Full Funnel Marketing: How SEO Fits In

Intro

Do you like ads?

Let’s be more specific: How many times have you clicked on the first two ads in a SERP?

Once? Twice? Probably never.

So, if you aren't interested in marketing material, why’d you expect your prospects to be?

Marketing today is no longer about noisy promotion. Nobody puts in a search query and clicks on obvious promotional content.

They want answers.

And that’s precisely what full funnel marketing achieves. You hook prospects with high-quality, actionable content. Then, you hint at a solution. Only once they’re completely invested, you show them your product.

The key to doing all of this perfectly? A well-executed SEO strategy.

Let’s talk about how it all works together.

What is full funnel marketing?

The typical marketing funnel looks like this:

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There’s the top of the funnel (TOFU), which involves publishing marketing content to build brand awareness. Then, the middle (MOFU) is about engaging leads and building brand consideration. Finally, the bottom (BOFU) deals with conversions.

Full funnel marketing treats all those phases as an interconnected process. It has you tracking the prospect’s journey to create cohesive and tailored promotional material for each of the three stages.

So, how does that help streamline customer acquisitions? For starters, it offers:

• Improved customer understanding: Creating marketing content based on each funnel stage lets you personalize your material and target specific prospect pain points.
• Higher retention rates: A full funnel strategy allows you to nurture customers even in the post-conversion phase. This helps with brand loyalty and directly improves retention rates.
• Better resource management: Since you tailor your marketing content to each stage, you can identify which strategy has the most impact. In other words, optimized resource management.

Studies also show that full funnel approaches offer better ROI than segmented methods. The MOFU and BOFU phases can hit up to 72% and 54%, respectively.

How does SEO fit into full funnel marketing?

You can build an airtight full funnel marketing campaign, with in-depth audience research, compelling promotional content and high-performing conversion methods.

It won't matter without SEO.

You see, a full funnel approach relies on TOFU content to attract leads. And the first result on a SERP monopolizes 39.8% of clickthrough rates. So, if you don't rank high enough, nobody’s ever going to know about you.

To explain this better, here’s how such campaigns work:

• Captures prospect attention: Marketers use SEO-friendly content to rank high and attract leads. Gating valuable information behind compelling landing pages can also help keep leads engaged. This kickstarts their first brand interaction.
• Re-directs to more in-depth material: Through strategic link-building, marketers direct prospects into the consideration stage (MOFU). Here, they offer content that positions their product as the best solution.
• Conversion: Brands provide customers with well-paced product demos and service specs, positive testimonials, etc. All of this showcases how their solution addresses the prospect’s problems and, subsequently, converts them.

Basecamp is a perfect example here. Its podcast and SEO-friendly blog help create brand awareness. Then, its open-source web application framework (Ruby on Rails) highlights the value proposition of its primary offering and accelerates the consideration stage.

Finally, testimonials from NASA and Women Who Code seal the deal when it comes to conversions.

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Best practices for creating SEO-friendly full funnel marketing content

When conceptualizing a full funnel strategy, it’s best to keep a few things in mind. For one, audience research is critical. Second, with a few exceptions, it usually doesn't blend well with cold outreach practices. SEO, though, is the most crucial element here. Its crucial to avoid negative seo.

That said, here are five tips to make your marketing content more SEO-friendly:

1. Align your content with search intent & buyer demographics

Full funnel content always factors in search intent and buyer demographics.

For example, a mid-level manager looking for LinkedIn decision-makers will likely search for tools to do the same. But if you’re writing about the benefits of connecting with such figures, that lead will instantly leave.

Similarly, C-suite executives only want to know how your solution solves their problem and its value proposition.

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To help with this, here are five tips to create cohesive full funnel marketing content:

• Stick to education on the given niche for TOFU prospects (No sale-oriented content)
• Create material based on detailed buyer profiles (C-suites=In-depth information)
• Co-relate your pieces/campaigns with each other (What is SEO→10 Best SEO Tools)
• Position your most impactful promotional content at the tail-end of the MOFU phase
• Build engaging conversion material (Interactive demos>list of product features)

You also have to consistently nurture prospects to keep them moving in their journey. It’s similar to mid-stage sales funnel management. Only here, you use case studies, white papers or email marketing rather than follow-up calls or free trials.

2. Conduct a SERP analysis to identify gaps in marketing material

A SERP analysis for your product category will tell you exactly what your customers want. And if you do one for your competitors, you’ll also gain invaluable insight into potential marketing gaps.

For instance, let’s say you’re promoting project management software. Your competitor already has an article on monitoring the related KPIs. But your web analytics tool tells you that time-spent-on-page is quite low. That indicates poor quality content.

Still, if you’re just stepping into this, here are a few things to include in your SERP analysis:

• Prevalence of content from authoritative domains/pages (Hubspot, Semrush, etc.)
• Relevant ranking opportunities in tough SERPs (featured snippets, ’people also ask’)
• Keyword difficulty (KD) and the strength of the top 10 link profiles in that SERP
• Average CTR and page metrics for top competitors to gauge user experience
• Competitor backlinks and content formatting structure (more on this in a bit)

Some of this can't be done manually and will require automated SERP evaluation. Simply type in your search term and get detailed insights into keyword rankings, regional competition and more.

3. Organize keyword research based on funnel stages

Very few prospects put in a query with the intent of purchasing. Once it gets to that, they’ve already made up their minds.

For instance, if you’re buying a laptop, you don’t search for ‘best laptops’. That phase (MOFU) has already passed. Instead, you look for the specific model you want. Put simply, full funnel marketing will require you to align your keyword research with the stage you’re focused on.

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A keyword analysis tool, such as the one Ranktracker offers, would be useful here. In addition to that, you could:

• Group topics to remove irrelevant keywords for each phase (Best X Brands❌TOFU)
• Identify missing search terms in your content that your competitors rank for
• Pick high-volume queries with low KD to create higher-ranking TOFU content
• Find relevant keywords for each stage with seed terms (GPU→X GPU Specs for MOFU)
• Pinpoint localized, long-tail keywords to improve BOFU metrics (X retailers in Florida)

That said, always remember that search engines, like Google, scan your material to see if it’s relevant to the user's intent.

4. Optimize your backlinking strategy

Reports show that 96.55% of online content doesn't get any organic traffic. And one of the primary reasons for that is because those sites lack backlinks.

So, what can you do here?

To start with, you can analyze competitors’ backlinks and check which ones have the highest domain authority. Then, see if these sites use ‘do-follow’ links. If they do and are relevant to your brand, it will improve your content’s SEO when you eventually get a link from them.

As for actually earning that link, here’s what you can do (aside from paying for it):

• Use guest blogs to organically link to your content in the piece
• Request backlinks from preferred and credible business partners/distributors
• Identify uncredited references and ask to be mentioned as the source
• Contact other sites to replace their broken links with high-quality content of your own
• Contribute to resource pages to feature your content and improve online visibility

It’s also important to consistently monitor your existing backlinks. That way, you can reach out to a particular domain the moment it stops linking to you.

5. Streamline your on-page SEO elements

It’s no secret that Google prioritizes on-page SEO elements while indexing content and displaying search results. Ensuring the success of your full funnel marketing content will require you to do the same.

Before you jump in though, use web auditing software to identify your weakest points and check your overall SEO score.

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Once that’s done, you can focus on the most critical elements. Some of these include:

• Content optimization based on Google’s E-A-T guidelines
• Cohesive structuring of internal links
• Content relevance based on keyword usage
• Inclusion of SEO-friendly alt-text and formats/file size for images
• Website architecture, page load speeds and minimal redirects

There are plenty of other factors. Some of them may even require outsourcing technical help, like rewriting your HTML code. Still, as a general rule, use SERP rank-tracking tools to pinpoint where you’re falling short before you go down that route.

Tips to create compelling & SEO-friendly full funnel marketing content

You’ve got the best practices down. Now, we’d like to help you create full funnel marketing material. Below, we’ve listed the three guiding principles for content creation in each phase. We’ve also highlighted related but critical elements in that process.

Let’s break them down:

1. Top of the funnel

TOFU content is about capturing the initial attention of your prospects. And the best kind always:

• Prioritizes educational material that focuses on specific audience pain points
• Avoids product/brand mentions and only does so if it’s relevant to search intent
• Uses internal links to direct to other useful resources and guides (MOFU content)

You also have several format options for publishing such material. For example, you could:

• Use how-to-guides (text & video) to help prospects troubleshoot specific problems
• Create gated landing pages to offer valuable information & collect contact data
• Curate resource pages for multiple data points and anchor prospects to one source

Regardless, If you’re covering complex topics in your TOFU content, you can deploy ebooks and whitepapers to help structure the information.

2. Middle of the funnel

To create compelling MOFU content, you just have to answer three questions with your material. They are:

• Why your product is relevant to the prospect
• Which product/service package is right for them
• What upgrading to or choosing your brand gets them

In other words, think like your customers and address the concerns they have. As for distribution, you can rely on:

• Organic search: Publish authoritative pieces to rank high in SERPs & draw prospects
• Email marketing: Use drip campaigns or contact subscribers from your email lists
• Paid advertising: Push your material through PPC or digital ads

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Influencer marketing is also an excellent option. Use it to incentivize relevant social media figures to promote your material.

3. Bottom of the funnel

BOFU content is perhaps the trickiest to execute. However, you can smoothen the process if you:

• Create a sense of buyer urgency through limited-time offers, flat discounts, etc.
• Gather and use positive customer reviews and testimonials for social proof
• Showcase Industry credibility through certifications, accreditations, etc.

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Now, you can't understand how effective your BOFU material is if you don't track the relevant metrics. A few things to focus on would be:

• Purchase conversion rate: The number of site visitors against total transactions
• Return on ad spend: Ratio of revenue earned to every dollar spent on marketing
• Lead-to-conversion ratio: Number of leads who initiate desirable actions (signing up for newsletters, form submissions, etc.)

You can also monitor your customer acquisition cost (CAC). Combined with the lead-to-conversion ratio, this can help identify issues with your lead generation pipeline.

A few parting thoughts

Full funnel marketing involves creating promotional material based on your prospect’s intent and position in their journey. SEO is the same. You publish relevant content to rank higher, achieve improved online visibility and attract better leads.

Put simply, they’re interlinked.

Sure, you can write highly engaging blogs on complex topics. Your whitepapers can even set the bar for educational content. But nobody’s ever going to see any of that if you don't make your content SEO-friendly.