When SEO Will Work for You and What Content to Optimize
If you've ever sat in a marketing meeting where someone said, "We should optimize all of this for SEO," and you nodded along even though you weren't sure it was the right call, this post is for you.
The instinct is reasonable. You've spent real time and money producing white papers, case studies, recorded webinars, and press releases. They're sitting on your site, so why wouldn't you optimize them for organic traffic and get more value out of them?
The short answer is that most of those assets aren't built for search, and trying to make them rank usually wastes the asset, the SEO investment, or both. The longer answer is what this post is all about.
I'll cover what SEO actually is (briefly, for context), why some content earns organic traffic and other content doesn't, what to do with the assets that aren't SEO assets, and an asset-by-asset breakdown you can use the next time someone wants to "SEO everything."
What SEO Does (and Doesn't Do)
SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization," and the simplest way I describe it is as the "pull" tool.
Other marketing channels push your message out. Ads, cold outreach, and paid social push. SEO works the other way. It pulls in people who are already searching for something and matches them with your content if the algorithm deems you relevant and authoritative on the topic.
That's the point.
You don’t have to convince someone to care. You already know they care because they've typed the query into a search engine. Your job is to be there when they do.
This makes SEO a different kind of marketing investment from paid ads or outbound marketing. It's slower to build, but a good piece of SEO content can drive free traffic for months or years after you publish it. A paid ad stops the moment you stop paying.
pful, and well-structured, but if it sounds like everyone else, it kind of just washes over you. I tune out sameness, and it’s only getting worse. I catch myself skimming anything with an overt AI cadence, even if it’s technically right. By the time I get to the end, there’s nothing that really sticks or makes me think of the company any differently.
I encounter the missing POV problem a lot with teams that are consistent and publish regularly. On paper, everything looks right, but if you cross out their company name, it could come from almost anyone. It’s “good,” so you might get a bit of engagement in the moment, maybe some steady traffic, but it doesn’t really turn into anything more.
This is also where you typically see teams sticking to a set number of blog posts each month, because that’s the cadence they landed on years ago. It’s mostly top-of-funnel, broad, easy-to-produce content that never quite builds into that feeling of “this is the company that gets it.”
SEO Example
Say you want to know the Canadian tax deadlines for 2026, so you Google it. The websites that show up at the top are there because SEO is at play. The Google algorithm, that mysterious force orchestrating how information gets surfaced online, makes a calculation about relevance and authority.
How Rankings Get Assigned
Google evaluates authority through a framework called E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's not just about backlinks or domain age, but whether a site has earned the right to speak on the topic through a combination of who's publishing the content, how long they've been publishing on the subject, how other reputable sources reference them, and whether the information they provide is consistently accurate and useful.
SEO tools will tell you the keyword "Canadian tax deadlines" is "hard to rank for," in part because websites like the CRA have built up that authority over decades. They're the source of the information, which gives them Experience and Expertise. They're a government body, which gives them Authoritativeness. And they've never published a misleading tax deadline, which builds Trustworthiness. No private blog is going to outrank the CRA on that query, no matter how well-optimized the post is.
Maybe you've invested in SEO and been told you rank for "easier" keywords, but you're stumped because you still don't get a lot of traffic. Ranking only matters if there are people out there looking for what you're selling or for the niche idea you're trying to bring into the world.
That's why good SEO specialists will insist on a discovery call and ask you questions about your buyers and what triggers them to start looking. They want to build a strategy that's rooted in buyer behaviour, not ad hoc keywords. An ad hoc keyword strategy can increase traffic, but it won't increase business. And if you're also bidding on those keywords in paid search, you'll drive up your CAC too.
The Three Layers of SEO
The work itself falls into three layers:
On-page SEO is what's on your content: keyword usage, header structure, alt text, internal links, and schema.
Off-page SEO is what happens elsewhere on the internet that affects your rankings: backlinks, brand mentions, and partnerships.
Technical SEO is the plumbing: crawlability, site speed, and mobile friendliness.
You don't have to be an expert in all three, but you should know they exist so you can tell which one an agency is talking about.
The Four Types of Search Intent
When SEO people talk about "search intent," they're usually referring to one of four categories. Whether you use Semrush, Ahrefs, or another SEO tool, these are the categories you'll see keywords tagged as.
Knowing the difference matters because the same word can mean completely different things depending on what the searcher actually wants.
Informational intent – The person is looking for information. Simple enough. They want to learn something. Queries look like "how does SEO work" or "what is E-E-A-T." These keywords are best served by blog posts, guides, help articles, and explainers.
Navigational intent – The person is trying to get to a specific website or page they already know about. Queries look like "Asana login" or "Shopify pricing page." Best served by your own product pages, login pages, and brand pages. It’s hard for anyone else to compete with you on these.
Commercial intent – The person is researching before they buy by comparing options, reading reviews, and looking at alternatives. Queries look like "best CRM for small business" or "Asana vs ClickUp." Best served by comparison pages, alternatives pages, reviews, and listicles, the formats that have blown up in AI visibility best practices.
Transactional intent – The person is ready to act. They want to buy, sign up, or download. Queries look like "buy Shopify Plus" or "free trial Asana." Best served by product pages, pricing pages, and conversion-optimized landing pages.
Most B2B SaaS content gets built for informational intent (blog posts that teach) without enough thought given to commercial and transactional intent (the content that captures buyers when they're closer to deciding).
That imbalance is one of the most common gaps I see and fix over and over B2B SEO programs.
Why "Let's SEO This" Wastes Money
When marketers say "we need content," they often haven't thought about whether it should be SEO content or not. The two aren't the same.
SEO content is designed for discoverability, which means it's shaped by search intent, keyword research, on-page structure, and topical depth. Most marketing content isn't, and shouldn't be.
What Goes Wrong When You Force SEO on the Wrong Assets
First, the underlying demand isn't there. Ranking for a term only matters if people are actually searching for it. Many niche or category-defining ideas haven't yet permeated the general public. You can rank for them and still get no traffic.
A white paper on your category-defining idea won't rank if the general public hasn't heard of the category yet. You can do everything right on the page and still get no traffic, because nobody's searching for it. The demand for the topic isn't there yet.
Second, the asset is doing a different job. White papers, case studies, recorded webinars, press releases, and gated thought leadership content exists to demonstrate expertise, equip sales teams, build credibility, or drive a specific action. They're not designed for organic search, and retrofitting them produces hybrid content that does neither job well.
Third, the "win" is hollow. A blog post that ranks for a term unrelated to your products and offers no clear next step toward conversion is a vanity win. It looks like SEO is working. It isn't.
The metrics that matter are the ones that connect organic traffic to business outcomes, such as demos, trial signups, and revenue you can trace back to organic search. Rankings are easier to measure, but they aren't what you're optimizing for.
I once worked for a company whose product shared a name with a popular healthcare portal here in Ontario. An agency suggested ranking on adjacent healthcare terms, which would have generated more impressions. But doctors trying to log in to their EHR weren't going to buy our service to vet tenants. The traffic would have been real, but the buyers wouldn't have been.
The Content Marketer vs PMM Fight You'll Eventually Have
I want to name a tension I see a lot and have experienced firsthand, because if you're a founder or a marketer running a content function, you'll run into it eventually.
Content marketers usually want to optimize for buyer behaviour, the actual queries people type when they're looking to solve a problem. Product marketers often prefer to use aspirational category-creation and positioning terms, the language the brand is trying to introduce into the market. Both are valid. But they pull in opposite directions.
The PMM logic goes something like this: If we keep talking about our category the way we describe it, we'll eventually train the market to search for it that way.
The content marketer's logic is the inverse: We have to meet people where they're already searching, otherwise nobody finds us at all.
Before we move on, short-tail keywords are broad, high-volume terms like "CRM software" or "project management tool." They’re usually expensive to rank for because everyone wants them. Long-tail keywords are more specific, lower-volume phrases like "CRM software for solo consultants in Canada" or "project management tool for distributed creative agencies." They're easier to rank for, and they tend to convert better because the person searching has narrowed down what they actually want.
Most B2B teams find their wins in the long tail. The short-tail terms in their category are usually owned by incumbents or aggregators (e.g., G2, Capterra, established competitors, etc.), and trying to compete head-on rarely works.
This vocabulary also explains the content marketer vs PMM tension I just described. If your keyword research keeps surfacing top-of-funnel terms but nothing that maps to bottom-of-funnel buying intent, that's often a signal you're trying to create a new category and the market hasn't caught up to your language yet. You may have plenty of long-tail informational queries to work with, but no short-tail category demand yet, because the category itself doesn't have a name people use to search.
SEO Content Optimization Best Practices
What type of content is most effective for SEO?
Here's the thought process I use when deciding whether to invest in SEO for a specific asset type. Every business is different, but these are the patterns I've personally seen consistently enough to have a default position on each.
Blog posts: It depends
There are two “species” of blog content, and they work completely differently.
SEO blog posts are built around keyword research, search intent, and on-page best practices. Done well, these are strong traffic drivers, and Google's creating helpful content guidelines still reward this combination of real substance and technical optimization.
Thought leadership or SME blog posts share a unique POV or industry insight. They're great for credibility and brand positioning. They often won't generate significant organic traffic because they're not built for keyword-driven strategies. That kind of content needs other distribution support to reach the right audience.
The mistake is treating them as the same. They're not.
Case studies: It depends
Direct SEO impact is limited unless case studies are specifically optimized for solution-based queries and internally linked. They're primarily sales enablement, and that's fine. They can capture niche search intent, but that's not usually their main job.
The better play is impact-driven storytelling that generates standout quotes and statistics for repurposing across channels.
Customer support and help articles: Yes
Well-structured FAQ and help content ranks for long-tail queries and feeds Google's AI Overviews. Especially valuable for post-purchase and how-to searches.
This is one of the most under-invested SEO opportunities in B2B. Most teams treat help content as a customer success cost centre. Treating it as an SEO asset, with proper structure and keyword consideration, often pays off significantly. That said, help content should serve your customers first.
Email newsletters: It depends
Direct email isn't indexed, but cross-posting full issues or excerpts to indexable platforms like Medium or Substack can capture organic traffic, especially if headlines target search intent.
Infographics: It depends
Infographics have minimal direct ranking potential. Infographics can generate backlinks if paired with supporting blog content and embed codes, but that's a slow play.
Where they actually shine is on social media. A well-designed infographic stops the scroll on LinkedIn in a way that text-only posts often can't, especially when it's communicating data, a process, or a comparison that benefits from being seen rather than read. They're also one of the few content formats that get reshared with attribution, which means a strong infographic can do double duty: building familiarity with your audience on the original post, then resurfacing weeks later when someone shares it to their network.
If you're investing in infographics, treat them as a social-first asset. Optimize for the platform where they'll live (LinkedIn carousels, Instagram graphics, Pinterest pins), make sure your brand is clearly visible without being intrusive, and accept that the SEO value is a bonus rather than the goal.
Interactive tools and calculators: Yes
Evergreen, problem-solving tools attract backlinks and brand mentions. They align with Google's helpful content guidance and tend to be more durable than blog content.
A good calculator on a topic your buyers care about is one of the most durable SEO assets you can build. It's also one of the most expensive to build well, which is partly why the category isn't crowded.
Lead gen landing pages (e.g., partner, ABM, event, etc.): It depends
Landing pages can rank if they're targeting Informational or Commercial intent queries, but pages that are purely optimized for conversion, with thin content and a big form, rarely compete in organic search.
Honestly, most of the time it doesn't matter. These pages usually get distributed directly, through a partner handoff, an ABM email, or a paid campaign, so whether they rank is beside the point. The priority is conversion, not discoverability.
Importantly, a page has to be indexed to be discoverable through search at all. If it's not indexed, it's not in the running, no matter how well-optimized your content is. Some teams deliberately keep custom URLs out of search results. If you hear "this landing page isn't ranking," sometimes the answer is "we didn't want it to."
At a previous job, one of my first quick wins was cutting "SEO optimization" from hundreds of unlisted pages that were never going to be indexed in the first place. The team had been spending real time on keyword usage, meta descriptions, and alt text for pages that search engines would never see. Once we cut that work, the SEO team got their hours back and could focus on pages that actually had a shot at ranking.
Podcasts: It depends
Standalone audio isn't indexed. SEO gains come from optimized show notes, transcripts, and episode landing pages targeting conversational queries. The transcript is doing the SEO work, not the audio.
Press releases: It depends
A press release on its own isn't an SEO asset. Wire syndication rarely drives lasting rankings, and the asset itself is built for a different audience anyway. But that doesn't mean press releases don't show up in a content strategy. They do. The SEO value is in what you build around them, not in the press release itself.
The bigger thing to understand is that good press releases are written for journalists, not for search engines. Their job is to give a reporter enough to work with: a clear angle, a usable quote, the facts they need to write a story. Trying to optimize the press release itself for SEO usually ends up watering down the angle that would actually get a journalist's attention. Pick one job for the asset and write to that job.
That said, you can usually have both if you're thoughtful about it. When you cross-post a press release on your own site, you can layer in lightweight SEO snippets, a headline that reads well in search results, a meta description that summarizes the news in keyword-friendly language, internal links to relevant product pages or supporting content. None of that compromises the press release itself. It just makes the cross-posted version do a bit of extra work once it's on your site.
Speaking of writing for journalists, I have a separate post on crafting PR pitches that actually land: Pitching Best Practices.
So where do press releases sit in your SEO work? They're a supporting asset, not a ranking one. The wins come from the wrapper, the cross-posted version on your Media Centre, the internal links to product or solution pages, the backlink that lands when a journalist actually picks up the story. Press releases also build your public record over time, which feeds AI visibility as LLMs ingest more of the web. The press release itself isn't the SEO play, the strategy around it is.
Product and solution pages: It depends
This is the asset type teams get most frustrated about. Product pages don't rank as easily as people expect, often due to thin or duplicate content, poor linkability, and a mismatch between search queries and intent. Unique copy, customer reviews, multimedia, schema markup, and long-tail targeting all help, but most product pages still won't win the queries that map to buyer intent.
The better strategy is usually to build topic clusters; related blog posts or resource pages around the same theme, linked strategically to the product page. The informational content does the ranking and the internal linking does the routing. Your product page is the destination, not the on-ramp.
Recorded webinars: It depends
Webinars work a lot like press releases. The recording itself isn't really an SEO asset, but the stuff around it can be. Ranking potential depends entirely on what surrounds the recording, things such as transcripts, detailed session summaries, SEO-friendly titles, and landing pages. Raw recordings offer almost no discoverability.
Webinar content can sometimes be repurposed into blog posts or resource articles, but the source material is usually SME-driven thought leadership, not keyword-targeted content. So when the repurposing works, it's because someone did the work of translating SME insight into search intent language. When it doesn't, it's because the team tried to publish the transcript as a blog post and hoped it would rank.
Honestly, sometimes it's fine to just make the thing as good as it can be and focus on getting it in front of the right people through the channels you already own. A webinar recording in your sales team's hands during a deal cycle, or featured in your newsletter to an audience that already knows you, often does more work than the same recording optimized for search ever would.
Owned channel distribution is one of the most under-used tactics in B2B content. "The webinar doesn't have to rank to be valuable, it just has to reach the right person.
Social media posts: It depends
The old rule was that LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok weren't fully indexed by search engines, so they were best used for distribution and engagement rather than direct rankings. That's still mostly true for Instagram and TikTok. It's no longer true for LinkedIn.
Between late 2025 and early 2026, LinkedIn became one of the most-cited sources in AI search. For professional queries, it's now the most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot, and Gemini. LinkedIn posts and long-form articles are getting pulled directly into AI-generated answers, especially mid-length posts in the 50 to 300-word range. So if you're publishing on LinkedIn, your content is doing more SEO and AI visibility work than it used to, whether you optimized for that or not.
If you're already producing thoughtful LinkedIn content, treat it as part of your SEO and AI visibility strategy, not just a distribution channel. Long-form articles and mid-length posts on specific topics give AI systems something to cite. Vague thought leadership doesn't.
Reddit is still the other big exception, and the trend has only deepened since 2024. Google and OpenAI both license Reddit content for AI training and AI Overviews, and recent analysis puts Reddit as one of the top citation sources for AI search, second only to Wikipedia in some measurements. Reddit threads now show up prominently in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers, particularly for product recommendations and experience-based questions.
Reddit visibility is still best earned through authentic participation, not promotional posting. The platform is community-driven and users still reject anything that feels like marketing. But the upside of being genuinely useful in the right subreddits has grown, because that's where the AI systems are pulling from.
Instagram and TikTok remain primarily distribution and engagement channels for B2B, not SEO assets. Use them for what they're built for.
White papers and eBooks: No
Gated content can't be indexed, which means it can't rank. SEO value here comes indirectly, from optimized landing pages or preview excerpts that target research-stage queries.
White papers and eBooks serve a different purpose. They demonstrate expertise, shape industry conversations, drive lead generation, and provide sales teams with valuable assets. They don't need to drive organic traffic to be worth the investment.
Video content (YouTube): Yes
YouTube remains the second-largest search engine and integrates tightly with Google's search results. Schema-optimized videos gain priority in video-rich results and AI Overviews.
If you're already producing video, optimizing it for search is one of the highest-leverage SEO investments available.
Enhancing Your Content Strategy: What to Do With Content That Won't Rank
Many people underinvest in distribution because they assume publishing is distribution. But it isn't. Publishing is simply hosting. Distribution is the deliberate work of getting an asset in front of the right person, through the channel where they'll actually encounter it.
White papers are sales enablement disguised as content marketing. They demonstrate depth, they equip sales conversations, and they fuel nurture sequences for prospects who've raised their hand. As I outlined above, optimized landing page can target research-stage queries, but the white paper itself doesn't need to rank. It needs to be the thing your AE sends after a discovery call.
Case studies are proof, not awareness. They go in proposals, on partner pages, and into deals where buyers want to see that companies like theirs have already succeeded with you. The standout quotes and statistics can be repurposed across social, email, and partner communications. But the job is to close, not to attract.
Recorded webinars are most valuable cut into short-form video for LinkedIn, featured in nurture campaigns, or handed to sales reps for specific deal cycles. The transcript can sometimes become a blog post, but only if someone does the work of translating SME insight into search intent language. Otherwise the recording is better off in the channels where it can reach the right person, even if those channels are smaller.
Press releases go to journalists, partners, and customers. Cross-post them on your own site under a Media Centre or News section, because that builds your public record and supports AI visibility over time. But the press release itself isn't an SEO play.
Then save SEO for the content that's actually built for search intent. Keyword-driven blog posts, help articles, interactive tools, video with proper transcripts, and social posts on platforms that get indexed. Each of these is actually built for search intent. The rest of your content has other jobs. Let it do them.
How to Evaluate an SEO Agency (Without Getting Burned)
Since I'm writing this for founders and marketers who often outsource SEO, I want to say a few words about evaluating agencies.
Having worked in-house for years, I've worked with many SEO agencies. I get pitches every day.
The quality spectrum is the widest of any marketing discipline I've worked with. Partly because the field changes quickly, and there's a lot of "this is the thing" language being used to sell whatever the agency is selling. Partly because SEO is the most mysterious part of marketing for most non-specialists, making it easier for bad agencies to hide behind jargon.
A few things I look for when evaluating an agency:
A good SEO agency will insist on a discovery call before they recommend a strategy. They'll ask you about your buyers, what triggers them to start looking, and what your sales team hears most often in deal cycles. The best agencies will actually ask to talk to your sales reps directly. They want to build a keyword strategy rooted in buyer behaviour, not whatever's easy to rank for.
A good agency will tell you when SEO isn't the right channel for a particular piece of content or a particular business objective. If they're recommending SEO investment for every problem, that's a red flag.
A good agency will be specific about who’s doing the work. Ask who will write your content, run your technical audits, and handle your link acquisition. Ask for names and titles, not just roles. Ask how many active accounts your assigned strategist is managing right now.
A good agency will measure its work against business outcomes, not just rankings or traffic. If their quarterly report only shows position changes and impressions, ask what those numbers turned into. The simplest version of this question is, “Show me one client where you connected SEO work to closed revenue.”
A good agency will have a POV on AI search. The criteria for evaluating an SEO agency have changed. A good agency in 2026 should be able to talk about how they track citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, not just blue link rankings.
A good agency will be teachable. Your team should come out of the engagement with more SEO literacy than they went in with, not less. If you're three months in and you still can't answer basic questions about what they're doing or why, something is wrong.
When SEO Will Actually Work for Your Business
SEO works when three things line up: your buyers are searching for what you offer, your content is built for the way they search, and there's a clear path from the page they land on to the moment they become a customer. That’s the magic. Miss any of those three and you're either ranking for the wrong things, building the wrong assets, or sending traffic into a black hole.
When all three line up, SEO is the closest thing in marketing to compounding interest. The work you do today keeps paying out months and years from now, often long after you've moved on to other projects. You stop grinding on LinkedIn, bidding up the same paid keywords as your competitors. You let qualified people find you when they're already looking, which is the part of marketing that always feels like cheating, except it isn't, it's just patience plus the right strategy.
But "the right strategy" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The wrong investment in SEO is expensive, slow to diagnose, and frustrating to unwind. Most teams don't realize they've made the wrong investment until they've been at it for a year and the dashboard still doesn't show pipeline.
That's the part I can help with.
If you're trying to figure out whether SEO is the right move for your business, what to do with the content you already have, or how to get your team confident enough that they're not deferring every question to the agency in your weekly touchpoint when the answer is sitting in GA4, I work with B2B teams on exactly this kind of strategy.
You don't have to keep guessing. Get in touch and let's talk about whether SEO is actually the right next move for you.