How Does The Marketing Funnel Impact SEO?

Before you look in your kitchen drawer, a marketing funnel isn’t a physical object — it’s a theoretical one often used when discussing marketing principles. At its base, the marketing funnel illustrates the hoops people will jump through before, during, and after buying a product or a service. To successfully gain a customer, you need to acknowledge each stage and cater to the customer in that stage.

Like many other marketing strategies and principles, the marketing funnel and customer journey echo in the SEO world. If you want to increase traffic to your website and subsequent conversions, it’s essential to understand the customer journey and how you can make the process validating, exciting, and motivating for your audience. 

At Resolve, the marketing funnel is a tool we frequently refer to in our daily lives, and we understand it can be a difficult concept if you’re not regularly in the trenches of the search world.

Stages of the Marketing Funnel

To understand how to cater to your audience at each marketing funnel stage, you must first understand each stage. We can best understand the marketing funnel in action through keyword research. For each stage, we’ll discuss what keywords customers typically use at this stage and how you can find them. 

Awareness Stage

At this stage, your audience may first learn about the subject or aim to find the solution to their problem. For example, if you are a chiropractor, your audience may search for “causes of low back pain.”  In this circumstance, searchers may want to know what may be causing their lower back pain and if any potential solutions exist. You can typically identify searchers in this stage, as the keywords they use are typically high-volume and have high keyword difficulty. Essentially, people are searching for broad and informational terms that many other sites compete for in the hopes of gaining the attention of searchers. 

Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, searchers may already know the subject and contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of different services. Returning to the chiropractor example, searchers would typically look up longer-tail keywords like “can a chiropractor help with lower back pain” to see how services like yours may help them.  

Conversion Stage

This stage is also known as the “decision stage,” when searchers turn into customers, decide they want your services and may look into the different offers you provide. At this stage, they may search for your specific brand, which you may already have at the top of the search engine result page.

Loyalty Stage

At this stage, existing customers may return after feeling satisfied with your services and products and recommend your services to others. They may already search for your brand name or use your website’s URL, contributing to direct traffic. 

Catering Your Content Stage to the Marketing Funnel

While each marketing stage will differentiate from the others, all should value the user first. The best way to do this is to provide an experience your audience will trust. As such, you want to build your SEO strategy, prioritizing their experience and creating relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy content.

Because you’ll receive an influx of customers at different stages of the marketing funnel, creating content that can serve them, no matter their stage, is essential. This way, they can move through the marketing funnel solely on your website, leading to conversions.

Top Funnel Content

Top funnel content addresses anyone at the awareness stage who wants to know more about solutions or a broad subject. Often, this kind of content is linkable or very relevant keyword content. Linkable content means more people will be willing to link to it, as it’s informational, evergreen, and original. 

While you may base keyword content on specific keywords that searchers at this stage are using, top funnel keyword content is typically highly relevant to your audience and may be tangential to your services. For example, as a chiropractor, you could publish “The Most Common Causes of Back Pain From Office Work” which could still be considered keyword content but may interest readers who simply want to understand their problem more before considering solutions.

Middle Funnel Content

Middle funnel content is any kind of content that addresses customers who are considering your services but may be undecided — the consideration stage. This kind of content becomes more specific and targets those long-tailed keywords mentioned earlier. This kind of content is easier to rank for, as there’s often less competition due to the specificity, but it still receives enough traffic to warrant posting. 

In our chiropractor example, you could publish content like “A Chiropractor’s Guide to Lower Back Pain” or “Best Chiropractors for Back Pain in Your Area,” which may be considered a middle funnel. People at the top of the funnel may not yet be interested in learning about this specific solution. Still, your audience in the middle funnel may already understand what chiropractic care is and wonder how it could apply to their back pain.

Bottom Funnel Content

Bottom funnel content addresses anyone at the lowest stages of the marketing funnel — the conversion and loyalty stages. Most commonly, this kind of content is service pages or articles that describe your services in detail. These pages must be transparent, easy to navigate, and informative. Customers interested in your services may quickly turn away if they’re confused about your pricing structure or what offers you provide.  

Link Building With the Marketing Funnel in Mind

While most SEOs will discuss the marketing funnel when publishing content on your website, it’s also an influential theory to consider while link building. The basis of the marketing funnel is putting yourself in the shoes of your audience, including those who may be visiting your site from a backlink. As such, you don’t want to build backlinks that could throw off visitors and simply label your link as spam. Instead, you want only to build links that are helpful and relevant to the audience on the target site. Because of this, it’s often more practical to build backlinks to informational and top- and mid-funnel content that readers would find helpful. 

As they read more, they can go further in the marketing funnel and consider purchasing your solutions. While effective in directing customers directly to your services, service pages may appear overly advertorial, and you should only build links to these pages within pages that target those already further in the marketing funnel.

FAQs About the SEO Marketing Funnel

What Is the Marketing Funnel and Why Is It Important For SEO?

The marketing funnel is a model that describes the stages a customer goes through, from becoming aware of a product to making a purchase decision. It’s essential for SEO because aligning SEO strategies with each funnel stage helps attract relevant traffic, guides customers toward conversion, and improves the overall user experience on the website.

How Can My Content Align With the Awareness Stage of the Funnel?

At the awareness stage, SEO-optimized should be top-funnel. Essentially, this content is educational, such as blog posts or guides that answer questions or topics relevant to your industry. 

Why Is Understanding Customer Intent Important For SEO?

Understanding customer intent is crucial because it allows you to tailor your content and SEO strategy to meet the specific needs of users at each funnel stage. By addressing what customers are searching for and their position in the buying process, you can provide more relevant information, improve user experience, and boost conversion rates.

How Can I Track the Effectiveness of My SEO Strategy Across the Funnel?

You can track the effectiveness of your SEO strategy using tools like Google Analytics to monitor user behavior, engagement metrics, and conversion rates at each stage of the funnel. Reviewing this data helps you adjust your approach to better align with customer needs and optimize for higher performance.

What Tools Can Help Me Identify the Right Keywords For Each Funnel Stage?

Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google’s Keyword Planner are excellent for finding keywords suited to each stage of the funnel. These tools provide data on search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms, which can help you select keywords that match customer intent, from general information in the awareness stage to high-intent terms in the decision stage.

How Do I Ensure My SEO Content Aligns With Each Stage of The Funnel?

Plan your content strategy based on the customer journey, creating content for each funnel stage. For example, educational and top-funnel content works best in the awareness stage, mid-funnel pieces for the consideration stage, and product and services pages for the decision stage. Regularly updating and optimizing this content helps maintain relevance and effectiveness across the funnel.