SEO Can't Die and Won't Die | E91 with Sam Dunning

Why have so many leaders written off SEO as “dead”? 🤔 Whether it’s the rise of AI search, fears of fierce competition, or painstaking boardroom battles over budget, the rumour mill keeps churning. But if your ideal buyers still Google for solutions—or even ask ChatGPT—you can’t afford to ignore it.

In this episode, we’re joined by Sam Dunning, founder of Breaking B2B and host of the Breaking B2B podcast, to explain why SEO isn’t dying—it’s just evolving. Sam shares the unconventional, revenue-focused playbook that’s working today for B2B and SaaS marketers.

We get into:
 ✅ Why “SEO is dead” misses the mark for most B2B & SaaS businesses
 ✅ How to decide if SEO fits your ICP, runway & resources
 ✅ The two quick-win page types that can rank in 30–60 days
 ✅ Niches, “offer + industry” and “alt vs” pages: long-tail goldmines
 ✅ Why one-and-done SEO is a fantasy—and what a revenue-driven strategy looks like
 ✅ How to win stubborn C-suite buy-in (or quietly prove ROI yourself)
 ✅ Brand mentions, structured data & AI search: ranking on ChatGPT, Perplexity & more
 ✅ Crafting top-of-funnel “jobs-to-be-done” content that truly converts

If you’re tired of SEO obituaries—or you’ve been guilty of underinvesting in search—this one’s for you.

Transcript

1:17

Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Blame It on Marketing. This is one that could have been filmed three years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. We can still call it the same thing and it's literally SEO won't die and stop trying to make it seem like it's dying. We've got a wonderful guest with us Sam today from the B2B Breaking. my, it's breaking me to be. break the other way breaking b2b there we go and you'll get something wrong but i'll let him introduce himself right now I appreciate you both having me on. So yeah, Sam Dunning founder at Breaking B2B. So we essentially work with B2B and SaaS companies with a bit of an unusual approach for SEO for revenue, not vanity is our tagline. And just, I also host a podcast, which is also under the same name Breaking B2B and a bit like this, we'll interview SaaS and B2B marketing leaders, share exactly what's driving growth for them today. And we do a mix of solo episodes as well, while I ramble on about what's working in SEO. weird B2B marketing experiments I'm running or just my thoughts on the industry. And apart from that, I'm rambling on LinkedIn when I'm not messing about with a podcast or the business. Yeah, we see, we love the you walking around with your like chalkboard, like the end is nigh. Um, style. I love it. It's great. More of that in marketing, please. Especially for B2B. I think it's great. but before we get into it, Sam, before we all have some sort of meltdown about SEO, tell us your deepest, darkest marketing. Yeah, I was trying to think of this because there's been so many just this, just this last 15 months since starting this business. mean, probably one of the worst I've done is when I first like my background's web development. So I worked in, then she came a partner of a web agency and I made some terrible mistakes when I first got in there. Cause I literally got thrown in at the deep end, like you're doing small businesses and startups. One. What probably the worst actually thinking about now is the first probably within the first week of starting this web agency. I got given a lead because back then this is going back about 13, 14 years ago. I kind of came on as a project manager, salesperson, jack of all trades, do everything person and had never done a sales call in my life. Got given this lead because they used to buy web design leads for people that need websites and this leads what he needed was a website, just a simple one, just a simple platform like LinkedIn. So really easy one, right? Just need a really easy website. It's got to be exactly like LinkedIn and Zing at the time, which is that German one, I think. Yeah, literally like LinkedIn. So I had no clue and I just said yes to every demand. So I had this prospect on the phone that I phoned up and he was like, yeah, I need a platform like LinkedIn and he's this feature, this chat, this networking tool and all this and that. And I was just saying yes to everything without having a clue. And by the end of the cool, my first ever lead, I'd sold a website, but I'd sold the equivalent of LinkedIn for like 500 pounds or $700 if you're in the U S and I was like, what the heck have I just done? And it's right. I'd sold this insane website. There's probably should have been 5 million at the time as opposed to 500, if not 500 million and didn't know what the heck I was doing, but luckily that saved my ass was the fact that this guy then eventually kind of put that website on the back burner, we could palm him off with two or three smaller sites. And he never really kind of drilled down on that one. So that's probably the worst, but there's been so many of the years. was really hoping that the end of that story was going to be, and then it turned out to be Mark Zuckerberg on the phone or something. aah And now he's a trillionaire or whatever and Sam's talking to us. No jokes. Yeah. that's, yeah, underpricing and over-promising, I think we've all done at some point as people that sell marketing things. So yeah, very much relatable. So we're excited to do this episode because I think people have been saying SEO is that ever since like, I remember starting to do marketing, which is not that long ago. I don't know, like eight, nine years ago. But I, me and Emma regularly start new clients. And one of the things that we evaluate is whether it's digging into SEO and doing SEO with them. And a lot of the time the answer is yes, because their keywords are accessible. They're still very much like not overcompeted or whatever it might be. So tell me. Why do you think people have been saying this for ages and why they're still wrong? Because they're businesses like you, cropping up fairly recently and people like Ben from Spicy Margarita, launching an SEO business in the time where I feel like a lot of people are like, no, it's done now, especially with AI search. A lot of folks are asking me this right now. And I say, yeah, SEO is dead along with cold email, paid media, demand gen, cold calling, all aspects of outbound demand creation. Everything died unless it's a service you sell and that's alive and well. So, um, yes, that, is, that is the philosophy, but I suppose the way I look at it is SEO is changing a lot, especially right now. And depending on. your dream client, it depends on their habit. So I suppose the problem is a lot of folks is ingrained to go to Google to search. But if you've got a more technical ideal client profile, then they're more likely to be using AI LLMs to search, which we can dive into be at chat, GBT perplexity, Gemini, whatever. Now, the way I look at it is I'm a bit weird in the fact that I say that SEO is definitely not a good fit for every business. there's many cases in B2B and SaaS and tech there. SEO is a complete waste of time. One of which might be you are a creating a new category or a new solution that folks simply aren't aware of. So they're not searching on Google for it. Google and search engines in general are best to capture that demand. So that 5 % of your addressable market, they're in buying mode when they're looking for your solution, comparing vendors or have the crisp and specific problem you solve. So you can show up top. get that traffic and hopefully drive a demo, a sign up or a booked call. If folks don't know about your offer, they aren't searching for it. So SEO is a waste of time. You're way better off kind of learning where that ICP hangs out, spends their time, gets their trusted info and marketing and sharing the problem you solve educating and entertaining there. Another situation it's a waste of time usually is if you're VC backed, you're funded and you've got extreme pressure on you to drive results like next week, next month. Although a lot of the stuff I share, can drive pipeline with SEO as quick as 90 days. If you haven't got that runway, you're way better off just doing like an aggressive paid media campaign, maybe some outbound sales or kind of pushing for referrals or stuff like that. Cause it's just not going to get the resource or time that it needs. Um, and probably the third use case where it doesn't make sense is if you simply for lack the resource in house or that have the lack lack of know-how. how to drive a pipeline driving revenue, revenue focused SEO strategy, or you just have the cash to hire a contractor, freelancer or agency. In that case, you're better off kind of looking at what you can do realistically and then giving it a good shot. So yeah, a lot of the time it doesn't make sense, but other times it will make sense if you've got the right market, if folks are searching for your solution and you have got resources to make it a success and a timeline to make it a success, if that helps. Hmm, definitely. So there are obviously quite a lot of misconceptions around SEO. A couple of my favorites being, there's no point in doing it because it is so competitive. But as you've already rightly said, Sam, people are searching for it. So you probably do want to stick your hat in the ring, right? You can tell me whether you think that's mad or not in a sec. And then the other one is the one and done argument. So like, hey, we've been paying for SEO for a year. We've completed. We have completed SEO and that is one of my, I mean, God, the amount of board meetings I've sat in where people have actually said that sort of thing out loud is shocking. So yeah, Sam, what are some of those other misconceptions? What do you think about the ones that I've just mentioned, but to name a few? I suppose starting with competitive markets. So one way to look at it is the opposite of what I talked about just then is if you've actually got tons of people searching for your solution, your software, your service, your offer, I actually think that's good because one, there's probably a lot of giants that are super slow moving. And it often means kind of smaller businesses, scrappier startups can get stuff published in live and actually make a dent quite quick. and the other thing is like many things in B2B marketing, there's riches in the niches when it comes to SEO. So an example I often use is like proposal software as one, like there's tons of players in the proposal software space. You've got Proposify, you've got PandaDoc, you've got GetAccept, you've got Quilla, you've got loads. So I would say, and same with things like calendar scheduling or calendar scheduling software, like massive players, right? Calendar lead, chili Piper, et cetera. So you could go for those kinds of classic category based search terms like best calendar software or best proposal software, but it's going to take you a lifetime to build up the authority, earn the backlinks, get the content. to probably talk years before a new business could start ranking for some of that stuff. So you'd want to take a much more drilled down approach. In that case, you might be a B2B tech company and you might think instead of just going for those real high traffic competitive keywords, you go for longer tail stuff like offer for industry, like workout, what are the, and this is just good marketing sense, like review my CRM, what industries have I historically sold well into, which ones do I enjoy working with, which industries have the expensive problem I solve, I'm motivated to solve the problem and we actually drive impact for. Um, so that might be HR, fintech sales teams, recruitment, whatever. And then you do offer plus industry kind of searches, like best calendar scheduling tools for recruitment teams, et cetera. Be way easier. And something a lot of kind of tech and software companies seem to be a little frightened to do is kind of alternative based searches. Again, this is something that can rank really fast. So And some of these terms that we've seen ranked 30, 40 days, so quite fast is basically make a list of your main competitors that always get brought up in sales calls to an annoying level. So if you're in the proposal space, that'd be like Proposify, Quillip, Pandadot, and just make alternative or versus pages for them. Where you basically do a fair comparison of your competitors, but you position yourself as at the top, you share kind of your differentiators in the market, why folks choose you, comparison tables. You share where you fall short, but where you excel. and those are really quite fast to rank. And the reason they work is because typically in B2B folks evaluate three, four, five vendors on a short list before making a decision. So that's why folks search for stuff like competitor alternative, competitor pricing, competitor reviews. So those can work really well, especially in B2B tech to rank quite fast whilst you're trying to kind of look at those more meaty keywords like best X software, et cetera. I think to add to that as well, like understanding what the space actually looks like. if you're bringing in a SEO agency or freelancer, they will have tools in place. like, let's say you've never properly worked in SEO for some reason, I don't know, that's not your specialist area. They will have tools that will tell you how competitive things are in terms of keywords and also how worth it's going, how worth it is going off to them in terms of volume. So I know me and Emma have seen some. previous clients kind of going for stuff that's really difficult to get because it's like the best fit keyword, but it's like, you're never going to rank for that. That's wild. So why waste your time and money? But some SEO agencies will be like, well, shit, that's what you want. You know, like, I'm not gonna, I'm going to tell you it's probably not good, but I'm not going to keep pushing. just be really realistic about that. because again, if like HubSpot's place one for the keyword you want, and it's like a high competitive keyword, it's just not. gonna happen probably anytime soon. Yeah, but also it's that and it's also like back to your point Sam about the long tail keywords. It's like, actually, like if you think for example, you're selling to like, I don't know, HR audience, Ruta and I do this a lot. So this is our example always. You know, yeah, there were some huge players in that space like HR tech massive. But yeah, if people aren't actually people generally don't search like if you know your ICP well enough. And you know that your ICP is not necessarily the most tech savvy as our HR audience tends not to be. Probably not in the same bracket as say like marketers or, you know, sales leaders. They probably are more tech savvy. But if you know that about your ICP, you can then also target things that they are actually searching. Like how do I do a performance review? Those sorts of things. So that is not just straight up going for the performance management software keywords, you know? It's that, it's like, how does your audience search, understand your ICP, understand their level of comfort with search. And that's not just, we're not just talking about Google are we? We're now talking about the LLMs as well. So I think that is also part of this, isn't it? It's like, what's the reality of how people actually look for stuff, not just what keywords do you fancy? It's very true. And something that I see a lot of SEO skip in general is they're very focused on ranking search terms or ranking pages, but they completely neglect customer research. So there's no point ranking content if it's not going to resonate and build trust with the ICP and then convert them. cause the chances are you might rank a page, but I'll probably just have a super high bounce rate. And that this is more and more important if you sell a higher ticket solution service or piece of software and because that ICP is not stupid and if they just land on a page where half of it's been AI generated and it's got like crazy buzz words like we're gonna supercharge your revenues and Turbo X your I don't know your SaaS solution in this crazy amount of time and all that kind of stuff. It's it's just gonna look like nonsense It's not gonna be the words they actually use or talk about the problems that they're So I think what you mentioned there, it was great because jobs to be done is an awesome framework that a lot of folks in SEO neglect. there's various, and this is a massive conversation itself. So I'll try and keep it snapshot, but SEO is greatest, is greatest when it's a demand capture channel. So that's why those kind of best X software, competitor alternative, like offer for industry terms work really well. Then mid funnel, you can have like, offer checklist or offer templates or solution wireframe, whatever. And then more at the top of funnel informational base is a great example. You said they're like using jobs to be done framework. Like what is that struggling moment that your prospect has or how do they try and cobble something together in house where they reach a point that they're so annoyed with it or they're having staff leave or they're wasting hours a week or month. And quite often in the tech space, that's cobbling stuff together on Google sheets or spreadsheets or something like that. So how can you learn those pain points and then address that with maybe a how-to search and then tackle that with an article that then features your product as the painkiller? Because those are really good at the top of funnel to introduce your product and get signups we're definitely moving in the direction of being generous with content in terms of like, I don't necessarily mean like gating or ungating things, but I mean in terms of like actually telling people how to do stuff. like me and Emma just are always with our clients, like, no, just tell them literally how to do it without you. And it's going to be painful and horrible and they can do it on paper. They can do it in a spreadsheet, but they will come back to you at some point if, they are feeling enough pain. because they'll find the answer somewhere anyway. So you might as well be the person to give them that answer. And they're like, yeah, they knew what they were talking about. Let me maybe go back and like, now I have some budget, do something with it. But I feel like there's still a lot of like reservation in that area. I don't know. Maybe if you're working in like, you know, like all tech isn't all tech. Like HR tech is like lagards. Marketing tech is like, you know, way early adopters. I don't know if you're finding that as well, that we're still kind of having to move through this. content generosity problem. Big time. It's this is a conversation way beyond SEO, I guess. It's like marketing leaders that we did a lot with and founders that are maybe shares a little frightened or a little reserved to share. Let's call it the secret source on how they are on maybe one, one how prospects get the job done today and to the new better way. And I suppose someone like me or yourselves are a bit of an advantage. Cause if you run your own business, it doesn't really matter. You've got no seniors ahead of you to say you can't do that. So like, I'll go on LinkedIn and I'll just post like what revenue we've done this month, how many clients have churned, what we're doing, these weird experiments and think nothing of it. But then if you're an exec in a company, can't necessarily do that. But I think the trouble is like trust is such a difficult currency where in, in 2020, 25 and 2025 and beyond. And like you said, this goes beyond just kind of writing blog posts or landing pages or content for your website. If you can lead with what your customers actually care about and what, what, where your company falls short compared to competitors and where you Excel is, it's going to help with that trust. especially in the world of AI when everything's so easily fake now. So I think that's a really good point. Yeah. I was thinking about this yesterday really weirdly while walking my dog because I'm a loser and I've got nothing better to think about. But I was thinking about how many companies that like B2B wise that you use, like tech that you use just because you actually like the company. Like, the tech doesn't even necessarily need to be particularly great, but you're like, I just like you. And obviously that's a, that goes back to that trust point that you're making. But the reason that I tend to like them is because they're helpful. They're helpful, they're good, they make me laugh, you know, all those things. And it's so interesting. Like, I mean, obviously it plays into every bit of marketing, right? Not just SEO, but that is still fundamentally there. Again, I think, I have met some SEOs where that's not on their radar. You know, it's like, no, don't give away everything upfront. Don't do that. You know, stick to just hitting the keywords. You know, like you say, then Sam, you end up with pages that are just garbage, um, that nobody actually wants to look at. So it is a bit of a battle, I think, if you're an in-house marketer or an external marketer and you're dealing with your SEO agency or your SEO freelancer, how can you, I guess, maybe best approach that conversation so that there is a bit more of a balance between, you know, what Google wants versus kind of you trying to be that company that people actually look at and like. Great question. Great question. I think a lot of it comes with setting expectations. So I'll quite often, like in our case, if you were, I suppose on the agency side, I would be encouraged to flip that back to the marketer that I was dealing with. So I'd actually say like, I don't know if we were writing in this case, maybe a jobs to be done article on how to fix a struggling moment or how to, do XYZ in Google Sheets and then introducing our product as a new better way. I would say like, what are you hearing? Like what are you hearing on sales calls? What's often being raised? Like what are the frustrations with it? Do you think it makes sense to talk about this or should we just skip it and just talk purely talk about your product? And often just, guess with weird human psychology stuff is we have to come up with it ourself. If someone's pushing something on us, it doesn't work. We need to come to the answer ourself, otherwise it ain't gonna happen. It's just how it works. to get someone there Sam, you've got the secret sauce right? Yeah, yeah, you can't change someone, they can only change themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is a bit of a battle because if you're a marketer and you've you've kind of got a team that you're reporting to, it can be a bit of a battle on this kind of stuff. So sometimes it is kind of internal education, especially I mean, SEO is one of the hardest internal sales ever. Like typically, I've written about this a lot. Oh, oh, yeah, I mean, it's like, SEO and stuff like CRO are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to budget, you've got like events. paid media, outbound motion, all that kind of stuff, influencer marketing, like gonna take up 99 % of the budget and it's like SEO, no, that's a waste of time. Like, can't we just install Yoast plugin and take a few boxes, job done? Yeah, sure, that'll get you. you'll pay 10 grand a month. Yeah, but you'll pay 10 grand a month for really expensive PR agency, but then you won't dovetail that with SEO. Are you like, I can't, I can't compute. I don't get it. It's, yeah, it is an interesting one. What I've seen so far is I never see companies get bought into SEO unless their marketing leader has done it before or their founder has done it before and seen success. Otherwise it very, very rarely happens. Mm. so interesting. Like for it's probably because me and Emma have done SEO before and have seen it succeed so many times. For us, it's like a like a first check thing, like should we be doing it? Is it feasible? If yes, go like get it sorted as soon as we can, you know, like start yesterday kind of thing. But yeah, it's it's really interesting that you say like, it's not even sometimes a consideration for some people because they just they've never maybe experienced it. We definitely bigger businesses that have that. And when I say bigger businesses, when you speak to someone who has a local business, they absolutely, I literally had the removal guy who moved me into this house, talking to me about SEO. And he's just literally like this, I start my company, I do the removals, but I also know that I need to SEO because otherwise local people can't find me. So that concept's just there. But then as, yeah, you move up the food chain a little bit to the kind of like tech companies, you're right. If they haven't done it before, they're very skeptical until like you say, Ruta, it starts to work. And then they're like, how do we, how do we do more? How do we do more? Yeah. Outside of, um, outside of Google search. So obviously AI search and not, not just in like, um, AI interfaces. mean, also like Google summaries and all of that stuff has become like a huge talking point when it comes to SEO, but no one's really beyond being like, have good SEO. So you pop up, no one's really got. anything to say about it? Is there anything you can add to it? Like how should we be thinking about it? Is it something we need to like, you know, our pants over in the next 12 months or just do a good SEO and you'll be fine. I would say first and foremost, like before anyone tunes into this and absolutely panics thinking, let's go all gun blazing on LLM optimization and AI search. And we need to be top for every single query on the chat, GBT, perplexity, et cetera. I would first take a step back and think like, what does my end client, what are their habits? Because like you said in HR, for example, let's pretend that our actual dream client is a little bit old school. They might not actually be using those tools that much yet. It's gonna happen. Let's be real, it's gonna happen as adoption takes place, but they might still be using Google search. They might still be doing more asking their peers or going to events and asking folks they trust or going to social media, whatever, to get their trust information. So if that's the case, then. not necessarily going all guns blazing on it now, but having a strategy so you can slowly chip away and get the foundationals in place. Whereas if you were a B2B SaaS and your end user was very technical, i.e. you're selling to developers, yeah, they're probably using ChatGBT similar tools way more than Google right now. They might have ditched Google altogether. In that case, it does make sense to completely double down. So that's the first thing I'd say. And the other thing to set the field before I give some advice on what actually is we're seeing work to get visibility on LLMs and AI searches. Chap called Rand Fishkin did a report, Spark Toro and a company called Datos did a report a few months back. And they found with their findings at least that Google still gets 373 times more searches compared to AI tools or ChatGBT. And even if you combined ChatGBT and or Perplexity Gemini, et cetera, together. only take up 2 % of the market share. So it shows you that Google's still the beast, but it makes sense because everyone's just got habit of Googling stuff. In fact, something funny happened when I do these, I do these stupid man on the street interviews. The last one I did was in London. I just go up to folks on the street and ask them B2B marketing questions. And one girl I asked, said, do you think, yeah, but I guess a few years of cold calling has kind of. made me a bit resilient because it is a bit mental. So yeah, one girl I asked, I remember it quite clearly because I asked her like, as AI killed Google and she said, yeah, definitely I chat GBT search everything, as she says, pulls up a phone and is like, look, look, look. And she's like, actually, no, I did Google this. I did Google this, I did Google this. So it's like, even the folks that think they use it and I've still got that habit of Googling stuff, which is really interesting. But the point I'm making is Google's still a beast. So don't ignore it, because it is still right now the ultimate demand capture engine. Websites are getting less click-throughs than they used to because of AI overviews, especially on top funnel queries like how to do X, what is X, et cetera. But we need to start thinking about ranking on LLMs like ChatGBT. I guess some of the classic SEO strategies follow through to AI search, like making genuinely useful content, sticking to your niche, actually writing in a conversational manner, going for long tail search queries. And one of the biggest factors it seems to be is getting brand mentions around the offer that you're trying to rank for. So this is something that is really big in B2B tech and SaaS. Like, you know, the classic best X software listicles, best calendar scheduling software of 2025, et cetera. If you, if you wanted to, if you were Calendly or if you were Chili Piper, whoever, and you wanted to kind of get some good visibility and search, you would basically look for all the companies that have those listicles, approach them all, try and get listed in those listicles on external websites, as well as your own articles. And that's going to bump up your visit visibility. You don't necessarily need a backlink like you might with SEO, but if you can get these mentions associated with the category, that seems to be a big thing right now for getting, getting split through. there's other things like structuring your content in a a sensible way and using structured data. In fact, kind of think this 80 % of kind of the Bing search guidelines carry through to chat GBT as well, because they're pulling data from there. So that's some stuff we're seeing work. Rich media works quite well as well, like embedding YouTube videos onto your pages, if it's relevant to the topic, which works really well on Google as well. And that's just a few thoughts there. Hmm. Very good. I think a lot of people will be listening. Their ears will have pricked up when that was mentioned because it's one of those things that I think falls into the category of like founders, CEO, C-suite, not understanding, know, SEO. They'll probably say at some point, what do we do about this AI search thing? And you're like, because I don't know about you, but obviously we work with a lot of B2B SaaS as well. And you know, the first few leads have started to come through. from chat and obviously that captures everybody's attention and everybody kind of gets, I was going to say fizzy knickers, that's not a nice term, it? I'm going to get excited about the fact that they've started to see leads coming through from chat in particular. So yeah, I can imagine a lot of marketers are trying to understand how to answer that question. And then obviously there is, we should talk about that kind of how do you manage... your C-suite when it comes to search conversations and SEO. So yeah, what's your advice there Sam? Like obviously if we are either trying to convince the skeptic or we're trying to convince people that we need to keep doing it, keep working at it, what's your advice? Ooh, yeah, so convincing the C-suite is really, difficult. Like I said, especially if they're not bought into organic search or SEO, it's gonna be an uphill battle unless you've got someone else on leadership, be it on the marketing revenue operation side that has seen success with SEO, it's gonna be extremely difficult. Especially if they're more on, I don't know, historically we've worked on events or. paid media or demand general, that sort of things. It is really, really difficult. So there's a few ways and take my advice with a pinch of salt, because I do some weird stuff. So if I was a marketer at a SaaS company and I wanted to get buy-in on SEO, there's probably a few ways I'd do it. The most risky way is just doing it anyway and asking for forgiveness later. which is probably my strategy. So like I say, take that with a pin of salt. that that's risky by the way. think most people are not gonna really look through your budget all that well, all that often. And then if they just ignore it for a bit and you're like, this thing's working now, everyone's gonna be happy. I actually think it's one of the best strategies personally. basics yourself first, and then you can show that there's some green shoots, right? Then you're okay. Then you can get the budget to bring in Sam, you know? And yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're exactly right. Exactly right. Especially if you're in a more mature website category and your website's already got a ton of authority and that solid backlinks, you could just publish a few articles with some of the strategies we've talked about and you can probably rank them super fast just because the website's got so much authority and clout on Google. And then you could go to leadership and say, hey, look what I did. We're ranking like top three organic for this category search. Some of them are like, nice. And then a of months later, maybe you get some demos from it. And it's like, if they see that they're going to obviously praise you and give you more budget. Um, so that's one way. The other way, lot of the stuff I talk about is talking about the pain of inaction. So no one likes to miss out a bit like chat GPT when folks hear about, Oh, our competitors getting leads from chat GPT. They posted the screenshot on LinkedIn and it's like, yeah, they got two over six months. Um, don't go crazy, but. No one likes to feel like they're missing out. And so if you can say things like on the Google engine side, you could say, well, look, each time we search for our category or our offer plus industry or compare us to alternatives, like we know where to be seen. Our competitors are way ahead of us in organic search, stealing traffic, stealing mind, share, stealing brand, but most importantly, stealing inbound leads 24 seven. Like what do you think? Get them to talk, get them to raise, raise their thoughts. Don't push anything on them. Just raise. give them the information, let them speak. That's quite powerful if you've got someone that's open-minded on leadership. So those are probably two of the best strategies if you've not done SEO yet. If you're doing SEO, then as a marketer, you need to show as much sign of success as you can. So you need to take a revenue-driven approach like we've been talking about, starting with what can give us the quickest time to value possible. And then you need to show signs of successes at every point. So I don't know if you're getting some top through organic rankings on Google, then take a screenshot, chuck it in a Slack group. If you're getting improved session times on pages, then again, take some screenshots, share those. Likewise, if you're long, more visibility on key pages, the website like pricing, demo, case studies, et cetera, show that data. Maybe the sales team can then follow up on that if you've got like an intent tool or website visibility tool and that kind of stuff. And then eventually if you're getting demos that are saying, how did you hear about us, Google search or Make sure your sales team are also asking the question again. Don't rely on that field. Get them to say like, what was your full route to stumbling upon us today? So they can double down to see if it was an organic search, share those recordings with, with the team. So basically show every sign of success that you can as it comes. So you can keep leadership in the, in the, in the loop. So just to wrap up this episode, Sam, then we would love to ask you if you have any marketing gossip. It could be something you love, something you hate, something that just won't leave your thoughts. There was one that used to grind my gears a lot on LinkedIn. I think people have stopped doing it now. It was actually mainly sales reps. It was like these sales reps that would post things like, I won't say the company, but I took this company from zero to 250 million in three years. And it's like, Dude, you're a sales rep. You did not do that alone. You've got like so much brand equity. It's unreal. If I was a seller at that company, I'd be like acing it as with any A, any sales rep. So those, those used to be funny. Those used to really frustrate me. Just like these account executives are like, took this company from X to 250 million. That was funny. The 10x bros though are still about, like they're still, like you see it in their LinkedIn like little bio bit and I'm like, please. can everyone remember where that reference comes from and can we just not use it please? Thank you. We don't need any more Grant Cordon in our lives at all ever.like no. Stop. Yeah, I used to do that as well. Like most of the stuff in marketing, I've learned the hard way. I used to say like, I think a few years back, my LinkedIn tagline was like, we're going to supercharge your traffic or supercharge your revenue, like some of that. then I, I don't know if you know someone called Josh Braun. he's a sales trainer, but he came on my podcast and basically slated me for 20 minutes. And I, I didn't mind. I was quite humble. just said, look, what should I do instead? Alright. said, use words that your customers actually use. Don't use this crazy, ridiculous jargon that no one ever says. And I said, well, that makes sense. Maybe I should do that. So a lot, sometimes with this stuff, you just got to learn it the hard way. And a lot of these... Yeah, go on then. Go read stuff. is to read it out loud. Because when you're reading it in your mind, you have this whole like, sass language in your head. And then you read it out loud and you're like, who the fuck would say that? Like, this is not English. It is funny though, because then do not find that sometimes you do go into businesses and I think sometimes they do sort of expect you to kind of behave a bit like that. And then, but then the re- and then people say things to you like, wow, you're a, you're a straight shooter. You're really honest. You're really blunt. And I'm like, no, I just talk like a human. not be that way? Like, do you want me not to be straight talking? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. B2B tech and SaaS is a funny world, especially for that. weird. thank you so much for joining us, Sam. We finally have an actual SEO episode after, I don't know, three years of podcasts, two years and a half of podcasts. So that's great. We love it. It's not dying. Go do it. Go investigate whether you should learn about it or invest in it. And we hope to see you on the