Need more reliable BOFU content ideas? Find high-converting ideas here

Communicating with leads when they are almost ready to buy (at the bottom of the funnel) is exciting; your eyes (almost) turn to green dollars with the anticipation of conversion. But here comes a problem: you have several BOFU content ideas, but historically, these ideas have not converted well. 

You know the stakes are high. To reach the bottom of the funnel, your lead has crossed a maze of decisions. 

If they are in your funnel, they may be in the funnel of your competitors as well. They will make more decisions on their way to a purchase which could lead them to your competitors. Nobody wants that! 

The agony of losing a qualified BOFU lead would be unbearable!

So it falls on your BOFU content ideas to hit the home run!

At Spear Growth, we help 5-10 companies with their SEO content strategy every month. And, as an agency, our results are the reason why our clients trust us.

Here is an example of SEO growth we delivered for a client:

These numbers are for a domain with a DA (domain authority) score of 14.

So today, we will help you:

• Reframe your SEO content strategy to move away from vanity metrics and overreliance on tools.
• Avoid 2 common mistakes most SEO strategists make
• Find BOFU content ideas with high potential to rank
• Check if your list of BOFU ideas is worth pursuing (without using on inaccurate keyword tools)

What is the value of SEO?

Google is the market leader in search engine share; it blows other search engines out of the water. If you are visible on Google, you are much more likely to capture the mind share of your target audience. SEO has traditionally been a way to improve the searchability and visibility of your website on Google.

Besides improvement in searchability and visibility, SEO brings the following advantages to your website:

• Building of trust and authority over the long term
• Understanding the voice of the visitor through analysis through SERP data, search query data, and insights from platforms like Google Analytics.
• Improving website’s user experience because Google has become smarter than ever in recognizing how good the user experience is on any given page.
• Reducing the cost of customer acquisition and improving overall ROI on marketing spend.
• Improving your competitive knowledge because you must first study what’s working for your competitors if you want to beat them on Google.
• Exploring new opportunities for your brand which were previously unseen

The top 2 mistakes in SEO content strategy

The #1 mistake prospects make is to think of SEO like a slot machine. They pour the money in and when they don’t see immediate results, the blame game begins. As I explained previously, an SEO content strategy takes quarters to work (not just months). 

Morning Score conducted a comprehensive research among 75 SEO experts. In that study, 82% of experts agreed that, on average, SEO takes 6 months to show a traffic increase and 12-24 months to show large-scale improvements. These results also improve over time as your domain authority (and therefore your ranking) improves.

Another mistake people make is that they focus on impressions and clicks. Their logic is that if more people see their content, more people are likely to buy from them. This numbers game sounds like a good strategy, until clicks and impressions are the only results you get from your content campaigns (and sales remain abysmal). 

Here’s how that happens:

Often new SEO associates in the industry use the “low keyword difficulty, high search volume” strategy to generate relatively quick gains for impressions and clicks.

One major drawback of this strategy is that there’s no consideration of buying intent in it. Most content with high search volume is individuals at earlier stages in their career looking to learn and acquire knowledge.

So, while impressions and clicks rise, sales remain low because these strategists don’t focus on keywords that bring in “ready to buy” prospects.

What B2B SaaS companies want are visits from their ICP (ideal customer profile). Even then, 100 ICP leads from a form attached to a blog mean nothing if none of them is interested in buying your product. So B2B SaaS companies should focus on content that drives ICP leads that are ready to buy (not just any traffic).

To generate such SQLs (sales-qualified leads), your content strategy must focus on the bottom of the funnel (BoFu) keywords. Such leads have a shorter sales cycle as they don’t need to be nurtured for a long time. 

How to address your audience at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel – TOFU vs MOFU vs BOFU

Top of the funnel (ToFU) blogs help them define their problem and direct them toward solutions. Blogs, reports, guides, etc are used in the Middle of the funnel (MoFu) stage to help the audience choose from among a bunch of solutions and products.

Once the user has chosen a solution, they are ready to look for a product that provides their preferred solution. This is the bottom of the funnel stage where your product must produce content that helps turn ‘product aware” leads into “product preferring” leads. Such content types include (but are not limited to) pitch decks, case studies, product page, pricing page, and comparison guides.

At the BoFu, the customer wants to justify choosing your product. They want to feel confident about their choice so they can explain their decision to their stakeholders (or whoever asks them). As the product, the BoFu stage is your opportunity to help resolve any hesitations, answer any questions, or address any objections your target customer might have.

Highly effective content examples for bottom of the funnel

Here is a non-exhaustive list of content types that help you address these concerns in different ways. If used well, they can help generate leads with high on buying intent from the bottom of your marketing funnel:

• Competitor pages / comparison guides
• Case studies
• Blogs based on case studies
• Product-roundup blogs
• Use case-specific product (or service) pages
• Industry-specific pages 
• Customer reviews and testimonials (especially on listing sites like G2 or Clutch)
• Video demos or product tutorials

How to generate BOFU content ideas

You can combine the content ideas I mentioned in the last section with keywords in your niche. Then you can perform further research on these keywords to generate more content ideas. 

For example, let’s say you optimize for the keyword “employee engagement case studies”. The first step is to check if there’s a demand for this keyword

One way to check if a keyword has demand worth targeting is to check its search volume in a keyword research tool, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMRush. 

But the problem with these tools is that they are not always accurate.

Sourajit Mukherjee, Spear Growth’s wonderful SEO Lead, explains it best:

“The search volume metrics that we see in famous SEO tools are broken.

We have seen examples where these tools showed a search volume of 0-30 for a very bottom-of-the-funnel keyword. But when we wrote the content, the Google search console data showed 1,100+ impressions.“

Therefore, at Spear Growth, we follow a more detailed process to find hidden content opportunities. Here is a brief about how we do content opportunity research. Use this process to list down all your options and then try analyzing each keyword option individually:

Step 1: Analyze content categories from your competitors

Start by manually tagging all the pages of all of our client’s competitors. 

We get the keyword data from Spyfu. This data includes the URL, the keyword, and the search volume (we delete the rest as they are not relevant to our process). Then we manually follow each link, find patterns in the link data, and use those patterns to tag the category of each link. Once that is done for a client’s competitors, we do this categorization for our client’s websites. This gives us a bunch of raw data sheets.

This is not an easy – or a quick – task. In fact, we request a full week from our clients to do only the category analysis. 

Then, we use Google Sheets to estimate annual search volume and the % share of each category in the overall annual search volume.

Once we finish doing this for each of our client’s competitors, it sets the stage and provides us with data for the next stage of pattern analysis. For example, we might observe that product pages in the client’s niche are all the rage, or some niches might have a high number of resource pages that are ranking across all competitors. 

Next steps:

1. Once we find the dominating categories, we use the raw data sheets to find variations of keywords which have URLs that rank in those categories.

2. Keywords in the related searches area (at the bottom of the SERP) and autocomplete options for this keyword (in Google) gives us more options to target.

Here’s what this might look like:

Step 2: Check if our own keywords are worth targeting

Sometimes, we (i.e. the SEO Strategists at Spear Growth) are well versed with the client’s industry and their specific sub-niche. In such cases, we come up with content ideas on our own. 

But here comes the problem: We don’t know if our keywords have enough search volume, i.e., we don’t know if people even care about it enough to search for it on Google.

This is easy to find out, though. Here’s how to check if a keyword you picked out from the swirling recesses of your mind is worth targeting:

1. Search for the keyword in Google
2. Find and click on one of the relevant keywords from the “Related searches” section (at the bottom of the SERP).
3. Check the related searches of that keyword. If your original keyword is visible in the related searches here, it means that keyword is worth pursuing further in your content opportunity research process.

Step 3: Check keywords for comparison pages

Typically, keywords for comparison pages follow typical patterns. Use these string patterns to find keywords for competitor pages:

1. [company 1] vs [target company] (or switch the order here)

2. [company 1] vs [company 1] vs [target company] (or switch the order here)

3. [target company] alternatives

4. [target company] competitors

5. Companies [/products] like [target company]

Secondary keywords for such pages can be:

1. [target company] price

2. [target company] alternatives

Step 4: Try product-specific keywords for BoFu content options

Keywords like “software”, “solution”, or “product” can be attached to the target company name to find more options to add to your list.

IMP: Check if a keyword is actually worth writing content for (a.k.a how we do things at Spear Growth)

Companies typically spend a lot of time, money, and effort on writing high quality content. So before you start writing content for all keywords in your list, take a look at its current search results in Google to see if it’s an opportunity worth pursuing. 

You will want to check for the following factors:

• Domain authority trends for the top 3 results and the bottom 3 results. Pages with low domain authority at the top of SERP page #1 indicates that the keyword might be a good opportunity. You can use a free tool like the Moz bar to find the domain authority of any page that is ranking on the SERP.

• Check the content quality and the length (number of words) of each result.

• Check the number of ads are being displayed at the top and the bottom of SERP. page #1.

Keywords that get filtered through this process generally have a higher chance of ranking close to the top of Google’s search results.

The results of this process 

At Spear Growth, we rely on our proprietary research process for organic SEO opportunities – for our own website and those of our clients’. While tools are always a part of our arsenal, we do not rely solely on tools. We focus our efforts on data that Google shows us because ultimately we want to rank on Google.

Following this process, we have achieved results like these:

We delivered this growth for a single page on the website of a SaaS client in the recruitment domain.

These are not typical results. The time to significant results is unique for each client and subjective to the current state of their website.

If you are after similar results for your website, talk to Spear Growth’s Founder Ishaan Shakunt by booking his time here.