Christian Klepp  00:01

Search engine optimization can be somewhat confusing, and it’s become even more confusing in the age of AI, both because of how people use AI to generate content and because of how Google search itself is changing. There are those out there who claim that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is dead. It isn’t. In fact, it’s more competitive now, which means you need a more refined approach. So how can B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) companies get AI to recommend their business? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Adrian Dahlin, who will be answering this question. He’s the Founder of Search To Sale, who creates content strategies that drive revenue from organic search and generative engines, tune in to find out more about what the B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp  00:52

All right. Adrian Dahlin, welcome to the show. 

Adrian Dahlin  00:55

Thanks for having me. 

Christian Klepp  00:56

Great to have you on. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because it’s super pertinent to content marketing. It’s something that B2B companies should be paying attention to. So I’m going to cut to the chase, and we’ll just dive right in. 

Adrian Dahlin  01:13

Awesome. 

Christian Klepp  01:13

Fantastic. So Adrian, you’re on a mission to help B2B SaaS companies show up in AI interfaces. So for this conversation, let’s kick it off with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first question is, what is it about generative engine optimization or GEO that you wish more B2B SaaS companies understood, that’s the first question. And the second question is, where do you see marketing teams struggle regarding you both.

Adrian Dahlin  01:42

We have right now is a stage of evolution where we’re overlapping between the Old World and the New World. And the tactics that work to get you ranked in Google, get you mentioned by an LLM (Large Language Model ) are relatively similar to the way SEO hasn’t working for years, but the paradigm is fundamentally shifting, and basically what that means is that you can do pretty well at getting mentioned by ChatGPT by doing a good job at traditional SEO, but the risk is that you’re not preparing for the future by not actually changing the paradigm of how you think about this.

Christian Klepp  02:23

Care to elaborate on that a little bit more, especially that last sentence, like, you know, preparing yourself. How should companies prepare themselves? Right? 

Adrian Dahlin  02:32

And I think it actually, it probably starts with timeframe for your goals. If you’re in an organization that has short term incentives, like your startup that needs quick wins to get a couple of enterprise customers so that you can raise your next round of funding. You’re probably sticking a little bit more with the tried and true stuff that has always worked. But if you have the ability to think long term, then you really want to work on changing your thinking. If you have the ability to plan long term, you want to change how you’re thinking about digital marketing fundamentally. And one of those shifts is from a channel strategy to what I’m calling an authority strategy. So a channel strategy is a big way about how marketers would think about particularly the go to market process, where you’re deciding initially where we should even be investing in the first place. You consider who your audience is, you do some research about where they spend time online, and you pick a couple of platforms, you’re probably not trying to be everywhere. We’re trying to focus on a couple of channels. And most channels, I think you can describe as a place where supply and demand interact. And if you play by certain rules and best practices, you can do pretty well. 

Adrian Dahlin  04:02

So Facebook, like, 14 years ago, I was like working on Facebook as a marketing channel, interactions between customers and companies play about certain rules you can do well. Tiktok today, paid search another channel. What’s different about AI is that ChatGPT, or any other AI chat bot is not a channel, because the supply side is not present. It’s not engaging directly with the customer. You have customers engaging with a large language model, which is looking at the entire Internet. Well, rather, its brain is trained on the entire internet, and then when you give it a query, it’s looking at some of the Internet to help inform its answer. In many cases, when you’re doing a kind of a search, type of a query in ChatGPT. Yeah, so this AI is making choices. It’s doing curation and filtering among all the information on the web to give you an answer to your query. 

Adrian Dahlin  05:12

And the analogy that I’m starting to use a lot is that AI is like a consultant working for your customer, you actually want to think of it like a person. The way a person reads a bunch of information, it consumes a bunch of information, synthesizes, it comes up with a point of view that’s, that’s what AI is doing. It has the ability to look at it much more information than a human can, and it’s not as good yet as we are at synthesizing that information. But when you think about AI more like a person, like a brain, then I think the strategies that emerge from that are going to work in a longer term way. Those will be more durable strategies than just doing the tried and true stuff that hasn’t worked for SEO for the last bunch of years.

Christian Klepp  06:06

That certainly is an interesting analogy. I’ve never heard of AI being compared that way before, like the one that I always hear is you treat it like an intern or you treat it like a co-pilot. But there’s, there’s definitely something to be said about treating it like a brain? 

Adrian Dahlin  06:21

Yeah, I mean, I think treating it like an intern is useful when you’re using AI to get stuff done, you know, you’re building workflows, you’re asking questions, you’re even if you’re asking it to, like, work on content, whatever, and but we’re talking about when, when kind of use cases where someone is, like, researching product options or the kinds of queries that make sense to try to market to. That’s where I think this other paradigm of AI as consultant makes sense. Yeah. And if you imagine, imagine those human consultants, you know your job, if, if you’re like a software company that tends to sell through partners, your job is to get in the brain of the partner, to get in the brain of the consultant. So that’s podcasts and maybe books and trade shows and conferences. So what’s the analogy for those? For AI, that’s where we start to get to the tactics of where you want to show up online. You want to show up in the places where AI is forming its view of your world. And what we’re learning is that that’s a lot of our own media and platforms like Reddit and Quora and Wikipedia and these, these kind of community spaces that demonstrate credibility, particularly when that credibility is propped up by an authority like a industry, media company or the wisdom of the crowd. 

Christian Klepp  07:56

Exactly. I’m going to move us on to the next question about key pitfalls that you think marketing teams need to avoid when it comes to this topic, and what should they be doing instead?

Adrian Dahlin  08:08

So the number one cited website in LLM answers is Reddit, which has created this whole new incentive to be more present on Reddit as a marketer, and that comes, certainly comes with pitfalls, because Reddit cares a lot about the quality of its platform. Moderators of communities care a lot about the quality of the conversation happening in those communities. So a pitfall definitely would be to jump on to Reddit, because you hear that it gets cited a lot, and post a bunch of self promotional stuff, because you are risking getting shadow banned by Reddit itself by disobeying their rule of thumb that only 10% of your posts should be promotional, and you might be disobeying moderator policies about particular communities, in which case your stuff might just get deleted by moderators. 

Christian Klepp  09:10

What’s your take on that? Like, because I’ve seen that a lot actually, about Reddit. Like, is that, is that a platform that you would recommend B2B companies be on? Or is it something like you should approach with caution?

Adrian Dahlin  09:24

Yes and yes. 

Christian Klepp  09:25

Yes and yes? 

Adrian Dahlin  09:26

Yeah. I mean, you just can’t, you can’t deny the impact of being, by far, the number one sided website by LLMs. So there’s, there’s the native benefit of Reddit where, like, it’s probably the case your B2B solution. It’s probably the case that people are talking about your space on Reddit already because, because people will talk about everything on Reddit. And so there’s, there’s, like, a native opportunity to be part of the conversation on that platform. Reddit is so good at. At segmenting people into areas of interest and also like the cool thing about being a user on Reddit is that you can have many interests, and you get to go to different feeds to discuss those things, which allows for this depth of conversation. It’s what’s kind of annoying about posting on social media when you have a niche interest, because only a fraction of your followers are going to be interested in that. So that makes it such a good place to have focused in depth conversations about anything, and regardless of what you’re selling, there’s probably a conversation happening there about maybe your actual solution, certainly stuff around it, stuff related to it. So there’s this native benefit of being part of the conversation, building your brand through answering people’s questions, giving advice, sharing, sharing how you do things in non promotional ways, being helpful, the fundamental principle we’ve always had a marketing which would be helpful. 

Adrian Dahlin  11:01

And then there’s the secondary benefit that some of that stuff might get picked up by LLMs. Like, there might be some question that someone asked in Reddit. You post a really nice answer that gets upvoted a lot. Someone asks a similar question in ChatGPT or Google’s AI mode, and your answer in that Reddit thread gets cited, gets shown in that response. So businesses like you pretty much have to be thinking about it again if you want a future proof, if you’re trying to plan for the long term, you definitely you got to jump on Reddit, and you got to see just how, what the scale of the opportunity is in your space. Are people talking about this? Are there really rich communities of people talking about your industry? And then, and then figure out how? And yes, yes, that means proceeding with caution and care and like, slowly, but it’s becoming a non negotiable.

Christian Klepp  11:59

Yeah, interesting. Interesting because I’m seeing a lot of people talking about it, like, on platforms like LinkedIn, but then there’s also, like, if you Google it, like, there’s, there’s a lot of articles out there about, like, how you should go about establishing that digital presence on Reddit, right? So that’s, um, that’s pretty interesting. Um, you brought this up, like, a while, a while ago, and I wanted to just maybe dig a little bit deeper, do a bit more prodding, but um, how, from your experience, how do you think GEO has changed the game, and how, what should B2B marketers be Paying attention to?

Adrian Dahlin  12:39

How has it changed the game? Well, first by sowing rampant anxiety among digital marketers everywhere, the anxiety that comes from uncertainty, and so presenting us all with the opportunity to adapt and learn and face our fears. It’s forcing marketers to learn new skills. You could debate if this is a good or a bad thing. It will be. It will be both good and bad. In different cases, it can be easier to quote, unquote rank in ChatGPT than it was in Google before, because traditionally, you’d have to invest a fair amount in content on your website that’s high quality and targeting the topics that people are looking for. And you’d want to invest in backlinks from sites, ideally, that have authority and rank for similar terms that yours is trying to rank for, and all the technical infrastructure of your site to make sure you’re not kind of accidentally signaling to Google not to rank your site, and especially because of the maturity of SEO, that’s no longer easy to game, so you have to invest in doing it well. And it’s and it’s a kind of a gradual process to earn domain authority. 

Adrian Dahlin  14:03

In LLMs, there are these quick wins that can happen. Where, like the example, in the Reddit example, you might find that there’s a vastly there’s actually just, like one really relevant thread that already exists about your product category, and just dropping an answer in that existing thread, if there’s an opportunity, if there’s like a gap, or someone hasn’t actually answered the question that well, yet you might be able to drop in there with a really good answer. They get some visibility, and that thread gets cited. And there you are. You do that one thing, and suddenly you’re getting excited at the top for LLM questions on this topic, right? And there’s other things like that where you can do the there are like lean tactics that can kind of get you visibility with less investment. Now. That will probably change as the whole world shifts to understanding these tactics, then we get more flooded, for better and worse, with people trying to gain this system.

Christian Klepp  15:10

Right, right. So I know you’ve mentioned this some of us already before, but like you know from your experience, can you provide examples of how B2B companies can get AI to recommend their businesses. So specifically, what steps should they be taking? What are some of those key components that need to be in that process?

Adrian Dahlin  15:30

I think this is actually one of the times that it’s probably a really good idea to work with an outside partner, but to vet them well for kind of being up to date on these AI tactics, because it’s going to be hard to do a fully flesh GEO program internally, unless you have a pretty large team and a lot of capacity and a lot of like, just desire and curiosity and willingness to experiment. So first off is the right people in place. And then it’s a matter of like looking at the sites that tend to get cited the most by LLMs, Reddit is at the top. Close to the top are Wikipedia. Quora was on the list. LinkedIn is on the list, thinking of B2B specifically. There’s other stuff that’s not relevant to B2B that’s high on the list of citations, looking at those and then doing some research about if your audience spends time on those platforms, because ideally, you want to invest in platforms that have native, inherent benefits and the secondary benefit of boosting LLM visibility. 

Adrian Dahlin  16:45

So like, let’s find out if your audience uses Reddit, if there’s conversations about your space on Reddit, on Quora, maybe niche, niche industry forums that are similar, but more focused. So validate where your audience is spending time, and then, and then be focused, you know, it’s probably Reddit or Quora or LinkedIn or something that’s in a niche in your industry. And then, and then really invest in being present, in demonstrating thought leadership and being helpful, and actually building relationships. Think of it as a relationship building project, where you’re you’re a part of the conversation, and you’re not going for silver bullets and for one one thread to to rule all threads, but you’re just present in the conversation, because people will actually people in your niche will get to know you that way, and plus you’re increasing like the level of brand visibility and mentions on the platform that’s going to ultimately drive LLM citations. 

Adrian Dahlin  17:52

So picking probably one to focus on for those in that category of communities and forums where a conversation is happening and citations tend to come a second pillar is going to be the earned media side of things. So this is another, another signal of brand authority when either a very large media entity with national, international credibility, or a credible, focused industry publication talks about your brand. You know, it can be quoting your… we’re talking like startups. It might be just kind of telling the founder story and getting quotes from the CEO in one of those publications, might be sharing your point of view, the old digital PR playbook, which is, and this is one of those areas that it’s like SEO, people were kind of aware of, but unless you were really doing holistic SEO, you probably weren’t touching digital PR. So it’s kind of a new muscle, but it’s increasingly valuable, again, for its inherent benefits. Of course, it’s good if people find you while reading an industry publication, and the secondary benefit that it signals authority to AI and will increase the chances that you get listed. 

Adrian Dahlin  19:16

And I think if I understand this isn’t this is one of the newer areas for me that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. But I think the actual mechanisms by which earned media effect GEO include actual citations, but also the general impression that the LLM has of your brand’s place in its industry. So like, the goal with the digital PR, I think, is not just that the piece where your CEO gets quoted gets cited in LLM answers, but it’s that the more your name is associated with your industry, the more likely that LLM brain is to include you once. Someone asks a question like, What are the best providers of x? And in that case, there might not be a citation that actually shows that breadcrumb trail when you’re looking at your LLM answer. It’s just that the brain has been trained by the associations between your brand and your industry and your competitors, so you make it onto a top 10 List?

Christian Klepp  20:24

Yeah, it’s interesting that you brought up that topic of digital PR, because I’ve, I’ve heard that from at least three other experts in this particular area. Do you think that? And I’m just, you know, I’m curious here, like, do you think that previously, with traditional SEO, marketers were not paying as much attention to it? But now, with GEO, because it gets because of these citations on ChatGPT and so forth, it’s given a bit more limelight.

Adrian Dahlin  20:56

I don’t know if it’s getting more attention overall. Definitely different people are giving it attention. 

Christian Klepp  21:02

Right, right. 

Adrian Dahlin  21:05

So LLMs gave a new cohort of people a reason to care about digital PR. There’s, of course, always been people. There’s always been the PR people are the people whose worldview leans on that as a viable channel, yeah, but it’s like, yeah, I think, I think that, like the tech people maybe are paying more attention, and definitely SEO people are paying more attention.

Christian Klepp  21:33

Well, probably is linked back to, I guess, if a SaaS company is thinking about, like their target audience, and in B2B, that tends to be a buying committee. And the buying committee usually consists of people in different role, with different roles and responsibilities, technical and non technical. So there may be some association there. 

Adrian Dahlin  21:52

You’re saying, like different people on the buying committee with like different biases, or kind of pay attention to different channels. 

Christian Klepp  22:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s my working assumption, just based on what you’ve been saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, fantastic. So we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips. And Adrian, you’ve given us a ton here, all right, but if you were to, and this is almost like a recap question, right? Like, if you were to, like, recap all this advice that you’ve been giving us now, for someone that’s listening to this conversation and you want them to walk away with three to five things that they can take action on right now as it pertains to GEO, what would those things be?

Adrian Dahlin  22:36

Yeah, for the marketing leader, right now is a super important time to be learning from other smart people. So LinkedIn is probably the best place for that. Maybe Reddit, maybe podcasts, but find maybe find people who have smart things to say, insightful things to say about GEO and look for in picking kind of your sources. Look for those that cite data, maybe their own, if they have access to a lot of data, like if they run an agency with lots of clients. But even better, those that are like looking at doing their own research on large public data sets, or, you know, purchased large data sets, or like Ahrefs publishes great data and interesting studies. You know, if someone is citing an Ahrefs study about Gemini, that’s that’s a good signal. 

Adrian Dahlin  23:46

Look for intellectual honesty in what they’re talking about. If it’s clear that everything they say is about articulating a worldview that benefits the thing they’re trying to sell that’s not that’s, don’t prioritize that thought leader, but find the one who’s obviously really interested in finding the truth and has like, uncertainty, accepts uncertainty, and can be wrong. And like, if you see that, like they post something about I said this six months ago, and I’m changing my mind as things have evolved. So yeah, find some people to learn from.

Adrian Dahlin  24:31

Since I mentioned Ahrefs, Ryan Law, who’s their content marketing leader, is a great LinkedIn follow. He obviously does have something to sell, but because their business is data, he’s great at content and they’re great at research, he’s a really good follow, so that’s what allows you and then, and then I said, like a roughly five, so you get a little bit diversity of perspectives and different people who are kind of looking at different things that will help you. Stay on top of things, because things are changing. And like, I feel like I said a lot in this conversation that was presented with a relative degree of confidence, and like a whole lot of what I’ve just said could be wrong in in a few months, that’s why I want to stay in touch with people who are themselves really staying abreast and remaining curious about what actually works. 

Christian Klepp  25:25

Well, because it’s to your point that you brought up earlier in the conversation. This is a continuously evolving ecosystem. 

Adrian Dahlin  25:31

Yeah, and that’s currently a quickly evolving one, and it’s like not a lot is not a lot of settled right now. There’s, there’s, there’s emerging correlation between what people are doing and things we see happening in LLMs. We don’t know anything about causation right now.

Christian Klepp  25:50

Exactly, exactly. Okay. Moving on to the next question, like in terms of metrics, because you kind of can’t talk about things like SEO and GEO, if we don’t talk about metrics, right? So what are like? Maybe three to five key metrics that you think B2B marketers should be paying attention to.

Adrian Dahlin  26:10

B2B metrics, marketers working on GEO, it’s definitely a less data rich space than SEO, because we don’t know the volume of queries prompts being done in chat bots, so we can only make guesses about what people how people would interact with a chat bot. Or you could do real custom research and ask people, What are you putting into ChatGPT when you’re researching x. So you can have real data about what people are doing, but you don’t know how much, the way we know monthly search volumes for Google. 

Adrian Dahlin  26:52

So one of the things you can measure is referral traffic, and I do find that super compelling. How much traffic is coming to your website from ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc, but we don’t want to think about that traffic the same way we thought about referral traffic in the past, because coming, because it’s coming at the end of what might have been quite a long interaction with the chat bot, and so one of the theories right now, where there’s some emerging research about this, is that referral traffic from AI chat bots is higher Quality and higher converting because they have just that user has just learned a whole lot about you and your competitors, probably in their AI interaction, and they have all this context, and they learn some things specifically about what you offer. And they decided that that you, what you’re doing is well enough, relevant enough to what they need to click on a citation which, let’s be honest, is not presented as the goal of the chat bot the way Google wants. Its whole purpose was directing you to one of 10 blue links. 

Adrian Dahlin  28:10

The AI chat bot. I mean, it’s a platform like social media that whose main incentive is that you use it more so that you get more value out of it, and they can either charge more for it in the future or add in an ad platform that benefits from your eyeballs so track traffic to your site. Think about it differently. Compare the conversion, compare the engagement and conversion for a cohort of users that come from LLMs versus other sources. See if you can validate this assumption that it’s higher value. Traditional rankings are useful. The correlation is positive, but definitely not one to one between ranking well on Google and showing up in an LLM answer. So it’s like you still want to rank in Google. I mean, Google is still, by far, a much larger discovery platform than all the other AI is combined. So work on ranking in Google and then use that user ranking as one of the inputs to your assessment of how well you’re doing with GEO. 

Adrian Dahlin  29:28

For the like digital, PR or media side of things. I’m newer to that world. I don’t really know the variety KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for Reddit. We’re, I mean, we’re paying attention right now, in the early days, to the karma of the profiles that are engaging, because you need history on Reddit to be allowed to engage. So user user karma, part of the Reddit game now is having an own subreddit. AKA community that’s like in your niche, or maybe tied to your brand. And so membership and engagement in a community, if you’re a moderator of one, that’s a decent metric. Overall though, I have to say where you’ve probably heard the term zero click marketing. We are moving away from the paradigm where everything is measurable and like let’s keep measuring the stuff that’s helpful to measure, while not letting that form our entire picture of what a marketing strategy looks like, or what success looks like.

Christian Klepp  30:42

Absolutely, yeah. Let’s not let that be the deterrent or the impediment to move forward, right? 

Adrian Dahlin  30:48

Yeah, yeah. 

Christian Klepp  30:50

Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, two more questions. I’ll let you go. So what is the status quo in your area of expertise? So in this case, GEO, that you passionately disagree with, and why? 

Adrian Dahlin  31:04

I had trouble with this question.

Christian Klepp  31:07

I’m sure you did. 

Adrian Dahlin  31:09

I think I’m a little bit jealous of people who are really contrarian, and I still know that I am. The best thing I came up with, well, I kind of already have talked about, which is just don’t think about GEO the way you’re thinking about SEO. 

Christian Klepp  31:25

Right. 

Adrian Dahlin  31:26

Even though I come from the SEO world, I come relatively recently from the SEO world. I’ve been focused on SEO for three years. So you know, like I was making the decision to niche my business from digital marketing generally down to SEO exactly as ChatGPT launched almost three years ago. 

Christian Klepp  31:43

Okay, well. 

Adrian Dahlin  31:45

So it’s like, I’m coming into GEO from SEO kind of but I don’t have the all of the inertia of people who have been in SEO for 20 years. And yet, something you’ll really often hear in SEO circles is people basically saying it’s the same GEO is just the same as SEO. And this gets at what I said right at the start of the call, which is, many of the tactics are the same, but the paradigm is totally different. So it’s like, keep thinking the same way at your own peril. GEO is not SEO. 

Christian Klepp  32:15

Yep, yep, not exactly, exactly. Adrian, this has been a great conversation, especially because this is all new territory, not just for you know, you’re the expert in this area. It’s like for all of us, right? 

Adrian Dahlin  32:29

So sort of. 

Christian Klepp  32:29

This is something, this is something that we all need to, like, continuously learn about, because it’s, it’s just gonna keep, keep growing from here, at least from what you’ve been saying, right? So, thanks again for coming on the show, for sharing your expertise with the audience. Quick introduction to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Adrian Dahlin  32:50

I’m Adrian Dahlin, Founder of Search To Sale, a full service done for you. SEO and GEO agency focused on B2B. I’m based in Seattle. I love fitness in the outdoors and music. Any of your listeners in Seattle I would love to connect with. I’m trying to network more locally, and I’m actually starting a community for small business people in Seattle, so a little niche call out there. You can find me on LinkedIn. Adrian Dahlin, you can find me on Reddit and Adrian Dahlin.

Christian Klepp  33:31

Yeah, it’d be kind of weird if, like you talked about Reddit this whole time, and then you’re not actually on there. 

Adrian Dahlin  33:36

Yeah, I am on there, but I’ve only been using it regularly as of recently. 

Christian Klepp  33:41

Fair enough. Okay, fantastic, fantastic. All right, so once again, Adrian, thanks for coming on the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. 

Adrian Dahlin  33:50

Thank you very much for the opportunity. 

Christian Klepp  33:52

All right. Bye for now.