Future-proof by focussing on the middle and bottom of the funnel

Myriam says: “Focus on middle and bottom of the funnel content if you want to future-proof your SEO strategy, particularly when considering SGE.”

How do you define the mid-funnel?

“Let me set the stage. When we talk about the customer funnel, we have the top, the middle, and the bottom.

What we mean by top-of-funnel is, ‘I’m not quite sure what I need. I’m starting to look for it. I have vague questions.’ Middle-of-funnel is, ‘I think I know what journey I’m on. I think I need more help, and I’m refining my understanding of the problem. I’m introducing some query modifiers that completely change my expectations in regard to the topic we’re talking about.’ Bottom-of-funnel is, ‘I’m ready. Whatever comes next, I’m ready to make an informed decision.’

When we’re talking about the middle of the funnel, let me illustrate that for you. A top-of-funnel query that all of us will have at some point in our lives is, ‘what to do in Rome.’ It seems to be one of the cities everyone wants to visit. If we’re going to the middle of the funnel, that could become, ‘what to do in Rome with two teenagers.’ With that query modifier, ‘with two teenagers’, it is no longer the same experience.

The difference between top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel, when it comes to SEO, is that top-of-funnel is generic and vague because, at the end of the day, it is introducing you to something. An LLM can do that quite well. When it comes to expertise on a specific topic, or where two elements collide to create a brand-new starting point, they’re not so good. That’s something that humans are very good at because we have experience.

When someone asks ‘what to do in Rome with two teenagers’, what’s the implication? We know that it’s for a vacation. We know that there are problems because, if you know teenagers, there are always problems. If you know Rome, you know there’s always traffic congestion. There are always tourists. Tie these elements together and you produce real value that a machine would have a harder time producing due to the nature of both LLMs and human expectations.”

Where does this lead us in terms of bottom-of-funnel keywords?

“At the middle of the funnel, we haven’t really decided if we’re going to Rome, at the end of the day. We’re still evaluating what’s going on with the teenagers. Maybe we’ll choose a different destination. In some cases, you might stick with Rome as a destination and leave the teenagers behind. It all depends. Sometimes, the person will go back to the top of the funnel and start a new journey because they can’t get to the bottom of their current one; that road is blocked.

If they do continue digging deeper, though, the bottom of the funnel is where you are addressing queries beyond the initial friction. The initial friction is travelling with two teenagers. If we go deeper than the travelling companions, it might become, ‘What specific activities can we do?’ You start removing any obstacles that would make you say ‘no’ to whatever you’re considering.”

What is a good way to measure the success of traffic coming from a middle-of-funnel phrase?

“I love this question because it’s not about better metrics. When we’re talking about SGE, which is an experience that is more interactive in SERPs, we are no longer able to capture the reality through our metrics.

In Google Search Console data, you have impressions stating how many times you have been shown to users. Now, though, there are multiple things happening on that page. If you’re shown, but you’re not part of the main element that the user is engaged with, are you really shown? Are you really having an impact? In terms of clicks, they happen outside of Google’s ecosystem, but most of the experience happens inside the ecosystem. Google doesn’t report on that. It doesn’t report on the engagements that people have with different elements that lead them further in their journey. We’re going to be losing a lot of visibility when it comes to seeing the impact we have.

Does that mean it’s all lost? No. In this context, traditional metrics – like query reporting, search volume for forecasting, etc. – are becoming a bit moot. We need to shift towards more outcome-based metrics, like revenue. At the end of the day, most websites care about getting people on the website to take an action, engage, and move closer to conversion.

Ultimately, if you want to think about SEO performance, you need to tie it to real-world performance and the bottom line. If you have C-level folks that are really focused on metrics saying, ‘Domain authority! Are we number one on this?’, it doesn’t always translate into bottom-line metrics that really serve the company’s interest. Today, we have an opportunity to focus on what happens at the end of the story.

If you’re not comfortable with that, it’s okay, because it ties into another metric: the brand-new bold world of your total addressable market. Since these metrics are changing, how do you define your total addressable market? How do you calculate it? How do you gauge how much you have penetrated that market in that location, for example?

For me, measuring the success of mid-funnel queries is a mix of determining whether it really brings home the bacon and, before that, figuring out what your real market value is. That’s something that most of us don’t do. We see volume (People are looking for Valentine’s Day gift ideas? Let me enter the ring), but what is the real total addressable market? What does the ring look like? Many SEOs don’t take the time to gauge this.”

How would you summarise what SGE means and how it’s going to impact the future of SEO?

“This is something that bothers everyone because we don’t want to address it. There’s an elephant in the room: SEO used to be easy traffic. No matter how much we used to complain about things getting harder, it used to be easy traffic because we were not necessarily focused on customers. We weren’t even focused on product or marketing.

I’ve been doing SEO so long that I remember when, if we were number one on ‘red shoes’, nothing else mattered. We won the world. Now, we’re forced to rethink this and acknowledge that, it’s not only getting harder, but a machine is replacing us. A machine is giving these answers, so what’s the point?

Right now, you need to focus on the customer journey. Is that part of the customer journey starting on TikTok? If so, why are you wasting budget on SEO? This is not where a majority of people are going to find you. If they do find you there, the total addressable market is probably going to be very small compared to what TikTok could offer. What I mean is, if you’re only focused on SEO, you could be producing the right content for the wrong channel – or for the wrong reasons. You really need to consider, out of your entire ecosystem, where you should be putting your money at each stage.

We used to do full-funnel SEO for everything, and we would want the budget to go with it. Now, it may be an assistive channel in some cases. Maybe it’s not the main focus. That is going to be a very bitter pill to swallow, but it’s the truth. If search engines are fundamentally changing the search experience towards answering questions by telling people what the next question should be and offering perspectives, what does that mean for us as experts? Either we have to have a more integrated approach, so SEO makes sense in the context of the customer journey, or we need to figure out what we can do that a machine cannot, in terms of content production.

Search Generative Experience in search results means that, as an SEO, you don’t dictate the rules as much as you used to anymore. This is a trend in SEO; we have less and less control over things. There is a reason for this. Previously, we used to trust Google to be a bouncer. We would produce content and say to Google, ‘Find the right people for us and bring them to us.’ Today, it has learned from us and it’s able to do that just fine without us. The next step is figuring out what it cannot do as well. That’s middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel because that requires true expertise, and knowing things that nobody really thinks about telling you.

For example, nobody told me that dogs lost their teeth. When they’re puppies and they grow, they lose their teeth. That makes sense, but I didn’t think about it until my dog started spewing her bloody teeth on my feet. That was a terrible experience, and understanding it required experience. You have to go through it. At the top of the funnel, you don’t necessarily have to go through it to explain it. At the middle and the bottom, you do. For me, that’s the next step in SEO.

What worries me is that we may end up, once again, teaching machines how to replace us in the midterm. When you focus on the middle and bottom of the funnel, always keep the customer journey in mind, because this may also be taken away from us in a few years, and we will have to find our added value elsewhere.”

Does the heightened importance of mapping to the customer journey mean that we do not need a traditional marketing funnel anymore?

“We don’t necessarily need it anymore because it’s a tool for us, internally. Does it reflect what really happens in the world? No. Some folks get to the middle of the funnel and then they go back up. Some folks exit completely. Some folks go straight from one question to a purchase.

You need to really focus on the customer journey and the jobs that need to be done. Jobs to be done could be: ‘Excel is so slow and frustrates me. I need something better. Let me look at BigQuery or Looker Studio. Let me look into learning a programming language.’ You try to find solutions to your problems. We’re too focused on the funnel to really ask ourselves, what are the problems that people are trying to fix at each step? We want this to fit in with the way we sell things instead. That means we have blind spots in our marketing.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2024?

“Stop stressing about the metrics that are fluctuating right now. Do your best with the existing metrics. Keep the funnel in the back of your mind, but really take the time to focus on the customer journey. That way, you can actually understand your own blind spots in the content. What’s missing, fundamentally, that will help you get people onto the next stage and become customers? Instead of focusing on how to scale your SEO content production at each step of the funnel. You really need to focus on the problems that you’re fixing for people at each step, where you can actually have something meaningful to say and help them.”

Myriam Jessier is an SEO Consultant and Trainer, and you can find them at PRAGM.co.