Ulduz says: “My insight is, with AI disrupting top-funnel visibility, SEO must evolve and capture bottom-funnel conversion-ready traffic.”

Let's start at the top there. How is AI disrupting top-funnel visibility?

“Right now, whenever someone searches for something very basic – such as ‘What is SEO?’, for example, or even ‘How to do something’ – AI already gives the answer. If it's an AI overview, it’s on the SERP, or it's ChatGPT, it will give you the whole answer, very comprehensively.

You no longer need to click the blue links, go to the website, and read from the brands. Brands no longer have any opportunity to capture you in the top-funnel and somehow convince you through their conversion tactics on their blog article that you find, for example, into a qualified lead.

So, right now, it's way, way harder for brands to capture people in the very beginning of their user journey.

That's basically what I mean by ‘AI disrupting top-funnel visibility’ because users are no longer clicking to get information from a website; they're clicking to buy only.”

Are you saying that it's not worthwhile to do SEO for top-funnel phrases?

Are you saying that it's still possible to influence that behaviour and use SEO to influence that general market overview type of inquiry to begin with, on AI search engines, and it's just the fact that you can't actually measure directly from top-of-funnel queries to bottom-of-funnel?

Or is it not worthwhile concentrating on that at all, and only worthwhile concentrating on bottom-of-funnel?

“I don't think it's about measuring the top-funnel or it's about attribution or anything like that.

You don't get to control what AI will show for top-funnel because, first, it depends on where users search. If it's ChatGPT, it's probably going to be based on its training data (which is updated every two years, or sometimes six months, depending on the content type). So, you can't really affect that one. Based on its data, it can give you answers without even referencing any website at all.

In the long run, I don't see any way that you would affect top-funnel traffic. The AI is basically taking over, and it's just going away from SEO.”

Interesting. Okay, so give up on top-of-funnel, but perhaps double down on bottom-of-funnel. If you're doubling down on that bottom-of-funnel, how do you identify bottom-of-funnel conversion-ready traffic?

“It's tricky and there are many unknowns in the age of AI. Another problem is that you don't have any attribution. You don't get to see the exact prompts people type. Keeping this in mind, how do you actually find these high-intent bottom-funnel queries to optimize for?

First, what you can do is focus on the exact solution that you provide. For example, if you are a data provider – if you are providing market data – what you could optimize for is ‘best market data provider in UK’, if you're targeting a local audience. If you're targeting this, you will see that there are many brands mentioned by AI, and you just need to make sure that you get to appear on top, or at least on the top three. This is the main big picture.

So, you just need to make sure that, if there is an AI overview that's dominating the SERP, and this huge snippet is pushing your website very far down on the search results, there needs to be a way to appear on it.

Your main objective is to appear, but there are many ways to do it, depending on your brand – which we can also discuss in the follow-ups.”

You started talking about what you do as a business. So, I guess, optimizing around your product terms and the phraseology that someone may use in order to actually find something like that.

Do you have a favourite way to actually identify the terms associated with the products that you sell?

“Yes. Basically, the easiest and most straightforward way is you just need to optimize for something that describes how your product solves a specific use case. It's even better if you can also include the specific industry. So, ‘how to solve X problem with my product in Y specific industry’. Then it's a very bottom-funnel query.

It’s even better if you can optimize more for brand comparisons or case studies, how you actually solve the customer pain point, and you write a very comprehensive case study about how some other brand used your products and they were able to address their pains, and you write it down in very clear detail.

Another way is to have comparison-type content, like your brand versus your main competitor, which is great because AI overviews are usually quite comprehensive. They will say, ‘Oh, there are these and these solutions,’ and it's usually sourcing from the comparison and listicle type of content.

This would be the type of content and queries you could target. Basically, to wrap up: product comparisons, case studies, customer testimonials, and it’s even better if you can get some of your content and brand recommendations into your customer's website.”

You mentioned a few different possibilities for bottom-of-funnel content there.

If an SEO doesn't have much time, how do they prioritise what needs to be done first?

“As there are many unknowns, it's hard to prioritise because, right now, you don't know what works and what doesn't. It's just mainly assumptions.

However, based on that, what I would prioritise is to find these very core product-related queries. Let's say, if you want to find this podcast in the UK, and you want to attract more people to this podcast, you would need to optimize first for ‘best SEO podcast in UK’ or ‘in English’ or ‘best SEO podcast in X specific topic’. Maybe you're more focused on technical SEO.

If there is any other synonym for SEO podcast, you could use that as well, like ‘Best SEO tips’. You just try to find what a user would type just before going to you and converting. What would they search for?”

Where do you go to find those keyword phrases? Do you simply go to Google and use Google Suggest? Do you use a keyword tool or something else?

“If you’ve worked with your brand long enough, you would actually know what it is by default. If you know your product well enough.

If not, I don't think you need to use any other tool. You need to brainstorm because, for AI visibility, you need to have very tailored branded content, so you need to put some effort in beforehand, to decide what it is that you want to appear for.

A good way would be to actually ask your previous leads, or previous people who have found you, how they actually found you. What did they search for? Did they look for ‘best podcasts on off-site SEO?’ Did they actually not look for anything, but they saw you on some listicle article somewhere? That’s a nice way to begin.

Another way is to see what the top queries on Search Console are that you're ranking for, and for those queries, you link it to the page that's ranking on top. You check the top query of your top-ranking page that converts your visitors into users. You try to find what question this page is actually answering, and you try to reverse engineer the question, and you optimize for that.”

You're touching on the importance of ensuring that the content is hyper-relevant to the keyword phrase that you're targeting.

What's your process for doing that? How do you try to ensure that your piece of content delivers and converts?

“For us, I am working with a very technical product. In my case, specifically, product knowledge is very important. You need to know exactly what people type, or might possibly type – and for that, what we usually do is ask people, ‘How did you find us?’ This is the best way. This is not very scalable, but if you want to get something of quality, you will have to do it at some point.

We have that, or another way could be that you just look at the Search Console, check your top-ranking page that's actually converting, and start doing your keyword research based on that page.

Of course, not top-funnel keywords, but you try to find some long tail keywords that lead to that page and then, from there, you can turn these keywords into a prompt, or you can actually type some of these keywords on Google to see what type of websites are appearing for those. What's the intent for it?

You need to find the intent behind and create a question for that intent, tailored to your brand.”

How do you ensure that you're not missing out on any opportunities?

As you rightly say, you should know about your business/products and you should know keyword phrases in relation to your products, but you can't be absolutely sure that your target market isn't calling what you do something else, or describing what you do and what they're looking for in a different way that you hadn't thought of beforehand.

How do you conduct research to make sure that you are actually incorporating all the phraseology that your target market is likely to use?

“It's a very big topic. So far, personally, I haven't found a solution to make sure that I have captured absolutely everything that people might have searched for. Again, because of how technical the product is – and also, if you're in B2B, it's even harder to predict how users find you.

My main way, however, is whenever I see someone quite valuable coming and converting, you can check which page the person came from and, if you're lucky, they will tell you exactly what they typed.

If not, you just do an analysis on that page. You just check, okay, this person converted on this specific date. On that specific date, what were the top queries ranking for it? What were the top queries getting clicks for that? Then you can just make assumptions. There are many assumptions here.

At some point, you need to take some of the assumptions, based on your internal conversion data, some information from customers, and your own knowledge – and, at some point, you just need to test those assumptions. You don't really have a clear data point to start with, unfortunately.”

How does this all fit into a broader content marketing strategy? Obviously, it's only part of what you need to publish.

Do you sit down on a quarterly basis to decide on what to do and how this impacts/works with other activities?

“Bottom-funnel SEO content usually supports the final step of the sales funnel conversion. Right now, we are just making sure that we are, in the big picture, not just driving traffic, but we are actually driving some business value out of it.

When you are focusing on this objective, it supports several other departments, because bottom-funnel quality content is something that you will use to nurture your customers too. It's something you will use in sales, maybe when negotiating and calling people/leads.

This type of content is actually solving many problems at once, and you're really focusing and giving all your resources to the group of people that are actually willing to convert/more likely to convert.

You're just shifting your resources in a more efficient way.”

Ulduz, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“The key takeaway would be, first, to remember that there are many unknowns, and shift your focus from traffic chasing to intent – and focus on addressing the high-intent queries of your potential audience.”

How are you sure that the intent is high?

“For that, you need to do many internal analytics and define what is high intent for you – because it's different for different companies

After you define it, you do the analysis of all your customers and you see which ones were likely to convert, after which conversion actions, and after which pages. You need a thorough CRO analysis for that. After you are sure, with your funnel, that this is where high-intent users are coming from, then it's defined for you.

For that, you actually use your product knowledge and you use all the information that you have from your leads to draft high-intent content based on that.”

Ulduz Ismayilova is SEO Manager at GeoPostcodes.