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. L
