SaaS SEO In The Age Of AI

Why SaaS SEO Is Shifting

0:00Howdy, welcome back to another fun fold episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, the best SEO podcast. I am your host, Matthew Bertram. Uh today um I thought it would be good to talk uh about uh, well, a lot of people are launching their own products, uh their own SaaS uh and SaaS SEOs. So I wanted to bring in the one, the only Sam Dunning. Sam, welcome to the show.

0:28Hey Matthew, appreciate you having me on, man. Looking forward to it.

0:31Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm glad uh to have you here. And you know, SEO is changing a lot. Um, it's changed more in the last uh, let's say, couple of years than it has like the entire time I've been in the industry. Uh which is fun. It's exciting. Uh, there's new opportunities, there's new strategies. And, you know, one of the big things that have come on the scene is AI. Uh, and it's given people the ability to do uh all kinds of things that they uh previously might have had and invest a lot in or do. And people are launching all kinds of SaaSes these days or bolting it on to their existing businesses. And, you know, just like e-commerce SEO or you know, B2C or B2B or B2G, right? Uh uh we've done some some episodes on uh SEO for government stuff. Pretty interesting. Um SaaS are are so popular, uh, it seems to be kind of in the elevation hierarchy of businesses. They tend to move from services uh to SaaS products, and so I would love for you to kind of kind of set the table for what's going on in the space. What do you see on the rise with with new entrants and different SaaS? How like the SAS uh market's gonna evolve, and then we can get into some SEO talk.

1:56Sounds good. Sounds

From Web Agency To SaaS Focus

1:58good, yeah. Like like you say, so I suppose to set the context, like I wasn't always in SaaS SEO. Weirdly enough, I actually ran, co-ran a web 8 design agency for a few years, and basically I'll try not to send everyone to sleep, but essentially I try to sell initial websites to anyone and everyone. So it could have been Bob's Corner Shop or Bob's Mechanics down the street, and then the next inquiry might be a national huge bank, and then it might be a software company, so there's no consistent client flow. And eventually, through my own pain, frustration, trying to sell to anyone and everyone, I realized that software companies, namely SaaS companies, quite often had marketing teams that one already knew SEO or now AI Search or GEO AEO, I'm not quite sure what to call it, is a decent growth channel. And also those marketing teams kind of already already understood how it worked and had maybe done it at a previous company. Plus, they rather selfishly actually had cash to invest in an SEO program and spin one up as part of their usually kind of fast growth. SaaS companies have have some VC backing or they have funding behind them as they have very ambitious growth goals in terms of kind of MRR and annual recurring revenue. And usually SEO is one of the pillars that they use as part of their go-to-market. So that that's a long short story long how I got into the space and how we got how we got this agency. But it's a crazy world for SaaS in general, because it feels like on one side of the coin, everyone feels they can vibe code their own SaaS, and then and they'll happily waste like 100 hours a week trying to replace DocuSign, which only costs $35 a month, and and then they'll actually try and run it and realize actually there's a lot of security implementations here. There's a lot a lot of things I've never thought about. And if I run and roll this out, there's a lot more to it than I initially thought. So it's a fun, it's a crazy time.

3:49Yeah, no, I I can I can totally uh see and appreciate that. Um, there's many times that we're trying to build a stack and we're trying to decide do we buy or do we build it? What makes the most sense? Uh when you start scaling up into like how many customers you're gonna run through, um, you know, the security implications. Uh, there's a lot of things to think about. And and many times it's like, hey, for that price, let somebody else manage it and it's consistent, and I can count on it, and then you can add it to your workflow. And so um, you know, I think workflow designs are like using AI as a tool has certainly become really big, and people love when when we talk about that sort of thing, but I but I think that that is completely different, a whole different category than showing up in the AIs for visibility, right? And and that would be where the SEO would would kind of take its place and and then you add all the other layers and and kind of fan out like optimization to to show up and be recommended by um the AIs to the humans, right? Like now it's like you got to talk to the AIs, you got to talk to the humans, you got to think even with websites, right? Like, okay, who who is this for? Um, who am I speaking to? Uh what it what do they need? Um and so doing marketing for SaaS overlays on top of that, uh, really interesting because you gotta you gotta think about all those things 360. Um, and so so I mean, when you're talking to uh founders or funded startups, right? Like I think probably funded startups are are where there's the the fast and exciting growth that people think about when they think about SaaS, what are those conversations looking like when you're when you're talking to those teams and those owners? What's going on in their mind right now with with AI? Are they concerned about uh their their moats uh with the business? Like how are they approaching it? Like what are they investing in? I'm curious what what's going on in their

Founders See Competitors In ChatGPT

5:58head?

5:58Yeah, I can tell you because we speak to a lot of SaaS founders and SaaS marketing leaders and growth leaders every each and every week. So usually that there's a few main pain points that come up and there's a few frustrations, and usually what causes them to initially reach out to a company like ours is probably it's got to the point where the marketing team have pushed for SEO, maybe for months or years, and eventually the CEO of the company or the founders got frustrated because every time he or she is going into ChatGPT or Claude and looking for their software, comparing options, looking for the problem they solve, they keep seeing competitors recommended instead of them, and then they'll finally hit that tipping point where they're like, yeah, we need to do some of this. We need we need to do AI SEO or GEO or AEO, and we need to start being kind of recommended to prospects because as you know well, Matthew, the the buying journey journey, especially in B2B, has changed massively. And I'm sure it's similar with kind of the folks you work with, but a lot of um a lot of websites that we we're kind of helping in SaaS companies, their traffic's massively down, so they're panicking a bit, like, oh, we can we recover all this organic traffic that we once had. Um, demos are down or signups are down or booked calls are down, whatever their conversion point is, and they're they're a bit frustrated that their competitors are being recommended to their customers, so they're missing out on like mind share, is so important now. I feel in SEO and AI search compared to what it once was, as you know, clicks and traffic are down. I believe SEO and AI search, especially in B2B tech and SaaS, it's all about getting into that consideration set, uh, especially if you're selling a high-ticket kind of piece of software tech service or solution. It's so much more important to get early to that buying intent prospect when they actually have that buying intent for a solution like yours. Because if you're not, then you're kind of missing out on what you never knew you had the opportunity to get. So I think that's that's kind of that that's usually the pain point. Or what we also see a lot is in fact, I spoke to a VP marketing yesterday, and our SEO agency was still running SEO like it was 2020. They were like focused on how to articles, what is articles, like deep guides and stuff like that, which was good for SEO like back in the day to get tons of traffic and show up in the blue links. But as you know, all the top funnel, we call it the top funnel traffic trap, all that content is just being eaten up by AI AI overviews and Chat GBT and LLMs are just pulling that information from their own inventory and they're not actually recommending brands. Um, and as well as that, by building that kind of more informational content, you're more likely to attract researchers or folks doing studies or folks trying to learn your niche, which as a company that wants to go to market and drive pipeline and sales for their business and grow, you want to attract folks that are in market for your solution, not folks trying to learn about your niche or do it themselves. So that that's that's quite a common trend we see of the like the main issues and problems.

9:03Yeah, so I think like middle of the funnel, maybe um, listicles are starting to be really, really big. And I feel like SaaS has not uh like other industries, maybe like top 10 lists or uh comparison charts and stuff like that, might be newer to other niches, but to SAS, it's it's kind of always been there's always that site out there that wants to compare you versus a competitor or a couple others, and it's always gonna like dependent on who owns the site, right? Like if you trace it back or if you can, that it's always tilted in in one way or another. I I I can tell you there's there's actually a listicle that I know is is run by a uh a marketing group and they're listed twice uh on the top 10 list. Okay. Um and you're like you're like if you're trying to be um impartial uh and you have yourself in the number one position and then further down on the list, like you're getting that repetition. But you know, it kind of looks fishy if you're giving out awards and you're like these are the top 10, and then if you trace it all the way back, it's it's the marketing agency that put it together. Um, not calling anybody out, but um that their listicles are really quite important when they're they're third party and and um they're they're validating what you have. And and SAS has been, you know, there's always been a comparison chart of like what you have versus somebody else, and and trying to get out of that commodity kind of feel. Um curious kind of what what you're seeing with with listicles and kind of what's evolved from that and and where it is now with with AI.

Listicles And Comparisons Still Matter

10:53Yeah, I think unfortunately, listicle-based articles, comparison articles, best of lists, X versus Y they're a necessary evil in SaaS, SEO, and AI search. And I guess the reason why is there's you've probably heard of the 95.5 rule. At one given time, only five percent of your roughly five percent of your total addressable market is in market for your solution. And really, for SEO, that's where you want to start to attract those buyers, work out what they search. And with SaaS, unfortunately, there's only so many ways that people can search for software when they're actually in that buying window. And usually, like, take this with a pinch of salt, it's is some variation of like this has changed a lot. Like back in the day on Google would be show me the best proposal software. Now it's like I'm a VP of marketing at this company, I have 50 sales reps, I have a budget of X thousand per year, I need these features, I have these pain points. Um, I need it within this time frame. Show me the best four options to hit this criteria. Bang, super detailed prompt. But it will still do a similar job to what Google served up back in the day. It's still going to pull from, like you said, Listico-based articles that are reviewing this type of software, whether that's ones that you own and control on your own website, or if that's third-party review sites, or just competitors that are building these as well. Um, and like I said, a bit of a necessary evil because it's like big, bigger, from my experience, bigger mid-market enterprise companies don't like doing them because they're kind of scared of lawsuits from other companies, rightly or wrongly. Um, and there is like a slight risk if you're way too biased on like the first 10 paragraphs of how amazing your tool is, and how how a bunch of case studies and social proof and all that good stuff, and then you do like a one-line for all the other competitors, and it's like the the problem is Google is clamping down more and more on fair reviews.

12:45Yeah.

12:46Um, so actually making sure you're you're non-biased, like you're saying, look, this is who we're a good fit for, like we're a great fit, I don't know, for mid-market companies within this criteria, but we're a poor fit for this company, making sure you actually clearly state your features, pricing, like I say, pros and cons, and then actually test out the other tools that you're software or platforms that you're comparing. So you can actually give an equal summary, go into GT Reviews, Software Advice, Captera, whatever ones are relevant, pull from there as well. Um, so it's important to give a well-balanced review. And it's also you've got to think of it from a prospect's perspective. Like your customers aren't idiots. If they land on your article and they think you've literally spent the whole time saying how amazing your software is and how terrible everything else is, and you've put a tick against everything you do and a cross against them, it's like that doesn't add up.

13:33Yeah. No, I I think what you were saying about those very detailed prompts, like certainly there's there's there's been a trend towards that as people are getting better, better using these tools to get a more precise uh question to a more precise answer, knowing that well, the the the AI bots are gonna um tailor it to you, they're gonna personalize it to you, they're gonna customize it. And I've I've seen a lot of like um you know, offsets of that of like if this is my current provider, like what will I get if I upgrade to this? So usually like I've seen it like you were talking maybe a little bit higher up in the funnel, like in this comparison phase, they're they have it narrowed down, right? They have it narrowed down to to two, maybe three options, right? And they're trying to figure out for them what's the best prompt, and they're trying to customize that, and they really need comparisons, like they really need human experience. And you know, I think that that's why Reddit and you know, kind of bubble up to the top, and and and even like social media is starting to get indexed quite a bit in in Google to be able to pull out those human answers of like people that actually have that experience to understand that because I think people are down to like, man, these are both great options, but I need to understand better user experience. I've even seen stuff like contractually, like, okay, if I get into it, like, you know, how is the customer service team? Like, are they because a lot of people get stuck when they're switching softwares into like, can I get onboarded? Can I get my team onboarded into this? And so, like, I've started to see kind of more real use cases uh do better. Um and I think that even like search overall is just trying to answer the question better to try to understand what the user is actually asking. And and I feel like a lot of people get into a flow with these chatbots, and then you know, they get into this flow, and then based on all the different things they said, what they know about the person, and then kind of what's online or what's trending, it will show them an answer. And and I've found it to be um like I understand that, and my team understands that, right? And but the clients don't understand why do I get a different answer? Uh, or why do you're telling me you're reporting on this data or this KPI, and then when I search it, I see this. Like, what are those conversations uh happening, Sam, on on kind of education in the marketplace of how AI's producing an answer versus Google versus their personalized answer versus what the market's seeing?

Why AI SEO Tracking Gets Weird

16:24Like, curious about reporting uh from your standpoint.

16:27Funnily enough, last week I did a post on LinkedIn where I looked at Ran Fishkin's post where he was basically saying like AI tracking is like absolutely crazy.

16:38Yeah.

16:38And then I s I kind of quoted him and mentioned that AI SEO tools are basically a waste of time and putting numbers out of the air. And it just blew up. Like it went mental. Then I kind of shared my my point of view on and kind of what we do. And the thing is, I think it's like it's really difficult because a lot of a lot of SaaS teams we we speak to are even thinking like I could invest a few grand a month into this AI SEO tool, I could spin up a workflow with um AI or one of the many tools that create content, and that will just own my SEO, right? Like tick, tick box, done. I'm gonna start getting tons of leads. I wish it was that easy. Um, and also I think the problem with that kind of measurement is that when you're measuring stuff with AI SEO, and specifically for SAS, it's like, well, how can I measure the prompts that actually make sense for what my target market is searching for? Because each prompt, like you like we just discussed, can be vastly different. One person has a full conversation, someone searches something like quite specific, then jumps off. How do we know what all those specific prompts are? The short answer is, in my opinion, we don't. Um, we can only take our best closest guess and link those to kind of customer research, which I think is massively neglected still in SEO. So many SEOs just jump into tactics and strategies before actually putting their customer research in, which is critical in SaaS, especially if it's selling high-ticket software, like you really need to know your dream client inside out. Um, so I think like pulling prompts from like sales calls, customer calls, support calls, problem-based prompts, how folks actually refer to your offer, um, and that kind of stuff. And to your point, like actually knowing why folks look for alternatives to their current provider, why do they switch? Is it because customer success dropped off a cliff, the features lacked, trying to add more users, the pricing went sky high, or is it something else? Like knowing that information is so important to actually resonate with your ICP and hit their pain points and what they might be looking for or looking to solve. Um, and I suppose rambling on about AI SEO track is also like citations can change massively. Um, there's so many like variables that aren't consistent compared to like classic Google organic search tracking. Um, that's why I'll often say, well, take everything AI SEO trackers to say with a prince of salt. We still report on AI SEO metrics, but I'm more leaning towards like track your general share of voice compared to your main competitors. Yes. Yes, if you can nail down 20 to 30 prompts that are tight money keywords relevant to buying intent, by all means do so. Um, and then apart from that, you want to track the kind of you want to track what you can with analytics tools, be it uh post hoc, GA4, your CRM like HubSpot Salesforce, um, everything you can put in in terms of last touch. But then you definitely like we we make sure our clients have got how did you hear about us free text field on their demo forms or sign-up forms or contact forms. And then I'll even say, like, have the sales rep ask again on the intro call, the discovery call, or the demo call, saying, like, what was your full roots assembling for us today? Oh, you used Claude. Okay, can you remember what you prompted? Okay, great. I'm gonna put that in the CRM. So you're basically like pulling all the information that's like analytical, but you're also going like deeper dive with the actual kind of human, what they actually said, and then you're feeding that back into your CRM to make informed decisions. Um but I suppose going back to my earlier point, like I still think all good SEO starts with knowing the buyer. And the beauty is like today, it's so much easier to pull in customer research compared to what it was three years ago. Like the fact that you can pull in sales call recordings from Fathom, Gong, Fireflies, feed those via MCP into your Claude instance, which we do for clients. Um, likewise, link that up with your SEO tool, href, semrush data for SEO, and literally query and find like long tail, money, high, high commercial buying intent, low difficulty keywords based on what your sales calls are saying for, then find the actual FAQs that folks care about and weave those into, like you said, your listical pages, your comparison pages, and so forth. Like it just makes SEO like on easy mode. Yes, you still need human and loop, but AI can like put together decent first drafts that you can then have a couple humans in the loop to actually verify, fact check, update, and more. So it's it's a great time to be an SEO, but um, unfortunately, there's there's still not loads of hack to just suddenly get recommended and get tons of leads, it still needs some manual work.

21:02So, so Sam, one of the things that I I talk about a lot, and it's when we're talking with with uh the stakeholders uh for any client, is they they really want a deterministic answer, right? And they want to they want to know that if I do this, if I spend this money, this is the raw result. And I have to have a lot of conversations about, well, unfortunately, as we're building out these entities, we're doing all these different things, targeting the buyers, we're trying to get a probabilistic outcome that is as consistent as possible, but we don't know what that direct answer is gonna be. And you know, like you, like you said, um and you bring in all this data because really most SEOs was dealing with fractured data for so many years. You're you're pulling in multiple tools. I mean, I Talked about on this podcast years ago, I used three different tools to triangulate what the answer was because even the data that was coming out, like I had to have a theoretical conversation with one client about you know, is the data from SEM Rush or H refs actually accurate and correct? Like, and and their scores are made up, right? Even the Moss score, right? Red Fish, like it's made up, like they they're they're they're trying to give you the best estimate. And so I always looked at it kind of like triangulating the data. But today, like you said, you can bring in a bunch of uh AI uh uh like MPCs, like you can pull in this and API data, and you can um get a better view across all kinds of different subsets, and then you know, yeah, pull pulling in the calls. We record all our calls with clients, sales calls, like everything. I even have like little clips for in-person meetings, right? To to catch the gap for those calls. And again, you know, different states and approvals on like recording information. Um, but but usually if you could provide better service, uh, it it adds a really nice buffer of who said what, even internally, if you're working with a remote team H. There's all kinds of advantages, I think, of recording data. There's there's also a huge downside. Um, you just got to figure out where you fall on that. But capturing all that data, real customer interactions, overlaying that with um, you know, all kinds of data that you can you can pull in and aggregate into a kind of a uh a machine, okay, that can process all that and then output an answer and then even visualize that answer into dashboards or or or graphics or anything like that can help you make better decisions. So I think it's all about more informed buyers, right? Like you're using AR, more informed buyers, but also understanding how are they getting that information, what are the sources that they're pulling from, and then and then mapping that and and really what AIs, well a SEOs, sorry, not AIs, but SEOs are doing or were engaged to do. I felt like they were engaged by Google to help organize all the information. Like that's what I really thought of back in the day is like Google was engaging webmasters and and and people that were doing SEO to help them organize information so that the machine learning, whether you know search engines, now we have AI, again, different different ways to get to that that answer, are are producing the the best answer. And then, you know, you got some SEOs that are kind of messing up like the tagging or the the labeling of the data, so so it it favors their client more. But if you have a strong client, you understand who your target audience is. I mean, we all love it when we get the client that's our bread and butter that we know how to deliver. And and that's what I feel like all the surveys and the data are telling you is understand who your your ideal customer is, speak to that ideal customer so that machine learning, AI, search engines, whatever you want to call it, bring you that customer more so that you can do better for them and for yourself. And it's just kind of organizing all that information to set the highways and the the traffic and the leads in to the right places.

25:32Yeah.

Positioning Problems That Kill Growth

25:33Do you know something that a lot of SaaS companies mess up is it's the positioning side of things. So they'll say, look, we want to move up market. Everyone's everyone wants to move up market. We want bigger clients. Who doesn't? Um tell me a new one. So they'll they'll say we want to move mid-market or we want to go enterprise. I'll say, Brilliant. You need to tell us exactly what that means. Like, what does that specific client look like? Who's the job title? What niches, sectors, industries, what do they refer to that market as and more? So then we can wrap that positioning clearly in not just our own website content, our landing pages, our own listicles when we talk about our product, um, any comparisons and more on our own website on every single page that makes sense. Then when we do manual outreach and we work out what sources are pulled into LLMs, Google Organic Search and beyond for these high-buying intent queries, when we're getting you featured externally in roundups, listicles, review sites, and more, that positioning is exactly the same. So then when LLMs know how to describe our products in comparison and similar, we're not scaring off prospects because we've got a startup that's looking for our software and it says for enterprise only. Or likewise, we're not scaring off enterprise because they see, oh, if a startup starts at like 27 bucks a month because they think you're too small and you can't handle them. So it's really important and it gets messed up terribly by a lot of SaaS companies.

26:57Yeah, no, put positioning, I feel like everybody wants to skip the strategy. And you you alluded to this earlier. Um, and I think that that's why people tend to gravitate to people that have specialized, because they they want to skip the strategy phase for their company and say, hey, we're we're in we're in this vertical, we want someone that understands the vertical, like we want to hit the ground running. Usually the pain's so great that when they engage a company, uh, it's like we need leads today or we need leads now. Like the the whoever's pulling the the trigger waits till there's that kind of real urgency around that. But man, the companies that really think about the strategy, that that lay it out, they understand where they're going, they build a roadmap, they they really invest the time in the market research. Um, how how are we going to penetrate this market? What are we gonna do? What are some real objectives or milestones? And then they roadmap it out and they execute their plan, you know, wins so much more often than than kind of the the knee-jerk reaction. Um, and and I I feel like there's like this level of education that that I've started to see, and people that listen to this podcast and businesses have started to educate themselves before they moved. Like I thought people were gonna move a lot sooner in the kind of AI search. We jumped into it really quickly. We saw this is the future. Like, there's gonna be just like let's left turn here. You know, a lot of people are gonna go straight, they're gonna dead end, they're gonna have to come back, they're gonna have to take this left turn. And and I think that um I think I think that there's a lot of value in in really doing that research, doing the planning. Um, I've found out a lot of people are not mapping out their workloads as well as they thought. Like, so like understanding that positioning piece to the delivery piece to be able to handle that infrastructure infrastructure scale. I think that that's why SaaS companies benefit a lot greater, because you can capture more of the stuff like e-commerce online so you can see the whole customer journey, you can see, you know, where you're losing people on the churn. Um, and I feel like even SEO, if you want to speak to this, I feel like a lot of people are always working on getting new customers. And if you zoom out again and look at, well, how are we, how long are we keeping customers? Why are they leaving? Um, how do we satisfy existing customers? There's a lot of data around maintaining um, you know, good good retention numbers and and getting referrals out of there. And and people spend so much money on the customer acquisition costs, and you're like, man, you know, keeping the existing customer, getting a referral, like if when you start looking at those numbers, like that that's where where I'm starting to see the advantage uh of companies that are are are spending their their resource allocation looking at opportunities there. I don't know, what are you seeing?

30:13All

Speed As A Startup Advantage

30:14sorts. Um, yeah, so I I can only really speak to the SaaS market specifically because that's what we do day in, day out. But we I would argue that a lot of SaaS companies aren't actually in a good position to start SEO. Like we're we're pretty sick in the sense we turn away a ton of business. We'll just simply say, look, you're not ready yet, come back in like three months, six months when it makes sense, or you don't have the budget to make this a good program. But by all means, here's some here's some material to to make it happen. Just like yourself, we've got a podcast where we share plenty of breakdowns that they can watch or listen to. Um but what what I'd say is I think there's an equal balance because I'd say if you're SAS, for example, if you're more early stage and you don't have you don't have clear positioning, you don't know the top three most expensive problems you solve, you don't know like exactly why folks would move from a competitor to you. Um, you haven't done like a bunch of customer interviews for recent one clients, recent churn clients. You don't know what they're doing in-house before it comes so frustrating that they need to find a new better way because it's causing too much time, frustration, churn, or cash loss. You don't know what they describe that pain as or how they look for new better ways, or kind of what goes through their mind and their process. Um, you need this basic knowledge. Um, you need to know your position, you need to know exactly who your ICP is, your dream client, they need to be clearly mapped out. You need to know your money niches, your money industries, um, the companies that kind of think it's a no-brainer to invest in your solution. As well as that, you need to be in an active category that has demand. People need to know your software is uh is a thing, it exists, and there's active demand to collect, therefore, SEO actually makes sense. So if that is right and that does exist for your SaaS company, I do believe that that's if that's in place, then as a as a more like looking at two sides of the coin. If you're a scrappier startup, maybe with a small team, I think speed is your unfair advantage. Because what you'll see is when you work with bigger and bigger SaaS companies, especially mid-market to enterprise and beyond, they move extremely slow. There's a ton of red tape. They just how it is, they need management meetings to get approvals on every step of the process. It's like approvals on keywords or prompts, approvals on content page, new pages, approvals on outlines, signing off the content, signing off the UX of the page, the UI of the page. And no joke, I've seen enterprise companies take 12 full months to get one page shipped. And that one page, by the time they shipped it live to their website, was completely off. The page intent was wrong, the structure is wrong, it had no chance to rank. It was meant to be a listicle. They published it as a landing page, it was completely messed up. If you're a startup SaaS company or a smaller SaaS company that moves fast, you can literally have such an unfair advantage where you can just map out your money high buying intent keywords, a lot of the stuff we've talked about. Work out what type of page you need to build to rank, exhaust that, like just build those pages as quick as you possibly can and publish on the on the site, like starting with the low, low difficulty, high buying intent, oftentimes low traffic, which is great, less less tire kickers, more buyers. Um, do that at speed, do a little bit of manual outreach to like some of the other external sources that are being cited, like beg borrow still, like do listical swaps, offer guest posts, build YouTube videos, like do all the kind of scrappy stuff that doesn't scale. And that like we've seen companies like see an uptick in demos like as quick as 90 days, four months, just by doing that, uh, just because they like aren't afraid to get their hands dirty and move fast. But of course, that doesn't apply to mid-market and Saa because there's a lot more red tape, there's a lot more considerations and things like that. So SAS is a an interesting space to be in for SEO for sure.

Reverse Engineer Then Make It Better

33:53Yeah, well, so Sam, I know we're getting a little close to time. It's uh right after the holidays, so we're getting back into it. So I I really appreciate you coming on. Is there anything else in this conversation that we really didn't touch on that you think would be helpful if people are listening to this?

34:12I suppose that the main thing is that I think getting the basics right, like pulling everything we talked about in terms of research, product research, positioning, and stuff like that, um, understanding every entry point that a SaaS company could potentially take when they have that buying intent, searching for a solution, looking to move away from a competitor, looking for an integration, a problem you solve, and so forth. And if you are a team that can move at speed, then it is gonna be an advantage. And I suppose the other side is I think a lot of SaaS companies, certainly ones that we chat to, they come up with all these tactics. They're like, Sam, I think we need like tons of backlinks, or we need to get all this digital PR or all this press, or do we need to publish tons of YouTube videos? And I'm a simple guy. A lot of the advice I give is I like things quite straightforward, mainly because I can't understand complex things. And usually I'll just say, look, you don't have to overcomplicate it, just reverse engineer what's already working and make it a bit better. So if you've worked out that, I don't know, we've got a client in the proposal software space that it makes sense, like proposal software is like Proposify, Quiller, Get Accept, Pandadoc. If you worked out that a lot of people move away from Pandadoc to your software, a Pandadoc alternatives page just makes sense. Um, then all you've got to do is reverse engineer what sources are being pulled from. It's probably a listical. We reviewed the best Pandadoc alternatives 2026. Well, make a page that's slightly more in depth, add some unique thoughts and research, make it more helpful, um, make it a bit more kind of useful, weave in some FAQs from real sales and support calls, publish that. If it's not right if it's not being pulled in after 90 days or ranking well on 90 days, earn some backlinks like through some trades, through some placements, through some swaps, and then you're probably going to see impact on that page because it's low difficulty and it has good buying tent. It'll probably get you a few signups or demos. Like you don't need to overcomplicate it, just see what's working already and do something a bit better. So I think a lot of people get stumbled on really technical SEO advice, which I tried to steer away from. Like technical SEO has its place, but I think until you get, at least in my opinion, at least until until you get to thousands and thousands of pages, I believe the content angle is more important.

36:24Yeah, I I think that's a great kind of unknown secret of internet marketing, if you will. Um, I think that that is something that I've been saying for years is just kind of it, it's really like what is working, why is it working, how do we reverse engineer it, put that together, kind of one up it, or like like you did uh and talked about with your your uh blog article, if you go really against what is publicly out there, so you got to add something new to to what's already published, or going against that, uh I feel like search engines are the public forum. So that's where Discord happens. And even in the Google algorithm, uh, like diversity of search comes up. Like, so they want to see the different points of view on different topics. And so if you do it really well and put it together really well, you're you're gonna get that visibility. You want to just make sure you're positioned properly to get that right kind of traffic.

Where To Follow Sam Dunning

37:25Um, so guys, Sam Dunning, it's thank you so much for coming on. How do people uh follow your work, get in touch with you, whatever you'd like to share?

37:35No, I appreciate it, man. Appreciate you having me on. I guess three main ways. One is LinkedIn, Sam Dunning. I rambled on about SaaS SEO and how I search most days. Um, the second is the podcast Breaking B2B. We've got tons of AI SEO for SaaS breakdowns, case studies, and more. Um, or the third is if you if you run a B2B SaaS and you're basically frustrated that your competitors are being recommended to buy us instead of you, we might be able to help. And that's breakingb2b.com.

38:02Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Sam. Guys, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, keep listening to this podcast for more tips. Uh, thank you so much. My name is Matthew Bertram. Bye bye for now.