In today’s digital landscape, attracting and converting website visitors is essential for business success. A well-optimized sales funnel is crucial to supercharge your venture and SEO plays a key role in driving qualified leads and conversions your way.
In fact, 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search. So, B2B brands have to prioritize their website SEO to reach a wider audience and achieve their top-funnel goals.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into an SEO funnel and explore how these marketing powerhouses can elevate your business.
Understanding the SEO Customer Funnel
An SEO customer funnel is a strategic reporting tool that aims to help businesses understand each stage of the customer journey. It gives you a clear picture of the steps a prospect will take as they move from a visitor to a loyal customer. The insights into the customer journey allow teams to identify any problematic drop-offs or issues in their SEO program.
Traditional funnels make use of old-school marketing tactics like cold emails or email blasts. An SEO funnel attracts users by sharing valuable content that leads to lead generation over time and finally guides them to make a purchase.
The marketing funnel provides valuable insight into the psychology, mechanisms, and touchpoints that turn searchers into users and later into customers. Early monitoring and optimizing content based on user intent can supercharge your SEO success and pave the way for new users.
SEO Funnel Stages
To create an effective sales funnel, you’ll need to understand the different stages of the journey. Let’s break them down below.
Awareness and interest
Awareness is the top-of-funnel SEO strategy. It is the first step in attracting prospective customers who may not yet know your brand or website.
To attract potential customers, a brand has to implement a range of content strategies to boost their search results. You can perform keyword research using SEO tools like Semrush or Surfer SEO. These paid SEO tools help you to identify high volume search terms in your niche that users are looking for.
Using these keywords, your content marketing strategy should focus on crafting blogs, infographics, guides, or local landing pages to improve your visibility. Social media engagement can also be used to raise awareness about your product.
You can measure your brand awareness through important SEO metrics and KPIs, like organic search traffic, branded search volume, and social media engagement.
Consideration and purchase
Once potential customers are aware of your brand, you need to increase their curiosity and encourage them to learn more. This consideration phase is a pivotal shift in search users’ psychology and consumer behavior.
In this consideration phase, users are heavily researching and considering whether your offering is a good fit for their needs. So, in-depth guides, eBooks, and whitepapers about your brand can give readers better insights.
Email marketing campaigns about your product pages can also improve your conversion funnel. Apart from this, case studies and testimonials can also show the value of your offering and improve your conversion rate.
Some valuable metrics that you can check are the click through rate, bounce rate, time on the page, or other engagement metrics.
In the final stage, prospects move closer to making the purchase. Some key components in this conversion stage are:
- Clear CTAs that’ll guide leads to conversions.
- A well-optimized landing page where visitors can easily make a purchase or ask for a quote.
- Smooth checkout process.
- Follow-up email upon purchase confirmation.
Loyalty and advocacy
Loyalty is the post-purchase stage that aims to keep customers for the long haul. You can encourage them to make repeat purchases or turn them into brand advocates. This helps reduce your customer acquisition cost for the marketing funnel.
Once the purchase is complete, you should continue your content marketing strategy and provide customers with solutions or user manauls regarding the product. Apart from this, helpful FAQs and guides can improve customer experience. Looking at this extra offerings, customers may think of social sharing your product for a wider audience.
You can measure loyalty of customers based on metrics like return visitors, lifetime value, repurchase ratio, etc. If these metrics are low, you can optimize your SEO activities and look to target keywords relevant to your target audience in your content. You can also start community building or start loyalty programs that incentivize repeat purchases.
Developing an Effective SEO Strategy
A strong SEO strategy is the foundation of a smart media strategy. In fact, SEO leads have a 14.6% conversion rate compared to outbound leads at 1.7%. This is why SEO Strategist Jon Lightfoot emphasizes the importance of SEO in powering the entire sales funnel, from awareness to purchase and beyond.
Building powerful SEO funnels includes optimizing your content with relevant keywords. Try to focus on long tail keywords specific to your niche with low competition. Identify the intent of these keywords and group them to guide your content creation journey.
Identify topics that address frequently asked questions, pain points, and curiosities of your audience. Ensure that the keyword usage is natural in your quality content. This also includes meta titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, etc. Optimize the content for speed and readability so Google and other search engines rank your website high on SERPs.
Measuring and Optimizing SEO Performance
Implementing an SEO funnel is an ongoing process that has to be constantly measured and optimized. The SEO customer funnel focuses on identifying leading indicators of growth early on in an SEO program.
This approach enables you to extend the value of the program via later stages and validate meaningful strategies. Make use of SEO tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement.
Google Search Console provides up to 16 months of search data you can go through.
To measure the success of your SEO marketing funnel, you will need to set measurable goals. Regularly update the content and make it relevant for your audience. Try to experiment a little bit with different landing page designs and check whether your conversion rates improve.
SEO is constantly changing, and Google rolled out 5 core updates in 2024. These changes in Google trends have completely changed the landscape for SEO professionals. So, what works today may not work tomorrow. So, you’ll need to constantly analyze your organic search traffic and adjust your site’s SEO strategy accordingly.
Importance of Backlinks in Building an SEO Funnel
Backlinks are the backbone of a strong online presence that sends organic traffic to your website. They link you from one site to the other, signaling search engines like Google that your content is trustworthy.
Why backlinks matter in SEO
When a reputable website links to your site, it is a vote of confidence and authority to search engines. This is why they hold immense importance to your website’s SEO. If done right, they not only boost your search rankings but can also get referral traffic from a linking website.
Furthermore, high-quality backlinks can boost your backlink profile, which will have a huge impact on your website performance and ranking. Ensure that you create content that is unique to drive your SEO success.
When you manage to build good credibility and domain authority, you will automatically get links from other websites. When your site receives positive signals from search engines and other domains, other websites will be more inclined to jump aboard and link to you, too.
Top websites often achieve a near-perfect score of 100 or 99 in Domain Authority.
Pro tip: Building backlinks requires a lot of time and resources. This is where a link-building agency like GrowthOG can help you achieve your goals by following white hat techniques and building quality links.
Backlinks and the SEO funnel stages
Backlinks can help you rank at different stages of your SEO marketing funnel. Here is how
- Awareness stage
During the first stage, you can earn links by crafting valuable content in the form of blogs and infographics. If you share relevant content or stats in your guide, then it is more likely to be picked by other websites.
Infographics are a treasure trove for backlinks, as they explain complex subjects through visual means. This will capture viewer interest and increase your brand visibility.
Try to leverage links from high-authority sites. These websites can help you with visibility as well as improve your authority amongst search engines.
- Consideration stage:
In the consideration stage of your SEO funnel, you need to establish your brand as an expert in a specific niche. This is why you need to acquire relevant backlinks from websites topically relevant to your content.
Creating in-depth guides, case studies, and crafting resource pages can help you get links from relevant pages. Niche relevant backlinks will help strengthen your authority and trustworthiness and get you more organic traffic.
Researching and reaching out to potential websites in your niche is a time-consuming job. So, seeking help from the experts at GrowthOG will empower you to expedite the process and get the desired results.
- Decision stage
The conversion stage is aimed at building trust and making it easy for consumers to complete the transaction. Focus on creating content related to purchasing and conversion to improve your discoverability amongst search engines.
Try to prioritize getting links from reputable sources in this section. These pages can be review sites or comparison platforms. Getting links from established organizations in the industry or government sites can further boost your reach.
Link-building strategies for the SEO funnel
Link building is very effective when aligned with different strategies of your marketing funnel. Here are 3 strategies you can try for your website.
- Guest posting: Guest posting is an effective way to gain links and boost your backlink profile. When you contribute high quality articles to reputable publications, it improves your authority in the niche. Ensure that you place the link in a contextual and natural way. If done right, guest posts can improve your content placement in search engines and intrigue readers to come to your website due to the engaging content.
- Content promotion: Promotion of your content through social media is a great tool to reach people and attain more leads. It’s a crucial part of your content marketing strategy, which will help increase your visibility and drive traffic.
- Digital PR: Digital PR is a mix of link building and outreach of traditional outreach. You can secure mentions or links from industry publications or news outlets to find your desired audience.
Leverage these data-driven insights to get link-worthy assets to improve your SEO. When you analyze the data, you can identify the topics that will resonate with your target audience. This allows you to create content that is informative and engaging.
Pro tip: GrowthOG can help you with your content marketing campaigns. Our experts can help you with guest posting and promote your brand on industry-relevant websites.
Tips for Optimizing Your SEO Funnel
The next step is to develop a content roadmap that will drive traffic to your website in the long run. The roadmap will give you a clear picture of your marketing funnel and how you can enhance your SEO efforts with time.
Brainstorm your keyword research and look into topics that customers search for in each funnel. In the awareness stage, try to use long tail keywords or question-type keywords. The mid-funnel keywords could include comparison. For example, traditional SEO vs modern SEO techniques. Finally, the conversion-level keywords have to be transactional, like the price of buying backlinks or cheapest hosting provider, etc.
Try to create an SEO blueprint that will leave your mark in the industry and earn you a reputation. Competing online is relative to the competitive environment for that particular search phrase. So, standing out can help you gain more traction in the digital world.
At the end of it all, focus on creating quality content that will bring value to your audience. This will, in turn, help you with your SEO and rankings on search engines.
Over To You
An SEO funnel is a roadmap to your online success. A well-optimized marketing funnel is essential to convert visitors into loyal customers. Creating a cohesive strategy allows you to integrate all aspects of your SEO, from technical optimization to content marketing and link building.
A top-tier SEO funnel can allow businesses to build a strong online foundation, attract traffic, and sustain growth on the internet. If you want to supercharge your SEO funnel, then GrowthOG can help you get backlinks from authoritative websites. Our experts can also help you with keyword research and crafting valuable content that ranks well on search engines.