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Query intent vs. conversion intent: Why the difference matters

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Query intent vs. conversion intent- Why the difference matters

One of the major reasons PPC practitioners hold onto syntax-oriented keyword strategies is the disconnect between “query intent” and “conversion intent.” For years, you’ve likely relied on keywords to show you understand what your customers want and to prequalify traffic using syntax-oriented signals.

As user behavior shifts to more conversational queries and AI becomes an increasingly relevant part of the user journey, the distinction between these two intents becomes even more critical to understand and act on.

Here, we’ll define query and conversion intent and explore strategies to apply them effectively. This isn’t prescriptive. You should make decisions based on what will serve your business well. However, it provides a framework for analyzing your data and optimizing for the right humans.

Disclosure: I’m a Microsoft employee, and I’ll be sharing some examples that pull from Microsoft tooling. However, most of the strategies reflect platform-agnostic approaches.

What are query and conversion intents?

Query intent is the underlying need driving the text put into a search function. This search function can be on a SERP (search engine results page), video/social/gaming/email/site search bar, or AI surface.

Conversion intent is the human need to achieve some outcome, understood through stated and inferred data points. These range from text entered in various search experiences, content consumed, and tracked actions taken.

Different examples of query and conversion intent will have higher or lower rates of confidence based on how explicit text is, as well as patterns in content consumed.

For example, if I search “Microsoft ads login,” both query and conversion intent are clear — I want to log in. It’s easy to match ads and organic content to that query. Videos shown in any video query would have to do with logging in, and emails would be focused around login information.

Google SERP

Bing’s SERP

YouTube results

The query “Microsoft ads” is more nebulous, as such, needs to draw from other signals like previously engaged content and search history. While I might get a login page, I’d likely also see blog/sales content, third-party advice on Microsoft ads, and potentially competitor info trying to capitalize on the general nature of the query.

Google SERP

Bing SERP

YouTube results

Let’s look at a non-branded example as well. “Purple hair dye” has a clear transactional intent. While the user might not have a brand in mind, they know they want a specific color. 

We don’t know if the user is looking for a semi-permanent or permanent color. We also don’t know the user’s pronouns, so matching them to a specific demographic to entice a purchase is a gamble. 

Google SERP

Bing SERP

YouTube results

In the query “purple hair dye for long wavy hair,” the transactional intent is maintained. However, the query focuses more on the core needs of the person behind the text. Long, wavy hair means there needs to be enough dye to cover long hair.

Additionally, while some men have long wavy hair, the person behind the query is more likely to identify as female. 

Wavy hair has a different composition than straight or curly hair, so products specifically for wavy hair will be more relevant than those without hair type identifiers.

Google SERP

Bing SERP

YouTube results

In all of these examples, there was clear conversion intent. The human behind the query clearly wanted to achieve something. However, if we relied only on the text (i.e., query intent), we might miss a meaningful opportunity to connect with customers. 

This is why close variants (which have been available on both Google and Microsoft for ~10 years) represent a useful way to unshackle ourselves from syntax alone.

Additionally, by limiting our understanding of queries to SERPs, we ignore critical insights from where our customers connect, work, and play. Microsoft’s internal data from March 2024 shows that brands that use both Audience ads (display, native, and video) and Search see a 6x conversion rate. Part of this is brand recognition, and the power of brand media buys influencing performance.

Yet there’s also the pragmatic piece that some marketers refuse to engage with video and social. By being where your competitors refuse to be, you can shape and capture desire while they fight over a shrinking share of voice.

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How to optimize for each intent

Once you understand the difference between query and conversion intent, you can begin mapping out the actions needed to capitalize on both.

Conversion intent is much easier to understand than query intent. This is why AI systems typically run queries in the background to understand human input and get at the conversion intent behind the query. 

To succeed at shaping queries and capturing conversions, it’s critical to understand the input points for humans and the AI systems that will be serving them results.

Let’s revisit the “purple hair dye for long wavy hair” query:

Copilot surfaces how it arrived at the output by looking up information and finding the best matches. This is similar to the SEO concept of E-E-A-T.

Yet you’ll notice that the results for my personal Copilot are different than the traditional SERP (chiefly that ads aren’t the dominant result — ads serve at the bottom of clearly transactional conversations after organic listings).

This is where the “Details” function comes into play and can help you know where to focus content, feed, and messaging functions:

This product is pretty flat on price, save for some deep summer dips. If I’m desperate for color, I might buy now, or I might wait for what seems like a regular summer sale. I’m also getting insights into why this product is wonderful (hair conditioning, cruelty-free, vibrant, and customizable color, etc.).

These are things I’ve shown interest in through past purchases, conversations with Copilot, and other signals it has access to.

Brands that want to optimize for query intent need to make sure the following are in good order:

  • Feed/landing page clarity
    • It should be incredibly easy to map what the product/service is to the query. While there is value in some 1:1 matching of language, it’s much more important that the core offering be understood as aligned with what the human is looking for.
    • For example, DUI and DWI are technically two different charges and have geo implications. However, DUI tends to be the universal legal charge and service.
  • Images adding context
    • Visual content is critical to engage humans. However, if the image isn’t clear or is duplicative of another service/product page, you might confuse the user and the machine attempting to understand and position you for queries. This is why it’s critical to add alt text (even on paid landing pages) for images and videos.
    • A good way to test whether your visuals are serving you well is to put the landing page into a PMax campaign creator. If you see the images and they match the correct service text, you’ve done a good job.
  • Invest time in understanding how humans and AI are querying
    • Free tools like Google Trends, Microsoft Clarity, and Bing Webmaster offer insights into search trends, citations, grounding queries, and which AI systems and humans are successfully engaging with your content.

Conversion intent is more straightforward, though debatably harder because it requires more creative and critical thinking: 

  • Matching messages to personas
    • The reason one person says yes to you might be completely different from the reason someone else does. Locking in conversion intent includes being mindful of how you’re selling yourself. If you ignore what matters to your customers in reviews, intake from customer success or sales, and other signals, you risk selling yourself badly and losing the customer.
    • This is where AI-powered creative and audience mapping can be helpful, since platforms have access to more insights than a brand does during the auction.
  • Honor the impulse nature of visual content
    • Someone coming to you from a display spot or short video is very different than someone coming from a text-laden SERP. They were inspired to act and need frictionless paths to conversion.
    • One-click checkout (including solutions like Copilot Checkout) ensures humans don’t need to think to do business with you.

Ultimately, both query and conversion intent need brand and performance marketing to be successful, and it’s critical to understand how the success metrics manifest.

The converging roles of brand and performance

For a long time, brand and performance marketing were treated as separate motions, with separate owners, budgets, and success metrics. 

  • Brand was about reach, recall, and long-term connection. 
  • Performance was about efficiency, conversion rate, and immediate return. 

That separation made sense when channels, measurement, and user journeys were cleaner than they are today. It’s much harder to maintain in an environment where AI systems infer intent continuously and across surfaces. 

A user doesn’t experience brand and performance as separate. They experience confidence, familiarity, relevance, and ease. Those signals are created over time through exposure, engagement, and trust, and they often determine whether conversion intent ever materializes, regardless of how “high intent” a query might appear on its own.

From a metrics perspective, this convergence is clear. Brand-oriented activity influences performance outcomes even when it isn’t the final touch. Exposure to display, native, or video doesn’t always produce an immediate click, but it changes how humans and systems interpret future behavior. 

When someone later performs a search, engages with an AI assistant, or compares options on a marketplace, prior brand interactions act as accelerators. They reduce hesitation, shorten decision cycles, and increase the likelihood that a conversion signal will be credited downstream.

From a strategy standpoint, this means brand work should no longer be evaluated solely on isolated upper-funnel KPIs, and Performance work can’t be evaluated purely on last-click efficiency. 

Audience-based formats, contextual placements, and visual storytelling directly shape conversion intent by shaping preferences and expectations before a query even occurs. Search and shopping formats then serve as capture mechanisms, translating that latent intent into action.

This is particularly relevant in AI-assisted experiences, where systems synthesize multiple inputs before presenting options or recommendations. Content, feeds, reviews, images, and historical engagement all influence how brands are represented and when they appear.

In these environments, strong brand signals don’t compete with performance outcomes. They enable them by making the brand easier to understand, trust, and choose.

Brand and performance don’t need to use the same tactics, but they must be planned together. Measurement frameworks should account for assistive value, not just final interactions.

Creative strategies should recognize that inspiration and conversion often happen at different moments. Optimization should focus less on forcing intent into rigid buckets and more on supporting the full decision journey.

When we recognize that query intent and conversion intent are related but not identical, the convergence of brand and performance becomes less a philosophical debate and more an operational necessity.

Success comes from designing systems that reflect how humans actually decide, not just how they type.

Key takeaways

  • Query intent describes what is said; conversion intent reflects what the human needs to accomplish. They overlap, but they aren’t interchangeable.
  • Brand activity shapes conversion intent long before a query is expressed and influences how future interactions are interpreted.
  • Performance outcomes improve when Brand signals reduce friction, uncertainty, and choice overload.
  • AI-driven experiences amplify this convergence by relying on cumulative signals rather than single actions.
  • Sustainable optimization requires aligning brand and performance strategies, metrics, and expectations around the same human outcomes.

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Web Design and Development San Diego

How China’s fragmented search ecosystem is reshaping SEO in 2026

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How China’s fragmented search ecosystem is reshaping SEO in 2026

In February 2025, the world watched as a small group of humanoid robots took the stage at the CCTV Chinese New Year show for the very first time. It was a charming performance, even if the steps were shaky and the movements were mostly limited to the arms.

Just one year later, at the Spring Festival Gala, the shaky steps were gone and the humanoid robots were able to actually run and do standing somersaults and full kung fu routines with swords and nunchaku. The message was clear: in just one year, we have witnessed a decade’s worth of advancement.

The 10-year leap in technology is real and not limited to robotics. Which raises a critical question for every digital marketer eyeing the world’s largest web population: How has search in China progressed in recent years?

A parallel in the Chinese search landscape

The answer is that we’re witnessing the first, calculated tremors of a massive shift. AI models have not yet replaced traditional search. The evolution isn’t happening through a single “big bang,” but through a constant, iterative pulse. 

New LLM models are surfacing every few months, each more specialized than the last. Chinese tech giants are increasingly open-sourcing their models, and even industry leaders are hedging their bets. Baidu, for example, is integrating DeepSeek into its search experience, even as its own Ernie (Wenxin) model remains a formidable powerhouse.

Let’s look at how users actually search in China today — and what this nuanced shift from links to reasoning means for your 2026 SEO strategy.

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The great narrative fallacy: Is web search dead in China?

In many marketing circles, a specific narrative has been repeated so often it has become an article of faith: “Traditional search on Baidu is dead — and has been for years. Websites are obsolete. In China, everything is WeChat.”

This narrative is almost always driven by service providers whose business models depend on WeChat, Douyin, Weibo, or Xiaohongshu marketing. To them, the “open web” is a ghost town. But is this actually true?

The social supremacy argument

There’s a grain of truth in the hype. The Chinese web is a mobile-first multiverse. Users access and explore the web through super-apps:

  • RedNote (Xiaohongshu / Little Red Book): This is the de facto engine for lifestyle research and travel planning.
  • Pinduoduo and Douyin: These are the juggernauts of social commerce and impulse buying.
  • WeChat: The absolute center of daily life, where everything from a quick message to a utility bill payment via QR code happens.

In this environment, social media isn’t just a channel. It’s the air people breathe. For B2C brands, social ads can — and often do — exceed website-driven sales by orders of magnitude.

The B2B reality check

For those of us working with B2B companies that need real visibility in China, the “Baidu is dead” narrative falls apart the moment you look at the analytics. Clients who invest in Baidu SEO and Baidu search engine advertising (SEA) continue to see a steady, high-volume stream of real human visitors — in many cases generating more qualified leads and higher conversion rates than their counterparts in the UK or Germany.

Why? Because when a B2B procurement officer or a technical engineer needs a specific industrial solution, they don’t just scroll until they find it on a social media feed. They search for a verified, authoritative source. In other words, they look for a website.

Is the social media narrative a lie? No. But ignoring a channel that — at least in the B2B sector — remains more effective in China than in many search-first Western countries is simply bad business. The goal isn’t to choose one over the other; it’s to understand how they coexist. 

And just as we’ve settled the debate between web marketing versus app marketing, a new challenger — the LLM — has entered the battleground to disrupt both.

Mapping the 2026 landscape: Intent-based specialization

To a Google-first marketer, the idea of searching anywhere but a search engine feels like a detour. In China, it’s the standard operating procedure. Users don’t just “Google it.” Instead, they choose the tool that fits the intent.

As a Baidu specialist living and working in China, I see this daily. While I might be optimizing a B2B landing page for Baidu, my wife is likely on Pinduoduo, finding household deals, or on Xiaohongshu, planning our next weekend trip. 

The “everything app” exists, but the “right app” always wins the click.

1. Traditional web search: The authority tier

Despite the “death of the web” narrative, traditional web search remains the primary battleground for B2B and high-authority research. If a user needs a technical whitepaper, a government regulation, or a verified corporate headquarters, they go here.

  • Baidu: Still the mobile heavyweight, with a ~70% mobile market share. Its structural advantage is massive: The Baidu app is installed on over 724 million monthly active devices (as of early 2026). It has evolved into an AI-first portal, but for SEOs, it remains the place where the open web lives and breathes.
  • Microsoft Bing: The professional’s sanctuary. It has claimed a massive chunk of desktop search for those seeking a cleaner, international, or technical experience.
  • Haosou (360 Search): The enterprise default, often pre-installed on corporate PCs and known for its security focus.
  • Sogou: Deeply integrated with WeChat, it’s the bridge between the walled garden and the web.
  • Google: Yes, Google. Despite the firewall, a significant population of tech-savvy professionals and researchers use it via VPN for global technical data and academic resources.

2. Social discovery: The inspiration tier

This is where search becomes discovery. Users don’t always have a keyword, but they do have an interest. In this context, SEO is about social indexing: ensuring your brand appears when a user looks for proof and not just products.

  • WeChat (Weixin): The internal search for official brand news and private traffic.
  • Xiaohongshu (RED): The ultimate product-discovery engine. If you aren’t on RED, you don’t exist in the lifestyle or luxury sectors.
  • Douyin: Visual, video-first search. Users search Douyin to see how something works.
  • Kuaishou: The powerhouse for lower-tier cities and raw, authentic grassroots content.
  • Weibo: Real-time search — what is happening right now in the public eye.
  • Bilibili: Long-form video search for deep dives, tutorials, and Gen Z subcultures.

3. Ecommerce: The transactional tier

In the West, users often start on Google and end on Amazon. In China, the journey frequently starts and ends in the same place.

  • Taobao / Tmall: The grand bazaar. If you want variety and brand stores, this is the first stop.
  • JD.com: The Amazon of China for logistics and high-end electronics.
  • Pinduoduo: The favorite for daily essentials and group-buy deals. Its search logic is entirely driven by value for money.
  • Douyin Mall: The rising star of “impulse search,” merging entertainment with immediate checkout.
  • Xianyu (Goofish): The go-to for the thriving second-hand market and hobbyist niches.

4. Generative AI (LLMs): The reasoning tier

This is the newest layer of the map — the “thinking” search. These AI models don’t just produce lists of links. They are assistants that synthesize the web for the user.

  • Doubao (ByteDance): Currently the most popular consumer AI assistant, used for casual, conversational queries.
  • DeepSeek (Domestic): The choice for developers and those in need of “deep thinking” logic. It’s the engine currently getting tested inside WeChat’s search bar.
  • Kimi (Moonshot AI): The king of long-context. Users use Kimi to search through 50-page PDFs or complex financial reports.
  • Qwen (Alibaba): Powerfully integrated into the Alibaba ecosystem for business and coding tasks.
  • Tencent Yuanbao: The “AI brain” for WeChat content.
  • Wen Xiaoyan (Baidu): The AI-facing evolution of Baidu search.

5. Hyper-local and logistics: The utility tier

For the physical world, search is about “now” and “near me.”

  • Meituan / Dianping: If you’re hungry or want to see a movie, you don’t use Baidu. You use Dianping for reviews and Meituan for transactions.
  • Amap (Gaode) / Baidu Maps: The “search engines of the real world.” SEO on these platforms is purely about point-of-interest (POI) optimization.
  • Ctrip (Trip.com) / Railway 12306: The specialized gates for the massive domestic travel market.

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From mapping to maneuvering: The Baidu specialist’s edge

Baidu SEO isn’t dead; your website just isn’t the sole focus of web search anymore.

The ‘walled garden’ SERP: A decade of distraction

If you’re a Google-centric SEO, there are some notable differences when working with Baidu:

  • The ad-heavy layout: It isn’t uncommon to see ads claiming the top, middle, and bottom of a Baidu search engine results page (SERP), occupying nearly 50% of the visible real estate.
  • The Baidu monopoly: The most coveted organic positions are almost always reserved for Baidu’s own properties. Baidu Baike (the encyclopedia), Baidu Zhidao (the Q&A hub), and Baijiahao (the news/blogging arm) are the permanent residents of Page 1.
  • The portal giants: High-authority giants like Zhihu (China’s Quora), Bilibili, and Sohu take up whatever space is left.

Riding the Chinese SERP dragon

In this environment, ranking a corporate homepage for a high-volume keyword is a fool’s errand. Instead, we’ve mastered the art of the “long-tail dragon.”

In the West, we talk about the long tail of search as a small, niche opportunity. In China, with its linguistic complexity and massive user base, the long tail is a winding, multi-layered beast that is often more lucrative than the head terms. 

And we don’t just rank a website; we piggyback on the authority of the platforms Baidu already trusts. If you can’t beat Baidu Baike, you become the verified entry inside it.

Interestingly, it is these very platforms — the ones we’ve been using to bypass the “blue link problem” — that have now become the primary focus of the next generation of search.

What is changing in Baidu SEO?

In China, there is no brand loyalty toward particular AI models, as Westerners have toward platforms like ChatGPT and Claude.

The AI-switching reality

Chinese users are restless. They don’t stick with one model. They switch — sometimes because a hyped model hits a downtime wall, and sometimes because a new model claims the throne of the “most intelligent AI.” In this cycle of competition and user preference, an SEO can’t just focus on the “big sources.”

If you’re following the Western playbook, you’re likely chasing Reddit, Quora, and YouTube as your “sources of truth” for AI training. But in China, that focus is dangerously narrow. To win the reasoning battle, you must understand the investor-source connection.

Brainstorming the wisdom platforms

If you want to train AIs to see your brand in China, you have to look at the platforms they were built on:

  • Tencent is invested in Sogou. In 2021, Tencent fully privatized Sogou. This means Sogou Baike is no longer just a Baidu alternative — it is now a core training set for Tencent’s Yuanbao. If you ignore Sogou Baike, you’re invisible to the AI search bar inside WeChat.
  • Bytedance owns Baike.com. Bytedance bought Baike.com (formerly Hudong Baike) specifically to fuel its search ambitions. If you want to get cited by Doubao, your content needs to be mirrored here and not just on Baidu.
  • The neutral giants: Keep an eye on Zhihu. Because both Tencent and Baidu are heavy investors in Zhihu, it remains one of the few neutral high-authority sources that almost every Chinese LLM uses for opinionated or expert reasoning.

The new SEO commandment

We’re no longer just optimizing for a search engine. We’re optimizing for a data pedigree.

If your client is B2B, you might still prioritize the Baidu ecosystem. But if your client is in ecommerce and you aren’t feeding the Qwen engine via Alibaba’s ecosystem, or the Doubao engine via Baike.com, you’re limiting your visibility across key AI systems.

The 2026 China SEO/GEO blueprint: From keywords to semantic saturation

If you’re waiting for a “DeepSeek optimization checklist” or a “Doubao ranking guide,” you’ve already missed the point. Because users switch models as often as they switch takeout apps, you can’t afford to be “Baidu-only” or “WeChat-centric.”

Here is what’s actually working for SEO in China in 2026:

Optimize for citations and not just clicks

While SEO in the West is focused on generative engine optimization (GEO), in China, it’s all about fact density. 

  • The logic: When Kimi or DeepSeek performs a reasoning query, the AI looks for verifiable facts.
  • The tactic: Stop writing marketing fluff. Start using the inverted pyramid writing style. Lead with a direct, data-backed answer in your first paragraph. Use hard statistics, expert quotes, and structured lists. If a model can’t extract a fact from your content in 200 milliseconds, it might hallucinate a competitor’s data instead.

Build an entity moat across wisdom platforms

As we brainstormed earlier, every AI has a “parent” with a preferred data source. But since models are now open-sourcing their weights and distilling each other’s intelligence, your brand must achieve entity consistency.

  • The goal: Your brand name, headquarters, and core product claims must be identical across Baidu Baike (Baidu), Sogou Baike (Tencent), and Baike.com (ByteDance).
  • The result: When these models cross-check their reasoning, they find a consensus. In 2026, consensus is the new authority.

Leverage information gain

Chinese AI models have a well-observed recency bias — they prefer sources that are roughly 25% fresher than traditional search results.

  • The tactic: Don’t just regurgitate what’s already on Zhihu. Provide a “unique data slice.” If everyone says “The best time to post on Douyin is 6 PM,” and you publish a case study proving “11 AM is better for B2B industrial leads,” the AI will cite you as the “nuanced exception.” That citation is worth more than ten #1 rankings.

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The era of the entity architect

We’ve come a long way from the shaky steps of the 2025 CCTV Gala.

In 2026, China’s search ecosystem is no longer a directory of links. It’s a living, reasoning entity.

For the Western search specialist, the lesson is clear: The “super app” was a distraction. The real story is the fragmentation of intent.

My wife still goes to Pinduoduo for the best price. My colleagues still go to Bing for technical sanctuary. And the “I, Robot” enthusiasts of 2026 are using a rotating door of LLMs to find their answers.

As a Baidu specialist, my job has shifted from “ranking a website” to “architecting an entity.” We no longer build for the bot; we build for the source. If you’re the undeniable source of truth across the platforms that shape China’s information ecosystem, it doesn’t matter which model delivers the answer.

You’ll be the one they’re cheering for.

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Web Design and Development San Diego

Unifying the search experience for real growth in 2026 by Level Agency

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In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026. It didn’t. Google’s search revenue accelerated to 17% year-over-year growth, crossing $63 billion in Q4 2025 alone. But clicks per search are falling while query volume explodes. The pie got bigger. The slices got redistributed. And most search teams are still optimizing for the old pie.

Are you still poring over spreadsheets full of organic keyword rankings like it’s 2003? Your customers don’t care where they’re getting their answers. They’re just looking for answers they can trust. And they’re finding those answers across more surfaces than your rank tracker knows exist.

If your organic strategy lives in one spreadsheet, your paid strategy in another, and your AI search strategy in a third (or nowhere), you’re optimizing for a search experience that no longer exists.

What “search” actually looks like now

Google “best tax software” right now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Count the surfaces on that single results page. Sponsored ads across the top. An AI Overview with its own recommendations and citations. A Reddit thread (because Google knows people trust other people more than brands). Organic listings from CNET, H&R Block, and others. A video carousel. Discussion forum links. A product carousel with images and prices. More sponsored results at the bottom. And a “People also search for” section feeding the next query.

That is one search. One keyword. And nobody owns it.

Now think about how different people actually use that page. I scroll past everything to find the Reddit thread, because I want to know what real humans recommend. My dad clicks the first sponsored ad because he doesn’t understand paid advertising (sorry, dad!) and just trusts Google to surface the best option up top. Someone else reads the AI Overview, gets a good-enough answer, and never clicks anything at all. A fourth person watches the Smart Family Money video and leaves.

Same query. Four completely different paths. Four different “winners.” And if you’re the brand celebrating a number-three organic ranking on this page, you may be missing that most of the real estate, and most of the user attention, lives somewhere other than those blue links.

This is what I mean by the total SERP experience. Your customer sees the whole page. You should too.

The AI layer changes the math

AI Overviews now appear on roughly 25% to 48% of Google queries, depending on the study. ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts a day. Perplexity is up 239% year over year. These are real numbers from real platforms where real buyers are forming opinions about your brand, or not forming opinions because you’re nowhere to be found.

But before the panic sets in: AI tools still account for less than 1% of U.S. web traffic. Google sends 300x more referral traffic than all AI platforms combined. The sky isn’t falling, but the ground is shifting.

The shift that matters most is behavioral. Wynter’s 2026 research found 68% of B2B buyers now start their research in AI tools before they ever open Google. They ask ChatGPT to narrow the field, then Google the shortlist to validate. AI evaluates, Google verifies, and your website converts. If your brand is missing from that first AI conversation, you’re not even on the shortlist when the Googling starts.

Why the click data is more interesting than scary

A Search Engine Land analysis of 25 million organic impressions across 42 clients found organic CTR drops 61% when an AI Overview appears. In addition, paid CTR drops 68%.

EVERYBODY FREAK OUT!!! Right? Not quite.

Here’s what the panicked LinkedIn posts leave out: brands cited inside AI Overviews see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. Being in the AI Overview doesn’t cannibalize your traffic. If anything, it amplifies it. The AI Overview functions like a trust signal, a stamp of “this brand is relevant to your question” that makes people more likely to click your listing below.

The real twist, though, is that ranking well in organic doesn’t guarantee you show up in AI. Tom Capper’s research at Moz found 88% of AI Mode citations are NOT in the organic SERP for the same query. Organic and AI are pulling from different source pools. You can be number one in Google and completely invisible in ChatGPT’s answer to the same question.

And the small amount of traffic that does come from AI? It converts at more than quadruple the rate of organic, according to Semrush. These visitors arrive more informed, more intentional, and more ready to buy. Which makes sense, because they’ve already done the evaluation inside the AI interface. By the time they click, they’re just confirming and often converting.

The org chart is the problem

Most companies have SEO reporting to content, PPC reporting to demand gen, and AI search reporting to nobody. BrightEdge found 54% of organizations have handed AI search to the SEO team alone, which is a little like asking your plumber to also handle the electrical work because, hey, it’s all in the same house.

The waste from this setup is real. One branded Performance Max campaign paid roughly $500,000 for clicks that would have come through organic anyway. Google’s own research confirms: when you rank number one organically, only half your paid clicks are truly incremental. The other half? You bought what you already owned.

Meanwhile, McKinsey found that a brand’s own website makes up only 5% to 10% of the sources AI references. AI pulls from Reddit, review sites, affiliates, publishers, and user-generated content. You can have the best SEO program in your category and be completely absent from AI search results because AI is reading what other people say about you, not what you say about yourself.

The unified approach works. Level cut acquisition costs 18% and boosted SEO leads 22% by merging paid and organic for a B2B SaaS client. And we can use tools in our Level Intelligence Suite to connect performance signals across search surfaces. The channels compound each other. Treating them as separate line items on separate P&Ls leaves that compounding on the table.

Three audits you can run Monday morning

You don’t need a six-month transformation to start seeing the gaps. Three lenses, applied to your top 20 keywords, will show you where the opportunities and the waste are hiding.

Lens 1: Where do you actually appear? Check your organic rankings, paid ad coverage, and AI visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for the same set of keywords. Semrush has a free AI visibility checker. Most teams have never looked at all three surfaces side by side, and the gaps are almost always larger than they expect.

Lens 2: Where are you paying for traffic you already own? Cross-reference your number-one organic rankings with active PPC bids on the same terms. Start with branded keywords, where the waste is usually largest and the test is cleanest. If you rank first and you’re still bidding, you’re probably buying your own clicks.

Lens 3: Where is AI ignoring you? Compare your organic rankings with your AI citation presence. Only 11% of domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity, so strength in one guarantees nothing in the other. And check your robots.txt while you’re at it. If you’re blocking AI crawlers like OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, you’ve pulled yourself off those shelves entirely.

This diagnostic shows you the full picture. What to do about it, the actual unification framework, is what I’m laying out at SMX Advanced.

The window won’t stay open

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) keyword difficulty currently averages 15 to 20, compared to 45 to 60 for equivalent SEO terms. That gap will close. Once an LLM selects a trusted source, it reinforces that choice across related prompts. The brands getting cited now are training the models to keep citing them. Winner-takes-most dynamics are being baked into the weights.

Many companies are seeing search traffic drop significantly. Those same brands, the ones that get it right, are seeing the inverse when it comes to business growth. Rankings and revenue have decoupled. The brands that win from here are the ones that stopped measuring channels in isolation and started measuring the search experience their customers actually have.

We’re presenting a search unification framework at SMX Advanced in our session, “Organic, paid, and AI search: one strategy to rule them all.” If you want to stop optimizing for three separate channels and start compounding performance across every search surface, join us for the session or come find the Level team at Booth #9.

Remember: The search experience that existed in 2023 is gone. The strategy should be too.

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Web Design and Development San Diego

SMX Now: The automation drift and how to correct course

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Automation doesn’t fail on its own — it does exactly what it’s trained to do. The problem is that when Google Ads is fed incomplete, misaligned, or overly broad signals, it can optimize toward the wrong outcome faster than most advertisers realize.

In our second installment of SMX Now, our new monthly series, Ameet Khabra of Hop Skip Media will break down a real account where a 417% jump in conversions turned out to be the wrong kind of success. She’ll use that case study to explain the four key ways automation drift enters an account: signal drift, query drift, inventory drift, and creative drift.

You’ll leave with a practical framework for diagnosing drift early, understanding where human oversight matters most, and managing automation more deliberately so it works toward real business goals — not just platform-reported wins.

Join us May 6 at noon ET.

Save your spot

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How to Calculate Share of Voice (+ Why it Matters for SEO)

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Your analytics dashboard tracks clicks, but it doesn’t convey the complete picture.

When a buyer reads an AI answer that mentions your competitor, or scrolls through a Reddit thread where your brand doesn’t appear, that’s lost visibility. And it won’t show up anywhere in your traffic data.

Share of voice (SoV) captures what traffic metrics can’t.

It measures your brand’s visibility against competitors across channels where buyers actually research and make decisions.

While SoV spans social, PR, and paid media, search is where most brands should start. It’s the channel where buyers with the strongest purchase intent show up, and it’s the easiest to measure competitively. That’s what this guide focuses on.

I’ll walk you through four steps to measure your share of voice in organic and AI search. Then, I’ll show you how to turn that data into decisions that move the needle where it matters.

What Is Share of Voice?

Share of voice measures your brand’s visibility relative to competitors across multiple marketing channels.

That includes organic and AI search, social media, review sites, communities, and more.

Traditionally, brands used SoV to track their share of ad spend in a market.

Now it’s evolved into something even more valuable. It can measure your brand’s presence across every touchpoint where buyers research and make decisions.

In simple terms: SoV tells you what percentage of the conversation you own in your category, compared to competitors.

Share of Voice

This guide focuses on search SoV — both organic and AI — because that’s where buyer discovery is shifting fastest and where the measurement tools have matured enough to give you actionable data.

I find that search SoV also tends to be the foundation: once you understand your visibility in organic and AI results, layering in other channels becomes much simpler.

What Counts as a “Good” Share of Voice?

While there’s no universal benchmark for SoV, establishing one for your brand comes down to:

  • Market position: Market leaders have a higher share of voice since they own the conversation. Challengers aim for a mid-range SoV when competing against players with decades of brand equity.
  • Competitive context: In a fragmented market with 20+ active competitors, 8% SoV could put you in the top five. But in a three-player market, anything below 30% could mean you’re behind the leader.

What counts as good share of voice

Beyond these two factors, look at the broader market shifts within your category.

High SoV in a declining market can be a vanity metric. The real win is growing your share as the category grows.

How SoV Works in Traditional vs AI Search

Both SEO and AI SoV answer the same question: What percentage of category demand does your brand own?

But they measure different search contexts.

SEO SoV calculates your slice of traditional organic search traffic.

You track 100 target keywords. Those keywords generate 50,000 total monthly visits across all ranking sites. You capture 15,000 of those visits.

That’s 30% organic share of voice.

AI SoV measures brand mentions in LLM responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and similar tools.

For example, you test 100 category-related prompts. Your brand is mentioned in 45 responses and cited in 15. Your competitor shows up in 30 responses with 10 mentions.

An AI visibility tool can calculate your weighted AI SoV based on mentions and citations.

Share of voice: Two different games

Try now: Curious to know how often your brand shows up in AI responses? Try our free AI visibility checker to find out.

Why Is Share of Voice So Important, Especially Now?

Here are three reasons why share of voice should be your core KPI when visibility is scattered across platforms.

Track Visibility Beyond Traditional Traffic Data

Your organic traffic data reveals only half the story.

And with zero-click searches on the rise, that half is shrinking fast.

When users get their answers directly from AI Overviews and featured snippets, a huge chunk of your visibility is never captured in Google Analytics.

This makes traffic a lagging indicator of visibility.

Share of voice is a better metric because it measures how visible you are in the consideration set, even when users don’t click your site.

Traffic vs share of voice iceberg

Think of it this way:

A user searches for the “best project management software for remote teams.”

They see an AI Overview listing five tools, including yours. The user reads it, takes no action, and later signs up for a product demo on your site.

Traditional traffic data would show this as “direct traffic” since the person went straight to the website. It wouldn’t capture the discovery that occurred in Google.

But SoV reveals that your brand appeared in the consideration set for this high-intent query.

Work Toward One North Star Metric

Your marketing team might be operating in silos.

The SEO team wants more website visits. PR wants more media mentions. The social team wants better engagement.

Each team tracks its own KPIs and optimizes for different outcomes.

But the long-term power of SoV is that it can become the one metric every team rallies around.

When everyone sees how their work contributes to the same visibility percentage, it changes how teams collaborate.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

  • SEO team targets specific keywords to boost traffic and visibility via content
  • PR secures features in industry publications through expert quotes
  • Social drives brand conversations on Reddit and LinkedIn
  • Product wins better reviews on G2 and Capterra

Share of voice as a north star metric

This full picture takes time to build.

Start with the foundation by measuring your SoV in organic and AI search.

Once you have that baseline, you can layer in other channels over time.

Read more: How to Rank Higher (& Get More Visibility) on Google in 2026

How to Measure Share of Voice in 4 Steps

Let’s see how you can strategically calculate share of voice in four steps.

I’ll use a fictional project management software example to show how each step translates into business insights.

Step 1: Define Your Industry Landscape

Start by outlining the specific competitors and keywords you’ll track for SoV.

Without clear boundaries, you’ll either miss critical gaps or drown in too much noise.

To map your competitive terrain, pick topic clusters tied to revenue.

For a project management software, I picked these clusters:

  • Category fundamentals (like “project management 101” and “project management for freelancers”)
  • Use cases (like “agile project management” and “remote team collaboration”)
  • Industry-specific (like “construction project management” and “marketing project management”)

Pro tip: Don’t pick these topics solely based on search volume. Choose clusters where gaining visibility directly impacts your bottom line.

One way to assess a topic’s revenue potential is to map it to funnel stages.

Categorize your clusters into three stages:

  • Awareness: Where people are learning and researching, like how to manage projects
  • Consideration: Where they’re exploring solutions, like the best project management software
  • Decision: Where they’re comparing options and ready to buy, like Software A vs Software B

Your SoV at each stage tells you where you’re winning and losing in the buyer journey.

This allows you to allocate resources for maximum business impact.

Map share of voice to buyer journey

Let’s say this project management software segments the SoV by funnel stage.

It reveals that most of the brand’s visibility is concentrated at the top with almost none at the decision stage.

That’s a problem.

They’re educating the market, but invisible when prospects are actually comparing options and reaching for their wallets.

Strategic takeaway: They need to prioritize comparison pages and case studies to shift visibility toward the decision stage.

Now, define who you’re measuring against.

In search, you’re competing for visibility against two key players:

  • Direct competitors: Companies selling similar solutions like Asana, ClickUp, Notion, and Trello
  • Indirect competitors: Review sites capturing the voice of the customer like G2 and industry publishers ranking for your keywords but not competing for customers like HubSpot and Zoho

Tracking them gives you the complete picture of who controls visibility in your market and where you can break through.

Step 2: Build Your Keyword & Prompt Libraries

Create a library of 200-500 queries that capture how people search in your category.

You need both keywords (what people search) and prompts (what people ask LLMs). Together, they reveal your search visibility spectrum.

Pull SEO Data First

Collect queries where you’re already visible to your audience.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a good starting point for this since it captures actual visibility through impressions.

Impressions show every time your brand appears in results, even when users don’t click.

Go to the “Queries” tab in the “Performance” report.

Click the “Impressions” column header to sort in descending order, and export this list of keywords.

GSC – Performance – Queries – Impressions

And if you’re running Google Ads, export your PPC keyword list and filter for terms with conversions or high CTR.

You can also repeat this process with tools like Semrush.

Open your Semrush Position Tracking project (or create one for your domain).

Scroll down to the “Top Keywords” section and click the “View all” button.

Position Tracking – Overview – Top keywords

Adjust the timeline to your preferred range before clicking “Export” to download the full keyword list.

Position Tracking – Export keywords

Pro tip: Export all tracked keywords, not just the top money terms. A keyword with 20 monthly searches might seem irrelevant in isolation. But 50 of these collectively represent meaningful category visibility that SoV captures.

Layer in Competitor Intelligence

Besides your own data, track where competitors show up.

This tells you where to compete directly and where to claim ground that they’ve overlooked.

You can use Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool to find these opportunities.

Add your domain along with up to four competitors, then hit “Compare.”

Filter to the “Missing” section to find keywords with proven search demand that competitors have validated.

You need to build visibility for these terms.

For example, this project management tool could target keywords like “Gantt chart” and “project management software” to boost its SoV.

Keyword Gap – Trello – Missing keywords

Dig deeper: How to Run a Competitor Traffic Analysis (9 Steps)


Build Your AI Prompt Library

After sourcing keywords, look at how people search for your category in AI tools.

Since AI search queries tend to be more conversational, they often mirror how people talk in community spaces.

Browse Reddit, Facebook groups, and Slack communities to see how your audience phrases their needs and pain points.

For example, this post reveals that agencies want project management tools that aren’t “too corporate or complex for creative teams.”

Reddit – Project management tools

A question like that can translate directly into an AI prompt: “What’s the most user-friendly project management tool for small creative agencies?”

For decision-stage prompts, review sites G2 and Capterra (or those relevant to your industry) offer a lot of insights.

G2, for instance, lists popular alternatives for every tool.

This is a ready-made list of “[You] vs [Competitor]” and “alternative to [Competitor]” queries your buyers are likely running in AI search.

G2 – Asana – Top alternatives

You can dig deeper with Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit to find prompts where competitors show up in AI answers, but you don’t.

Go to “Prompt Research” and add any of your core topics, like “agile project management.”

Click “Analyze” to get started.

AI SEO – Prompt Research

The tool lists real prompts that generate AI responses for your category, such as “best productivity app” and “companies that use agile software development.”

Jot down the prompts relevant to your primary cluster.

Then, repeat for each of your 3-5 clusters.

Prompt Research – Agile project management – Prompts

Document Your Metadata

Finally, organize everything in a master spreadsheet with columns for:

  • Keyword/Prompt
  • Topic Cluster
  • Funnel Stage
  • Source (SEO/AI)

Once you’re done measuring SoV, this metadata will become your strategic lens.

Use it to decide which clusters to prioritize, which funnel stages are weak, and where SEO and AI visibility diverge.

Here’s what this looks like for the project management software:

Keyword Funnel Analysis

Step 3: Calculate Your SoV

Your SoV equals your estimated traffic divided by the total traffic for all tracked brands, multiplied by 100.

Track both SEO and AI SoV to see the full picture of your brand’s visibility.

Calculate SEO Share of Voice

Start by checking your rankings for all the keywords in your tracking list. Track your competitors’ rankings for the same keyword set.

Each ranking position gets an average share of clicks, like position 1 getting roughly 27%.

This will help in estimating the traffic share per keyword.

Note: These benchmarks for organic search CTR shift over time. It’s also crucial to mention that organic CTRs have been declining as AI-generated answers absorb more clicks before users ever reach the results.

Multiply each keyword’s monthly search volume by the click-through rate for your ranking position to estimate your traffic for that duration.

Then, run the same calculation for each competitor.

Use this data to calculate your SoV.

Add up the estimated traffic across all keywords for each brand. Divide your total by the combined total for all tracked brands and multiply by 100.

How to calculate SEO share of voice

This manual approach can be time-intensive, especially when tracking hundreds of keywords across multiple competitors.

Semrush handles this math automatically once you set up tracking correctly.

Go to Semrush Position Tracking and click “Create project.”

Enter your domain, target search engine, device type, and location.

Position Tracking – Targeting

The location setting matters for SoV tracking because search results vary by location.

If you set the location to the United States, but most of your customers are in New York, your SoV might look different than reality.

Pro tip: Start with country-level tracking to establish your baseline. Only segment by region later if local variations impact your business.

Then, click “Continue to Keywords” to manually add or import your keyword list.

Upload the CSV you made in Step 2 to preserve the data by cluster and funnel-stage categorization.

Then, press “Add keywords to campaign.”

Finally, click “Start Tracking” to begin data collection.

Position Tracking – Keywords

Once this setup is complete, Semrush starts collecting daily ranking data for every target keyword.

Check out the results in the “Share of Voice” tab under “Overview” in the Position Tracking dashboard.

Position Tracking – Backlinko – Share of Voice

You can also add up to four domains to see how you fare against others in the market.

Semrush tracks every brand’s rankings for your keyword set to aggregate the data into SoV percentages.

Position Tracking – Backlinko – Share of Voice

Important: While SoV is inherently relative and compares your visibility against others, who you choose as competitors shapes how you interpret your SoV.

Calculate AI Share of Voice

Your AI SoV shows how often LLMs cite your brand when answering questions in your category.

There’s no standardized way to manually measure AI SoV yet, but this two-step process gets you close:

  • Step 1: Run each prompt from your library through your AI tools of choice, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Mode, and any other AI tools your audience uses
  • Step 2: For each response, document every brand that appears — yours and your tracked competitors. Record whether each brand was mentioned, cited as a source, and whether the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative.

Once you’ve tested all prompts, count how many times each brand appeared across all responses.

Divide each brand’s total mentions by the total number of prompts tested, and multiply by 100.

How to calculate AI share of voice

Keep in mind: This calculation gives you a directional read instead of a live metric. AI responses vary by session, phrasing, location, and platform. That’s why it’s important to test regularly and track trends over time.

Measuring AI SoV manually for 20 prompts across three platforms is doable. Doing it for hundreds of prompts while tracking how recommendations shift week over week isn’t.

That’s what Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is built for.

Go to the Brand Performance report in Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit.

Enter your domain and click “Analyze.”

AI SEO – Brand Performance

Pick an AI platform between ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, or Perplexity.

Switch among these tools to identify any significant gaps in platform-specific LLM visibility.

Brand Performance – Paypal – Select platform

Once the report is generated, you’ll see a pie chart visualizing the distribution of SoV for your competitors.

The tool tests hundreds of prompts related to your category across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity to measure your AI SoV.

For each prompt, it analyzes AI responses for:

  • Brand mentions: How often your brand appears in the answer
  • Citations: Whether the AI links to your content as a source
  • Context: Whether mentions are positive, neutral, or negative

It aggregates this data across all tested prompts to calculate your percentage of total visibility.

Semrush – Brand Performance – Sentiment & Share of Voice

You’ll also find a section comparing each competitor against a set of business drivers specific to your industry.

These drivers are the most frequently mentioned topics for your category.

Use this data to identify clusters where you’re stronger and weaker than your competitors.

Brand Performance – Backlinko – Key Business Drivers

Interpreting SEO vs AI Share of Voice

SEO share of voice measures organic traffic while AI share of voice tracks LLM mentions and citations.

These might not always align.

You can have a strong organic share of voice (ranking on top for many keywords) but a weak AI SoV if LLMs don’t find your content credible.

And brands with more credible content can win a bigger slice of AI SoV even without much visibility in organic search.

Here’s a simple matrix to understand your data:

High AI SoV Low AI SoV
High SEO SoV You dominate both traditional and AI search.

Maintain content freshness and expand into adjacent topics to defend your position.

 You rank well, but LLMs don’t cite you.

Implement content chunking to optimize your content for AI search and create citable assets to create credibility that LLMs value.
Low SEO SoV AI tools cite your content even though you don’t rank at the top on organic search.

Improve SEO fundamentals, including title tags, internal linking, site speed, and keyword optimization.

 Focus on depth over breadth.

Create a definitive, well-researched content resource for every core cluster. This is a good start for building visibility on both traditional and AI search.

Dig deeper: Learn more about building visibility in AI search with LLM seeding.

Step 4: Establish Your Baseline and Track Trends

The final step is turning your SoV numbers into an ongoing tracking system that informs decisions.

Create a baseline dashboard to capture three levels of detail:

  • Overall metrics: Are you gaining or losing ground overall?
  • Topic cluster performance: Which topics need more investment?
  • Funnel stage breakdown: Where in the buyer journey are you least visible?

Here’s what this could look like for the project management software:

Share of voice baseline dashboard

Once your baseline is locked in, set your tracking cadence strategically.

A monthly frequency allows you to spot trends without the need for reacting to noise.

With quarterly deep dives, you can:

  • Analyze cluster-specific performance in detail
  • Correlate SoV changes with past campaigns
  • Adjust resource allocation based on what’s working

This rhythm prevents you from chasing short-term variations and missing critical shifts that impact your category.

Pro tip: Set up notifications in Semrush Position Tracking to get real-time alerts. You’re notified when SoV drops more than a certain threshold in any core cluster.

How to Improve Share of Voice

Not every fluctuation in your SoV requires action.

Here’s how to strategically diagnose gaps in your SoV and prioritize the right tactics to fix them.

1. Close Visibility Gaps

Clusters with <10% SoV mean you’re almost invisible.

This is especially damaging in decision-stage queries.

If you have less than 10% visibility when buyers search “best project management software,” you’re not in their consideration set.

At the same time, look for opportunities where competitors dominate, but you can compete.

For example, if your project management tool serves creative agencies but you have zero visibility for “project management for creative teams,” that’s your opening.

Potential Solutions

Diagnose the cause:

  • Search your weak clusters and compare what ranks against what you have
  • Check if you lack topic coverage, content depth, or basic optimization
  • Look at which competitors dominate and what formats they use

Build topical authority for major business themes.

Create one pillar page with multiple supporting articles.

Build backlinks to your pillar content to establish visibility across every query in that cluster.

For example, if we learn that the project management software needs to gain decision-stage visibility, we could prioritize comparison content.

Build pages targeting “[Your Brand] vs [Competitor]” and category buyer’s guides.

2. Solve Efficiency Problems

Compare your SoV to actual traffic.

A cluster like “what is project management” might give you a high SoV.

But if only 1% of that traffic converts, you’re likely burning money on the wrong audience.

You’re winning visibility in areas that don’t drive business outcomes. And competitors are capturing high-intent buyers.

Potential Solutions

Diagnose the cause:

  • Check if you’re ranking for awareness content when you need decision-stage visibility
  • Look at your traffic-to-conversion ratio by cluster
  • Identify if your content attracts the wrong audience (students vs. buyers)

Reallocate resources to high-intent clusters.

Instead of producing more awareness content, shift the budget to bottom-of-funnel content.

This includes comparison pages, case studies, and ROI calculators that target buyers ready to evaluate solutions.

Update existing comparison pages with current data and competitive intelligence.

3. Address Competitive Threats

Keep tabs on competitors gaining ground in your strong clusters.

If a competitor gains over 5% SoV in your strong clusters, it’s an early sign that they’re targeting your territory.

That gap can widen unless you respond to maintain your market share.

Diagnose the cause:

  • Analyze what new content or tactics they launched
  • Check if they’re winning on review sites, community platforms, or organic search
  • Identify if they’re capturing a format you’re missing (video, podcasts, tools)

The fix depends on where your competitors are winning.

If competitors actively feature on review sites, optimize your profiles. Run campaigns to source reviews from happy customers.

If they’re visible on community platforms, proactively engage in communities like Reddit and Slack.

Prioritize Based on Effort vs. Impact

Not all gaps matter equally.

Focus on opportunities that will actually move your revenue pipeline.

Start with high-impact, low-effort wins. Then invest in high-effort moves that compound over time.

High Impact Low Impact
Low Effort
  • Optimize content ranking #5-10
  • Claim existing review site profiles
  • Update comparison pages with current data
  • Claim industry directory profiles
  • Minor content refreshes on supporting pages
  • Social engagement in established channels
  • Guest commenting on industry blogs
  • Newsletter mentions in partner publications
High Effort
  • Build authority in community spaces (Reddit, forums)
  • Create comprehensive hub content for weak clusters
  • Earn citations from AI-referenced sources
  • Develop thought leadership for industry publications
  • Content for saturated topics without authority
  • Channels where your audience isn’t active
  • Platforms AI tools rarely reference
  • Keywords outside category relevance

Making SoV Your 2026 North Star

Share of voice captures how often you show up across the fragmented platforms where buyers make decisions.

Get started by measuring your current SoV across SEO and AI search with the steps in this guide.

Pick the gap that costs you the most revenue, and strategize the best ways to close it.

Next step: Build your AI optimization gameplan to capture visibility in the fastest-growing search channel.

The post How to Calculate Share of Voice (+ Why it Matters for SEO) appeared first on Backlinko.

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The SEO Services Report

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SEO services have evolved significantly in recent years, driven by changes in search behavior, AI-powered results, and rising competition across industries.

To give you the most accurate picture of the industry today, we’ve combined data from multiple sources, including our survey of 1,200 business owners.

In this report, you’ll learn:

  • How much businesses spend on SEO services today
  • Where companies actually find and hire SEO providers
  • What factors influence the decision to choose one agency over another
  • Why clients leave (or stay with) their SEO provider
  • Key trends shaping the future of SEO services

Let’s dive into the data.

Highlights and Key Statistics:

1. Companies spend $119.4 billion on SEO and digital marketing consulting each year in the US.

2. We found a strong correlation between higher spending and higher client satisfaction in small business SEO. In fact, clients who spent over $500/month were 53.3% more likely to be “extremely satisfied” compared to those who spent less than $500/month.

3. Most small business owners find SEO providers through referrals, Google searches, and online reviews. A small fraction of SEO clients (8%) found their current provider from online advertising.

4. When it comes to choosing a provider, 74% of business owners consider an SEO provider’s reputation “very” or “extremely” important. Monthly cost and the provider’s own Google rankings were also noted as important factors.

5. Overall, SEO client satisfaction is decidedly low. Only 30% would recommend their current SEO provider to a friend or colleague. However, we found that client satisfaction among marketing agencies was higher than that of freelancers.

6. SEO provider turnover is high. 65% of our panel stated that they’ve worked with several different SEO providers. 25% have worked with 3 or more providers.

We have more detailed and expanded findings below.

Average Monthly SEO Spend

In 2025, US organizations spent $119.4 billion on SEO and digital marketing consulting.

Our 2019 research found that small businesses spend $497.16 per month on SEO services.

However, we did discover a large range in SEO spending. Half of our respondents reported spending less than $1,000 per year on SEO. 14% spend $5k+ per year. Only 2% spend over $25k/year.

Small business SEO spending varies greatly

We also found that agencies tend to get paid significantly more than freelance SEO providers.

Specifically, agencies were 2x more likely to get paid $1k-$2k/month than freelancers, who mostly get paid in the $500-$1k per month range.

SEO agencies get paid significantly more than SEO freelancers

Agencies also tend to dominate the high-end pricing range (clients that spend $10k-$25k/year on SEO).

Agencies are 8X more likely to get paid $10k-$25k/year than freelancers

As you can see, 24% of small businesses that work with agencies spend between $10k-$25k/year, compared with 2% that work with a freelance SEO.

Sources: Infinite, Backlinko

Monthly Spend Is Tied To Client Satisfaction

When it comes to SEO, do you “get what you pay for”?

According to our data, yes.

Specifically, we discovered that clients spending over $500/month were 53.3% more likely to consider themselves “extremely satisfied” compared to people who spend less than $500/month.

Higher SEO spending is correlated with higher client satisfaction

We also found a clear relationship between dissatisfaction levels and cost.

Specifically, business owners who spent less than $500/month were 75% more likely to be dissatisfied than those who invested at least $500/month in SEO.

SEO dissatisfaction is correlated with lower SEO spending

This relationship played out whether a client worked with a freelancer, agency, or a mix of both.

Source: Backlinko

Referrals and Google Searches Are the Top Ways Businesses Are Finding SEOs

When someone wants to hire an SEO agency, where do they look?

According to our panel, most people find potential SEO service providers through word of mouth, Google searches, and online review platforms (like Yelp).

Most clients find SEO services via referrals, Google search and review sites

On the other hand, relatively few find SEO providers through online or offline advertising, or referrals from other vendors (like web designers or writers).

If you’re an agency owner or a freelancer, this is a key finding. If you know where small business owners look to find SEO service providers, you can invest resources to make sure your business has a presence in those places.

Sources: Backlinko

Reputation and Cost are Key Factors Involved In Choosing a Provider

Demand for SEO services continues to grow as search becomes more complex and harder to manage in-house. 

In fact, recent data shows that 61% of companies hire SEO agencies due to a lack of internal expertise, while others turn to external providers when they don’t have the time, resources, or results needed to scale.

Most common reasons for using SEO services:

  • Lack expertise – 26.87% 
  • Lack resources – 22.70% 
  • More cost-effective – 21.48%
  • Poor in-house SEO results – 15.48%
  • Lack sufficient time – 10.70%

But hiring an agency isn’t just about capability. Once someone finds a list of potential providers, how do they decide which one to go with?

We discovered that reputation, cost, and a provider’s own Google rankings influenced their decision the most.

Reputation and cost are key factors involved in choosing a provider

Small business owners cited client case studies and the provider’s social media presence as significantly less important.

However, even these relatively minor factors played a role in whether or not someone decided to work with a particular SEO provider. For example, 55% of our panel cited “referrals” as an important consideration.

Referrals influence more than 50% choosing a provider

Although the importance of referrals pales in comparison to a provider’s reputation (55% vs. 74%), it’s still something that influenced more than half of the people we spoke to.

Interestingly, we found that a provider’s location mattered quite a bit.

Only 51% knew exactly where their SEO provider was located.

Half of SEO clients don't know where their SEO provider is located

However, 78% of US-based small businesses stated that knowing their provider’s location was “extremely” or “very” important (with 46% stating that a known location was “extremely important”).

78% of small business owners state SEO provider's location as 'Important'

If you provide SEO services, making your location clear and obvious may help you land more SEO clients.

Here’s a great example from Siege Media, which actually includes a picture of their office on their about page:

SiegeMedia – Make location clear

Sources: Leading Edge, Backlinko

The Vast Majority of Business Owners Expect SEO Services To Increase Customers and Traffic

A recent 2025 survey found that 91% of people who used SEO services reported a positive impact on website performance and marketing goals.

As such, it’s no surprise that expectations are high when working with an SEO provider.

According to our survey, the most important expectations are “accessing new customers”, “increasing traffic”, “increasing brand awareness”, and “building trust” as most important.

SEO clients value new customers, traffic and brand awareness

“Gaining social media followers”, “increasing number of email subscribers”, and “helping to attract new talent” were cited as relatively unimportant.

In fact, even though this is a common goal set by marketing agencies, only 26% of respondents cited “getting followers on social media sites” as extremely important.

Only 26% state getting followers on social media sites as extremely important

This finding is especially key for SEO providers that are taking on new clients.

For example, a newly-hired SEO provider that says, “Our first step is going to be to get more likes on your Facebook page” isn’t speaking their client’s language.

On the other hand, kicking off the client-provider relationship with: “I look forward to helping you get more targeted traffic and customers” will likely result in a more satisfied client.

Needless to say, for the relationship to last, you need to deliver on those promises (more on that later). But it does help to understand what clients hope to get out of SEO so you can mold your services and reports based on that.

Sources: Conductor, Backlinko

SEO ROI: What Businesses Can Expect

SEO is widely regarded as one of the highest-return marketing channels, with some estimates placing the average ROI at around 22:1, meaning businesses earn roughly $22 for every $1 invested.

And around 1 in 3 qualified leads (34%) come directly from SEO efforts.

However, ROI varies significantly across industries:

Medical Device – 1,183% ROI, 13 months breakeven
Higher Education & College – 994% ROI, 13 months breakeven
Oil & Gas – 906% ROI, 10 months breakeven
Industrial IoT – 866% ROI, 7 months breakeven
Pharmaceutical – 826% ROI, 9 months breakeven
Manufacturing – 813% ROI, 9 months breakeven
Biotech – 788% ROI, 8 months breakeven
Solar Energy – 770% ROI, 9 months breakeven
Commercial Insurance – 758% ROI, 9 months breakeven
B2B SaaS – 702% ROI, 7 months breakeven
Construction – 681% ROI, 5 months breakeven
HVAC Services – 678% ROI, 6 months breakeven
IT Staffing – 612% ROI, 10 months breakeven
Legal Services – 526% ROI, 14 months breakeven
Healthcare – 532% ROI, 11 months breakeven
Financial Services – 447% ROI, 9 months breakeven
E-commerce – 317% ROI, 9 months breakeven

The rapid emergence of AI also has a bearing on SEO ROI, with 39% reporting a “moderate increase” and 29% claiming a “significant ROI increase”. Only 1% claim that AI reduces their SEO ROI.

Sources: WebsiteBuilderExpert, G2, AllOutSEO, Semrush

Overall Satisfaction With SEO Services Is Low

SEO is a long-term investment, and results often take time to materialize; many campaigns require 6–12 months just to break even. 

That slower payoff, combined with unclear reporting or misaligned expectations, can leave many businesses frustrated with the SEO services they receive.

In our study, we asked our panelists to rate their current SEO provider (or the last SEO provider they worked with) using the Net Promoter Score.

The results were markedly low.

First off, we found that only 30% of small business owners would recommend their current SEO provider.

Only 30% of small business owners would recommend their current SEO provider

Importantly, 30% of our respondents considered themselves “detractors”. Which means they would leave a negative review for their last or current SEO provider.

In fact, the SEO services industry as a whole has an NPS score of 0, which is considered “not likely to recommend”.

The SEO services industry has an NPS score of 0

When we broke down the NPS scores among agencies, freelancers, and a combination of freelancer and agency, we discovered that agencies had a higher average NPS score than freelancers.

Agencies had a higher average NPS score than freelancers

However, all three types of services had fairly low NPS scores.

Sources: AllOutSEO, Backlinko

Clients Cite Lack of Education and Resources as Top Reasons for Low Satisfaction Levels

Delivering effective SEO requires significant investment in talent, tools, and ongoing strategy, something many businesses underestimate when hiring a provider.

Building comparable in-house capabilities can cost $150K–$250K+ for senior talent plus thousands per month in tools, which helps explain why expectations often exceed what lower-cost or under-resourced SEO services can realistically deliver.

NPS is a helpful benchmark. However, NPS can only tell you so much. In other words, it’s difficult to understand why SEO services have such low levels of satisfaction.

That’s why we decided to dig deeper into this finding.

And when we dug a bit deeper to understand more about what’s happening, we uncovered a few surprising insights.

First, many unhappy SEO clients fully or partially blamed themselves.

Specifically, 50% stated that “I feel like I need more training to fully benefit from what SEO offers”, and 28% told us that they “do not have the staff resources to properly benefit from SEO”.

Many unhappy SEO clients cite 'training' and 'lack of resources' as reasons for leaving an SEO provider

This means that low satisfaction levels aren’t solely due to poor quality work. In fact, many clients are simply not in a position to benefit from SEO due to a lack of resources.

Plus, even clients with resources may not make SEO a priority because they don’t have the training to fully understand how SEO benefits them.

For example, let’s say an SEO provider wants to change a title tag on a client’s site. But it doesn’t happen because their developer is swamped with a website redesign. Also, this client may not understand that this simple change can increase their Google traffic due to a lack of training. So they don’t make that change a priority. And progress stalls.

Which leads us to our second interesting finding, the importance of reporting and transparency.

27% of the clients we spoke with agreed with the statement: “I find SEO to be confusing and unclear about what services they offer.” 25% said that “I am not sure what I am really paying for with SEO.”

Many clients are unclear on how SEO benefits them

In other words, many clients are confused about what their provider is doing for them or what they’re getting out of the arrangement.

These are two points that could be remedied with better reporting and increased transparency.

I should point out that a fair number of clients stated that “I feel like SEO companies are very unreliable” and “I don’t think SEO is worth the money for my business.”

A small but significant percentage of small businesses consider SEO companies unreliable

Which means that a simple lack of results and ROI is often the culprit behind low client satisfaction levels.

However, as you just saw, there are usually non-performance-based factors at play as well.

Sources: Passionfruit, Backlinko

Turnover In the SEO Services Industry Is Extremely High

Likely due to low global satisfaction levels, we found high levels of turnover in the SEO services industry.

Specifically, we found that 65% of small business owners have worked with at least one SEO provider before:

65% of small businesses have worked with multiple SEO providers

We also found that 1/4th of our panel have worked with 3 or more providers:

25% of small business owners have worked with 3+ SEO providers

However, our data suggests that most clients don’t switch between SEO providers without careful consideration.

In fact, the clients in our panel have been working with their current SEO service for an average of 3 years. And lapsed clients give their service provider an average of 2 years to deliver before moving on.

Both existing clients and lapsed clients stay with SEO providers for 2+ years before switching

That said, we did discover a small subset of clients that do rapidly switch between different providers.

These “rapid switchers” tend to hire and fire SEO companies at a fever pitch.

For example, we classified 10% of our panelists as “rapid switchers” (worked with 3 or more SEO providers over the last year).

10% of people have worked with 3+ SEO providers over the last year

Source: Backlinko

Most SEO Clients Leave Due to Lack of Results and Cost

We wanted to know why people decide to leave their current SEO provider or switch to another company.

We referred to people who worked with multiple SEO providers as “lapsed clients”. And we asked this subset of lapsed users what went into their decision.

Here were the results:

Reasons that people switch from current SEO provider

Not surprisingly, 82% of our respondents cited “Dissatisfaction with business results” as a factor in their decision. 81% reported that cost played a large role as well.

This suggests that clients don’t look at results in a vacuum. They also pay attention to the ROI that they’re getting from SEO. In other words, delivering results for clients is one thing. But it’s also important to demonstrate the ROI that SEO has on their business. Otherwise, they may leave.

Although lack of results and cost were the two largest factors, they weren’t the only reasons that clients decided to stop working with an SEO provider.

In fact, 80% of lapsed clients stated that they found a better option on their own, which suggests that clients are happy to shop around for an alternative to their current SEO provider.

80% of lapsed clients say they 'Heard about a better option'

And 34% cited poor “customer service/ responsiveness” as a factor in their decision.

However, relatively few clients cited “pitched by a competitor” as a reason for leaving. In other words, as long as you can keep your clients happy, they’re not likely to leave. This remains true even if a competitor attempts to poach your client with a better offer.

We also asked our “lapsed clients” panelists to describe to us why they decided to stop using an SEO service. Here’s a sample of those responses:

Quotes from clients that stopped using an SEO service

We also asked a group of users who were happy with their SEO service (“existing clients”) what they liked about it. Here’s what they told us:

Quotes from clients that are happy with their SEO service

Source: Backlinko

Existing Clients are 2x More Likely to Be Web Savvy Than Lapsed Clients

We asked our panel to self-report their level of “web savviness”.

Here were the results:

Self-reported web savviness among SEO clients

As you can see, 37% of SEO clients consider their web savviness as “somewhat” or “not very”.

The upshot here is that many clients simply don’t have the web savviness to understand key digital marketing terms, like “title tags”, “CSS”, and “backlinks”. This suggests that SEO companies should largely avoid this sort of jargon in favor of terms like “leads”, “sales”, and “first page Google rankings”.

In fact, this is backed up by another finding from our panel: that lapsed clients are significantly more likely to consider themselves not web savvy.

Specifically, we found that existing clients were 2x more likely to consider themselves “extremely web savvy” than lapsed clients.

Existing clients are 2X more likely to consider themselves 'Extremely web savvy'

This suggests that web-savvy users are in a better position to understand how their SEO service is helping them. So they decide to stay. On the other hand, clients who aren’t web savvy may not fully understand what they’re getting from their SEO provider. So they decide to leave.

Source: Backlinko

Conclusion

I hope these findings helped you get a better feel for the SEO services industry.

I’d like to thank Northstar Research Partners for helping me design and conduct the survey that formed much of this report.

And if you’d like to learn more about how this survey was conducted, here’s a PDF of our study methods.

The post The SEO Services Report appeared first on Backlinko.

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Best Content Marketing Agencies of 2026

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Key Takeaways

  • Content agencies often specialize in certain industries or subsets of content marketing, such as technical SEO or conversion-focused content.
  • Our list of some of the best content marketing brands in the business covers a range of services and specialties.
  • Check out their client lists and portfolios to see if their work aligns with your expectations and preferences.
  • Knowing what to look for in a content marketing company and the right questions to ask can help you identify the ones with the abilities and capacity to help you expand and improve your content strategy and reach your marketing goals.

The content world is changing, but people still know its value. A 2023 survey from the Content Marketing Institute showed that over three-fourths of marketers indicated that content marketing generates demand and leads. 

This is no surprise when you realize 70 percent of people would prefer to learn about a company through an article rather than advertising. 

Content marketing can generate huge amounts of traffic, leads, and sales for your business. If you’re a company looking to get started with content marketing, it can be tough to find the resources and expertise you need. 

What kind of content do your customers want from you? Is that the same kind of content that creates revenue for your business? Today we’ll take a look at the best content marketing companies in the industry to help you answer those questions and more.

Agency  Best For  Ideal For  Notable Clients  Standout Approach 
NP Digital  Immediate and consistent revenue growth  Broad (B2B, e-commerce, SaaS, finance)  CNN, Adobe, Western Union, SoFi  Revenue-focused content with technical SEO built into every campaign from the start 
Seer Interactive  Big data search and content  Competitive industries like finance, banking, and mortgages  Asos, Intuit, SendGrid, Terminix  12,000GB proprietary data warehouse surfaces hidden customer trends competitors can’t see 
Brainlabs  Technical SEO  Not specified  Formula 1, Estée Lauder, Capital One, Polaroid  Built on a team of mathematicians, scientists, and programmers driving data-backed automation and testing 
Fractl  In-depth, research-heavy content  Research-intensive industries  Porch, Fanatics, Superdrug, Healthline  Research published in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and the NYT, with a dedicated client growth division 
Column Five  Data and content visualization  Not specified (broad enterprise client base)  Deloitte, JP Morgan, Dell, Harvard University  Visual storytelling specialists covering infographics, video, interactive motion graphics, and exhibition design 
Single Grain  Conversion-driven content marketing  Businesses needing rapid turnaround or growth  Lyft, Warby Parker, Semrush, Nextiva  Entrepreneurial approach to flipping underperforming businesses through aggressive conversion optimization 
The Content Bureau  B2B content marketing  Technology, venture capital, and financial sectors; global corporations  American Express, PayPal, Microsoft, Cisco  Woman-owned agency with 80 percent of staff at 10+ years tenure, offering premium, high-attention client service 
Webprofits  Growing challenger brands  E-commerce, consumer, and retail brands scaling fast  Logitech, Philips, Nespresso, HP  “Fluid marketing” methodology blends digital strategy and performance marketing to find hidden growth opportunities 
Siege Media  Scalable SEO content  Fortune 500 companies down to small startups  Zillow, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Asana  Passive link generation through content, backed by a proprietary link management tool maintained monthly 
Directive  Performance marketing for tech companies  Tech companies of all sizes  Amazon, Bill.com, Matillion, SentinelOne  Generated $10B+ in client revenue by acting as an embedded extension of in-house marketing teams 

1. NP Digital – Best for Immediate and Consistent Revenue Growth

The NP Digital website.

NP Digital is my content marketing company. We created NP Digital in 2017 to serve the millions of people who needed help with their content marketing to grow revenue. 

Rankings are important, but many marketers still focus obsessively on keywords and content that doesn’t lead to revenue. I’ve always focused on helping readers build a business that generates traffic, leads, and, most importantly, revenue. So we have a big focus on developing high-quality content that ranks high and converts visitors into customers by aligning with user intent.

Today, we’re one of the top content marketing brands in the business. a powerhouse global agency with one of the top 100 blog destinations in the world.

Another thing that’s different about NP Digital is the fact that we incorporate technical SEO into our content marketing planning. SEO — technical, on-page, off-page, local, etc.— it’s always a package deal with content marketing. Our status as one of the top SEO agencies means you get the best of both worlds.

We stay on top of Google’s updates and algorithms and adjust our strategies accordingly. This means the content we create for our clients automatically performs well with Google. here’s no extra work required. 

NP Digital is my way of helping everyone achieve the revenue and growth they deserve in their business. 

NP Digital’s client list includes:

  • CNN
  • Adobe
  • Western Union
  • Brightside Health
  • SoFi
  • LiquidWeb
  • ConnectWise
  • ModKat

2. Seer Interactive – Best for Big Data Search and Content

The Seer Interactive agency website.

Wil Reynolds founded Seer Interactive, which got its start as a search engine optimization company. What makes Seer one of the best content marketing companies on our list is its focus and emphasis on big data. 

Using a combination of in-house and third-party tools, they’ve built a massive data warehouse with almost 12,000 gigabytes of data they can analyze to identify new, hidden, and unexpected customer trends. 

If you’re in a competitive or cutthroat industry (e.g., finance, banking, or mortgages), this data is what you need to stay ahead of your competitors.

With Seer Interactive, their approach is SEO-heavy. That should be an important priority for every company, whether you’re big or small, but not every company is ready for Big Data.

Seer Interactive’s client list includes:

  • Asos
  • Intuit
  • SendGrid
  • Terminix
  • Think Company
  • Time Inc.

3. Brainlabs – Best for Technical SEO

The Brainlabs website.

Brainlabs was founded by Daniel Gilbert in 2012. Understanding that marketing was becoming all about data, he took the unusual tactic of hiring mathematicians, scientists and programmers to support automation and data-driven insights.

His approach paid off: Since 2020, the agency has expanded its services by acquiring other marketing companies, including the SEO-focused Distilled, a leader in the space. 

Today Brainlabs is known as one of the top content marketing agencies for technical SEO and helping companies evolve in an increasingly competitive SEO landscape. They are constantly experimenting and testing to improve conversion rates.

Brainlabs’ client list includes:

  • Formula 1
  • Estée Lauder
  • Capital One
  • Polaroid

4. Fractl – Best for In-Depth, Research-Heavy Content

The Fractl Website.

Fractl is a research-heavy, data-driven content marketing company. They’re focused on rapid, organic growth that’s driven by content marketing, data journalism, digital PR, and search engine optimization. 

Research makes Fractl unique. 

They’re always researching industry-related topics, and they share their understanding of the art and science behind newsworthy content. They share their research in top publications, leading market resources, scientific journals, and authoritative conferences around the world.

Their research has been published in MarketingProfs, TNW, The Economist, Time, the Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, Pub Con, and many other publications and journals.

If you’re in a research-heavy industry and you’re looking for a high-growth content marketing company, Fractl is a good choice. Aside from being one of the best content marketing brands, they’re one of the few companies that have a division dedicated to client growth.

Fractl’s client list includes:

  • Sapio
  • Porch
  • Fanatics
  • Travelmath
  • College Finance
  • Alcohol.org
  • NVISION
  • Superdrug

5. Column Five – Best for Data and Content Visualization

The Column Five website.

Column Five describes itself as a creative content agency. They’re primarily focused on the visual side of content marketing — storytelling, design, data visualization, video, interactive motion graphics, even exhibition design.

They are most known for their “child of the 90s” viral video on behalf of Internet Explorer, which launched their reputation as one of the best content marketing brands out there.

As a content creation company, Column Five is focused primarily on content strategy, content creation, and content distribution. They rely on a simultaneous mix of organic and paid distribution channels to draw attention to client content.

The company mantra is “the best story wins,” showing their commitment to developing great content that delivers big results. It specializes in content that is “inherently newsworthy,” making it more likely to get traffic, links, and media attention. 

The Column Five client list includes:

  • Deloitte
  • Cornell University
  • Harvard University
  • J.P Morgan
  • MetLife
  • ASPCA
  • The World Bank
  • Charles Schwab 
  • Dell
  • eBay
  • Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Zendesk

6. Single Grain – Best for Conversion-Driven Content Marketing

The Single Grain website.

In 2014, entrepreneur and leading marketing expert Eric Siu made a big gamble. He bought a failing SEO agency for less than the cost of a cappuccino — $2. This wasn’t the first time he’d made a seemingly risky bet — in the past he led the growth strategy for an online education company when it had just a few months of cash left in the bank. 

“A month into it, the CEO pulls me aside,” Siu recalls, “and he’s like, ‘Eric, you know, 48 people, their families, they’re riding on your shoulders right now, and if you can’t hit numbers in the next month, we’re gonna have to let you go.’”

Did I mention he was just 25 years old at the time?

Eric leveraged his marketing know-how and entrepreneurial outlook to turn Single Grain around and take it to where it is today: solidly among the ranks of the best content marketing brands out there.  

Eric Siu and the Single Grain team can do for your business what they do best: turn it around. They know how to turn a faltering business into a successful one with an approach of optimizing for conversions and focusing on rapid growth. 

Single Grain’s client list includes:

  • WineDeals
  • Nextiva
  • Peet’s Coffee
  • Semrush
  • Warby Parker
  • Crunchbase
  • Lyft

7. The Content Bureau – Best for B2B Content Marketing

The Content Bureau's website.

The Content Bureau bills itself as a premier B2B content marketing company. This agency is woman-owned, 100 percent virtual, and their team is 90 percent female, of which a third are women of color. The Content Bureau focuses its attention on the technology, venture capital, and financial sectors, working almost exclusively with global corporations that rely on them year-round. 

Many of their clients are long-term, stable clients who prefer their premium approach, exclusive attention, and veteran workforce; 80 percent of their team have been with The Content Bureau for 10+ years. 

As an organization, they give their clients lots of handholding; they’re open and transparent with each of their clients, and they deliver amazing service with their extraordinary content.

The Content Bureau’s client list includes:

  • American Express
  • PayPal
  • Royal Bank of Canada
  • ADP
  • Unilever
  • Magento
  • Microsoft
  • Cisco
  • Atlassian

8. Webprofits – Best for Growing Brands

The Webprofits website.

Webprofits is the content marketing and advertising company that was co-founded by Sujan Patel and Alex Cleanthous. Their company focuses on challenger brands in the e-commerce, consumer, and retail space that want to grow their business fast. They’ve refined their process based on real-life, in-the-trenches experience.

In fact, Patel doesn’t think of Web Profits as an agency. He calls it a marketing “hit squad,” a team of specialists who understand your business inside and out. 

What makes Web Profits one of the top content marketing companies? They use a unique “fluid marketing” approach, which combines digital strategy with performance marketing. This enables its team of experts to identify hidden correlations and connections that can point to exciting opportunities for content marketing.

This makes the Web Profits team uniquely qualified to serve challenger brands that want to make a big impact.

Web Profits’ client list includes:

  • Logitech
  • Philips
  • Nespresso
  • Swarovski
  • HP
  • LG Electronics

9. Siege Media – Best for Scalable Content

The Siege Media website.

Siege Media prides itself on taking a “scientific approach” to scaling SEO-focused content. The agency works with a wide range of companies, from established Fortune 500 businesses to small startups.

The focus of the business is on link-building. Siege Media creates content that serves as passive link generators, a tactic they say is more effective than manual outreach. Their formula results in high-impact content that produces instant results—and it’s a cost-efficient tactic, too.

Siege’s superpower is a proprietary solution for link management. Siege maintains the tool for its clients on a monthly basis, ensuring that websites are always aligned with overall goals and updates. 

This commitment to innovation and leveraging technology for content marketing makes Siege one of the best content marketing companies for the future.

Siege Media’s client list includes:

  • Zillow
  • Quicken Loans
  • Inuit Mint
  • Shutterfly
  • Airbnb
  • Healthline
  • Casper
  • TripAdvisor
  • Asana
  • ZenDesk

10. Directive – Best for Performance Marketing for Tech Companies

The Directive Website.

CEO Garrett Mehrguth founded Directive when he was just 21, focusing on SEO. Today it works with some of the world’s most prominent tech companies, helping them become more discoverable in a dynamic and often challenging industry. Since its founding, it’s generated more than $10 billion in revenue.

The agency uses a unique data-driven methodology to generate quality leads organically across the marketing funnel. The team prefers to act as a partner rather than a vendor, serving as an extension of its clients’ in-house marketing teams.

Directive’s client list includes:

  • Amazon
  • Bill.com
  • Matillion
  • Sumo Logic
  • Eden Health
  • Vyond
  • Brooklyn Solarworks
  • ActivePDF
  • SentinelOne

4 Characteristics that Make a Great Content Marketing Company

A good content marketing company will have no problem demonstrating that they have the expertise and the resources they need to make your campaign a success. These are some qualities to expect in a high-quality content marketing agency.

1: A Stable Team of Content Creators

Content mills produce poorly written filler content that’s mainly written for search engines. Not only is that a short-sighted approach, but Google’s algorithm is more likely to ding sites that use it—especially now that it is incorporating AI. 

The best content marketing companies have a roster of regular and consistent writers on their team. Stable writers are skilled at writing, grammar, logical consistency, and storytelling. These writers can draw your readers in, creating content that moves people towards a specific goal or objective that you have in mind. 

These writers don’t need a lot of babysitting, and they’re able to figure things out, to a certain extent, on their own. They’re dependable, and they’re able to match your brand voice. 

When you contact a content marketing company, you’ll want to ask them questions about how they run their business. 

  • How many writers do you have on staff?
  • Are they freelance or W-2? Do you use a mix of both? 
  • How many of your writers are full-time? Part-time? 
  • How do you manage your team of writers? 
  • How many years of experience does the average writer on your team have? 

When you ask companies these questions, listen to their answers carefully. Look for any inconsistencies or red flags. If you spot any, bring them up immediately and ask for an answer. 

2: Access to Publishers and Influencers

According to Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers, you should be spending 20 percent of your time on content creation and 80 percent of your time on content promotion. The content marketing companies you work with are no different. If you’re investing a significant amount of time and money in creating an amazing piece of content, you should be spending 4x as much time on promotion to make sure your target audience sees it.

When you’re working with a content marketing company, they should already have a list of influencers and publishers in their address book. They should also have strong connections and relationships with the right people, so they’re reasonably sure they can drive traffic to your content. 

3: Specialized Knowledge About Your Industry

In an ideal world, your content marketing provider has a significant amount of experience in your space, or the ability to connect with experts who do. At a minimum, you’ll want to ensure that the content marketing company you choose can write credibly about the topics that are relevant to your business. 

The more specialized the content, the more important these criteria are for your business. 

Industries like healthcare, engineering, or finance require large amounts of specialized experience. It’s unrealistic to expect an inexperienced company to write credibly about a highly technical topic. 

Specialization requires specialists. The more technical your business, the more important it is to hire a content marketing company with experience and expertise in your field. 

4: Content Analysis and Measurement

When you’re investing in the services of a content marketing company, you’ll want to see the numbers. The agency should be able to provide you with a detailed breakdown that includes data outlining your performance as well as the KPIs, metrics, and sentiment surrounding your content.

This information should give you the answers to the following questions:

  • Does this content move us closer to our campaign goals? 
  • Does this piece of content (e.g., blog post, whitepaper, e-book, infographic) lead to enough conversions?
  • How far are people reading into your content? 
  • Where in our flywheel are we losing customers? 
  • What do we need to change/optimize to improve our conversion rates?
  • Which content marketing opportunities are we missing, and where? 

Creating content isn’t enough. The content marketing company you choose should provide you with the actionable data you need and a comprehensive strategy to create profitable content for your business. 

What To Expect From a Great Content Marketing Company

Top content marketing agencies are able to get you up to speed on their processes and provide you with a consistent and comprehensive set of deliverables. These deliverables ensure that your content marketing campaigns stay on track and that you’re able to achieve the consistent results you need.

To do this, your content marketing provider should provide you with onboarding guidance and specific deliverables throughout the pre-launch, launch, and post-launch phases of your campaign. These should include: 

  • Content samples demonstrating your knowledge and expertise
  • The information and materials (e.g., credentials, existing content) they need from you to get started
  • A statement of work and a list of deliverables (e.g., 14 2,500-word articles each month, edits included)
  • Their process (if they’re not working with you and yours)
  • Projected campaign milestones, timelines, and calendars
  • Your point-of-contact, including their name, and contact information
  • Hours of availability
  • The best way to communicate (e.g., Slack, email, phone, chat, or text)
  • Expectations from you 
  • Their process, policies, and procedures
  • Analysis and reports, including business goals, objectives, KPIs, metrics, strategy, tactics, and risks
  • Content audits
  • Consistent updates on your campaign performance
  • Regular (weekly or monthly) calls to discuss performance
  • Consistently updated due dates and delivery timelines
  • Monthly debrief to discuss successes and failures

Here are some additional details you should also expect from your content marketing providers:

  • Good boundaries (including the ability to say no)
  • Prompt and clear feedback
  • Accurate information on various parts of your campaign, including financial, campaign, and performance data

The best content marketing companies ask a lot of questions. They make sure to provide you with the upfront information you need to vet their company and make an informed decision. Once you’ve decided to move forward, they ask you for all of the information and materials they’ll need to produce the results you want.

FAQs

What makes good content marketing?

Good content marketing is different for every business, but in general, it involves creating well-written content that provides valuable information for your target market. It also draws in qualified leads and converts them into customers at a rate that justifies your investment.

How do you track content marketing results?

Tracking content marketing results involves setting clear goals, identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, inquiries, and conversion rates to use as metrics, and monitoring the results. Most content marketing agencies use analytics tools to track and measure results. 

How do you optimize for content marketing?

Optimizing for content marketing involves several steps. First, research who your target audience is and their needs. This will guide you toward topics for content development that can answer their questions and provide valuable information. Incorporate SEO to ensure your content ranks high on search engine results pages and brings in organic traffic. Finally, analyze the results to refine content topics, formats, and overall strategy.  

Which content marketing agency is best for B2B companies?

B2B companies should look for agencies that focus on long-form content, SEO, and lead generation. The best partners understand how to create content that nurtures prospects over time, not just drives traffic. Agencies with strong experience in SaaS or professional services tend to perform best here.

Which content marketing company is best for small businesses?

Small businesses need agencies that balance quality with cost. Look for teams that offer flexible packages or project-based work instead of large retainers. The goal is to get consistent, high-quality content without overcommitting your budget early on.

Which agency is best for SEO-driven content?

You want an agency that combines content creation with keyword research and technical SEO. Firms that focus heavily on search performance will build content designed to rank, not just read well. Check for proven results in organic traffic growth and rankings.

Should you hire a specialized content agency or a full-service marketing agency?

Specialized agencies go deeper into content strategy and production. Full-service agencies connect content to SEO, paid media, and conversion optimization, which can drive better overall results. If content is your main bottleneck, go specialized. If growth is the goal, full-service often wins.

How do you choose the right content marketing agency?

Start with their results. Look for case studies showing traffic growth, lead generation, or revenue impact. Then review their content quality and process. The best agencies have a clear system for research, creation, and optimization.

Conclusion

Content marketing produces more leads and revenue than traditional marketing methods. If you’re looking for a good content marketing company to help you get started, it can be tough. Use this list to identify the companies that are a good fit for your business. 

With this post, you should have a pretty good idea of the questions to ask, what to expect, and how to select the right content marketing provider. 

Invest the right amount of effort with the right company, and your content marketing will grow faster than you expect. It’s tough in the beginning, but it will take effort, push through, and keep creating really helpful content, even if it’s hard. 

You’ll see consistent revenue growth once customers realize that you’re serious about helping them solve their problems. Content marketing is the best way to show them that you understand, and you can help. With this said, combining with other disciplines is the best way to unlock your content’s true potential. Check out my lists of the best CRO agencies and top social media agencies for more information.

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LinkedIn expands Event Ads beyond its own platform

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LinkedIn Ads retargeting: How to reach prospects at every funnel stage

LinkedIn is rolling out Off-Platform Event Ads, giving marketers a new way to promote events without needing a native LinkedIn Event Page.

What’s happening. The new format allows advertisers to run Event Ads that link directly to external destinations — such as webinar platforms, landing pages or livestream sites — instead of keeping traffic on LinkedIn.

This marks a shift from platform-contained experiences to more flexible, marketer-controlled journeys.

How it works. Marketers can create an Event Ad using a third-party URL, add event details like date and format, and choose from objectives including awareness, engagement, traffic or lead generation.

Clicks send users directly to the external event page, while performance metrics remain trackable in Campaign Manager.

Why we care. Until now, promoting events on LinkedIn often meant working within platform constraints, which could fragment the user journey and limit control over registrations.

Off-Platform Event Ads remove that friction by allowing marketers to tap into LinkedIn’s targeting while keeping traffic, data and conversions on their own platforms — making it easier to scale campaigns and maintain a consistent experience.

What to watch:

  • Whether this drives higher registration rates compared to native Event Pages
  • How advertisers balance LinkedIn targeting with off-platform conversion tracking
  • If LinkedIn expands similar flexibility to other ad formats

Availability. Off-Platform Event Ads are currently rolling out globally and are expected to be available to all advertisers by May 6.

Bottom line. By opening Event Ads to off-platform destinations, LinkedIn is making it easier for marketers to scale event promotion — without forcing them to build inside its walls.

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How to measure paid social’s impact on PPC

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How to measure paid social’s impact on PPC

If your paid social campaigns aren’t converting, you may be undervaluing their impact. Your brand’s exposure on social media can influence other parts of your marketing that platform metrics don’t capture.

Here’s how to design and measure a test to understand how paid social influences your other marketing channels, including PPC.

Step 1: Determine your hypothesis

Start with what you want to learn, then define a hypothesis you can realistically evaluate with your data.

For example, this is a common hypothesis for measuring paid search lift from social traffic:

  • Search lift hypothesis: Increasing spend on social media will increase brand search volume and overall PPC CTRs.
  • Logic: 
    • Social ads build brand awareness. As more people become familiar with our brand, they will search for it more often when making research and purchase decisions. 
    • As more people are exposed to our brand, they will increasingly click on our PPC ads regardless of their search term (i.e., increasing non-brand and brand CTRs).
    • People exposed multiple times to our brand will have a higher trust factor in our products, and therefore, our conversion rates will increase. 
  • Measurement: 
    • Impression and click volume for our branded terms.
    • CTR changes for brand and non-brand terms.
    • Conversion rate changes for brand and non-brand terms. 

Your hypothesis could have a different scope, such as measuring paid and organic lift from social spend or an increase in direct traffic. 

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Step 2: The test

The next step is to set up the test parameters. Generally, measuring before and after a change is a mistake, as seasonality or other factors can affect your test results.

The most common test setup is a geographic split. In this test, we’ll increase social spend for only a set of geographies. Then we’ll examine the PPC data for the geographies where we ran the test and compare them with areas where we did not.

As you choose geographies, you’ll want to control for other variables that may affect your test. Here are some common issues that companies have run into and need to control for in their tests and measurements:

  • You sponsor a sports team, and they’re playing during your test.
    • If the game is regionally televised, this can dramatically affect your test results.
  • You’re running TV commercials in only certain regions.
  • You choose experimental geographies with many out-of-region commuters, such as New York City, and include New Jersey and Connecticut in your control group.
    • In these instances, grouping a region and its surrounding commuter areas together, and placing other cities with similar characteristics, such as Chicago and Philadelphia, in a different group, can help balance these tests. (Note: in this example, we’re splitting New Jersey in half.)
  • Seasonal or local events. Large conferences, festivals, or major weather events can affect your data.

Your control and experimental groups should be statistically similar across factors such as income levels, and urban versus rural regions.

As you set up and measure your test, consider your budget. If you increase social spend and expect higher clicks and conversions for your PPC campaigns, ensure you have the budget to capture the increased demand.

Examine your impression share and impression share lost to budget before and after the test to ensure budget limits won’t severely impact your results.

Dig deeper: Why PPC tests in 2026 call for nuance, not winners

Step 3: The measurement

Measurement can go from very simple to extremely complex.

At a simple level, you can compare platform data to see how your data changed. In this case, a Google Ads report shows how pausing social spending and influencer campaigns across all social platforms (TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) affects performance.

For this test, pausing social spending yielded mixed results for conversion rates. As brand searches decreased, conversion rates in some regions increased, while in others they fell.

However, what was consistent was a dramatic drop in conversions.

You can get more sophisticated in your testing. Depending on your analytics setup, some companies want to measure touchpoint differences for their conversions. Others will want to measure overlap rates between social and paid search visitors, or examine attribution touchpoints and models.

Before you set up your test, ensure you have the measurement capabilities needed to understand and interpret the results.

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Step 4: Evaluation beyond the test criteria

As you run various tests, you want to measure the results against your hypothesis. However, it’s useful to list other variables worth evaluating beyond your test criteria.

This is where search consoles, analytics tools, CRM, internal data, and even the paid and organic report can come into play.

In one example, a company was running a test to see whether pausing several advertising channels, from social media to TV ads, would dramatically change its brand search volume. They hypothesized that their brand was so well known in the marketplace that they could cut back on several forms of brand advertising and reallocate that budget to other channels and non-brand advertising.

While the simple paid and organic report in Google Ads won’t tell you the full story about in-store revenue and direct traffic changes, it can serve as a signal to form an overall picture of a very complex test.

They had recently launched a new product line, and that line continued to see a large increase in traffic during the test. However, their most common brand terms saw significant declines from the test. This was a year-over-year comparison across a set of geographies, rather than a period-to-period comparison, to help correct for the increase in holiday traffic that would have occurred during the previous period.

The results were by far the most dramatic I’ve ever seen in this type of test, to the point it was clear other variables had to be in play that could affect the test.

This takes you to the sniff test. Rely on your experience with data to make common sense adjustments. If you look at the data and it just doesn’t seem right, ask yourself whether this makes sense, if it’s a math quirk (common with low data), or if other unforeseen variables are in play.

In this example, no one believed the results should be this dramatic. The company stopped running the test and began an internal evaluation of its organic presence, including Google’s recent updates, changes to AI Overviews, AI engagement, and other factors affecting its web presence beyond its usual marketing channels.

Dig deeper: Are your PPC ads still authentic in the age of AI creative?

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What to do with your social impact tests

The test setup is simple:

  • Determine your hypothesis.
  • Decide how you will test. The easiest setup is a geographic split.
  • Make sure you can measure the results.
  • Launch the tests.
  • Evaluate the metrics for your hypothesis.
  • Examine other metrics for insight or additional testing ideas.

For some companies, Facebook and other social channels are their top conversion channels, and these tests won’t be applicable. For others, social media advertising results often look poor when evaluated in isolation.

In these examples, the companies were already running many social media campaigns, so the test was to reduce social media spend. If you don’t run much social media, your test will be to increase your social media spend to see how it affects your data.

I’ve seen a lot of these tests, and the results are highly inconsistent across companies. Many companies will increase their social media spend and see little change in their data. Others will increase their spend and see a nice lift in overall performance. These are tests you need to run yourself, as your results will vary by company.

Running geographic split tests in your social media campaigns and then measuring the results on paid or organic search traffic can give you insights into how to leverage social media campaigns for other marketing channels.

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New to PPC? 7 tips to build skills and confidence fast

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New to PPC? 7 tips to build skills and confidence fast

Understanding the ins and outs of paid media can seem like an overwhelming process when you’re first entering the field. As AI has rapidly changed ad platforms in recent years, keeping up can feel challenging.

Thankfully, you’re not alone. You’re part of a supportive industry with a wealth of content and knowledge to share. Here are seven tips to help you learn and become a more confident PPC manager.

1. Be curious

Curiosity is foundational to growth in PPC. You’ll learn best by taking initiative to understand ad platforms, how campaigns are structured, and what options are available on the backend. Of course, be careful about tweaking settings you’re not familiar with, but don’t be afraid to dig in on your own.

If you’re part of a team, ask your colleagues why they use a particular setup. If you’re not familiar with a platform and have a team member who frequently uses it, ask if they can walk you through it.

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2. Absorb content and find community

There are countless industry professionals producing content to teach PPC. Whether you learn best from reading, listening to podcasts, or watching videos, you’ll find options that fit your style. Looking up the authors of articles on this site is a great starting point to build a list to follow.

Block out time in your schedule for education. Even setting aside a couple of hours a week helps you gain perspective from others in the industry and keep up with constant platform updates.

The PPC industry has long been known for its welcoming, supportive community. Seek out individuals and organizations who are actively sharing, and don’t be afraid to engage with them on social media. Conferences are also a great way to network with other PPC professionals and sometimes discuss their approaches in a more informal setting.

A brief word of caution: Vet recommendations you see from others against your own experience in ad accounts. Just because a “best practice” worked for one account doesn’t mean it’ll work for every account. Depending on the tactic, you may want to test it as an experiment to measure impact, or compare results before and after.

Dig deeper: What 10 years of PPC testing reveals about breaking best practices

3. Take industry certifications with a grain of salt

While ad platform certifications can serve as a starting point for demonstrating basic functionality, be cautious about relying on them as the end-all proof of PPC expertise.

Certifications often lean heavily on platform-recommended best practices, which may conflict with tactics that align with a brand’s goals. Academic knowledge can’t match the insight gained from practical, hands-on experience in accounts.

4. Don’t chase what’s new and shiny

While I’d encourage staying aware of ad platform updates and current tactics, I’d discourage implementing a new campaign type or expanding into a new platform just because it’s new. Make sure you have sufficient budget and a clear reason to test.

Additionally, avoid making adjustments without a rationale. If campaigns are performing and driving qualified leads or sales, keeping the status quo may be best.

Basic marketing principles still apply, such as knowing your target audience, addressing their problem with a solution, and presenting a clear call to action. Focus on aligning your channel choices with these goals, and the rest will follow.

Dig deeper: 10 keys to a successful PPC career in the AI age

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5. Translate jargon for stakeholders

As you become more embedded in PPC, you may naturally use industry terms and acronyms such as CTR, CPC, ROAS, and CPA. However, these metrics are often meaningless to stakeholders who aren’t immersed in your world. One of the most vital skills for a paid media professional is translating abstract metrics into language that connects with what stakeholders care about.

For instance, I often default to “conversions,” even though the term can be ambiguous in reports. Referencing the actual action being tracked (such as account open, form fill, or purchase) is more concrete and ties directly to what stakeholders are tasked with driving.

6. Use AI, but don’t neglect the human touch

AI is an inevitable part of a future-forward career, and ignoring it will be detrimental to career development. However, don’t lose the human oversight that sets a seasoned PPC practitioner apart.

When writing ad copy, LLMs can offer a strong starting point and help refine wording. But don’t rely on AI to produce all your copy, as it may pull irrelevant content from your site (or elsewhere), and may not reflect your brand’s voice and perspective. Also, learn where AI can save time on “busy work” tasks, such as reviewing search terms and placements for exclusions, while still reviewing the output for accuracy.

While most ad platforms default to automated campaign setups and encourage a hands-off approach, a standout PPC manager understands the levers they can pull to maintain control when needed. Examples include:

  • Setting target bids or cost caps.
  • Excluding irrelevant keywords, placements, and audiences.
  • Pinning headlines and descriptions in responsive search ads.
  • Restricting geographic targeting to avoid unwanted locations.
  • Tailoring creative to specific demographics.

Dig deeper: The new PPC playbook: From media buyer to profit engineer

7. Don’t change things for the sake of showing activity

One common temptation for both new and seasoned paid media practitioners is to make changes just to appear busy. The motivation may be valid, as you want to prove to your client or boss that you’re attentive to PPC account management.

However, particularly with campaigns that rely heavily on data to drive automated bidding, too many changes in a short period are often detrimental. Be sure to allow for data significance and enough time before pausing ads and keywords or tweaking bid targets.

If you can show positive performance trends and provide readouts on which campaigns and channels are driving those results, you can validate your decisions to take or not take action when presenting to stakeholders.

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Keep learning, start sharing

Becoming a confident PPC manager requires mastering a blend of technical, interpersonal, and marketing skills. As you build your knowledge, look for opportunities to share what you’re learning with peers. It’s one of the fastest ways to reinforce what you know and keep improving.

Dig deeper: 7 power moves to accelerate your PPC career

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