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Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
972: The Future of Search: SEO vs LLM Optimization with Sam Dunning
00:43:21
Is traditional SEO dead, or just evolving? If you’re wondering how the rise of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and AI-powered search features is changing the rules, you’re not alone!
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- [00:02]
Abigail Pumphrey
Welcome to the Strategy Hour Podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Abercrombie Kids is bringing the ultimate first day energy back to school. It all starts with on trend outfits for that front door photo shoot, plus the coolest tees, shorts and jeans to take them through the rest of the year. Get them ready for their close up and keep them comfy too. Make this grade their best one yet. Shop all things back to school, in store online and in the app. Does working with your accounting software make your head hurt? That's why I'm here to talk to you about FreshBooks, the cloud accounting software designed to make the hard part easy. Lose the complicated process and switch to FreshBooks. Run your billing books and payroll on the same platform. They've made it easy to send invoices, get paid fast, save time on data entry and keep your finances organized. No accounting classes required. With FreshBooks, you'll save time and get peace of mind. Imagine having all of your expenses neatly organized and a clear picture of your business health all in just a few clicks. FreshBooks automates your workflow year round. Snap photos of your expenses on the go, send professional invoices in seconds and track payments seamlessly. Feel more confident about your numbers. Get FreshBooks now 60% off for 6 months@freshbooks.com get started today and thank yourself tomorrow. That's 60% off for 6 months@FreshBooks.com no joke.
- [02:15]
Sam Dunning
I've worked on SEO campaigns where it's taken seven to eight months to get one page published. So speed is your absolute advantage. This is how kind of a lot of our clients how we've kind of come in as an underdog in B2B SEO and kind of taken rankings that we should never have got just because they move aggressively. So one of the main takeaways I'd say is kind of work out your money keywords, money topics, work out what type of page you need to build to rank, maybe weave some listicles in there like we've talked about, and then have publish at speed because that's how you can chip away at those giant competitors that move slow.
- [02:48]
Abigail Pumphrey
Today's guest is Sam Dunning, founder of Breaking B2B and host of the Breaking B2B podcast, who specializes in driving serious leads and revenue through strategic SEO. Here's the deal. SEO is changing fast, and with the rapid adoption of AI powered search and large language models, it's fair to wonder, is traditional SEO still worth your time? Are we heading in a totally new direction? I've shared a few thoughts recently on Instagram about the evolving search landscape and specifically how I'm landing in AI search terms referrals. If you're interested in that, go to bossproject.com AI referrals. I would love to kind of walk you through how I'm specifically doing that, but for now, I'm genuinely so excited to debate the future of search with Sam today. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hey Sam, welcome to the show.
- [03:49]
Sam Dunning
Hey Abigail, thanks for having me on. Looking forward to the chat.
- [03:52]
Abigail Pumphrey
It's going to be great. Before we dive into the debate on the future of search, I'd love if you could give some quick background. How did you start working in B2B marketing and specifically SEO?
- [04:05]
Sam Dunning
I'll try and give you the shortest, least painful version I possibly can. So I if we rewind. Probably 13, 14 years ago I worked in a camera shop that if you've got any UK listeners, I'm not sure if they've got US branches, but it's called Jessup's Camera Shop because I was basically into media. I went to college, which at UK we do after high school and I studied media there, did media studies, went into retail, worked in that shop selling cameras for about a year and realized I absolutely hated dealing with the general public. I'd go up to folks in the UK that were looking at cameras or lenses or video cameras or SLRs and say, hi sir, hi miss, how are you doing today? How can I help you? And they'd literally like swear at my face, tell me to get lost, all that kind of stuff. Like people here are super rude, especially to retail assistants. I don't know what it's like in the us, but that was pretty rough and I thought there must be something else for me, probably about a year in, my cousin was working at a web agency and and said that there was a role going and it was at the time around Sales and bit of project management, did the interview the next day, took that job, never looked back. So I stepped out retail, got into websites, literally learned the trade pretty much as a jack of all trades, which I feel is probably one of the best ways to do it. Just get thrown at the deep end at a small startup and you basically sink or swim. So I was doing everything from sales to managing website projects to building wireframes to liaising with an offshore web design and development team, to customer support, basically everything. So I learned a heck of a lot in a short space of time and eventually became a co owner in that agency. Like years and years down the line, the issue was kind of where the bottlenecks were to growth was we tried to serve anyone and everyone. So we kind of serve small businesses, e commerce, B2B, B2C, tech companies, non tech companies, a bit of everything. So cash flow is always lumpy and up and down. And then eventually what happened was that web design company, their best source of inbound lead flow because I dealt with a lot of sales calls, was SEO. So it kind of struck a note to me towards the end of kind of that partnership. When I was there, I thought we need to offer SEO as a service because it's one of our top inbound lead drivers. Makes sense we offer it to clients. Meanwhile, this was going on whilst I became a partner of the business. I started a podcast that I now run called Breaking B2B where I interviewed B2B marketers, SaaS, marketers and kind of learned their secrets to growing their tech or B2B service company. And I thought, well, I've learned so much, it makes sense to niche down now. I've tried to do everything, I might as well to sell to B2B. Companies that have the problem we solve, are motivated to solve it, have cash to easily invest in it. And SEO is a good way to get a retained client which, as you know, running a business, cash is king. And if you've got a regular source of retained business, it's so much easier than having lumpy revenue. So rather selfishly, I then for various reasons left that business, started my company now breaking B2B about 16 months ago and we basically focus on B2B SEO work with tech and service companies. And I like SEO because I've always done founder led sales. I like the fact that it can drive high sales, intent inbound leads or demos depending on your go to market. I like the fact that it changes a lot, especially at the time we're in right now. There's so much change with AI, search, SEO, LLMs we can dive into. So that's the quickest version I can give.
- [07:33]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, for sure. I think it's so funny how most people assume that experts just come out of the woodwork, but it's just a good reminder that experts are born out of doing the work enough times in a row that you learn about the topic. And so I very similarly started in the website business. I was more on the design side and development. And as far as my knowledge of SEO, it's all because I've been writing and producing content online for a decade. You learn a thing or two about how to drive web traffic. And I am excited to be kind of talking through this because you're right, we are at an inflection point where so much is changing. We have the rise of LLMs and clearly they're going to just continue to dominate. But I think it leaves a lot at question for what resources people should be investing in SEO or not. And maybe the one that I think is the most interesting is so often people will say I want to like focus on SEO, I want to drive organic traffic, but then they're not actually producing any content on their website. They might be producing on social or posting long form elsewhere like on a podcast or YouTube, but they're not putting anything on your site. So I'm curious, what do you think is like the thing to be paying attention to and what are people missing?
- [09:02]
Sam Dunning
Good question. So I'm one of those sick SEOs that thinks not everyone should do SEO. So first and foremost, like you say, if there's folks that are small business kind of tuning in, you perhaps have limited resources. Whether that's a small marketing team, maybe you're running the marketing, maybe you're paying a team. So you want to make sure you're using best bang for buck when it comes to marketing dollars. And I'm one of those weird guys that says not every company should do SEO. And there's a number of reasons I say that. One is if you're offering if your service or your offer your product or your technology or software is not in a mature category now this is quite rare, but it can happen, I. E. You're creating something quite new that folks don't actually know exists, which is common in the software business, in SaaS, in AI tools. Now a lot of folks are creating software that solves problems but haven't historically been sol solved. So if you're creating an offer that's not a well known category, then SEO is not the smartest move because people aren't actually searching for it. Instead, you're way better off working out where your dream clients spend their time, where they get their trusted information from. Work out those top two, three channels, whether that's podcast, LinkedIn, email list or YouTube channel, whatever, or Reddit. And spend your time kind of creating content that talks about the problem solving and position your product as a painkiller, there's makes a lot more sense. The other thing is SEO does need some resource to make a success. So I guess to frame the opposite of what I just said, you're probably familiar with the 95, 5 rule. So any, any one time, only 5% of the total addressable market is actually in market looking for your solution. SEO is at its peak, is a demand collection channel. So you can collect those folks that have the problem you solve, that are looking for your solution, looking for your category, comparing vendors, looking for crisp and specific problems you solve. That's when it sits at its peak to collect that demand. But to build an SEO program successfully, it needs a bit of resource. Whether that's a team doing the research, doing some of the technical work, building out content, maybe doing some link building, some pr, some partnership work, whether that's in house or yourself, whether that's kind of paying a team, it does need that there. So if you think like if I stretch myself to do that or to invest with another range, but I couldn't really do that again, it might not make sense. Like a lot of things right in B2B marketing, if it's not going to get the Runway it needs, it's. It's not smart. And the other thing, I suppose when it's not the best match to wrap this segment up is if you expect results tomorrow.
- [11:32]
Abigail Pumphrey
Oh yeah, it's a long game. It's.
- [11:34]
Sam Dunning
I wish it was.
- [11:35]
Abigail Pumphrey
I know, I know. It's. You're not going to go viral overnight like you can on social. But on social that's such a fleeting moment in time like here today, gone tomorrow, versus the things you invest here can serve you for many years down the line if you're doing it right. I think I'm curious on the, the types of content because before the best way to kind of win at SEO was to answer people's questions. But with the rise of AI, people aren't asking questions on search in the same way they're used to. I think more search is happening with buyer intent and less on the research phase. So how are you kind of editing the kind of content that you're putting out into the world as a result.
- [12:24]
Sam Dunning
Great question, great question. So there's something I talked about, I ramble on about quite a lot on LinkedIn and my podcast is something called the quote unquote traffic trap. That's something that a lot of SEO agencies and contractors used to, used to push in years gone by where they'd focus on traffic at all costs. And that might look in your month end report from your SEO team. Awesome. Like all the charts, massive upward trends, everything's on track. But then you look into your CRM or your sales funnel and there's next to no pipeline generated, no qualified leads, no demos, no signups, and it's like, what's gone wrong? And the issue was we focused on top traffic all costs, which usually in simple terms means top funnel informational based content. Like if someone, as a tactical example, someone searches on Google or an LLM, like what is a CRM or what is a KPI or how to build a website or how to build a funnel. These quite light questions which oftentimes are going to be researched by folks quite early on in their journey, maybe students, maybe folks that are just really, really early in that buying process. And a lot of that content now is being wiped out by Google AI overviews. So you're getting that instant answer above the fold. You don't need to click through to an external site like traditional times. So instead I suppose going back to that 95.5rule, focus on what that 5% of prospects in market would search. And that's basically taking a commercial standpoint with your content. Like what would a dream client look for? I mean, is there, can you think of perhaps an industry that listens to this show or watches this show quite a lot that maybe we could give an example for?
- [14:03]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, I mean we have a ton of designer brand designers, other marketing professionals, SEO strategists, or not SEO strategists, social strategists rather. So people in the marketing space got it.
- [14:17]
Sam Dunning
So I suppose as a tactical example, if they were, maybe if they had a B2B social media agency, let's pretend, or B2B LinkedIn agency, let's say a B2B LinkedIn social agency at the real top funnel, a query might be how to build a LinkedIn strategy, but again that's probably going to be wiped out by a Google AI review. So you get an instant answer above the fold. Whereas if you go for something like Best B2B LinkedIn Ads Agency or Best LinkedIn B2B Social Company or Something like that. It's a lot more high sales intent. Yeah, there might be an eye overview, but someone's probably going to look at the companies that listed, probably look at the blue links below and if they have that intent, click through to a website or at least check the website name and then externally search for the homepage. That's kind of what I call avoiding the traffic trap in the sense that go after the commercial queries first high sales intent prospects will look for. There's a lot more to it and we can talk about that, but that's it at super high level and building.
- [15:12]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, that makes so much sense in terms of building out what's going to be the most effective at actually driving sales. I think people get caught up on the what the search actually would look like. I get that it's for buyer's intent based searches, but do you have any thoughts on like how you identify what those keywords or string of keywords look like?
- [15:34]
Sam Dunning
100%. So if we follow along this money keywords route, what's a dream client going to look for when they need our offer? I basically have this money keyword matrix and the simplest way of doing it is you fire up a Google sheet or an Excel sheet and you split it off into four main columns. First column is what's every way that a prospect can describe our offer. So in the social media company space it could be like, I don't know, social media Training Company or LinkedIn Training Company or LinkedIn Social Selling Agency. Like what's all the way that a prospect could refer to your company. The second column is what are all the industries that we serve best? Not any industries, but industries we've historically sold well, have the expensive problem we fix, are motivated to fix it and if actually want to spend money on it, have the cash to invest. The third is what are the competitors that always come up on sales calls to an annoying level? Those three or four teams, probably agencies in this case that always get brought up on sales calls. Make a list of those. And the fourth column is what's our dream client's jobs to be done? What are their struggling moments? What do they perhaps try to cobble together in house before they get so frustrated they evaluate our solution or what's a common crisp and specific pain point that they're struggling with. That's the four columns and then from there you can build up what we call long tail kind of money search terms. So you might mix them together like as an example, I mean trying to rank for B2B LinkedIn agency would be quite tough, be quite competitive. So that might be a term that you'd slowly chip away at as a long term. But if you went for like best LinkedIn agency for recruitment or for fintech or for construction, you see where I'm going, like having those industry pages and normally those will be landing pages that rank. You can slowly chip away at these long tail searches that are a bit easier to get found for and that can actually quite oftentimes these have low traffic but they have a lot more sales intent behind them. So it's basically working out kind of what do you want to sell, who do you want to sell to, what might they search? You can then run the keywords for a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, check they've got a little bit of volume and then once you've done that exercise from a Google standpoint, we can talk about LLMs in a bit. From a Google standpoint, one of the easiest things to do is type that keyword on Google, do something called assessing the intent. So see what page Google favors is an article, a landing page, a comparison, a product listicle and then whatever's shown on Google most, you know what type of page to build. So that's it at high level. There's a lot more to it we can dive into, but hopefully that's helpful.
- [18:05]
Abigail Pumphrey
No, it is helpful and I, I think if you guys are stuck kind of trying to figure out what needs to go in those columns, I take a first pass. But I think this is one of those excellent opportunities where you can use an LLM to kind of reverse engineer this a little bit. Here's my ideas of what people would call me, but like what am I missing or what? What are other things that are common and using that to kind of build out a more complex matrix. But I agree that like looking at actual volume of traffic and competition is going to make a big difference in you knowing if you can even compete for that result. What do you think is going to change though? All of the things we're talking about? Sure, we've talked about less focus on top of funnel, more focus on buyer intent. But do you think search is going to go away? Do you think people are going to rely on almost exclusively on AI solutions? Like what does this look like on a more long term basis?
- [19:08]
Sam Dunning
Yeah, I wish I knew the exact answers. That'd be great because I'd also make a fortune. But I think the way I see it is I'm in the uk, as you can probably Tell from my weird accent. So Google have rolled out AI mode in the US so right now it's an option to click onto AI mode. So it's basically their LLM, their version of ChatGPT, if you will. The way I see it going in the next couple of years is that the next year or two the AI mode won't be optional in the sense that Google will put you straight through to that LLM. And all these search engine LLM tools I feel are trying to give you zero click experiences. So giving you as much information as possible on their platform. Everything on platform without having to click through to an external website. Websites are seeing it already. A lot of traffic is declining. Impressions are going up on Google like you're getting the AI overviews but click throughs are going down. So I see especially in like I work in B2B marketing, I see a lot of, a lot of this moving into Mindshare. What do I mean by that? Well, companies if a prospect searching for as an example, I have a client in that does HR and Payroll software, a SaaS company and someone on Google might have historically searched for best HR software. Someone on an LLM might search. I run a team with 500 reps. I've got 20 on my sales team. I need a HR software that can do X, Y and Z. I need it within this budget in this timeline, super specific and crisp query. Now what they'll probably do is they'll get given five vendors with pros and cons of each and maybe they'll make their own shortlist. And then they might not even click to a website. They might just then search for the homepage, go direct to the homepage. That would count as direct traffic. Like no one's getting the credit for that. Well, that's kind of where I see it going. Like if your brand can consistently show when folks are looking for solutions, comparing vendors looking for Chris problems, you gain that brand, that mindshare almost thinking it from it from a podcast lens. Like not tons of people are listening to a show and like going to a specific URL. Some will, but many won't. Many will listen to it time and time again and eventually go directly to that brand's website. And I kind of see that going like zero click. Get the content be found, get brand recognition and then someone eventually goes to your homepage. That's how I see it.
- [21:31]
Abigail Pumphrey
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- [23:09]
Sam Dunning
On.
- [23:09]
Abigail Pumphrey
WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat or trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone, I think it's interesting because, you know, we all have our own experiences with how search has worked for ourselves historically. And when I was auditing my 2024 traffic, which now feels like light years ago, but nonetheless, the top page on my website was one podcast episode that had been recorded a full year prior. Like I think it came out in Christmas Day of 2023, which was an odd day to publish, but nonetheless. And it was all about internal monologues and you know, my husband doesn't have one, which is obviously like a very like curiosity driven focus. But what ended up happening is Google picked it up as like the answer to people having an internal monologue or not. And we are getting thousands of hits to just this one page on our site because it was served in the top section. And you were saying you think people will just end up not opening. I think that's interesting that you say that because I found, at least from my own behavior and obviously I'm, I'm in the US and so I'm seeing AI search every single day. Like I don't have an option to turn it off. And I consistently will look at the summary and like if I feel like the summary is answering my question, I will always click on the top link that surface within that kind of lens to go deeper. But if the LLMs like not giving me an answer that's sufficient, then I might scroll further down the page to see what the other headlines look like. But obviously I'm one person. Like I'm one person using search. I'm not necessarily representing the majority, but I don't know if that's going to like, be what ultimately kind of pans out. It obviously means you're going to rank for things that you didn't necessarily mean to, depending on what you're kind of putting out into the world on a regular basis. But I don't know, it feels like you have less control over what gets surfaced. Do you agree or disagree with that? In terms of like the content that gets picked or promoted in terms of.
- [25:55]
Sam Dunning
Google AI views or in terms of like an LLM like ChatGPT either.
- [26:00]
Abigail Pumphrey
Really?
- [26:01]
Sam Dunning
Yeah, I mean Google AI reviews, like, I can't say I've 100% nailed it. They do tend for most of our B2B clients, they tend to pull results that are typically ranked well in organic. So you can put some strategy behind it. Like for example, if you're writing an article, then one tactic we like to use is having a heading for like why trust us? A quick snapshot like a TLDR on the article. And sometimes those can get picked up nicely on the AI reviews. And also like thinking of LLMs like LLM, the thing about ChatGPT is there's a lot of people saying that you can just do what ranks for Google Classic SEO and you'll be found on LMS. Not strictly true because chatgpt like 86% or such of its results are pulled from like Bing search. So Microsoft backed. And the thing with that is Bing's guidelines are quite different. They have different ranking procedures. But also Another thing with LLMs is they cite a lot of sources. So a big thing that we're seeing for B2B clients is they're pulling a lot from sites like Reddit. So if you're getting if people are commenting a lot on Reddit, around your niche and around questions you're searching for, those are getting pulled up a lot. Sometimes YouTube videos are getting pulled up in resorts, but one thing that's massive is especially in like we serve a lot of B2B tech clients is if your company has a lot of brand mentions. So historically SEO has been big on backlinks, but LLM seem to be big on brand mentions. So if you've got a lot of mentions on external websites that are relevant to your category. So in my case, someone citing a B2B SEO agency breaking B2B or SaaS, SEO agency breaking B2B or whatever your agency may be, or solution provider, and a lot of those that seem to go super well is you might have seen these top listicle articles like we reviewed. If we go back to that LinkedIn agency, like we reviewed the top 10 LinkedIn agencies of 2025. If you can get your site mentioned with your category on a lot of those third party listings, it gives you a heck of a great boost right now in LLMs when someone's searching specifically for your solution or category. So that's like one of the big things that we're seeing for clients that are getting an uptick in kind of visibility into the LLM side of things.
- [28:16]
Abigail Pumphrey
It's interesting you say that because I've had quite a few new clients and new sales and even like brand deals where I've asked how did you find out about me? Or where did you kind of discover me? And ChatGPT is becoming a far more common answer than even six months ago. And I tend to be on those lists. But never once, not in my 10 years in business have I ever applied to be on one of those lists, put myself on one of those lists, reach out to someone to be on one of those lists. And so I'm wondering if that's not something that's already happening for you, how do you go about getting on third party sites in a way like that?
- [29:04]
Sam Dunning
So one thing I'd encourage you to do which kind of goes back to our money keywords matrix, is what you'll find for some of those terms. What tends to rank well on Google is if we go back to our social media agency, like Best LinkedIn Social Agency or something like that, if you wanted to rank for a term, usually those kind of listicles rank well for those kind of terms on Google. Like we reviewed the top 10 LinkedIn ads agencies or LinkedIn social agencies or LinkedIn organic agencies in 2025. So build your own list on your website, own your own article that reviews those. By all means put yourself at the top, but do a fair comparison of yourself as well as the nine or 10 other agencies that you evaluate. So then you can have your own article that could get cited both on Google and the LLMs. But then also, is it that easy to get cited on other articles? Not that easy, but there is a way. I mean there's an outreach strategy. It's quite manual, I. E. You find out the sites that are being shown and then you reach out to whoever wrote the article, whether that is connecting with them on LinkedIn, sending them an email. Some of them are pay to play, some of them you might be able to do an exchange. Like if we cite you on ours, can we do it on yours? I've done that with quite a lot of teams over the years. Or like you say, sometimes you can just earn it. I'm sure your podcast is well, well known now, so I'm sure your podcast and your business gets cited on a lot of these. Likewise, ours has steadily picked up some over the years so you can organically earn them. But that's more of a longer tail than some of the other strategies.
- [30:30]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, it does take a longer period of time and I've struggled to articulate for people how to show up when a lot of my success has been from earned media. Not necessarily the content I've put out. Not that the content hasn't been helpful. I published a ton. Like I was looking at total kind of number of pages the other day and I have like over 1100 pages, which actually seems a little bit low because I for sure know there's at least 500 blog posts and 950 podcast episodes, all of which that have their own page. So unless we've called out a bunch of old blog posts, which we very well may have, that number seems low to me. But I think most people aren't producing that much volume. Like most people are barely getting social media done. So what if you had to prioritize one thing that you were doing on a fairly regular basis, even once a week? Like what is the thing that you feel like is going to move the needle the most for people in terms.
- [31:39]
Sam Dunning
Of an SEO lens? I think you've hit the nail on the head. The one advantage that startup or small businesses or companies that can move fast is that their advantage is speed over mid market enterprise, large scale companies. I've Worked with a bunch of enterprise and large scale companies. Sure they pay well, but they, they move extremely slow because they have various tiers of a manager has a manager, who has a manager, who has a senior director, who has a director as a head, direct, whatever. So these companies, no joke. I've worked on SEO campaigns where it's taken seven to eight months to get one page published. So speed is your absolute advantage. This is how kind of a lot of our clients, how we've kind of come in as an underdog in B2B SEO and kind of taken rankings that we should never have got just because they move aggressively. So one of the main takeaways I'd say is kind of work out your money keywords, money topics, work out what type of page you need to build to rank, maybe weave some listicles in there like we've talked about and then have publish at speed because that's how you can chip away at those giant competitors that move slow. Especially if you go for the more niche long tail, industry specific stuff that's maybe underserved. If you can set a cadence that's realistic for your company, that might be one blog article a week, that might be two a month, whatever you can do at a sensible, realistic pace consistently, then you can start chipping away and making some progress. But the thing is, don't wait for the perfect piece of content. Because the good thing about ranking a site is that it takes two to three months for a platform like Google to index a page at times anyway for the rankings to settle. So the more lines in the water you put in, the quicker you can see how it ranks. Then if you need to improve it, fine. If not, you can kind of keep going. It's like most things in B2 marketing, like you say, like it's rarely a quick hit. Yes, you can see impact from SEO as quick as 90 days, but you need to actually do the work and speed is a big thing.
- [33:33]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, I think so many people get caught up on quality over quantity. And as much as I think that quality is important, I know for sure early on it was just the sheer volume of content that I put out that made the biggest difference. And worrying less about each individual piece being perfect and more about just getting it out there. Even if you feel like it's an incomplete thought, you can always come back and revise or do a second version or do the 2025 update of whatever topic it is that you're talking about. Because there's no kind of end to things that you could say but you have to keep talking, otherwise you're just kind of lost in the muck, so to speak. Do you think there's any sort of cadence that you feel like is more optimal? I get that once a week or twice a month might be more realistic, but what is like the highest volume you're kind of seeing that feels like it's still authentic or I don't know what the right word is, but yeah.
- [34:41]
Sam Dunning
It'S a good question. I mean, I suppose it depends on your resource in house, right? Like, we're typically working with kind of B2B companies that have anything from the founder doing everything to small marketing teams, maybe 1, 1 to 3, maybe 4 max in their marketing team. So I mean the larger teams, maybe they're publishing like 15 to 17 pieces of content. And when I say pieces like articles, landing pages, listicles, comparison pages, etc. A month on the high end, sometimes a bit more. But you've got to be realistic because if you're just trying to do the other stuff, and I suppose going at the opposite end, like pumping articles through ChatGPT and just saying spin me up an article on this topic and then publishing on that on your blog is probably going to do more harm than good. Because a lot of the time Google's actually reviewing and rating this content and it's all good, maybe even some of these pages rank. One of the biggest mistakes in my opinion with SEO is you can rank, but if you don't resonate with your dream client, AKA their problems, their goals, their jobs to be done, and that starts with customer research. If you don't resonate with them, you're not going to convert. Especially if you provide a high ticket B2B solution. They'll read the jargon that's produced by ChatGPT and bounce off your page. So ChatGPT is good to build a framework, good to build an outline, but needs the human touch, ideally with a subject matter expert involved.
- [35:59]
Abigail Pumphrey
Yeah, I think I saw definitely when it kind of became an option, I suppose, that LLMs could produce blog content. We started seeing people just produce whole websites, so they were churning out stuff all the time. But I agree we're not super far into this whole game. Like ChatGPT has only been able to write so. So for what, six, nine months maybe. And in that time, I think if you're using AI on a regular basis, you can start to sniff out things that have been written by AI. It used to be like, this was so exciting and like amazing that it could happen. And now you're like, this is garbage, like biopeels just saying the same thing. So having a real point of view, I think makes a really big difference. Talking about the stuff that's ancillary related can add a lot of context and complexity and personality to the content you're producing. Not to mention stories like no one else is going to have your experience or your background or the things you've done along the way. And if you're just skipping that entirely and giving a Merriam Webster definition of a certain topic, like, who wants to read that? Nobody I know. So producing content that you actually want to consume I think is a really helpful kind of metric for looking at this. Well, before we wrap up, is there anything else that you feel like we have to talk about? If we miss talking about this, we're really doing the people a disservice who are listening.
- [37:39]
Sam Dunning
Yeah, I suppose. The only other thing we've touched on SEO at a high level at different stages, we've talked about money, keywords, building pages that can rank, talked a bit about LLMs at a high level, talked about kind of content that resonates. I suppose the only thing we haven't talked about the controversial one, is backlinks. So I'll do a quick summary of my thoughts to wrap things up. I mean, with backlinks, some hate them, some think they're dead, some beg for them, some steal for them, some pay for them. Now backlinks, when it comes to trying to rank real competitive content from a Google Lens, LLMs, like I said, go more for brand mentions. But you can do two with one hit. If you're trying to build backlinks from a Google lens, they're still worthwhile right now. To rank one of the lowest, I'll give you two kind of real low lift ways. One that works really well is what we're doing now, podcasting. So one of my favorite strategies is I love a website called Listen Notes. So you go onto Listen Notes website, literally just type your niche. So I might type in B2B marketing, SaaS, marketing, etc. If you're an accountant, you might type in accountancy. Whatever your niche is, whatever your listeners might tune into, you can look at the top rated shows in your industry and you can see who hosts them. And you can literally just outreach to those posts through LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever they hang out, drop them a painfully short message that's not a wall of text pitch, wait for them to connect with you, send them a customized loom video on why they should consider having you to your show, you'll get a good hit rate because most people just put a really long email and then do a valuable show that's useful to their audience. And then in return, they might do an article for the for the episode and then ask for a backlink that works really well. And then the other thing is a lot of companies are sleeping on past pr, so you can go into tools like Hrefs or Semrush. If your founder or if yourself or your marketing leader has done a lot of press, a lot of articles or podcasts in the past, cut and paste their LinkedIn profile into Ahrefs or Semrush, click the backlinks tab and you can see every single article that's ever linked to their LinkedIn profile. And a lot of articles will have not linked to your website, just the LinkedIn. So you can reach out to that author of the article and just say thanks very much for including us whenever it was. Could you just make a small tweak to this page and link to this keyword and page and mention our brand? That is a really low lift, easy way to earn brand mentions. Backlinks. That's like my two favorite tips.
- [40:00]
Abigail Pumphrey
Awesome. Well, just so you know, the podcast pitch strategy that he mentioned worked because it's literally what he did land on this show. And it was because it was an authentically good episode for y' all to listen to, which is I get so many garbage pitches for podcasts, it's not even funny. But thank you so much for being here. I think there's so much more to, like, talk about and where this will go. And I think there needs to be a whole part 2 on LLM specifically, especially as we learn more, because I think there's a lot that is yet to be discovered. But thank you so much for being here. Where can people connect with you online and listen to your show?
- [40:40]
Sam Dunning
I really appreciate you having me on. Enjoyed the chat. And like you say that LLMs is still early, so there is so much more to learn for sure. But yeah, I guess there's three main ways. The first is LinkedIn, where I post kind of daily ramblings and thoughts on SEO and B2B marketing. The second is my podcast, Breaking B2B. Or the third is if you're kind of struggling to drive leads or pipeline through SEO, organic search or LLMs, then we might be able to help. It's breaking B2B.com is our site.
- [41:07]
Abigail Pumphrey
Amazing. Thank you so much for being here, Sam. I hope you have a great rest of your day if you're listening to the show and if you get some value out of this. If you find a nugget that you're going to run with, I would love to hear about it. Feel free to go post what you're going to be working on over on LinkedIn. Tag both of us. We'd love to see what you got out of the show. Also, sharing the episode in general is just incredibly helpful, so I appreciate all of our listeners. Sam, again, thank you so much. It was a super awesome conversation.
- [41:41]
Sam Dunning
Thank you very much. Enjoyed it.
- [41:42]
Abigail Pumphrey
Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me at Abigail says and OSS Project so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from bossproject. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.