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.

What does it take to be able to write this kind of product-focused content? We’ve been asking ourselves this question for years, in particular while trying to hire writers. We’ve evaluated portfolio samples from thousands of applicants and waded through tons of test projects, and we’ve noticed one major pattern that separates the bad writing from the good. The bad writing gets the value propositions wrong. 

Specifically, we’ve noticed 4 patterns in messing up value props:

1. Selling the wrong value props
2. Selling non-existant value props (aka “fluff”)
3. Missing important value props
4. Selling a good value prop the wrong way

Where do these mistakes come from? Why does blog post after blog post make these same mistakes? It’s because the writers don’t deeply understand customer pain points. As a result, they just guess on which value props are important, which ones should be emphasized, or how they should be positioned. Or, they often just fill space with fluff to mask this lack of true understanding.

The solution is to understand the customer’s pain points deeply and write about them deliberately. Getting this right leads to good writing that makes the customer feel like the brand understands their pain and has a solution to their problem.

As such, just as our foundational content strategy framework is called Pain Point SEO, we’re calling this product copywriting approach Pain Point Copywriting.

Below, we discuss this approach to content writing and dissect the 4 mistakes mentioned above, using a case study (a post we wrote for a past client that’s currently ranking #2 for the term “website translation plugin”) to illustrate our points.

Case Study: “Website Translation Plugin”

The keyword we’ll be analyzing is “website translation plugin”, which is a moderately high difficulty keyword according to Ahrefs:

At the time of writing, the post we wrote for our client ranks #2 for this keyword:

Note that “website translation plugin” is a prototypical bottom of funnel keyword (in the “category keyword” bucket of Pain Point SEO) which means searchers are actively looking for products.

This seems obvious, but it actually has a big impact on what you should write.

Specifically, Google is favoring ranking lists of plugins, not how-to posts or guides. That’s because the searchers don’t want some belabored background discussion on why translation is important, they just want a list of plugins, and importantly, they want to figure out which plugin best solves their translation problems (aka “pain points”). This is what it means for a keyword to have high buying intent. Keep this mind when we discuss more details of the writing below.

Mistake #1: Selling the Wrong Value Props

When writers don’t deeply understand the pain points of customers, they don’t know what value props of the product are most important. So, they end up guessing. And when they guess, they often riddle articles with totally irrelevant or unimportant value props. This kills the writing.

Let’s look at some examples.

“More than 100 Translation Languages”

Here are two excerpts from the first-ranked article in the SERP, from HubSpot.

The descriptions of both products mention the number of languages each plugin can translate to. In fact, the first one (coincidentally, our client’s product) mentioned the number of languages as the very first thing.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, even our post (ranking #2) mentions the number of languages our client’s product can translate to. Certainly the more languages, the better, right?

Sure, but here’s a key fact: Most companies only care to translate their site to a handful of languages. Everyone just assumes any translation plugin can translate to the languages they care about.

Think about when you’ve been to a site with multiple language options on the top right, are there 100 language options? Never. There are usually just three to five. And it’s the usual suspects every time: English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, etc. That’s because the majority of companies only do business in a few countries.

Even the United Nations website only has 6 languages listed.

So, sure, the number of languages is a value prop, but by no means should it be the first thing you mention. So why do writers keep overemphasizing it? Because to a writer just getting familiar with this space, it seems like this number matters. It’s easy to find. Bigger seems to be better. But, alas, it’s not a real pain point.

“Assign Tasks and Chat with Your Team”

In the description of the tool Lokalise in HubSpot’s post, we see this interesting value prop mentioned:

Chat with your team? In a translation tool? Is anybody looking for this? Are web teams really looking to chat inside the translation tool instead of on Slack or Teams or wherever they normally chat? Are they using translation plugins to assign tasks instead of whatever project management system they already use?

Even if assigning tasks inside the tool is useful (it could be), is this really such an important value prop to where it should be the first feature mentioned about the tool? No, not at all. Again, the writer is just looking at the tools’ website and guessing at what’s important.

“Cloud-Based”

In the #3 result for this keyword, by WPBeginner, it states that our client’s product is cloud-based. This is true. But why does it matter? Isn’t almost all software cloud-based now? Are any of the other options built to run on-premise or on your local computer? I doubt it. You could argue “cloud-based” is a value prop, but it certainly isn’t an important one.

Complete Mis-Characterization of Loco Translate

Finally, I discovered this mistake was most exemplified in a total mis-characterization of obscure translation plugin Loco Translate in HubSpot’s post.

Here’s the full description:

To appreciate why this copy is so bad, you need to understand what in the world Loco Translate actually does.

I actually had to look it up and it turns out Loco Translate is not a tool for translating any of the public facing content of a WordPress site! That means it won’t translate your homepage headline, your on page copy, your blog posts, nothing. In fact, it doesn’t actually translate anything!

It only helps people edit translations of WordPress theme files.

That’s literally the only thing it does. It says so very clearly in its help docs:

If the writer had just dug into the most basic documentation of this tool, they would have figured this out. Then, they would have realized it actually doesn’t belong on their list at all (or if it is included, it should be clearly stated as a very specific tool for editing translation files of WordPress themes). But they didn’t do this work. They just more or less regurgitated what was on the WP plugin listing for Loco Translate.

This is an extreme example, but it illustrates the point that in order to get the value props in your writing spot on, you need to deeply understand what pain points the product or service solves. But most writers and content marketers don’t do this. They just look at the company’s website and guess what the most important value props are. That leads to egregious and embarrassing errors like this.

In fact, many of our clients have actually told us not to use the copy on their website because it’s bad, outdated, poorly written, or improperly positioned. Marketing site copy is a hard thing to change because it requires agreement from executives and a bunch of key stakeholders, so it often sits with outdated or poor copy for months (or years).

This is why interviews with customer-facing employees, like what we do in our agency’s process, are so important to getting value propositions correct.

Mistake #2: Selling Fluff

Next on our list is maybe the most common complaint about bad writing: fluff. By fluff, we mean unnecessary words or phrases that don’t add anything to the writing and often don’t even really mean anything.

Many clients have told us fluffy writing was one of their biggest annoyances with their previous content teams and writers. They complain that they spent hours turning fluffy writing into something concrete and specific.

Even for us, fluff is our number one challenge with new writer applicants and something we are extremely critical of in our own work. It’s a big problem.

But where does fluff come from?

I believe it also comes from not understanding the customer’s real pain points at a deep and detailed level. Writers need to write something. So when they don’t really, truly, know what the reader cares about, they fill that space with fluff.

To eliminate fluff, you have to ask yourself: Does every word in this sentence earn its way onto the page? This is not a question I invented. It’s a common rule in non-fiction writing, and it works in our marketing content writing as well.

Examples of Fluff

I’ve noticed that one of the most common places where fluff makes its appearance is in the very first sentence describing a product, which is, ironically, where you least need fluff. You’re on the first sentence! You haven’t even gotten to the details yet. Just describe the product plainly.

But here’s what some writers do instead:

“Full-fledged”

The first sentence of the first product mentioned in the WPBeginner article is:

On the surface, this looks like a clean sentence. But look closely. Does every word earn its place?

What immediately jumps out to me is “full-fledged”. What is “full-fledged” accomplishing in this sentence? What does it even mean? This article is a giant list of a bunch of website translation plugins that all…drumroll…translate websites. So if this tool also translates your website, that doesn’t make it “full-fledged”. That just makes it normal.

For “full-fledged” to not be fluff, it needs to be defended with evidence of what features make a tool full-fledged versus what are baseline features. In this case, we see no such defense. “Full-fledged” is just thrown out there with no explanation or backup. It’s fluff.

Here’s the full section. Note how the concept of full-fledged is never defended or explained:

And this brings us to a key definition of fluff words, phrases, and sentences: words by themselves aren’t fluff, it’s the context that makes them fluff.

In other words, “full-fledged” could have been good, non-fluff writing if there was an argument for why TranslatePress was full-fledged. For example, something like:

“While most translation plugins are limited to just [this thing], TranslatePress is a full-fledged WordPress multilingual plugin that also….[list of other features that make it full-fledged]”

That sentence would have defended and even defined full-fledged, turning it from fluff to an actual, useful, value proposition. But, it didn’t.

“Every aspect”

The second half of that first TranslatePress sentence above has additional fluff: “to translate every aspect of your website”. If you have a translation plugin, it, by definition, can translate every word on that site. That’s literally what all of these plugins do. So what does mentioning that this plugin can translate “every aspect” of your website accomplish? Nothing. It’s fluff. It sounds like good sales copy, but it isn’t.

(Note: In this way, fluff is similar to the concept of Mirage Content we introduced back in 2017. The difference is Mirage Content is talking about larger arguments in blog posts. Here, I’m talking about specific words or phrases in the writing that are unnecessary or unclear. They’re related but not the same. Every sentence of a piece could be fluff-free, but if the arguments are all beginner level or cliche, it’s still Mirage Content.)

“Multilingual or bilingual”

Later in the WPBeginner post, there is a discussion of the plugin Polylang that says it’s good for creating a “multilingual or bilingual WordPress site”:

This is redundant for two reasons. A bilingual website is by definition multilingual. If you just say it can help you create multilingual websites, that’s enough.

Second — and this is the more important reason that is at the heart of fluff — this is just not a notable characteristic of a particular translation plugin because all translation plugins help you create multilingual websites. That’s literally what they all do. It’s the equivalent of listing a bunch of different tennis racquets in a blog post and for one of them saying “This racquet can help you hit tennis balls.”

Fluff Makes Your Brand Look Bad

Fluff muddies the writing. While most readers won’t recognize it or call it out as such, they will have a sense of unease at reading bad or shallow writing.

Fluff doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. It’s true that a tennis racquet helps you hit tennis balls. It’s true that a translation plugin can help you create bilingual or multilingual websites. It’s just unnecessary to say these things — often to the point of being weird.

That’s why fluff makes your brand look bad.

To anyone who actually knows the topic (like a high end, savvy B2B customer), fluff immediately stands out as weird or amateurish. How can you expect to attract, impress, or convert the best customers if your content is full of fluff?

Expertise Eliminates Fluff

Although I can’t get inside these writers’ minds and tell you exactly what they were thinking, I’m convinced that fluffy phrases like this enter pieces because the writer doesn’t know what is actually important to say about a given product. They’re just spending a few minutes checking out the website of each tool and regurgitating what it says back into their post, filling in the blanks with fluff.

They haven’t stopped to really figure out which features of each product are the most important and which problems of the customer are most important. If they did, they wouldn’t need fluff.

As evidence of this, think about if you asked any writer to talk about something they know extremely well, say, a specific aspect of their favorite hobby, a political issue they care a lot about, or a family event that was important to them. The writing would be dramatically less fluffy. They’d probably be discussing all kinds of very specific arguments and details that they’ve thought about and been passionate about for a long time. The writer is the same, but in this case, they know all the nuances of that topic — so there is no reason for fluff.

Mistake #3: Missing Important Value Props

The lack of understanding the true pain points of customers and guessing at value props or filling space with fluff results in perhaps the biggest travesty of bad copywriting: missing the most important value props.

For website translation, while writers waste time emphasizing the number of languages you can translate or filling space with fluff like “full-fledged” or “multilingual and bilingual”, we noticed almost none of the other posts on page one of the SERP emphasize (or, sometimes, even mention) these two critical value props of website translation:

1. Automation
2. Accuracy

We figured this out from actually talking to employees who work with customers every day. We do this with all of our clients. We talk to sales reps. We talk to account managers. We talk to customer support. We talk to anyone who interfaces directly with customers and learn the real reasons people buy, the real pain points they have, the value propositions that are really important. That way we don’t have to guess.

How Our Article Is Different: The Work Required to Deeply Understand Pain Points

In the article for our client ranking #2 for this keyword, we have an entire section at the beginning that outlines what to look for in a translation plugin:

First of all, the very existence of a section like this indicates a well-written article. Of course, the actual “features to look for” listed in this section need to be correct, but writers who don’t know what pain points are most important don’t even think to create sections like this.

Why did we list Automation and Accuracy as #1 and #2? Why are they so important for a website translation tool?

To answer that, you need to understand the customer in detail:

• Who are they?
• Why are they translating their website?
• How were they doing it before?
• What is annoying or a pain for them about translating their website?
• And more.

First, through extensive interviews with our client, we learned that one of the biggest annoyances with website translation is keeping up with all the new content that people add to their website.

A common customer type of site translation tools are eCommerce brands that sell in multiple countries. And eCommerce sites are constantly adding new products. Every time that happens, they need to have all copy related to that product translated to all the languages that site is in (typically most European languages: Spanish, French, German, etc.). This is usually managed by humans and is a huge pain. They don’t want to have to go into a tool and even click “translate” over and over every time a new product is added. They want it done automatically.

Without talking to customers, you would have no idea that this was a critical pain point (arguably the biggest pain point) of website translation.

Second, customers want to pair this automation with accuracy.

Automatic translation means computer translation, which everyone knows can create unnatural sounding language. That’s fine as a start, but most brands want to make sure a human can edit and tweak the translations. They want both the computer translation to be as cutting edge in accuracy as possible and the ability to easily let human translators check the site’s work.

Third, they want the SEO meta info (meta tags, etc.) to be translated to each language as well, so each language version of their site is automatically optimized for SEO.

And, these three are just a start. There are many more pain points (as you can see in the five things to look for section) that we uncovered in our interviews for this piece.

Then, when we introduce our client’s product, we emphasize the three critical features that address these three major customer pain points right at the beginning:

This is what it looks like for an article to talk about the correct and most important value props. Yes, it’s hard work to figure all this out before writing a blog post. Yes, it takes time. But if you want good copy and good blog posts, this is what it takes.

Now, let’s look at the opposite.

How HubSpot Gets Our Client’s Product Wrong

In contrast, look at how the HubSpot post mangles these value props and fills space with useless value props and fluff:

Specifically:

• “100 languages” — Again, the vast majority of brands only care about translating to 5–10 languages, maybe even less. That said, our post also mentions this, but it’s as a side note in a bullet about automation that is one of the most important value props: “Automatic machine translation (you can translate any website in minutes, not days) that works with over 100 different languages.”
  
  
• “A lightweight plugin” — Who cares? No one is choosing a translation plugin based on how many megabytes it takes up on your server.
  
  
• “Manage from a single dashboard” — This is fine but not as important as automation, accuracy, and SEO, which aren’t mentioned anywhere here.
  
  
• “The best part? It can even handle your WooCommerce product pages” — The best part?! This is not the best part! It’s expected that it can translate all pages. This is fluff.

But to be fair, there is a single line in this HubSpot blurb about our client’s product that starts to get at the right value props:

“…offers automatic translations and access to professional translators if needed.” 

This is great. These are the important value props of automation and accuracy (via professional translators). The only problem is that this is not emphasized enough and not positioned quite correctly.

The phrase “if needed” is really, really close. While it’s technically accurate, in our opinion, it positions professional translation a little too casually. The better positioning of professional translations are that they can help you keep your translations extremely accurate. In addition, this line misses a critical related value prop of our client’s product: you can order professional translations right from the platform, which solves a massive pain point of having to find your own translators.

This difference in positioning is subtle, but it’s important — and it takes us to the last common mistake.

Mistake #4: Selling a Good Value Proposition the Wrong Way

This is the last mistake because it’s the most subtle. It requires that you talk about the correct value props in the first place, which, as we saw above, isn’t a guarantee.

But when you are talking about the most important value props, the way you position them matters.

“If You’re Short on Time”

The second tool discussed in the HubSpot post has this line that talks about automatic translations — a feature we know is important to these customers:

That last line is so close to being good. It does talk about automatic translations, which as we said is one of the customers’ biggest pain points.

But the problem is it’s positioned as “if you’re short on time.” This isn’t quite right because it underemphasizes the importance of this feature. It makes it sounds like automatic translation is a optional perk, like a heated cupholder in a luxury car: “If you happen to have a hot coffee you need to keep warm, you can!” You don’t buy the car for the heated cupholder, it’s just a nice perk. But good automatic translation is a reason you’d choose a specific plugin. It’s that important. This emphasis matters if you want your copy to convert the best customers at the highest rate possible.

“Grow into More Complex Language Implementations”

Another tool in the HubSpot post, Lingotek, has its human translation feature positioned like this:

This is also almost there. As we learned, pairing machine with human translation is a feature that solves important pain points. But it’s not about “starting simple and growing into more complex language implementations.”

First of all, that line includes fluff. What is a “more complex language implementation?” That sounds like a smart phrase but what does it mean? Do they mean more complex languages? What exactly is a language “implementation?” Language is language. You have a website in language X, you want to translate it into language Y. You do that every time. Why would one time be more complex than another? Maybe they mean length? If so, why not just say length? It’s unclear.

Second, it’s not about “growing into” anything. These plugins aren’t like when your parents bought you oversized clothes that you had to “grow into.” It’s not that small companies only need machine translation and big ones need human translations. The real value prop of human translation is accuracy.

Even a small site with only a few pages may need extremely accurate copy (say, for legal reasons). If customers are looking for accuracy, but you’re positioning these features as being about “growing into” complexity, you’re going to lose some of those potential customers due to lack of clarity.

A simple sentence like this would have been much better:

“These three tiers let brands pair the speed and automation of machine translation with the accuracy of human translation — depending on the accuracy levels they need.”

Why This Matters: Good Copy Converts Better

These subtle differences matter. This is the difference between copy that makes a prospect think “Yes, this solves my exact problem!” and “Hmm, let me see what other options there are.”

It’s the difference between copy that converts and copy that doesn’t.

To really understand how to position the automatic translation feature, you can’t guess.

A typical freelance writer just given minimal info isn’t going to stumble upon the fact that automatic translation is really important, or that it should be paired with the ability to edit translations for accuracy, or that finding your own professional translators is a pain, or that translating SEO meta info is a pain, or that being able to translate everything without developers is a huge need. You need interviews — like the ones we do with all of our clients for our pieces — to figure that out.

Here are resources from our site to help you fix these mistakes:

Interviews to Understand Pain Points

• Content Ideation — An old article that details how to interview customers to figure out their real pain points

• Case Study — An example of how we learned a lot about a complex space where we had no domain expertise, via interviews

Pain Points for Content Topics

• Jobs to be done keywords — How to use pain point understanding to find niche keywords that convert

Our Course

• Our content marketing course and community is case study based and the first module has recordings of us actually interviewing members of the founding teams of 3–4 companies so you can see how we do these for clients.

Our Content Agency

• Finally, if you’re looking to work with a content or SEO agency that does not make the writing mistakes outlined above and writes in a very intentional, careful way about your products, you can learn more about working with us here.

We have, for those familiar with Grow and Convert, built our entire business on using content to generate conversions. So, we have lots of opinions and ideas on this topic, which this article will review.

To start, we noticed that most discussions about creating conversion content place too much emphasis on what we think of as the “window dressing” of content. For example, writing great headlines, having easy-to-read formatting, using compelling visuals, etc.

All of these tips are fine, don’t get us wrong, but they’re, (a) kind of obvious (of course you should have good formatting), and (b) not that important. We’ve had plenty of clients come to us with all of these bases covered — good headlines, clean blog design, good user experience — and yet, their content barely converts.

Why? Because in our experience, these UX details aren’t nearly as important as, (1) the topic and SEO keywords that your content ranks for, and (2) how well you sell your product or service in the content.

You can think of the important aspects of getting conversions from content in three tiers:

• Tier #1 — Topics: Choosing high-converting SEO keywords

• Tier #2 — Writing: Selling your product or service inside the content

• Tier #3 — CTAs and Everything Else: CTAs, headlines, blog design, etc.

Crucially, these tiers are in order of importance. If you don’t take care of tiers 1 and 2 first, then no amount of tier 3 tactics (well crafted headlines, banner CTAs, or CRO “hacks”) will make your content convert.

Below, we’re going to walk through the framework we use to create high-converting content for our clients, including what to know about each tier, why the order is so important, and links to articles that will help you with executing this conversion-focused content marketing strategy.

Note: This post focuses specifically on creating conversion content for SEO because this is what we do at Grow and Convert. We’re not talking about content for social media, video, or other channels, because SEO content is more evergreen and can drive traffic and conversions more sustainably over the long term, making it one of the most valuable forms of conversion content for many businesses. You can learn more about our approach here.

Tier #1 — Topics: Choosing High-Converting SEO Keywords

As we’ve discussed at length many times before, most businesses, content marketing and SEO agencies, and in-house marketers use traffic-focused content strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that with enough traffic, conversions will inevitably follow.

In practice, this means they prioritize keywords that have high search volume, but low to zero buying intent. For example, if you sell project management software, this might mean targeting keywords such as “project management tips” or “top trends in project management.”

While these keywords are loosely related to your product and likely have high search volumes that could drive substantial organic traffic, people searching these terms show no indication that they have intent to buy project management software. (If they did, they’d be more likely to Google a term with clear buying intent such as “best project management software” or “project management apps for contractors.”)

As a result, from our measurements, these keywords tend to have very low conversion rates — a point that is neatly 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 for each of the URLs listed. The three boxed posts follow the Pain Point SEO approach and rank for keywords with high buying intent. The rest rank for something the target audience could search for, but not a high buying intent keyword. The new user signups from the three Pain Point SEO posts are hundreds of percent higher. 

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

The posts targeting high buying intent keywords (which we’ve traditionally referred to as “bottom of funnel”) didn’t just convert a bit better than the higher-volume-lower-intent posts, they converted 2400% better. In that case study, you can read about how that difference in conversion rate more than made up for any differences in search volume or traffic between the two buckets.

If you choose and rank for the high buying intent keywords, you could get everything else we discuss below wrong and still convert more readers than if you were to get all of what we discuss below right, but focus on keywords that lack buying intent.

This is why choosing the right keywords is the #1 most important thing to get right if you want to increase conversions from content. For an in-depth look at our process for developing a conversion-focused keyword strategy, check out these articles:

• SEO Keyword Strategy: How to Prioritize Based on Buying Intent to Drive More Conversions
  
  
• How to Create a Successful SEO Content Strategy: 2 Factors That Are Often Overlooked

Tier #2 — Writing: Selling Your Product or Service inside the Content

Many content marketers barely discuss the company’s product or service inside of the content they write. They’ll sometimes glancingly mention and link to a product or service page in their blog content, but they often just rely on design elements of the page to “take care of conversions” (e.g. pop-ups, email list opt-in forms, CTA graphics, etc.).

We think this mistake is related to the problem discussed in Tier #1 above: that the culture of content marketing has been to keep everything top of funnel (whitepapers, infographics, ultimate guides, etc.). The advice that’s typically paired with that practice is to “not be too salesy” in your content: “just give the customer advice and value and they’ll like your brand and (fingers crossed) remember you later when they need to buy” (not likely).

In our experience, even if you’re writing about top of funnel topics that aren’t product-focused, you need to weave in a compelling discussion of your product or service if you want your content to convert.

Furthermore, if you focus on high buying intent keywords as we discussed above, this necessitates discussing your product or service in order to meet search intent (a key ranking factor in search engine optimization that determines whether or not your content will rank for its intended keyword).

If someone is searching for “best project management software”, their intent is to learn about the details of various options. They want to know what’s better about this software option versus that one, how they compare, which is better for whom, and more. Discussing those product related ideas isn’t “being salesy” for this search query, it’s just fulfilling search intent! So, whether you go after that keyword with a landing page or a blog post, the content of the page needs to discuss your product or service in-depth.

Now, with all of this in mind, there are two key things to consider:

1. Writing about product and service details and differentiators requires that writers are able to gain product and domain expertise, and express that through content.
   
   
2. Expressing originality through content (a key aspect of driving conversions) requires a slightly different approach when selling a service versus a product.

Let’s look at each.

(1) Conversion Content Requires a Process to Gain and Express Product and Domain Expertise

Writing conversion-focused content requires writers to be able to deeply understand your value propositions, key features and unique differentiators, and express these in a clear and compelling way through content.

We can say from experience that this is a unique skill set that isn’t easy to find or teach. Even great writers often lack these key abilities that are more akin to product copywriting. And from what we’ve learned, most content marketing and SEO agencies (many of whom outsource content writing to freelancers) also lack good processes for gaining and expressing product and domain expertise.

At Grow and Convert, because our focus is on ranking for high buying intent keywords (“best accounting software” or “recruiter for executive assistant” for example), we sell our client’s products and services in every piece of content we produce. We get into the details of features, explain how they solve customer pain points, weave in testimonials and case studies, and differentiate our client’s products from those of their competitors.

We do this by basing our articles on extensive interviews with people at our clients’ companies — product teams, sales teams, customer support teams, etc. We have been doing this for years and have an extensive writer training process that has helped us build a tight-knit team of product copywriters.

If you want to write truly high-quality content that is capable of converting readers (particularly advanced B2B readers), involving the experts at your company in your content creation process is absolutely essential.

To learn more about the details of how we approach this, check out these past articles:

• How to do B2B Content Marketing without Domain Expertise
• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow

(2) Expressing Originality Through Content Is Different When Selling a Service versus a Product

What we’ve discussed above — the need to gain product and domain expertise, discuss your unique differentiators, and the way you solve customer pain points — applies to both product and service businesses.

However, another key aspect of conversion content is expressing originality, and in our experience this is done slightly differently depending on whether you sell a product or a service.

If you sell a product, originality comes from discussing your product’s features and the way they solve customer pain points differently or better than your competitors. But if you sell a service, typically the way you express originality comes from discussing what’s different about your strategy or process compared to competitors, and how that allows you to get better results for your clients. We do this in every piece of content we produce for our agency as well as for the service businesses we work with.

For example, we previously worked with a remote executive assistant service, and their unique differentiator was their hiring process. Specifically, they used their backgrounds in behavioral science to design a rigorous hiring methodology that allowed them to more thoroughly vet executive assistant candidates. So, this was the main point of differentiation that we would focus on expressing in each one of their articles.

To learn more about leveraging originality in content, check out this post: Why Your Content Needs “Originality Nuggets” to Be Effective.

Tier #3 — CTAs and Everything Else (Headlines, Blog Design, etc.)

If you’ve done the first two tiers right, the rest of the tactics that marketers talk about prioritizing for conversion are, to be honest, pretty trivial and inconsequential. Why?

Because if someone is googling some super high buying intent term, like “plumbing management app” for example, 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 to click on should they decide they want to learn more.

For example here is a collage of blog layouts of our actual bottom of funnel blog posts for our real clients:

Note how all of them, across different industries and verticals, have unmissable CTAs in the navbar. Plus the logos going to the homepage and other navigation links are also totally reasonable routes for a customer reading a good BOTF article to use to explore more about the company and its products or services.

These customers have come to your site with clear intent to see if your product or service might be a good fit for them, you’ve either convinced and compelled them with your content, or you haven’t. If you have, the CTA buttons and links in your navigation are generally right there for them to take the next step.

Sure, you can make conversion optimization tweaks like making your navigation bar sticky (a good idea), or use UX improvements like increasing font contrast to improve readability, but the bottom line is that if these potential customers want to sign up for a demo or call to learn more, most websites make this very easy.

This is why we don’t prioritize the typical window dressing elements of blogs. When you’re using a high buying intent SEO content strategy, they’re nowhere near as important as they might be otherwise.

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.

1. Hiring an individual contractor
2. Hiring an in-house SEO manager or building an in-house team
3. Hiring an SEO agency

All three of these options have their pros and cons and what’s best for you depends on your situation. However, we noticed that most discussions stop there, with some cliche about “do what’s best for you”, which is obvious and helps no one. 

This article is meant to be the antidote to that surface level discussion. Below, we share our experience and opinions of when each type of SEO makes sense for a business to hire. This is based on years of working with dozens of clients as an SEO and content marketing agency and, importantly, working with their internal SEO teams and contractors. Our opinions are also informed by what clients have told us has been their experience with past SEOs they’ve hired and our observations of their work. 

Finally, yes, the fact that we’re an SEO agency obviously affects our opinion. We are proud of our process and methodology and the results we’ve achieved for clients, so we feel that we can help tons of businesses achieve real lead growth via SEO, not just hollow traffic. 

But we also freely admit that we aren’t the best fit for every SEO need. For example, if you’re already ranking for a lot of buying intent keywords and need someone to maintain and improve 100+ existing URLs, an in-house SEO or technical SEO contractor would be better than hiring us. 

So, below we’ll cover:

• Key factors when deciding which hire is best for you
• Questions to ask when hiring an SEO
• Scenarios of when each option makes sense for a business

Agencies vs. Freelancers vs. In-house: Key Factors to Consider When Deciding Which to Choose

Factor #1: Execution of SEO Generally Requires More Than One Person 

To have any hope of distinguishing a good SEO hire from a bad one, you need to start with at least a basic understanding of what SEO entails and thus what skills and processes are necessary to “do” SEO. 

SEO requires a wide range of different skill sets to be executed successfully. Specifically, it takes some combination of: 

• Keyword strategy: Keyword research, identifying valuable keywords, prioritizing the order in which to tackle keywords.
• Content writing: Writing high level content that both ranks and converts traffic to leads or sales.
• Technical SEO: Performing SEO audits and monitoring websites for technical issues, fixing issues that arise.
• Analytics: Setting up systems to track key metrics (i.e. organic traffic, conversions, backlinks, etc.) in Google Analytics, Search Console, Semrush, or Ahrefs, among the other tools you’re using.
• Web development: Making website changes when necessary (such as creating new pages, adjusting the site map, etc). 

It’s unrealistic to find a single SEO expert that can do all of these things successfully. For example, when working with our agency, there are often 3 to 5 people with different areas of expertise working together on your account. We have SEO and content strategists, 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. 

So, if you’re planning to hire an individual SEO consultant or in-house SEO manager, it’s worth keeping in mind that that person will need to build a team (either through more in-house hires, contractors, or agencies) to execute the full process. 

In theory, if you hire an agency that has a team in place to handle the entire SEO process from A to Z (as we do at Grow and Convert), this gives agencies an advantage over individual contractors and single in-house hires. But be careful about the writing step — many agencies tend to outsource content writing to freelance writers in their rolodex, which brings us to the next key factor to consider. 

Factor #2: Most SEOs Outsource Content Writing to Freelancers in a Flawed Way

Content writing — specifically, blog content writing — is a crucial aspect of SEO because the core pages of a company’s marketing website (home page, product or service pages, etc.) can only rank for a handful of keywords. To rank for more valuable keywords, you need to produce new, unique content. 

To create this content, most SEOs use freelance writers. This in and of itself is not an issue. But the process that SEOs use when working with freelance writers is flawed. We’ve written an entire article about this topic, which you can read here.

In short, there are two common approaches used by SEOs when working with freelance writers:

The first approach is to simply give the writer a topic or keyword, and have them self-research and produce an article on that topic. We call these “Google Research Papers” — where writers do a Google search on the topic and regurgitate what other people are saying. This leads to generic, low-quality content that is unlikely to rank for valuable keywords, let alone convert any readers into actual customers. 

The second approach is to provide writers with a “content brief” that is slightly more prescriptive (e.g. providing a light outline of subheadings and topics to cover), but still leaves writers largely to figure out the key arguments to make on a topic by themselves. 

In both of these approaches, there are two key issues: 

• Lack of product and domain expertise. Neither of these methods for producing content use a process for gaining and expressing product and domain expertise in your content. They produce Google Research Papers, as we said above, that just sound the same as what everyone else is saying. This is a poor reflection on your brand. In particular, if you’re a B2B business where your customers are professionals in their field (Head of IT, HR managers, CMO, etc.) they’ll often know more on a topic than the writer who wrote your content. That’s embarrassing. It also means that for bottom of funnel topics — which we’ve argued ad nauseam are the most impactful — your writers don’t have the knowledge to discuss the details and differentiators of your product and actually convert readers to customers (more on this below).

• High potential for lacking SEO best-practices required to rank. Many freelance writers are not trained in on-page SEO, and may not have the know-how to take an SEO content brief and turn it into an optimized piece that’s capable of actually ranking for a highly competitive keyword.

If you work with an individual consultant or single in-house SEO manager, they’re almost always going to need to work with freelance writers, and therefore, these issues are likely to be a problem unless the person you hire has a more strategic process. 

Alternatively, if you work with an agency that has in-house writers and a process for solving these issues (as we do at Grow and Convert), then agencies can be a better option than individual hires. 

Factor #3: In-House Teams Take Longer to Get Up and Running

As a final consideration, if you hire an in-house SEO manager, it may take 3-6 months for them to get to know your business, develop a keyword strategy, find and hire freelance writers (a task we’ve found to be very hard), and get content production up and running. Then, there’s the additional time that it takes for your pages and content to rank for keywords in Google; so you might be looking at 12 months before even seeing initial results. 

In contrast, good SEO agencies will have processes (and teams) in place to get up and running immediately, speeding up the time it takes to get results from SEO. For example, as shown in our case study on how long it takes to rank in Google, our agency often has 25-35 articles ranking on the first page for high-value, buying-intent keywords in the first 12 months. 

Consultants with good systems might have a slight time advantage over an in-house hire. But since they’ll likely need to hire and work with contractors to handle parts of execution, they’re also at a disadvantage when it comes to speed. 

For these reasons, agencies will often be the best option from a speed-to-results perspective. 

Now, with these factors in mind, let’s look at the key questions (based on our experience) that businesses should ask candidates when hiring someone for SEO.

Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO

We’ve written at length about factors to consider when choosing an SEO agency, but these factors are relevant when vetting an SEO from any of the categories we’ve been discussing. 

Here we’ll touch briefly on these, but read that post for the full context and explanation behind each one of these questions (discussed as “factors” within that post). 

Do They Use a Traffic-Focused or Conversion-Focused Keyword Strategy?

In our opinion, this is the #1 most important question because it dictates whether or not your SEO budget generates actual ROI. 

Most SEO professionals use traffic-focused keyword strategies with the mindset that with enough traffic, conversions (leads, sales, signups, demos) will follow. But we’ve seen time and time again that more search traffic does not mean more conversions.

Traffic-first SEO strategies might make sense for some businesses (e.g. large incumbents who are already ranking for most of their high-buying-intent keywords), but in our experience, they are a bad fit for companies who want to be efficient with their budget and hit tangible revenue and business goals with their SEO investment (i.e. measurable leads and sales). 

Here are two past articles that provide conversion rate data to back up this assertion:

• Pain-Point SEO: How to Produce SEO Content That Drives Conversions
• Scaling Content: Expanding from Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)

And here’s a good article detailing how we approach this at our agency: SEO Keyword Strategy: How to Prioritize Based on Buying Intent to Drive More Conversions

Regardless of who you hire, be sure to ask them what their SEO or content marketing strategy is optimized to achieve. You will see far better ROI if you hire someone that focuses first and foremost on driving conversions. 

Which Facet of SEO (Technical, Keyword Strategy & Content, or Link Building) Do They Place the Most Emphasis On?

Through conversations with clients about their experiences working with other SEO services, we’ve learned that many focus the majority of their efforts on on-page search engine optimization, technical SEO, and link building. They spend much less time and effort on what we’ve found to be the most important parts of SEO — identifying high-value keywords and creating pages designed to rank for those keywords. 

We think this is backwards. 

In our view, technical SEO and link building should only be done in the service of ranking for your highest value keywords. They can help increase domain authority and improve your chances of ranking in top search engine results pages (SERPs), but they cannot generate any actual revenue for your business on their own. 

Getting top search engine rankings for valuable keywords (our agency’s #1 priority) is where revenue from SEO comes from.

So, without (1) identifying what your highest value keywords are and (2) strategically creating pages on your site to rank for those keywords, having a technically healthy site with several white hat backlinks does very little for your business. 

When hiring an SEO, make sure you get to the bottom of this. 

Ask them questions like:

• What tangible results can we expect after 6-12 months? 
• When they say something about “rankings” ask for specifics: how many keywords can we rank for? How will we rank for those? Which pages on our site or new pages will you use to rank for those? 
• How much weight do they place on technical SEO vs. link building vs. keyword strategy and content? What portion of their time and effort do they spend on each?

If they seem to emphasize technical SEO and link building heavily or as being equally important, this is a red flag and you should think twice about working with them. You’ll be better off hiring someone that uses these to support the main goal of (a) identifying your highest value keywords, and (b) ranking for them with unique, dedicated pages.

Do They Just Do Keyword Research and Provide “Content Briefs”? Or Do They Actually Create New Content to Rank for Your Target Keywords?

Your homepage and existing marketing site can only rank for so much, yet many SEOs and agencies almost exclusively focus on those few site pages to rank for valuable buying keywords. Then they relegate blog content to general top of funnel traffic building. They create a giant keywords list and hand content briefs to writers without worrying too much about those articles. That is a huge waste of SEO resources. 

Most businesses have dozens of high-buying-intent keywords available; you can’t possibly get your homepage or a few landing pages to rank for all of them. You need new content tailor-made to rank for all of these keyword variations, and that content needs to be created carefully and strategically. 

So, if you’re hiring an agency or outside consultant, be sure to ask them about this. In our opinion, you’ll be much better off going with a service that does both the keyword strategy and the content creation so that they can ensure the content is written carefully enough to rank and convert.

Note:If you’re hiring an in-house SEO manager, this question still applies. Ask them whether they’d do both the keyword strategy and the writing themselves. If their plan is to hire freelance writers to create content, ask what their process would be to ensure writers produce pieces that will properly execute on keyword strategy.

Do They Have Expertise in Product and Service Copywriting?

If you take our point that your priority should be to rank for high-buying-intent keywords, then whoever you hire to do SEO will need to understand how to talk about your products or service in-depth, describe your key features, use cases, and what differentiates your product from competitors. 

In order to do this well, they need to have a process for getting this knowledge out of the heads of the experts at your company — your product managers, sales team, customer success team, etc. — and onto the pages they create for you. This is what makes compelling, high-quality content that’s capable of converting readers into customers. 

We can say from experience that this is a unique skill set that isn’t easy to come by. Even great writers often lack these key abilities required for selling products and services through content.

When speaking with prospective hires, try to get a sense of whether or not they have a process for expressing your product features and differentiators through content. Ask them about this. Have them show you examples. If their answers and/or examples aren’t compelling, they probably aren’t the right person (or agency) to work with.

At Grow and Convert, since our focus is on ranking for high buying-intent keywords (e.g. “best accounting software”, “concussion clinic in utah”), we sell our client’s products and services in every piece of content we produce. We get into the details of features, explain how they solve customer pain points, weave in testimonials and case studies, and differentiate our client’s products from those of their competitors. 

We do this by basing our articles on extensive interviews with people at our clients’ companies — product teams, sales teams, customer support teams, etc. We have been doing this for years and have an extensive training process for writers that has helped us build a tight-knit team of product copywriters. 

Read the following past articles to learn more about how we approach this:

• How to Do B2B Content Marketing without Domain Expertise
• SaaS Content Writing: How to Write Content That Gets Leads and Signups

Do They Have Case Studies Demonstrating Their Ability to Drive Actual ROI?

Finally, ask any individual or agency you’re considering hiring to show you proof of their ability to drive business results from SEO. If they have in-depth case studies that show data of the results they’ve achieved for other companies, you can feel much more confident that they’ll be able to achieve results for you, too.

Here are 7 case studies you can read to see how we’ve executed our SEO strategy and met SEO needs for real businesses:

1. B2C Content Marketing Example: 0 – 200,000+ Pageviews/Month
2. 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)
7. Case Study: Applying Pain Point SEO to All-In-One SaaS Products

Then, and this is key, ask for as much detail as possible about how they achieved these results. Don’t be satisfied with surface level case studies like “We grew traffic from 0 to 100,000 pageviews”. Ask about: 

• What pages got that traffic? 
• Was it from a couple of pages, or many? 
• Was unique content created? 
• Who created it? 
• What keywords did this traffic come from? 
• Why are those keywords useful for this business? 
• Did you measure leads or conversions? What was the conversion rate? 
• And so on.

Scenarios of When Each Option Makes Sense for a Business

Throughout this post, we’ve argued from many different angles that most businesses would benefit from hiring a good SEO agency, rather than an individual consultant or in-house hire. 

However, there are cases in which any of these options can make sense.

When Hiring an Individual SEO Consultant Makes Sense

Hiring an individual SEO specialist can make sense for companies that already have a ton of content on their site and are looking to get the best performance out of their pages that have already been created.

For example, an eCommerce website with dozens (or hundreds) of product pages can benefit from an individual contractor that provides ongoing technical maintenance and on-page SEO to ensure their site is well-optimized for driving traffic and conversions through organic search.

When Hiring an In-House SEO Manager Makes Sense

Making an in-house SEO hire can be a great fit for larger companies that are well funded and have the intention to build an in-house team. For example, if you’re a product store or a large SaaS company and you can afford to build an SEO team, this can be worthwhile to pursue.

Alternatively, hiring a single in-house SEO manager that works with and manages contracted writers, for example, can work as long as they’re savvy about the factors we discussed above (i.e. they understand how to hire and work with content writers, how to gain product and domain expertise, they’re good at editing and copywriting, etc).

When Working with an SEO Agency Makes Sense

If you want to have a single point of contact (or a single vendor) that can execute the entire SEO process, then considering an agency makes sense. Another reason to choose an agency is if they have a unique or specific process or methodology that would be useful to your business. 

But, as with all options for SEO, vet agencies using the questions above. Just because they are an agency and can do all aspects of SEO, doesn’t mean they do it well, so vetting is important. 

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 generating leads, 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. 

1. The results are evergreen.

When SEO is done well, once you rank for keywords that bring in traffic, leads, and customers, they continue generating this “free” organic traffic and leads for as long as those rankings are maintained. In our experience, you can maintain rankings for years if the pages you create are crafted to deeply match the search intent of the keyword.

Note: We put quotes around “free” because as we’ll discuss below, it takes effort (i.e. people and resources) to actually get and maintain those rankings, so it’s not really free. However, there is no incremental cost per visitor, so at a certain point rankings do begin generating free traffic and leads.

2. The traffic is highly targeted.

In contrast to many other digital marketing channels where audiences are only passively coming across your marketing (e.g. display advertising, social media advertising, etc.), organic search allows you to reach people who are actively searching to buy the type of product or service you sell (or solve a problem your product or service solves). As a result, we often see much higher conversion rates than many other channels if you target the right keywords.

With that said, while SEO is worth the investment for many businesses, how can you know if it’s worth it for your business?That’s what we’re going to discuss in this article.

Below, we cover:

• How costs and value of SEO change over time
• How to estimate the costs of SEO
• How to estimate your potential value of SEO
• A spreadsheet to help estimate if SEO is worth it
• Our foundational articles for businesses looking to invest in SEO

Understanding How the Costs and Value of SEO Change Over Time

At the most basic level, asking “Is SEO worth it?” means asking… Is the value I could get from SEO higher than what I’m likely to spend on it? 

Doing that is, in theory, straightforward: Figure out the cost of doing SEO, estimate the revenue it could bring in, compare the two numbers. If the value is higher than the costs (positive return on investment), it’s worth it; otherwise, it’s not.

But the tricky part of this for SEO is that the value of SEO changes dramatically over time. Specifically, SEO takes time to generate traffic and leads. So the value in the early months is very low, but if brands stick with it, it can (in our direct experience across dozens of clients) generate tremendous value, multiple times higher than the monthly cost of the SEO team.

To understand if SEO is worth it for your business, you need to take a moment to understand how the costs and value of SEO change over time. This is a critical concept that we see executives and experienced marketers misunderstand all the time.

Here is this value change over time expressed as a (hypothetical) graph:

The costs of SEO are largely fixed and predictable. You’re paying someone (in-house, agency, consultant, etc.) to do keyword research, pick keywords, create pages to rank for those keywords, build links, and more. But the rub is that, unlike paid channels, there is no immediate ROI because once those pages are created and published, it takes time for Google’s algorithm to actually rank them on the first page for their intended keywords. Before pages rank for their target keywords, they can’t generate this targeted, high-converting traffic we spoke about at the beginning.

Therefore, SEO requires patience! There’s a period of initial investment where the value generated from your SEO efforts each month is less than what you’ve spent. That’s shown in the first 6-10 months of the graph above where the red line (investment) is higher than the blue lines (value generated). Then, as you begin to rank for your target keywords (typically between months 5-10), website traffic and conversions begin to tick up subtly. As your rankings compound (often at the one year mark and beyond), the traffic and leads from your efforts begin to produce more value than your monthly spend. In our experience, it doesn’t take long from there to recoup the initial period of investment.

At that point, your business can make money from the rankings you’ve acquired (which have already been paid for), while continuing to spend that same incremental monthly cost to produce more content and get more rankings (or, optionally, stopping further SEO investment and letting the rankings you acquired continue producing results while you cut off spend entirely). ROI can grow at a relatively linear rate from that point, and generally levels off as you exhaust high-buying-intent keyword opportunities in your space.

This is the thing to understand about how the value of SEO can work in an ideal context over the long-term, with the following two assumptions:

1. There’s good keyword search volume and conversion potential in your space (i.e. the potential SEO value for your business is higher than the likely costs)
   
   
2. Your SEO strategy is focused on targeting buying intent keywords that drive actual revenue for your business (not brand awareness, traffic-chasing, low intent keywords)

We’ve written at length about the latter point which is essential and we’ll link to those articles below. The rest of this piece will focus on helping you decide if the first assumption — that the potential value of SEO is higher than the costs — is true for your business.

How to Estimate the Costs of SEO

The cost of SEO is mostly based on the cost of the people you pay to do the work, whether that’s an agency, a group of freelancers and/or consultants, or an in-house SEO manager or team.

The key thing to understand about SEO costs is that — as per the red lines in the graph above — they usually stay relatively fixed. Yes, you can decide to scale content creation efforts up or down, produce more or less content in a given month, pay for more or less backlinks, but by and large, most companies we work with reach a steady state or rhythm of content production and link building, so their monthly SEO costs stay fixed.

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. The most popular plan for our SEO agency, for example, is $10,000 per month.

When it comes to estimating your costs, Google or ask around to price out options for SEO services, freelance SEO experts, or in-house SEOs. If you want current employees to do SEO work for you, calculate what percentage of their time they’d spend on SEO and multiply that by their salaries. But the bottom line is not to worry about this being exactly right, just aim for a number that’s close enough and move on to estimating your potential value from SEO.

As we’ll discuss below, the whole point of SEO is that once you cross breakeven, it has a positive impact that should far outweigh your initial costs to get rankings. So even if you’re off by thousands of dollars a month, if SEO is worth it for you, the value and potential customers it can generate shouldn’t be slightly higher than your cost, it should be far higher. If it’s a close call, it’s likely SEO isn’t worth integrating into your marketing efforts.

How to Think About and Estimate the Value of SEO for Your Business

Estimating the value of SEO for your business is not easy, but it’s possible to map out some ballpark numbers that can help you get a baseline understanding of whether or not SEO could be worth investing in. Approach this part as a go/no-go or pass/fail decision.

Don’t try to get overly precise with exact ROI estimates — as we explain below, there are many reasons why it’s basically impossible to estimate exact SEO ROI.

We’re going to look at this in terms of two factors you should consider:

1. Traffic Potential: Are enough searchers looking for the product or service you sell? If so, what’s the search volume and potential traffic you could get from SEO?
   
   
2. Conversion Potential: How many conversions (leads or sales) could you get from that additional organic traffic to your site?

Ultimately, you’re looking to estimate whether you can get enough organic traffic to produce conversions (based on an average conversion rate) that generate more revenue than what you spend on SEO.

Let’s take a closer look at each factor.

1. How Much Potential Traffic Can SEO Help Generate?

The first key thing to investigate is whether people are searching for your product or service in Google and other search engines. If no one is searching for what you sell, then SEO likely will not be worth an investment. This is the #1 (and probably only) reason you should rule out SEO as a channel.

If people are searching for what you sell, then you need to get a sense of how many people are searching every month — referred to as search volume. Search volume is the number of searches per month for a given keyword. And you can find this data in any keyword research tool such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Clearscope, or many others.

A good place to start is figuring out how many monthly searches and keyword variations there are for the terms that describe your product or service. Just type your business category into a keyword research tool and see what comes up.

For example, if you sell a natural pre-workout drink mix, see what keywords and associated search volumes come up for that. Here’s what we see in Clearscope for “natural pre workout”:

At a glance, we can see there are thousands of monthly searches for keywords with really high buying intent in this category, and many different keyword variations. So, if this is what you sold, this would be an indicator that SEO is likely worth investing in, given that the value of traffic to your site is high enough (discussed next).

Alternatively, if you sell a super niche, innovative product that your market generally doesn’t know about yet, you might find that no one is searching for what you sell — in which case, SEO may not be the best channel for you.

For example, one of our current clients previously ran a business where they developed a product for validating the authenticity of B2B testimonials and case studies. If we type in “B2B testimonial authentication tool”, we find that (unsurprisingly) there’s no registered search volume for this keyword:

The same goes when we try searching for “validate case studies” or “validate testimonials.” Indeed, they told us that they used outbound sales almost exclusively and their sales people had to explain both the concept and the value of their product to customers, confirming the idea that no one was looking for this.

Could it be possible for them to create demand and define a category with enough content marketing elbow grease? Maybe. But they’d need to be really willing to play the long game and most companies don’t have the budget or wherewithal for this.

Ideally, you want to see decent search volume for your business category. But it’s also important to understand that this works on a sliding scale with the size of your target audience and the price of your product. If you sell a high priced B2B SaaS where customers spend thousands of dollars with you every month and stay with you on average for a year and a half, there’s obviously a lot less people searching for this than a consumer product like a natural pre workout drink mix. But that’s okay because you may only need 5 or 10 customers per month to break even on your monthly spend.

Ballpark Estimates of Number of Keywords and Search Volume

That said, in general, when taking on new B2B clients, we typically do some quick keyword research to see if we can easily find 20 – 40 keywords with decent buying intent. We don’t need to find the exact keywords immediately, but we see if it’s easy to find dozens of keywords. (Our best, longest running clients have hundreds of keywords with some buying intent.)

If it’s a struggle to find ~20 keywords that you think have buying intent, then you may be in a niche where SEO isn’t the best channel. It doesn’t mean SEO is totally not worth it, but you should think of it as a short term investment to rank for however many high-buying-intent keywords you do have, and then move on.

Alternatively, if you can easily put a couple of obvious keywords into any SEO keyword research tool and, within minutes, find dozens of keywords that simple logic would tell you are high-buying-intent, you’re likely okay. Most products and services we’ve run into are in this category. It’s actually quite rare to run into a profitable business in a niche so innovative that no one is searching for it. If it has a market, it likely has search volume.

For example, if you sold accounting software, this is what you’d see in any keyword research tool:

There are dozens upon dozens of keyword variants containing just “accounting software”. Other ideas would bring up even more. This is obviously a highly-searched-for example — your product or service may very well not have this level of search volume — but you get the idea.

Finally, don’t forget to also check for slightly higher in the funnel keywords that still have good buying intent. The above examples only show screenshots of us searching for the most obvious “category name” type of searches: “natural pre-workout”, “accounting software”. But as per Pain Point SEO, there are usually tons of use cases, how to’s, or other question-based queries that also have good buying intent. For example, for pre-workout drinks, you could try topics like “are pre-workout drinks effective” or  “tips for getting a good workout”. In the accounting software example, you could try “how to generate a balance sheet” or “how to do small business accounting”.

Next, What Search Volumes Are Good Enough?

This is harder to give ballparks for because they depend so much on the industry. But in general, for B2B companies, we are comfortable if we see keywords with 20+ monthly searches and at least a handful with 100+ monthly searches. Yes, this seems low, but in our experience, if you rank for a keyword with a reported search volume of 50/month, you typically get at least that many organic pageviews from that page every month (full article) or often much more (see below).

For B2C or lower priced ecommerce products, where you’ll need more traffic and conversions to recoup SEO costs, there should be many keywords with 3 and even 4 figure monthly search volume. For most B2C businesses, this typically isn’t a problem (consumer search terms just have a lot more volume than business terms).

Now, importantly, you shouldn’t assume that if you rank for a keyword with a certain monthly search volume, that you’ll only get a small fraction of that volume. For example, don’t do this typical granular calculation: “Ok, 1000 searches a month, and if we rank #1 and get 30% of clicks, then that’s 300 pageviews…”. You will severely underestimate traffic this way. 

Here is an example using one of our own articles to show how the actual traffic we are getting is 5X higher than what this kind of bottoms up calculation would estimate:

Instead, a good rule of thumb is if you rank highly for keywords with hundreds of searches per month, you’re likely to get hundreds of pageviews a month from each of those keywords (or, as per the example in that Twitter thread, potentially a lot more). If you rank for keywords with thousands of searches a month, you’re likely to get thousands of pageviews per month from each of those keywords.

So, start by getting a sense of search volume for the keywords that describe your business, assume that with top rankings for those keywords you could get somewhere in the vicinity of that amount of traffic (or more), and then move onto the next step of determining the potential conversion value of that traffic.

2. How Many Potential Conversions Could You Get From That Targeted Organic Traffic?

A simple way to estimate the total number of potential conversions from that traffic is to multiply whatever estimated traffic number you came up with by an average conversion rate.

For example, let’s say you’re a B2B business that’s found 40 high-buying-intent keywords with an average search volume of 40 searches per month. And per what we discussed above, you determine you could conservatively drive 1,600 organic sessions per month if you ranked in top positions for those keywords.

To estimate the potential conversions from that traffic, you could simply multiply that by an average conversion rate of 1%.

Note: The conversion rates we see from the content we produce for our clients range from 0.5% to 5% for a single article and average about 0.5% to 2% across dozens of articles. However, for the purpose of making a conservative estimate, assume that an average conversion rate of 1% is safe for high-buying-intent keywords.

So, continuing with the example of 1,600 monthly visitors to your high-intent pages, you could conservatively estimate receiving 16 leads per month. With a $1,000 value of a lead (a simple round number — you can calculate this by taking the first year annual value of a paying customer and multiplying by your lead-to-close rate), 16 leads would produce $16,000 of value per month.

Next, you need to put this into context alongside your monthly spend. So, taking our agency’s monthly cost of $10,000, for example, that would be $6,000 or 60% ROI per month. Therefore, this napkin math would indicate that the potential conversions you could get would make an investment in SEO worth it to you.

Caveat: Don’t Try to Get Too Precise with These Estimates

Note that these estimates have a lot of assumptions built in (as estimates like this tend to do). So be careful not to get too precise with it.

The reality is, you don’t actually know where you’ll rank or how long it will take to get there. You also don’t know how much traffic will actually be generated with that ranking (as we said, it’s almost always way more than what SEO tools estimate). Finally, you don’t know the actual conversion rate you’ll get after you rank (which is also heavily dependent on how well you sell your product in the articles).

So instead of over-calculating what your likely revenue from SEO is, we suggest you just think of this as “go/no-go” — that is, is SEO likely worth it enough to try or not. Or, if you want to get more precise, simply test SEO as a channel with a handful of articles, say 5 or 10, and you’ll get a much better feel of what the actual numbers are compared to your estimates.

Also note that conversion rate, in particular, will vary significantly by article and keyword. So all the more reason why we suggest you start with the highest buying intent keywords that convert the highest. You might as well grab that low hanging fruit first and see what the top end potential of SEO can be.

Other Key Considerations

1. How Many Months Can You Afford to Invest in SEO Before Hitting Breakeven on Your Monthly Spend?

In our experience, it takes between 6-12 months to amass enough top search rankings for our clients to hit the conversion volume required to breakeven on their monthly spend.

Due to the time it takes for pages to rank for their intended keywords once they’re published, you need to ask yourself: do you have the capacity to wait that long? Can you afford that monthly cost for, say, 10 months before you begin getting positive ROI on your monthly spend?

If not, SEO might not be a reasonable channel for you to invest in right now, or you may need to find cheaper ways to test it. On the other hand, if you can afford that, there can be huge upside and ROI that comes later, as we discussed above.

2. Benchmarking Long-Term Conversion Potential

It’s also worth trying to benchmark what SEO success could look like over the long-term. You can think about this in a couple of ways.

First, if you’ve been running your business for a while, you can ask: how many leads per month are you getting in total? And how many are currently coming from organic rankings?

If you’re getting 100 leads per month, for example, and barely any are coming in from organic search — or, you’re getting leads from a couple of high-intent keywords and you see dozens more which you aren’t ranking for that could also bring in leads — it’s pretty reasonable to estimate you could get another 100+ leads per month from SEO.

Alternatively, if your homepage and product landing pages are already ranking for the main high-intent keywords in your space, but there’s some more long tail buying intent keywords, plus a decent number of mid or top of funnel keywords you could go after, you might estimate that that you could increase your total number of leads from SEO by something like 50% by going after those keywords with your blog.

Again, this is all just ballpark estimates, but benchmarking this long-term potential based on guidelines of what you’re already generating is a practical way to get a decent idea of the potential value SEO could drive for you.

3. Scaling Content to Drive Additional Conversions From Higher Volume, Lower Intent Keywords (AKA Top of Funnel)

In the examples we’ve discussed throughout this post, we’ve focused on buying-intent keywords and search volumes. However, for most businesses, there are many lower-intent search queries that their target audiences are searching that can also drive conversions — just at a much lower conversion rate.

Once you’ve tackled your high-buying-intent keywords, you can move up the funnel and take into account potential keywords that have much higher search volumes. This increases the volume of conversions beyond what you’ve estimated in the conservative calculations above.

A Spreadsheet You Can Use to Help Estimate If SEO Is Worth It for You

To help you calculate and visualize ballpark estimates of the value of SEO for your business, we’ve created a spreadsheet that you can make a copy of and modify with your own data.

It includes the following:

• Inputs: Columns to input your value of a lead, estimated monthly spend, and estimated number of leads you could generate each month as you progress doing SEO.

• Outputs: Columns that calculate your spend to date, value generated from SEO, net ROI, value generated to date, and net ROI to date.

• Charts: Graphs that automatically reflect the inputs you enter and allow you to visualize your ROI per month over time, net ROI to date over time, and spend versus value generated to date.

The numbers in the spreadsheet are hypothetical placeholders to demonstrate the concept of how ROI works in SEO.

In addition, we’ve included a calculator for determining the amount of traffic you’d need at different conversion rates to get your desired number of leads.

Click here to download the spreadsheet and make your own copy.

Further Reading: Articles for Businesses Looking to Invest in SEO

SEO Strategy

• Pain-Point SEO: How to produce SEO content that drives conversions
  
  Learn about our agency’s foundational SEO strategy and how we approach it differently than other agencies.

• SEO keyword strategy: How to prioritize based on buying intent to drive more conversions
  
  Most articles on SEO keyword strategy barely discuss prioritizing based on buying intent. This post explains how to create an SEO keyword strategy that’s focused on finding and prioritizing keywords that will drive measurable ROI for your business.

Content Creation

• SEO content writing: A 5-step process you can follow
  
  This post explains how to analyze search engine results pages (SERPs) for a target keyword, and create high-quality, tailored pages to rank highly for that keyword.

Measuring SEO Results

• Using Google Analytics goals to measure lead generation from content
  
  This post outlines ​​an extremely simple way to begin attributing leads generated from your website — using a thank you page combined with Google Analytics goals.

• Content marketing attribution: How to measure content performance
  
  This article outlines a more advanced (and more accurate) way of measuring lead generation or conversion rates from content.

Case Studies of Our Work with Clients

Here are 6 client case studies you can read to see how we’ve executed our SEO strategy for real businesses:

• B2C content marketing example: How we grew Cognitive FX to 70,000 pageviews in 14 months (Updated)

• How we scaled Leadfeeder’s signups to over 200/month

• Scaling content: Expanding from bottom of funnel content to top of funnel (Geekbot Case Study)

• 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)

How to Work with Us or Learn More

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content-focused SEO strategy, you can 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.