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- [00:01]
A
Hey, everyone. We don't usually dive deep into specific tactics as topics on this show, but I had to make an exception for this one. I sat down with SEO expert and founder of Breaking B2B, Sam Dunning, to talk about how SEO is evolving in the age of AI. He doesn't believe SEO is dead. I think a lot of people hold that stance. But he does have a really refreshing take on how it's shifting and particularly why messaging and customer centricity matter more than ever, which really aligns with my thinking and our thinking episode. So this show is packed with actionable insights, which I think is great. I love this conversation and I think you're gonna too. You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto. Here we go. Hey, Sam, how's it going?
- [00:52]
B
Hey, thanks for having me on. Look forward to the chat.
- [00:55]
A
Thanks for coming on today. I'm really excited about this one. For folks listening, we talk a lot about like data architecture, unit economics, we talk a lot about that stuff. We rarely get into the weeds on actual marketing and go to market tactics. So I'm excited to have you on today, Sam, just to get a little, a little nerdy on the topic of SEO, but I'd love if you could give folks a little bit of an intro on yourself, who you are, what you do.
- [01:18]
B
Sure thing. Thanks for having me on. So my name's Sam Dunning. I'm founder of a company called Breaking B2B. These days mainly working with B2B tech SaaS, similar companies and most of them have similar problems. Right. They have small marketing teams. They're probably tired of seeing competitors above them in Google organic search or now AI search, essentially stealing mindshare pipeline and inbound ops. Or maybe up to now they've just invested solely in things like paid media events or just built their pipeline from the founders network. So we tend to fix that with a bit of an unusual approach to SEO. And I also run a podcast called Breaking B2B where each week we into a SaaS marketing leader for them to share growth strategies or I share a solo episode with a weird SEO case study or what I'm up to, or some weird B2B marketing strategy I'm working on for our business. And whether it worked or not, that's what I do most of the time.
- [02:09]
A
Very cool. Yeah, yeah, super pumped. And that's actually one of the reasons why I thought it would be particularly interesting to have this conversation today. One thing I'm seeing a lot of, I would say in the last year or so is just the things, the tactics that we have historically executed across go to market have almost stopped working in the same level of effectiveness that they used to be. And I think SEO is one of those things, right? Companies spend a lot of money to rank higher in search, you know, to build a content strategy around keywords and things like that. And I think that that's changing a lot as a lot of things are with commoditization of the Internet. And I think the way AI particularly is changing. I've kind of got this theory that like, is Google search dead or is it going to be dead with the rise of things like Claude and ChatGPT and things like that? So what is your thinking around all of that?
- [03:03]
B
Yeah, SEO's dead, cooling's dead. Code email's dead, paid media is dead, everything's dead. At least usually if you scroll the LinkedIn feed, everything's dead apart from that service provider, the service they're offering. Right. But jokes aside, it's a massive change up. There's a massive shakeup coming on right now, especially in search. For example, Google in the States have rolled out AI mode, so that's had a massive change. There's a lot going on with Chat GPT, with LLMs, there's a huge shake up. Google have had AI overviews out for over a year or so. So there's so much that's moved. It's probably been in one of the biggest shakeups in search for like the last 10 years. So there's a lot, a lot of change. And nearly every marketing leader that joins a discovery call with us at breaking B2B usually says like, what should we be doing on ChatGPT? Should we completely ditch Google and just go all in on LLMs? I suppose I take a bit of a foundational approach with that and there's kind of few, a couple mindsets that I have right now. One is, as it stands, not saying for months or even years down the line, Google's still the demand collection beast in the sense that a few months back a guy called Rand Fishkin and a company called Spark Poro that are owned, that worked in collaboration with Datos run by SEMrush, they did a report and it basically said at the time of that report a few months back, Google still had 373 times the searches of all the AI tools, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. Now what does that mean? Well, that means folks are still using Google as it stands because it's almost like a habit people have just done it for so long, right? It's like I'll go to Google. But queries that folks use on tools like ChatGPT are much more advanced. Like as a tangible example, someone might go to Google if they're in buying mode and search for something like best proposal software, see the traditional 10 links, maybe click one of those organic search results and evaluate on a tool like ChatGPT. Completely different. They might search something like, I'm a CMO of a 200 person SaaS, I have this exact requirement. I'm struggling with this pain point. I want to evaluate three vendors within this budget and I need it within this timeline. So the search is so much more detailed, so much more advanced. And I suppose the other angle to consider as it stands, if you're selling to a more technical ICP, then chances are they're probably using LLMs pretty much everything and have ignored Google. Whereas if your ICP is a bit more traditional, a bit more old school, then they might still be using Google for a lot of their search. So I know I've thrown a lot in the mix, but that's kind of where we're thinking about, but happy to dive in as much as you wish.
- [05:35]
A
That's interesting. The one other thing about I think ChatGPT too is just the reality that we put so much information about ourselves in there that it starts to get to know us, I think, and sort of like tailor, it's almost like we don't have to sift through the noise, it just serves us the things that we need to know. But I've also had my own experience where like not everything actually populates in CHAT GPT. Oh well, you forgot about this. Oh, sorry, blah, blah, blah. So I think that there's still some gaps, I think in that technology where, you know, something like Google is more robust in that way. But what do you think the actual business case for SEO in 2025 onwards really is? Like, how should companies really think about its ROI relative to other investments?
- [06:16]
B
Okay, so it's a lot to unpack with that. Now SEO can still work, drive pipeline, no doubt about it. So it can still work. I've always said there's a few angles to this, right? And I suppose this is a long winded answer, but SEO is not a fit for every business. Definitely not. Like I turn away a lot of B2B SaaS companies, whether they're marketers, founders, where it doesn't make sense. One particular use case where it's just not worthwhile is if you're in a Kind of newer category that's not so established, AKA there's no demand collect on a channel like Google LLMs or AI search because people aren't aware that your solution actually exists. So in that case I'll always say look, unless you've got an endless pot of cash and you want to build tons of demand or rank for kind of real top funnel stuff like problem based searches, et cetera, SEO is probably not your best bet. Work out where your ICP spend time, get trusted information, those platforms like educate them, build trust, entertain them. Then when there's demand, focus on searches using my answer. But pretending you're in a category, you offer a solution that is fairly mature that people do know exist. And as it stands, Google can still work for sure. So if someone's searching for, I don't know, calendar, scheduling software, proposal building software, whatever your tool is, there's still ways to rank. Put out content that shows up, that resonates with your dream clients, goals, pain points, jobs to be done, positions your product as the painkiller, builds some trust and then either captures that demo or not. Now, SEO is changing a lot. So there's something that a lot of SEOs are calling the great decoupling. And what they're talking about is that their impressions are going up. So if you look at their traffic and or look at their results in Google Search console, impressions are going up, but clicks are going down. Because with the introduction of things like AI overviews in Google, so the instant result above the fold and LLMs folks are now getting more and more 0 click content in the sense that these search engines, these tools, they, these LLM engines, they want to give you as much information, a bit like LinkedIn, right? They want to give you as much content in their platform without you clicking externally. So whereas historically SEO was all about work out what dream clients are searching, create best in class content that shows up, earn backlinks, pr, et cetera to reinforce those rankings to get top three organic and then get the click through. Whereas that can still work to drive pipeline for sure we still run that play, but it's moving into certainly over the more months and years, build up mindshare in your category because with Google's AI mode, with ChatGPT with other LLMs, the links to click through are smaller and smaller and not every result has a link to click through. So it's becoming more like build mindshare for your category, consistently show up when someone has the problem, compares vendors, looks directly for your solution. So you're the known brand and then they'll probably go direct to your homepage or search directly for your company and it'll show up in the result. And the attribution is branded search or direct traffic.
- [09:03]
A
I'd want to talk about that a little bit more. Like how do you actually build up mindshare? I've been thinking a lot about this in the last few weeks and months is just I think value prop messaging, customer centric messaging, you know, like the strategic narrative is so important for companies now. And I think for a long time that was overlooked. I think it was let's just pay for visibility, have our brand show up in the feeds. I think now it's becoming a lot more difficult and expensive to reach people. And I think more than anything that's where sort of like the messaging really needs to break through the noise. I'm not sure if you agree with that or if you have a stance on that, but I think that sort of feeds into this idea of like building up mindshare in a particular category.
- [09:45]
B
Or niche a hundred percent. I think so many marketing leaders, founders that I jump on discovery calls with and we're not working with huge companies quite often. The time we're working with series A, series B companies.
- [09:56]
A
Okay.
- [09:57]
B
And the amount of times that I'll chat to these folks and when we kind of talk about things like what's your messaging, what's your differentiators in your marketplace, where do you stand out, where do you fall short? And they don't really have rock solid answers. And I ask things like what's your customers jobs to be done? Well, their struggling moments, what their top three most expensive problems and they just don't have answers. And like you said, that comes down to foundational issues where they just haven't done the customer research and it's not always their fault. Sometimes it's because perhaps VC funded and they've got so much pressure on them to get results fast that they've completely skipped the customer research phase. And this goes way beyond SEO, right? This is just B2B marketing fundamentals. Knowing who your dream client is, who you've looking in CRM to know who you've historically sold well. Top industries that have historically bought well from you, like the top three most expensive problems, they face the impact of not fixing them. Their main motivators, what happens if they don't fix it? Why do they choose you over competitors? Why do they nearly not choose you? Like knowing this, putting the time into into like recently won clients, recently churned clients, et cetera. To get these valuable insights is going to make sure, like you said, your messaging actually hits home. So it doesn't necessarily matter if it matter if it's your homepage value prop, if it's a blog article, if it's a listicle, if it's comparison page, if it's an ad on LinkedIn, if you don't know what your dream clients care about, what they're kind of nervous about, what motivates them, then your messaging just won't resonate. And so many folks try to jump into execution before they do that. Right. And it's just something we see time and again. Like it goes way beyond SEO. It's just B2B marketing 101.
- [11:30]
A
Yeah, I think too, I was listening to another show just over the weekend and I think being able to interpret and aggregate those insights has become so much easier now with ChatGPT. Right. Like just throw your, your call transcripts in there and you can very quickly learn reoccurring themes that sort of like come up in these conversations that you're having with prospects or your customers. But the other thing too is one thing that we see, you know, with a lot of the people that we work with is obviously we talk about this all the time, like the inability to actually track go to market performance. And then when you're doing that, you might be looking at all of the things you're winning, which is great because we should be analyzing the data and sort of like the themes and trends that come with that. But what about all of the areas that you're losing? I think there's so many insightful breadcrumbs of information that we can gather from those people as well. And unless you're measuring that or scrutinizing that, it sort of gets lost. But I sort of like digress on that a little bit. But I think that really all ties back to really strongly and heavily understanding your icp, their problems, why you're winning, why you're losing, et cetera.
- [12:37]
B
Definitely. I mean, I suppose I'm at advantage in the sense that whilst I'm a founder at Breaking B2B, I run all our discovery calls, I interview marketing leaders on the podcast weekly, I'm active on LinkedIn. So I get that feedback loop from, from our ICP all the time. I mean it's meta, I'm a marketer saying to marketers, but I'm actively talking to I knowing what's going on the market. I mean that helps so much. Right? And I appreciate as you move mid market enterprise that Becomes a lot more difficult because you move further and work away from the customer and you have layers of management dealing with it. So that's the tips that you shared. Then having a system to pull that customer, research to systemize it to look for the patterns and share that with the team, then those things become more and more important.
- [13:15]
A
Yeah, exactly. So when you talk about building up Mindshare, how do you do that?
- [13:19]
B
What's your stance on that from an SEO perspective? Okay, good. So there's a number of ways and some of this will be to do research and some of it will be completely outside of search. So can search completely influence like mindshare? Of course it can. I mean be to buy B2B. Buying journeys are messy. Messy as anything. Right. For example, we've had sales calls where on the how did you hear about us form someone's put SEO that I'll ask them on the discovery call, how did you stumble upon us? They'll be like, oh no, it wasn't Google actually tuned into the podcast, then followed you on LinkedIn, then grab the newsletter, followed that for months, then tuned into your podcast again, saw you, did a case study on LinkedIn and eventually reached out. So SEO is just one piece of the puzzle and that's often the case. So I suppose my point is that full funnel SEO and what do I mean by full funnel? I mean smart SEO always starts with working out exactly what dream clients search for. Not for fun, but when they're in that 5% of buying window, when they're actively in market for your offer, so they're searching for like best X software or competitor alternatives or best X software for industry or for use case or maybe a specific integration that they need. So working out what those dream clients search for and exhausting that, that's the best way to collect demand. But how do you build mindshare? Well, I suppose one way is showing up for those kind of terms. So then what's probably happening is whoever's in the buying committee is searching for something like that. They may be seeing your landing page or article prop up, whether that's in Google or an LLM. And then they're probably sharing it in Slack with our exec team. So you've kind of been added to the shortlist. I suppose another way of doing it is a lot of top funnel SEO is being wiped out. So for example, like traditionally SEO companies used to sell folks on like we'll get you traffic at all costs. Like we're going to ramp up your traffic by 500% whatever the issue with that is that often relates to top funnel SEO. So going for things like informational searches, like what is a KPI, how to build a website, that kind of stuff. But you search that now on Google, it's going to be wiped out by an AI overview with an instant answer. Some people might click through to an article, right? But at best they're probably going to grab the info they need in bounce or maybe sign up for a lead magnet for more info or maybe check out your YouTube channel or LinkedIn. At worst, they'll get the info from AI views and bounce. So it's about jobs to be done. What we call kind of detailed, crisp and specific how to searches can work when they're very relatable to going back to what you said, customer research. Like I don't know how to let's pretend we sold proposal software. And a struggling moment was when a Google Docs is like how to build a sales proposal for an engineering teams within Google Docs. Maybe that's a struggling moment. You've deciphered and then you put something super specific, super useful. They remember your brand, they share it in Slack to one of their teammates that's struggling with it. And now your brand has a little bit of mindshare, et cetera. And I suppose the third piece of the puzzle is right now in LLMs, it's almost a hack to if you search for anything kind of bottom of funnel, like show me the best SaaS, SEO agencies or show me the best kind of scheduling softwares for this use case, whatever, nearly. They're basically citing things like Reddit or they're citing listicles like an article we reviewed the top 10x software for 2025. If you can get consistently listed in those article listicles. This is a tip. If you've got a marketing team that have got a bit of time on their hands, reach out to all these articles, the authors of all these articles and try and get your product cited in them. That's almost like a hack to show up in the nlms. And if they can mention your brand, even better if they can give you a backlink. So I'll give you an SEO boost. But if they can mention your brand, that's like such a nice boost. If you can, you can do a bunch of those each week. It's going to get you a lot of visibility in the LLMs because they cite product listicles a heck of a lot. And again that comes down to being remembered.
- [16:53]
A
Very cool. I love a quick tip. Things like that that are actionable. So thanks for sharing that. One thing I want to talk about is SEO measurement. Right? Like where do you typically see SEO breakdown as a revenue driving channel? Like what are the signals that SEO is working or that it isn't working? A lot of times we see companies think about how they can reallocate their marketing budget or their go to market budget and we're very quick to make the assumption that, oh, everything, you know, the dollars that we're spending on SEO aren't working. So let's just kill it basically. What's your philosophy on that?
- [17:24]
B
Yeah, yeah. So there's, there's a bunch of ways that we do it. So historically what we've done is we track everything. So I suppose you have leading and lagging indicators. The leading indicators might be right. We've deciphered that these are our quote unquote money keywords. This is what a dream client is likely to search when that 5% buying wind, when they're actively in market for our solution. And that could be like best X software or competitor alternative or competitor pricing or best X software for use case or for industry or integration for use case, whatever. So we've deciphered those are our money keywords. One could be okay, we've built out best in class content for each page that we want to show up for those. We've made it super detailed, super useful, made it educational, helpful, trustworthy, position our product as a solution and so on. So we can see that we've published those pages from a Google perspective. Historically that might have been okay. These rankings have improved. We've got these top three organics, We've now improved click throughs for these. We've now improved session time on our website. So people aren't bouncing straight away. They're going to this page and then maybe they're flicking through to pricing, to case studies, to results, et cetera. So the session times on these pages are good. And then lagging indicators, if it's top funnel, they've, they've taken a sign up or they've grabbed an asset, it's bottom funnel, they've requested a call, they've booked a demo or they've taken a free trial or free demo of our solution, whatever the go to market is, if it's PLG or sales led. So that's historically kind of leading through to lagging indicators. Now that is getting changed quite a lot. Like I say, because for a lot of things now you're getting those Google AI overviews, you're getting results above the fold. So you're seeing brands positioned without necessarily clicking through. And the same for LLMs. And the problem is LLM measurement is quite difficult because tools like ChatGPT aren't always feeding through data into analytics. So you've got to go by a few things. So as well as measuring kind of everything you can, using analytics tools where you can, you've got to make sure that you have quite a rigid process when these folks are filling in forms. Yeah, how did you hear about us? But also then pre qualifying that again. So if you do have a sales LED motion, then when you're AE or sales engineer, whoever is speaking to them on call, just ask questions like what was your full journey to discovering us today? Make sure it's quite open ended like that, not giving them preset options, but saying like what? What was the full journey to summoning upon us today? And then I'd even layer that with what actually made you take the time to fill out our demo form or take a free signup Because I know I don't necessarily book a demo or take a sign up on every site I see. Was there something that kind of made you take that time and then getting that kind of extra manual data, chucking that wherever you can, whether that's your CRM, that then bumps into slack to the rest of the team and kind of doing that on top and also realizing that measurement's getting harder and harder, not just for SEO but for most channels. Now that's a few things I'd advise on.
- [20:09]
A
Oh, I just feel that so deeply in my, in my soul because we see it all the time. Like we're just looking, we're trying to find like narrow it down to one thing that got somebody into an active sales cycle. And as you had explained earlier, it's really multifaceted. Usually a buyer does a whole whack of a whackload of things before they ever talk to anybody. They want to educate on their own. They don't want to be sold to, they want to do that discovery in their own time. And when we think about it that way, that could mean multiple different touch points or conversions or things that happen. And SEO might just be like one little snippet of that. But if we have no ability to track it or measure it, how do we know, you know? And I think a lot of times tactics like SEO and efforts around that just get under leveraged or underreported just for all of the reasons that you just explained.
- [21:02]
B
I think a lot of it feeds back to like Customer research as a feedback loop is just so important just to be actively talking to the market and just knowing like if you're speaking to recently won prospects or maybe prospects that in your target account list and maybe using podcasts as a Trojan horse, however you're doing it and you're saying like what are these, what are the channels you use to get trusted information? Like if you need xyz, where are you going? And if they're saying things like Google is one, but I'm also going to communities and more so domain research on YouTube, whatever. And if you're consistently getting this pattern, then it's part of the journey. Is it the sole thing they do? Probably not. I don't think any of us just do one thing and then suddenly book a demo or grab a trial. There's like, even for low consideration items, there's usually quite a lot of stuff behind the scenes.
- [21:44]
A
Oh absolutely. And so much of that I think is untrackable. Even conversations with people you go on Reddit. Like I for one am somebody who's looking at Reddit threads all the time when I want reviews on, you know, a product or a brand. And I think, yeah, that a lot of that is still happening. And I think we're stuck in this generation of automation. Right. We want everything to be super simple and automated. And I think you had said asking somebody what their journey was to like speaking with a rep is a really good question to ask. It's not something that can be automated, I don't think. And I think a lot of times sales teams don't want yet another thing that they have to do. They just want to get the deal done. But I think when we think about go to market as a system, that information empowers the entire factory in so many ways that simple data capture automation just can't get. So I think that's really, really important. Especially now in the age of everything being AI driven or automated. I think that human component is so often now overlooked, yet it's very, very powerful. I think that's my personal viewpoint on that.
- [22:52]
B
I'd agree. Yeah, I think that kind of comes down to marketing leadership as well. To actually enforce that with sales and say that this has got to be part of the process, especially with so many things now becoming harder and harder to track. That is one of the main things that's, that's going to help you get that data point. Yeah.
- [23:07]
A
One thing I consistently see with literally every company that we work with at Passetto is in Salesforce, like opportunity contact Associations, right. You've got an opportunity. And then of course, the people who are engaging in all of these things leading up to becoming a qualified opportunity are at the person level. And you want to be able to connect the dots so that you can understand, okay, what did the people do leading up to this account opportunity? And it's just pulling teeth to get reps to like actually make, unfortunately it's a manual process, but to make the opportunity contact association so that we can close the gap and understand those little breadcrumbs that led to that opportunity being created. And so, yeah, these things are, I think a little bit of an uphill climb, but they can be so powerful to an organization.
- [23:54]
B
Definitely agree.
- [23:56]
A
Hey, quick break from the episode. We're heading into the second half of the year and for a lot of teams the pressure is really on now. Most of you, you're behind on your targets and your executives are watching you really closely under a microscope, expecting you to turn things around. And here's what you don't need. You don't need more top of funnel activity that is going to burn the budget just to generate leads. What you really need is full revenue visibility and a fast diagnosis of what's stalling performance and also a clear GPS for where to go and how to get there fast. That's exactly why we built our revenue visibility sprint. In just a few weeks, you'll understand what your biggest blockers are, identify your biggest data gaps and what you actually need to fix with the actual data foundation and then have a step by step plan to fix everything so that you can start to rack up some wins this quarter and also build the foundation to track what matters going forward on your own without so much pressure in trying to pull together the metrics and tell a story. It's simple, clear data and the ability to make decisions easily. If you want the playbook, go to passetto.com to book a call or shoot me an email@carolynassetto.com what content formats have you actually seen with your clients and the people that you work with to be the best performing when it comes to driving conversions? Can you give us some information on that?
- [25:21]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a very simple process or we have a very simple process at breaking B2B when it comes to actually crafting content. So I'll give you kind of two angles. So if you go from Google search, which is still working well to drive pipeline at the time recording traditionally I talked about early what you do is you'd work out. I have something called a Money keywords, matrix and that basically I encourage any company that wants to take search seriously to do this simple four stage column and that's like some of this we talked about. Work out what your category terms are. So if you provide, I don't know, like proposal software like I talked about earlier, I don't know why I always give that example, but I do. So how can people refer to that term? It could be appraisal software, appraisal tools, appraisal, platform, et cetera. And it's the same pretty much any SaaS, tools, platform software, et cetera. The next column you build out is and you can use ChatGPT to enable you. Here is the industries that have historically bought well. So looking at your CRM data, top industries you serve that have the problem you solve, have bought well historically, have cash to easily invest in the offer and motivated to get the job done. The third industry is the competitors. Like what the competitors that always come up in sales calls almost to an annoying level. Those top three or four that you're always being sliced off again, your sales reps hate them because they're always in conversations. You sometimes lose deals to them. And then the fourth column is what your prospects jobs to be done. This links back to research. What are their struggling moments, what becomes so annoying or frustrating that they start evaluating a solution like yours. Build those four columns and that'll help you build up what we call kind of long tail search terms. So from there you could build out things like best proposal software for FinTech or for sales teams or HR for recruitment or any alternative route. It might be PandaDoc alternatives or Quiller alternatives or proposed for alternatives and so on. So that process you can probably best to build out alongside your sales and marketing team so you can kind of work out what makes sense. Then what we have done historically is work out our money keywords. And often those money keywords, if you look at them on a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, they have low search volume but they have high sales intent. So probably start with the ones that are fairly low keyword difficulty, have low search volume but have high intent behind them. And what you do historically is you've just searched them on Google, you look at what content format is favored, is it a landing page, is it a article, is a product listicle comparison and whatever page is showing the most, just build that because you know Google likes it already. But review what's ranking top organically and do build a page that just blows out the water. So this is why Leveraging customer research is going to be a superpower because you can make sure your page really resonates with what dream clients care about. So for example product listicles just rank well for most stuff like best X softwares of 2025. A lot of SaaS companies make the mistake in the sense that there's nothing wrong with positioning your tool or your platform as number one but they'll just talk about how great they are and then the other nine competitors they'll just slate them. And one, that might cause you legal issues and two, no one's going to trust you so you want to leverage things like when you talk about your product like this is where we're, this is where we fall short, this is who we're not for, but this is where we excel. These are the problems we solve that others don't. Weave in plenty of social proof like there's nothing worse than an article or a page that's just a wall of text. So make it product led. Integrate your product, maybe a gift with your products. Aha moment Client case studies that have actually maybe even if it's an alternative article like competitive alternative or proposal for alternative let weave in a customer testimonial that swap from your main competitor. That's a really strong proof point and then make it easy to take them for them to take a sign up or a free demo, whatever and then do a fair comparison of the other vendors. So that's, that's essentially how you kind of find what's called search intent with Google. What's historically worked well. Work out what page ranks for your money keyword, build something that's way better than everything else on the Internet that's backed by customer research. Make it handle real sales objections. Something a lot of folks are scared to do on especially on landing pages is they put generic FAQs at the bottom like I don't know, let's pretend we were in my case like for my SaaS SEO agency page. What is a SaaS SEO agency? What does SEO mean? It's like everyone knows this stuff instead why are you so expensive? Do I get shipped off to a junior account management after you sell me are you going to give me the 6 to 12 month usual spill that results take a year and just answer those questions that you get on sales calls because speeds up sales enablement and also helps search engines because you're actually answering like those real painful questions that people really care about and stuff that might even be on a Reddit thread. And then the other thing is yeah Going back to what I talked about earlier for LLM visibility beside listicles, like getting feature building your own list of calls, so having your own owned list of calls for each product, each category and also trying to feature on others. Also making sure that the content of your pages is really ICP specific. So because folks are searching for such detailed queries and prompts, making sure that one your content is well split up and chunkable. Because LLMs pull chunks of content, they don't pull pages like Google. And making sure you go real in depth ICP use cases, integrations, all that kind of stuff. So it's easy for LLMs to cite that content.
- [30:11]
A
Very cool. You had said something and that was to make sure that the content that you're creating is product led. And the one thing that I I see a lot more often than not are and I'd love to know your feedback on why this is. But companies that super over index on thought leadership, we know I thought leadership is important, right? To build credibility, trust, build sort of like human connections with people become credible. But I think what happens when we go so deep on thought leadership is that we often forget that we're we're actually selling a product too. And while we might integrate sound bites of what the product does or what the company does in that thought leadership, it's not product led. I actually recently consulted with a company, they're like a low ACV SaaS product, super powerful product, but they do nothing in the way of like product marketing whatsoever. It's strictly thought leadership. They're not putting anything out on their social feeds. With respect to product, what's on their website is super minimal. And so I'd love to just understand your point of view on why being product led with respect to content can be really powerful for a SaaS company.
- [31:20]
B
Yeah, I think for a high level I'd be interested to know that companies go to market as well. But I suppose at a high level, like there's two ways to look at it. One is that prospects are extremely skeptical. As a prospect, myself included, I'll do as much as I can to avoid speaking to a sales rep or to getting into like an email chain or something like that. So folks want to see as much under the bonnet of your product or your offer as they can before they even consider like sharing their email alone, filling out a demo form or even taking a free trial. So if you can't show under the bonnet of your product like the aha moment where it clicks into play, where it actually gives some value, showing Some proof showing some screenshots in action so they actually know what it looks like under the hood. Like why the hell should they trust you to like with their contact information, let alone to speak to a sales rep? I mean at the bare minimum, hrefs like the SEO tool, they're like the masters of this. They like nail the SEO. So if you pretty much search for anything around SEO tips or guidelines, you'll see a HRS blog and their blog articles like just full of the product, like this is how you can do it if you're struggling with this specific SEO task. But here's our product and this is how it does it and this is how you can do it within our tool. So being useful to the prospect while showing how your tool or your offer your platform, your service is the painkiller to that is people think that's too salesy. But why are you investing in SEO program if you're not making your content a sales page? And likewise the same for LinkedIn. Like it's like posting all this stuff on LinkedIn but never talking about your brand. Like what do you expect to happen?
- [32:47]
A
100%. And yeah, I wish this was more straightforward or like easy to digest for marketing or for go to market executives. Overall, this one company that I was mentioning, almost everything that they're sourcing is BDR source. They've got a pretty heavy BDR team and so they're doing like their motion is like cold outbound for the most part. And I believe their conversion from like meeting booked to closed one is under 20% I think around like 18%. And they're not doing any product marketing. It's all thought leadership and events driven. Right. So they're bringing people out to events and a pretty solid like podcast and content strategy. But I'm like if you just layered in product centric content and build a strategy around that too, people when you go reach them might actually be more aware of your brand and know a little bit about what your product does or you know, you know, serve as really solid enablement for the stuff that your BDR team is doing. I think there's just so much power to what you are saying that I think in a lot of cases really gets overlooked.
- [33:47]
B
There is for sure. But are there exact team, like from outbound backgrounds?
- [33:52]
A
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah.
- [33:54]
B
It's like whenever I try and I say try and sell SEO, but if I jump on a call and say let's say the marketing director wants to invest in SEO program, but if the rest of leadership have never historically done SEO and they don't believe in SEO or they don't know how SEO works. There's no chance in hell we're selling SEO to that client that die hard outbound or their die hard events like it's just not going to happen. There's almost like a 2% chance of me selling into that account. Unless someone like high up in leadership has historically done it or wants to do it or is motivated. It's so hard to change the status quo.
- [34:24]
A
Yeah.
- [34:25]
B
Unless one of their peers maybe goes up to them, whoever they trust and says look, we've grown this much through search and they think oh we're missing out on search. Then the marketing exec like yeah, we've been talking about this for three years but replace search with any go to market.
- [34:38]
A
Yeah. I think when it this conversation that we're having amongst others, like it really comes down to that mindset shift at the top that really needs to happen to get cross functional alignment in these types of, these types of initiatives. I have one more question and that is very specific to what you had just posted on LinkedIn. I thought it was a great post. But if you were leading a small marketing team and leadership gave you 90 days to start crushing competitors with organic, what are the steps that you would take?
- [35:08]
B
I'd love to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure thing. So essentially at a high level we talked about earlier. So one is get with. It's basically piecing together everything we talked about in this conversation. So one is like make a list of what your top current customers, what do they actually look like? So you know those industries you've sold well into the problems they had, the industries, the main offers you actually want to be selling. Do that like kind of step one, step two like build a world class moat around your your website, but just kind of your ecosystem in general. And what I mean by that is make sure you've got a page for your site that covers each and every of those, one of those use cases, those products, those solutions. When someone's searching for every term that has high sales intent around your offer, whether that's best X software, competitor, alternative, whether that's offer for use case or some kind of integration. Then you have a best in class page that positions your product as a solution that is super useful, it's helpful and that addresses any concerns and follows basic technical SEO, that's the next piece. The third is to leverage any existing content you have that's actually kind of ranking or has some visibility and make sure that's kind of optimized using the above flow. The next piece of the puzzle is to kind of do what's historically called off page work, but now I'd consider more building the brand and building mindshare, getting visibility, visibility on LLMs. And that is, yeah, reaching out to all of the top external sites that have articles that have those listicles like Best X software, Best X offer, Best X tool, Best X category, et cetera. But you don't always have to pay like some of those sites that are maybe like really exclusive, I don't know, Forbes, et cetera. Yeah, you will have to pay their pay to play, but a lot of them you'll be able to do some kind of value exchange to get featured on Listicle. I say that because I've done it myself. And that could be invite them to the podcast, maybe you add them to your own internal listicles, maybe you offer to do a piece of press, maybe you give them a LinkedIn shout out, maybe there's some kind of value exchange, you do them a guest post, whatever, so you don't have to. This is especially good for small marketing teams that tighten budget. And the reason we want to do that is just because LLM cite them so much. So if you can get a brand mention is super useful. And also if you can get a backlink back to one of your money keyword pages, that's going to be nice for an SEO boost. The next thing is having some kind of system to be active on Reddit and Quora. Reddit especially gets cited a lot in the LLMs and a lot of marketers, like you say yourself, you're going there to kind of get that trusted unbiased information. So working out what are the specific threads, sections where folks are talking about your solution, problems you solve, or looking for vendors, et cetera, where you can have a way to actually be genuinely useful and only mention your brand where it makes sense. So that's the next play. The next thing I do is once I've got all of that in order, I'd look to leverage existing press. So one of the best like this is like one of the best historic ways to earn backlinks is you work out whoever from your company, whether that's your founder, marketing leader, revenue leader, et cetera, Whoever's active on PR, podcast guesting, et cetera, copy and paste their LinkedIn profile URL into a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush. Then click the backlinks tab, look for all the niche relevant websites that have historically linked to that profile and then reach out to the authors of all those articles or press releases, et cetera, and just ask if they can. A lot of them will have just linked to the profile. So instead I ask if they can mention your company name in your category and if they can do a backlink to you to one of your relevant pages that you're trying to rank for that, give you a boost in LLMs and Google. And then the other thing, I suppose apart from doing all of that stuff, that alone, if you can make a system to do that consistently each week, that's going to give you a decent uptick in Google search as well as LLMs. And then I suppose the other thing is, I'm very mindful of this right now because outside of SEO, LinkedIn organic reach is tanking like crazy. So I myself are trying to go super big on earned media. So if you can one, if you can get whoever is relevant from your team, founder, et cetera, to guest on niche relevant podcasts, there's a really good site called listen notes.com and you can literally type in your category. Mine might be B2B marketing or SaaS marketing. Someone else's might be fintech, finance, whatever. And you can see the top shows in your niche and you can see whoever hosts them. You can reach out to them, like have a system to reach out to a couple each week, do one better than everyone else does. Instead of sending a wall of text email to them, pitch them with a customized loom and try and give some genuine value. And again, that can help you get boosted. But with the YouTube video, you can get some PR, you can get a link back, you can get a brand mention on the article. And I suppose the bottom of that process is eventually starting your own kind of media system, whether that's your own YouTube channel, podcast. That's a lot harder work. So I'd prioritize the other stuff and then eventually kind of move into the more earned media mindset. And a lot of that goes outside SEO, right into building a content engine. But there's a lot of. Because I'm quite scrappy, I've always worked at bootstrap startups. There's quite a lot of ways that you can get kind of these wins if you're willing to put in the time and the effort or if your marketing team's willing to do it.
- [40:02]
A
Who are you finding? Yeah, I love that. Who are you finding with the companies that you're working with or just, you know, the companies that you're familiar with? Like who's owning this inside a company, Is it a dedicated like SEO person? Is it a content head of content, something like that? Is it who's the champion for work.
- [40:18]
B
Like this varies really. Usually. Sometimes head of Demand gen, sometimes marketing director, sometimes VP marketing and this like bear in mind I'm working with like series A, series B and beyond. That's usually who I'm seeing own this kind of stuff. Yeah, or super small companies that might even be the founder. But yeah, usually the marketing leader, not the cmo because obviously they're managing the team.
- [40:43]
A
Right. Great. I love all of that. I think the whole piece around earned media is so can go so far today. I've noticed too the LinkedIn organic reach has just changed so much in the last couple of months and so love that other approach that people can take. Do you have any bold SEO predictions for the rest of the year even going into 2026? Like we're talking a lot about how, you know, the rise of AI has changed things so much, probably more than ever in the SEO space. What do you think is is going to happen?
- [41:16]
B
Oh, a few things really. I suppose the way that I'm different, or at least I think I'm different to a lot of SEOs is that I look at marketing a lot more holistically because I actually run all our sales pools and I've got this direct feedback loop with my market B2B marketing leaders on my podcast and salespools, et cetera. I think customer research like we talked about should be at the heart of everything. So it doesn't matter how strong your SEO or any go to market is if it's not backed by customer research and what your dream clients care about, fixing, learning, improving, etc. It's still going to fall flat because it doesn't resonate. And I suppose the other thing like the more the way it's going is the website traffic from channels like Google Organic and so on is is going to drop down. Your impressions are going to go up, so your visibility is going to go up, but it's going to show more as as direct traffic or branded search. So that's something to be be mindful of. We're moving more and more, especially as Google. I think eventually they will. Right now I believe in the US Google AI mode, which is their version of ChatGPT is optional. But I see a year or so down the line, maybe two years, that won't be optional. So it'll be just like ChatGPT's interface or their own version of it and Thereby traffic from Google. Historically, we've had the 10 links to select is going to go as we know it. We move into mindshare mode. We move into kind of building brand, building awareness around your category and getting more and more kind of direct traffic, branded traffic, and kind of understanding that's the new way of search.
- [42:35]
A
I think that's so important for people who are like in the trenches in marketing to be able to very clearly articulate that to their executives and leadership teams as these things change. Just really fully understanding the impact that that's going to have on their reporting, on their analytics, on their strategy, all of that.
- [42:53]
B
But the thing is, it shouldn't be too much of a shock because if you sell a high ACV product. And let's think like a lot of companies invest a lot into paid search, right? Google Ads. And it's rare that someone's going to see a Google Ad when they search for your category solution the first time or your software or your industry type. They're probably not going to book a demo the first time they ever see it. And then you're probably going to retarget on LinkedIn, maybe other channels. Stay top of mind. Maybe you've got thought leadership leadership ads from your founder that stays top of mind like we do. If someone doesn't convert, we spin thought leader ads to them. And it's like this, this cycle. So nothing's ever been that quick or fast. It's just search is changing. We still need to stay top of mind. We still need to be useful, we still need to serve prospect content they care about. It's just the way that happens is changing.
- [43:35]
A
Right? Yeah. So not SEO is dead, It's SEO is changing.
- [43:40]
B
I think so.
- [43:41]
A
Cool. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation. I'm sure that our listeners are going to get a lot of value from this because I think we went deep on some of these topics and just tactical things people can start doing today. People want to find you, we'll put it in the show notes. But if people want to find you, tell us what they can find you.
- [43:57]
B
Yeah, I really enjoyed the chat. Appreciate having me on. So there's three main ways. One is LinkedIn. Sam Dunning. That's daily ramblings I post on SEO and B2B marketing. The second is my podcast Breaking B2B. Or the third is perhaps you've listened to me ramble on and you think you finally want to search or fix your search strategy to start driving pipeline, then it's breaking b2b.com happy to have a chat and see if we can help.
- [44:16]
A
Awesome. Thank you so much. It was great to have you on. Appreciate the time and we'll chat with you all soon.
- [44:32]
B
Sa.