Too often, SEO and content strategies are built around keywords, not user behavior.
But keywords alone don’t tell you what users need – intent does.
Content and intent: Understanding the disconnect
Performance marketers often ask too much from users too soon, like offering a “free audit” when someone has just discovered their brand.
As my colleague Laura Schiele points out, this disconnect usually stems from a lack of understanding of where users actually are in their purchase journey.
That same misalignment shows up frequently in SEO and content strategy.
When we push high-intent CTAs or product-heavy content at users still in the awareness stage, we not only lose conversions – we risk losing trust.
In this article, I want to address that mistake by showing you how to align your SEO and content strategy to each stage of purchase intent, often framed as the classic funnel:
- Top of the funnel (awareness),
- Middle of the funnel (consideration).
- Bottom of the funnel (decision).
While the funnel’s structure hasn’t changed much, how users move through it has.
With AI-driven search, social discovery on platforms like Reddit and TikTok, and conversational tools like ChatGPT reshaping user behavior, traditional keyword journeys are shorter, faster, and more fragmented than ever.
Still, the fundamental principle holds true: if you want to drive results, you need to meet users with the right content, at the right moment in their journey.
Here’s how we help our clients do that by:
- Mapping keywords to intent.
- Tailoring content formats by stage,
- Aligning SEO with paid campaigns to drive meaningful, full-funnel results.
Understanding your goals at each stage of purchase intent
To recap:
- The top of the funnel is about building awareness and helping users discover potential solutions.
- The middle of the funnel focuses on educating those users and positioning your product or service within their consideration set.
- And at the bottom of the funnel, the goal is to convert interest into action and close the deal.
Because the top of the funnel is the highest-volume stage, where the customer is likely aware of the problem but perhaps not the solution, you may have work to do to establish your vertical (not just your brand) as a potential solution.
For instance, a customer searching for symptoms that show dogs are allergic might not realize that both shampoo and dietary supplements can help treat the issue.
If you meet customers at the top of the funnel by introducing both potential solutions and building awareness of your brand as one of those solutions, you’ve done your job.
The middle of the funnel is where the real work of establishing your brand in the consideration set happens.
At this stage, educating the user on the differentiated features of your product or service – and their significance in helping the user solve their problems – is key.
It’s not a hard sell; you’re simply trying to help users learn more about your solution, including why it might be the right one for their particular needs.
At the bottom of the funnel, the user is ready to make a decision, so your goal should be to close the deal.
Case studies, comparison charts, and social proof (e.g., highlighted user reviews) help remove any hesitation and instill trust that your product is the best option for your user.
Dig deeper: 9 tips for aligning SEO with the B2B buyer’s journey
Mapping keywords to purchase intent
Generally speaking, you’ll find the highest-volume keywords at the top of the funnel, where users are still trying to discover all possible solutions to their problem.
Keyword modifiers at this stage look like:
At the middle-funnel stage, users are gathering information on possible solutions, with keyword modifiers including:
And at the bottom of the funnel, along with very direct, high-intent searches like:
- Comparisons (e.g., [brand] vs [brand] or [brand] alternatives).
- Reviews (e.g., [keyword /brand] review or [brand] ratings), where you’ll see modifiers such as:
In other words, the queries themselves will tell you a user’s purchase stage.
The next step is to make sure you’re aligning the type and theme of your content to address that specific stage.
Developing content that aligns with purchase intent
To build awareness and discovery at the top of the funnel, we recommend the following types of content:
- Podcasts.
- Social media posts, videos, and carousels.
- High-level research reports.
- Blog posts.
At the middle of the funnel, in establishing your brand/product firmly in the user’s consideration set, we deploy:
- Tools, quizzes, and assessments that help users understand more about their particular needs and possible solutions.
- Product-driven assets like YouTube videos and product pages demonstrating key product assets.
- Repeatable, informative, entertaining content like newsletters that help your brand truly own the topic in question.
And at the bottom of the funnel, to build trust that your brand or product is the right one for your user, we create:
- Comparison pages.
- Alternative pages.
- Product pages.
- User review highlights and use cases.
- Case studies.
- Webinars.
- Pricing pages.
- Product demonstration videos.
The most important thing to remember here is not to get ahead of yourself and ask too much of the user, too early.
For instance, don’t ask the user to read case studies about your product when they’re still figuring out the types of solutions.
I rarely have to guard marketers against being too conservative with their content offers, but if a user is sending you high-intent signals with their queries, make sure you’re giving them content that pushes your differentiators and includes a CTA for them to reach out.
Dig deeper: Content mapping: Who, what, where, when, why and how
Working with your paid media partners
Paid media can and should be an effective complement to your SEO campaigns, and vice versa.
At my agency, we usually recommend clients integrate PPC with SEO (using PPC to target the bottom of the funnel) to ensure we’re using the budget to capture the demand that SEO has built.
An easy way to find the audience you really want to target with your PPC campaigns is to Google your target keywords and review the results.
Are the organic results similar to your business and niche?
If not, experiment with new phrases that are a closer match to your users’ intent.
If you’re already running PPC campaigns, that data can be useful in building SEO momentum.
For example, if you have a key phrase that’s doing really well in a PPC campaign, use that same key phrase for SEO and see if you can dominate the organic results.
Another part of our SEO strategy is using keyword data from paid ads to see which keywords actually convert to buyers.
From there, we can make informed decisions about which keywords merit extra attention on the organic side.
The volume here will be relatively low, but there’s great potential for trackable bottom-funnel activity like pipeline and revenue.
On the flip side, we may choose to deprioritize low-converting PPC terms in our SEO strategy – unless those keywords sit higher in the funnel and help attract the right audience early in their journey.
In those cases, we often repurpose them to build a qualified user base for remarketing across Google, YouTube, and paid social.
Dig deeper: How to maximize PPC and SEO data with co-optimization audits
What’s next?
User behavior and the customer journey are both in an unprecedented state of flux as polar-opposite search forces of highly personal content (Reddit, TikTok, YouTube) and AI-generated content (LLMs, AI Overviews) continue to gain steam.
Although the way users may address their needs at each stage is changing, I don’t see the actual stages (discovery/awareness, consideration/education, purchase) evolving dramatically.
Users will still need to become problem-aware, then solution-aware, before they even consider making a purchase.
Most users will do considerable research to narrow down a consideration set, and others will rely on some kind of social proof when making a purchase.
In general, shifting your search and content strategy to align with the stages of intent will help you engage your users no matter where and how they consume content.
Some of this article may be moot in a matter of months, but it’s the mentality of staying agile and meeting your users where they are in their journey that will continue to matter.