3 Quick Ways to Use SEO as a Growth Channel (Not Just a Traffic Channel)

If you think SEO is just a traffic channel, you aren't alone but boy are you missing out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah - SEO is synonymous with blogging. But if all SEO does for you is drive traffic to your blog then there is a serious gap in your website’s potential.

I help marketers and founders use SEO as a growth channel for their businesses. I do this by guiding them to build strategies that are focused on growth as opposed to traffic.

Let's face it, traffic is a vanity metric. What most of us care about is leads (or revenue).

Here are my top 3 tips to drive more growth from SEO and not just traffic:

Think about keywords in the context of the funnel
Map out the buying criteria for your product
Leverage your top-performing content to fuel your funnel

1 - Think about keywords in the context of the funnel

Right now different segments of your target market are hopping onto Google and seeing radically different search results.

That's because your customers are using Google at different points of the buyer’s journey to accomplish different tasks, and how/why they search will change as they move further down the funnel.

Often we search to:

Ask Google a question
Get a quick reference or answer to something
Look up a guide or walkthrough
Watch an in-depth tutorial video
Review products we might buy
Compare different alternatives

In SEO we call this "search intent" - but I try to keep it simple: what question are they asking, why are they asking it, and where in the funnel are they when they ask this question?

You don’t get this nuance from loading 1,000 keywords in a tool. You get it by building empathy for your customer in their buying journey. This empathy leads to nuanced content that is actually useful and has a much higher chance of earning traffic and converting.

2 - Map out the buying criteria and reflect it on your website

Ever notice how SaaS websites tend to look the same?

There's the home page, a features dropdown with various features pages, and a use-cases dropdown with the same. The reason for that is this works very well for SEO but most SaaS websites aren't using these sections strategically.

You need to understand your customer’s buying criteria and buying process for this to work.

When buying a product people tend to ask the following types of questions:

I need a product that does X
I need a product for X (subtly different question)
I need an alternative to Y
How do X and Y compare?
What is the best product for X?

Here's a real-life example: I recently swapped my hosting from PythonAnywhere to Digital Ocean. The reason for that is PythonAnywhere was very slow (pain point, motivator) and I was looking for an alternative. Here are my searches:

How to speed up PythonAnywhere
Alternatives to PythonAnywhere for Django app
PaaS for Django app
PythonAnywhere vs Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean reviews
Digital Ocean Django
Digital Ocean Reddit

The better you understand how and why your customer buys your product, why they would leave a competitor for you, and how they arrive at a buying decision the better your content will serve them (and trust me, you’ll dominate Google).

3 - Leverage top-performing content to fuel your funnel

Your blog posts (or any content that generates loads of traffic) are a lead-generating machine - and I’ll bet you can 10x the number of leads it generates in less than 30 minutes of work.

There's a simple strategy I use for my website (and teach my clients): review your top-performing pages and drive them toward a lead magnet on your website.

Every month I review the top-performing content on my blog and match each of the top 10 posts with a lead magnet that is directly related to the content of the post. If there isn’t a lead magnet that fits, we create one from the blog post.

This lead magnet is featured:

At the top of the blog post
Throughout the blog post
In a slide-in form
At the bottom of the post

This has allowed me to 4x my organic leads in the past year for my site, and it's helped each of my clients fill their pipelines as well.

Follow These 3 Steps And SEO Will Drive Growth - Not Just Traffic

The best way to sum this up is:

Write content that your audience actually cares about (not just what search volumes tell you)
Structure your website in a way that makes sense based on how your customers buy
Optimize your traffic-driving content to convert

If it sounds simple, that's because it is. But from working with dozens of companies across industries in the past year I can say for certain that it works.