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Intro
I’ve been super vocal about what a good SEO strategy should look like. And one of the things you’ll see often is a 12 months SEO checklist shared with stakeholders as an SEO strategy.
[checkout my SEO strategy course]
I guess stakeholders want some stability in what to expect is coming next, but also, it needs to be super clear that SEO is dynamic with new things happening and Google updates to search itself and to websites ranking criteria happen all the time.
Not to mention a lot of experimentations are happening to improve visibility in LLMs and we’re basically learning new things every day.
So whatever you present as an SEO strategy, there needs to be an understanding that this strategy is agile, and will adapt to whatever new thing comes our way. Or else, we will be living in the past.
A new report
I was reading a recent report saying that B2B buyers have started to embrace LLMs. But not just any B2B buyers, small and medium size buyers. The use LLMs to create a vendor list, and then take this list to do their own further research on other platforms [source].
What does that look like?
Bob, VP of Operations at a 50-person SaaS company, asks ChatGPT: “What are the best project management platforms for a growing B2B software company?” The LLM recommends five vendors, and Bob narrows his shortlist to three. He then visits their websites, checks G2 reviews, and watches YouTube demos before booking a few sales calls.
What does that mean for SEO?
If you’re optimizing your blog and landing pages pages content hoping this would help new users discover you and learn about your products, you maybe missing out a lot. Because users at the awareness (or discovery stage) may not be starting at google search at all, but rather on LLMs.
I mean here’s another simple example to demonstrate a real life scenario:
I was playing around with ChatGPT’s “fan-out” searches and noticed something interesting: the brands it recommends are already part of the search—not something it discovers from the websites it finds.
So, if you ask ChatGPT for “top SEO newsletters,” it already has a set of brands in mind. The additional searches are mostly gathering information about those brands or validating its choices.
In other words, the shortlist comes first; the search helps justify or verify it. That shortlist is influenced by what the model has already learned from its training data.
Adjust your strategy to the new funnel
The buyer journey funnel for b2b buyers changed a bit 😄
The buyers in the study were evaluating solutions with an average annual value of approximately $250,000, and 94% of those buyers reported using LLMs during their buying journey. [source]
So this means you need to yes continue thinking of search, but optimizing for LLMs visibility should take most of your attention. Ranking in bing is actually more important for you than ranking in Google, since chatgpt uses Bing.
The good news is Bing gives us a bit more data in it’s Bing webmaster tool dashboard, so that should be fun!
The next thing that should be a solid part of your strategy is how you get mentioned on third party websites, your social presence and if you’re doing enough of those to begin with. Because that’s were b2b buyers go to verify and do their own research, so you gotta be ready for them.
While these two things seem simple to understand, execution is where you separate the men from boys. It is a complete directional shift, and a good SEO will come up with a good list of tactics to execute on those two new directions.
If your SEO is still doing SEO for your B2B thinking only about Google, they’re still using the old playbook, in this new new world (yes new new 😄)
And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)
Agility is essential to success as much as doing the SEO right tactics. The last thing you want to be doing is sailing your ship at the best speed in the best possible way, only in the wrong direction.
I always say understand who the customer is, in-depth. Only then you would be able to create a tailored SEO strategy for them.
Ya… a mix of agility, and knowing your customer well would take your SEO strategy a very long way!
That’s that for today folks and see you in the next newsletter!
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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.