Top of Funnel: Traffic Channels & SEO Explained (Edition #3)

Riley Kearl - Senior Marketing & Sales Growth Partner | B2B Funnel Clarity & Pipeline Systems – Turn Traffic ​into Revenue 

March 30, 2026


Here we are at Edition 3 of Funnel Clarity Weekly! Last week we mapped the basic funnel Traffic → Leads → Sales, and got some great responses, thank you to everyone who commented and messaged. This week we are zooming in on the very top of that funnel: Traffic channels / sources.

Do you know your top traffic channels? And more importantly, do you know which ones are actually producing leads and revenue, not just visits?

Most founders I talk to can tell me what they spent and what they did (ads, posts, content, SEO, events, partnerships...) but when I ask which channel produced their best leads last month, things get vague pretty quickly. Sound familiar? Let's get into it.


The 7 Channels of Traffic

Here's how I break down the traffic channels (aka sources). You don't need to be great at all seven, but you do want visibility into all of them because the winning mix is genuinely different for every company.

Before we go through each one, where can you actually find this data?


Where to find your channel data (keep it simple)

In Google Analytics (GA4), head to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition. You'll see a breakdown by Default Channel Group.

The three numbers I look at per channel:

If you do nothing else this week, pull 6–12 months of data and identify your top 2 channels by engagement quality and lead outcome. Not just traffic volume, actual lead actions.

For SEO specifically, pair GA4 with Google Search Console (Reports → Performance → Search Results). GA4 tells you what people did after they landed. Search Console tells you whether you're being found in the first place. You need both. If you don't have them set up, do that now. And yes, Bing Webmaster Tools is still worth setting up too.


The 7 Channels Explained

The goal is to increase trust online, we do this by increasing the number of touchpoints. You need many (10-20?) touchpoints to get a sale (especially in B2B). These channels are your trust touchpoints.

1. Paid

Paid covers search engine ads (Google, Bing etc), paid social, display ads, and paid sponsorships. It's the fastest way to generate traffic if you have the budget for it, but there's an important caveat: if your website conversion is unclear (whether that's the messaging, the design, the speed, or the offer) ... then paid ads will just amplify the problem faster and add to your marketing costs.

Paid traffic is rent, not an asset. When the spend stops, the traffic stops. It can absolutely be worth it and I've seen it work incredibly well (a $55K budget generating $5.7M in quotes is a real example from my own work), but it works best when the rest of your funnel is solid. If you're seeing high volume but low quality leads from paid, it's usually not the platform's fault. It's a funnel and messaging problem.

Paid also includes traditional advertising like billboards, newspapers, bus stop ads etc. But we won't get too much into it here as it is not directly linked to a digital funnel (although it can be linked by urls and QR codes).

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO (aka Organic Search) is the long game and it compounds over time, which is what makes it one of the best investments you can make for long-term inbound traffic. It's also not just writing blogs. Good SEO is a combination of messaging that matches search intent, solid site structure, credibility signals, and technical basics all working together.

Two things to make sure you have set up: a sitemap.xml file (so search engines can understand your URL structure) and a robots.txt file (so crawlers know what to index and what to leave alone). These are table stakes.

SEO can feel slow and thankless for a long time, and then one day it takes off. Your investment now will pay off later, sometimes much later. SEO is still very relevant in the world of AI. I like to describe GEO (more below) as "advanced SEO". Some of the basic tactics overlap but the aim is different. Your SEO foundation is going to help your GEO build later so don't neglect it even if you've heard people say "search engines are dying".

3. Email

Boring old email? Yes email! Get in the inbox! Everyone has email, multiple emails. Email is probably the most underestimated channel in B2B, and I think it's because it's not flashy. It is crowded in those inboxes...but users curate what they want to see. So it needs to add value, so if done right it can really increase traffic. Email nurturing is where a lot of B2B deals get quietly won, especially when your sales cycle is long.

This includes linkedin newsletters (hi 👋), true email newsletters (any platform), onboarding sequences, lifecycle emails, reactivation campaigns, and partner co-promotions. If you're generating traffic but have no nurture sequence in place, you are leaving future revenue on the table. People who visit your site and leave aren't necessarily gone forever, they just need more touchpoints and more time.

4. Backlinks (Referrals)

Clickity Click...Backlinks are links to your site from others: partner websites, directories, review platforms, media mentions, community posts, industry blogs. A quality backlink is essentially borrowed trust, and the right referral from a relevant and respected source can outperform even your best paid ad.

Not all backlinks are equal though. A relevant link from a trusted industry site is worth far more than a generic high-volume site. Beyond SEO value, backlinks also tell you something useful about where your credibility is coming from, which is a great signal for partnerships and positioning decisions.

Low quality backlinks negatively affect your domain authority. Use the Google Disavow tool to tell Google you don't approve of those links. Probably not worth it to actively reachout and ask links to be removed but some do this (SEMRush has backlink tools for this).

5. Direct

Direct traffic is the channel that confuses people the most, and it can be a bit misleading. At its best, Direct represents people who already know you. They typed your URL directly, saved a bookmark, found you through an in-person event, or saw your details on a business card or physical collateral (traditional ads).

But if your Direct numbers are very high, don't automatically assume your brand awareness is through the roof. It might be true! But it could also mean your UTM tracking is missing, your tracking code is broken, or cross-domain journeys aren't being captured properly. Direct is a signal worth investigating more, Google is known to dump any unknown traffic source into the direct bucket.

6. Social Media

Social media is primarily a trust and demand creation channel before it's a lead channel, especially in B2B. It builds awareness, increases touchpoints, and gets your point of view in front of the right people over time. Direct leads from social are possible but usually come after someone has been in your orbit for a while.

All the social medias!! TikTok so cool, is Insta Facebook? Is my company a person now? What a can of worms, ugh amirite? My advice: pick one or two focus platforms you can actually sustain and show up on them consistently, rather than spreading yourself across five and burning out. Consider "being there" on others by reposting similar content using tools like Buffer but your "main" platforms are where you invest in your followings the most

There are conversations happening about your industry/niche/software across social wether you are there or not, so still keep an eye on those conversations wether you decide to have a profile or not. But social works best when it connects to a clear point of view, a repeatable content format, and a logical next step (newsletter, lead magnet, call, workshop etc.). LinkedIn is the obvious one for most B2B companies and I'd say YouTube if you have the appetite for video creation. But be careful, YouTube SEO is it's own beast. Are you ready to tackle it? Choose platforms wisely.

7. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

What I also call "advanced SEO", GEO is simply about showing up for human users inside AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overview. GEO is built on SEO foundations and so they work together, a good reason to work on both simultaneously.

I covered this briefly in Edition 2 and we'll go much deeper in Edition 7, but here's where to start:

Create content that is structured to be cited by AI tools: clear headings, FAQs, comparison content, direct answers to specific questions. Add an llms.txt file to your site (similar to robots.txt but for AI agents. It gives ai-agents the key information about your business so they're more likely to surface you to human users). And if you want to go a step further, create a dedicated page (public but not linked in the menus) built specifically for AI bots to read and understand your offering, pricing, and use cases. Message me and I'll send you a really good example of what these both look like.

GEO is still early and moving fast. You don't need to rebuild your whole strategy, but you do want to start thinking about it and slowly incorporating the basics. We'll revisit this much deeper in Edition 7.


A simple process to pull this together

This is the same process I use with clients when we're getting clarity on their channel mix:

Step 1: Map all 7 channels and check your tracking isn't broken (UTMs, GA4, Search Console set up properly).

Step 2: Identify which channels are driving engaged traffic and which are driving actual lead actions/GA4 Events. Further down the line (in Sales Funnel Clarity heaven) you would know which channel turned into a sale (more later).

Step 3: Decide your mix going forward. Double down on what's working, fix the leaks, and stop spending time on what isn't moving the needle.

Step 4: Keep reading this newsletter because it will get increasingly meaty and more coming you need to know!


Last question as I sign off for the day:

What are your top 2 traffic channels right now, and do you actually trust the data behind them? Especially from those of you running B2B SaaS or services businesses. Drop it in the comments or send me a message directly.

Next up is Edition 4: Leads and CRO

Next week this is where we talk about website conversion, lead quality, and how to create content that works for both humans and AI without overcomplicating it. Read Edition 4 here.

As always, if you want to dig into your own channel mix and figure out what's actually producing leads and revenue, book a call with me here: https://calendly.com/rileykearl/cmo-discovery-call

Riley


PS. I used ChatGPT as a starting point for this one, rewrote in Claude and then edited much of it myself. Curious if you can tell the difference from Edition 2 (which I wrote entirely myself and then used as the basis of my writing style to get this one off the ground). Let me know if you noticed! Do you care? Am I becoming a robot too?


PPS. Where are you at with your own personal AI journey? I am probably somewhere in between level 1+2 myself but getting more towards level 2. This is outside of the GEO topics discussed above, I am thinking about these levels as follows:

Level 1 - Productivity improvements / assistant (IE: Writing or content help)

Level 2 - Workflows and automations giving more time savings (advanced)

Level 3 - Going full "Agentic" with multiple steps, reporting back, using company data (most helpful and very advanced)

...similar levels can be outlined for your company, your employees are probably already using AI even if you don’t want them to. Put the policies in place and embrace it! Diving further into these topics in edition 7.


Read Edition #4 on LinkedIn