A practical guide on how to prioritize SEO content

If you’re on a content or marketing team, your list of topic ideas is likely very long. You probably have a Trello board overflowing with cards, a Google Doc that never ends, and a few sticky notes that have lost their stick. The problem isn't a lack of ideas; it's figuring out which ones are worth your time and energy right now.

Without a system, it's easy to fall into bad habits. You might chase a keyword just because it has a huge search volume, write about something because a competitor did, or just pick whatever seems easiest that day. That kind of guesswork leads to a content strategy that feels more like throwing spaghetti at a wall than building a real asset for your business. You end up with a bunch of articles that don't connect, don't build authority, and don't really move the needle on your goals.

most advice I've seen from YC themselves (videos/talks from YC partners) is that you shouldn't be prioritizing SEO (or running ads) in the early stage. SEO is a means to scale your reach to a wider audience. In the very early days (without product market fit) you should focus on finding product market fit... Once you have a certain amount of product market fit validation (which means you should be able to grow somewhat organically), you can eventually look to SEO/Marketing to expand your reach.

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This guide is here to change that. We'll walk through a clear framework for prioritizing your SEO content that goes beyond basic metrics and connects your work directly to business objectives, audience needs, and what your team can actually get done.

Understanding SEO content prioritization

SEO content prioritization is the process of deciding what content to create, update, or even delete to get the biggest return for your efforts in search rankings and business growth.

But it’s about more than just sorting a keyword list by search volume. Real prioritization takes a wider view. It’s about understanding the why behind a search, not just the what. It means thinking about:

• Your audience’s actual problems: What are they trying to solve? What questions are they typing into Google?
• Business relevance: How closely does a topic connect to the product or service you sell?
• Conversion potential: Will this article just bring in traffic, or can it guide someone toward becoming a customer?
• The effort involved: How much time and resources will it take to create something that can actually compete and rank?

The goal is not just to publish more content. It's to build an intentional content plan that establishes your brand as an authority, supports customers at every step, and delivers results you can point to.

Step 1: Align business goals with content strategy

Before you can rank your content ideas, you need to know what you're aiming for. Prioritizing without a clear goal is just organized chaos. You have to start by defining what "impact" really means for your business. Is it more leads? Better brand awareness? Happier customers?

Identify your core business objectives

Your content plan should directly support your company's bigger goals. Once you know what those are, you can connect them to specific content outcomes.

• Goal: Increase sales or leads. If this is your main focus, you should prioritize content for people who are close to making a purchase. Think reviews, comparison articles, "best X for Y" guides, and case studies. These pieces target commercial keywords and speak to users who are actively looking for a solution.
• Goal: Build brand awareness. If you're trying to get your name out there, your priority should be top-of-funnel content. This means creating helpful articles that answer broad questions in your industry. You’re not going for the hard sell here; you’re building trust so that when people are ready to buy, they think of you first.
• Goal: Improve customer retention. Don't forget about the people who are already paying you. To keep them happy, prioritize content like in-depth help guides, video tutorials, and best-practice articles that help them get more value from your product.

Understand user intent and the marketing funnel

Matching your content to what a user is trying to do (their search intent) is essential for SEO. Generally, there are four types of intent: informational (I want to learn), commercial (I want to compare), transactional (I want to buy), and navigational (I want to find a specific site).

You can map these intents to the buyer's journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. Your content plan should have a healthy mix of pieces for all three stages. If you realize your blog is full of top-of-funnel awareness content but has nothing for people in the consideration stage, that’s a gap you need to prioritize filling. It's usually a good idea to fill the gaps closest to the point of conversion first, as they often deliver a quicker return. This can be visualized by mapping content types to each stage of the funnel.

Use qualitative data to inform your content plan

Some of the best content ideas won't come from a keyword tool. They'll come directly from your customers. Your internal data is a goldmine.

Your customer support conversations, especially, are filled with insights. Every support ticket is a real person telling you what they don't understand, what they're struggling with, and what information they need. As one Reddit user pointed out when trying to analyze their Zendesk history, it can be almost impossible to manually sift through thousands of tickets to find these patterns.

This is where smart automation can be beneficial. For example, a tool like eesel AI can plug into your help desk (like Zendesk or Freshdesk) and learn from your team's past support tickets. It sifts through all those real conversations to automatically surface the most common questions and pain points. Instead of guessing what to write about, you get a prioritized content backlog handed to you, straight from your customers.

Step 2: Use frameworks for prioritization

Once you know your goals, you need a system to score and rank your content ideas. Using a framework removes the emotion and guesswork from the process and gets everyone on the same page. It doesn't have to be complex, but it does need to be consistent.

The impact vs. effort matrix

A classic for a reason, the 2x2 impact vs. effort matrix is a simple way to get a quick read on your priorities. You plot each content idea on a grid based on its potential business impact (traffic, leads, conversions) versus the effort required to create it (time, cost, resources).

This gives you four clear quadrants:

• Quadrant 1: High Impact, Low Effort (Quick Wins): This is your sweet spot. Tackle these immediately. Think about things like optimizing title tags of underperforming pages, refreshing an old but popular blog post with new stats, or adding better internal links to a key page.
• Quadrant 2: High Impact, High Effort (Major Projects): These are your big, strategic bets. They’ll take a lot of work but promise a significant return. Creating a comprehensive pillar page or a free tool falls into this category. Schedule these carefully.
• Quadrant 3: Low Impact, Low Effort (Fill-ins): These are "nice-to-have" tasks you can work on when you have downtime. They won't change the game, but they can provide small wins.
• Quadrant 4: Low Impact, High Effort (Time Sinks): Avoid these at all costs. These are the projects that drain resources without delivering meaningful results.

The acquisition vs. conversion matrix for existing content

What about all the content you've already published? This framework helps you decide where to focus your optimization efforts by plotting pages based on how many organic searches they get versus how well they engage users (think time on page, bounce rate, or goal completions).

• High Searches, Low Engagement: These pages are great at attracting an audience, but they aren't keeping their attention. The priority here is conversion optimization. Maybe the content doesn't quite match the search intent, or the call-to-action is weak. As you'll often see with pages that have high impressions but low clicks, the fix is often to improve the title, meta description, and introduction to better align with what the user was hoping to find.
• Low Searches, High Engagement: People who find this content love it, but not enough people are finding it. The priority here is acquisition optimization. You need to focus on improving its on-page SEO, building more internal links to it from other popular pages, and finding ways to promote it.

Here’s how the four quadrants break down:

Step 3: Use data to make decisions

A framework is only as good as the data you feed into it. To make smart, objective decisions, you need to pull together a few key data points for every content opportunity on your list.

Analyze keyword and topic research data

This is your foundational SEO data. For every potential topic, you should be looking at:

• Search Volume: A basic indicator of how many people are searching for a term. It gives you a rough idea of the potential audience size.
• Keyword Difficulty (KD): An estimate of how hard it will be to rank on the first page of Google. Every tool has its own scale, but for reference, Semrush's scale considers scores from 0-14 "very easy," while scores from 70-84 are "hard." Be realistic about what your site can rank for based on its current authority.
• Business Relevance: This is a crucial, often overlooked metric. How closely does this keyword align with your product or service? A low-volume keyword with high relevance is almost always more valuable than a high-volume keyword that’s only tangentially related to what you do.

Perform a competitive content gap analysis

A content gap analysis is a great way to find high-priority keywords you might have missed. The goal is to identify topics that your competitors are ranking for, but you aren't. This shows you where there's proven demand that you're not currently meeting.

To get free organic traffic from search engines quickly, you should find THE CLOSEST COMPETITORS you have and get a list of their domain names. Run the domains through tools like ahrefs or semrush or any other SEO software that lets you figure out the KEYWORDS they are currently ranking for. Filter the keywords for keyword difficulty and MONTHLY SEARCH VOLUME... Filter your keywords so that what's left are: keywords that yield content that talk about problems/issues/topics that are closely related to what your product/service SOLVES, relatively easy to rank (shoot for keyword difficulty of 29 or lower in Semrush), decent search volume estimate

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You can use a tool like the Ahrefs Content Gap tool to make this process super easy. You just plug in your own domain and a few of your top competitors, and the tool will spit out a list of keywords they rank for that you don't. This provides a ready-made list of potential content priorities.

Leverage your website's performance metrics

Your own website data is one of your most valuable assets. Using a free tool like Google Search Console, you can quickly find low-hanging fruit for optimization.

One of the most valuable reports to look at is pages with high impressions but low CTR. This is a strong signal from Google. It's telling you, "Hey, we think your page is relevant for this query, and we're showing it to a lot of people, but they aren't clicking on it." This usually means your content is solid, but your title tag or meta description isn't compelling enough to win the click. Updating them is often a quick win that can drive a big traffic boost.

This is where combining data sources gives you a real edge. Google Search Console is great at telling you what pages are underperforming, but analyzing customer conversations with a tool like eesel AI can help you understand why. You might find out that people are leaving because the article, while good, is missing one critical piece of information or doesn't cover their specific situation. That's the kind of insight that turns a decent content update into a fantastic one.

For a deeper dive into improving your SEO, check out this video which explains how to determine which parts of SEO you should focus on based on your business type.

This video explains how to determine which parts of SEO you should focus on based on your business type.

Creating a clear path for content prioritization

So, where do you go from here? We’ve covered a lot, but it boils down to a simple, repeatable process: start with your goals, apply a consistent framework, and use the right data to guide your decisions. This isn't a one-time task; it's a cycle. You should plan to revisit your content priorities at least once a quarter to see what's working, what's not, and how your business goals may have shifted.

And remember, don't let the pursuit of a perfect system stop you from getting started. A simple spreadsheet with an impact/effort score is better than no system at all. The most important thing is to shift from a reactive, "what should we write about next?" mindset to a proactive one that consistently drives real business results.

Creating high-value content is one of the best investments you can make, but it's nearly impossible when your team is buried under a mountain of repetitive customer questions. If your support team spends all day answering the same things over and over, you are not just losing efficiency; you are also losing time that could be spent creating the very content that would prevent those questions from ever happening.

eesel AI helps break that cycle. It automates frontline support by learning from your existing help docs, past tickets, and internal wikis. This frees up your team to focus on meaningful work (like creating awesome content) and gives you the data to build an even smarter SEO strategy. You can even test it out completely risk-free with its simulation mode to see exactly how it would have performed on your past support tickets before you turn it on.