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MBC / Group / Blog / SEO & Traffic
SEO & Traffic 8 min read Sep 22, 2026
Festus Eze of Mindset Digital Marketing gathered answers from thirteen practitioners who run organic growth for B2B SaaS companies. Matthew Montez, founder of The MBC Group, is one of the thirteen, quoted on aligning organic search with the SaaS funnel.
The interesting part is not who got quoted. It is how much the thirteen agree about where organic search stops producing revenue, and how few companies fund the stage where the money actually changes hands.
Matthew Montez
Founder · MBC Group
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00 Key Takeaways 01 Why organic is a growth lever 02 Which funnel stage is underfunded? 03 Why most organic strategies fail 04 CAC, pipeline and MRR 05 Organic content and retention 06 What order to build it in 07 If you are not a SaaS company 08 Common questions
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There is a familiar scoreboard in B2B SaaS: traffic up 40%, revenue flat. The dashboard looks healthy, the calendar is full, and the pipeline does not move. Somewhere between the click and the close, the strategy loses the thread.
That is the problem Festus Eze takes apart in a feature on B2B SaaS growth strategy with organic search, built from the answers of thirteen practitioners who run these programs. Matthew Montez, founder of The MBC Group, contributed the section on aligning organic search with the SaaS funnel.
00 — Key Takeaways
Paid growth is rented. Stop paying and the traffic stops. Organic can become an asset that compounds after the spend ends.
Matthew Montez’s answer: the middle of the funnel, the evaluation stage, is the most underfunded — least content, highest commercial value per visitor.
Rusty Rich of Latitude Park: appearing in both paid and organic results raises click-through rate 25%, and targeting proven paid-conversion keywords organically has produced up to 160% growth in organic leads.
Chris Coussons of Visionary Marketing: blended CAC can rise through the first two quarters, which is when teams quit.
Yadin Katz of SysAid sequences it: demand capture, then demand creation, then product-led SEO, with revenue optimization running throughout.
Because the cost curve runs the other way. Paid produces demand by Monday, but holding that flow requires continued spending, and as costs per click rise, so does the cost of each prospect. A page that earns visibility keeps working without paying for every click. The feature cites HubSpot’s finding that inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound on average.
The framing, in one line
Durable growth comes from building assets that keep working even when you’re not spending money. Paid ads can generate traffic, but they stop the moment the budget does.
Floryne P., founder of Magical Chart, quoted in the feature
The most practical argument comes from Rusty Rich of Latitude Park, who treats paid and organic as one system. He reports that appearing in both paid and organic results raises overall click-through rate 25%, and that targeting the paid keywords already driving conversions has generated up to 160% growth in organic leads for B2B campaigns.
That turns paid data into an organic roadmap, and the distinction underneath is the spine of the piece: traffic-generating SEO is not necessarily revenue-generating SEO. Rich also reports that brands not cited in Google’s AI Overviews see a 67% decline in organic click-through rates, while optimized brands get 7.8 times more AI visibility — the pressure behind our guide to answer engine optimization.
The middle. That is the answer The MBC Group gave, and it explains the flat-revenue problem.
Most SaaS content calendars are packed with top-of-funnel work: blog entries, manuals, “what is X” explainers. That stage is easiest to fund, because traffic is visible and simple to report. The stages further down, where a visitor becomes a qualified lead, get a small share — even though that is where revenue is decided.
Matthew Montez, The MBC Group
The most underfunded stage is the middle — the evaluation layer, where someone has already accepted they have the problem and is now deciding who to buy from. It’s the stage with the least content and the highest commercial value per visitor.
Quoted in Mindset Digital Marketing, September 2026
The mechanism is a reporting problem, not a strategy one. Impressions and rankings are easier to put in a deck than the small volumes attached to comparison and use-case content. But those searches come from buyers closer to a decision. Without content there, you win attention at the top and lose the prospect when they go compare vendors elsewhere.
The fix is allocation, not volume. The pages that do this job are specific: comparison pages, alternative pages, integration content, migration guides, cost-objection content and use-case pages, each aimed at a buying trigger — measured against trials, demos and pipeline, not traffic.
In five repeatable ways. Five practitioners each described a different one, and together they read like a diagnostic list.
Failure mode
The fix
Who described it
Traffic-first mindset
Stop asking how do we rank. Ask who is 60 days from buying and what they search now, even if volume looks small.
Siim Kostabi, Pageloot
No connection to revenue
Connect organic landing pages to the CRM and judge them by conversions and lead-close ratios, not sessions.
Stephen Taormino, CC&A Strategic Media
Ignoring bottom-funnel content
Freeze top-of-funnel content. Build category, comparison, alternative and review pages first.
Alex Chaidaroglou, Altosight
Weak product-content integration
Fewer articles, each with a harder job: answer a real question and hand the reader one obvious next click.
Nikita Vorontsov, CharGen
No measurement framework
Measure velocity, not volume. Instrument UTMs, events and lead scoring to see what produces pipeline.
Pavankumar Kamat, Panto AI
Nikita Vorontsov of CharGen attaches a number to the fourth: his visit-to-signup rate sits at 13.6%, and he credits the next click, not the answer above it. Alex Chaidaroglou of Altosight takes the third further than most would dare, freezing top-of-funnel content entirely.
On MRR, Martin Gjini of OpsMavix finds the demand before committing: run a small paid campaign, not to scale, but to learn the exact terms buyers type and which convert, then build clusters around them. His team has published 200+ posts off that loop.
On CAC, Chris Coussons of Visionary Marketing explains the timing trap. Spending starts immediately while returns take time, so blended CAC can rise through the first two quarters — exactly when teams quit, just before it would compound. He also separates two very different wins: ranking for terms you already buy mostly shifts spend between channels, while capturing problem-aware searches paid never targeted brings in new buyers.
Two of his recommendations are worth stealing whatever you sell: separate acquired from retained economics, and report the paid counterfactual — what the same qualified demand would have cost through paid. That gives finance a monetary basis, not a traffic chart.
On pipeline, Raul Menoyo of Citora names the blind spot: much of the research that decides a purchase now happens before any measurable website visit, inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Around 90% of what those engines say about a company comes from third-party sources, which makes even first-touch attribution incomplete. He tracks a Citation Rate instead — whether AI systems recommend you when users ask about your category.
Yes, and most teams file it in the wrong drawer. Help documentation sits under support, measured by ticket deflection. But it is often where a new user builds real product understanding — where a customer activates, or quietly churns three months later.
Coussons puts it in one line: “The help center is doing acquisition work now as well, still filed under cost.” In his analysis of 14.7 million AI-attributed sessions, AI referrals converted at 4.21% against 1.94% for Google organic. His fix: report documentation alongside activation cohorts.
The feature’s retention case study makes the same point. Bogdan Nicholas of VINspectorAI had customers churning soon after onboarding — not because the product failed, but because they did not grasp what its vehicle-inspection AI could catch. The team built a library around scenarios their users were already searching: hidden flood damage, odometer fraud, salvage titles. Organic traffic rose 30%, retention improved 15% in six months. The acquisition case study is the mirror image: with no paid budget at all, Siim Kostabi’s team at Pageloot mapped pages to the exact terms people used right before needing a QR code tool, and organic became their largest acquisition channel.
Capture demand that already exists before trying to create any. Yadin Katz of SysAid lays out a four-stage compounding model, and the sequence is the point: skip a stage and you get traffic that does not convert, or conversion mechanics with no traffic.
The conclusion is worth sitting with: the companies benefiting most from organic today usually invested 18 to 24 months ago. No version of this pays out this quarter.
Almost all of it transfers, because the underlying mistake is not a SaaS mistake. It is publishing for the top of the funnel because the top of the funnel is easy to report, then wondering why the phone does not ring. A clinic, a law firm or a home services company has the same evaluation layer: their comparison page answers “which of you should I call, and why.” Their version of product-led SEO is a service page that sells rather than a blog post that hands the reader back to Google — the work behind our web design.
The AI thread runs the same way. After The MBC Group rebuilt R2 Medical Clinic’s pages around physician authorship, structured data and depth on the questions patients actually ask, ChatGPT cited the clinic with a link in 12 of 16 patient questions we tested. The R2 Medical Clinic AI search case study shows which competitors it out-cited.
Q Which stage of the SaaS funnel is most underfunded?
A The middle, the evaluation stage. Matthew Montez of The MBC Group describes it as the stage with the least content and the highest commercial value per visitor, because top-of-funnel traffic is easier to report than the smaller search volumes attached to comparison, integration and use-case pages.
Q How long does organic search take to lower CAC?
A Longer than one quarter. Chris Coussons of Visionary Marketing notes that blended CAC can rise during the first two quarters of an organic program, because spending starts immediately while returns build slowly. The feature adds that today’s winners usually made the investment 18 to 24 months ago.
Q How do you measure organic search when buyers research in ChatGPT?
A Add a citation measure alongside traditional attribution. Raul Menoyo of Citora tracks Citation Rate, whether AI systems recommend a company when users ask about its category, because around 90% of what those engines say about a company comes from third-party sources, leaving a blind spot in click-based attribution.
Q Does help documentation really affect retention?
A The feature argues it does, and that it is measured wrong. Indexed help content lets customers reach value without waiting for support, and Coussons recommends reporting documentation performance alongside activation cohorts rather than only through support metrics. VINspectorAI saw retention improve 15% within six months of building scenario content.
Where The MBC Group helps
Evaluation-stage pages and visibility inside AI answers.
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