#236: SEO & AEO Strategy to Drive Pipeline in 90 Days - Sam Dunning

Speaker A: G'. Day. It's George from the B2B playbook. If you're a B2B marketer and you're stuck spinning up some random campaigns based on whatever the business asks you to do this week, or you're chasing low quality leads and you're watching sales take credit for the business that you helped create, but instead you're just stuck, uh, justifying your activities to leadership, well, we have made something for you. The B2B incubator is our demand generation program for small in house B2B marketing teams. It's built around our 5B's framework and it gives you the strategy, the templates and the system to finally take back control of your marketing and actually align with sales. And we show you how to use AI too, but the right way, not to do more of everything worse, but to know exactly what to focus on and to do that better. It's a top rated demand generation course. We've had over 315 graduates, including marketers like Alison from Rivet who went through it and with their team are now driving 70% more pipeline for the business. And so if you've got some training budget sitting there that's unused, this is exactly what it's for. Applications for the next Cohort Close on 10 July, but of course we have our self service program available if that timing doesn't work for you. So the next time that you take that first sip of coffee in the morning, head to the B2B incubator.com join us and take back control of your B2B marketing. All right, let's get on with the show. Welcome to the B2B playbook where we help B2B teams punch above their way.

Speaker B: We're your hosts, Kevin and George.

Speaker A: Each week we break down how modern B2B companies build demand, win deals and

Speaker B: grow revenue using our uh, 5Bs framework.

Speaker A: So if you work in marketing, sales or customer success and you want to make a bigger impact in your business, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

Speaker B: And remember, revenue growth starts with people, not platforms. We always say to every client, don't do SEO, AI search alone. If you're doing it alone, you're making it way harder for yourself. Like if you ever have have other channels to support it, it's just going to be a lot easier. Especially if you're selling like a B2B service or software that's higher ticket.

Speaker A: Big part of the game now is making sure that you're really speaking to your icp. And so unless Your AI has like a very, very firm understanding of who your ICP is and exactly how you fit into that world. You need to have really strong human open sight.

Speaker B: SEO gets over complicated in the sense that, ah, a lot of it is working out. What do your target customers, what your icp, your dream client, avatar, what do they search for? Not when they're messing around, when they're in that buying window, whether it's 2%, 5% of your total addressable market, when they are in that buying window, what are they going to hunt for? When they need your software now and they need your service now, when they

Speaker A: need your solution now, SEO takes ages to get pipeline from now. You famously say 90 days is all you really need. Why do you think that you can make it happen so much faster than others? Welcome Back to the B2B playbook, where we believe the great go to market is built on people, not platforms. Today's guest has built one of the most recognized B2B SEO brands in the game. And he's done it by saying what most agencies won't that B2B websites are built for vanity, not revenue. And most SEO advice out there is built for the wrong goal entirely. Sam Dunning is the founder of Breaking B2B, a B2B SEO agency. In one of the top B2B marketing podcasts running today, he's almost doubled us with over 500 episodes, which is phenomenal. He's also scaled breaking B2B to 50 plus clients in about 26 months, which is absolutely wild right now. Sam is probably one of the clearest voices on what AI, search and geo, uh, actually mean for B2B marketers. And more importantly, what to do about it. While everyone is kind of panicking and trying to hack together different things. Sam, I think this might be the third time that you're back on the B2B playbook. So, so glad to have you on.

Speaker B: Hey, thanks, George. Appreciate it, man. Hopefully anyone listening or watching isn't sick of me yet. And yeah, appreciate you having me back on. Looking forward to digging in and chatting AI search, SEO and what we see

Speaker A: working today, that's the goal, isn't it, Sam? I mean, we help you with, uh, LinkedIn ads and stuff and the goal is let's make people sick of Sam. Let's get him in your face too, right?

Speaker B: When someone says that, uh, I suppose for context, George and his team are running our LinkedIn ads. And when someone comes inbound saying, I keep seeing, seeing you all over LinkedIn, I'm like, yes, it's working. Let's ramp it up.

Speaker A: It's awesome. So Sam, you've um, really scaled breaking B2B which is phenomenal A uh, lot eating your own dog food too, which is great to see. What's the single biggest thing that you believed about B2B SEO three years ago that you maybe have had to revise?

Speaker B: Good one. So I suppose three or so years ago was just before we started this agency, breaking B2B. So I think for a while I actually had a weird misconception in my head that uh, one thing was that you should only do landing pages for SEO or that landing pages were the main part of SEO to actually convert good leads, demos, signups and opportunities. And I think back then I was still quite a big believer uh, in like top funnel SEO. So when I say that I mean more informative based SEO. So going after things like how to based searches and that could be how to build a LinkedIn ads program or how to start B2B SEO or how to build an SEO strategy for SaaS, those kind of things which are more informational based. So it was more, I had, I think two main things in my head. One was you had to kind of follow a landing page structure that would convert, which they still can for sure. And I think the other was more the top funnel focus, like trying to get as much traffic to your website as possible in the hope that a small chunk of those visitors would convert. And I wasn't really that familiar back then with how powerful kind of the well structured blog could be. I knew aspects of it, but now it's changed so much like you say, especially over the last year or two with the introduction of AI overviews for Google and with ChatGPT, Claude and a bunch of other LLMs being so much more popular, used just a part of most folks day to day. So things have literally flipped on its head. So I suppose those, those were a couple of things, but I'm sure there's a bunch more.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. I mean that's definitely a change that we've seen and that's something that you've been helping us with too Sam, which is awesome. And we've got a like really consistent inbound uh, coming from pages that you helped us build for our agency services and also a whole lot of listicles and maybe that's something tactical that we can get into later on. But um, we're seeing a ton come from the AI SEO work that you're doing. Aeo, geo, whatever you want to call it, which One should we be calling by the way Sam I feel like I'm always mixing up the terms.

Speaker B: I'm still not sure because I'll have marketing leaders and founders join calls and say we need to have a geo, we need help with AEO uh, we need help with AI search, we need help with LLMO M uh, we need to show up in ChatGPT. So I think I'm still not clear on the exact word to use. I tend to lean towards AEO so answer engine optimization but sometimes I'll say SEO and AI search to keep it simple. So I still hear a bunch of

Speaker A: stuff because people are using AEO, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever it is, do you find that they're making much sort of longer tail searches more specific to their own situation and if so does that then change your approach? Like very different approach obviously from what you had three years ago?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I think it also like with most things and like you folks talk about uh, going back to the fundamentals it depends on if we're selling. I deal with a lot of B2B companies that are selling software most of the time but not always their icp their target customers are fairly tech savvy so they will already be using an LLM like chatgpt. Claude Perplexity there is a few. We've actually got some med tech clients that have more layman users and a couple more traditional industries as well where they actually get the majority of their inbound from folks finding them on Google but generally yeah, uh, it's an LLM AI search. Yeah to your point the prompts, the good, the beauty about these systems is the prompts can be a lot more in depth whereas traditionally in your sense George, someone might have looked for best LinkedIn ads agency or in my case they might look for best SaaS, SEO agenc or in the proposal space they might look for best proposal software. Whereas now we can go to an LLM and we can type in our exact Persona, our exact problem statement, our exact company size and exactly what we need and around our budget as well. So we could say like I'm a CMO of a company with 50 headcount or 100 headcount we're targeting the mid market. We, we have I don't know, 10 sales reps. I need a proposal software that has XYZ features and right now I'm using this system and then we can get a much more granular response and get several brands recommended to us along with a breakdown of the specs that we the LLM that the system thinks they're a good fit for and then probably a pricing range as well. So then we can start putting together our short list and then probably going on to ask more questions and do more research deeper inside the LLM. So that's of course changed massively compared to two, three years ago where most folks were going to Google. Still a long tail, but just way less long tail. Like show me the best XYZ or best XYZ software and then hitting the blue links and then trawling through until they got the information they needed to get in touch of that. That certainly changed. And with that, the structure of how you build an SEO and AI search campaign is important. So a lot of the fundamentals remain the same in terms of how you do kind of what we used to call money keyword research or money prompt research, finding out the right types of pages to build to hit the search intent. But then a big piece of this, and happy to walk through all this stuff as well, is actually making sure your positioning is right within, whether it's an article, a listicle based article, whether it's a landing page, an ICP page, an integration page. Making sure your positioning is really spot on on the type of companies you go after, who uh, you're best suited for, who you're profit for pricing and all that kind of good stuff. So LLMs can easily grab that info. And likewise, if other companies are talking about you, it's important they get your positioning right if you're being mentioned on other sites because you could start one attracting the wrong leads or missing out on the right types of leads that are searching for you. So I feel like positioning, controlling that narrative is way more important now than perhaps it historically was.

Speaker A: You know, we talk a lot on this channel about how the secret to B2B marketing and sales is making sure that people remember you when the need arises. Well, this is our time. We're here to tell you we're actually a B2B demand generation agency too. We're not just education and upskilling. So we don't just do the strategy for you, but we also specialize in B2B channels like LinkedIn, Google Meta and Reddit. So if you need an agency for the first time, or if you just want to see how we stack up compared to your current one, head to the B2B playbook.com to learn more and book a time to chat if you're ready. Okay, let's get back to it. So m this fundamentals just become even more Important. Then uh, we actually had an inbound come to us recently, Sam, who said that he searched in Claude, find me a B2B SaaS, um, demand gen agency that won't fob me off to junior account managers because he was like sick of signing with like a big fancy agency and then being passed on to junior account managers. And when we had our initial call with him, he told me like that's exactly what I searched. You guys came up. And then I went back and looked at our services page and remembered that that's something we had called out. You know, we don't fob you off to a junior. We're the ones who push the buttons, we do the strategy, etc. Etc. And so that really resonates for me when you're saying build for your icp. And I guess on that, Sam, then you want to make sure you have the right information out there that communicates to your ICP that you are for them and these are all the different ways that you can help them. Right. Like you need to really make that clear and kind of take ownership of that content.

Speaker B: Exactly. And yeah, that's, that's awesome that you had an inbound that was, was a great fit and what you communicated on your website clearly stated how you think about the industry and resonated with that and found you for an LM and came inbound.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Right. It's, I mean I, I'm a simple guy, so a lot of the, a lot of the things I say are fairly simple, at least in my head. And most of the time I say SEO gets over complicated in the sense that a lot of it is working out. What do your target customers, what your icp, your dream client, avatar, what do they search for? Not when they're messing around like trying to learn the industry or trying to understand for themselves, but when they're in that buying window, whether it's 2%, 5% of your total addressable market. I'm not sure what it is anymore because everyone says different. But uh, when they are in that buying window, what are they going to hunt for? When they need your software now and need your service now and they need your solution now. And realistically there's only so many variants or different ways they can search for that and, and usually it's some variant, some long tail version of like, show me the best XYZ software, show me the best software for a use case, show me the best alternative to this solution. Or I'm comparing this option versus this option. Like what should I consider or maybe I'm reviewing pricing or maybe I need a specific integration like something along those terms of the crux of it is nailing every way someone can search for your offer when they're in market. Then to your point, putting all these lines of the water to control the narrative on our own website, I think a lot of folks now are ah jumping to we need to build backlinks, we need to get brand mentions, we need to get placements, we need to digital pr, we need to do get review sites, we need to get on Reddit. Sure those things will definitely help but make sure your house is in order first AKA the foundation which is your website. And I'd much rather that an LLM or AI search pulled from our website rather than another source that may or may not be accurate about us especially and this is me going on a tangent like for example a lot of tech companies still hide their pricing on their websites and the problem is if someone searches for your brand name plus pricing, like there was a well known data provider that was hiding their pricing for years and years and they still do. What you actually see in the LLM results is Reddit Reddit users basically giving information that are probably disgruntled. Like this company's frustrating because they're not telling me their pricing. Then they handed me over to a sales rep who gave me a discovery uh call then gave me another pitch on a secondary call and eventually got their pricing. And it was like I don't know, 10k a month, whatever it was. But the problem is that was like three years ago and it might not be up to date. So now someone's seeing that and they're getting a bad first taste of your brand plus pricing that may or may not be correct. Just put that on your website, clearly put it on your articles as well. Put on any other pages that make sense and folks are going to get served up the right information. That's one thing. It's basically putting these lines in the water, working out like what's going to hit the search intent. If I search for this money keyword or this money prompt on Google or an LLM, what type of page shows? Is it a list of article comparing the top 10 options? Is it a landing page, maybe with a problem agitation solution framework? Is it a vertical uh page? Is it an integration page like work out what it is, build a page that's more helpful, more useful, more evidence based, more convincing than whatever showing up and being pulled into AI search now and then. To your point, make sure Your positioning and who you want to serve is tied into that page. So if it's an article comparing the best in your case George, the best LinkedIn ads agencies of 2026 what we'll usually do for those kind of article, we want the information to be quickly snapped up by AI. So we'll do a quick summary like a TLDR which can then be pulled into AI results, maybe a Y truster section. Then we'll do like a mini table like the top three options. Then we'll jump into the full maybe 10 options and then when we're members positioning yourself so the B2B playbook first that's when we want to wrap in kind of who you're for. So we tend for example I don't know what you want to say whether it's the best fits to startups or a best fit for mid market companies and you're probably struggling with xyz, we typically work with these budget ranges. Here's an example of some of the clients we've held. Here's a quick review video, here's our pricing range and then a CTA to get in touch and then a fair comparison of the other kind of nine competitors. So it's constantly thinking about that and keeping that positioning the same on the content you put on your own website and if you are getting mentioned on others and like you say making sure then you're attracting the right type of opportunities that are hunting for your wares.

Speaker A: On this show we talk a lot about being remembered in the right moment when your buyer actually has the need. Well here is our uh, moment. If you're thinking about switching agencies or you're finally ready to bring one on for the first time. We're actually a B2B demand generation agency. We run LinkedIn ads, Google Ads, Meta, all the channels that your B2B buyers hang out in. And of course we do the strategic component that is completely aligned with our 5B's framework for demand generation. This is all we do. So when that moment comes we want you to think of us. And if you're still just figuring out your next move as a marketer, uh, next time you've got a two minute coffee break, grab our free upskilling report from the b2b playbook.com you'll get instant personalized results showing you exactly where you sit compared to other B2B marketers and what other ones driving real pipeline are uh, doing. We'll also send our best free resources over to you based on your answers. Check it out@the b2b playbook.com okay, back to the show. I love that. I love how you do keep it reasonably simple. I think the gap for a lot is like the actual execution of that. Like a lot of in house B2B marketers will probably read your posts and be like, oh yeah, if I really put the time into it, maybe I could have a go at doing some of that. But they just have so many competing priorities that they won't get around to doing it. And that's why to me, like for companies that do have that budget around, like get uh, it bringing an expert in to make sure that this stuff is happening on Autopilot makes a lot of sense. Um, and Sam, you said that there's obviously different pages or types of pages that you could build depending on the search query that people are using. How do you decide exactly if you should be doing a listicle, a comparison page, a uh, vertical landing page or anything else?

Speaker B: Yeah, again, nothing too complex. There are tools that you can, you can use for this. Like there's a bunch of tools now like SERP analysis tools, so search engine result page analysis tools, or there's a bunch of AI workflows. But if you don't have any of those tools, there's plenty of them that basically just give you an idea of what type of page you need to build to hit the search intent, AKA show up for your money keyword or prompt. If you don't have those, you can just google your keyword that you're trying to rank for, or you can just type it into the ChatGPT or Claude and see what, what websites are pulled from and what websites are cited. And for example, in George's case, if we're looking for the best LinkedIn ads agencies or some variant of that, then nearly always it's going to be a list call based article. So we evaluate the top 10 top 15 top 5 LinkedIn ads agencies, 2026 and that carries through to software. Like if I'm looking for the best proposal software or calendar scheduling or whatever it is, project management software or tool or platform, nearly always, not always it'll be some form of listicle based article. Whereas if I don't have that best abbreviation, if I'm looking for a LinkedIn ads agency, or if I'm looking for, I don't know, proposal, uh, project management software or something like that, it may be a landing page or if I'm going a bit more specific like project management software for HR or for sales, again that might be a Landing page, a vertical based landing page that, that gets pulled into results. So the crux of what I'm saying is the easiest way is to literally search what you want to show up for. See what the most frequently cited or what's actually showing up in Google organic search pages. That'll give you an understanding of the type of page you need to build to show up. And then you can benchmark what's showing up top and you can try and make your page kind of more helpful, more useful, more trustworthy. Maybe you drive some more internal links to it, maybe you then once you've launched it, if it's quite a competitive search term with a lot of other competing agencies or software companies trying to go after it, maybe then you look to do some backlink building again happy to share ideas on that or some, some brand mentions which are super powerful. Now in AI search and LLMs, getting other websites to mention your company in the right context is really powerful. So there's a bunch of ways you can, you can do it.

Speaker A: I like that good common sense approach. Look at how uh, things are already being ranked, uh, look at what those pages um, are actually looking like themselves and, and do it better basically. So then there's the off site to stuff Sam, that you touched on at the end there, the brand mentions in the backlinking. How important are they now? I know that sort of in that first 90 days Sam, um, you really look to make a lot of impact by targeting a lot of those bottom of funnel keywords right in search terms. And typically there's not always an enormous amount of competition for those depending uh, on what they are like if they're comparisons there just might not be a huge amount of competition. You can get some good quick wins there. At what point do backlinks and brand mentions become quite important?

Speaker B: Yeah, you nailed it. So I think that's the good thing as well about starting with bottom funnel. SEO and AI search is that especially for software companies, there's usually if you're in a category that has some demand, AKA your target customers know a solution like yours is out there so they are hunting for it. Then there's usually some, some good ops like you say at the bottom of the funnel, which could be competitor alternative, competitor pricing, competitor reviews, competitor A vs competitor B vs you, that kind of stuff. And a lot of times those searches, if you look on a tool like HRS they'll have like anywhere from 1020, up to 200 searches per month which isn't a ton. But the keyword difficulty will be super low. So it'll be like, I don't know, 0 to 5, not to 10, something like that. So in theory that means you could knock up a solid page for these terms, build it out, publish it. And we've seen these like compared to alternative pages, rank as quick as days and start driving demos super fast. But then on the, that's why I'd always say prioritize those and start with kind of the low traffic stuff, um, the high intent, low traffic stuff. Just because that can rank super fast and give you a quick win on the board even if your website has low domain authority, low domain rating and you haven't got a ton of backlinks. But then on the flip side, if you're trying to go against big competitors that have been doing investing in SEO for many, many years, you've got in the Canada scheduling space, you've got Chili Piper, Calendly, a bunch of others, project management, you've got all the, all the big boys that have been around long, long time like ClickUp and so forth. So it's going to be very, very difficult unless you build a solid page and then start driving backlinks to it, which is going to help you with kind of classic SEO and Google or likewise we've got brand mentions. This is important for a number of reasons because the brand mention side leans into LLM. So a few interesting things we found. Yes, building a page for your money, keywords and prompts, important. Ideally you'd like an LLM to pull from that, cite it and then mention your brand because of it. It's not always going to happen. So that's why you then want to work out if in George's cases, one of our money terms is like best LinkedIn, ads, agencies and variants of that. If we know that there's other websites that are being cited and pulled into AI search consistently. Let's make a list of those and let's try and get into their listicles. Ideally a top three placement because LLM's pulling from them. And the funny thing is we've had, we've had clients that have been like super slow to publish on their own website. Maybe just because they've got issue, maybe they're going for a read design or maybe their dev team's fully booked up or maybe there's something going on with product or maybe they're still working on positioning things or they're changing the products that they're kind of um, careful on what they do on the website. So we said fine. All we've done for them is manual outreach to listicles in their niche. So we had a we've got an active CRM client in the AI space. All we did was for the first two, three months, manual outreach to the listicles in the AICRM space that were commonly being cited. Got them top placements and then for all their money terms they were showing up and we didn't do much on page work but we started getting them demos and sign ups just through that, which is the interesting thing of how things have flipped. So there is that and there is ways you can do that through sweat equity. So you can just make a list of these sites and manually outreach to them. A bit like we talked about a couple of years ago when we did the link building exercise with with you George, but instead of asking for a link we're kind of saying working out who published the article, maybe connecting them with them on LinkedIn, avoiding a classic wall of text email that they're going to ignore and then maybe maybe sending them a custom loom video or something similar saying hey great article, I'm actually about maybe you offer them a value exchange. So we're actually building a similar list right now. Would love to include you in it. I wonder if you'd be up for uh, kind of discussing us adding you as a top placement in yours or some kind of value exchange. Maybe you feature them on your podcast or maybe you do a write up on them, whatever it is that's actually valuable to them and in return you can, you can get a nice placement in their list and should give you some good weight in the LLMs with a chance of your brand to be mentioned. Uh, some will be pay to play but some will be up for a value exchange and that is carrying big weight right now as well as you'll often see in the LLM results. That's what cited is the classic review sites like G2 Capterra or if you're in this service space it might be clutch or similar along with Reddit. A lot of what I'm saying is prioritize the things that move the needle quick, which is kind of your own website and placements on others. Then if you've got the resource in time, of course you want to invest into review sites and Reddit, but a lot of it is we know B2B marketing teams are often small, they're often strapped for time. So it's prioritizing what's actually going to move the needle in the shortest space of time and then ramping things up as and when you can.

Speaker A: If you like this channel, you're going to love the B2B incubator. It's our demand generation course built for B2B marketers who were tired of doing random acts of marketing and whatever the business asks them to do. We show you how to take back control by implementing our 5B's framework for demand generation and how to align more closely with sales. It's a top rated cause. We have over 315 graduates like Allison from Rivet who credits the program with helping her drive 70% more pipeline for the business. We also show you how to use AI the right way. Not to do more of everything worse, but to focus and do the right things and do them better. So if you're ready to take back control of your B2B marketing and be proactive instead of reactive, head to the B2B playbook.com and check out our demand generation program to learn more. Okay, let's get on with the show. Uh, so with the backlinking then you good advice is to try and go for that value exchange. Uh, is that something that you typically lead with Sam, or do you often go down like the pay to play route because it might just be a bit faster, a bit more transactional.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of, for a lot of client work. Well if they won't have a value exchange with one of the other websites we're working with, then it will be pay to play just for speed. Whereas for my own website, breaking B2B as we're gonna have a bit more time and we're not necessarily going to be in a time constraint to get, get the, the link or the, the brand mention or both done, then we can be a bit more flexible. And I suppose for my sins, I know a lot of the founders in the SaaS SEO space, so I can kind of approach them and I guess sweeten them up a bit and try and get, get a placement. So it's a bit different.

Speaker A: Uh, I'm sure it depends on the website Sam, but what is the going rate for asking people basically for a brand mention or a link?

Speaker B: Yeah. So on list go placement. So if you were trying to get like if George was trying to get on a top placement for an article that was ringing the best LinkedIn ads agencies, if it was was like consistently ranking one on Google, maybe consistently cited on, on LMS, um, had a good amount of traffic, then it could be like anywhere from 500 bucks, $1,500 like that kind of range, possibly a Bit more. It usually depends on how much traffic they're driving, what position you want to get on them. And yeah, if they rank well, basically it could be way more. If it was a really sought after list in the SaaS, uh, space that maybe was by an independent review site, it could be way more. It could be a high in the thousands of dollars depending, like if they're getting that traffic, they're getting that inbound from it, they could theoretically charge what they want. So it kind of goes back to the old wild west of link building and guest posting like that we saw years and years ago. It's kind of like a, uh, similar thing but more for uh, the brand mentions in the write up, in the, in their review or in their roundup or in their listicle.

Speaker A: We've always had people reaching out to us, asking us for uh, mentions and link placements. But especially since we've been ranking for agency pages, the ones that you helped us do, we've been getting a whole lot of other agencies who are asking to basically be placed in there. And I'm always hesitant to do it because I'm like, well then I'm just adding to the list. It's helping them. Is it diluting my authority? I'm probably better off finding someone else where there's like a different value exchange where they're not directly competing head to head with what we're trying to rank for.

Speaker B: Yeah, you have to be a little bit careful in that kind of outreach because if they were a competitor, but they did have, I don't know, a listicle that was useful, that was ranking well on Google, that was being cited in AI search and they maybe offered you a top three placement, then it probably would be valuable. Whereas if it was a newer site or they've only just published the article and there was no real value to it, then it's not really worth it. So it's kind of weighing up if there's a good exchange of value. If not, no point.

Speaker A: Sam, probably one of the other big myths that you break down constantly and we see this in the great building in public that you're doing and working with companies like rbdb, Fibla, that SEO takes ages to get pipeline from. Now you famously say 90 days is all you really need. Why do you think that you can make it happen so much faster than others?

Speaker B: I think there's a couple reasons. I think how it actually came into my head was a mix of two things. Thinking back, I was thinking about this the other day. I think one is because when we started breaking B2B just over two years ago, I kind of set myself a bit of a mission. Like rather foolishly I was like, we're on a brand new website, zero domain authority, zero content, nothing. Let's just see if we can get ranking in three months. And back then we were not as focused on SaaS like we are now. We were focused just broadly on B2B SEO. So I was like, we'll go for B2B SEO agency, we'll go all out and that'll be the focus. So we'll knock up a load of landing pages on the site, B2B SEO agency being one of them. We'll try and make it like best in class, like more useful and helpful and whatever's on the web right now. And then I'll outreach to basically every founder, uh, or marketer that I know that has an agency or is in SaaS that I can kind of ask a favor and just offer to write a guest post for them, which I did a guest article and all of them backlink back. And I also reviewed all the podcasts that I'd been on and any of them that were kind of slightly related to the B2B or SaaS niche. Again, I asked for a backlink for that money keyword, wherever is relevant on their site. So basically just brute force, just pumping out a ton of content on the site, hitting up as many people as I possibly could to annoy for a backlink back then because this was when Google was still more prevalent. And yeah, it worked. To my surprise, Even then like B2B SEO agency was actually full of listicles. So I tried to bombard my way through the landing page and somehow it worked. It did crash three months later when I neglected it. And also a funny story hider, I think he was, I think he was Nigerian copywriter who screwed me over like two or three grand by doing full AI content. But I didn't check it because I was just heads down cold calling trying to get customers. So basically I proved the model myself, got some inbound from it, had a funny case study and I thought this could work for clients that have way better websites than our brand new one that's built on a weird CMS and has next to no content. And at the same time I was reading Alex Hormozy's um, $100 million offers and the lead magnet book and obviously his big thing is like have an entry offer that brings people in the door. No one wants to hear about another SEO analysis or audit. What they do want to hear is that SEO doesn't take 12 months or six months, that it can actually drive pipeline revenue as quick as three months. So I think while we were constructing the offer as well, interestingly, we then kind of ran it with you guys like whenever that was a year or two back for, it was for demand gen course. Right, like demand generation course. And we did a similar thing on your landing page, like very similar. And yeah, just, just started rolling out for SaaS companies basically because we kind of proved it, we proved it with you, you folks. George. And then rolled out. Does it always work for, for brand new websites it's tougher because they literally have like no content and no authority. So if they're a SaaS company, maybe you could do it with some of the super low traffic stuff like compared to alternative searches and some of that content that's, that has really low difficulty to rank for and you could pump out a bunch of that and drive some backlinks and you probably could do it. It does help if you've got a bit of a base. So for a lot of the SaaS companies and B2B companies we work with tend to have a little bit of content on the website, a little bit of authority and then we have a good base so we can start building out the strategy and doing all those things we talked about like working out the money keywords and prompts, building the right type of bomber funnel content that can show up fast, doing some brand mentions, some backlinking work, maybe some technical work and all being. Well, the other part of the 90 days was platforms like Google typically take up to three months for rankings to settle. And because a lot of the LLMs like ChatGPT are pulling from Google results, when they use grounding, when they actually trigger a search, that means that they go outside of historical data. That's how it tied in. So that's the long winded way of how we built the offer and how it came about.

Speaker A: Right. So the LLMs are often pulling on Google initially, right, to get a lot of their information. So to get found by the LLMs, it's pretty important to do the stuff you've always done in Google then, is that right?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So not always. So I mean if you're doing like a general search, like I don't know, in my case, maybe I'm searching something around a uh, workout, the gym, or maybe I'm working, searching something general like in my day to day. But if I'm doing something where it triggers, which will just pull from its, its own historical knowledge base and its training data. Whereas if I'm doing something that triggers grounding, I'm, I'm um, company searching for specific software, a specific service, uh, or similar that then goes outside of its own training data and actually starts triggering grounding like doing a search it might pull from Google results. And that's why it's so important to still not ignore SEO and still do good SEO principles because a lot of it carries through to uh, Google AI overviews, ChatGPT pulls from it. A lot of the LLMs pull from Google search when you're searching for that kind of stuff. So that's why it's always funny when you see Those posts on LinkedIn like Claude Repace, my 10 person marketing team, type Claude below for my AI search or my complete AO guide and it's like some random guide that pumps out uh, a thousand pages following this playbook using AI tools and you see like an uptick in traffic for a month and then what they don't show is like the three month crash because their website was marked as spammy by Google because they pumped out a thousand low value pieces of content that were not useful to the end user at all. So we really are in the wild west of SEO and a lot of random advice is being given out by people that aren't really in business.

Speaker A: Oh God. I mean just generally if you see any posts like that on LinkedIn, people like just run for the hills, you know, especially, especially if they're talking about uh, you know, selling on LinkedIn or doing anything on LinkedIn or how to get more views on LinkedIn. These people are a, ah, snake oil salesman, I guarantee you that um, they're all such great insights and again that's why I love so much of what you say because it's just really grounded in fundamentals and just always goes back to everything you say. I sit back and think oh that makes a lot of sense. Uh, it just makes sense. So that's why I'm so bullish on your approach and you know, we've seen it work firsthand, um, not just for us but for the other companies you work with too. Which is, which is awesome. And Google's report or announcement Sam, about you know, how to optimize for aeo. What was the key takeaway there?

Speaker B: The quickest way of summaring up is do SEO I suppose the longer winded version of it. But let's remember that one Google have said there's a few things to think about. Google have Said contradicting stuff especially on like Twitter and social over the years, which from what us SEO contractors have seen, hasn't actually played out. Like they used to say things like backlinks aren't that important when they definitely were. They still are. They've said lots of stuff in that, in that piece they're basically saying like SEO at least showing up in Google AI views is good, good, good, um, SEO fundamentals. So actually building content that helps the end user that is not spammy, that's you can use AI as long as actually you're feeding it the right kind of context, you're not relying on it. There's a human in the loop. You're structuring your pages right, you're doing good technical SEO. You're thinking about performance and all that kind of stuff. They do ment something about third party lists. So they do kind of hint that they're not that important. But again we've, we've seen that they are. So it's like sometimes Google, I don't know why they do that. Uh, maybe it's because they don't necessarily want to send you away from their own platform. So naturally they make most of their cash from Google Ads and things like that. So maybe they're just trying to do stuff that keeps you on their own search system, which kind of makes sense I guess. But yeah, the long short of it is do good SEO. Work out what your target customer search build content that's, that's super useful, that's backed by in our opinion, customer research and the problems they face and your positioning and why they choose you and then make sure your website is structurally sound from a technical perspective in terms of performance and how the pages are built out. It was nothing groundbreaking. It was just kind of interesting because that is, that's what we see across our client base. Good, good AI searches, good bottom funnel SEO that we've talked about plus B2B ecosystem marketing. So then working out what is the, what's going to give you the biggest clout to then get surfaced in LLMs when your dream customers are searching for what you do. And that usually moves into getting featured on other articles, making sure your review sites, uh, are up to scratch. If you're able to getting in Reddit, um, relevant Reddit threads, maybe YouTube and like those main big four or five platforms that are regularly cited from kind of working out the resource you have and then getting involved in them if you've got the knowledge and understanding of how to do so.

Speaker A: So what role does YouTube play then Sam. I mean, you're investing pretty heavily into YouTube. We are as well. Have you found that's made a positive impact and if so, how?

Speaker B: Weirdly, I don't actually see YouTube pulled in that much in AI search and LLMs. I don't know about yourself, but I don't see it all that much. I know some people say they see it a lot, so it must happen. Um, maybe it's just because I'm using ChatGPT and Claude. I'm not entirely sure. Certainly still see it a lot on Google. So in the video section and some of the results and things like that. And it's definitely like weaving in relevant YouTube videos onto relevant landing pages and articles. Has definitely helped us with our own Google presence and helps us generally in terms of our, uh, building trust with folks and kind of sending folks videos before sales calls and as part of that process and enablement process has been great. But yeah, I'm hearing a lot of other folks saying they've seen them in LMS M. I'm not seeing them as much myself. I don't know about you.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm not seeing him a huge amount at all. Um, I think most people are finding our YouTube stuff from. Yeah, basically Google and because every episode we do has this video embedded into it along with the RSS podcast and a very rich article around it. Um, yeah, I don't know if somehow it all seems to work together and help those pages rank better maybe also because we tend to stay in our lane with what we talk about, so there's probably some authority there in terms of what we spe about and maybe the domain is helping that too. But yeah, in terms of us being like a YouTube channel being discovered in AI search, I'm not seeing a lot of that. I wonder if that is something that they'll do more of.

Speaker B: Would be interesting to see for sure. I'd love it if they did because you and I would. Would show up at even more so we could pull. And plus the fact that if someone see. If someone sees you on video, they just trash you way more if they actually buy into what you're talking about. That is, um, totally. I mean there's value, no doubt because plenty of people still go to YouTube and they'll search around your niche or industry after they have a problem or if they're trying to learn about it. Like there's no doubt the value is there. Um, outside of search, which we always say to every client, don't do SEO AI search alone if you're doing it alone, you're making it way harder for yourself. Like if you ever have other channels to support it, it's just going to be a lot easier. Especially if you're selling like a B2B service or software that's higher ticket that involves multiple stakeholders and consideration and takes time. So they're not just going to search to get their trust information, they're going to all these other things as. As I'm sure you and a lot of your listeners are well aware of. So yes, it definitely plays into that side of things, I guess outside of search too.

Speaker A: Yeah, m definitely. Look, I just hope that the LLMs don't decide that it's like TikTok that they really want to pull in because otherwise I'll be like LinkedIn has.

Speaker B: LinkedIn's doing that again.

Speaker A: What are they doing?

Speaker B: Has LinkedIn not put the video feature back on your app? They've got that back on mine. They've literally a couple days ago now, now we've got the video feeds. It had it like two years ago, right. And now it's done it again.

Speaker A: I'm. I'm just exhausted by that wonderful cesspool of a place, to be honest. Too much time. Too much time spent on that platform. Uh, it's amazing. I do recommend people be there but. But yeah, it can. Like any form of social media can get really, really tiring. Sam, um, is there anything that we haven't discussed so far that you think we should have talked about today? Uh, when it comes to SEO or AI SEO, something tangent, tangentially related. Feel free to say no, but always like to ask.

Speaker B: We've covered most of it. We've covered m. Like most of the. Most of the fundamentals. I think the crux of it now is like we say do do great bottom of funnel SEO. Make sure your foundation, AKA your website is best in class. One thing that I will say. So we talked about kind of doing the research. One thing I will say is where we are now. There's a couple pieces so we're at such a good time in to help speed up a lot of the workflows here. Like one of the best use cases we've seen right now for AI as part of this workflow is if you've got a sales team or if you're the founder running sales calls, then the fact that you can hook up sales cool software like Fathom Gong, Fireflies, whatever, straight into a Claude via mcp super easy. Takes like a minute to do and then you can start getting that Rich data from your sales calls, support calls, success calls, and that can actually feed. You can set up a Claude skill. So you can, even if you use a tool like hrefs or Semrush, you can then put in the hrefs or the Semrush MCP and you can start doing your money keyword research with a Claude skill. So you can say like listen to my latest 90 days of calls. I want to focus on the bottom of funnel, maybe mid funnel. So here's some examples of those kind of searches. Um, I want to uh, go for kind of low key or difficulty, high sales intent. Can you kind of pull some pain points, pull some bottom of funnel searches that folks might look for when they're in market for our solution. So you can do money keyword research based on sales calls. Then you can actually use that research to then ask questions. You can help it like make first drafts of your content if you're doing landing pages and things like that. So it's really going to resonate with the pain points, the jobs to be done, the goals, the motivations. When it's a wild world where you don't have to use just like your own notes on Google Docs, you can just get a machine to help you do it. So that's like a sick use case. And like our clients that are getting really good results are just giving us the MCP to their sales calls. I wish everyone would do it, but obviously a lot of SaaS companies have high security levels so it's just a no go. We just get autonomized, um, blanked out transcripts. So that, that's insane right now. Another thing that gets neglected like crazy, which we didn't talk about is if you've already been doing SEO, you probably already have money pages that maybe historically ranked well on Google. Maybe they're, they're not being pulled into AI search. So actually going through your commercial pages like Listicles, we talked about landing pages, vertical pages, integration pages, use case pages and looking out those ones that maybe ranked well historically or not being pulled in AI search and then benchmarking them against what's ranking top, what's being cited, improving the structure. So a lot of folks get Listicles wrong. They don't use that structure we talked about with the quick summary up front. Why trust us? Then jumping into three tools or three or four tools in a table and then building the right structure beyond. So making sure one, you've got the right structure, two, maybe you add to the depth and quality, three maybe you Add some more proof signals. Four, maybe you get at least five relevant internal links. Then maybe you add some back, you work on some backlinks and some brand mentions to get those money pages ranking well, because that's the quickest lift that will get you pipelined in 90 days. Um, and that's often neglected. That's just classic SEO stuff. But it works for AI search too with the right structure. So that's just a few things I'd leave on.

Speaker A: Yeah, they're phenomenal. Um, love, love that workflow of looking at the calls of the last 90 days and looking for those bottom of funnel keywords based on transcripts. That's such a great idea. And integrating it with something like ahrefs to go and automatically find you those keywords with some kind of search volume around them too. That's really, really smart. Probably. One final question I have for you Sam, before I let you go, is for those that have never really done SEO themselves or yeah, I haven't really engaged an SEO agency before. It might be good for them to get a sense of what the sort of like the different tiers and like velocity of SEO you see or you work with in being like how hard do we go at this thing and what does that look like is entry level? Are we talking uh, like to make some kind of difference, are we looking at you know, three or four pages of three, uh, or four pages a month and a handful of backlinks and then what does the middle of the rung look like? And then what's like the craziest level that you've seen that is actually moving the needle?

Speaker B: Exactly. So we, we, our entry level is, is basically like that. It's like we'll build the strategy. We'll do three to four pieces of content a month, we'll do a couple backlinks and then we'll give, we'll give you some basic support, some basic technical work and reporting. It's quite a light plan. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we'll have super aggressive campaigns where we're, we're like, we have, we still have a bunch of human writers, so we're doing up to 20, 30 pages per month. Whether that's articles, landing pages or beyond, that'll be a good chunk of technical SEO and support. That'll be link building. So they'll get a good amount of high quality backlinks. They also will also be doing manual outreach. We'll be finding websites that are like we talked about, whether listicles or similar roundups or review sites, outreaching them to get them placements like top three in their lists. Uh, maybe we'll be giving them suggestions for Reddit, maybe we'll be doing some CRO work or uh, recommendations for their site to make sure the visitors that do come are likely to convert, take a demo, take a sign up, get into the funnel, whatever that is, plus quite detailed reporting across LLMs, AI search, Google organic and so forth. So it basically the main difference typically from my experience is aggression like deliverables that will move the needle, that'll help you see time to value quicker. Um, which I think is the same for most B2B services. Right. With, with, with the, with the, the support of a strategist from the team that's actually going to guide you and give you sound advice and push back if we think you're doing the wrong thing and, and give you recommendations.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And you still mostly use human written content, do you? Or is it supplemented with AI or what's the mix looking like there?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we still have a panel of, of writers, which I think's important now because I think we are in a weird space because I think you can, there's definitely workflows where you can produce content with AI. Like you could do something like I talked about just now, like putting in all the information from sales calls, support calls, success calls, having that feed coming through. And then that could help you build something like this a bit more straightforward, like a listicle, because then your positioning could be pulled from the research maybe then you do some, you try out the competitor tools or you try out their software or whatever it is, and you feed that in and you build like a bare bone structure and that helps you compile the list of call because then you analyze, you analyze what, what, what other competitors are doing in terms of their page format. You build the rough structure, then you have a human then loop to kind of verify all the information and check is on point. So I think something like that it can be produced, whereas, I don't know, pages, like landing pages and things like that, you probably want to spend a bit more time on and care on and things like that. So yeah, I think, I think we're in a funny phase right now where AI can do a lot of the good stuff, but you still definitely want to hum in the loop, in our opinion. Is that still working? Well?

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it comes back to what we were saying around, you know, a big part of the game now is making sure that you're really speaking to your icp. And so unless your AI has like a very, very firm understanding of who your ICP is and exactly how you fit into that world, then you need to have really strong human oversight. And even then, you know, you still want a good, strong human oversight. I mean, we have workflows and use, uh, it to help us build our rich articles off the back of our podcast. But, but it's got like a 50 minute transcript of our voice, plus all the history of how we wrote them previously before we had AI help us. Um, so it tends to be like pretty decent at doing that. Um, but not everyone's going to have that huge backlog and reference library, right?

Speaker B: Oh, for sure. That's it. Yeah. If you've got that historical rich data, then that definitely helps a ton. No doubt.

Speaker A: All right, awesome. Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining us. Um, for those who want to follow you, learn more about, uh, B2B SaaS SEO best place. LinkedIn for you, Sam. Sam Dunning.

Speaker B: Yeah, appreciate it, man. LinkedIn for daily ramblings on SEO, AI search and SaaS marketing. The podcast breaking B2B, which will get you on very soon. And yeah, lastly, if you're basically fed up or your CEO tells you that every time someone searches for your software, your competitors keep getting recommended instead of you, so you're missing out on a, uh, mind sharing inbound opportunities, demos, leads and so forth, then we might be able to fix that with our weird approach to SEO and AI search. Is breaking b2b.com phenomenal?

Speaker A: Sam Dunning, thanks so much for joining us. A quick note before you go, listeners. You can find more great content and get in touch with us at theb2b playbook.com be sure to subscribe to this

Speaker B: podcast and our newsletter while you're there to get the latest news, tips and resources from our playbook.

Speaker A: We'll be back the same day and same time with another episode next week.

Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to the B2B playbook. Remember, successful B2B marketing starts with the buyer.