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.

— Seth Trammell

Nofollow, LLMs and the measurement problem

Nofollow used to mean a link was worth less. For model visibility it does not work that way, because being mentioned is the point rather than passing authority. That quietly invalidates a lot of outreach that filtered targets on domain metrics.

On measurement he is sceptical of the tooling. Mimicking real multi-shot prompting is hard, so most visibility trackers are sampling something narrower than the behaviour they claim to measure.

They’re just prediction machines. They just want to tell you what word should come next.

— Seth Trammell

That is also his answer to people treating a citation as an endorsement. A model citing you has not vetted you.

The loop customers actually run

His model of the current buying path is three steps, not one. Google to find the field. A model to interrogate the shortlist. Then a branded search on Google to actually buy.

Which means the branded search at the end can look like the whole story if you only read the last click, when the work that earned it happened two steps earlier.

He is much less kind about the content filling that middle step. Self-serving comparison posts and listicles get cited happily by models, which is exactly why there are so many of them.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• Why does my blog content not convert?
• What should top-of-funnel content actually be measured on?
• Is ecommerce SEO easier than B2B SaaS SEO?
• Do nofollow links matter for AI visibility?
• Does traffic from LLMs really convert better?
• What does the real customer research loop look like now?
• Why are comparison posts and listicles everywhere?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• KlientBoost, where Seth runs the SEO product.
• Mike Ginley on multi-channel presence, which is the same argument about not judging one channel in isolation.
• The SEO Tactic Library, if you want the executable version of the plays discussed here.

Find Seth Trammell

He is at KlientBoost, and says LinkedIn is where he will start posting. He lurks on X and Reddit and does not engage.

Cite this episode

Trammell, Seth. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Your Blog Content Was Never Supposed to Convert.” The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast, 2025. https://the-unscripted-seo-interview-podcast.castos.com/episodes/seth-trammell-your-blog-content-was-never-supposed-to-convert