The Difference Between MOFU, TOFU, and BOFU Keywords

Another day, another set of keyword categories to talk about, right? There's a near-endless way to divide up the concept of language and how it relates to search, or group keywords by their attributes in some way. I've talked about seed keywords and long-tail keywords, I've talked about zero-volume and zero-click keywords (and how they aren't the same thing), I've talked about co-occurrence in keywords, and a whole lot more besides.

So what are these new acronyms? What are MOFU, TOFU, and BOFU keywords? I don't know about you, but if I hadn't seen these acronyms before, I'd assume someone is messing with me. TOFU keywords: keywords about pressed soy milk blocks, right?

Well, actually, you probably have heard of these keywords before, just not by the acronyms. They represent parts of a well-known structure in marketing: the sales funnel.

With me so far? Let's go through that funnel and talk about these three types of keywords, why they can be important to use properly, and how to find and use them.

First Up: Defining TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU

To start with, let's just dig into the definitions of these three classes of keywords.

The FU part of the category stands for Funnel, as in your sales funnel.

TO stands for Top Of. MO stands for Middle Of. BO stands for Bottom Of.

So, you have your Top of Funnel keywords, your Middle of Funnel keywords, and your Bottom of Funnel keywords.

Each group of keywords is reflective of the purpose of that stage of the funnel. It's also a way of reflecting the search intent behind the keyword when it relates to your sales process.

Personally, I subscribe to a five-intent paradigm for search intent.

1. Navigational. These are queries where the user wants to go somewhere, like when they type in "Netflix.com" in the search bar.
2. Informational. These are queries where the user wants to learn something, and are most often satisfied by Google's knowledge graph and AI overview these days.
3. Tutorial. These are queries where the user wants instructions for how to accomplish a task, usually via DIY.
4. Commercial. These are the flip side of informational, where the user wants to learn more about a product or service, or compare several products or services for a task.
5. Transactional. These are queries where the user wants to actually make a purchase, so they want to find the appropriate storefront or checkout page.

How does this line up with the three-group paradigm using TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU?

TOFU, at the top of the funnel, generally encompasses informational queries and is the "awareness" stage of the sales funnel. Sometimes, tutorial queries also fit this bill, as people look for how to accomplish something and are recommended your product to do it.

MOFU, in the middle of the funnel, is the "consideration" phase, where the user is aware of your product or service and is considering if it suits their needs. Informational, tutorial, and commercial queries can all satisfy this need, depending on how deep in the process the user is.

BOFU, at the bottom of the funnel, is the "decision" phase, where the user is making their determination. This is mostly where commercial queries can be found, but also sometimes transactional queries as well. Often, the shift from commercial to transactional doesn't necessarily have a new search involved, but sometimes it does.

You'll note that navigational queries aren't present in this paradigm. Most often, navigational queries are from people who already have a need and knowledge and know where to go, so if anything, they fit in the bottom of the funnel. But they tend to be less useful as a keyword to target because it's usually just your brand name, which you should already rank for. You're pretty unlikely to win over someone else for their own brand name, too.

As always, when I talk about a keyword paradigm, the importance isn't a rigid adherence to the structure; it's getting used to looking at keywords, searches, and user behavior through a new lens. Think about things in different ways.

How to Find TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU Keywords

Now let's dig in a little deeper. If you want to tangibly make use of this paradigm, how do you do it?

It all starts with keyword research, as usual. Different kinds of keywords benefit from slightly different kinds of keyword research, though more general keyword research techniques will find all three kinds of keywords, and you'll need to sort them out yourself.

Keyword Research for TOFU Keywords

Keywords at the top of the funnel are those with search intent that relates to awareness. These are people who don't actually know about your brand or your products. Generally, what they know is that they have a problem, they want to solve that problem, and they don't know how to do that.

Some of them might search for the specific pain point they're experiencing. They want to be more productive for the new year, so they look for "productivity tips," "time management tools," or whatever. At this point, they haven't heard of you.

The keywords at this top level tend to be general and vague. They're how-to keywords and tips, tricks, tools, and lists. These people not only aren't usually looking for products, they might actively turn away from content that appears too commercial. They want information and tips, they want strategies and techniques, they don't want to be told to use a tool or buy a product.

The exception is when the query is something that specifically can only be solved with a tool or item. If someone wants to buy a car but knows they don't have the cash on hand, they'll be more receptive to information about car loans. But, they still probably don't want your car loan application form; they want a loan interest calculator or an explanation on dealer financing instead.

A lot of keyword research tools focus on these kinds of queries because they're some of the most common, most broad, and most easily targeted kinds of keywords. Tools like Answer the Public and anything that scrapes Google's "people also ask" boxes are going to be primarily TOFU keywords. These broad awareness-stage topics also align well with what are known as pain point topics.

TOFU keywords often look like:

• "How to organize multiple projects at once"
• "Tips for better time management"
• "How to get out of debt effectively"
• "How buying a car works"

Keyword Research for MOFU Keywords

The middle of the funnel is where people are more aware of the details and particulars of the topic they're looking into, and they're often a little more receptive to sales tactics. They'll be looking for landing pages, comparative pages, reviews, and features lists.

Keywords here are still likely not branded searches, but they might occasionally include a brand or product name, in the context of reviews and comparisons. They know they need a power washer or a high-yield savings account or a project management platform, but they want to read a list of the top ten of those to compare, look at features lists and cost breakdowns, and make a decision for themselves. Building out these comparison-focused pages starts with a solid keyword list for comparison pages.

Middle of the funnel keywords are often some of the most valuable you can target in your marketing. They're close to a sale and give you a lot of room to be convincing. But, they're still fairly broad. They aren't guaranteed to result in a sale (not that anything else is either, to be fair), but they're better at converting than TOFU keywords.

MOFU keywords often look like:

• "The best project management tools"
• "Top ten time management apps"
• "Best debt reduction company"
• "Car loan interest calculator"

Keyword Research for BOFU Keywords

Bottom-of-the-funnel keywords are often branded keywords. These are queries that use your product name or brand name. The destination isn't always your product page, though. Instead, the user might be searching to get to your website to then click around and browse, or they might be hoping for a comparison between several products you offer, or they might just want a landing page they can compare to the landing pages for your competitors.

Since you already have the user's awareness and interest, you don't need to spend overly long in your content trying to convince them you're capable of solving their problems. Instead, you need to be providing tangible, useful information. I'll get to that more in a bit, though.

Finding BOFU keywords is often harder using tools because of how niche and branded the keywords tend to be. Tools aren't going to necessarily give them to you as good keywords because the volume is low, so you need to pay specific attention to how you can make a more generic keyword into a relevant branded keyword. Content targeting these users also tends to have the hallmarks of a high-intent blog post.

The best sources of these keywords tend to be your own analytics. How are people finding you? What keywords are they using that relate to your brand? Those tend to be your BOFU keywords.

BOFU keywords often look like:

• "buy XYZ project management software"
• "download pomodoro app"
• "Apply for car loan"

How to Use TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU Keywords

Finding the keywords is just the first part of the battle. You also need to know how to use them.

This comes down primarily to two things.

The first is understanding your audience. You likely already understand your audience when they convert. You have information on demographics, income levels, industry, and all the rest. You can tell whether you're doing numbers with the single moms, dominating the industry amongst growth hackers, or standing as a very attractive option for multinational enterprises.

What you need to do, then, is look into that same information higher up in the funnel. You'll generally have two possible sets of results. Either it's the same audience but a little broader, with people who don't quite meet your core audience peeling off on the way down, or you'll have a much more varied audience where a lot of people drop away for various reasons.

The former means you're good at targeting the people who convert, but it might mean your top of the funnel is too narrow to attract other possible audiences. The latter means you're good at attracting a wide range of people, but bad at convincing them why they should be more interested.

The second element is creating content appropriate to the stage in the funnel. You can only do this when you know the search intent and funnel stage behind the keyword, and the attributes of the people you're targeting with the content. Otherwise, you can end up with overly generic content or otherwise ineffective content.

Creating Content for TOFU Keywords

The content you create for the top of the funnel tends to be broad, informative, and focused around building EEAT. They're great as parts of content clusters feeding into central authority-building pages.

Content at this stage takes many forms. Informative blog posts, podcasts, videos, guides, e-books, checklists, resource lists, and discussions are all relevant here. These are the kinds of content you create to get people to come to your site, not expecting anything beyond a visit.

The goal here is to create as much of this as you can, to have the broadest mouth possible. Think of it like fish that feed on microscopic krill in the water; the bigger the mouth, the more water they filter, and the more they capture. Whales with the biggest mouths capture the most.

All you really need to do with this content is establish that you're an authority. The more people see your name, your brand, your site in the results, the more they'll come to trust you. Obviously, the quality still needs to be good, and the information needs to be accurate, but your biggest perk is volume. If you have the choice between a longer, more detailed post or two shorter posts with niche but relevant value, the two shorter posts will likely do more for you. How many blog posts you publish each month matters more at this stage than at any other.

Creating Content for MOFU Keywords

The content you create for the middle of the funnel will have more tangible information. Instead of a discussion of dealer incentives and car fulfillment, it's a step-by-step tutorial for car shopping. Instead of a discussion of the theory of finding keywords, it's a guide on how to use the Ahrefs platform for keyword research.

Specificity, tangible and useful information, and utility are the name of the game here. People in the middle of the funnel know who you are and at least somewhat trust you, so now they're extending that trust to look for your advice. That advice will guide them on further research or on accomplishing a task, and if it works out for them, they will continue to trust you.

How-to guides, tutorials, product lists, recommendations, comparative posts and similar are all part of this section in the funnel. This is also the connective tissue that bridges the gap between the top of the funnel with its content clusters and the bottom of the funnel with landing pages and sales pages.

You might also build microsites and landing pages here, depending on how your strategy is focused. If your business is structured in the classic "demand generation, lead generation, sales" structure, this is lead generation as well.

Creating Content for BOFU Keywords

Bottom of the funnel content tends to be heavily focused on sales. It's not the kind of stuff you see ranking in Google for generic queries; instead, it's the kind of thing users navigate to your site and then dig to find, or you promote aggressively with navigation buttons, banners, and sidebars.

Content here encompasses sales techniques. You might have a video walkthrough of your product, an interactive demo page, a webinar to show it off, case studies on how effectively it works, and so on. Various free tools that tie into your main offering are also common. To give you a directly tangible example, my "blog post ideas" section is a great example.

This is all the kind of content where you expect your audience to, by the end of it, click a button to exchange money for your product. It's focused, it's salesy, and it's not generally meant for organic SEO, though it does still need to be indexed for people to find.

Which Kind of Keyword is Most Important?

All of them. All three stages of the funnel are crucial to optimize for their intended purpose. TOFU focuses on bringing in the most people while maintaining relevance and building trust. MOFU emphasizes growing trust and reliability and explaining why you're the best choice for the task you perform. BOFU seals the deal with conversions. If you miss any of them, you lose out on what makes a business a success. Understanding what topic clusters are and why they matter can help you cover all three stages more effectively.

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