{"id":5113,"date":"2024-10-29T15:51:14","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T19:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/?p=5113"},"modified":"2026-03-19T10:50:05","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T14:50:05","slug":"the-ikigai-of-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/blog\/the-ikigai-of-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ikigai of SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Marketers are now in agreement that the \u201cold playbook,\u201d the one where you take a list of 100 keywords organized by search volume and create generic content based on them, is dead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new playbook\u2026well, everyone\u2019s got a different idea there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it\u2019s uncontroversial to say that planning, writing, and ranking for the term \u201cshrug emoji\u201d is probably useless for HubSpot\u2019s business:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Playbooks like this were born essentially of the need for content and SEO teams to hit their core KPI: organic traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome,” as Charlie Munger says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So from 2016-2022, marketers were caught on what we call the Traffic Trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, however, the tide has gone out and we’re seeing that there was very little (if any) value for ranking and driving traffic for terms like this in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve heard several cases of traffic and click-through-rates dropping due to AI overviews on TOFU content. Yet, in every case I’ve heard, the perplexing outcome is the same: leads haven’t dropped, and in many cases have increased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOnly when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked,\u201d goes the famous Warren Buffett quote. And so many SEOs and marketers were swimming naked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By no means is SEO dead. Rather, it’s evolving, and in many ways, we’re forced to due things we should have been doing all along: caring about relevance, value, utility, expertise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(As a quick aside, I found it hilarious that a major influencer and tech VP wrote recently that the “new content playbook” involved “using expertise and specific examples” in your content. If this is the “new playbook,” what the hell kind of content were you publishing before?!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It means you need to treat the channel like a channel, and in addition to understanding the mechanics and incentives of search and information retrieval, to understand which buyer pain points you are solving, how your product maps onto those pain points and jobs-to-be-done, and how people use search to solve those problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To me, this represents such a fun opportunity to focus on value instead of vanity metrics, to treat SEO like a product and not a surface layer marketing play that never seems to generate positive ROI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is how we\u2019ve looked at search since our inception, insisting that SEO & content can and should drive attributable business outcomes (our founders come from growth and conversion backgrounds, so we\u2019ve interwoven this into our methods from the beginning).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Combine that with some old school audience and buyer research, as well as product and industry positioning, and you can sit at the executives’ table, speaking to the influenced pipeline and revenue you\u2019re bringing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll get as tactical as I can on the three dimensions I listed and how I pull intelligence and use it to inform our strategies:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1) Buyer Research: The Foundation and First Pass Filter<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Before you even think about SEO, you need to know who your buyers are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who are you trying to reach? Which audiences will you prioritize and which will you omit for now? What keeps them up at night? What problems are they actively searching for solutions to? Without this, no amount of keyword research or SEO optimization will get you the business outcomes you\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buyer research is the filter for everything. It tells you which segments of your audience are most valuable and which pain points to address in your content. You get this insight from\u00a0Gong calls,\u00a0customer surveys<\/a>,\u00a0revenue attribution analysis<\/a>, and qualitative customer interviews. It’s through these methods that we learn how our best-fit customers talk about their challenges and desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was at CXL, we obsessed over this stuff. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had a panel of experts that I called my editorial cabinet<\/a>, who I would interview for each piece (and quote in the content). We mined comments on blog posts (when those were a thing) to inform future content topics, along with questions and debates in our Facebook group (when those were a thing). We scoured forums like inbound.org and growthhackers.com (when those\u2026the joke is getting old). We included a survey for our email subscribers in the 3rd drip email. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was all target buyer and audience driven, and only later, optimized for search or social.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

CXL became known as the go-to resource for conversion rate optimization (CRO) because the content strategy wasn\u2019t just about driving traffic\u2014it was about owning the CRO space. The editorial mission was to produce \u201cbest in the world\u201d blog posts that were the first and last piece a person ever needed to read on the topic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This mapped well to prospects who would be looking for an agency, but it worked even better after launching CXL Institute, an education platform. Of course, SEO is the perfect channel to drive adoption here, as people search looking to educate themselves, and the upsell is a platform where they can further educate themselves (and get credentialed). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another company I think does this well is Freshpaint<\/strong>, which makes privacy software for healthcare companies. Their content strategy isn\u2019t driven by keyword volume\u2014it\u2019s driven by the evolving regulatory landscape their buyers navigate every day. Freshpaint\u2019s product solves critical compliance challenges, and their content speaks directly to those pain points. In an industry where one wrong move could mean hefty fines, Freshpaint\u2019s content is less about SEO rankings for topics that have no discernable volume and more about educating buyers on the complex legalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversely, we’ve seen clients and prospects who have struggled at great lengths to define this, or have pivoted too frequently, resulting in whiplash and dilution across topical spheres (which is harder to clean up in retrospect than to define moving forward). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, your buyer’s pain points could span far beyond your products and solutions, and in some cases this warrants expansion, and in some cases it doesn’t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two extreme examples: HubSpot sells to marketers (and sales, services, ops, etc.), and has tons of entry level products. These collective audiences absolutely love reading and learning, thus justifying a “media company” strategy as well as 101 level content on “how to make a shrug emoji.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversely, JH Scherck gave an example in a webinar recently of a company that makes software to manage porta potties on construction sites. This buyer, it turns out, has no interest in listening to a podcast or reading LinkedIn thought leadership about their pain points. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, audience and buyer research is my first pass filter. It’s the broadest envelope for content opportunities, and if an idea doesn’t fit into this surface area, it’s thrown out. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next filter layer is product utility, which helps us narrow in on our unique advantage, to create relevant and unique assets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2) Product Knowledge: Where Content and Strategy Align<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Once you understand your buyer, the next step is aligning your content with your product\u2019s unique advantages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, we can map core features and solutions to pain points and jobs-to-be-done your buyers are actively trying to solve. Content should naturally highlight this, making the connection between the problem and your product\u2019s solution crystal clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this stage, we dive deep into the product by interviewing subject matter experts<\/strong>, analyzing product demos<\/strong>, and talking to the sales team<\/strong>. We look at competitive positioning<\/strong> and review sites<\/strong> to understand exactly what differentiates your product in the market. Typically, this results in a semantic map<\/a> springing from product categories and encompassing the features and pain points related to the category. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can also invoke a prioritization dimension (this framework from Ahrefs<\/a>) that assigns a value to each topic or content idea based on its association with your product or service:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Zapier is a famous example of great product & audience overlap, with their programmatic X + Y product integration library. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another example is Workato, which I can speak to more confidently having worked there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their product solves complex business automation problems, and they sell to a more enterprise audience than point solution integration products. They have well-established vertical use cases, and their content maps towards those, both in terms of their integrations directory, but also in their editorial content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s focused on what their buyers actually need to do in their day-to-day roles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By understanding buyer pain points\u2014like integrating different business systems or automating routine HR tasks\u2014Workato has built a content strategy that directly speaks to the \u201cjobs to be done\u201d for their buyers. And the result? Not just traffic, but pipeline and closed deals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, when we worked on Jasper\u2019s organic growth program, generative AI was very new. It\u2019s now a saturated space with hundreds of tools and organic competitors. But early on, we were able to map out content topics tightly integrated with their product\u2019s core value\u2014helping users create content faster or better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We focused on specific buyer pain points like \u201chow to write a LinkedIn bio\u201d or \u201chow to write engaging podcast descriptions\u201d as well as categorical claims like \u201cbest AI content writers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be clear, this was pretty bread-and-butter keyword research, but it was mapped towards the middle and bottom-of-the-funnel, and in the content itself, we were showing buyers how Jasper\u2019s product could solve their exact problem (product-led content<\/a>!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it worked\u2014Jasper\u2019s blog generated over $4M in attributable ARR<\/a> because the content wasn\u2019t just aligned with SEO, it was aligned with the jobs to be done<\/strong> of their buyers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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3) Channel Optimization: SEO as the Final Layer<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Right, so now we return to our safe space \u2013 SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Breathe in for 4 counts, and upon exhaling, say “canonical tag” with me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what\u2019s left to say? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to channel research our goal is, at a high level, to determine two things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n