SEO: A Lost Cause for Services Firms?

I nearly had a meltdown at the start of my career when I tried to apply the SEO playbook to a services firm. They were looking to launch a new service line focusing on procurement automation services and wanted leads for their business.

I did what most SEOs would do. I went to my favorite SEO tool, researched keywords, and built a content strategy around “key” procurement-related keywords. 

Then, we created a comprehensive guide that served as our pillar piece and dozens of articles around procurement automation. We also went hard after backlinks. 

In a few months, we started to see the beginnings of that glorious “Up-And-to-The-Right Graph.” The holy grail for SEOs. The team was ecstatic. The CEO was happy. Competitors called the business to ask them for their secret sauce.

Months went by: Lots of traffic, lots of backlinks, lots of noise. 

No conversions. 

The only people contacting the business were students looking to become procurement officers. They were using the site’s chatbot to ask questions. It annoyed the hell out of the sales team. Eventually, they ignored the chatbot completely.

To this day, years later, no conversions came from that extensive campaign.

SEO has been synonymous with content for years. Specifically, they’ve created a playbook designed for SaaS businesses with clear case studies showing its effectiveness.

The problem is that this playbook is mostly ineffective for service firms.

The SaaS SEO Playbook Doesn’t Work for B2B Services

The SaaS playbook for SEO has been around for a while. It’s popular because it works for some SaaS businesses. 

You find keywords with high traffic potential on perceived customer problems, create content around those keywords, and get backlinks to increase awareness. 

Once you rank and drive traffic, you sit back and wait for leads to pour into your business. It’s popular mainly because reporting is easy—show rankings and traffic increases.

The problem is that this traffic doesn’t convert for service firms because how people buy B2B services fundamentally differs from how people buy SaaS products. 

Senior-level employees don’t usually use search to find services. Projects are often too complex, too time-consuming, too expensive, too disruptive, and way too risky.

But what about all that traffic?

A lot of it is misleading.

For example, you’ll see a lot of service providers for technology platforms trying to rank for platform-related keywords. Instead of getting new business, they end up competing against partners for traffic. These technology platforms often have much larger budgets and brands than the service partners, so they never step out of that shadow.

Even if they manage to rank on some obscure topic tangentially related to the technology, those visitors are on a completely different buyer’s journey. They’re looking for a platform, not a service. 

When they reach out (which is very rare), you still have to sell them on the platform before you can sell your service.. 

People Don’t Go To Search to Find Services

The expectation from SEOs is that people always use search to find the answer to their problem. This simply isn’t true. 

It’s one of many channels.

Because of the cost and the risk involved in working with services firms, search is often a last resort. Instead, people often look to their network first. They go to people they trust and businesses they know. They’ll speak to former colleagues, partner networks, and friends.

Their main concern: Can this person do the work? 

Often, the decision to seek out a service is the result of a mandate. Something has happened within or to the org and a senior team member has been asked to remedy the solution. They either lack the time and/or expertise to deliver, so they seek help. 

But they’re still ultimately responsible for solving that problem. This means there’s a lot at stake: reputation within the organization and with colleagues, promotion potential, and future career trajectory. 

A CMO friend of mine put it succinctly, “No one wants to be the guy who brought in a $300,000 consulting firm that has no impact on the business.”

Going to search to find a solution would be a desperate “Hail Mary.” It happens, but it’s not a GTM strategy any service firm should consider.

AI Has Made Marketing Service Firms Worse

Businesses can create content at scale with minimal effort, thanks to various AI tools. And the general consensus from leadership teams at these firms is that more is the answer. 

More knocks. More phone calls. More content. More noise. Sooner or later, we’ll stumble into someone who will say yes. 

Except that’s far less likely now. 

Because AI is so accessible, it’s hard to build a moat with it. Your competitors can just as easily create content with a few prompts and some editing. Your sales teams can scale “personalized” outreach with a few clicks. Your SMEs can publish generic LinkedIn content full of emojis and em dashes that sound nothing like them in seconds.

Sturgeon’s Law states that 90% of everything is crap. With AI, it’s likely that 99.99% of everything is crap. We had a storm of bad content before. Now, we have a bad content tsunami causing hurricanes, avalanches, and mudslides.

But most service firms don’t think they have a problem. Their teams are hitting their KPIs. They’re busy. Loads of outputs…until it comes time to show business impact.

This puts marketers under pressure, stress, and frustration until they quit.

Should Service Firms Ignore SEO?

SEO is still important for services.

You need to provide a smooth user experience. This means a fast-loading website without a bunch of broken links or pop-ups hounding your visitors to convert.

You also need to make sure your key services pages match search intent. For example, we had a client that provided software architect services. But they labeled their service page “Architecture Services” which aligns with building buildings, not software infrastructure.

Most of these changes are one-and-done. You fix your site: Get it fast, accurate, and in working order. 

Then, you move on to sales enablement and thought leadership. And you focus more on what your customers are saying than reports from SEO tools.

Expertise Recognizes Expertise

The people hiring service firms are experts. They know their business, customers, and service. And they understand their problems to some level. 

An SME from the finance industry once told me, “I can tell in a few seconds if what I’m reading was written by someone who’s done the work. I don’t have time to read marketing trash.”

“I don’t trust White Papers anymore,” another client told me, “They’re basically just marketing assets with a shallow understanding of the topic. It’s frustrating.”

Often, SEO assets for services come off as generic marketing collateral that is so transparent any key, sophisticated decision-maker will roll their eyes within 3 seconds of skimming it and deleting it or moving on.

We’re too busy. There’s too much to do and read and analyze. We don’t have time. So, our patience for marketing BS is low. 

People Crave Lived Experience (Not Templated Answers)

We’ve all been there, sitting through a math lesson only to get infinitely frustrated at home when the problems we get are way harder than the examples.

That’s the most content. Templated answers to very niche problems.

One software engineer told me at the end of the conference, “I hate these talks. Everyone gets on stage and talks about how perfect a project was. We all know that’s BS. I want to hear about projects that went sideways and what you did to fix it.”

We crave stories and granular details. These insights stick with us (unlike the 100s of articles we read every year and completely forget). 

And when ChatGPT can serve up most generic answers in seconds, you need stories—lived experience and expertise—to stand out.

Use Interviews to Create Better Content

The best content comes from the people doing the work in your organization. 

For services, this means your SMEs (practitioners, directors, etc.). The downside is that these people are very busy. It’s unrealistic to ask your SMEs to bucket 8 hours a month to create an article. They have too much on their plate. Their billed work is more important to the firm. 

It is equally unrealistic to ask a marketer to become an expert in a field they know little about and speak confidently about it to other practitioners. 

But you need expert content if you want to convince experts to buy.

The best way to do this is through interviews. You lean on the expertise of your SMEs and the storytelling capabilities of your marketers. 

Experts find it easy to talk about their work. Marketers love avoiding the frustration of trying to become an overnight expert. It’s win-win.

Distributing Interview-Driven Content to Your ICP

Unfortunately, the best content for your ideal buyer can’t be effectively distributed through search. It’s too niche and emerging to have search traffic or keywords tied to it. 

By the time the topic has keyword volume, it’s on its way to being best practice.

If you’re targeting those topics, you’re less of a thought leader and more of a “me too” business, chasing after trends instead of establishing your firm as an authority.

A better approach is to give your content directly to your audience. Use email, social, and niche publications to get your content to more of your ideal buyers.

James De Roche is the founder of Lead Comet, a consultancy that helps service firms differentiate, build trust as thought leaders, and improve sales outcomes. Their interview-driven approach to sales enablement helps businesses get more interesting (and profitable) projects.