How Content is related to Sales and Marketing
Content is the bridge between Sales, Marketing, and SEO and it informs, attracts, nurtures, and ultimately converts customers. Here's how it ties them all together in an SEO strategy:
🔍 SEO: Content as the Foundation
Search engines rank content and not products, sales reps, or email campaigns.
Content must:
📈 Marketing: Content Drives Awareness and Engagement
💰 Sales: Content Supports Conversion
🔍 SEO: Content as the Foundation
Search engines rank content and not products, sales reps, or email campaigns.
Content must:
- Match search intent (informational, navigational, transactional)
- Be optimized for keywords prospects use at each buying stage
- Use proper meta tags, headers, schema, and internal links
📈 Marketing: Content Drives Awareness and Engagement
- Marketing's role is to attract and nurture leads.
- Content types:
- Blog posts → Establish authority, improve brand trust
- Case studies & whitepapers → Provide in-depth information for evaluators
- Social media content → Drives engagement and off-site signals (indirect SEO)
- Content helps segment audiences and personalize messaging (via landing pages, retargeting).
💰 Sales: Content Supports Conversion
- Sales teams use SEO-optimized content to educate prospects and overcome objections.
- Examples:
- “How-to” guides for product use
- Competitor comparison pages
- Industry-specific FAQs
- Examples:
- Content shortens the sales cycle by preparing leads before contact.
- SEO helps Sales by generating qualified inbound leads, reducing reliance on cold outreach.
🎯 Unified Strategy: The Funnel View
| Stage | Marketing Role | SEO Content | Sales Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top of Funnel (TOFU) | Generate awareness | Blog posts, pillar pages, glossary terms | N/A (lead not ready yet) |
| Middle of Funnel (MOFU) | Nurture & educate | Case studies, how-to guides, product pages | Light engagement; use content for education |
| Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) | Drive conversions | Comparison pages, testimonials, demo pages | Use content to close deals |
✅ Summary
- Marketing creates content that is discovered via SEO.
- Sales leverages that content to convert prospects.
- A solid SEO strategy aligns content with user intent, which supports both lead generation and conversion.
B2B Marketing Essential
Our content team has to produce content that upsells products to visitors.
Great content on your website could drive more subscriptions and conversions.
We can meet our business goals without focusing on the traditional role of SEO.
All steps in the search and persona workflow can be optimized. I often here about many of the obstacles that an SEO encounters, and they can make executing an online strategy challenging.
We can meet our business goals without focusing on the traditional role of SEO.
All steps in the search and persona workflow can be optimized. I often here about many of the obstacles that an SEO encounters, and they can make executing an online strategy challenging.
Obstacles in creating an SEO or Online Strategy
Common objections that you hear from the marketing and development team
- I am not the person responsible for all of this, I just run the marketing department.
- I need to know the keywords my competitor is targeting.
- I need to know what sites are linking to my competitor before I know who to target.
- Is my competition planning to have a social media presence?
- Search engine algorithms change so much that I cannot keep up unless I am a synthetic approximation of a socially interactive human.
Plan Implementation
You are not going to understand every variable before you begin. Implement your plan by demonstrating confidence to your company
To truly capitalize on organic search acquisition that provides long term success in search engines as well as delights your customers and keeps them coming back, try developing searcher personas that use search data to better understand your audience and ensure a compelling experience from the search box all the way through to conversion.
- Understand the a) searcher persona workflow and b) create an integrated strategy inclusive of all components.
- Determine goals, define metrics
- Audit your site to best reach your audience. Maximize existing search traffic by optimizing the crawl, index, and search results pipeline.
- Work with the entire team when improving your online business because success requires more than ranking.
To truly capitalize on organic search acquisition that provides long term success in search engines as well as delights your customers and keeps them coming back, try developing searcher personas that use search data to better understand your audience and ensure a compelling experience from the search box all the way through to conversion.