Rethinking Content Strategy: Moving Beyond Keyword-First Approaches
We’ve spent years optimizing for intent and obsessing over keywords, and while those fundamentals still matter, they’re increasingly brittle. Search is shifting. AI-driven experiences, volatile SERPs, and misaligned traffic are forcing us, SEOs, to rethink not just what we rank for, but why we're ranking in the first place and who we’re attracting.
JTBD (Jobs to Be Done) offers a roadmap to make that pivot. It gives us a lens to reframe content strategy - but turning that lens into a working system requires more than understanding the theory. It takes structured, repeatable action.
Start With the Right Questions, Not the Keywords
Many content workflows still begin in Ahrefs, Semrush, or Search Console.
You find what people are already searching for, build around that demand, and optimize for performance.
It’s clean. It’s measurable. It works until it doesn’t.
With JTBD, the process flips. You don’t start with volume. You start with motivation. What’s the job someone’s trying to get done that might eventually lead them to your product? And more importantly, who is that person?
It’s not always the buyer. In fact, for many sites, there are multiple audiences involved in the journey—end-users, decision-makers, managers, or someone floating somewhere in between. Each of these personas may have different goals, different frustrations, and different ways of articulating their problems. Understanding that nuance is critical if your content is going to resonate and convert.
These aren’t answers that keyword tools will give you. They come from conversations with sales teams, customer support, and product managers. In early-stage content engagements, that qualitative input is your goldmine.
You’re trying to surface:
The recurring questions customers ask
Frustrations with competitors or previous solutions
Goals users have that they may not even realize align with your product
Misconceptions or outdated beliefs they hold
Opinions that they need to be reinforced
This isn’t about bypassing SEO tools. It’s about decreasing your reliance on them and honing in on what moves the needle. You want your inputs to be real user needs, not just keyword data.
Search Volume Isn’t the Same as Search Value
One of the biggest hurdles to adopting a JTBD-informed strategy is the resistance to low- or zero-volume keywords. Stakeholders often push back: “No one’s searching for this.” “How do you know this is a worthwhile keyword?”
And that’s often true—because people don’t search for solutions they don’t know exist. They search for the problem, not your product. That’s the gap between capturing demand and generating it. A keyword might have zero volume, but if it directly speaks to a pain point, it’s still valuable.
Rather than obsessing over tools and their monthly volume estimates, start with the SERP. Does the current ranking content actually help? Are real users in forums like Reddit or Quora describing the same challenge? Are your competitors showing up? And more importantly: Should your brand be the one answering this?
That’s where JTBD shines. It helps you create content that resonates deeply, even if it attracts fewer visitors—because the visitors it does attract are way more likely to convert.
We still use volume as a comparative metric—when deciding between two equally relevant JTBD angles, for instance. But it’s never the starting point, and never the final arbiter.
Connecting Search Intent to Funnel Stages Through JTBD
JTBD content naturally aligns with traditional search intent categories—informational, commercial, transactional—but it’s even more useful as a funnel-mapping tool.
Instead of asking “Is this keyword informational or commercial?” ask: “Where in their job-to-be-done journey is this person? Are they just starting to explore possible solutions? Are they comparing tools? Trying to validate a decision to their boss?”
Someone searching “how to migrate marketing automation tools without losing data” is likely earlier in their journey than someone Googling “best alternative to [Competitor X]”. But both are expressing specific jobs to be done.
By creating content that satisfies those jobs and gently guides users to the next logical step, you’re building pathways—not just pages. And unlike keyword-optimized content, JTBD content doesn’t stop at the article. It sets up logical internal links, next-step CTAs, and nurtures real buyer journeys.
We still analyze SERPs aggressively. But we don’t just look at who’s ranking. We look at what kind of content is winning: Is it product-led? Peer conversations? Community-generated answers like Reddit threads or forum posts? These signals tell us how people are thinking about their problem and what kind of voice or format we need to show up credibly.
Forums like Reddit are a goldmine. People speak more naturally there than they do to Google. You’ll often find unfiltered descriptions of problems that haven’t yet been mapped to traditional search behavior. By capturing both the how and the why behind these queries, you get a sharper sense of what your content needs to say—and how to say it.
From Feature-Led to Problem-Led
One of the most common disconnects in traditional SEO strategy is the overemphasis on product-led content too early in the journey. You’ve probably had clients or internal stakeholders say, “We want to rank for our brand name plus ‘features’” or “Why aren’t we leading with the product?”
The JTBD response is simple: Because no one cares about your product yet.
Users don’t search for what they don’t know exists. They search for pain, not product names. Your job as a content strategist is to meet them where they are, solve a problem, and introduce the product as a potential solution, not the hero of the story from the start.
Rankings and traffic don’t disappear in a JTBD world—but they become directional, not definitive.
Instead, success is tied to qualified engagement. Are users spending time with the content? Are they progressing to product pages or demos? Are they converting? If traffic dips but conversions rise, that’s a trade worth making.
And that means looking at metrics like:
Conversion rates from specific articles
Engagement depth (time on page, return visits)
Progression down the funnel (next steps, demo requests, downloads)
If you want to build internal support for this model, frame it like this: You’re trading wide nets for targeted spearfishing. Less volume, more value.
In the long run, this approach builds more resilient SEO strategies. Less dependency on rankings. More alignment with business goals. Better trust signals for users—and for search engines.
As tools like AI Overviews, Bard, and Gemini become more integrated, the way people interact with search is becoming more conversational. This actually benefits JTBD content. You’re not just competing for clicks—you’re competing for inclusion in AI summaries and citations.
Start paying attention to what AI pulls into overviews. These snippets give clues about the structure, clarity, and authority signals Google values. Use that insight to reverse-engineer your own content. Think of it like the featured snippet playbook—but applied to a much messier (at least for now), newer, dynamic canvas.
Final Thoughts
Integrating JTBD into content strategy isn’t about abandoning SEO fundamentals—it’s about evolving them. You’re still optimizing, still tracking, still competing—but with a renewed focus on who your content serves and why it exists.
Jobs to Be Done isn’t just a theory. It’s a content strategy that puts substance over surface. For SEOs who are tired of chasing keywords with diminishing returns, JTBD offers a clearer, more sustainable path.
Start with people. Understand their jobs. Create content that solves them. And let the algorithms catch up.
P.S. I’ll be exploring this topic further at Digital Olympus in Amsterdam on September 11—would love to connect if you’re attending.
Article by
Kavi Kardos
Kavi Kardos is an altruistic SEO evangelist with over a decade of experience leading organic search strategy for top companies in entertainment, cybersecurity, education, and beyond. A former Mozzer, she is the creator of Moz Academy’s Technical SEO Certification and has lent her expertise to Whiteboard Friday, brightonSEO, SEO Mastery Summit, Pubcon, and Women in Tech SEO Fest, among others. Kavi is currently the Director of Organic Growth at KlientBoost. In her spare time, she can be found hosting pub quizzes, playing poker, or watching baseball with a good beer in hand.
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