Client Winning SEO Strategy - Teacher: Sam Dunning

The real questions you get on sales calls are hard They're not basic stuff. Are they they're harsh people want to know harsh truths And the good thing about pulling faqs and like a little carousel at the bottom of your pages You'll find they get read quite a lot You And you'll also find that it saves you time on sales calls.

Cause you're addressing these objections and these queries and these hard questions up front. It makes folks more likely to convert because they actually see you as transparent and trustworthy rather than just trying to get their contact info at all costs. Hello and welcome to the useful content podcast. And today we have a brand new teacher in our useful content classroom. Sam Dunning. Hi, Sam.

Hey Juma, thanks for having me on, man. Looking forward to the conversation.

It's great to have you on Sam. Uh, I've been following your content for a while. And you have been in my LinkedIn feed for a while as well. And so it's great to have you on today to talk about B2B strategy and SEO. So that's a topic that I think I'm going to enjoy and the audience was going to enjoy as well.

But before we get into that, could you please tell the people what you do and how you help your clients make useful content?

yeah, yeah, sure thing. So we, we tend to work with slightly frustrated B2B service tech or SaaS companies that are maybe a little tired of seeing their competitors above them in Google's organic search results. Every time a dream client searches for their offer direct. Maybe a problem that they solve or compares them to competitors.

Meaning those competitors to them are stealing traffic, mindshare, and most importantly, inbound leads, demos, or sales calls. So we fix those issues with a slightly unusual approach to SEO and content marketing, uh, breaking B2B, which I'm sure we're going to dive into soon.

Hmm. What is the slightly unusual approach you're talking about?

there's, there's a lot of mistakes when it comes to B2B SEO. Yeah. Both serviced and technology companies and software companies make all the time. And rather than so many folks, when it comes to an SEO strategy, get caught in what I call a traffic trap. So they try to acquire as much traffic to their website as possible. As a result, that often means they're going for more informative. Based keywords or ranking informative based blog articles, pages, or similar on the website. And the trouble is when you focus on that it drives more what we call top of funnel traffic. So people that are maybe just looking for a quick answer to a question Maybe looking to educate themselves And they're probably going to skim your page, skim your article, skim your blog, whatever it may be, but they're pretty unlikely to do something bottom of funnel, AKA book demo, book a sales call, whatever that relevant next step you want to feed your sales team with.

So we, we tend to go for a bottom up approach. I, how can we make this as commercial sales ready as possible? And how can we work out what a prospect is likely to search when they're actually ready to have that sales conversation and how can we craft content that's going to rank resonate with folks and convert a lot of that is down to great customer research, understanding what dream clients care about, and then building out content to attack that.

so the unusual approach taking it from the bottom up, because I know many people will talk about, you know, create content so that you can get me known. And people talk about that, even though I have spoken about creating content and why, why that is important. Um, but we all know that not all companies need to invest in SEO. In your experience, what are some of the symptoms that you're seeing? That you see that can tell you for sure that a company needs to invest in SEO.

Yeah, it's great one. There's a few, there's a few really. One obvious one might be if they're investing a ton into paid media, i. e. that could be Google ads, that could be paid review sites, that could be LinkedIn ads, in the B2B realm, it could be other cases of social ads. But, they haven't done a ton in organic.

But the good thing is, they've probably proved out a paid media model. So they know there's demand there to capture from target prospects that have their problems, that's actively searching. They're actively in market searching for their solution, their service, their software, whatever. But they've perhaps just maybe lack the resource to start building out an SEO program, whether that's lacked in house content team.

Maybe it's like the technical knowledge or the strategic knowledge. Um, another could be typically SEO works best as a demand capture channel, right? So that means you're in a category or a set sector or a solution that your target clients know exist. So there's actually people searching directly for that offer or variations you've offered on Google.

So if you've already, if you know that your market is, has some demand to capture, I there's, there's a fair, fair few competitors. And perhaps the, the solution that you provide has been around for some time, then the chances are SEO is going to be a good model to go down. But on the flip side, if you're in a sector that's perhaps not as well known, maybe you've trying to create a new category.

Maybe your product is just something a bit different, not well received by the market, then SEO is not always the best bet purely because there's probably not that many folks that actually know about your solution, your service, your software. And in that case, your SEO might be a bit of a waste of your time.

You might be better off kind of working out where those target clients hang out and investing into those platforms, channels or events, whatever it may be.

So you can do a blended strategy, or you can do something that really heavily leans into SEO. But you know, Sam, I have a big problem with SEO these days, and part of it is not the people, part of it is the platforms and particularly Google. Um, so I was looking at some content the other day and it occurred to me, somebody did a test.

It occurred to me, and you will see too, if you search that the top results on the Google page, They are all ads. They're all ads. And we know that the first page of Google gets like 96 percent of the search traffic, but the top results are always. Ads. So why even bother to invest in organic if you can just pay for ads?

Love it. Love it. So you're exactly right. And you could, you could invest a ton in paid search and most B2B, especially in tech, especially in SAS, like companies invest a shed load into paid search, Google ads, G2 review sites, and similar, and it can work super well. And the good thing about paid ads is yes, you can get a quick, quick hit at the top of Google search results. But there's a few things to consider and a few things to be wary of. One is that if you're in a market where your buyers are fairly tech savvy, then they know what an ad is and they know what an organic listing is, and there's plenty of data in certain industries to show that a lot of people will skip the paid ads and they'll place more trust in the folks that have earned, let's say, uh, the organic position.

Um, so that's one of the main things. And then the other side of the coin is that organic search, paid search, paid ads is a great way to prove out demand. It's a great way to say, look, there are folks searching for these keywords. We see that when they land on certain pages of X amount of percentage of them convert into whatever next step that is sales, cool demo, sign up, depending on our model, and SEO campaign for specific keywords, topics, or pages is going to work.

And then you can say, well. We actually want to lower our cost per click or a cost per acquisition cost per demo, cost per signup. So organic search actually makes sense because we've already proven that folks are searching for this stuff. So why not, why not get two bites of the cherry, have an ad and have an organic result, or over time, we might be able to lower our ad spend by getting more traffic through the organic results.

Yeah, I like that. I like the idea of over time, reducing the amount of investment you put into ads, because I mean, nobody really wants to pay for ads. They pay for ads because they think they have to, but if there was some way that you could stop investing in ads and really get all of your inbound through organic, that Probably would be the ideal SEO play is you think so?

Or that's not a thing.

I think it's good. I think there's a few things to buy in mind. Like I say, every, every prospect and depending on the idle client profile, you, you sell to how tech savvy they are. It can vary. Um, and again, there's plenty of data out there to show that typically organic sessions of folks that come through organic search tend to spend more time on the page.

So it's tend to have a better increased session time on your website. Whereas ad traffic tends to not always, but tends to be a bit of a flick onto the page. Have you got what I want? I might convert if you haven't, I'm going to bounce. So yeah, that, that's something to consider as well.

All right. So this is the last thing I'm going to ask you before we actually get deep into, into the sales part of it. So there's something, uh, you know, you've heard of, of course you've heard of zero click content. And now there's something emerging called zero click search, where the search results, the actual answer to the question are coming up inside of the search results.

You don't have to click away to get to that. Do you see that as a good thing or a bad thing for organic search and for SEO?

It's a bad thing. If you've only ever relied on what we talked about right at the start of this show, what we call top of funnel SEO. So if you've relied heavily on trying to attract traffic at all costs. Purely going for what we call top of funnel searches. Like what is something, how to do something, best ways to do something.

Some more question, more educational based searches that are less likely to result in a bottom of funnel activity, like sales school, demo books, stuff like that, then you might get punished. And what I mean by that is exactly like you say, Google introduced AI overviews and for anyone that's not heard of that, it's basically an instant answer above the fold.

So instead of having to trawl through the organic results, clicking through to pages, blogs, whatever. You'll get an instant summary and sometimes you get supporting links. So if you want to get more detail on the topic, you can click into a page, an article, whatever. So it's good. And it's bad. It's good in the sense that folks that take companies that are taking organic search seriously have a chance to appear in the market.

In that AI overview and then gain a, gain a click through to their site. But it's also bad because if that content's not useful, if it's not helpful and all that other stuff, it could mean that kind of your, your rankings could get surpassed and you're perhaps not showing up in those results as much, so it's, there's good parts to it and bad.

Yeah, hopefully Google is eating its own dog food and taking its own medicine when it comes to their own EEAT framework. And they're considering that when they're posting these AI results, so that, you know, people get results that are good and not

Um,

trash results.

well, yeah, I mean, I know when they, when they first rolled it out, there was some crazy answers you might've seen feed people posting on social and LinkedIn, like stuff like, how do you make a pizza? And they were saying like, use a tomato base. And then instead of cheese, you'd cover it in glue and like all this crazy stuff.

So they had to strip back the AI overview results initially, just cause so much of it was false information.

Yeah.

it's, uh, yeah, it's a funny one.

It's a funny thing. Uh, for those who don't know, the EEAT framework is experience, expertise, authoritiveness and trustworthiness. Yeah, that's it.

Yep, that's right. That's correct, sir.

Yeah. Okay. Great. Wonderful. Um, all right. So let's, let's get deeper into how you connect those SEO things to sales things, because I know that's what you're about.

You're about not just traffic. You're about how does this generate revenue for the companies? And could you tell me, I know we're going to talk inside of some more B2B, SEO strategy stuff, but could you tell me why is it important anyone, any. Companies considering SEO that they don't just focus on traffic.

They consider the revenue parts of the equation. So, so

So I, I would say put yourself in a prospective client shoes. So for example, if you were in the market, let's pretend I was in the market. One reference I use a lot is for calendar. Scheduling software, you know, like Calendly or chili pipe or the classic tools that you look to book meetings.

Would you search if you're ready to speak to a salesperson, you're serious about investing in one of those for your company, would you search like what is a calendar tool? Or how to schedule meetings or how to book meetings in my sales team's diary Probably not because you already know at that stage of the funnel.

You're already aware that you need that solution If you didn't know that existed then yeah, by all means you might search. What is it? How does it work? How can I solve this problem? Definitely, but if I need software for Scheduling meetings i'm probably going to search best calendar scheduling software best calendar scheduling tools Or if i've already got a tool that i'm not happy with I, I've got Calendly, but I think there could be a cheaper, better, easy to use option.

I might search something like Calendly alternatives or that kind of Calendly competitor. And that's what we call bottom of funnel SEO. What is a prospect actually searching for when they have a good level of intent to speak to a salesperson or if we're product led, get a demo or sign up straight away.

How can we start with that closest to sales activity, work out what content ranks for that keyword. What Google likes and at the same time is going to convert our prospects. So that's, and usually those kinds of keywords that I alluded to have less traffic, which is good because there's more buying intent behind them.

Right. What I'm getting from what you're saying is that on a most basic level, that SEO needs to become a little bit more human. Like think like, what would the people actually want out of this? Would you agree with that?

Definitely, definitely. And if, if we walk through the process in a bit, when we talk about how we actually, once we've defined kind of the keywords that make sense to rank for, and then we're building out the pages, like one of the best things that you can tap into is getting the inside knowledge from your sales team.

If you've got one or as yourself as the founder, you'll have this intel from your customer success team or from any subject matter experts on your team. So anyone that's speaking to sales, anyone that's just knows a lot about the topic you're writing about, or like I say, if you're a smaller team, your founder, that'd be yourself.

Cause you'll be having these chats every day.

Right. Okay. So let's get into that now and talk about how do we actually do this? What are the steps? What are the things that you have created in your experience and makes it easier for us to move from. Having no idea how SEO can, can work for me to gaining revenue through proper SEO. So let's take us through these steps of how a company can do that and how you approach it.

Yeah, yeah, sure thing. So I'm quite a simple guy. So a lot of the advice I give is very straightforward and simple. So one of the best recommendations I can give, if you want to get stuck into SEO, one of the first things I recommend is firing up a Google sheet or an Excel sheet or whatever tool you use that's similar to that, and then you can just Sorting that out into various columns.

So the first column should be the main offer, the main offerings, the main solutions, the main services you actually want to be selling. These might be three to four to five main solution services, depending on the type of business that you sell day to day, and that's column one. Column two is your money niches.

What do I mean by money niche? I mean, the main industries. That you've historically sold well into, that have the problem you solve, that understand the impact of that problem, that want to fix it, and most importantly have cash to easily invest in it. So your money niches that you sell well to and want to fix for yourself.

That's the second one. The third, this is more relevant for tech companies is main competitors in your industry. So that could be going back to the Canada scheduling reference. That could be Canada, the Chile, Piper revenue, hero, HubSpot meetings, and all the other tools that are common competitors that come up on sales schools. And the next one that I do is the main problem. The main problems that you solve that folks, this will be more for more top funnel activity. What is the main problem that people come to you to fix? So for example, if in the tech space, if you provide a CRM, What's the main way that folks try to do it in house?

And then get so frustrated with how they're doing it currently, how they're getting that job done right now, that they're searching for a new, better way to get the job done. And so for example, CRM or many tech and software solutions, the enemy in house is usually spreadsheets. So it might be like, how do I export?

Data from Gmail into, I don't know, HubSpot or something like that. Or how do I grab sales records from Excel sheet and export them to another platform or whatever that way someone's trying to get it in house resolved that you hit often time and again on sales or prospecting calls. That you know, that that's an issue that someone's facing because we know they're cobbling together records and Google sheets, and it's taking them like two hours a day to get all the Intel they need from there to their sales team.

So make a list of those bleeding neck, those frustrating problems that you see time and again, and that should give you four columns or so of data. And once you've done that, the reason we're doing that is we want to make these into long tail keywords that someone would search on Google. When they're relative, they're relatively close to, to being sales ready.

So

But before you go on, Sam, could you explain what a long tail key? What is some people might not know?

exactly. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Usually a long tail keyword is a keyword that has kind of two, three, four words in it. So for example, what, what we mentioned earlier, best calendar scheduling software or calendar scheduling software for HR teams, rather than I don't know, calendar scheduling. There's just two words or something like that.

It's that's more of a short tail keyword. So, and what you'll find is the longer tail, the keyword, not always, but they're usually the longer it is, the less traffic, the less search volume it will show up as in a tool like hrefs or semrush or either suggest or whatever tool you use for your SEO data. So.

We we've made that list. We fired up our Google sheet. We've got some Intel. We've started to get some good data. Maybe we've had a chat with our sales team to for us customer success team, or if we're the founder, then we've done this ourself because we know the score. we want to make those long tail keywords that make sense.

So usually the competitive ones, if I go back to my calendar, scheduling example, the competitive ones would be things like. Best calendar scheduling software or best calendar scheduling tools or best kind of scheduling platform. Those are going to be really valuable keywords because someone's going to have high intent.

If they're searching for that to invest in the offer, but they're going to be quite competitive to rank. So I would also, whilst I'm doing that, make niche relevant terms. So using the same, same sequence, it would be things like kind of scheduling software for recruitment. What kind of scheduling software for sales teams or for finance teams, HR teams, whatever those money niches we defined.

And it doesn't have to be kind of scheduling. It could be whatever your offer is for certain niche. And then the next one that works particularly well, it's not so relevant for service companies. It's more relevant for tech. And that would be things like going after competitor keywords or alternative keywords, as you probably know already when it comes to B2B folks usually make a short list of three, four, five vendors.

To discuss with their board boards, especially in high ticket offers before they pull the trigger and invest. So a common way to grab SEO traffic from your competitors is if we go back to the kind of the scheduling space, it might be someone searching for chili Piper alternative or chili Piper versus calendar or.

Chilli Piper pricing or Calendly pricing. These work really well because people want to know they're getting a good deal. Um, so if we can show up for those kinds of keywords and position ourself as the preferred choice and the reasons why it can help scoop up some good leads. And then the last one on that framework is the jobs to be done technique.

So what is the, the way that someone's getting it done now? And what's our new better way? So how to build out a content calendar and Google sheets or how to move data from one platform to the other or whatever that might be. Frustration that our prospects are facing, but that's more of a informational based query where we position our offer as a solution.

So that's something that I'd recommend doing later on along the, along the process. And if you want to check that these cute long tail keywords that we're building out, I've got some traffic. You can use a tool like hrefs or SEMrush or even suggest or something similar. And they'll, they'll show you the search volume that they've got behind them.

Like I say, some of these will have low search volume, which is good because it shows us that there, there is a bit of search there.

Mm hmm.

the more, the more sales ready, the more high intent it is typically lower the search for him. So we've built that out. The next thing we want to do is called judging the intent.

And what that means is one of the easiest ways to see what type of content we need to build for each keyword is to just Google the keyword and look what ranks organically. So if we follow along the same process, if we were trying to rank, let's say best calendar scheduling for recruitment teams as a long tail keyword for one of our money niches, we typed that in.

It probably come up with one or two types of pages. One might be a listicle. And what a listicle is, is a blog article, which would be something like the top Calendar scheduling tools for recruitment teams in 2024 or the other type of page it could be as a landing page, which just be something like, I don't know, recruitment, your only recruitment platform, or your only calendar scheduling for recruitment teams.

And what you want to do is you want to look what what's ranking kind of top three organic non paid results, get a good assessment for what's ranking well. So what's got the market share is at listicles. Is it a landing page? Is it a blog article? Is it something else? And then you can assess, okay, I need to make this type of page.

Okay. And then you want to, you want to dive into what's ranking well. So if it was a list school, like the top 10 solutions of 2024 for this tool, have a look what they've got, look for gaps in that page and look for ways that you can completely blow that page out of the water using the framework that you said, Juma EAT experience, expertise, authority, trust. And weaving in any insights that we can pull that we know that prospects are going to be hungry for and going to find a view. Some, a common mistake that folks make on those product listicles is they give a bit of an intro. Then they position their own tool as number one in the list, which is, which is fine.

There's nothing wrong with that because people typically won't scroll past the third, fourth one. Um, but they usually just put a list of features, like how great they are, how awesome they are and that kind of stuff. Whereas what you really want to do is share your points of differentiation in the market.

So why do folks choose you? What's the problems you solve? Maybe a comparison table of you against your main competitor, maybe a nice customer review video of again, the problem they faced, why they were struggling and why they chose you. And just back it up with a bit of social proof, then a nice clear call to action to book a book, a demo.

Whereas on the flip side, if it was a, let's say a landing page that's ranking for one of our keywords from our Google sheet that we're trying to build out, then there's a lot of opportunity to, to, to outrank competitors. Like for example, when we were breaking B2B, when I was trying to rank B2B SEO agency and similar keywords, I essentially looked to map down as many notes as I could of how I could surpass the pages that were ranking well.

So in my case, that was in the hero area. I wanted to add a, a YouTube video embedded on the topic specifically, as we found embedding YouTube videos that are specific to the topic you're writing about, just get seems to give you an SEO boost. And not only that, but it can encourage folks to then check out your channel And it can give you not only a click through on that ranking But there's sometimes a video section in the google results So it can give you a ranking there plus it can sometimes give you a thumbnail and there's organic search results So you almost get like a three in one boost.

So yeah super powerful that is which i'm sure you've played around with as well and then landing pages other the best thing you can do is kind of Speak to your sales team again as a founder You'll know this in like The topic you're writing about really understand that the common problems like problem impact solution is usually a fairly, fairly straightforward framework, like what's the problem someone's facing?

What's the impact not fixing it? Why are you best suited as the painkiller? Can we back it up with some social proof, customer quotes, testimonials, review videos? Can we have an FAQ section that's not generic? Like in our case, like when folks were trying to rank for b2b seo, they'd say stuff like what is b2b seo?

How does it work? Whereas i'd say why are you folks so expensive compared to other agencies? Shouldn't I invest in google ads instead of seo? Like do you have any guarantees all this kind of stuff like the real questions you get on sales calls are are hard They're not basic stuff. Are they they're harsh people want to know harsh truths And the good thing about pulling faqs and like a little carousel at the bottom of your pages You'll find they get read quite a lot You And you'll also find they help sales enablement in the sense that it saves you time on sales calls.

Cause you're addressing these objections and these queries and these hard questions up front. It makes folks more likely to convert because they actually see you as transparent and trustworthy rather than just trying to get their contact info at all costs. Um, and you might have now pricing directly on the landing page on the topic itself as well.

If you really want to prequalify people.

Right.

so that that's, that's a few ideas in terms of kind of coming up with keywords, working out what ranks and then basically building a best, best in class page that completely blows, blows the existing page out of the water. Um, it's more useful, it's more helpful, it's more detailed and actually is, is enabling your sales team because you're leveraging queries, problems, frustrations from sales calls.

And I suppose the other thing before, before we wrap this part of it up is technical SEO. So a lot of folks think they need to spend weeks and months or even longer on huge technical audits when really not needed because most B2B service companies or SaaS companies or tech companies, their sites only have at max, like a few hundred pages.

And it's not until you get to real detailed e com sites with thousands of pages that you need to waste tons of time on, on technical SEO. All you really need to do is let's say, let's say our target keyword, for example, sake was best Canada scheduling software. Then in your URL, you'd want for that page forward slash best hyphen calendar, hyphen scheduling, hyphen software.

If you're H one, your heading tag on that page, you'd want that keyword. Within your meta type and description, you want that keyword. And for example, the meta title, try and get a hook. So when people see your organic search result, they're more implying to click it. So it might be, we tested the top 20, we tested the top calendar tools of 2024, like in brackets, like no, no expense spared or something like that.

Um, and that's pretty much it. Like weave in your target keyword in the copy. Don't stuff it, make it useful. And, and have some internal links to relevant pages. It's pretty much all you need to do. Like a lot of folks in B2B in tech, like overcomplicate technical SEO. They say that your website needs to load in like 0.

1 seconds. And yeah, if your website is super slow, you will get penalized. That's common sense. You need a good UX. You need a good design. You need to clear navigation. You need to show your product if you're in software and show people what it looks like before they get in touch. That's straightforward UI design stuff. Don't, don't over, don't overinvest in technical SEO when your best superpower in SEO is to do everything I've talked about at speed. So if you can map out those money keywords that are going to drive commercial folks, commercial intent prospects, and if you can start publishing content at pace. Far more beneficial to your brand to get relevant traffic than wasting hours or days or months on technical SEO.

Yeah.

and I'm wondering, I know some people just from hearing that are going to be extremely overwhelmed by the thought of it. Um, so, so I, I understand a lot of what you said and, uh, is there a, a Anyway, that's someone who is not, cause I know the big battle is, should I do this internally?

Should I hire someone to do this? Depending on where a company is at, they might be in a position where maybe they could afford to hire someone. Maybe they might want to try it in house. What is your usual recommendation and how can someone determine if they should in fact bite the bullet and have a professional like yourself come in and help them or try to have Maybe someone on the marketing team do it.

And I know you have strong views about that. Could you share your thoughts with me on how people determine if to do it in house or if to outsource it?

I definitely think you should do it in house if you've got resource. So if you've got someone that they can spend a bit of time each month doing those tasks that we outlined. So maybe you keep a content calendar and you say like each month, we're going to address three to five keywords. Build out three to five topics.

And that's going to be three to five blog articles or landing pages or whatever pages they are. And we can actually do that in a systematic manner. That's got a commercial focus. And we can actually ensure that we're going to build out this content. That is going to follow SEO best practices. Like I talked about with the technical SEO stuff, and then we can make sure they're going to get published on our website consistently.

Great. Let's do it. And maybe we do a bit of link building as well, which we haven't talked about what we can. And yeah, if we've got a process, if we've got resource to make that happen, fine. If we haven't, and we believe that organic search, the SEO makes sense. Cause we know that our target clients are searching for our offers on Google, or they're searching for problems we solve or comparing us to alternatives.

Then maybe we do a little bit in house. And then we hire contractors, freelancers, or agencies. Um, I suppose the thing is like, probably like much like any B2B service. It depends how much, how hands on you want to be, right? If you hire individuals, freelancers, then you might have to manage them a bit more.

If you hire a team, they might do it all for you. So usually it's, it's dependent on what resource do we have or what lack of resource do we have, how much cash can we assign to it. Or perhaps we're not ready. Perhaps we need to double down on the channels we're doing now. Exhaust those, get those to the best point we can as an inbound engine.

Then consider SEO when we've got a bit more time, cash or resource to assign to it. It's the, it's the age old battle really of deciding if you're ready to, to work with a contractor or team.

Hmm. Hmm. Something you said in, when you were talking about the whole system is that you mentioned, getting like a three, four, one using, YouTube. Video, um, I, in my experience, uh, there's, there've been two, well, two trains of thought concerning that. Right. the first one I don't necessarily agree with, which is somebody said, don't ever put YouTube on your site.

This is someone who I saw on LinkedIn. And of course on LinkedIn, you get all different variants. That's of advice. And you have to know what you're hearing and whether it makes sense or not. They said, don't ever put YouTube on your website because people will just click away and go to YouTube. Right. But in our experience, when we've embedded the YouTube, it lit, it has caused us to rank higher for the search terms, for the content that is in there.

So when people actually search for it, then your video turns up and you, you, you talk about the video turning up, you get the thumbnail and you get ranked as well. Would you recommend that for people like having a, is having a YouTube channel and posting content in YouTube one of the ways that you can actually boost your SEO without having to do anything additional?

100%. I love YouTube, man. I'm very biased because I, just like yourself, run a podcast. So we publish the solo episodes and the guest episodes to YouTube. But one of my strategies is Very search driven in the sense that I'll create an episode to handle. Maybe it's a solo episode for breaking B2B, and it might be on a specific problem that often comes up.

It might be that I'm just highlighting a strategy. It might be that I'm sharing on a topic, or maybe I've got a guest practitioner like yourself to come in on a topic, but when it comes to actually crafting that headline for the title of the YouTube video, then I'm going to make sure it's got some search value behind it.

And then we'll, we'll publish it on, on the website, on an article page, or if it's going to go on one of my service pages, cause it's one of my walkthroughs. And yeah, I mean, I'm happy if someone clicks a YouTube video and goes to my YouTube channel. It might, it means they'll probably watch that. And then they're quite likely to consume more of my content, which means provided they don't think I'm talking BS, which some, then that they're going to spend more time, perhaps trust me a bit more and then eventually flick back to the site and if they're ready, either pass it to their colleagues or book a call.

So I'm, I'm all about a marketing ecosystem. And if someone can not just spend time on my website, but follow me on LinkedIn or check out the podcast or check out the YouTube, then I'm all for it.

A text based blog's dead.

Are they dead? I used to say they were, but I was wrong. So if they're pure text, then the thing is, I suppose there's two ways to look at this because text based blogs, if they're pure wall of text, then they can still rank on Google. But they ain't going to convert. I mean, no one wants to spend 10 minutes reading through it, especially in the tech world.

No one wants to spend 10 minutes trolling through your blog. That's where you need to make, I suppose, a few best practices. You need to make it skimmable on mobile and PC. You probably need to give a TL, too long, didn't read approach. Um, you need to show, like we've been talking about the whole episode that, you know, your prospects world.

You know, their frustrating problems, the impact of those problems, their goals, and what they care about on the topic. And then, like we say, weave in some interactivity. We've in a YouTube video on the topics. They can click to that if they wish. If you're technology based, we've in some screenshots of your offer, maybe a live demo, maybe some gifts, but let's spice that blog up a bit because we want them to consume more of our content.

Maybe we've got a lead magnet we can direct them to, or if it's more of a, if that was a how to blog, we might pass them to a lead magnet or a YouTube channel, if it's more of a top tools or bottom of funnel kind of sales focused article, maybe we prompt them to take a demo or whatever that relevant next step is, so articles are good.

When they're done strategically and they're what we call product led. So they actually weave in your offer in there. Um, a H refs, H refs are one of the best at doing this. Like check out the HHS blog. Superb. Not only do they rank super well, but each one of their articles really weaves in their product as a painkiller to your problem.

Um, so you can get a lot of tips and advice from there.

Yeah, that's true. I, like we used to be really, really invested in doing blogs, but obviously our company was a little different before were only doing photography back in the day. So we would put the images. And then, and I know you have a history, I guess your first job was like this camera store salesperson or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I, I know you kind of have an issue that, which you didn't like, obviously. And, um, We used to put a lot of the images and name them properly, tag them properly And have all these stories and of course for our own seo We would put the location and all those different things and that ranked really really well, but that was like 12 years ago.

And so now I know content is different and blogs are different and text based blogs are a little more challenging. I heard you say, um, in, in one of your pieces of your content, you talked about what do your prospects want to see when they come to your website? And you made a list of things.

And so the list of things was like what you do, right. And this is for people who want to do business with you, who potentially could do business with you. And this is after you're talking to hundreds of. CEOs and business leaders and about that. So the, the list that you put out was something like on your website, what you do, how it helps your offer in action, like how your offer works.

If it's like a piece of software or some type of thing, proof of results, which is like client testimonials, case studies, things of that nature. And you want to have your price and you want to have some way after you pass all those different tests. He wants them to have a way for them to book a meeting with you.

If that's what they want to do, uh, because you put that list out, is that, is that, uh, actually a way people can structure the website in order to help with SEO as well. And people staying on the website and not bouncing away.

To a certain extent, it's not that that will definitely help your SEO, but it's not going As a, as a mad boosting factor to get you all these rankings and traffic. It's more, more thinking about the prospects journey, especially in B2B. Like for one, most folks, uh, impatient. So if they're stumbling upon your site for the first time, and they are actively interested in the offer that you provide, not necessarily actively interested in you specifically, but they're comparing three, four vendors.

If you're putting roadblocks in their way or run needed friction, i. e. they go to your homepage. And they don't understand clearly what you do or why they should consider you opposed to a competitor in your headline, in your hero, your top banner area. Like that's a needed friction. Um, technology companies, software companies are terrible at this.

They say stuff like we're the only number one AI fueled revenue driven software. And you're kind of scrolling around the homepage. You're still not quite sure exactly what they do. So if you can have a clear, sustained, like you said, hero area, that's clearly clearly summarizes what you do, but also why you, so what leveraging kind of insights from, from sales or prospecting calls, whatever, then you're, you're probably a step ahead of most people.

And then, like you said, people want to understand what you do. Why you, they want to check your price. Cause put yourself again in the buyer's shoes. Like, why would you want to speak to a booker call with a salesperson just to find out how much it costs? And if it turns out that you've only got a budget of, let's say a couple of grand a month for this offer, then you speak to a salesperson.

They say the minimum investment is 10 grand a month. You've wasted 20 minutes just to do that. Even though you've got a bunch of three or four of other vendors, you need to shortlist. then, yeah, showing, showing the offer itself. If you're SaaS, then maybe a live demo, whether it's on gated or video recording or screenshots and offers on of the product in main office.

If you're a service based company, then maybe that's more of a video rundown of how it works or explaining it or whatever makes sense. Um, yeah, so it's, it's more enabling prospects really. Cause like you said, this is just data from interviewing a bunch of execs over the years on, from marketing and business and entrepreneurship on breaking B2B and just finding out what they actually care about seeing quickly.

Um, and like you said, that's offer pricing, how it works, proof of results for others, and then making it easy to, to book that call or, or get in touch. Um, and just, just removing friction, but also realizing that the website is, Like most things are a living organism. It's not a one and done. There's always, there's always improvements.

There's always tweaks. There's always changes that we can make. And if you're actively getting a feedback loop, feedback loop, sorry, from your prospects, from your customers, then that's only a good thing, really. Okay.

it needs to be reorganized. It needs to be updated, because I think one of the things that is hard about having a website is looking at it and knowing that it's not done.

Getting the sinking feeling like, Oh, this website is terrible. I mean, from the time you make the website and you launch it, like you could just look at the following day and be like, Oh, this is not, this is not finished. Um, so I, I was thought about how can, you know, somebody, what's the easy way to, make sure that your website is always.

Reflecting the thing that you care about the most and, and all allowing for SEO to be done easier. Is there any way to actually do that? Or you do, you just have to continually just try to update, update, update.

yeah, I mean, there's so much unwrapped, there's so much to unwind in that question alone. But yeah, SEO aside, I think the best thing you can do is put your own opinions, ego thoughts to one side, unless you directly fit your idle client profile, which many of us don't. Because it's like you say, it's easy.

Like I've done it myself on my own site. It's easy to burn days, just messing around with headlines, design, color schemes, layout, templates, and all that kind of stuff. And is that really going to help you? Not necessarily. It might, might make small, small improvements, but a better way is to get feedback from the market.

So like one of the things we encourage clients to do all the time is if you're thinking about a redesign and you're doing it for a good reason, that might be conversions have dropped off a cliff. Session times are low. You're adding a new product line, whatever. Maybe you're on a recruitment drive. Then if you can get a feedback loop from, if you can get five to seven, recently won clients.

The reason I say recently won is because they're not biased to you. They're not going to say what you want to hear. Um, but we know they, they trust you enough. Now, if you can get them and you can ask them questions like, why did you choose us? What's most important to you when flicking on a vendor in our spaces website?

What do you feel is missing on our current website? What do you care about quickly seeing on a website in our space? Um, what do you need to see to trust us enough to book a sales call like that kind of stuff? Those kind of crispy questions can really inform not just a website structure, but your messaging And if you record those sessions, you'll notice patterns in this feedback that folks say, and yeah, I mean, just, just getting stuff like the main problems they bring up, the main way they refer to your offer, the actual insider jargon or words that they use, and you'll start to, once, once you interview five to seven people, you'll start to notice patterns that you can then leverage for the key pages, your website.

So that that's something that so many B2B companies don't bother to do, but it's, it's really useful.

I love that. I love that. And then you can take those answers and of course, create content out of that, which then goes back into your YouTube channel, goes back into your blogs and just starts, continues the flywheel, continues the, the, the SEO process. Push for you. That's that's lovely, Sam. Sam, I love to ask people this question as we're coming to an end here.

Is there anything that is, uh, one SEO rule to rule them all that you may may or may not have mentioned, but you want to emphasize now that if people got nothing, if people landed at this point in the podcast and they heard nothing, you said before, what would be that one SEO rule? Big takeaway about SEO.

Hmm. So you'll, you'll probably notice that unlike most SEOs, I'm more strategy and content driven. So I'm not a technical guy. That's why I have web devs on my team way smarter than me. So my, my main ethos is build for buyers. So build specifically for the niche that you serve has those bleeding neck problems you fix is motivated to fix it.

Once you get the job done, if you can pull the Intel that they really care about and kind of lay that out in a systematic way on the page that you're trying to build out and rank, then as long as you follow SEO best practices, you're not going to go too far wrong. So that's, that's kind of my main thing.

And that doesn't just fuel SEO. Like that's just good content marketing, isn't it? On, on your website, on your LinkedIn. On your YouTube channel, on your podcast, whatever.

Yeah, excellent. Thank you so much, Sam. That was a great answer. Some, some people may want to get in contact with you and break some B2B themselves, where can they find you online?

No, I really appreciate it. So yeah, three ways. One is follow me on LinkedIn. So I'm done in a second is check out the breaking B2B podcast, or if you're perhaps just tired of seeing competitors above you in Google's organic search results, stealing traffic leads and inbounds, then breaking B2B. com. Happy to have a call and see if we can help.

Beautiful, beautiful. Well, thank you, Sam, for joining us today on the Useful Content Podcast. Thank you students for being here with us to hear about B2B SEO and how that can make your company make revenue and get your sales team going. Useful content classroom dismissed and we're clear. Good. That's that is good.

You know, one of the things I really love about, uh, your content, and I know we're still recording, this is what happens at the end of the podcast. One of the things I really love about your content is that even though you're somebody who could be in, indoors, sitting behind the computer, uh, You actually get out into the world and you try different types of content.

And I'm wondering like, what fuels that? What, what makes you do the man on the streets and SEO man and all those different things? Why, why at all?

I guess there's, I've not thought about it too deeply, but I think there's a couple of reasons. One, cause I get bored easily second, because a lot of folks, especially in the SEO space are quite boring. So it's the main thing, like LinkedIn, as you know, it's harder and harder to get attention. So I want to put stuff out that gets attention first, but then delivers either entertainment or value, you know, like Alex Sheridan, the rest of them talk about.

Um, and then being remembered that kind of stuff. And also, cause I experiment a lot. So I want to see like a lot of the stuff I do just flops, but then I get the odd one that just hits, like so much of the stuff I've put out as flopped. Um, yeah, that's, that's it really.

Yeah. You keep going. I like that. I love that about how you approach things. Even though you might try something and it's just like, ah, it didn't work, but you keep going. A lot of people will get hit with a no and they'll be like, yeah, I'm done. They give up immediately. You know? Uh, so that's a good, I guess that's part of your character as well, that resilience and the ability to push beyond any failures.

Yeah.

Oh man. If you've cold cooled before, then you can build up a pretty good resilience. If you've put cold cooled B2B execs, then there's once you've done that, then nothing else really feels that difficult. Silence.

So let's, let's, let's end the recording before it gets to 12 noon. And, uh, we'll stop right here