Seth Trammell: Your Blog Content Was Never Supposed to Convert

Seth Trammell is director of SEO at KlientBoost, running the SEO product for a mostly B2B SaaS client base. His argument is one SEOs have been losing to clients for years. Blog content that does not convert is not failing, because converting was never its job. Key takeaways Stop measuring top-of-funnel content like a pricing page. Judged as a bottom-of-funnel asset it will always look like a waste. Treat it as an email and SMS acquisition channel instead. That reframe gives the content a job it can actually do and a number it can actually move. Ecommerce SEO is often the easier game. Though small beauty and skincare brands are being squeezed out by Ulta, Sephora and Amazon. In B2B SaaS you are optimising for a champion. That person then has to sell your product internally to a finance team you will never speak to. Nofollow links matter again. Not for PageRank, for whether a model has seen you. That undercuts a decade of domain-authority outreach logic. The claim that LLM traffic converts better traced back to one site. Worth remembering before it gets built into a strategy. On this page Content that was never supposed to convert Ecommerce, and the squeeze on small brands Selling to a champion, not a buyer Nofollow, LLMs and the measurement problem The loop customers actually run People, ideas and sources mentioned Questions this episode answers Go deeper Content that was never supposed to convert It’s not SEO’s job necessarily to nab that conversion, but they can help your other channels by basically providing new users that you can then find ways that you can remarket to and retarget to and use.— Seth Trammell The trap is last-click attribution applied to an asset that was never designed to take the last click. Run that report and every informational page looks like a failure, so it gets cut, and then the retargeting pool quietly dries up a quarter later. His alternative is to give top-of-funnel content an honest target. Email addresses, SMS opt-ins, an audience that can be reached again. Those are countable, and they feed the channels that do convert. Ecommerce, and the squeeze on small brands Seth came from an ecommerce-heavy agency before KlientBoost and thinks that side of the work is frequently simpler. The intent is clearer, the money is closer to the page, and the feedback loop is short. The exception is category consolidation. In skincare and beauty in particular, the retailers are winning the queries the brands used to own, which changes what an independent brand should even be trying to rank for. Selling to a champion, not a buyer In B2B SaaS the person reading your content is rarely the person who signs. They are the champion, and their real job after finding you is to argue your case to a finance function on your behalf. That should change what you publish. The champion needs ammunition, not a brochure. Numbers they can quote, comparisons they can defend, and something that survives being forwarded into a meeting they are not in. You’ve got this whole ecosystem of marketing that’s going on and everybody can play together if we try.—