How to Align Your SEO Strategy with the Stages of Buyer Intent

Avoid one of the biggest mistakes in performance marketing: using the wrong call-to-actions (CTAs). We need to match SEO and content with what users want at each stage of the funnel.
Often, SEO and content focus only on keywords, not on what users really need. But keywords alone do not show user intent—intent does.

Content and Intent: Understanding the Gap

Performance marketers sometimes ask too much from users too early, like offering a “free audit” when users have just found their brand.

As our colleague Laura Schiele says, this mistake usually happens because we don’t understand where users are in their buying journey.

This mismatch also happens a lot in SEO and content strategies.

When we push product-heavy content or strong CTAs at users still in the awareness stage, we lose not just conversions but also trust.

In this article, we will fix this by showing how to match your SEO and content to each buying stage, known as the funnel:

• Top of the funnel (awareness)
• Middle of the funnel (consideration)
• Bottom of the funnel (decision)

The funnel shape hasn’t changed much, but the way users move through it has.

With AI-powered search, social platforms like Reddit and TikTok, and chat tools like ChatGPT, users move faster and their journey is more broken up than before.

Still, the main idea stays the same: to get good results, we must give users the right content at the right time in their journey.

Here’s How We help Our Clients:

• Match keywords with user intent
• Use the right content type for each stage
• Connect SEO with paid ads for better full-funnel results

Understanding Your Goals at Each Buying Stage

To sum up:
The top of the funnel is about making users aware and helping them find possible solutions.

The middle of the funnel is about teaching users more and showing why your product fits their needs.

The bottom of the funnel is about turning interest into action and making the sale.

Since the top of the funnel has the most users—who may know the problem but not the solution—you might need to explain your whole product area, not just your brand.

For example, a customer searching about dog allergies might not know that shampoo and dietary supplements both can help.

If you introduce both ideas and show your brand as one of the answers, you’ve done well at this stage.

The middle of the funnel is where you show why your product stands out.

Here, you educate users on the special features of your product and how it solves their problems.

You are not trying to hard-sell but to help users understand why your solution fits them.

At the bottom of the funnel, users are ready to choose, so your goal is to close the sale.

Tools like case studies, comparison charts, and social proof (like user reviews) help remove doubts and build trust that your product is the best choice.

Mapping Keywords to Purchase Intent

Usually, the highest-volume keywords are found at the top of the funnel. Here, users are still trying to find all possible solutions for their problem.

Developing content that fits purchase intent

To build awareness and discovery at the top of the funnel, we suggest using these types of content:

• Podcasts
• Social media posts, videos, and carousels
• High-level research reports
• Blog posts

In the middle of the funnel, where we want to make sure your brand or product is in the user’s mind, we use:

• Tools, quizzes, and assessments that help users learn about their needs and solutions.
• Product-focused content like YouTube videos and product pages that show key features.
• Regular, useful, and entertaining content like newsletters that help your brand lead the topic.

At the bottom of the funnel, to build trust and show that your brand or product is the best choice, we create:

• Comparison pages
• Alternative pages
• Product pages
• User reviews and use cases
• Case studies
• Webinars
• Pricing pages
• Product demo videos

The most important advice is not to rush users or ask too much too soon.

For example, don’t ask users to read case studies if they are still learning about the types of solutions.

We rarely need to warn marketers about being too careful with their content offers. But if a user shows strong intent through their searches, make sure you give them content that highlights what makes you different and include a clear call-to-action (CTA).

Dig deeper: Content mapping: Who, what, where, when, why, and how

Working with Your Paid Media Partners

Paid media should work well with your SEO campaigns.

At our agency, we usually advise clients to combine PPC with SEO, using PPC to target the bottom of the funnel. This helps use the budget to catch demand that SEO has created.

A simple way to find the audience you want to target with PPC is to Google your target keywords and check the results.

Do the organic results match your business and niche?

If not, try new phrases that better match what your users want.

If you already run PPC campaigns, use that data to help your SEO efforts.

For example, if a key phrase is doing well in PPC, try using it for SEO too and see if you can rank high in organic search.

We also use keyword data from paid ads to find which keywords lead to actual buyers.

Then, we decide which keywords deserve more attention in SEO.

These keywords may have lower volume but can bring important results like sales and leads.

On the other hand, we may choose to focus less on low-converting PPC keywords for SEO, unless those keywords are useful higher up in the funnel to attract early users.

In those cases, we use those keywords to build a strong audience for remarketing on Google, YouTube, and paid social.

Dig deeper: How to maximize PPC and SEO data with co-optimization audits

What’s Next?

User behavior and customer journeys are changing fast because of two opposite forces:

• Highly personal content on Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube
• AI-generated content, like large language models and AI summaries

Even though the ways users meet their needs may change, the buying stages (awareness, consideration, purchase) stay mostly the same.

Users will still first become aware of their problem, then learn about solutions, before they buy. Most users will research a lot before deciding, and many will look for social proof. In general, changing your search and content strategy to match user intent stages helps you connect with users no matter where or how they get content.