How to Make Sure Your SEO and Marketing Funnel Work Together

By Ben Allen, Guest Contributor

​The purpose of a marketing funnel is to plan out how your business is going to get customers, start to finish. It covers how you can attract potential customers during the first stages of the buying process, down to making the specific decision of which company to buy from.

Boost your sales and make sure your funnel works.

Likely, your website plays a massive role in your business’ marketing funnel. It provides visitors with information they need, assists them in deciding what kind of product they need, and then sells them on why they should buy from you. The problem is, no consumer’s buying process happens solely on your website.

Commonly, consumers utilize Google when shopping around, especially when it comes to larger purchases. It’s essential that your website shows up on multiple relevant searches, not just one, in order to boost your sales and make sure your funnel works as intended.

Top Funnel SEO to Attract Visitors
The purpose of the top of the marketing funnel is to attract visitors to your website. Typically, this is when people are doing basic research into a problem they have and what kinds of solutions exist. They aren’t ready to make a purchase yet, they simply want to learn more.

The success of your marketing as a whole relies on a good top funnel. Top of the funnel marketing usually consists of information designed to help visitors educate themselves. Typical content includes: blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, e-books, infographics, and resource guides. Either it is information they can get for free, or have a very low cost (like information in exchange for their email address).

If you make high-quality content, you want people to find it online, and that’s where SEO comes in. You need to make sure it targets relevant keywords, is structured clearly, and you have proper tags and meta descriptions.

Your SEO efforts should be focused to get as much relevant traffic to your site as possible. More visitors to a website often means more customers at the end of the funnel.

Mid Funnel SEO for Influencing Decisions
While top of the funnel is all about a person educating themselves about their situation and problem, mid funnel is learning and exploring potential solutions. The potential customer understands what their problem is, and is now ready to start investigating how to fix it. They aren’t ready to buy quite yet, and don’t know who to buy from, they are simply doing window shopping.

This is when you want to showcase what makes your product, and your company, special. You want them to learn that your product is the best possible fix for their problem. This is typically done through demos, case studies, social media, reviews, side-by-side comparisons with other products, and pages describing how to use your product. Content should highlight features of the product and how others use it.

When it comes to mid-funnel tactics, it’s important that your pages show up on search terms relating to specific products or solutions. If you sell high end vacuums, you’ll want your side-by-side comparison to show up in the search results if somebody searches “Is it worth buying a high-end vacuum?”

Bottom Funnel SEO to Convert Customers
Bottom of the marketing funnel is getting people to buy your product. It’s convincing them your solution is the best one, and you are the best place to buy it.

Convincing a potential customer to make the leap is not an easy process. You have to persuade them to think you have the best product for the best price, along with quality customer service should something go wrong.

You need to be sure that your product pages are easy to find online, both on your website and through search engines. That means having the right tags, a properly written description of the product, lots of images with good alt text, and a meta description that entices and describes the product. A user should be able to identify which product is on the search result without having to click through.

Killing It With SEO
Making sure your marketing funnel is supported by your SEO work is essential to being successful. Whether you do the work yourself or hire professional SEO services, make sure it’s up to par with the rest of your marketing strategies. Poorly optimized pages can result in a marketing funnel that is terrible at attracting visitors, or unable to ultimately convert.

Your website needs to be able to bring people back time and time again, and a key part of that is always showing up in search results. Especially in competitive markets, you need to be sure your business is there anytime a potential customer is doing research. By doing so, you’ll find a much healthier marketing funnel, and in turn, more success.
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