Mine sales conversations to find topics with low competition and high intent

Michael says: “Avoid ultra-competitive topics with limited intent by mining sales conversations for bottom-of-funnel content.”

What are examples of ultra-competitive topics?

“Project management is a big one. Right now, monday.com ranks for ‘project management’, but there’s mixed intent around that query. There are people looking to become project managers and people trying to understand what project management is, and they’ve got a strong position there.

They have a classic piece of content, a complete guide, that opens up with a definition – the ‘What is…?’ content – and it’s a very involved piece of work. If you’re an early-stage company or you’re dealing with limited resources, creating a piece of content to compete with that is going to be a big undertaking. You’ve also got an uphill battle going against an established brand that’s been around for a while.

You’re not going to be able to get to that spot and compete with them. Putting effort into these broader queries that may not necessarily lead to a lead or conversion is a bit of a fool’s errand.

You can tell that a topic might have limited intent if it’s very broad and the search results look mixed. For example, if it’s definition content where people are searching to find out what the subject is, not what your product does. That is the main way to look at it.”

Would you also look at the competition for that keyword?

“That would be open to interpretation. If it’s less competitive but it’s got some decent volume, there could be some opportunities there. You could experiment with those.

However, if it’s still top-of-funnel and awareness, then it’s going to be hard to attribute that to becoming an actual lead in the sales funnel.”

How do you mine your sales conversations for bottom-of-funnel content?

“The first thing to do is talk to the sales teams. It’s amazing how established and big a brand can be, but the sales team is frustrated with marketing and marketing’s frustrated with sales, and they don’t communicate with each other.

They’re playing on the same team. If marketing can bring in more qualified leads, then the sales team has an easier time selling, which makes the whole sales process easier.

If the marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned, then start talking. What’s your process? What are your pain points? If you’re on the marketing team, you can talk to the sales team. What are your pain points with marketing? What are your pain points as you’re going through your sales process? What are we not doing that we could do better? You’re going to get better results if you go in with an approach that shows you want to help.

I can remember working with dev teams back in the day and we would go in and befriend the dev team. Not necessarily to ask for something right off the bat, just to start making those connections. Once you start talking to those sales team people, find out if they’re transcribing calls. If they are, get access to those transcripts.

If it’s at an early stage and they haven’t done that, it’s something that they can start exploring. They can use tools like Fireflies.ai, or there are a lot of built-in tools nowadays that can generate these transcripts. The next step is to analyse the transcripts and then determine what questions are likely to occur more often.

Fireflies.ai is a transcription tool I’ve been using for the last year. I like the way it deals with accents, which is very helpful when you’re dealing with international teams, and you get really accurate transcriptions.

You can set up some automation so it will summarise the questions that it heard. Then you end up with a short summary, instead of going through the transcription and trying to filter through a 30-minute conversation of somebody exploring a product.

Even if your sales team isn’t doing that, they know the common questions that they’ve heard more than once, which are worth exploring.

The more frequent the question, the more likely it is that somebody has searched for that query before they made the sales call. These queries may not show up in a keyword researching tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush because they’re going to have very low volume, but high intent. If it’s less than 10, it’s not going to surface in these tools.”

What kind of content are you looking to produce from this?

“Pain point content. Why did this person on the sales call, this potential customer, reach out? Why do they think that this might potentially solve that problem? Why did they have to get on a call to do that? Why couldn’t they figure that out on the website?

If you can create content that allows them to figure it out on the website, then they’re going to have a more focused call when they end up talking to the salesperson.

You can create different types of content, like video, social media content, or content for an FAQ section on the website. I mainly focus on blog content, but you can spin that out. You can take blog content and turn it into video content, and vice versa.

It’s nice to have multiple channels to approach this with, and then take small parts of that and use them on social media to push the posts or just build more brand awareness.”

If you’ve identified lots of pain points, how do you prioritise what needs to be written about first?

“You could go back into keyword research and see if any of them have decent volume and are not highly competitive, depending on the age of your brand and the authority you’re dealing with on your own website.”

Do you have personas that you write to as well?

“Marketing teams should already have personas developed. This can help you refine those, or you can try to fit this into those personas, so you can create that content around those personas.

A persona document should be a working document. It shouldn’t be that you just define 4 different types of people who you sell to. As you learn more about those individual personas, you can keep refining that and keep aligning those questions to the specific personas.”

Do you do some keyword research around a particular pain point to identify as many keywords as possible in relation to that?

“I have a mixed opinion on that. When you have a big list and you’ve got to narrow it down, it’s a quick way to understand which ones have more volume. However, I would recommend taking SEO best practices into account, like proper heading structure and a table of contents, rather than focusing too much on keyword research.

Then, work with the sales team to get that piece of content developed. When you release it, you can get the social media team to push parts of it out and find those little clips that make a lot of sense. The comment section is a great place to find additional refinements or ways of expanding that content based on the interactions with it.

From a keyword research standpoint, take a look at it in Search Console after a week and a month, to see what it actually starts ranking for and what drives clicks. Then, optimize for what it’s focused on – what queries Search Console is saying it’s ranking for and what’s turning into clicks.

When you’re looking for traffic, the bottom of the funnel is where you’re aiming here. Maybe a little bit more middle as well, but people who are further along in the buying process. They have a problem, and they want to solve it.

I would focus on the bottom of the funnel earlier on before you move towards the top of the funnel. It’s going to be a lot easier to get some traffic to the website – and not just traffic but qualified traffic as well.

This is especially helpful if it’s a new or early-stage company and you’ve got a small amount of marketing resources. Getting these pieces in play early can allow you to compete for those broader terms later on because you’ll already have an association to your website for those types of topics.”

Do you use AI in the production of this type of content?

“I’m very keen on AI, but as an augmenter. We’ve all tried to create content with AI, and then we’ve all reread it and decided that it’s not us. However, it helps you organise transcriptions really quickly.

It can help you pull out information. It’s a great starting point and a great refinement point. It’s a great coach. If you know where you originally wanted to go with a piece of content, and the question you’re trying to answer, you can ask it how far off you are and what other additional pieces you can look into.

It’s not a replacement, but an augmentation.”

Is this a one-off project or is this something you have to do regularly?

“There will be a heavy lift at the beginning, for sure. First, you have to get aligned with the sales team, and you have to deal with privacy concerns too.

Most sales calls are recorded with the concept that they are only available for training purposes. You either have to change that disclaimer at the beginning of the sales call or work with the sales team and use that as a guide, then get the sales team to help you create that content.

You can get good content from customer service calls as well, but you’re dealing with the converted there, not the people you’re trying to convert. It’s a different tactic.

If you’re trying to support people and reduce your churn rate, that’s a great way of understanding what type of content should exist for people who have already bought the product. If you’re trying to upsell something else, however, then it becomes a bit more of a traditional sales cycle.”

Do you try to get the sales team involved in the production of the content?

“It’s great to get sales teams involved, particularly if you can attribute the piece of content to them. Then they can push it through their own social media channels and their own networks as well, which helps them build a body of content.

Even if they’re not directly writing the piece of content, you can quote them, and have it linked to them, so they get a bit more exposure. It can help continue that relationship, and it adds their EEAT to the page as well.

They’re your subject matter experts. They’re the ones talking to the salespeople all the time. They know the answers to a lot of these questions, so they’re a great resource.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“If you’re early-stage, stop chasing competitive keywords and focus on the ones that are more long tail and a lot less competitive, and answer the pain points that your customers are having. Start communicating with the sales team as well. That’s the first thing to do.

If you haven’t had many sales conversations yet, and you want to make sure that you cover as many pain points as possible, reach out to your existing customers. If you’re early-stage, you probably know almost all of your customers. You probably had a drink with them or a cup of coffee. Ask them what pain points brought them to your product.

Also, cut down on extensive keyword research. You don’t need to rank for every ‘What is…?’ piece of content. It’s highly competitive, you’re probably going against very established players, and it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Revisit your existing content as well. That’s a great opportunity. You don’t need to create a second piece of content. If there’s something out there that’s answering that query, with some authority built on that page already, you can use that.”

Michael Macmillan is the Principal at MacMillan Search, and you can find him over at MacMillanSearch.com.