SEO in the Age of AI & LLMs: Insights from a B2B SEO Expert

Ryan: At the end of the day, good SEO is still good geo, but B2B buyer behavior is what's changed.

Host: Welcome back to series two of Generation Marketing Podcast. This is episode two and today I'm going to be speaking with Ryan about SEO and how AI is impacting SEO and how SEO needs to evolve in the world of AI. So loads of really fun topics today. There should be loads of insight around how LLMs are, uh, kind of affecting search, but also how AI is just making buyers change their behavior and how we need to use SEO to respond to that behavior. So really excited for this one. Ryan, it's your first time on the podcast.

Ryan: Welcome. Thank you for having me.

Host: It's really exciting, really exciting. I want to kick off, uh, because I think it's important to understand the lay of the land and where things started. Let's talk about the SEO landscape generally and the history and how we've kind of got to where we have got to today.

Ryan: Yeah, sounds good. So I think I like to break SEO down to I guess the decades. The 90s was your cowboy years. That was when a lot of, I guess, um, more black hat practices were prominent. Things like, I guess, keyword stuff from web pages. The old trick of having a full list of keywords on a page, putting them away so they blend in with the background. 2000s was when a lot Google started to really make changes to make content a bit more helpful. So started out with the Penguin, uh, and Hummingbird updates, which were the kind of initial updates to help define more helpful content. And then 2004, 14 I believe is when E force landed, which is your expertise, your authoritativeness and your trustworthiness, which to this day is still the foundations of what makes good content, what makes great content, what makes content that, uh, ranks well. Obviously in the 20s there's been so the force half and 20s was a bit more. They added experience E so became experience on top of that. So not just showing that you're trustworthy, that you're an authority, it's also shown what have you actually done. It's like what AI, the things that your business has done, what anecdotes can you add to your content to just show users, give them real life experiences, which I think is still used in a lot of the more conversational shifts we're seeing with AI. But I'll, uh, get more into that in a second. There was also, you know, Google did the helpful content update, which also had very strict parameters of what makes content helpful, what makes content useful. And then more recently we're starting to see a lot of LLM tools come true. And I think at the moment there are a lot of concerns these days about how LLMs have impacted SEO. It's quite a new technology at the moment. I think there's still that great unknown. For the most part, we are seeing that they still rely a lot on search engine best practices. We know that ChatGPT tends to crawl Bing a lot for its content, and there's also evidence, so unconfirmed, that it also uses a lot of Google as well. Google SEARCH engine But yeah, it's just been a lot of shifts, a lot of concerns. And it's almost like that what that next step is going to be is where people are concerned. As LLM tools start to grow, will they still be as reliant on, um, search engines or will they figure out their own ways of, uh, providing helpful content to users?

Host: Yes, it's a good point, I think. Before we dive into that, let's talk about. I think it's quite a divisive subject at the moment. People were talking about GEO and AEO being a new version of SEO. I know your opinion is more that SEO is just kind of evolved slightly, so there's a new way people can search. It's still SEO and it's still reliant on the best practices. Do you want to talk a bit about that?

Ryan: Absolutely. So, yes, I believe good GEO is always going to have good SEO at its foundations. At the end of the day, users are still searching for queries, looking for helpful content. And Google has done a great job at mastering the helpful content algorithm, being able to decipher queries and turn them into tailored results for users. So at its foundation, LLM still rely on that data quite a lot. Um, and at the end of the day, you still need to have great content on your website. You still need a website that's crawlable, not just for users and, um, search engines, which is traditionally the way, but now LLMs as well. So you need a site that is going to be easy to crawl. You need a good site structure. So if an LLM that's not familiar about who you are as a business is able to quite easily scan through your site and, um, provide the right answers to user queries. I think that's where I think LLMs have leveled up quite a bit, is actually something that I'm gonna go onto a little bit later. But how LLMs are crawling your site, it's still in the same way search engines do, but it's a lot better at providing especially more towards.

Host: They're looking for different things as well. Yeah, there's extra bits. They want extra uh, bits of context.

Ryan: Yeah. And one of the things that I found quite fascinating so I spent a bit of time just diving through LLMs and searching, just looking through and seeing how they not just how they crawl content, how they provide information to people. Is it any different? And generally lean into what I said about good SEO being good geo. There's not a stark difference between the top and middle funnel. A lot of what I found was ranking well in search engines was also ranking within LLMs. When I get to the bottom funnel they were. A lot of the key information I found was that it wasn't just showing you this is a good company generally if you go on to. Let's say Listercles are now AI overviews and Google it was like some. It's now giving you good recommendations, quick summaries. This is the business. This who we are specifically I believe was GROK was going through and also providing extra information. What awards has this business won? What year were they founded, who did a walk, where. And these are all things that they are finding by just crawling the whole site, not just going through a ah homepage giving you a quick summary of this is the this is who we are, this is what we're about or going into structured data and just pulling the description of the business. It was going a little deeper and trying to find okay, what accreditations does this business have. So I was definitely seeing a lot more I guess social proofing within that. And the other thing that fascinated me was sometimes it was quite blunt with like if it didn't have the right uh, information to back you up, it would still recommend you but the recommendation wouldn't be good. One of our clients for example, I believe it was. So I was looking at machinery companies and one of the description for our client was claims to be a leading provider for the food industry. If you're just reading that, yeah, claims to be. There's no social proof. I've seen other competitors being like oh they're 20 years in the business. These are the clients they walk with. It didn't have client names but I had. These are the industries they walk with. But with one of our clients it just said claims to which is nothing recommendation. And as a user reading that I'm gonna be a lot less likely to go for that kind of like a client in that situation because the recommendation wasn't great.

Host: I think that leans into the experience part of the EAT framework. Because it's not just about experience of the person writing a piece of content, but it's actually about the experience of the company. How many case studies do they have? How many good testimonials do they have? Also uh, I know like um, you know Reddit is cited a lot, so are some of the directories like G2. If you're a software company or a services company, it will take all of that into account. It's not like a search engine that reads a page and reads the meta description of that page and kind of serves you one item, um, it serves you one item, um, but with the context of the entire site and it, and it gives you all of that. It's kind of like bringing more context to the forefront for users. Which is a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know your thoughts.

Ryan: I think it's a really good thing. It gives users more context. It saves a lot of. Let's say you have hit list of businesses. You're like, which one do I want to go for? It takes a lot of research out of it. Now me personally, I would like to do my own kind of desktop research anyway just to make sure. But to have that initial information is just a bit more helpful. It can help you. Let's say you have 10 businesses and you look at ah, quick recommendations. You can quickly weed that down to maybe, okay, these are the top two or three based on some of this information I'm given and then you can do your own research. So it's almost sets the foundations for the buyer, the decision making process.

Host: Well on that subject I want to talk about some of the stats that we've got in um, that we've got in some of our recent research with Creemark Labs. We are going to be releasing a report at some point, aren't we around uh, how LLMs are affecting SEO. But in the meantime let's share some stats on the podcast. One of the stats I think is that's really key, which is an extension of what you've just said, is that 89% of B2B buyers now use an LLM as one of their top sources of self guided information. So we know from previous episodes of generation marketing that 80% of the B2B tech buying process now is self serve. Buyers don't get in touch till towards the end of that process. They've already kind of made up their mind most of the time. If 90% ish of B2B buyers are using LLMs as part of that process, as you say if you don't appear on that list, if you're not cited or you're not cited in the right way with the right context and social proofing, you've kind of already failed.

Ryan: Uh, yeah, I think we're, and um, for us as well we're in that space where we don't really, we're in the B2B tech space. So there's always, that's always going to be the force industry to start to adapt to these new tools. It's a very tech heavy product. It's taken over a fair bit of I guess in ways how we function as teams as well. So we're definitely seeing, we're in the right space to be able to see the changes that's happening in. But at the same time I think we're at a stage now where LLMs are still a long way from taking over search engines. At the end of the day Google still has a 90% market share over the search industry. So that's, I believe it's 5.8 billion users are using ChatGPT. Compare that uh, to Google which is 83.8 billion. Wow. So there's a long way to go and I think ah, Google is still for me will be the top priority. But at the same time there's still tactics you can use to be visible within LLMs and I think it's important to do. But as long as you have the SEO foundations right that's really going to be the main thing for showing up. Once you have them foundations it's then down to the little optimizations you can make. So for example making content a bit more conversational to show up and say in these large language models helps a lot of the way large language models walk it. They're essentially a powered interpretations of language in a way. I may have be oversimplifying the technology quite a lot but what it does is it helps break down a user's ask to try gain context clues to try understand exactly what they're looking for. Especially as LLMs have more specific queries in mind. A lot of users will tend to go towards more long tail search when they're using ChatGPT because they're very specific requests of okay, I'm this person, I, I need this, what are my options.

Host: But, but on that subject I think that's a really good point because this shift in just generally in the world has meant users are using more longer tail key phrases. Now traditionally you wanted to own the short tail key phrase space because that felt like it was Higher intent. It was just something, it was like I want to, you want to be there because it's the most visibility. Right. But I think you can see. Right. Google has, has really lent into this all of Google's recent campaigns. It's obviously got AI mode now as part of Google. It's got Gemini, which is embedded and integrated into search with your uh, AI overviews. But all of their campaigns recently have been showcasing users inputting the most ridiculously long tail key phrases. Right. I think I've seen one that was kind of like uh, about holiday, but it was like on a beach with yoga, uh, less than three hours from this airport. And that is generally how people will search now because LLMs have given them the opportunity to be that specific. I think with B2B tech, if you're selling something specific, you've got to be mindful that people can now search for that specific thing if your competitor does it first, whether that is through better SEO or better LLM citations, uh, which we know is based on SEO, you will be left behind.

Ryan: Definitely. And I think that also leans back into the point of the importance of having a good site structure. So LLMs can find exactly what a user's looking for. Not just true, I guess not just true. One specific landing page. Now it's searching the whole site and being able to find them, um, context clues. And it's also, I think we're lucky we're in a space where there's always been room for more specific searches because that's B2B. There's so many user experience companies trying to rank for user experience. What is your niche. And I think that's always been something that B2B has had to adapt to. Gone more long tail, gone more industry targeted in some ways. And it definitely kind of sets the foundations that are in the B2B space for a lot of these. Even more specific now as you said, it's a good point. It's people are. Now the way they communicate is as you said, I am um, a compliance manager looking for a compliance software from my manufacturing plant. Before it was people typing in things, let's say compliance, manufacturing services. But now people are uh, they give that extra, give that extra context. So I think a lot of B2B SEO are set down foundations. But I'm definitely seeing, as you said, search is getting a bit more conversational now.

Host: Conversational, conversational content was also and is still also good for general SEO best practice but, but even more so now. Right. As you, as you say, I think something that I find really interesting is when you've been speaking to a lot of our clients, you've been talking about the FAQ type of content because that helps you be more conversational. But also the fact that you like to attribute every piece of content to an actual expert. Yeah, I think they're two really good bits of advice and insights into how we can make content feel more conversational even if it's written by an agency on behalf of someone.

Ryan: Absolutely. And I think that's generally with. I know one of the ways people tend to do it uh, is they'll have an FAQ drop down at the end of an article and that's. That is in its own right a good practice. Use in more top and middle funnel articles. I prefer to within the article, in short our ads and common queries because that's what users land on your page for. And you need to think if you're a user, you'd rather get what you can in an article than have to drop down to the FAQ section. The FAQ sections can still be good for quite super specific things that you don't cover in article. Maybe it's like one or three points. It's like, oh, this article is getting a bit too long. Are there any quick far questions that users may still have? You can do that through either more middle form content or true FAQs themselves. But that's the way of search now. People are looking for answers to their queries and a lot of. As we just touched on the way users dealing it, it's becoming a lot more of a conversation. So it's always been something that's been valuable to SEO. But with LLMs because of the way they interpret language, it's definitely a step more important than it has been before.

Host: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. I want to delve a bit deeper into that. Which parts of your website are going to be really important now for SEO and, and geo?

Ryan: So for me, based on a lot of the GEO research I've done, it seems like there's a shift. Traditionally your homepage has always been your point of entry. I still believe that's quite valuable to have. One of the things I noticed that uh, is a lot of the recommendations I talked about, like who the company are, the awards they've done, they were all information from the About Us page and the accreditations page. So when LLMs are making these recommendations, it's a page that gets glossed over a lot in our business. It's almost seen as uh, your, your mission statement, but doesn't provide the right context clues of who you are, what, what year were you founded, so how long you've been in business, what expertise do you have, how many years you've been in the industry?

Host: Um, it's all your credibility. It's, it literally is, I mean it is the foundation of how credible you are as a business. It's the, it's the story of how you got to now. But also, you mentioned accreditation pages. I don't think most people have accreditation pages. Yeah, they, they hide them away. They might have some logos but without any alt text on them. So an LLM can't even see that that accreditation exists.

Ryan: Yeah. And even in some cases they're done in image format. Uh, it's good to have specific pages for that kind of content. Especially if you are a business that's been in operation for 30, 40 years. The amount of industry awards you may have won over there, especially if you are quite a leader in your field, you're not going to fit all that onto an About Us page, but it's still valuable to have.

Host: So

Ryan: for me, I advise clients to really build out that accreditation page. Show not just LLMs users as well and Google itself that you are an expert. You have won these awards. You, you are seen as quite a leader within your field because these massive companies within your field are giving you awards. And not even wards, but uh, accreditations. What certifications do you have? If you are working with compliance companies, what kind of compliance certifications do you need?

Host: Are you ISO certified? That kind of stuff?

Ryan: Yes. So that's stuff that's becoming increasingly important, but not just accreditations. I also, what I say about your About Us page, that's your chance to sell who you are, what you do, your key industries. And that's where a lot of that paid. That page gets wasted a lot, I feel, on clients. Um, where it's. This is our mission statement and it's a lot of corporate speak that you tend to find on homepages, just not duplicate but similar kind of stuff. And I feel like having clear, clear information who you are, but not just your values as a business. Your mission statement. And just trying to give as many, I'm, um, saying this word a lot, but as many context clues as you can.

Host: Let's talk about author attribution because I know you sort of hold that very highly.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. So with author attribution, a lot of where a lot of businesses struggle is that they'll have a blog section because that's the thing to do, but they don't take that next step of okay, how can we provide context of who actually wrote this? Because if you go into some blogs, it's a faceless organization. Like this blog was written by Cremac. Who is Creemark. He was the person Cremark.

Host: Yeah.

Ryan: Trying to have. It's just, um, it's important for readers to be like, okay, I know Creemark's a marketing agency. They're writing about SEO. Who's the person that's actually talking about it?

Host: Who's authoritative on that subject?

Ryan: Who are they? What have they done? Similar to. I'm going to go back into like, almost in a way, the points I touched on the about us page where it's like shown your own authority. It's a little bit different within author description. It is, who is this person? But also what have they done?

Host: Yeah. What's their story? Yeah.

Ryan: Do they have any awards, uh, within the business themselves? Like do they have any certifications that are watch on, um, to an audience has like, it's really good point to. Yeah. And going back to the compliance side of things, do they have the ISO certifications? Find the business. Does the person I'm going to deal with. Are they.

Host: Are they HubSpot certified? Are they Google certified?

Ryan: Yeah, exactly. So I think trying to show audiences as much information as possible that you don't just know your stuff. Like, you have experience, you've done this. You are a trusted and credible person to be talking about this subject. And here is why. That's something I've always found valuable. It's really good for going back to E. It's good for your expertise, it's good for your experience. You can show your bear with page is a set of your experience, but also your expertise. It's what you've done, how that's kind of shaped your career.

Host: I think credibility is the key point there. And I think it's really. Yeah, it's really, really valuable. I, uh, think a lot of people who have. Who are listening to this podcast or watching it can, can take that away and say, right, we want to be authoritative, if that's a word on these subjects and who do we have that is credible to talk about them? How can we prove that we're a credible business in that space? Let's take our leadership team, let's take our head of departments, let's take our, uh, subject matter experts, and we'll assign content, whether they contribute to it, whether they're actually attributed to it, or they provide insight. And it's attributed to them. Whatever works. That's going to be a key thing that they can take away today, which is really great. I want to hit you with a question which I think is going to be interesting. I want to know do you think buyers perceive LLM responses answers in a different way to how they perceive SERP results? So search engine results yes and no.

Ryan: Where I feel like yes, as I mentioned sometimes in queries there's a lot more context clues as I mentioned, especially around bottom funnel. But I think at the end of the day when it comes to trustworthiness, I feel like I don't think there's a stark difference between how people trust Google versus how people trust an AI. I'd argue in some ways they trust Google more because Google's been around a while. Yeah, longevity, um, exactly. And AI rollouts have had some teed in problems. Even Google's own AI has had teething problems where it can sometimes give you false information or information that's not fully relevant or will sometimes just misinterpret what you say. I think users that use LLMs enough will have them experiences. So I still think it's quite good for providing valuable information. But I don't think people see it as more trustworthy than a Google search even if the intent is a bit more conversational. I think for me anyway the majority of people still see it as a re a tool in the same way they use. They see a Google.

Host: Yeah, I think that's a good, that's a good point in my head. I uh, I wonder if if buyers have a higher intent if they come m from an LLM than if they come from a search engine because it feels like a curated recommendation rather than. I, I think this is, this is really interesting train of thought because search engines people do trust Google but Google has come under a lot of fire. But also generally the marketing sector has come under fire because people feel like search engines. It's, it's not a pay to win but it's kind of the people at the top aren't necessarily the best. It's probably because they've done more SEO or you obviously scroll past two or three ads before you get to the organic results. So do you think when people get a tailored curated recommendation it feels and they click through it's a higher intent than if they click through through on a search on a serp?

Ryan: It's hard to say because I think it's more to me anyway and I could be wrong at this. It's more a case of an acceleration of what that user's buying journey is was going to be. For a traditional search engine a lot of, because it's a uh, more of a back and forth, you probably ask a lot more queries right off the bat. Instead of googling something, you get the result, you read about it, you're like okay, what's this? And then you may, might do another search and then eventually get down to your buying decision. I think it's accelerated. It uh, I think it's, I think it still sources search engines quite a lot. I think people are aware of that. So yeah, I think it's more a case of people get buy in quicker potentially because they're doing more upfront research rather than it's more trustworthy. But it's always hard to say because LLMs, I like to call it the invisible search. It's like the invisible what's behind user intent. With Google, uh, you've always been able to see your impressions, your clicks. A lot of recent spam updates have kind of mitigated what you can see and that's actually to stop AI tools from overly crawling results. They've kind of put some blockers in the Traditional Ways that LLMs have Crawled Google searches.

Host: But on that let's, let's talk about measurement quickly because we've, we've done a few things but you're right, there is a massive, there's, there's a massive gap. Right. You can't see how many times Chat GPT has recommended your company. What we can see, which we've started measuring for Phil from our data team, we put together a dashboard not too long ago for a few clients and it showed uh, basically a breakdown of source traffic but filtered by LLMs. How can B2B tech companies now test where they're at in terms of LLM citations? Is it a case that they just need to go and speak to ChatGPT and see if they come up?

Ryan: I'd say the best ways of measuring uh, your performance LLMs first looking at where you're getting your traffic from LLM. So as we mentioned about fails dashboard, checking GEA, looking at source data, seeing okay, based on these LLMs you can look at ChatGPT perplexity copilot what pages are they landing on? That gives you a good context around okay, this is the kind of content that's coming through. You can see from what's on that page. You can make a little bit of guesswork of whether it's, if it's blogs. Some of the more common questions that that blog will answer. And then lastly just test like go into ChatGPT, go into Copilot, go into whichever AI tools you want to show up for, go into them, ask them very common questions about your industry blogs you have. Ask questions that will be answered in your blog series coming up. Bottom of funnel. Look into come at it with your client's hat, come at it with their head and be like, okay, I'm in this field, I need this, give me some recommendations. See if you show up, test across different industries, you can see which industries are showing up in and which ones you're not. That can help inform your content plan. Do I need more content around this specific topic? Do I need content around more targeted content towards this industry that could help me show up a little bit better within that. Do I need better internal linking towards that page? Do I need a better site structure to make sure that pages found better?

Host: It's really good. I think it's, it's all reliant on, on businesses really understanding their customers because I mean it's the same as SEO generally. Right. The searches are what customers are, uh, questions that actual customers have.

Ryan: Yeah.

Host: So unless they can properly get into the mind of their customers and understand what they might be searching for or asking, you're going to fail at like you're going to fall at the first hurdle. So it's really good advice. Now from your perspective, what are the biggest pitfalls that B2B tech companies have at the moment? Why are they failing with SEO and, and uh, GEO as well?

Ryan: So your SEO fundamentals, how fast is your website? How does it perform, your content? Do you have good enough content on your website to show up and search?

Host: Do you have enough content as well?

Ryan: Exactly.

Host: You always talk about this. I've, I've, you know, I've brought you into new client projects and you always say, you know, there's only so much we can do because we actually need more content to even have enough of a foundation.

Ryan: Exactly. I'm uh, making sure them foundations are right is essential, which falls into your site structure. Making sure that you can be found, making sure that even making sure it's clear for users, if your structure is clear for users, it's going to be clear for search engines, it's going to be clear for LLMs and there's always going to be things that are quite common. Your products page, your uh, solutions page, your resources page. Ensuring that it's done in a best practice way, an industry standard way as well, is good for users that are A bit more used to a specific way websites function and of course the right amount of backlinks, I'd say ensuring that you have credible references from especially. It's a good thing for SEOs to collaborate with, uh, ongoing PR agencies. If your client has a PR agency, how can you work with them to essentially build a good backlinking profile? But also nowadays as well, social mentions. Where are you showing up? You mentioned Reddit earlier. Reddit's quite a good, uh, point as well. Where are you showing up online? It's not just about backlinks, although making sure you get the right backlinks from the right industry papers is going to be super helpful. Also just showing up, you know, things like positive reviews from customers, things like, yeah, as I said, people posting on social media, not in a paid, uh, advertisement way, but organically posting about you. And that could be done through influencer collaborations as well.

Host: That's a good point. Yeah, yeah. And I think influencers are hugely underutilized in B2B, aren't they? So, yeah, it's a really, really good point and really, really good consideration for people to take away. I want to end on, on a quick fire one, which is five or six things. What are, uh, what should be the SEO and geo, uh, priorities for B2B tech businesses in 2026?

Ryan: Off site SEO? Where are you showing up? Are you showing up on the right news sources? Are you showing up on the right social media channels? Are you just showing up in the right communities? How is your About Us page? Do you have the right information, the right context to inform users who you are and what you do, what you do and why you're the right business for them, what industries you walk in, etc. Awards and accreditations. Have you showcased everything that you've done as a business to your users? Every certification, every industry award shows your expertise. Is that on your website? And um, finally, author attributions, are you showing people that you're not a, uh, faceless organization, you are a team of experts. You have specific teams with specific experience in different fields. The content you write, has it come from them? What is their experience in the field? Who have they walked with? Are they the right person for your company? Because that's the person you're going to walk with. So yeah, show people that you know your shit and you are the shit.

Host: Amazing. Great place to end it. Uh, that was super insightful. So thank you for joining the podcast this week. We have got so many key takeaways there and I think we're going to have to expand on that, uh, with a load more content like we've spoken about from Best Practice today, I think we're going to have to get you to write some very credible pieces of SEO content in a conversational way so that the listeners and the viewers at home can take more of this insight and understand the real details. So, so thank you for this, um, for joining.

Ryan: It's been a pleasure, Gabe. Um, and I look forward to it.

Host: Yeah, it's amazing, right? We've got loads of really exciting episodes coming up in this season. Season two of Generation Marketing, one of the next deep dives into a specific marketing channel will be into paid social and paid media in general, where Adam, who's one of our LinkedIn ads and paid media specialists, we be talking about loads of insights with Gary. That should be the next episode. So super excited for that. Please join us, uh, for the next episode. In the meantime, like comment subscribe if you've been listening, but you want to watch video episodes are available on YouTube. If you want to get in touch about any of the topics discussed in this episode or let us know about things you want to hear for future episodes, you can get in touch by emailing podcastreemark.com thank you so much for listening or watching this episode. We'll see you in the next one. Goodbye.