SEO/GEO is generally associated with online visibility and customer acquisition. However, search data can also reveal opportunities that go far beyond these objectives.
These insights do not emerge simply from reading SEO data. They become valuable when combined with market knowledge, feedback from business teams, and the company's actual operational constraints.
Through three practical examples, let's explore how SEO — and, more broadly, the analysis of signals from search engines and LLMs — can become a genuine business intelligence tool.
1. From SEO Signals to Product Opportunities
An SEO analysis can sometimes uncover a business opportunity that a company had not previously identified. However, this requires going beyond the initial findings, comparing the data with business realities, and taking the time to explore the opportunities that emerge.
This is exactly what happened during a website redesign project in the carpentry and joinery sector. An existing product, which was not being sufficiently promoted on the website, caught my attention during a semantic SEO audit. What initially appeared to be just an SEO signal would eventually contribute to the evolution of the client's commercial offering.
1.1. Identifying Demand That the Company Is Not Promoting (or Is Underpromoting)
1.1.1. The Context: A Website Redesign
As with every client engagement, the first phase involves carefully listening to the client's needs, challenges, objectives, and priorities.
This essential phase allows me to establish priorities, ask questions, build arguments, and suggest new opportunities.
This is how a project in the carpentry and joinery sector became part of my client portfolio. The company was preparing for a website redesign, which is the ideal time to review the marketing strategy from the ground up and reassess existing priorities.
1.1.2. Questions Raised During the Semantic SEO Audit
During the semantic SEO audit, one product — a particular type of door — caught my attention:
- It showed potential based on search volume.
- It appeared to be associated with the client's existing website, but ranked well beyond the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Even better, I was not familiar with this product.
That was enough to spark my curiosity. Curiosity is a valuable quality when it comes to thinking outside the box, going beyond initial observations, and avoiding a purely mechanical approach to execution.
I therefore felt there was an opportunity to capture some of the search demand. The search intent appeared transactional, yet the results being displayed did not fully meet what I would expect as an internet user looking for this product.
This observation alone was not enough to conclude that the market was untapped. Nevertheless, it was an interesting signal worth comparing with the client's offering and actual market conditions.
I then wondered whether some of the demand might be expressed through less popular, more descriptive, or less obvious search queries.
After all, what do we do when we cannot find a satisfactory answer?
We rephrase our search. And when we do not know the exact name of a product? We describe it.
But why, despite this context, was my client not appearing in the search results?
1.1.3. Analyzing the Client's Website for This Product
The product was indeed part of the company's offering, but it was not sufficiently highlighted on the website. It was grouped under broader categories. Its page also had very few relevant internal links and did not appear to benefit from a dedicated backlink profile.
At this stage, the idea did not require extensive additional research. A few checks and a focused discussion with the client would be enough to better understand the product's role within the offering and assess whether further investigation was worthwhile.
1.2. Comparing SEO Potential with Business Reality
This led to a discussion between the client and me. Here is a summary of what emerged:
| Question | Findings |
|---|---|
| Does the product address a specific need? | Yes, according to the business teams. |
| Is it sufficiently highlighted in the current offering? | No. It is grouped under broader categories and lacks visibility. |
| Do online searches reveal potential? | Yes. SEO data suggests demand for this type of product. |
| Have sales teams identified this demand? | No. It had not come up in the known sales discussions. |
The client remained skeptical about a product they did not believe was in demand. However, the information gathered justified testing the hypothesis without committing to a significant additional project.
1.3. Testing the Opportunity Without Expanding the Project Scope
Since the product was considered marginal by the client and the available online responses to this need appeared relatively limited, I decided to focus on:
- Improving the product page more extensively.
- Strengthening the internal linking structure.
If the hypothesis proved correct, we could then consider taking things further.
Indeed, a business hypothesis generated by SEO does not necessarily require a major investment. It can initially be tested through an action proportionate to the level of risk and the resources available.
1.4. From SEO Results to Commercial Impact
The website redesign helped the product reach the top three positions for its main keyword.
The results went beyond improved visibility: the page generated product-specific leads, whereas previously it had generated none.
This SEO signal therefore revealed previously underexploited commercial potential, leading the client to consider launching a new product range and subsequently creating a dedicated category on the website.
Product potential is one example. However, opportunities can also be found outside the company's own offering, within the wider ecosystem of market players.
Key Takeaways for Your Business
A product that your teams consider marginal may conceal genuine market demand. You do not need to launch a major project to verify it.
- Ask your SEO specialist which products generate searches but receive little visibility on your website.
- Compare this data with feedback from your business and sales teams.
- Test the opportunity through a lightweight action (an optimized page, internal links) before making a larger investment.
2. Analyzing Competitors' Backlinks to Explore Their Business Ecosystem
Backlinks can provide an entry point for identifying potentially interesting players and initiatives. However, they should not be considered direct proof of a financial opportunity.
2.1. Going Beyond Traditional Backlink Profile Analysis
A backlink is not just a signal that matters for search engine rankings. It can also reveal a mention, a reference, or a relationship between two organizations. Depending on the context, this information may open up opportunities that extend far beyond organic visibility.
Analyzing competitors' backlink profiles can therefore help identify potential commercial, partnership, or institutional opportunities.
I deliberately emphasize the word "potential" because a link alone does not prove the existence of a partnership, support, or funding arrangement.
The advantage of this approach is that it can be integrated into an SEO/GEO analysis that is already planned, without necessarily requiring a substantial additional research project.
Tools such as Ahrefs can be used to explore competitors' backlink profiles and identify organizations or stakeholders that may deserve closer attention.
2.2. An Example: Discovering Potentially Useful Initiatives for an Environmentally Friendly Business
The initial analysis aimed to:
- Strengthen my client's backlink profile, as the company had limited recognition in its sector.
- Understand the backlink profiles of established competitors.
Two links caught my attention: one came from a nonprofit organization, while the other originated from a public institution associated with an environmental initiative.
Both organizations had strong reputations and, interestingly, offered dofollow backlinks.
By examining the source URLs, I discovered that they pointed to funding programs worth more than €7,000, which the sales and marketing teams had not previously been aware of.
This discovery immediately attracted their interest.
Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to find out whether management eventually investigated these opportunities.
2.3. Turning a Lead into a Qualification Process
To make effective use of these leads, I recommend following a three-step approach:
- Identify the organization: Understand its role, responsibilities, strengths and weaknesses, and relationships within the sector.
- Qualify the opportunity: Check whether the program, partnership, or support initiative is genuinely relevant to the company.
- Pass it on: Have management or the relevant team review the opportunity, verify the conditions, and decide whether action is warranted.
The digital footprints left by competitors can therefore provide clues about their professional environment, networks, and the stakeholders operating within their market.
These findings should be treated as opportunities to investigate, not as sufficient proof that a business opportunity exists.
Key Takeaways for Your Business
Links pointing to your competitors also reveal who operates around your market: institutions, associations, and support programs.
These are leads, not certainties.
- Ask for competitor backlink analysis to include an assessment of the organizations and initiatives appearing in their backlink profiles.
- Assign someone (management or the relevant team) to assess whether these opportunities are relevant to your business.
- Keep track of what has been investigated and what decisions have been made.
Beyond competitive intelligence, SEO/GEO can also help establish a more consistent approach to understanding the market and customers.
Search analysis can provide valuable insights into people's needs, expectations, and questions. It can also help explore a market that the company does not yet know well before considering expansion into it.
3. Turning SEO and GEO Signals into Useful Sales Questions
Let's look at another opportunity for collaboration between SEO/GEO and the sales department.
3.1. Search Data Reveals Questions, but Not Always the Reasons Behind Them
To identify the questions people are asking, we can rely on several sources:
- Search queries and search intent.
- Questions associated with Google search results, such as People Also Ask.
- Competitors' pages and content.
- Questions, AI-generated answers, and cited sources found in LLM tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.).
These signals help identify topics of interest, potential concerns, and decision-making criteria.
However, on their own, they cannot fully explain why a customer asks a particular question or chooses one solution over another.
This is where feedback from sales teams provides additional value.
3.2. From SEO/GEO Signals to the Right Questions to Ask
The principle is quite simple:
- SEO identifies a topic.
- Marketing turns it into a useful question.
- Sales gathers an answer when the context of the conversation makes it appropriate.
Instead of asking sales representatives to spontaneously report every interesting piece of information they come across, SEO can help prepare a targeted set of questions.
The idea is to use signals identified through search analysis to formulate simple questions that can be naturally integrated into regular sales conversations.
The answers can then be used by the marketing team to improve content, highlight customer case studies, optimize product pages, or refine sales arguments.
Here are a few examples of this approach:
| SEO Signal Identified | Question to Ask the Customer | Potential Marketing Application |
|---|---|---|
| Searches related to a specific use case | In what context do you use this product? | Create or expand a dedicated page for this use case. |
| Searches related to ROI or cost savings | What challenges did you encounter during implementation? | Create an FAQ or practical guide. |
| Searches related to installation or usage | What results did you expect, and what results did you actually achieve? | Produce a data-supported customer case study. |
| Searches related to reliability or results | What convinced you to choose our solution? | Highlight decision-making criteria in trust-building content. |
This table is not intended to become an exhaustive questionnaire that every sales representative must follow systematically.
Rather, it provides a starting point for exploring the relationship between customer needs, sales questions, and potential marketing ideas.
Of course, the wording of these questions will also depend on your sales methods, company values, and the way you naturally communicate with prospects and customers.
The approach should therefore be adapted to your industry, market, and the lead's stage in the conversion funnel.
The objective is to make information gathering more useful without increasing the number of requests or turning sales meetings into market research interviews.
Furthermore, these signals are not automatically proof of commercial demand. Nevertheless, they provide valuable leads for understanding the questions people ask, the criteria that may influence their decisions, and the challenges they face.
3.3. Organizing Information Sharing Without Overloading Sales Teams
The problem is that this information sometimes remains within the SEO specialist's tools.
It gets analyzed and used to produce content, but it is not systematically compared with what sales representatives observe in the field.
Yet a sales representative speaking directly with a customer can provide much more precise answers than search data alone.
They can explain why a particular question keeps coming up, what is actually preventing a purchasing decision, or what convinced a customer to choose one solution over another.
However, they need to be given the right tools to collect this information without making their daily work more complicated.
Here is a suggested approach.
The three key conditions for success are:
- Questions must be targeted and adapted to the sales context.
- Answers must be centralized in a shared space and accessible to the people who can use them.
- Insights must be fed back to SEO and marketing teams to improve subsequent analyses.
This approach offers several advantages:
- Sales representatives do not have to figure out on their own which information might be worth collecting. They receive targeted questions based on prior analysis of market needs.
- SEO no longer relies exclusively on the data available through search tools. It also benefits from qualitative feedback that helps better understand real-world intentions, objections, and usage patterns.
- Marketing has access to richer material for producing differentiated content. Questions identified online can be compared with concrete answers, testimonials, and real customer experiences.
The key point to remember is that the objective is not to make sales teams do more work for SEO, but to make better use of the information they already collect.
Key Takeaways for Your Business
Your sales representatives already know why customers hesitate, make a purchase, or walk away.
The goal is to capture this knowledge, not to give them additional work.
- Start with two or three search signals and turn them into simple questions.
- Centralize the answers in a shared space accessible to the people who need them.
- Schedule regular reviews to ensure insights are shared with the marketing team.
This approach requires a minimum level of coordination between teams, but above all, it requires taking a step back and reviewing internal processes.
3.4. Practical Example: A B2B Blog Without Dedicated Content-Writing Resources
3.4.1. The Starting Point
My client operates in the B2B sector and provides painting services.
The company faces four constraints:
- No internal resources dedicated to writing.
- No budget to outsource content production.
- Limited writing skills.
- Very little time available.
Its website includes a blog where each completed project is presented through photographs and a maximum of three lines of text.
The company already has a process for showcasing customer projects, but the content remains superficial. The customer's context and challenges are barely explained, nor are the approach and resources involved (prioritization, adaptations, team size, etc.).
Yet all available signals (searches, People Also Ask, keywords driving traffic to the website) indicate genuine demand for information.
3.4.2. Listen Before Recommending Solutions
Simply saying "you need to produce more content" solves nothing when the obstacles are real.
I therefore decided to build on what already existed: the published customer case studies.
The approach involves just a few steps:
- SEO/GEO signals indicate what internet users want to know.
- I turn these signals into a few simple questions to ask the team after completing a project (for example: What was the customer's problem? What constraints did the project involve? How did the team organize its work? What did the customer appreciate most?).
- The answers, even if brief, are used to enrich the corresponding article.
- Insights are shared with SEO and marketing to guide future content.
This approach compensates for the lack of writing inspiration with concrete information gathered directly from the source, while the experience is still fresh.
It also avoids having to reconstruct these details later by going back to the customer or the team.
3.4.3. Is It Really That Easy to Implement?
The client agreed with the approach, but the most challenging part lies at the beginning of the process.
It requires:
- Internal education and communication, building trust through listening and addressing concerns.
- Preparing the methodology.
- Launching the process.
The time invested at the beginning, when properly managed, eventually translates into time savings later on.
Key Takeaways for Your Business
You have neither the time nor the budget to produce content?
There is no need to add another task to your team's workload. Simply collect a few pieces of information they already know at the right moment.
Conclusion: SEO/GEO as a Business Intelligence Tool
SEO/GEO data can open the door to three types of business opportunities:
- Evolving your offering: Identifying new needs and use cases.
- Better understanding the competitive ecosystem: Observing market positioning, sales arguments, and the players operating in your sector.
- Improving customer understanding: Exploring their questions, concerns, and decision-making criteria.
In each case, the process is the same: a signal is identified, compared with real-world experience, and then translated into an action proportionate to the opportunity.
Search data is a starting point. Its real value emerges when it is combined with the experience and knowledge of your teams.
Of course, SEO/GEO retains its essential role in driving traffic, improving visibility, and generating leads.
But it can also support decision-making across marketing, sales, product development, and business strategy.
This requires breaking down silos between teams (and their external service providers) and making better use of the knowledge already available within the organization.
The objective is not to give everyone more tasks, but to make everyone's work more effective: SEO/GEO insights inform sales conversations, while feedback from the field, in turn, improves subsequent analyses.
Key Takeaways for Your Business
- Choose just one search signal that has already been identified.
- Share it with another team (sales, management, or production).
- Agree on one action to test within a defined timeframe and decide who will be responsible for it.
