This interview is with Nick Mikhalenkov, SEO Manager, Nine Peaks Media.
To kick things off, how do you describe your role as an SEO Manager helping B2B companies grow leads and revenue?
When I think about my responsibilities as an SEO Manager at a company, I see a direct correlation between search engine visibility and pipeline, and not just traffic. For B2B businesses, ranking for keywords means nothing if the people seeing your website don’t have a business interest or the intent to buy. That’s why I focus on targeting those keywords that are commercially valuable and have a clear buying signal by building out content that leads the user to a demo or consultation.
I have worked with B2B clients who have grown their organic lead count by over 40% year on year by aligning SEO with their sales goals, streamlining their internal linking strategy, and acquiring backlinks from sites with domain authority of 60 or higher and over 1,000 organic visits. That’s where SEO turns into a revenue-generating channel instead of just an activity in the marketing department.
Looking back, what pivotal experience led you into B2B SEO and shaped how you drive recurring revenue today?
At the beginning of my journey, I had a SaaS client that had a lot of traffic coming to the site (20,000+ monthly page views) but very few qualified leads. Understanding that there was no connection between qualified and total leads led me to re-evaluate my understanding of SEO as a function of revenue rather than simply a function of driving traffic.
After we made a shift to focus on intent-driven keywords like “best [category] software for enterprise” and created comparison pages with links from industry publications with a Domain Rating of 60 or higher, we saw a 55% increase in demo requests within six months.
This changed my perspective on how I think about SEO today for B2B companies. I focus on recurring revenue metrics such as pipeline contribution and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) rather than rankings that look good on paper. Additionally, I recognize that only a few high-intention visits will generate more revenue than tens of thousands of visitors who have no intention of converting into a paying customer. This change in mindset has transformed everything for me.
Framing SEO as a revenue engine, what framework do you use to tie search intent and pages to pipeline, MRR, and ARR?
My process starts with aligning the search intent to each funnel stage and assigning revenue projections to each page type. I use the results to evaluate pre-targeting audiences (top of the funnel), lead generation (mid-funnel), and driving high-intent searches (bottom of the funnel) to each type of page to measure success against SQLs and closed revenue versus just visits to the page.
Next, I build what are called Revenue Clusters, which consist of:
- 1 Primary Commercial Page (top of funnel) supported by
- 5-10 Intent Driven Content Articles (mid-funnel) that interlink to each other and are all connected back to authority links from sites with a DR of at least 60% and 1,000+ monthly visits to those URLs.
Using this model, we generated a 38% increase in demo bookings for a single SaaS campaign within 9 months. Ultimately, every keyword must demonstrate its ability to contribute to the Pipeline, MRR, or ARR growth before targeting it.
Building on that, how do you turn your ICP and buying‑committee research into a keyword and content map that sales believes will close?
I do not use keyword tools to begin my research. I use recorded sales calls and pipeline notes as an initial starting point. For instance, if three different stakeholders repeatedly ask about implementation timelines, integrations, or internal buy-in, these would become keyword clusters (e.g., “[category] implementation timeline” or “[product] vs legacy solution”). This data is pulled directly from revenue conversations and does not rely on guesswork.
Once I have mapped out all the themes I have identified to the funnel stage they belong within and what the desired outcome is for each stage, I will then create content against those themes based on what I found in my research. For example, I aligned my finance-driven ROI pages and comparison pages to opportunity creation and influenced revenue in the CRM for one of my SaaS clients. Additionally, when the content I created helped the client align their content with four recurring buying committee objections, they experienced a 27% increase in close rates because their prospects were pre-educated prior to the demo. As a result, when the sales team starts to see how content shortens the time required to close deals, they typically become advocates for search engine optimization.
Once the map is live, how do you attribute organic performance to MQLs, SQLs, and closed‑won in 2025 using your analytics and CRM stack?
When I make content mapping (live), I now view organic as a revenue channel within the CRM, not just a source of traffic from GA4. Each of my key pages will have defined conversion actions associated with lifecycle stages, so organic demo requests, trials, or gated downloads will automatically pass their UTM and first touch data into HubSpot or Salesforce. I then track the progression from MQL to SQL and attach revenue that has been influenced back to the original organic entry page.
In 2025, I am heavily dependent on multi-touch attribution and not on last click. For example, with a recent SaaS account I used, organic only represented 28% of first touch conversions, but when looked at full funnel touchpoints, it acted as the influence for 61% of closed-won deals driven by other marketing approaches. This quickly changed budget and resource allocation strategies. The simple truth is that unless SEO is visible in pipeline reports along with that of paid media or outbound marketing, it will continue to be undervalued.
When high‑intent capture channels plateau, what experiment do you run first to create net‑new demand and lift qualified leads?
The first test I run when high-intent keywords flatten out is competitor-conversion hijacking. To do this, we create alternative and comparison pages for the terms “[competitor] pricing” or “[competitor] vs [category]” and then run intention-matched retargeting ads to these pages, along with a sales follow-up sequence to buyers already in the market, instead of waiting until the bottom of the funnel has more volume.
While this occurs, I also expand into problem-aware demand by identifying upstream pain-point searches that the buyer persona will search for prior to knowing that our category exists, and creating educational content clusters that lead to product pages. With one B2B SaaS client, this two-pronged strategy increased qualified organic leads by 34% over the next six months when core demo keywords had plateaued. If demand has plateaued, you must find ways to intercept it at an earlier stage or try to redirect it from competing companies.
For near‑term wins, which single technical or on‑page change has most reliably moved revenue within one quarter in your recent work?
My top pick for a reliable way to drive incremental revenue within 90 days is to strengthen internal linking to commercial pages. In most B2B environments, there is a lot of traffic on blog content, but there’s a lack of effort to direct visitors with authority and intent from those pieces of content through demo, pricing, or comparison page experiences. In working with high-traffic blog posts, I create contextual links between those posts and bottom-funnel URLs using intent-based anchor text.
In a recent engagement with a SaaS client, we restructured links within the internal linking structure of the 40 most visited blog posts to point to three commercial pages. Within 90 days, those three commercial pages saw a 29% increase in organic pageviews and a 22% increase in demo requests without adding any additional blog posts or creating any additional inbound links. It may seem simple, but it works, and it’s because you are repurposing authority that already exists for the purpose of directing traffic to pages that can close.
To keep finance aligned, how do you forecast SEO’s contribution to MRR and ARR for the next two quarters in a way they will trust?
I analyze SEO based on a linear pipeline versus a ‘how much traffic flows into’ forecast model. The beginning is based on current keyword positions, estimated CTR at each position, and past velocity based on historical trends that pertain to the estimated movement within the search engine, thus converting that into MQLs at the same rate as current MQL conversions.
The next step is converting SQL percentage to close rates in our CRM system and applying that to the actual revenue contribution for the two quarters following the forecast.
For instance, if three pages at the bottom of the sales funnel move up from rank 8 to rank 4, we would anticipate an increase in CTR from 3% to 8%. For a SaaS client, that could potentially equate to an estimated increase of 18% for booked Product Demonstrations, which finance can then utilize to determine average deal size and close rate.
The importance of this process is that it relies on information provided by finance as opposed to the assumptions of marketing, therefore making it easier to gain buy-in from finance. In other instances, once the forecasted values are on par with those in the CRM, finance loses trust in the model.
As the program scales, what leading indicators tell you it’s time to reallocate budget between SEO, content, and paid to sustain pipeline growth?
I tend to observe SQL velocity as a primary signal rather than just traffic. If we see an increase in organic traffic, but the rate of SQL creation has flattened out, this typically indicates that we may be over-investing in top-of-funnel content, and we should consider readjusting our budgets to support bottom-of-funnel pages and/or paid capture.
Conversely, if we start to see an increase in paid cost per lead (CPL) while also observing growth in organic-assisted conversions, this signals to me that we should continue to double down on our SEO efforts.
I also continuously monitor both keyword share of voice (SOV) for commercial terms and the pipeline influenced by channel. For example, in a SaaS account we were monitoring, we found that organic was responsible for 58% of closed-won deals while we experienced a 22% increase in paid CPL quarter-over-quarter. We reallocated 15% of paid budget to fund the development of commercial SEO and content refreshes, which stabilized the pipeline growth rates within two quarters. Our decision to allocate funds was based on cost per SQL and revenue efficiency rather than where the funds would come from.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Here’s what I would add to the above list of tips: SEO for the B2B space must be looked at as a revenue-generating function and not just as a type of content. The end goal is not to get traffic; it is to generate a pipeline.
The businesses that have been successful in leveraging SEO as a service have been using a combination of SEO with sales, their CRM data, and finance since day one. When the way that you communicate the results of your SEO program changes from looking at your rankings to reporting on how much revenue was influenced, or cost per SQL, the executives will start to change their buy-in immediately. I’ve witnessed how some SEO programs went from being perceived as a slow-burn channel to creating 40% to 60% of their influenced closed-won revenue in less than 18 months.
SEO is not about the number of pieces of content published. SEO is about the intent behind publishing a piece of content, and being able to measure which pieces of content actually influenced a sale.