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00:00:01
Unpacking Google's Leaks and AI Overviews: SEO Strategies with Sam Dunning
146 Plays5 months ago
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Mark Evans interviews Sam Dunning, a content marketing and SEO expert, to dissect the recent leaks about Google's search algorithm and the rise of AI-generated content.
The conversation delves into the implications of these leaks, which reveal the ongoing importance of backlinks and brand relevance despite Google's previous statements.
Sam explains the critical impact of these changes on B2B SaaS companies and shares best practices for staying competitive in this volatile landscape.
They also discuss the future of SEO, emphasizing the shift towards bottom-of-the-funnel content and the diminishing value of top-funnel, AI-overviewed content.
The podcast highlights the importance of understanding high-intent prospects, leveraging detailed customer research, and creating content that genuinely resonates with target audiences.
As AI continues to transform SEO and content marketing, Sam offers practical advice on adapting strategies to maintain visibility and drive leads.
Thanks to this week’s sponsor, Landbot, AI Chatbot Generator for Conversational Experiences.
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Transcript
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Marketing Spark. I'm your host, Mark Evans. Today, we're taking a deep dive into the fast-changing and increasingly volatile SEO and content marketing landscape. Recently, we've seen major leaks about Google's search algorithm and an update highlighting AI-generated content. These changes could have a huge impact on how B2B SaaS companies create, optimize, and distribute their content. And to help us make sense of it all, I'm excited to welcome Sam Dunning, a seasoned content marketing and SEO expert to the podcast. Sam and I will explore the significance and impact of Google's latest updates, discuss the future of SEO, and uncover best practices for staying ahead in a competitive market. Before we start, here's a word from my latest sponsor, Landbot.
00:00:54
Speaker
In building my business, I've come to an important realization. Certain tools can be enjoyable and valuable for your prospects. I'm excited to talk about LambBot, the AI chatbot generator. With the help of AI, you can easily automate fun, friendly, and flexible conversations. Engage your leads, answer repetitive questions, or provide a round-the-clock customer service on your website, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or any of your customers' favorite channels. The chatbots are super easy to design for non-technical people. I created mine in 15 minutes and could instantly deploy it on my website. If you want a hassle-free and intuitive AI chatbot that your customers will love, head on over to landbot.io forward slash try, or follow the link in the podcast description to sign up and create yours for free. Okay, we're back. Welcome to Marketing Spark Sam.
00:01:44
Speaker
Hey, Mark, appreciate you having me on, man. Looking forward to it. It's been a while since we have done a podcast together, and obviously a lot has changed over the past year or so. As I mentioned off the top, there were recently massive leaks about Google search algorithm described as one of the biggest stories in the history of SEO and Google search, maybe some hyperbole there. The leaks contradict many public statements made by Google over the years, including denials about click-centric user signals. Big, juicy question here. What are your thoughts ah about these leaks and how should marketers adapt their strategies in response?
00:02:23
Speaker
It was a funny one for me because I can remember wa waking up whenever it was a couple of weeks back, like rubbing the steeper dust out my eye and then seeing a post from Rand Fishkin and thinking of what the heck is going on. I see like the night before or a couple of days before basically got insider information about this leak and then been speaking to an ex-Googler about it. And then another guy called Mike, he's like super hot on tech SEO. I thought it was surprising. I think. A lot of what's come of it is almost common sense ah SEO, but there were some interesting elements. One specifically from the leak is that Google have said
00:03:00
Speaker
When even when asked on forums like Twitter and stuff like that, that links aren't that important. But then in that leak, it pretty much says that links are important, but they've got to be relevant to your niche. So when you're acquiring backlinks, they've got to be super relevant to your industry or your sector and then contextual. So you're not just getting links from random sites and then hoping that's going to juice up and rank ram some authority. And another part of it is they're saying that brand's super important. I think most B2B companies knew this stuff already and the point you alluded to around click data. I think that's still a bit of a tricky one to define in terms of kind of more click throughs to your site. Naturally, if you're looking to rank a site in organic search,
00:03:45
Speaker
You're aiming to get the click through. Realistically you've got to be in a top three organic results or so or similar to to gain that click through. Although that is affected by AI overviews, which we can of course dive into in a bit. So those, those were some of the core things. There's lots of other bits and pieces, but it was surprising. But I think it was also reassuring for a lot of folks that have been doing SEO for a little while to see that some of these things are actually ringing true. A lot of the stuff that Google, perhaps even when directly asked, had brushed off. Just funny that a lot of these things that people in the weeds for SEO thought were true around links and stuff like that. And Googling up to now had been denying it. Will you take a step back?
00:04:25
Speaker
and look at the leaks and how much they matter and how they change the SEO landscape. Is this a geeky SEO story or are there impacts for marketers and content marketers Do they need to change the way that they do marketing, create content, or is it business as usual? And what the leaks highlight is that some of the fundamentals that we thought were important are important, such as brand. If I'm a marketer, what should I do? Should I dive into the leaks and figure out how to change my rules of engagement or is it business as usual?
00:05:11
Speaker
If I was a B2B marketer, I wouldn't take tons of time for the leaks first and foremost, because there's so much you can dissect. And I think a lot of it, unless you are a super well-versed e SEO, a lot of it might even go over your head because some of it goes over mine. And the other thing is, like you say, some of it's fundamental, so I'd more encourage you to understand the foundations of SEO. I would also encourage you to understand what the AI overviews update entails and excuse me, jumping into kind of excuse and a leak and go more into our overviews. But I think there's so many issues like B2B marketers and organic search SEO in general get stuck out and it's often not their fault.
00:05:56
Speaker
Taking a bit of a tangent, the fundamentals, the main reason why most B2B companies will get their marketing team to run SEO is because they want to acquire customers. So they want to acquire pipeline, i.e. qualified demos, qualified leads or sales tools, depending on whatever your motion is, whether you're SaaS or service-based. And a lot of companies just get SEO completely wrong. And that is a big chunk of what? Partly this leak and partly AI overviews is blowing out the water because AI overviews, depending on how much you know about it, it's going to wipe out a lot of top funnel content.
00:06:35
Speaker
and buy top funnel content, super simple. If we take the B2B space, like how is questions or what is questions or those kinds of simple searches, like what is web design? How to build a website? What is SAS? Just those simple things that could be answered by a robot, answered by AI, anything like that. You'll get an instant, rather than going, having to trawl through the traditional organic results or blog posts or pages. You'll get an instant AI overview that will say, this is what it is. This is what what's entailed with it. And then you have a couple of supporting links. So it just saves everyone time. So if you're doing that as your SEO and perhaps your, I don't know, the C-suite or the exec team has said, I can see that we're struggling organic search that we're not getting many leads or we're not getting many demo requests from it. Can you go ahead and.
00:07:22
Speaker
kind of do some SEO work and then the poor marketer probably has got about 102 other tasks to do. They're probably thinking, okay, I'll do a little bit of okay of research. I'll see what's good. I've got a bit of traffic. I'll quickly run a blog post through chat GPT. I'll fire up the article and then I'll forget about it and I'll do my 99 other tasks on my checklist. They publish it, it might get a bit of traffic. A few months later, the whoever tasks some of the job, one of the exact team says, how are we doing on SEO? Great. I published this article. It got some traffic. Did any leads come off the back of it? No, you didn't ask me to get any leads. You just said, do a bit of SEO. I did a bit of SEO. And I think that's where it goes wrong, Mark. because it's It's often seen.
00:08:04
Speaker
Like organic search, like this is fundamental, organic search in in general is often a barrel scraping marketing activity. So when it comes to SEO, just like a lot of other marketing channels will claim, I'm sure, you've usually got things like paid ads, be it LinkedIn ads, Google search, review sites at the top of the food chain. You might have events. Then you might have underneath sponsorships, influencer marketing. Then you've probably got up there outbound sales teams, that kind of stuff. Then you've probably got partnerships. and Right at the bottom of the budget or resource, you've got SEO. So often it gets given like the limited amount of resource or cashflow. That's why marketers get it wrong. So my point is top of the funnel SEO and less done super specific is is more and more going to be a waste of time. We want to focus on the funnel, which I'm happy to dive in and explain.
00:08:52
Speaker
When I look at Google leaks versus AI overviews, and just so people are clear, what Google has introduced is that when you do a search like what is web design instead of getting the list of articles or that generic content that you usually see, Google will have AI generated content. And yeah there was a story on the BBC website that claimed that the introduction of a AI overviews the internet and will never be the same. What they highlighted was websites that had seen their traffic like dramatically evaporate. 90, 99% were to the point where these companies actually had to cease operations because what they were doing didn't make sense anymore because they'd depended so heavily on search for traffic that this algorithm change destroyed their businesses.
00:09:48
Speaker
And as a marketer, i I look at that, I look at creating this basic top of the funnel content and all that stuff really doesn't matter anymore. And then you look at people who are starting to use generative AI, chat TBT, perplexity, quad to answer those basic questions is completely changing. I guess from an SEO and content marketing perspective, What does this mean for marketers and content marketers? So if top of the funnel content is, I'm going to use a dramatic word here, irrelevant or not as important, then what kind of content should they be creating that is going to rank high and, as you mentioned, generate leads? That's the question, right? And in my opinion, it comes down to what?
00:10:38
Speaker
whoever's doing the SEO, whoever's doing the content marketing for your business should have been doing already really. And that is understanding what high-intent prospects that need your offer solution service now, or that are comparing you to a common competitor in the sector, What specifically do they search for on Google when they're ready to have a sales conversation around that offer or ah checking you off against a common competitor? That is some of the quickest wins that you can get when it comes to SEO, both for B2B SaaS or service-based organizations. So one of the best routes to do that is like getting super straightforward what I did for my company, Breaking B2B, when we started earlier this year.
00:11:23
Speaker
And what I advise any other similar business to do is just fire up a Google sheet. quite literally list out what are the main offers that we want to be selling? What are our kind of core offers or high ticket offerings, whether that's tech-based, whether that's service-based, whatever. Secondly, who are the main audiences we want to serve? What are the main industries that we've historically sold well into? What are those industries that have the expensive problem we fix?
00:11:54
Speaker
appreciate the impact of that problem but most importantly actually have cash to invest in the offer because we don't want to target folks that aren't going to be able to afford our solution. That's one of the first things so I'd list out on all our main offers and all the main industries we want to be serving. Secondly, I would make a list there of all our main, I don't know, top 10 or so competitors. And if you're in tech, then you can go onto a site like G2 or Captera or whatever paid review sites relevant to you, but you'll probably know a lot of these already, right? So if you're in the, for example, if you're in the calendar booking space, it might be Calendly, Chili Piper, Revenue Hero, HubSpot meetings, all the usual suspects. You want to do that.
00:12:30
Speaker
Then the last exercise I'd probably encourage you to do when you're on that Google sheet exercise is to also list out what I call jobs to be done of your target prospects. And that is basically what is the problem that your target clients face when they get to that real struggling moment. when they're trying to do something in-house or internally or they're trying to do a solution themselves when they realize this isn't helping you at the progress I need to make, I need to look up another solution to get this job done in a better way and to give you a tangible example what a job to be done from an SEO perspective might be. So let's say perhaps you run an outbound sales team and perhaps they're doing
00:13:14
Speaker
Not many are probably doing this anymore but perhaps yourselves folks are doing manual dialing on their handset, on their cell phones, and they're thinking, we're making dials but it's taking us like, I don't know, 10 dials per hour, there must be a better way. I wish there was a way I could connect to cell phones if decision makers quicker and they might search something like, I don't know how to make faster. dials to decision makers with my cell phone. That would be the struggling moment. And in your article that we can talk about in a sec, you might introduce the fact that there's something called a parallel dialer and SDR teams can use this to to make a hundred dials in an hour rather than making 20 manual ones with a cell phone and all the advantages. So of course, jobs to be done, understanding what folks struggle with when they might need your offer and then shining a light on this new way of getting the job done. So that's why I'd encourage you to do
00:14:05
Speaker
That's something that we did when I fired up my site, BreakingBTB.com, I know four or so months back, we did the same in our case. We listed out our main offers, B2B SEO, B2B SEO for SaaS, all the main niches. And then once you've listed out all those main offers, plus the niches you want to serve within them, plus your competitors, plus a list of the jobs we've done, you want to find relevant keywords for each one. So perhaps stuff that's got a little bit of search volume. One mistake I see a lot is folks want to go for keywords with super high traffic. And the truth is that's not always the best way. So those classic top of the funnel ones that we talked about earlier, Mark, how to do X, how to do Y, best ways to do Z, they might have a lot of traffic, but they're probably not going to drive leads because someone's probably just going to search it. Even if there isn't an AI overview, instant answer, they might click on your blog post, get the answer and then jump off.
00:14:53
Speaker
Whereas we want to go for some high intent for someone that's actually searching to to speak to sales, not just searching to get a quick bit of intel. So but those keywords that you're making your Google sheet, you can run them through a tool like hrefs, and then you can see which ones actually have a little bit of search volume, which are relevant. Maybe your offer parts industry to give a bit of context, what that looked like might be the scheduling tool for sales teams or. calendar scheduling for HR or whatever, or another one might be but best calendar scheduling tool, and another might be, if we're doing jobs to be done, I don't know, how to book meetings with your sales prospects fast might be a jobs to be an unbiased specific search. So let's pretend we've done all that. Let's pretend we've run it through the keyword tracking tool, at hrefs, and then got some kind of target prospects. And I really encourage you to exhaust the bottom of the funnel. So many companies do it a little bit of this.
00:15:43
Speaker
like a little bit of industry plus solution, a little bit of jobs to be done, a little bit of alternatives. And then once you've done that, the next stage really is when you've got a list of your focus kind of bottom of funnel and middle funnel keywords is to understand the intent. So this is where, again, a lot of folks get it wrong. The simplest way to do that is to literally type in the keyword in Google. You might type in best calendar scheduling tool or calendar scheduling tool for sales teams. Or if you're doing alternative keywords, which is super good for SaaS. If we keep it on the calendar scheduling tool theme, you might type in Calendly alternatives or Chili Piper alternatives. and
00:16:21
Speaker
To assess the intent of a page, all you do is look at the top three or four organic results, click on them and see what type of page loads that's called page intent. And the page intent could be something like if you're looking for an alternative keyword, can the alternatives is probably going to let fire up an article, which would be a listicle format. And that's usually something like, top 10, can the alternatives consider in 2024? And traditionally, the whoever's written the article will position their offer as number one, and have nine other competitors underneath them. But a lot of folks get that type of page wrong, for example, as they'll just use point one to talk about how great they are.
00:17:02
Speaker
when what I recommend you do is by all means put your solution as number one, but leverage customer research. So instead of just saying we're great, we've got these features, whatever, by all means position yourself in number one, but say, this is how we're differentiated in the market. This is our unique problem we fix. This is the impact of not fixing it. And here's why you might consider our solution. But also you might have like ah a graphic, like a table and a chart that says, look, this is our most common competitor. This is what they have, but this is actually what some of the check marks for us. Here's a few screenshots of the offer in action. Here's even a live demo so you can play around and then a a call to action. I don't know, request a free trial or get a 30 day trial or whatever's relevant for your offer. And maybe even some social proof, like a video review from a client.
00:17:47
Speaker
And the other example I usually give is once you've assessed that intent, so it could be a listicle like I just described, or maybe the the keyword you're going for is like best calendar booking software. That might be a solution type page, which is a bit different, which you can dive into. But the main thing you want to consider here is build out these pages, but look to completely blow out the water, whatever is ranking number one, number two at the moment in organic search. And when I say blow out the water, if you were going for an alternatives based keyword, like the Cannondi alternatives or Chili Piper alternatives, they do they might do top 10 alternatives. I'd go for top 20. I would do something that's radically different. That's just my style, right? I don't want any chance of being beaten anytime soon. So I just want to do something that's so more informative, so much more helpful and so much more useful. And I want to, whoever's building out that page, whether it's myself or one of my team,
00:18:41
Speaker
like One of Google's Google's frameworks is called EAT, experience, expertise, authority, trust. So when um we want to be sure that whoever's putting together this content is kind of almost a subject matter expert in the field. So they can really write it from a level that's not just a lot of words. But when a prospect lands on that page, they're actually going to resonate with it. They're actually going to think this person knows their stuff. like They know my world, they know my problems, they know my goals, and thus it's going to be more likely to convert. So I'll take a breath there as I now round a lot of information down your throat. That's a lot of information in a short period of time. I would encourage people to hit the rewind button a few times to soak in the approach that you need to take to create content that is going to rank within and and new the new Google world. A little bit of a tangent here.
00:19:32
Speaker
I'm glad you mentioned ja the JavaScript framework because a lot of marketers, a lot of entrepreneurs lean into buyer personas and they come up with these semi-fictional representations of what a prospect looks like, including things like their hobbies, their demographics, Unless you do it right, unless you have to do buyer personas in the right way and anybody's interested to check out what the buyer persona Institute advocates, then they're useless.
00:20:04
Speaker
templates, they really don't help you much. I lean more into the jobs be done template because it gives you a picture of the everyday world for your prospects, their pains, their problems, the tools that they use, the approaches that they take to get jobs done. and Every piece of software that we sell is actually being hired to do a job. We want to know as marketers and as entrepreneurs the nitty gritty day-to-day activities that someone takes and how our software, our product, can make those activities easier, more efficient, more successful. So I'm i'm glad that you mentioned that. Now getting back to our regular programming and talking about SEO, there's obviously a lot of talk right now
00:20:56
Speaker
um When you people look at the answer, does SEO still matter given the rise of generative AI tools like chat GPT? Some people suggest that 50, 60, 70% of their search activity is actually done using generative AI tools. they In many respects, they've abandoned Google because they don't want to scroll through all the results. They don't want to pick and choose what could be relevant. They just want the answers to appear. and We live in an instant gratification, show me world, where people are multitasking. and Frankly, a lot of people are lazy and they don't want to work. They want they don't want to read long form articles. They just want the information given to them. so
00:21:36
Speaker
A big question here is does ah SEO, is it still matter? Is it still relevant? Are people overhyping the impact of generative AI and tools like chat GBT on SEO? What are your thoughts as an SEO person? I suspect I know the answer, but what are your thoughts in terms of the future of SEO? I'm probably a little different to most SEOs because I see SEO as a channel. A lot of what I talk about is it's using SEO as a revenue channel. But when I say that, of course you've got to get the qualified deed first. You've got to get the demo or the trial or the sales call that then can eventually
00:22:15
Speaker
convert into into one deals and one cash in the bank for your business. Now, ah SEO is a channel just like cold calling is a channel or LinkedIn ads is a channel or email marketing is a channel or influencer marketing or partnership plays or whatever. AI has affected all these channels, right? is There's parts that you can do that can speed up processes that can help you gather intel and similar. If I take the focus back to SEO, is AI, is chat GPT, killing off SEO? The truth is SEO, there's a few ways I look at it.
00:22:47
Speaker
ah SEO is best placed, like I talked about earlier, as a demand capture channel. So understanding exactly what your idle clients, your dream clients in the niche you serve are searching for when they need your offer now, or they're shipping you off against competitors, or they are using a so crisp and specific job you help get done to capture that traffic, show a best in class page that shows their world, their problems, their goals and motivations, build enough trust with social proof, and then provide them to take that relevant action. Now, Let's have a think about it. If we're leaning on AI to produce all that content for us, do we really think that's going to convert, especially as we move up to high average contract value offers? Even if you did rank a page using AI copy, if someone lands on one of your pages and be it a solution page, a industry landing page, or even a comparison page or something similar, and it comes up with words like,
00:23:43
Speaker
20 actual revenues with our all-in-one, all-singing, wizardry, dancing platform today. We're going to supercharge your sass with everything you need to know with our 360-degree CRM know-how. If I landed on that page, I'd probably bounce within two to three seconds thinking I could tell this written this is written by a robot. It's just going to annoy me. And I think most prospects are probably going to be similar to me. Not everyone, that's for sure. But I think something that's often overlooked in ai and sorry in seo so it's often looked overlooked in SEO is,
00:24:19
Speaker
yes, you've got to do the the technical points. Yes, you've got to get the content on point. Yes, you've got to understand what folks are searching for and then match that intent. also But also, what we talked about earlier with jobs to be done and customer research is you've got to understand who the stream client is. And if your current content doesn't resonate and clearly show you understand their world, their problems, their struggling moments, their aspirations, their goals, their motivators, what's annoying them, their common questions, their common objections by leveraging this info that you can grab from sales calls, customer success, prospecting calls and more. So important for SEO, because you can rank a page. If that page doesn't resonate with that target prospect, it's almost useless because they're going to land on the page, read a bit of the copy and then think this is a waste of time. I'm going to head to the next result.
00:25:07
Speaker
I want to turn our sights a little bit to content marketing and as a long time content creator, newspaper journalists, B2B marketer, content is at the heart and soul of how I like to go to market with clients, but there is a raging debate between quality content and quantity. And you hear, read a lot on LinkedIn about content needs to be value add, insightful, informative. Meanwhile, we're seeing a tsunami of content generated by
00:25:46
Speaker
generative AI, generic vanilla, robotic, nondescript, uncreative, uninspiring, but a lot of companies are leaning into it because you can create content at scale really easily. And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of marketers have a hundred things to do, including creating content. So they're taking shortcuts and they're, they see generative AI as a content creation replacement when it is in fact more of an ideation tool, a brainstorming tool, a way to structure content and plan content. I think the question that I wonder about or I ask as far as the future of content is concerned is if we're going to focus on creating high quality content, then
00:26:37
Speaker
How do we make it stand out from the crowd when there's just so much happening? The marketplace is so noisy. You and I are active on LinkedIn and you look at the newsfeed and there's just so much content. So whether it's SEO or other approaches, if you create a great piece of quality content, whether there it's top of the funnel or middle of funnel, How do you get people to read it, to make people aware that it exists? Do you have any thoughts in terms of the advice that you're giving to your clients when it comes to this content conundrum?
00:27:13
Speaker
It's the question if I can talk about LinkedIn, but if we keep it, I suppose more from an SEO perspective in terms of content marketing, is it more, how does, how do you get the content to rank? Are you talking more, how do you get the content to actually resonate with target prospects and tech to take them, guide them to take a desired action or what's the, I think it's lots of things. It's LinkedIn as a way to. reach a global audience. It's SEO to tap into the power of search, but it could be things like tapping communities like Reddit or Slack or Facebook groups or newsletters. The question that I'm asking is if I'm a content creator and I've leaned heavily on SEO for a long time, keyword research, click intent, to all that good technical stuff. Now I need to dig a different approach holistically.
00:28:07
Speaker
What should I do? How do I get people to read my great content given there's just so much competition? From a high level perspective, and this could be, this could be applicable to SEO content if you follow the best practices we talked about, and it can be applicable to LinkedIn. I think the word resonates, still stands important, still stands clutch here because If you can understand, I think a lot of folks in general, and this again could apply to a lot of industries and B2B are just too afraid to niche down. So they're trying to speak to too many people at once, rather than understanding a few main segments of an audience, a tight niche, a tight few sectors, industries, whatever.
00:28:51
Speaker
And really drilling down into those, because when you do that, then it's easier to understand who you're trying to market and sell to. And then you can actually, it's a lot easier for you to, if your team's doing prospecting calls, or if they're running sales calls, or running customer success calls, or if you're the founder selling, then you're obviously doing this all yourself. It's a lot easier to understand their world. And that's a fluffy term, but what I mean by that is what are the problems that they're raising, what kind of the frustrations that cause them to reach out to a company like yours what the competition competitors are seeing in the market. When they choose you if they do sign like what are the reasons for choosing you opposed to three or four other vendors what are the common questions that you get from them. What the common objections when you know a lot of this stuff.
00:29:39
Speaker
You hear a lot of patterns. You hear a lot of things at the same time. If you're a bit like me, bit of a nerd, then every time I hear this kind of stuff, be it a question, something I think, oh, that's a good one. I'll just grab my iPhone and check on the notes app. And that fuels a lot of my content for LinkedIn. It fuels a lot of the stuff when I look to perhaps improve one of our own website pages or client pages and think, oh, we can add an element here, like we can add an FAQ section onto the solution page, because this is going to address real prospects questions, thus making them all likely to trust us and convert. Or if it's a LinkedIn post, it might be, I just spoke to a marketer, a B2B SaaS company.
00:30:16
Speaker
They were asking me, like why don't I just ramp up my ad spend on Google instead of investing with SEO? That's probably on a lot of marketers' minds now with kind of budget constraints and a lot of that a lot of their exact team saying, let's just pump more into ads and hope for more leads. and So if you can leverage that stuff, then it's more likely to ring a bell with the audience that you're trying to connect to. serving them what similar folks are asking you, what you're talking about, the questions you're raising. So it's, I suppose what I'm saying is a mix of using community. This doesn't have to be sales calls. It could be in communities like Slack groups and stuff like that. It could be from customer success calls or that kind of stuff. But when you have a tighter niche, a tight tighter target market, this kind of stuff becomes a lot easier to build out content that's actually going to hit home with the folks you want to do business with.
00:31:09
Speaker
Let's wrap up our conversation with a crystal ball question. which This is the part where it's more of a guessing game when you look at the content marketing and SEO landscape over the next six to 12 months. Given how much change has happened so far in 2024, any predictions about what trends will dominate? I definitely think that certainly in B2B and B2B tech, a lot of companies are going to go hard on smart ones anyway, going to go hard on bottom of the funnel organic search, like we talked about, especially with
00:31:42
Speaker
spend locking up, funding being less available, so therefore companies have less cash to spend on ads. They might get their internal marketers to understand bottom of the funnel SEO and just really drill that home so they can capture that demand and capture some leads. Funnily, I think it was Lily Ray, who's one of the top voices in SEO, was posting about the Google recently. They pulled back their AI overviews results quite a bit, so there was a certain percentage that you would the chance that you'd see an instant AI over a result, but I think that they've drilled it down to 2% or so. Because it was giving so many, in fact, incorrect answers. So talk about like how it' to bake a cake, and then it would involve something like, if you want a really quick way of baking a cake, put some PVA glue in. it's Get the nicely, and it's like, what the hell? Just so many dirty answers. That's probably where I see it going. i think
00:32:33
Speaker
Invest in brand is quite general because I think it's easy to say if you're a well-funded, large-scale company. I think if you're a startup, it's a lot more difficult to allocate spend and resource directly to brand because you're often under pressure to hit targets pretty quickly. So I think that's a bit of a fluffy one to me to say. So I think it's more teams going back to the fundamentals, understanding a lot of the stuff we talked about around what prospects care about and then gearing a strategy towards that. Final question. Where can people learn more about you and what you do?
00:33:05
Speaker
Yep. Appreciate you having me on. So there's three ways really, one on LinkedIn, it's research, sound, dunning, got daily tips on SEO and websites I post there. Second is the podcast, Breaking B2B. So again, I post solo episodes on SEO strategies and we also have guest interviews or if any of these kind of issues sound relevant in your and you're a bit frustrated, the organic search isn't driving a steady flow of leads or demos, then head over to breakingb2b.com and happy to chat and see if we can help. Thanks, Sam. And thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it, subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a B2B SaaS company with revenue between one and 10 million, and you're looking for strategic and tactical support to scale, we should talk about how I can help you do marketing that drives outcomes, whether you're looking for lead sales, brand awareness, or simply looking to get key projects completed, reach out via email, connect with me on LinkedIn, or visit my website, marketingspark.com. I'll talk to you soon.