Did AI Kill SEO? (with Sam Dunning from Breaking B2B)

Did AI actually kill SEO? Or are recent traffic drops for sites like HubSpot a sign of something else entirely?
 
In this episode, we’re joined by Sam Dunning, founder of Breaking B2B and a leading expert on search strategy, to unpack what’s actually happening in the world of SEO. We talk about how AI overviews are changing the way people find information, and what it all means for marketers and revenue teams.

Sam shares when SEO still makes sense, when it doesn’t, and what to focus on if you want to drive real pipeline today. We also dive into AI-generated content, the role of brand in LLM-driven search, and how to build a practical keyword strategy that works in 2025.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:58) - Did AI kill SEO?
• (06:17) - When SEO doesn't make sense
• (10:05) - Does SEO still take forever to build?
• (12:24) - Should we just generate AI content?
• (15:39) - Buidling a Money Keyword Matrix
• (22:20) - Who should own the matrix?
• (24:45) - Quicker vs longer strategies
• (29:07) - Old school SEO in a world of LLMs
• (34:08) - Brand builders have a step up
• (36:21) - Common LLM hacks
• (43:00) - Measuring SEO in a world of LLMs
• (48:24) - Nothing's changed. Everything's changed.
• (50:29) - Wrapping up

Creators and Guests

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

Guest

Sam Dunning

Founder @ Breaking B2B

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

Did AI kill SEO? (with Sam Dunning from Breaking B2B)
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[00:00:00]

Introduction
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Toni: You've probably seen the posts on LinkedIn. SEO is dead, and the example is usually HubSpot losing tons of traffic and they are not alone to really investigate what's going on. I pulled in Sam Dunning for this episode. Sam is one of the leading experts on SEO here in Europe, and today he's shedding light on what's actually happening in the world of SEO.

This episode is super educational, especially if you're not a marketer. If you're thinking about SEO as a channel or are already relying on it heavily, this is a must listen for you as a revenue leader. And if you are a marketer, even better, we'll dive into three concrete tactical projects you can launch right now to tackle your SEO challenges.

Head on. Enjoy

Sam: everything's dead. S SEO's, dead cold cool's, dead outbound's, dead paid media's dead Demand. Gen RIP. A lot of the time though, it's, when I see these kind of posts on LinkedIn or similar, it's folks shipping something that's like the polar opposite of that service, which is quite [00:01:00] ironic.

S-E-O-L-L-M-O-G-E-O-A-I-O, whatever you wanna call it, no one's cracked it yet. A lot of folks are claiming to be experts, but there's, there's so much new stuff going on with it that no one is yet, 'cause it's so early. People will do their research, so when they have a problem, they'll do it on chat, GBT and they'll, they'll kind of evaluate in internally instead of clicking through to your website, like with the Google search.

They might just go directly to your website, like your homepage, 'cause they now know your brand direct traffic is going up, but you can't attribute it to LLMs. It feels more like we're moving into a mind share era.

Toni: So it's actually really great to finally have another dad on the show again. So since Wool was basically the new cohost after Mickel, um.

I feel I can finally have some dad talks with, with, with my next guest here, Sam. Hey, really nice to have you.

Sam: Oh, hey Tony. Looking forward to it, man. Appreciate you having me on. I'll have to crack some subtle dad jokes, which I'm sure won't be subtle. They'll just be terrible, but No, no, good fun.

Toni: And I, I don't think we will need to, you know, focus on that.

Did AI kill SEO?
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Toni: I think that will just happen [00:02:00] actually. But, uh, let's just jump right in, right? I mean, you are obviously the go-to guy for all kinds of SEO topics, so search engine optimization topics, and I think what has happened in this space lately is really interesting, which is really why you and I wanted to jump on here.

There's obviously lots of AI stuff going on. We'll talk about this in a little bit, but I think before we go there. The big thing that I think a lot of people, you know, that I have at LinkedIn readers, which I know everyone on this, uh, on this podcast is, has seen is, oh, uh, HubSpot traffic dropped, dropped dramatically.

A couple of other pages dropped dramatically. I think it even got to the point where the HubSpot, CEO stepped up and put something on LinkedIn to explain it, and obviously that for everyone means, oh my God, outbound is dead. Whatever is dead. SEO is also dead. What's your take on that, Sam? Bring us, bring us some like reality [00:03:00] check, please.

Sam: Oh yeah, for sure. Ev. Everything's dead. Just like you said, SEO's, dead cold call's dead. Outbound's dead. Yes. Paid media's dead Demand. Gen RIP. A lot of the time though, it's, when I see these kind of posts on LinkedIn or similar, it's folks shipping something that's like the polar opposite of that service, which is quite ironic. But truth be told, I mean, SEO, is it dead? Well, it's, it's still driving pipeline for us and clients, but it's changing. It's changing massively. It's probably the biggest shakeup in search in the last 10 plus years. Mm-hmm. With, like you say, the rise of ai. LLMs. So Google rolled out AI overviews about a year or so ago, which really kind of disrupted search.

As you mentioned, a lot of things, especially the HubSpot blog, got impacted because they had a lot of top funnel informational. Based content and think I mm-hmm. In fact, I think one of their top articles was around like [00:04:00] marketing jokes or it was something like that. Something super vaguely related to HubSpot and marketing and their, their blog traffic like tanked a ton.

Yeah, because Google AI overviews is basically giving folks instant answers above the fold to those simply are answered kind of top funnel informational queries. And Google AI mode rolled out a few weeks back at the time of recording in in the US and a couple other countries, which is basically Google's version of chat GPT.

Mm-hmm. Um, and of course, more and more folks are using chat, GBT, perplexity LLMs to get responses, but. Google is still the beast. Old habits die hard.

Toni: Yeah, I was about to say that, right? I mean there's obviously, you know, all of us that are in the equal chamber in the bubble that are like, Ooh, wow, OpenAI.

That's really the go-to place for like searching stuff. Yeah. Um, but I feel like the vast majority, and I saw something, you know, perplexity was obviously on the way up, but it [00:05:00] was still like. 97% is just normal search. Um, is that, is that stat, does it still hold up? I'm not sure if you have like an updated version of this, but, um, what's, what's, what's the newest on that?

Sam: Yeah, the problem is there's a lot of skewed data. Mm-hmm. And the last, the last big report that we looked at was Ran Fishkin and Spark. Toro and datas are part of SEMrush. They did a report, this was a few months back now, and their report basically shared that Google still gets 373 times the amount of searches compared to AI tools.

And I think even if you combined all the LLMs together, be it chat, GBT, prop complexity and so on, that, that that's about 2% of the market. Yeah, so like I said, old old habits die hard. People are still kind of used to using Google when they need a solution, when they have a problem, when they're kind of comparing vendors or have some level of sales intent, they still go to it.

But that is changing. Yeah, it's changing a lot. And [00:06:00] yeah, the landscape is, isn't gonna stay like that for long,

Toni: so. Exactly. And I think the other obvious piece, like, you know. Yeah, we probably have more rev ops sales and, and CROs and founder kind of folks on the, on, on the show here, um, that are listening than, than marketing experts.

When SEO doesn't make sense
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Toni: Right. But sure. I think the other super obvious piece, and I think you mentioned this, is should people still go to Google and search there, but they're now getting served up a really great answer that doesn't require anyone to click on the link where it actually came from, right? Mm-hmm. So basically kind of Google is building a product that more and more is actually kind of.

You know, keeping people on their own product, which then obviously ast No, that's not what you intended with that blog post that you wanted to write, so, right. So to, to a degree, the question that people are, you know, asking now themselves is like, should I be doing SEO? Is it the right thing for me? Is it, you know, does it make sense for me to get into the game now?

Or should I kind of do something else instead? Kind of what's your, what's your [00:07:00] breakdown? What's your decision tree here for, um, you know, who in the audience should be going down that path and investing money in this and who maybe shouldn't?

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm one of those weird SEO B2B marketers that often says on sales calls, look, SEO is not a great fit for your company.

Whether I'm speaking to a revenue leader, a marketer, or maybe even a founder, there's many scenarios where. SEO just doesn't make sense. And we can talk about this kind of high level then break down kind of what measurement models you should look at. So when it comes to, when it comes to SEO, there's, there's a bunch of scenarios where it just doesn't make sense.

And one of those is first and foremost, if you are creating a new category. So if your solution is not known by your target prospects, and that's simply because Google is uh, is best placed. As a de demand collection engine. So most folks have probably had a 95 5 rule at any time. Well, any one [00:08:00] given time, 5% of your total addressable market are in market.

Google is always best placed to capture those folks that know they need your solution, have crisp and specific problems you solve are comparing vendors or shortlisting vendors or looking to switch from a current supplier to another. That's when it's a beast. But if folks don't know your offering exists, then you're way better ignoring search for now.

And kind of working out where your dream clients spend their time, get their trust and information, and start building that awareness around problems you solve. Why you and all that good stuff.

Toni: And maybe, maybe this is a silly question, I just wanted to interject this. Does this, I mean, when we're talking about SEO, we are specifically talking about the optimization, which is basically organic, right?

Kind of you, uh, put out content, you try and optimize it towards the algorithm, and you wanna rank high for no money, basically. But when you kind of talk about for whom is search right and for whom isn't, those are kind of the same things though, right? Whether you spend money on ads or kind of, uh, use SEO If you create a completely new thing where no one would [00:09:00] actually be finding you through a very specific problem, is, would, would you generalize it to say like then probably search in general is not a good idea for you?

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that's, I would say there's no point doing like Google ads paid search, or there's no point doing organic search. Um, which we can talk about kind of the benefits of in a sec once I've talked about all the time where, where, where all the reasons to steer clear of it, but Yeah. Yeah, you're right.

Exactly. So, if, if folks aren't necessarily aware of your solution, your category, maybe it's, it's something new that you are creating that hasn't previously had demand for, then you're way better off kinda spending your marketing dollars. Or your sweat equity kinda working, doing that customer research and working out where your prospects actually spend time, get trust information and spend time on those channels.

'cause search isn't gonna be for you until they're Yeah. More aware.

Toni: So let's assume people listening are in a super competitive field. I think most of them actually are. Mm-hmm. I think most of 'em are like five, 10 million plus. Yeah. And usually when you add this scale, someone is like, oh, that sounds like a [00:10:00] great idea.

Let me do the same thing. Right. So there, there usually are competitors around. Yep. Um,

Does SEO still take forever to build?
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Toni: so let's get through some of the. Obvious objections that people have with SEO nowadays. Right. And I'll just rattle it off one by one and you kind of, maybe we do like a quickfire response here, but doesn't it take forever to build SEO?

Sam: Yes and no. So let's pretend you're in a super competitive category. For example, I don't know, calendar scheduling software. Something like that. Chili Piper, Calendly, there's, there's huge players. So if you went for like, one of the broadest terms you could try and show up for would be like calendar scheduling software or calendar booking software.

It's gonna be super competitive, right? You're gonna have Chili Piper, Calendly, beasts of the game that have been doing it for years. Have a huge content marketing player. I have a huge SEO engine, have tons of backlinks flowing to and from them. They have a lot of authority, a lot of clout on Google. So I always say riches are in the niches, so.

There is ways to see [00:11:00] impact with SEO as quick as 90 days. Yes. If you wanna rank for super competitive category terms like Canada scheduling software, it's gonna take you six, 12 months, perhaps longer. But if you can work out all the ways that a dream client might search, kind of less obvious ways where a dream client might search for your solution but aren't necessarily looking directly for the category.

Maybe that's part of industries that you serve best. Mm-hmm. So, for example, maybe you've historically served FinTech well. Or, I don't know, sales teams or accounting teams. So you go kind of the calendar scheduling in this case for FinTech or for accounting. So you kind of niche down into industry or you know for a fact that on every sales conversation I'm hearing, we're getting sliced up against Calendly or Chili Piper or HubSpot meetings or whoever it is.

Well, let's pick them off. Let's cheekly cap, let's cheekly hone in on that demand. We know that people are switching away from this, this company because there's, I dunno, the customer support's lacking or it gets [00:12:00] super expensive when you act, when you go above 50 seats. So I know that if I try to rank for Calendly pricing or HubSpot meetings, pricing or HubSpot meetings, alternatives, then there's some demand to capture from annoyed prospects and that those, those terms can rank fast.

Toni: No, I can, I can see that. So the, the next one would be. ​

Should we just generate AI content?
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Toni: Um, and this is like, you know, probably like a year now, but okay, super cheap to generate AI content. Let's use that to plow all of this in SEO build a thousand off pages and, you know, let's see, you know, what, what works, what doesn't work, right? Kind of.

Um, but the, the thing behind that is like, isn't that gonna get penalized by the surgeon? Is, is this AI slop actually gonna work out? Kind of what's the, what's the, what's the take here?

Sam: In theory, it sounds great, right? Like, yeah, we can get this engine pump out, all this content, SEO tick box done. The problem with it is [00:13:00] that although some of these tactics can work in theory, especially if, like you said, the folks listening in, revenue leaders, perhaps they wanna share it with their marketing team as well.

If you're selling a high a CV solution, people don't suddenly wake up and decide to spend a hundred grand on software. Or tag. There's a painful process that goes on behind the scenes. They have problems. The impact of that problem gets too frustrating. They try to do something in house. They cobble something together that doesn't work.

Eventually they realize that there's a new better way. Then they start evaluating. So let, let's pretend someone does go to Google, for example, searches for some kind of solution that's relevant to your niche or your offer. Let's pretend you did rank with an AI page. If they land on that page, landing page, article, whatever it is.

And it's just full of crazy jargon. Like, we're gonna turbocharge your revenues, we're gonna 10 x your performance with our all in one, all singing, all dancing, cutting edge solution. It's like this was written by a robot. [00:14:00] It sound, it does not sound like a human. And I, I often say, look, you can prob, you might be able to rank with AI content, but you're not gonna resonate with your dream clients.

Mm-hmm. So AI is quite good as a starting point to maybe build a page outline and get inspiration and maybe feed in sales call recordings, all that kind of good stuff to compile it. But you want some manual input to make sure that if you're selling a high a CV product and someone sees that AI slop, they're gonna hit that page and they're gonna bounce within a few seconds, most likely.

So you need that human. It human interception where they can say, look, that's okay. That's not, we know that our customers have these problems. We know that they care about this. These are the main features, these are the main jobs to be done, and we, let's make sure we're weaving that into the, to the page.

Toni: Hey folks, Tony here, dropping in from the future. Real quick, I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the conversation with Sam, but this plug was just too perfect to pass up. So here's the thing. Using chat j BT to analyze your conversational [00:15:00] data, like call transcripts or emails is super powerful, but there are few big problems.

Pulling the data is a hassle and you have to keep doing it every time there's a new call. You can't just trace specific insights back to a specific customer or prospect, and you can't easily slice it by pipeline ICP or rep or region, and that's exactly what we fixed here at Atif. You get the structure and clarity of your CRM, but powered by the rich inside Bird in your actual conversations.

If you want to check it out, go to Attive.ai and now back to Sam and our conversation.

Buidling a Money Keyword Matrix
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Toni: In my head, there are a lot of, well, how do you then actually do it? Questions, right? Because on the one hand side, for me personally, I, it kind of makes a lot of sense to kick off some, some kind of a, you know, I'm going to call it agentic workflow that, you know, spins off a lot of websites and fill some with some kind of content that is optimized for the algorithm.

Like that [00:16:00] makes total sense for me. Right? And then he would look over this whole thing, he would see what works and then you double down on the things that work kind of, that is like an intuitive, naively speaking, that's like an approach I can see people taking. Now I think you already kind of created a caveat there by saying like, well listen, if you have like high a CV clients and if it's um, if it's maybe not so many, if it's not a numbers game, then obviously kind of you need to think differently about it.

Let's maybe dive into, I don't know, should we, should we do this typical, oh, if I were to start over as a marketeer, here would be my 90 day, my 90 day plan to fix SEO, kind of what, what, what would you do stepping into an organization given that Yes. Um, there's a sound decision that SEO o is actually the right strategy.

Let's kind of take that away, right? Kind of that that decision was made you have, you know, successfully not dissuaded them from doing it, and you kind of came to the conclusion that that's actually the right thing to do. What would you do now in order to, uh, get this thing off the ground?

Sam: I'll try and be as [00:17:00] tactical as I can, and if, if I'm using jargon, feel free to, to dive in so I can simplify.

So in, in most straightforward terms possible, what I would do is if we wanted start an SEO engine, like I say, we wanna start with giving the quickest possible time to value, probably to our sales team or whoever deals with the inbound book calls or for PLG, then that's a different motion. So. We wanna work out. I often do something called a money keyword matrix, so I encourage anyone who's listening or watching to fire up a simple Google sheet or Excel sheet, build out this thing I call a money keyword matrix and what we're doing here. I love it. I really love it. What we're doing is we're basically working out what would a dream client search.

Not when they're messing around, not when they're information hunting, but that when they actively are in market for our software, our tech, or our service. So I usually, and the simplest way I can do that is a lot more to it, but let's say we split it into four columns. Column one is every way that a prospect can refer [00:18:00] to our solution.

So let's pretend that we're selling, I don't know, proposal software. Then that could be sales proposal software, proposal tools, proposal platforms, all that kind of stuff. That's column one. Column two is what industries do we serve best? So look through your CRM, what industries, one, have the problem you solve.

Two are motivated to solve it. Three, actually have cash to easily invest in your offer. And four, you've historically sold well into. So FinTech, accounting, whatever. That's column C.

Toni: So let's call that ICP basically. Right. And like

Sam: ICP, the problem is a lot of, a lot of companies have what they think as an ICP, and when they actually dive into the data, it's like, you're right.

That's not our ICP, that's just who we wanna be selling to.

Toni: Our ICP is, uh, fortune 500 blue chips. You know? Yeah. Because that's what we wanna sell to. Not that we are actually selling to them, but, okay. Got it. Yeah, that's column number two.

Sam: Column three is competitors. This works specifically well in [00:19:00] SaaS, so if you've got competitors that always come up on sales calls for an annoying level, those three or four in the proposal space, that might be Proposify, Quila, panda, dark, get Accept, those kind of guys.

Mm-hmm. That's column three. And then column four is what are our dream clients? This is moving a little bit more up funnel, but what are our dream clients' jobs to be done? Their struggling moments. So what are the problems they raise on sales calls? What do they try and cobble together in house before they get so annoyed?

They need to evaluate a solution like yours? So in the proposal space, that could be building something out on Google Docs. That could be a frustration that, why aren't my sales quotes closing? Why aren't my sales team hitting quota? That kind of stuff. You know, problems and symptoms that your solution solves.

So that's, that's the four columns. So you've got column one. Offer column two industries, column three competitors and column four jobs to be done on problems. Why are we doing this? Well, we're doing this 'cause we basically wanna exhaust every way. A high sales intent [00:20:00] prospect could be going to a search engine or now LLM and having, having intent to evaluate a solution like ours.

And what you'll find is, like we touched on earlier, if we're in the proposal space trying to rank for. Best proposal software or best proposal tools, whatever it is, is gonna be competitive. 'cause the big players, the top four that we talked about, probably gonna own this space. Um, so that's why we make this matrix.

'cause we wanna make kind of longer tail variance of these. So whilst we might slowly chip away at, and like over time try and show up for best proposal software, but in the meantime, let's use the data we've collected to go for what we call longer tail searches. So that might be things like. Best proposal software or proposal software for sales teams or for accountancies or for FinTech or whatever those industries have worked out are, that's one route.

The other route that you're gonna rank for even faster. In fact, recently we ranked a page in 72 hours, like top three of Google going after [00:21:00] this competitor strategy. So literally, let's say one of our competitors was PandaDoc. That would be quite tricky 'cause they're pretty big, but maybe get accept. The ways these can work is get accept like alternatives or get accept pricing or get accept competitors or get accept reviews.

These work well because we know that customers churn. We know that prospects get annoyed with their vendor. Maybe that's pricing. Maybe that's customer support. Maybe that's something else or. They just know of that brand already and they're looking to shortlist three or four vendors to bring to their execs.

Mm-hmm. That's why those terms look work so well. Um, and we can talk about how to create content for each of those pieces in a sec. And then the fourth one was, yeah, jobs to be done. So like problems if that's around the sales appraisal. I don't know. Why aren't my sales quote team hitting quote, uh, um, how to build a sales proposal that closes within Google Docs.

All that kind of stuff. Kind of niche, relevant, useful problem-based content. And then this is all about building long tail searches, [00:22:00] uh, keywords or, or queries or prompts that your dream clients are gonna be searching for. And you'll find that a lot of these from a Google perspective, have lower traffic compared to kind of real top funnel, like what is a CRM or how to build a website, but they have way higher sales intent, so they're more likely to drive inbounds.

Um, so that's a money key keyword matrix. Then we can talk about how to build content.

Who should own the matrix?
---

Toni: So actually kind of on, on this one, right? Who in the org would you give that to? Like, let's just say you're a CRO listening, and your first thing is like, oh, I'm gonna give this to my marketing leader. Right? And I would be like, yes, great starting point.

But in my experience, and we can have a philosophical conversation whether or not that VP should be hired if they don't know this, but to a large degree, they sometimes actually don't know these things so super well, right? Mm-hmm. Kind of, you know, what are the struggles, kind of what are the. What is our ICP?

No, no one in our organization as to our previous joke, sometimes knows that even, right? What? What? It really is our ICP, not our, not the ones that we want to sell to, but the ones we are selling to right now. [00:23:00] Um. Kind of in, in, in your engagements, did you, um, what was it usually kind of a, a broader team you worked with or kind of how did you, how did you build this for your clients?

Sam: Yeah, so we were working with a lot of kind of Series A, series B companies, and quite often they're small marketing teams, like maybe they've got like a, a VP, marketing ahead of marketing, then possibly someone on content marketing. That's about it. Um, at best, really. And yeah, so usually we work either the VP marketing, head of demand gen, something like that to, I suppose to give some context.

But quite often what I say is if you've got someone from the sales team that can chip in in this, this kind of exercise, it's always useful. Or if you can get access to. Kind of a few TR sales calls or transcripts that you can just feed into GPT and kind of ask for the key insights around these points.

Then that's gonna save you a lot of time and pain, so you can kind of pull all these excerpt excerpts and if you can get CRM data as well, that's gonna gonna [00:24:00] help you as well. A lot of the stuff I talk about kind of goes above SEO and is just general kind of be good B2B marketing best practices, like foundational stuff, like know your dream clients, know their top three most expensive bleeding net problems.

Know what happens if they don't fix it. Know why they want to fix it. Know the industries that have cash to invest in the offer and get the job done. And then that's gonna build the, the foundation for helping you kind of craft messaging that resonates not just on your website, but way beyond.

Toni: So this.

What is it? The money keyword matrix. Yeah. Great. I really love that. So this was the kind of the, the quick money way, right? Kind of this is how you as a, as a marketing leader or as a, as a consultant can come in and kind of prove our eye real quick, I guess. Um

Quicker vs longer strategies
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Toni: , what is the longer term stuff, you know, be, because it feels like there, there, there are two different routes to go, right?

Kind of the, very much, the long term game and then the short term stuff. You can probably do both somewhat in parallel, but what's the. Well, [00:25:00] what's the, what's the, what's the alternative or what's the longer version of this?

Sam: So I, I suppose in simple terms, you can get quick wins from kind of what a lot of what I'm talking about is what's gonna drive kind of pipeline for your sales team or signups depending on your, your motion of your SAS or tech company.

So I suppose going back to those competitor searches, those can rank quite fast. And I suppose to tee up context, the, the way those pages usually work is that if someone searches, be it on chat, DBT, or be it on Google for, let's say, Panda alternatives, what usually kind of shows up is what's called a product listicle.

And in simple terms, you might have seen these pages or these articles that say, we evaluated the top 10 pound alternatives of 2025, and the way they're usually structured is your product number one. And then nine other competitors. But where companies get these wrong is they'll put their product number one, but then just kind of slate the competition or [00:26:00] put in, in un incorrect data about the others.

And it's, it's just not good practice. So this is where customer research is really key. So by all means, put your offer number one, but actually leverage insights like for why folks choose you from that stuff we talked about earlier, like problems you solve, others don't. Maybe the kind of pricing point, maybe the customer support point.

All that, all those kind of pain points, jobs to be done that your customers care about, feature your product as well. So folks can actually see under the bonnet. So many SaaS companies just don't show their product properly under the bonnet on their website. Like we wanna see screenshots, we wanna see gifs of the aha moment where your product clicks into play, maybe even kind of a live demo integration.

And then also I'd, I'd wanna weave in like a customer case study of someone that switched from that company. So they switch from Avena to you and then Yeah, have a fair assessment of if it is the top 10 alternatives, the other nine have a fair assessment of those. Um, but yeah, those can work quite well.

So those can [00:27:00] rank relatively fast from our experience. Then longer term stuff is kind of ranked, trying to show up for more category based terms. So yeah, like high level, like in the proposal space, best proposal software or. Best proposal tools, it's just gonna be dominated by the big players. And yeah, you can, you can build a landing page that maybe follows the problem, agitation, solution route, whether you're facing this problem, this is how we're equipped to solve it.

Here's some examples. Um, here's why we're good. Maybe an FAQ section at the bottom that leverages kind of real questions that you get on sales calls. Like, um, how long set up, what's your guarantee policy? Um, why should I choose you of the, of the other big three? All those kind of stuff. Um, but even then, you're still gonna need to build what's called backlinks to build up the authority of this page.

And simple term of backlink is another website that's linking to you to this, this kind of focus time and page.

Toni: I tried this backlink thing once. Yeah. It's really, I mean, that's really [00:28:00] difficult, right? Um, but what I'm, if I'm, if I'm understanding it correctly, for the, for the money keyword matrix. For that magic tool that everyone should use tomorrow.

By the way, you don't necessarily need to require tons of backlinks, right? That's, that's kind of a, it feels like a different play. Am I, am I getting this right?

Sam: So that those kind of more niche terms. Like competitor alternative and stuff like that. Quite often you can rank without back links, just by building a, a powerful piece of content that I usually say just blows out the water.

Whatever's ranking at the moment or showing up at the moment. Yeah. And leveraging some customer research that's gonna resonate with your prospects, doing what we call basic technical SEO. So all I mean by that is, let's say you're trying to rank for PandaDoc alternative. Then in your website, URL, for that page, it would just be your domain.com/panda alternative.

You have one, I don't wanna go too technical, but just one h one heading, one tag that has panda alternative within it. Same for your meta title and description. And then you naturally weave it [00:29:00] into the copy. Yeah. But that, that's, that's the crux to it. There's, there's more technical stuff, but I'll keep it kind of simple at the moment.

Old school SEO in a world of LLMs
---

Toni: So let's turn the page a little bit. This was a little bit the. I wanna say the old school playbook. Sure. That still works extremely well. Sure. Like, let's not forget, you know, everyone listening, let's not forget this, right? With what Google has still the majority of the search contact, um, and, you know, those, those tactics here, they still work. So how does, uh, however, they're calling it now, L-L-M-S-E-O or uh, generative. AI Optim. I, I like there, there are all kinds of different things floating around. So the, the team, the, the, you know, the, the community hasn't really settled on, on what to call this, but basically your brand showing up in someone's open AI prompt, uh, or answer to that prompt, basically.

Right. How is that? Is it [00:30:00] changing the game? You know, what, what, what is different now that this is around?

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of difference. There's a lot of difference. So I suppose there's a few things I've, I've talked about kind of, let's call it the old school playbook, which can still work to, to drive inbound and pipeline from Google, but.

SEMrush, I think it was backlink, have done kind of analysis and they seem to think that LLMs will overtake traditional Google search by 2027. So it's something to be aware of and something we we should start building a foundation for. So I suppose the core difference between L LMS is with Google. Now if you do a search, sometimes you might get an AI overview at the top.

Might get a Google ad or two, and then you've got the traditional 10 blue links to click through to external websites on the results page. Whereas lms, chat, gt, et cetera, don't have that. Uh, when you, when you do a prompt, when you do a query, instead of directing you to, instead of bringing up a bunch of [00:31:00] pages, they're just pulling information from different sources on the open web.

So for example, I like to flip this and carry on, I suppose, the tone of context. A CMO historically might have searched on Google. Show me the best proposal software on Chatt BT. They might say, I'm A CMO at this company. I've got 50 sales reps. Um, I'm struggling with X, Y, z pain points. I need a b, C features.

I need these, I need it within this budget for 50 sales reps. And please show me the, the top four solutions I can evaluate. Uh, quite a lot more detailed. So there's a lot there to, to consider. And I suppose I should preface this with S-E-O-L-L-M-O-G-E-O-A-I-O, whatever you wanna call it. No one's cracked it yet.

A lot of folks are claiming to be experts, but there's, there's so much new stuff going on with it that no one is yet, 'cause it's so early. But the difference I'm getting at is when you do that search, you'll then get, like you said, these [00:32:00] platforms are moving into more of a zero click experience, so you're getting fed all the information you need.

Without having to click through to an external website. Now some of the, some of the information that's shown will be cited, so we'll say like, we pulled this from this review site, or this article, or read it, or Quora or Wikipedia, whatever sources they're citing from. But it's a lot. I, I, I'd say it's a lot more difficult to kind of clearly see that, like the links are quite small.

Toni: What you just kind of said out loud was something that was lingering in my hat a little bit. Uh, but I couldn't quite put a finger on it, and I think you did this extremely well. I don't think people will go into ChatGPT and say like, proposal software and then just, you know, wait, what's gonna happen? I think they're gonna treat it just like you said, more as, um, you know, their personal assistant.

Mm-hmm. That you know that who knows their context. Um, yeah. And maybe they're gonna verbalize it or the LLM knows their contracts already, that this is maybe a. You know, CRO [00:33:00] and a and a mid-size B2B and, you know, knows all of those things. Um, so therefore the, um, you know, the, the research is not gonna be so, you know, who's the best, it's like, who really is the best for you, right?

Mm-hmm. So, and I think that's a really, really important takeaway for people to kind of think about this, but what are the implications of this now, like we, we talked about previously being super specific. Isn't that kind of the same strategy here now? Or am I getting this wrong?

Sam: Niche and specific content's really good.

So it's, it's really nice. So I suppose there's a few things. There's a few things, there's a lot of nuance that we can dive into, but I'll try and keep it kind of straightforward. Now the thing is because, because Chat GBT and lms, they're not. Kind of giving you the blue links like Google do. They're pulling different source, different, different content from all, all across different websites.

That could be articles, could be review sites, that could be, uh, like I [00:34:00] say, Quora, Reddit communities, all that kind of stuff, all in one. So it's a lot different playbook to classic SEO because some of this is almost beyond your control.

Brand builders have a step up
---

Sam: And what you'll find is companies that have built up, quote unquote brand.

Have almost an unfair advantage. Going into lms 'cause they, they love to cite companies that have been mentioned loads in the press, have tons of positive reviews, like on the classic review sites, G two Capterra, et cetera. Mm-hmm. Maybe have built up a solid community. Whether that's core or Reddit. 'cause a lot of people have talked positively about them when folks were asking for recommendations in different forums and different landscapes and such, and just have a lot of solid press because they've one been going a while and have done a lot of PR and similar in the past.

So if companies that have done have kind of been around a long time and have done that almost have an unfair advantage because LLMs are scooping all this past kind of ecosystem and just naturally think that [00:35:00] they're the go-to. So newcomers have bit of an uphill battle, and there is a way in which I can talk about in a sec, but I suppose I should tee that up.

That brand is, is kind of really big because LLMs don't care so much about backlinks. They care more about brand mentions. So if your brand and your category are consistently mentioned on different sources across the web, could be on your own website. Could be on review sites, could be on Reddit, other forums that has a solid positive impact.

Toni: Isn't that hilarious how the pendulum swings back almost? Right. I mean, I feel like. Couple of years ago, brand was like, oh, we need to fire those CMOs and we just need to have a performance director. And that's it. Um, and now it's like, oh, wait a minute. This new way of, you know, how people discover you actually leverages that thing quite a lot.

Yeah. So, you know, two bad boys, uh, you know, kind of made the wrong decision there, but like, um, I can totally see that. Like I can [00:36:00] absolutely see how, um. How this is even a good way to figure out who is a good company, right? I can actually see that, uh, obviously what those elements trying to achieve is, um, give you the best possible answer and I can see how that is actually a good way to, to get to the best possible answer for like with whom, you know, with which vendor should you work with.

Common LLM hacks
---

Toni: Right. Um, obviously nuances and I get it. Definitely nuances and, you know, please, please kind of go into this for a little bit, but, um, uh, I, I understand. That, that is kind of the approach, uh, to figure out, you know, what recommendations to give you.

Sam: So with that in mind, let's keep this to, I suppose to keep it specific.

Let's keep it focused on what folks might search on or, or prompt in these LLMs when they actually have sales intent. With that said, yep. If you've, if your company's been going a while and you've, you've, you know that the company's built up a lot of PR and brand over the years, you do have an unfair advantage 'cause these LLMs using all that training data that they've scraped from over the years, and that's woven in, [00:37:00] but.

There is ways to game these, and I feel that there's gonna be more and more over time that LMS do to perhaps stop this kind of stuff. But at the moment, it seems to work well. So one example we touched on it is making sure that your website goes deep on niche relevant content. So we, we touched on it a bit, but that's making sure your website is, is a really useful resource.

So as a standard, if you're a B2B SaaS, then making sure that you've got pages for each and every industry that you serve. Each and every use case, all the core features that prospects care about, um, all the main competitors that you go against and all that good stuff. So, I mean, that's good practice anyway.

But a lot of, a lot of SaaS websites are extremely thin on content and definitely a pricing page. Pricing is huge because if someone searches, let's say that prompt, we just talked about that. I'm A CMO, show me the, the best, uh, proposal software X, Y, Z [00:38:00] with these pain points for 50 reps and filter them by pricing.

If you are not sharing pricing on your website, which I'm not gonna name and shame, but there's tons of B2B SaaS that have pricing pages without pricing. It is being shown, whether you like it or not, it's just being pulled from a third party site. So it could be someone on Reddit and that might not even be accurate data.

It might just be from like three years ago where someone on Reddit said, actually, I wanted to upgrade for this SaaS tool for my 50 reps and the pricing 10 Xed. And that might be pulled into chatt VT on the current comparison. And you are getting skewed data just 'cause you're too scared to show pricing on your website.

Um, and that's one, one case where kind of transparency is, is kind of key in these kind of things.

Toni: And I'm just kind of thinking down this rabbit hole now because this is also new for me. Um, you know, when you, when people write a website, they write it for humans, right? And you want to be concise, you wanna be clear, you want to actually, I mean, we know the average attention span.

It's like, you know, maybe people skim the H one, H two and you [00:39:00] know, a little bit further down. But yeah. Rarely. Maybe they're, they read the listicle, but rarely they read the full paragraph. It's just not gonna happen. Mm-hmm. But AI might read the whole thing, actually. Should you be writing for an AI instead?

Now, when you kind of do this kind of content and you know, to a degree, the reason why I'm asking is like, you can be way more elaborate. You can put way more stuff in there. You can be way more, you know, uh, going into details because. That thing actually will care about the details versus the busy executive that, that, you know, is just gonna Okay.

Skip too much, too much. Back to TikTok.

Sam: Yeah, I think there's a balance, right? But I think getting that niche relevant stuff, so for example, if we're doing an industry page IE, our software for X industry. Then, yeah, we need to be more specific than we'd historically be because people are gonna be putting these detailed prompts.

One, we need to chunk up our content on that page nicely. So it's split by headings and really easy for folks to consume with bullet points and nice graphics and all that kind of good stuff. So it's really easy to, to break down. And two, yeah, we need to [00:40:00] make sure we're leveraging customer research to talk about like pain points that this industry might experience, kind of their jobs to be done, their motivators, the features they care about.

The FAQs they're gonna raise. So that's all covered. So if someone is doing quite a detailed prompt, our page does, its damn best to, to make sure that some of that content could be pulled into an LLM. Um, I mean that, that was SEO good practice, but not many folks did it. It so that, that's one important thing.

And then without going too technical, there's something called kind of schema markup, which helps, it's helped search engines kind of read your page at a high level. And that seems to help a bit as well with some of these LLMs. So kinda making sure that your, your site has that as well. Um, but yeah, it's, it's a good point kind of considering that.

Uh, more depth, more detail, more specific, but not for the sake of being specific for actually what dream clients care about.

Toni: I think that's really helpful. It's really cool conceptually people will be like, okay, cool. Actually this makes sense. Yes, I can see how we need to, you know, do a homework, kind of think a little bit differently of how people will search and consume the next question, like [00:41:00] everyone is gonna ask like, well, how are you gonna measure that this thing actually is gonna work, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, and actually two. Two different topics around this. Um, one is the analytics. So does it actually work, right? Kind of are we, are we now ranking higher? Whatever ranking means. In those, in those AI problems, what's your take on that for the current state of the art? And you know, maybe something comes out tomorrow and everything is fixed, but what's your, what's your current perspective on this?

Sam: Yeah, yeah. Can I give one more tip before we talk about measurement?

Toni: Oh, yes, yes, sure.

Sam: Just because this seems to be mentally good is when you search for that, that kind of high sales intent stuff we've been talking about in lms. You'll notice that most of the time when you get the results, the citations are, the little links that you see being pulled are normally what we call product listicles, like Capterra G two, or maybe articles set with things like we reviewed the top 10 proposal.

Softwares a 2025. Those [00:42:00] get cited a heck of a lot for these high sales intent queries and prompts. So if you wanna start being more visible for your brand, build those listicles on your own site. For every way someone can refer to your product, make sure you own those lines in the water and look to have a process to get on all of your competitors sites, to have those listicles review sites, to have those listicles and so on.

And a lot of that can be done not necessarily by paying. Yeah. Some of them are paid to play Forbes Capterra due to, but a lot of the times you can just do value exchange and sweat equity. So that's like in my case, a lot of them are B2B saeo agencies of 2025 or saeo agencies of 2025. I go to a lot of founders and just say, look, I'll, I'll give you some kind of value exchange, like I'll add you to our article or something like that.

And a lot of them are happy to do it and it's just a, at the moment it's a really good way. If you can get that brand visibility across all of those that are relevant, it, it is seems to be an unfair advantage. So just something to pass on to your marketing leader, but now let's move into attribution and [00:43:00] analytics.

Measuring SEO in a world of LLMs
---

Sam: So historically on Google it was, let's track we've, we've got our money, keywords, how well are they ranking? Are they page one, are they top three, organic, et cetera. How's the click through rate? How are these are kind of leading indicators? How is the session time? Are they staying? Are they spending a few minutes on the page and then.

Crawling through to the rest of our website, maybe checking out demo pricing, et cetera. And then eventually, um, lagging indicators. Are they signing up? Are they grabbing a demo, booking a sales call, and so on at a high level. Those were the kind of the leading and lagging indicators up to now, and it's traffic going up, of course, traffic and impressions, but a lot of websites, organic traffic.

Is declining, at least for non-branded search. So when I say non-branded, I mean not their company name. Company name. Basically someone searching a company name as a brand search. Non-branded search was typically very big in organic SEO. So like if your proposal file pander doc, you want someone to search proposal software and find you.

That's non [00:44:00] non-branded search. But now with the rise of AI search and lms, more branded searches going up, websites are getting less click-throughs. Traffic looks like it's declining. Um, they're getting less. Non-branded search impressions are going up, so views are going up, but that kind of non-branded traffic seems to be going down.

And that's because these platforms want to give you that zero click experience. They don't. They wanna keep you on platform for as long as possible. Think of LinkedIn. LinkedIn Organic reaches tanking like crazy 'cause they're boosting more thought leadership ads and paid media content. Same for Google.

Over time, I think chat, GPT is gonna move more into a model of. With agents and stuff like that without going too complex. I think they're gonna take, um. A percentage of kind of online store payments and maybe SAS SaaS payments and that kind of stuff, rather than a a, an ads model. I digress. So how can you measure?

It's very difficult with lms. So there are tools, like there's been a massive. Bunch [00:45:00] of SaaS funded tools that have cropped up, cropped up, that claim to measure kind of what prompts people are searching for around your solution, um, how effective it is, what you should be targeting, that kind of stuff. I think it's very, very difficult.

HF seems to have some good data around it, but it's still because there's so many variants that people could prompt for your solution, it almost seems like at this stage, like a really, really difficult feat. 'cause there's so many variants that people could search. So. What you'll find is there's a few things that are changing.

I think the mindset's changing. I think what's hap, what's gonna happen more and more is people will do their research. So when they have a problem, they'll do it on chat, GBT, and they'll, they'll kind of evaluate in internally. Then they might say like, show me the top four vendors, like with all this criteria alongside it, and then evaluate there.

Then they'll discuss it internally. Then they might, instead of clicking through to your website, like with the Google search. They might just go directly to your website, like your homepage. 'cause they now know your brand. So you might notice [00:46:00] that direct traffic is going up, but you can't attribute it to LLMs.

Yeah. Or Google search or whatever. 'cause people were remembering. It's, to me it feels more like we're moving into a mind share era. So you want to build brand and mind share around your product, the problems you solve. Why you, your differentiators. You want to get all that external brand that we talked about and then what are you gonna see a result as a result?

Maybe more direct traffic, maybe more branded search, maybe more traffic direct to your homepage. Yeah, there's things you can track so you can make sure on inquiry forms, you've got, how did you hear about us? And you've got, you're ask, your sales team are asking again, like what was the full journey you took before you discovered us today to kind of collect that quantitative data.

And yeah, there are kind of LLM data tools that claim to kind of get some prompt information and HF is starting to roll out similar. So there is some kind of analytical stuff you, you can do, but like most things in B2B marketing, it's really linear. So it's, it's almost like you're piecing [00:47:00] together the puzzle and realizing that kind of non-branded traffic is, is on the decline and likely branded traffic is going up.

Um, with what we're seeing.

Toni: So basically saying, forget about it. No, forget about

Sam: it.

Toni: You know, you can't measure it. You really can't attribute it really well, which to a degree, um, you know, I think. Um, you can be a cynic about it and be like, um, okay, well, you know, if I can't measure it, then we shouldn't do it.

Or you, you think about it a little bit differently and you're like, well, maybe the way we've been doing measuring in the past was a mirage anyway. You know, like doing, um, I, I know a lot of companies that basically get like. Paid search as the main source and basically placed paid ads on their brand names, you know?

Mm-hmm. Um, and then attributed this to paid search. It's like, that's actually kind of silly, you know? That's probably not how this thing works for you, right? Mm-hmm. And, and to a degree now, um, you know, we're moving almost away. [00:48:00] Well, you can't, you can't attribute this anyway. Um. So, um, do the right things that he should have been doing all along.

Almost do the right things, you know, you know, put out the content, be specific, give information. So when this AI thing is doing the assessment of you, it is in a, in a position to give the best possible answer to, to their customers, so to speak. Right. It's like, I don't know.

Nothing's changed. Everything's changed.
---

Toni: What's your, what's your philosophical take on this year is, um, you know, since, since none of this can be measured anyway, how, how should, how.

How should CROs think about it? Like how should CEOs think about it?

Sam: I would say nothing's changed, but everything's changed. So it's like, do what you can to measure so you can, like if someone, for example, um, chat gpt and similar, they do have small citations, small links, so you can click through to some of the information.

So by all means, but the problem is some of that traffic or click through doesn't always feed into tools like Google A that's a kind of hot topic at the moment, that it's not always feeding through accurately. [00:49:00] So track as best as you can, use analytic tools and processes. Also measure the inputs. So measures the actual habits and activities that if you've got a marketing team or if you're using a contract or agency that they're doing proactively to do this.

So whether that's the money keyword matrix, whether that's doing niche and specific content, whether that's doing stuff outside of your website, getting featured on Listicles Press, maybe you're doing podcast appearances, all this kind of stuff to build a aware awareness. Maybe you're having a a feed so you can be updated when someone posts or Reddit that's relevant to your niche so you can get involved in that community.

And mention your brand when possible. So have, have processes that you know are gonna move the needle. Measure what you can and realize that this isn't just relevant to Google. This isn't just relevant to lms, this is relevant to social media, all this kind of stuff. Platforms want you less and less to kick through to external sites.

Know that that's the way things are going, and know that we're moving more in, at least in my opinion, into a brand and mind share game. Yeah, so if you're getting more [00:50:00] directed and branded search, that's good. Pipeline's probably gonna, if you're doing the right activity, the pipeline will come if you're doing it properly, but it will be more and more difficult to track.

But then B2B marketing has always been difficult to track with high a CV. It's, I get inquiries on my website where people put, how did you hear about us podcast? I ask them, they're like, I searched Sass your agency. Followed you on LinkedIn for three months. Listened to your podcast for six months, forgot about it.

My exec saw you on LinkedIn, eventually booked a cool, how do you track that?

Wrapping up
---

Toni: So we're coming up on time here. Really, really insightful stuff. I think the last question I have, which is probably on the minds of everyone on this podcast, what's your dog called?

Sam: Yeah, he's, he's featured in a lot of podcasts 'cause he is mental, his, his name is Barney.

He's a caucus spaniel and he loves to bark 'cause this house has got a lot of windows. Pretty much anyone that walks past. But then I, when I take him on a walk, he's scared of every dog. So do with that as you will.

Toni: Wonderful. Sam, thank you so much for today. I think this was really insightful. We went [00:51:00] really deep, and I think also for the folks that stuck with us to the end, uh, got a really comprehensive understanding of what's changing and how it's impacting, you know, you potentially as a, as someone that wants to sell stuff.

So, um, thanks so much for that. Um, if someone wants to follow you or buy your services, Sam, where can they find you?

Sam: Yeah, I really appre appreciate it, enjoyed the chat. So three main ways. One is Sam Dunning on LinkedIn. I post daily ramblings on SEO and what's working, what's not memes, et cetera. Two is the podcast, breaking B2B bit like this.

I do solo episodes with kind SEO strategies, but, and what's working with my own experiments, my agency, and also interviews with SaaS marketing leaders, how they're driving growth today. And then thirdly, if you've kind of listened to me ramble on for the last 50 minutes and kind of thought, is there a way to shut 'em up?

Or maybe they just. Kind of tired of not driving a steady flow of organic search pipeline and wanna start cracking that and driving kind of a steady flow of inbounds through SEO. Then breaking b2b.com we might be able to

Toni: help [00:52:00] breaking b2b.com. Sam, thank you so much and thank you everyone else for listening.

Have a good one. Cheers.