Bottom Funnel SEO Strategy: How to Build AI Search Visibility That Compounds
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TL;DR
- AI search visibility is earned through transactional and product-specific content first, not informational blogging.
- Starting SEO at the top of the funnel is one of the most common and costly mistakes early-stage B2B founders make. Build a bottom funnel SEO strategy instead.
- LLMs cite sources based on topical authority and third-party brand presence, making your blog a prerequisite for AI-driven discovery.
- A clear value proposition is the non-negotiable foundation under any keyword strategy, paid or organic.
- Small teams of two or three people can build real search authority, but only if they sequence their efforts correctly.
Most B2B founders start SEO with a blog. That is exactly backwards. The content that earns AI search visibility and drives conversions is not informational content. It is transactional content, and it belongs at the bottom of the funnel. Rita, Head of Academy at SEMrush, explains why almost every early-stage team gets this sequence wrong, and what the right sequence looks like.
Search is still the dominant discovery channel, but the interface is changing fast. Google remains powerful, but LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are increasingly where buyers start their research. For founders and marketers trying to build organic pipelines, the rules around AI search visibility are being rewritten in real time, and most early-stage teams are still playing by the old rulebook.
On a recent episode of Edbound With Kinner, host Kinner Sacchdev sat down with Rita Cidre, Head of Customer Education & Community at SEMrush, a veteran full-stack marketer who has led GTM at Zillow, run her own e-commerce business, and taught marketing at business schools across Europe. What came out of that conversation was one of the most practically grounded early-stage SEO strategy frameworks available for founders building today.
The Mistake That Kills Most Early-Stage SEO Strategies Before They Start
Most founders treat SEO as a distribution problem. They ask: which channel? How many blogs? Should we be on TikTok?
Rita reframes the question entirely. Before any channel decision can be meaningful, a company needs what she calls a "crystallization of value." That means knowing, with real precision, what your product does, who it is for, and what language your customer actually uses to describe the problem it solves.
"The first step is this crystallization, and it is not easy. What AI can do is if you have a very clear idea of who you are, what the value is that you're communicating, what the messages are, then I think you can use AI to figure out how to translate those messages into content. But without that initial kernel of truth, I think AI cannot solve that problem for us." : Rita, Head of Academy, SEMrush
This is the foundation beneath every keyword strategy, every blog, every product page. Without it, you are optimizing noise. With it, you are building a compounding asset.
For startups at the zero-to-one stage, the temptation is to move fast into tactics. But Rita is direct: skipping value clarity does not save time. It costs it. Sai Krishna's story of building $100K ARR with no ads and no sales calls is a clean example of what happens when a solo founder gets this foundation right before touching any channel.
Start at the Bottom of the Funnel, Not the Top
Here is the insight from this conversation that most founders will push back on, and most will later regret ignoring.
When Rita advises early-stage companies on SEO, she does not tell them to start a blog. She tells them to start with transactional keywords.
"If I were a business just starting with SEO, my recommendation is to always start with transactional keywords. Start with the bottom of the funnel. Nail that first and then expand to other things." : Rita, SEMrush
This is a lower funnel marketing tactic that runs counter to how most content teams are taught to think. The default assumption is that you build awareness at the top, nurture in the middle, and convert at the bottom. So naturally, many teams start writing informational content first, because it feels like building an audience.
The problem is that informational content takes months to rank, attracts broad audiences that may never convert, and burns the limited bandwidth of a two or three person team.
Transactional and product-specific keywords, by contrast, capture people who already know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. Those are the visitors most likely to become customers. That is where small teams should focus first.
Think of it in terms of Rita's doctor example. A psychiatrist opening a private practice in New York does not need a blog about workplace anxiety, at least not yet. She needs to show up when someone searches for "psychiatrist in New York City." That is the bottom-of-funnel keyword. That is where the buyer intent lives. Nail that first. Then expand.
What a Bottom-of-Funnel SEO Strategy Looks Like for B2B SaaS Founders
For B2B SaaS founders, the bottom-of-funnel SEO strategy looks like this: product pages, feature pages, use-case pages, and comparison-adjacent pages, all built around the exact language your buyer uses when they are close to a decision.
To make this concrete: "project management software for construction teams" is a transactional BOFU keyword. "What is project management" is a top-of-funnel informational keyword. The first captures someone who already knows they have a problem and are comparing solutions. The second captures someone who may never buy. Build the first pages first.
This is not glamorous content. It is not the kind of writing that gets shared on LinkedIn. But it is the content that converts.
Once those pages are indexed and performing, you expand into informational content that supports topical authority. That is when a blog starts to make strategic sense, because you have a base of commercial intent content anchored in the site, and the informational content begins to reinforce the brand signal that LLMs pick up.
The sequence matters. Most teams get it backwards.
For more on how content strategy maps to GTM at different stages of growth, the Max Mitcham episode on content-led funnels and zero ad spend is worth your time.
How LLMs Decide What to Cite and Why Brand Mentions Are the New Backlinks
The most important structural shift Rita identifies is the one happening off your website.
In traditional SEO, the game was backlinks. You earned authority by getting other credible sites to link to yours. Backlinks signaled to Google that your content was worth ranking.
LLMs work differently. They care about how widely and authentically a brand is mentioned across the open web. Not just backlinks, but brand mentions. Reddit threads. Industry forums. Third-party reviews. Podcast transcripts. Newsletter features.
"One of the biggest changes happening right now is that we are moving away from backlinks being the number one off-page SEO strategy towards a strategy of third-party brand mentions. LLMs care about how your brand shows up on the internet. It could be that you show up in Reddit, in a bunch of subreddits. That is a brand mention. It is not a backlink." : Rita, SEMrush
This has profound implications for how founders should think about answer engine optimization for startups. It is no longer enough to have a well-optimized website. You need a distributed presence, across communities, publications, podcasts, and platforms where your buyers spend time.
Blogging still matters, but for a different reason than most people think. A blog does not just drive traffic. It establishes you as a source. When an LLM constructs an answer to a prompt related to your category, it draws from sources it has encountered across the web. If your brand has published consistently on relevant topics, and if that content is being referenced and mentioned by others, you become part of the citation pool.
That is what organic brand discovery in AI-driven search actually means in practice. You are not just ranking. You are being cited.
Measuring this distributed presence is still nascent, but founders can track it through share of voice in LLM outputs using tools like Profound or Otterly.ai, brand mention volume in platforms like Reddit and G2, and citation frequency in AI-generated category summaries. The goal is not just to rank. It is to become a source the model reaches for.
For founders building content-led pipelines from scratch, the Adam Robinson episode on founder-led marketing maps closely to this philosophy, specifically how consistent content output builds compounding brand authority without paid media dependency.
Paid Ads vs Organic Growth: Where Each Strategy Actually Belongs
Rita does not dismiss paid advertising. She contextualizes it.
The paid ads vs organic growth debate is often framed as a binary choice, and that framing is misleading. Rita's framework is more nuanced: the right channel depends on your product's sales cycle, your margin structure, and your team's internal capabilities.
Impulse-purchase products with high margins can generate immediate ROAS from paid social. B2B products with long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and a significant evaluation period are rarely going to convert from a single ad impression.
For those products, paid can play a role in discovery or nurture, but it is not the primary conversion engine. And critically, it does not compound. The moment you stop spending, the traffic stops.
Organic, and increasingly AI search visibility, builds a moat. It takes longer, but the returns accumulate. Rita puts it plainly: if you crush SEO, your competitors cannot catch up quickly. That asymmetry is exactly what early-stage companies need to create.
The Heyreach episode on hitting $4M ARR without ads is a concrete case study of this compounding dynamic in action.
The 6-Step AI Search Visibility System for Small B2B Teams
This is the framework Rita outlines, structured into a repeatable sequence for a two to four person team.
- Clarify your value before you touch a keyword tool. Define what your product does, who it is for, and the exact language your customer uses. This is not a branding exercise. It is the input that makes every downstream decision more precise.
- Research transactional keywords first. Use a tool like SEMrush to identify keywords that reflect buyer intent in your category: product comparisons, use-case searches, category-specific terms. These are your first pages to build.
- Build product and feature pages around those keywords. Every core use case should have a dedicated page, optimized for the specific query a buyer would use when they are close to a decision. These pages anchor your site's commercial value.
- Layer in informational content to build topical authority. Once your transactional pages are live, start building content around the questions your buyers ask earlier in their journey. This is where blogging earns its place. The goal is topical authority, not volume.
- Distribute your brand beyond your website. Contribute to industry publications and communities where your buyers spend time. Be a guest on podcasts. Earn brand mentions, not just backlinks. This is how you build the third-party presence that LLMs draw from when constructing answers. The Yash Tekriwal episode on signal-based GTM at Clay is instructive on how brand signals compound across platforms over time.
- Use AI to scale content production, not replace content strategy. AI tools can dramatically accelerate the writing, formatting, and distribution of content once the strategy is set. But they cannot replace the human judgment required to define the message in the first place.
"There's never been more information, more educational resources for someone to pick up a skill, particularly in the world of marketing and just run with it. If you have SEMrush and you have the internet to learn how to use it, you will be successful in SEO." : Rita, SEMrush
That is the ceiling. The floor is having a clear enough value proposition that the tools have something meaningful to work with.
How to Build AI Search Visibility That Compounds: The Full Sequence
The shift from traditional SEO to AI search visibility is not a replacement. It is an expansion. Google still matters. Blogging still matters. Keyword optimization still matters. But the game now extends beyond your website into the broader digital ecosystem where LLMs learn what brands stand for.
For early-stage founders, the sequencing insight from this episode is the most actionable takeaway: start at the bottom of the funnel, capture the buyers who are ready to decide, and then build outward into the informational content that earns you topical authority and AI citation over time.
The teams that get this right will build a compounding organic pipeline that reduces dependency on paid channels and creates a durable competitive moat. Alan D'Souza's episode on building pipeline without paid media is a useful final proof point for founders who want to see this dynamic across different business models.
Edbound AI helps founders and marketers execute this kind of content-to-distribution system at scale, without burning out the team. If you are building an organic growth engine and want to run it consistently, that is exactly what Edbound AI is designed for.
About the Guest
Rita has scaled marketing at Zillow and leads the SEMrush Academy, the educational arm of one of the world's leading digital marketing platforms. She also teaches marketing at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her work sits at the intersection of marketing strategy, customer education, and full-funnel content systems.
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