Christian Klepp  00:04

Mr. Sam Dunning, I’m gonna say, welcome back to the show, right? Good to have you back on.

Sam Dunning  00:10

Hey, appreciate it, man, and glad I didn’t annoy too many people that weren’t protesting for do not get Sam back on for round two. So glad, glad I made it back.

Christian Klepp  00:21

Nah, I’m pretty sure that they’re a fan of your online video series, and we’re gonna talk about that little bit later on in the conversation. I’m sure.

Sam Dunning  00:32

Looking forward to it.

Christian Klepp  00:33

Yeah, but you know, Sam, great to have you back on. You know the drill. We try to, like, not do any too much of the small talk here, cut off the fluff and just hop right to it. Looking forward to this conversation because you shared a LinkedIn post with me about a month ago now that I felt was really pertinent in terms of, like, what B2B marketers should be doing. So let’s dive right into that, right? Because you’ve been on a mission to help B2B companies to up their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) game, as you call it, for revenue, not vanity. So for this particular conversation, I’d like to zero in on the topic of how B2B marketing teams can crush their competitors with organic So let’s kick off the conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So first one is, why is it so important for B2B companies to get it right with SEO? And as a follow up to that one, where do you think many B2B companies get it wrong when it comes to SEO?

Sam Dunning  01:34

Yeah, sure. So I suppose I should preface that first and foremost for as a B2B Company, SEO isn’t always the best thing to invest in, and now there’s a couple situations where it might not be a smart move. One is, which is quite common, especially in B2B Tech and SaaS, is if you’re creating almost a new category or a new solution or a new offering, where there isn’t active demand. What do I mean by active demand? Well, there isn’t any prospects that are aware of that solution or that offering, meaning that SEO might be the best bet, because people aren’t searching for it, whether that’s on Google search, whether that’s now on LLMs or similar, or it’s not always the best bet. If, let’s say you’ve perhaps got a leadership team that have never done SEO before. SEO is not an easy internal sell. It’s often, if I was to imagine a marketing budget for a B2B team as a barrel, usually SEO is scraping the bottom of it, and usually somewhere towards the top is things like outbound sales, yeah, plenty of budget for that. Paid media, yeah, plenty events, yeah. SEO is usually something that’s not given the kind of priority resource or similar. So there is a couple things you’ve got to consider. And also, hate to say it, but it’s not always the quickest thing. There are quick wins that you can yield with SEO. But if you’re a company that’s perhaps venture backed. You’re funded, you’ve got investors that want to see results super fast, whilst there can be quick wins as fast as 90 days with a solid SEO program, it’s not something like paid media or kind of super cold out cold calling, or things that we can kind of see, see appointments or meetings or demos booked relatively quickly. Usually you will need some kind of runway. I 90 days or so. So it needs to, needs to have that in mind. 

Sam Dunning  03:27

But with that said, if you are a B2B company that is in a mature market, aka. your target clients know your offer or your solution or your software or service exists, then it’s a solid channel to get in front of those dream clients, when they have that high sales intent, when they have the problem you solve, when they need your solution. Now, when they’re actively in market, when they’re comparing options or comparing vendors, or they have kind of a good level of intent towards your solution, to get in front of them on Google organic search, or now LLMs (Large Language Models). And start kind of driving awareness, driving kind of high, high intent prospects to your website that could potentially be booked, calls, demos, sign ups, whatever your kind of end conversion point is, so that tees it up a little bit, hopefully in terms of how it can be effective. And I suppose when you compare SEO to paid media, whether that’s Google ads, LinkedIn ads or similar, opposed to paying for each and every click, you’ve got more of that evergreen effect where, just like when you do a YouTube search, right, like you might see content that’s a week old, a month old, or even years old, and SEOs are similar, like your content can work almost around the clock, and you’re not paying for each and every click. It kind of compounds over time with the right strategy in place, so that that hopefully teases up a little bit. And I forgot what the second part of your question was.

Christian Klepp  04:52

No problem at all. Where do you see a lot of B2B marketing teams getting it wrong with SEO?

Sam Dunning  04:58

There’s many, many ways. So one is trying to do SEO. If there’s not actually active demand for your offer, I maybe you’re a new solution, new category that your dream clients know about. In that case, I would suggest that you actually work out where your ICP or your ideal client profile spends time, where they get their trusted information from, and one of the best ways to do that is with customer research, whether that’s leveraging sales calls or actually interviewing kind of target prospects, or recently churn clients or recently won clients. Understanding what are those top two three channels they get their trust information from, be it a podcast, maybe they listen to certain industry podcasts or newsletters, or hang out on LinkedIn and work out that spend time there, educating them, talking about the problem you solve, positioning your product as a painkiller, building trust, social proof, authority, and that’s more much more likely to get your clients than SEO is. 

Sam Dunning  05:46

Where else do folks get SEO wrong? Well, let’s pretend you are in a segment. You are providing an offer that’s known, and you do have potential clients searching for it. Well, most of the time it’s we often see companies falling into what I call the quote, unquote traffic trap. So they’re going after, let’s call it real top funnel informational based searches. And that could be something like, what is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management), or how to build a website, or what is a KPI (Key Performance Indicators), or those kind of real high level queries, informational based stuff. And the thing is, if you search for those kind of keywords on tools like Ahrefs, they might show up as having tons of traffic. But the issue is, if someone’s searching for something like how to or what is, or things like that, they’re probably super early in their journey. They might even be a student. They’re just looking for information about that. But what’s worse is a lot of those queries now, especially on Google search, are being wiped out by AI overviews. So the instant result above the fold, where Google will give you an instant explanation to the question, sometimes cite a website, sometimes not. And the problem is, whilst historically, that was a big SEO play, kind of go for super high traffic search terms, build content around them, get traffic at all costs, and a small chunk of that will convert. Nowadays, it doesn’t really make sense as a strategy, purely because AI, AI is wiping out a lot of it. 

Sam Dunning  07:14

And secondly, because even if those prospects do eventually click through to your website, be it an article or landing page or similar, in most cases, they’ll get the information they need and hop straight off. Or a best case scenario, they might grab a lead magnet, or check out your YouTube channel, your podcast or something like that. So going after what we call vanity metrics, like traffic at all costs, that isn’t going to attract high sales intent prospects. Because most of the time if B2B companies are looking to do an SEO program, they’re doing it to feed their sales team with booked calls or demos, or they’re looking, if they’re product led, then they’re looking to drive sign ups or trials of their product. So we can talk about this, that the crux of great SEOs doing the opposite, working out what those dream clients actually search for when they need the solution, or they’re comparing options, or they have the crisp problem that you solve, and starting at the bottom and working up.

Christian Klepp  08:11

Yeah, no, those are some really fantastic points. I had three pull off questions there, but let me just work through them here. So you mentioned but one of the circumstances in which you wouldn’t advise companies to use SEO is if they’re creating a new category. So I guess my question is, Okay, that’s fair enough. But like, at what point in time would that category have reached a certain level of I don’t know, you can call it maturity, and then that’s when you would recommend, yes, you can use SEO now.

Sam Dunning  08:44

Yeah, good question, and there’s no, I don’t have a pinpoint answer to be fair. I’d probably say there’s a couple ways you could think about it. So if you were in a new category, creating a new solution that hasn’t existed before, there is an argument that you could go do SEO, but I’d say unless you had, unless you were well backed, had a good amount of or had a good amount of cash in the bank, it might not be your best bet. But if you really wanted to do SEO, there’s a couple ways you could hit it. One would be leaning more into the problems that your dream clients might face. So I don’t know. And one example we sometimes use is like, one of our clients is a, I suppose, to tee up some context, one of our clients is a proposal software SaaS (Software as a Service). So if you had their problem, it might be something like how to build sales quotes that convert in Google Docs. If you knew your dream clients crisp and specific problems and how they’re getting the job done today, chances are they’re probably searching for that. And if you can map those out in problem based, crisp and specific searches that are relevant to that pain point, then those could be one, one way you could do it that would be reasonably top funnel. 

Sam Dunning  09:52

So if someone searched for something like that, they might land on an article. And you could say, look, you’re probably getting it done this way, like messing around with Google Docs, trying to build these lengthy sales proposals, taking you an hour and a half each day to do it. Why not try our SaaS? Grab a free sign up. You can do this process in five minutes. Follow these AI prompts, and it’s going to build it all out for you. So that’s one way to do it, quite top funnel. Another way, if you really wanted to attack it, was going after maybe competitors that aren’t direct. So maybe there’s competitors that you could try and target that maybe aren’t direct but are loosely related to your product. So if maybe someone’s frustrated with this incumbent solution, and they’re looking for like, X alternatives, or whatever the software name is, alternative to that, that’s another way you could position your product, and those would be reasonably high intent. So there’s a couple ways you could do SEO. It would just be a lot more of a slow burn. And of course, you could, you could build out content, build out pages, put up product pages, industry pages, feature pages to wrap, to show up for your category terms. And then meanwhile, the strategy would be to build awareness, build brand and build demand on those channels. You do know that your your dream clients are getting trust information from so whether that was LinkedIn organic content, LinkedIn ads, guesting on niche, relevant podcasts, featuring on industry relevant newsletters, attending events, then all this stuff you’re doing outside of SEO, we’re building up that awareness and that brand and that demand, and then when they search on Google or AI search now, and you have that foundation in place, I guess.

Christian Klepp  11:30

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely, no, fantastic. Okay, so that was the first follow up question. Um, second follow up question is, and I know that you’ve probably been in the spot more times than you care to remember. But as you said, getting buy in from leadership to do SEO, if a, they’ve never done it before, and B, they kind of sort of know what it is, but not really right. And but perhaps it gets to that point, and I suppose it got to that point with many of the people that you’re working with now. It got to the point where SEO has become a necessity, and they needed to get that buy in, right? They can’t, they can’t do this like slow dance around the room anymore, right? Well, how would you, how would you get that buy in from senior leadership? Is, I think what I’m trying to say.

Sam Dunning  12:23

Yeah, it’s difficult. So you’ve kind of got a leverage. There’s a couple ways you can go about it, but there is no easy way in, yeah, and it’s usually the most difficult when your leadership team haven’t invested in SEO before. I maybe they’ve historically grown their company through referrals or trade shows or maybe even outbound sales. So they’ve got a completely different mentality to maybe inbound marketing or similar, that’s where it gets tough. But there’s a few ways you can leverage it, like one is with Google search. For example, you could, you could literally just sit down and show them and say, look every time, or maybe create a loom video, if you’re working remote, remotely, whatever makes sense. And you say, look every time someone’s searching for our type of service or our solution or our software, I’ll send you screenshots or record on this loom video, we’re nowhere to be seen. So every time someone’s searching for X software or X solution or X service, X industry, or searching for this specific problem we solve, or they’re fed up of our main competitor, and they’re looking for alternative solutions. We’re nowhere to be seen, but these top three competitors show up each and every time, both in Google search or now LLMs, and they’re enjoying that visibility, that mind share, but most importantly, those high sales intent visits and potential leads, 24/7, that we’re just sleeping on around the Klepp so they’re literally eating our lunch for free whilst we rely on whatever it is, cold, outbound, etc. 

Sam Dunning  13:52

If you were already doing paid search, it would be a lot easier, because if you’re already doing Google ads, you could say, Look, we’re quite literally paying for each and every click through. Some of those will convert to opportunities. Some won’t. Why not start owning that organically so over time, we can reduce our reliance on paid and lower our cost per customer acquisition and kind of build that out and also realize that our prospects aren’t stupid. They know what’s a sponsored ad and what’s not, and quite a lot of folks do place more emphasis on the organic results. So those are a couple ways. And the third I’d say is it’s better I forget the exact phrase, but it’s better to seek forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. So if I was ABM (Account-based marketing) marketers, then I and I knew that SEO was a valid channel for our business, I probably just start doing it anyway. It’s like, I probably just work out, like, I call them money keywords, but what is the, what are the terms that we can map out that our dream clients are going to look for when they need our solution? When need our solution for their industry, when they’re fed up with competitors, which is often a quick one to rank for that content can rank super fast. And how can I start with like the lowest difficulty but easiest to build out pages. Do a bit of research. Build those out, start mapping out those pages. If we see a bit of traction, then report to leadership and say, Look, I’ve built these articles, or affiliate solution pages, I’ve built these landing pages. And if you’re getting some impact, then they’d be stupid not to buy in. And if they’re not buying into that of work you’re doing off your own back, then you’re probably in the wrong company. 

Christian Klepp  15:36

Absolutely. It’s almost like you’re injecting them with a little bit of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), right, or maybe not even FOMO. But like, you know, if we’re not doing it, the competitors will, right?

Sam Dunning  15:46

Exactly, exactly. That’s it. And I appreciate the advice I’ve given. Is a lot more difficult if you’re an enterprise company, and I know things, there’s way more red tape stuff, stuff moves a lot, lot slower because there’s various tiers of management. But let’s pretend maybe you’re startup or mid market, then you’ve probably got more flexibility to do some of this stuff. 

Christian Klepp  16:06

Yep, absolutely, absolutely fantastic. So that was the second follow up question, the third follow up question, and this in itself, could be an entirely different episode, but like, what’s your take on AI and SEO and where it’s going.

Sam Dunning  16:24

Yes, it’s probably one of the biggest changes in SEO in like, the last 10 years or so, because everything’s changing in the sense that historically, SEO was mainly Google organic search, search for what you want see, the 10 blue links, if you’re top three, you’ll probably get a chunk of those visitors. And if you’re a B2B Tech or service company, then a set amount of those visitors for those high sales intent keywords will convert, convert into calls or demos or signups, whatever is relevant to your company. That’s changed a lot with one Google AI, AI overviews. Now Google’s rolling out AI mode, which is basically their version of ChatGPT. And now, of course, LLMs like ChatGPT. 

Sam Dunning  17:10

So historically, someone, if they if they wanted, let’s say payroll software, they might search on Google best payroll software as a CMO, and then what would probably show up on Google would was, would be a listicle, an article listicle, like we evaluate the top 10 payroll software as a 2025, you’d click a few of those links, look at the top three, make a short list, and reach out to some for demos. Whereas now on an LLM, a CMO might search. I’m a CMO at this company, I need a payroll software for a company with, I don’t know, 100 execs or 100 reps, it needs these features. It needs to solve these pain points, and I need it within this budget. And then you’ll get presented instantly, these, these results that hit that quota, I’ll hit that search criteria, that prompt criteria rather and some of those will have links to external sites, some of them won’t, so LLMs will right now, Google still, by far, got market share. So traditional SEO for Google is by no means a waste, because I still see Google as the demand capture beast. It’s still really solid to drive inbound leads and pipeline for mostly to be companies, but LLMs will slowly gain more and more market share, and they already have, if you’ve got a technical, if you’re, for example, if you’re a B2B company that sells to a technical ICP, a technical end user, they might have scrapped Google altogether, and they might solely use LLMs like ChatGPT and so on. So in that case, you probably want to go all in on your strategy. 

Sam Dunning  18:42

But the point I’m making is, to me, at least, it feels like we’re going more into the era, because a lot of companies that have historically done SEO will see that their non branded traffic might be taking a hit, their impressions might be going up, but their click throughs might be going down, but they might be getting more direct traffic to their homepage or their general website. So what’s traditionally been kind of great SEO to get loads of non branded traffic get loads of click throughs is changing because AI is giving instant answers, likewise with LLMs, so I feel we’re moving more into the mind share era. So which was all mind share, in my opinion, has always been big for B2B marketing, like getting your brand known for the problem you solve as the end solution, sharing why you so your differentiators in the market and being remembered. So if someone thinks of your category or solution, you’re in that consideration set. And that’s kind of where I feel that SEO is going. With LLMs, because they’re less encouraging click throughs more giving you instant answers, instant responses. So it’s more a case of you want your brand shown each time someone has the problem you solve, someone’s comparing vendors, someone’s searching directly for the solution. And someone’s asking questions around your niche, if your brand can be consistently mentioned, then that will put you in the consideration set you might you’re probably going to see less non branded traffic. But what probably happens is folks do their valuation, whether that be on Google, whether it be on LLMs, discuss that internally, and then just go direct to your website when they’re ready, type in your website directly, or search for your website name on Google, and then click through to your site and grab a call and grab a demo. That’s kind of how I see it going.

Christian Klepp  20:34

You can kind of go down this really deep rabbit hole with that question, right? Like there’s a lot, yeah, and what I appreciate that you’ve given us a top level perspective, and you mentioned earlier some aspects of like, where B2B marketing teams get it wrong when it comes to SEO. So looking at it from a more constructive perspective, what else could you add in terms of what are some of key pitfalls that marketers need to watch out for when it comes to SEO, and what should they be doing instead?

Sam Dunning  21:08

Yeah, yeah. So most of it is ruthless prioritization. So a lot of marketing teams, especially ones we deal with at B2B Tech and SaaS companies, they’re small marketing teams, right? Marketing teams of anywhere from one solo marketer could be a VP of marketing to maybe they’re 2, 3, 4 max on the team. So they have a lot of stuff to juggle, be it their website, be it SEO, be it paid media, be it events, be it communities and more. So ruthless prioritization is important, not just an SEO but in their work in general. So where am I getting at with this? Well, like I said, not falling into the traffic trap with your SEO, kind of working out, in our case, doing the opposite of that, working out, what would a dream client search, not for fun, but when they need our solution now, or they’re comparing their options, or they have very specific problems we solve, or they’re looking for our solution for their specific use case or their specific industry, or they’re looking for a specific feature that we provide, or all that kind of stuff, and mapping that out, and I’ve got a bit of a flow that we kind of recommend to see. We recommend a lot of small marketing teams to follow if they want to see kind of pipeline as fast as 90 days with SEO, which I can run through in a sec. 

Sam Dunning  22:31

But yeah, a lot of it is ruthless prioritization, working out what is realistic. So like mapping out those money keywords, working out what is actually realistic for your team to manage. Like, can we put out, I don’t know, five net new pages of web, of content on a website each week or each month? What’s actually gonna be realistic? Can we do this in house, or do we need to get a contract or an agency or an external team, like, what’s going to be good use of resource or budget, or, like we said earlier, is it? Can we actually make SEO a good bet right now? Well, if we do it, are we going to be able to access resources or cash flow to make it happen? Or we better spend doubling down on what’s going on already and then maybe looking at SEO again in 3, 6, 9, months, when we know we’re going to have even gonna have either cash or resource to make it a good bet, because doing a month of SEO is pointless. Really. I’ll say that to prospects. I’ll say, Look, if you want to do this for one or two months, I’d rather not not partner yet. I’d rather pick it up when you’re ready. So we can actually make it a good bet. It’s not something you can kind of switch on, switch off.

Christian Klepp  23:43

Pretty good advice, pretty good advice. Going back to the article that you wrote on LinkedIn that received quite a bit of engagement, and I thought it was an interesting one, and which is why I asked you to come back on the show, right? So you published this post, it received great engagement, and it was on the topic of crushing competitors with organic so the question, I suppose, is, walk us through what you talked about and what are those steps you would take, what are those key components in that process? 

Sam Dunning  24:15

I’ll try and make it as actionable as possible, and feel free to dive in if anything is kind of a bit too high level. So all of this is on the premise that you’ve got 90 days. And the reason we say 90 days is often, especially on Google, if you publish net new pages or content, it usually takes roughly 90 days for rankings to settle. So that’s tends to be why we use that as a benchmark. So the I suppose, to set some context, this is, if you’re a small marketing team and you want to kind of make SEO or organic search a good bet from both LLMs and Google as soon as possible. So one is starting where you win right now. That’s the first step, and that’s basically mapping out who the industries we’ve historically sold well into. Like, what they accounting, finance sports, whatever, and those are the ones that have the crisp and specific problem that we solve. Are motivated to solve it we’ve sold well into before and can easily afford our offer. And kind of map that out. 

Sam Dunning  25:17

Once you’ve done that, you kind of got to look to build a moat. So you know the industries, you should also know the problems that dream clients might search for when they need your solution. So we talked a bit about that before. Great framework for this is jobs to be done, knowing what kind of struggling moments your prospect face when they’re evaluating solutions like yours, or they get so frustrated with what they’re working with, whether that’s the incumbent or whether it’s a botched together or cobbled together solution internally that gets so annoying that causes churn, or causes revenue loss or causes time loss, that they need to evaluate a solution like yours to map out those industries, map up those those problems, I’d also say, map out the main competitors that often get raised on sales calls, almost to an annoying level. There’s always three or four that you’re sick and tired of. Heard of hearing of that your sales team always say, Look, we’re up against these again. Map those out. 

Sam Dunning  26:14

And the fourth is probably most important. What is, what are actually your category terms? So what do folks call your solution or your service? So if you are providing payroll software, they might call it best payroll software or best payroll solutions. Or then you could tap into your industries, like best payroll software for nonprofits, or best payroll software for HR teams or finance teams, the industries you’ve established there’s money in because you’ve sold well into them historically. And the reason we do that exercise, this is a simplified version, but the reason we do that is to build out the long tail potential searches, queries, keywords or prompts that dream clients are looking for, not when they’re in information gathering mode, but when they’re in buying mode. And that’s how they could look at those kind of industries or solution based searches, but if they were those sometimes take a little while to rank, and usually what will rank well for those is kind of landing pages, or what’s called product listicles, where you evaluate top 10 vendors in the space. But ones that can often rank even faster is alternative pages. So this works especially well in tech and SaaS like if you know, there’s three or four vendors that often get raised on sales calls, if you can make that competitor alternative page, and again, usually that’s the top 10x alternative vendors of 2025, or something like that. And the way you build those in simple terms is it’s kind of a list. You position your product or services number one, but you share why folks choose you problems you solve that others don’t. How you stand out your differentiators. You weave in social proof, and then you put a fair comparison of the others below those rank really well for those kind of terms. So map out all those terms. Look to build out all those pages in as much depth as possible. Make sure when you’re building these other articles, industry pages, landing pages, product pages, comparison pages, that you’re leveraging customer research. 

Sam Dunning  28:08

One of the biggest mistakes in SEO is just trying to optimize for search when really you shouldn’t just optimize for search. You should do that, but you should think about your end user, and that’s why a lot of the stuff I talk about is regularly having a feedback loop of talking to your dream clients, whether they’re recently won, target prospects recently churned, so you have a good pulse on what their problems are, why they chose you, what they like about the offer, the features they care about, and more. So that’s ingrained into the content you build. So yeah, basically we’re talking about step two is building out a moat like no other. So you have all these useful pages that are actually money pages, like high commercial, high sales intent, pages that cover industries, use cases, the product itself features alternatives, maybe competitor one versus competitor two, all this kind of stuff that’s high sales intent, that all these lines in the water that people could search for that could position your product as the solution. 

Sam Dunning  29:06

And then step three is kind of looking at quick wins to craft and improve. So you might already have, if you’ve got a website that’s been around a while, you might have pages that already have commercial value, and tools like Ahrefs will let you easily look at these. I think they call it like low hanging fruit keywords, or stuff like that. And you can basically look at the pages that are lagging on page two or bottom page one, and benchmark against what’s ranking top and look for gaps. I basically have a strategy called the blow out the water strategy. So evaluate the top ranking pages. Look for gaps. If it was landing page, maybe they’ve built out the landing page with the problem agitation solution framework, and I’d say, Well, how can I blow this page out the water, leveraging our customer research? Maybe I’ll add in a nice YouTube video that talks about the topic. Maybe I’ll go into more depth on the problem my dream client might be facing. Maybe I’ll weave in, weave in some relevant case study. Maybe I will add an FAQ section at the bottom that talks about kind of real difficult questions we get leveraged on, we get asked on sales calls, and kind of really weave those in. Like, why are you so expensive? How long is customer onboarding? What’s your refund policy? All that stuff that everyone else is scared to address. 

Sam Dunning  30:17

So improve those pages that are lagging. Step four is, like, one of the cheat codes I touched on it a bit, and that’s that’s listicles. So especially in B2B Tech and SaaS and B2B service, if you’re doing prompts on LLMs, like I mentioned payroll, like, show me the best payroll softwares for this specific use case, this specific feature set, in this budget, the small links that get cited on there are often listicles like we evaluate at the top 10 payroll software as these articles. So two angles to this. One is build out all those articles, those listicles, on your own website, so you own them. And the second part is reach out to those, those listicles that are often cited on LLMs, or those list schools that are ranking well on Google organic search, reach out to try and get featured placements on those, ideally in the top three, because not many people scroll past like the first 123, when they consider options. And a lot of folks think these are only pay to play. But we’ve had quite good success by value exchange. So you kind of reach out to these listicles you want to get placements in, find out who’s the best person to speak to. Maybe find them out. Search for them on LinkedIn. I’m a big fan of painfully short connection request messages, so I’ll find out maybe the author of the post or who manages content for the page. And might say something like, Hey, Jess had a weird idea, if you’re listicle, you against a conversation. And then she’ll probably connect with me on LinkedIn and say, like, Sam, what the heck are you on about? And I’ll probably send her a quick loom video that would just be like me, on their list, on their article, like top 10x software page. And I’ll just say like, I’ve enjoyed this recent read. Was having a look. I wondered what it would take to get a placement here. Perhaps I could have you as a guest on my podcast, or maybe we could feature in an article writing for this. Or maybe you’ve got another idea of a fair value exchange, and that’ll separate you from probably the masses of wall of text emails that they’re getting and get, likely get your response, whether it’s no way, or it’s pay to play, or, yeah, we can actually do a value exchange, at least you’re going to get straight to the point. 

Sam Dunning  32:27

So we’ve had good success with that for our own company, breaking B2B, and also for clients. See, I’m making a process to steadily reach out to those listicles is super powerful. One, because LLMs love them, and two, because LLMs really like brand mentions. So if you get your brand mentioned, along with your category really strong, also you can get a backlink, which is going to help your SEO. And also, the chances are those listicles already get good traffic, so they can, they can drive you direct leads, direct inbounds as well. That’s step four. 

Sam Dunning  32:59

Step five is leveraging past media. So if you’ve got a founder or someone in your exec team, maybe a marketing or revenue leader, or IT leader, whoever it is that’s done a lot of podcasts or press or articles or stuff like that in the past, what you can do is tools like Ahrefs SEO tools, you can literally just copy and paste their LinkedIn profile into that tool, and it will come up with all the press that they’ve been on, and then look for those articles or those podcasts or similar and they’ve probably just in the article, just put in their LinkedIn profile. So similar process to before reach out to whoever wrote the article and just say thanks again for including our founder, or whoever it was in the article. And I wondered if you could change this and actually mention our brand and possibly give us a backlink back to one of our focus pages and keywords, and that’ll give you a nice little boost again on both LLMs and SEO.

Sam Dunning  33:54

Step six out of seven is again really big. Reddit is getting cited like crazy, both on Google and ChatGPT and other LLMs. So looking to really control the narrative, a lot of people ask me on sales calls, like Sam, what’s the best way to ramp up our LLM visibility? And I’ll say we just need to go back 10 years and build a brand. So yeah, nothing difficult. But unfortunately, not many people are able to do what Back to the Future did in the DeLorean so.

Christian Klepp  34:23

No, at least not yet. 

Sam Dunning  34:25

So controlling the narrative is really important, because LLMs love to cite from all over the web, not just your website, places like Reddit, Quora, Wikipedia could be YouTube, could be elsewhere to build thinking, which could be to be marketers have done anywhere anyway. They’ve known the channel from customer research. They’ve known the channels that their dream clients get trusted information, and they’re trying to build positive affinity around the problems they’re solving, and how their brand’s positioned to solve those and why they should choose them on channels outside of their website. So having a process to do that, it’s going to help you control that narrative. And then the last thing is to is speed. So a lot of this goes outside SEO, but the thing that slows down SEO programs the most is kind of building out what those money keywords we talked about, what stream client actually searching for on Google ABM when they need your offer now. Building out that content at speed pace that you can keep up with, whether that’s a couple articles a week or a couple of landing pages a week, whatever your team can manage, and then getting those published as fast as possible, because it’ll take a while for them to get indexed or Google get visibility on a lens. But often what hamstrings SEO progress is this is very common in enterprises. You can kind of build a strategy for SEO, work out what you’re targeting, or work out the updates you’ve got to do to existing content, and likewise, net new content, build this clear plan of action roadmap, which is priority based, and then that might take a couple months to get approved. Couple months later, the contents written couple months later, it’s checked by legal. Couple months later, web design and dev team have got it, and a couple months later, you’re a year down the line that’s eventually got published. Your advantage as a scrappy startup or kind of smaller marketing team is you can do everything we’ve talked about in this episode, but speed and meanwhile, these slow moving giant competitors are slowly publishing. You can get stuff out the door, see how it tracks, see how it goes. Like does it show up in LLMs? Does it show up in Google. Great. Let’s do more of it. All right? It didn’t go as well as we did. Let’s go back to the drawing board. Update it, ramp it up, refresh it. Okay, now it is. Let’s keep going. So I think that’s such a massive advantage as a smaller marketing team that you can really outpace these slow moving giants just by doing things done at speed. They don’t need to be perfect. They need to have the strategy we talked about and be well executed. But it’s better to get out the door and then see how it fares and then update it if you need to. That’s kind of a high level seven step progress or plan. Rather that we encourage a lot of our clients to do that kind of can actually drive pipeline from LLMs and Google as quick as 90 days.

Sam Dunning  34:25

I mean, that might be coming soon. Might be a new SaaS tool, go back in time for 10 years, but the next best thing is to do all this stuff that we talked about, to really look to control the narrative. So try and guest on industry relevant and niche, relevant podcasts. Make sure, when they publish the article, that they’re uploading a transcript, mentioning your brand and also giving a link back to your site. Maybe, if you’ve got resource, you build out your own podcast, niche, relevant show and YouTube channel. If you’ve got someone in your team that knows how Reddit works and they. Many tools now that can actually notify you when someone’s talking about your niche for your industry, and Reddit, if you can get involved in those Reddit threads and have someone from your team that actually knows how to use Reddit, knows how to add value, and when I say add value, I mean, be a useful resource like give tips about your industry, actually answer the questions people care about, talk about problems that they might want to solve. Give them the step by step, and then only mention your brand where relevant. So give real, tactical, useful advice and kind of avoid getting your comments instantly deleted, which is easier said than done. 

Christian Klepp  38:21

Dynamite stuff. Dynamite stuff. Yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been just writing down the stuff furiously here, and I hope the audience does the same thing. Or if they’re too lazy to write them down, they can just use transcription AI, right? 

Sam Dunning  38:32

True, true that. 

Christian Klepp  38:35

Yeah, yeah, no, I haven’t, because I was like, hey, palace. Um, if you have the opportunity to take this series because you’ve been doing this, um, you’ve been doing this mostly in the UK, right where you live. But if you had the opportunity to take this series abroad, where would you go? And why?

Christian Klepp  38:35

All right. Um, two more questions before I let you go. All right. So the bonus question is, for those of you in the audience that don’t know, um, so Sam has this video series on LinkedIn called I asked the public. So you’ve done this video in many places, and I think one of them was outside Buckingham Palace, if I’m not mistaken. 

Sam Dunning  38:54

I forgot about that one. 

Sam Dunning  38:56

Do you know where? For some reason, I don’t even know why. It just came into my head. Literally, as you said it, what’s the place in America where they’ve got those paving slabs with the stars name in stars?

Christian Klepp  39:25

Oh, it’s an, um, it’s in LA. 

Sam Dunning  39:28

For some reason, when you said that, that just came into my head, yeah. And maybe I’d do it. Maybe I’d do it like, we’d Photoshop, or we’d AI work famous marketers into those stars. And I’d say, like, I don’t know, for example, have you heard of Adam Robinson, or have you heard of Chris Walker, just famous B2B SaaS folks on LinkedIn, and just do some kind of spoof or something like that, confusing the public. 

Christian Klepp  39:55

That’ll be awesome. 

Sam Dunning  39:56

Probably getting some abuse along the way, as usual.

Christian Klepp  39:59

Yeah, you can. Cut those out in the post production. Fantastic. Sam, thank you so much for coming back on the show and for sharing these excellent tips with the listeners. So please a quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you.

Sam Dunning  40:14

No, I really appreciate having me back on there’s. Yeah, three main ways. One is LinkedIn. I’m showing daily ramblings on SEO and SaaS marketing. The second is the podcast called breaking B2B, much like this, we interview B2B marketing leaders, share tips, and we have solo episodes on SEO as well. And then the third is, if you’re perhaps a little frustrated that your website is not driving a steady flow of organic pipeline through SEO. LLMs, we might be able to fix that. It’s https://www.breakingb2b.com/ Happy to have a chat.

Christian Klepp  40:15

Fantastic, fantastic. Once again. Thanks for coming on the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Sam Dunning  40:33

Cheers. 

Christian Klepp  40:34

All right. Thanks. Bye for now.