📂 Why I’m all in on the middle for organic search

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Today's newsletter is by my friend and SaaS content marketer Josh Spilker.

Josh is the Head of Marketing at Friday.app. He knows what he's talking about. I'll just leave this here:

And for the Swipe Files audience only, he's sharing some behind the scenes content of real projects with clients.

You know the typical marketing funnel?
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Awareness – Consideration – Decision

Or maybe this:

Problem Aware – Solution Aware – Product Aware

In my view, the middle funnel has been overlooked for way too long.

Here’s why...

These buyers are:

• Actively shopping
• Actively interested in new products

They may not know all the features, but they know similar products and are willing to try something new.

As a marketer, what more could you ask for?

This area is under utilized in content marketing, especially organic search content marketing.

When I talk to SaaS companies who are just starting out, content marketing can look very overwhelming. All of these topics? Where do you start?

For too long – perhaps due to our trustworthy Hubspot inbound certification – we (or maybe just me???) gave equal weight to each of the three parts of the funnel.

It was important to have each, recognizing that the top would have lots of volume, and the bottom would have very little volume, but lots of buying intent.

Most start at the top of the funnel, but this is a huge mistake. If you try this, what you soon learn is that the top funnel takes forever to rank and no one goes straight through your well-designed funnel anyway.

So what do you do?

Focus on the middle.

The Middle Funnel Advantages:

• Larger volume than bottom-funnel pages
• Interest from people looking for a solution

Because of that volume, you have a higher chance of seeing results in your organic efforts.

…And you’ll find motivated buyers faster as well.

It’ not that the other parts of the funnel are unimportant (they are!) they just don’t deserve the same percentage of your time.

We’ve been conditioned to think that the top of the funnel deserves more time because there’s more opportunity. But only more opportunity for higher volume words. The middle funnel is the best – it provides good enough volume, with higher buying intent.

Check out these examples from Ahrefs. These are search terms in industries I’ve never been involved in before.

The key for these is not to only look at volume, but also Clicks Per Search (CPS) – It’s a ratio that indicates how often people do click when they search for these terms.

I tried to pick three words in each part of the funnel. The middle funnel comparison has the highest CPS with a healthy amount of volume.

Granted, these are still competitive keywords. Topic depth and expertise are important. If I’m trying to compete with search on these words, the middle funnel gives you a lot of impact.

I’ve used this strategy mostly in the productivity space (ClickUp/Workzone), in the HR space (special projects at Toptal), and now in company/team communication (Friday). I’ve seen significant conversions each time.

Instead of running generic leadership posts competing with Forbes or Inc, you can drill down the solutions/problems that your target audience is keenly interested in.

Your buyers aren’t investing the same amount in the different parts of the funnel, and you don’t have to either.

Others can build the “What is…” pages and you can build the pages that actually convert*.

But if you’re just starting out, jump into the middle funnel.

I’ve built a content playbook to help you do just that, documenting my learnings from publishing 50 posts in 1 quarter, mostly focused on the middle funnel.

Here’s a special Gumroad link with a 41% discount for Swipe Files members: https://bit.ly/3gDKgjQ​

PS: Oh! My (new) friend and agency owner Billl Rice is publicly tracking his progress implementing my content playbook. Here’s his Twitter thread.​

Thanks!

—Josh

* I write those pages, I’ve written those pages, and I will write them in the future. But it’s not where I pend most of my time. They have seasons, lifecycles, and purposes.

Thanks again to Josh for sharing on the middle of the funnel.

What did you think?

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →​

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