For years, SEO was the backbone of content marketing.
SEO is hailed as the “organic growth engine”. Once a page claims the much-coveted top-3 position, companies can expect free traffic, free conversion, free sign-up, all evergreen. And, admittedly, there is some truth to that.
For example, with SEO (and more specifically, link building) done right, Brian Dean from Backlinko has established for himself a solid SEO moat that makes him an authority in the field.
However, there’s a catch. Backlinko did not do SEO. At least not in the textbook SEO way. What he did was content marketing, and content marketing is so much bigger than SEO.
If you’re doing SEO in the textbook way that most SEO websites tell you to do (picking keywords, building clusters, optimizing on-page/off-page, etc) in 2025, you’re going to have a bad time. SEO alone is never enough. It is only a small part of the game. If Backlinko solely did SEO, he couldn’t have been able to rank as high.
He did content marketing. Really, really good content marketing.
In this article, I’m going to share with you why you need to go way beyond SEO, and the strategies to do so.
Let’s dive in!
Why you need to go beyond SEO
#1. SEO restricts what you can create in terms of content
SEO, by itself, is only a game of “fooling the algorithm”.
Yes, many SEOs probably won’t agree with me, but I’m saying this from experience as someone who used to do SEO, a lot.
SEO, by its nature, is a game of trying to “predict” what search engines reward, and create content accordingly, often at the expense of the reading experience.
Most of the time, we never know what Google truly rewards. They do not employ a one-size-fits-all approach to ranking content, but rather, a highly customized approach, adapted for specific niches and industries.
In certain niches, I would say that SEO is valuable. The process of researching keywords, optimizing title tags, or establish topic authority is highly rewarding for search-driven fields. Local businesses and e-com niches are some examples that come to mind.
However, in B2B, or trust-driven fields, SEO starts to become a shackle rather than a growth lever.
SEO principles force writers to write in a very specific way to “include the keywords” at the expense of their creativity and originality. Even if you rank in the top of Google, but your content was written without the intent of influencing the readers, then that first position doesn’t mean anything.
Even worse, it erodes trust in your brand.
Here are the three major limits of SEO content that I can see:
- Reactive vs. Generative: SEO shows you what the market is already asking, not what it doesn’t yet know it needs. That’s great for harvesting demand at the bottom of the funnel, but weak for brand building.
- Homogenization: When everyone optimizes for the same keywords, the resulting content looks and feels the same. It’s safe, formulaic, algorithm-friendly, but rarely memorable.
- Brand Dilution: Over-optimized articles can strip out the quirks, the voice, and provocative angles that make your brand distinct. Instead of who you are, readers get what everyone else says, rewritten for Google.
When you create content not constrained by keyword research or SERP competition, you open up a brave-new-space for:
- Thought leadership: This is where you can share new frameworks, original research, or contrarian takes that shape how people think about a problem, even if no one is searching for it yet. This is your brand, your voice, your ideas. It is not ranked on the top result, but it is you, and if done right, you surely will impact your readers in ways that a top-ranking article never can.
- Brand identity and voice: Zero-click posts, founder essays, videos, and storytelling pieces establish that much needed emotional connection. People love saying that B2B brands are less emotional and more professional, but I don’t believe so. B2B leaders are still humans, and humans are driven by human emotions. B2B leaders aren’t that different from B2C buyers.
#2. Google is volatile, and it doesn’t reward good SEO. It rewards good brands.
SEO has the reputation of being “a stable, evergreen organic channel”.
The data doesn’t say so.
Let’s take a look at the traffic of geeksforgeeks.org, which is one of leading sources of information on IT and software engineering in India (and also the US). After one Google update, their rankings dropped from 28M/month to 6.7M/month. 2 weeks later, they bounced back to around 20M traffic. What a relief, but that’s still a 8M decline in traffic!
Many brands also experience similar volatility in terms of website traffic after a Google update, both the big fish and the small fish.
What rescued GeeksForGeeks wasn’t some “content optimization” or “technical SEO fixes”. They were saved because of their brand as the “leading source of information and content on IT and software engineering”. That gives Google the trust to bring their keywords back to the top results.
In other words, Google rewards GeeksForGeeks because they are a good brand, in general, not because they are doing good SEO.
If you have stellar SEO, but your product is not good, and everyone is recommending against your brand on social media and forums, Google sure is going to pick that signal up and rank you accordingly.
This challenges the notion of SEO as an “organic, evergreen” channel. SEOs can’t control Google’s updates, nor can they control the branding side if they do purely SEO. If you only do SEO without other supporting types of content, all it takes is one Google update to wipe out your efforts.
#3. Traffic does not mean conversions
In a previous blog about BOFU content, I discuss why SEO is sometimes too focused in the ToFu stage, but that stage is not going to bring in many conversions.
Top-of-funnel (TOFU) content usually goes after broad, informational keywords like:
- “What is spend management?”
- “Why is budgeting important?”
These terms are so broad that even if you land the #1 spot, the traffic is unlikely to convert. Most searchers are students, researchers, or beginners who want to learn about the field. These are people curious about the concept, not actual decision-makers with budget authority.
Think about it: why would a manager actively looking to purchase a B2B SaaS solution waste time Googling an entry-level definition?
Another trap is saturation. TOFU keywords are dominated by industry giants with decades of authority. Search “project management,” and you’ll see Wikipedia and the Project Management Institute at the top. They are the Goliaths, and you are not David the shepherd. It’s not worth competing with these giants when the win is not even going to bring in much revenue.
That’s why I always advocate for creating content at the BOFU stage first. These are keywords like:
- Top financial tools for startups
- ClickUp vs Monday.com
- Top Monday.com alternatives
People searching for these tools are all ready to buy. They know what they want, and they probably have the budget to make all the decisions. These keywords don’t have that much volume, but they sure have the potential to drive true revenue.
At this stage, it’s no longer about SEO, it’s about whether your brand holds up to their expectations, and to properly convince your prospects, you need to create tailored content for them, which, again, requires you to unshackle yourself from the constraints of SEO writing.
Conclusion
As you can see, relying on SEO alone is no longer a winning play in B2B content marketing. Google changes too fast, algorithms are unpredictable, and traffic without conversions is a vanity metric at best. What really matters is creating content that people remember, trust, and act on.
SEO-driven content can still serve a purpose, but if you stop there, you’ll never build a brand. It’s the expert-led articles, the contrarian essays, the BOFU comparisons, the founder-driven stories, and the community engagement that actually move the needle. Google rewards strong brands because people reward strong brands, and that has nothing to do with keyword density or topic clusters.
I believe the future belongs to content that isn’t written for an algorithm, but for humans. And at the end of the day, marketing has always been about humans choosing to trust other humans.
If you’re serious about building a B2B SaaS brand in 2025, it’s time to go far beyond SEO. Create content that shows expertise, that sparks conversations, and that convinces real decision-makers.
