How We Ranked #1 for a Competitive Keyword in Just 67 Days - (B2B SEO)

I'm very excited because we're sharing the results of our live SEO experiment where we wanted to see how fast could we rank in Google search using SEO for our money keyword stick with us and you're going to learn how to do it for your brand too so you can make more sales through the Google Gods welcome to the B2B Playbook we built this channel for small B2B marketing teams who want to drive more revenue for their business every week we're showing you how to create more demand for your brand step by step using our five

be framework so if your time poor resource strapped but you still want to make a big impact on your business make sure you hit that like And subscribe button down below so that you don't miss an episode welcome back to the BB Playbook listeners today I'm very excited because we're sharing the results of our live SEO experiment where we wanted to see how fast could we rank in Google search using SEO for our money keyword stick with us and you're going to learn how to do it for your brand too so you can make more

sales through the Google Gods we've got B2B SEO expert Sam Dunning here to help us and show us exactly how to do it he's actually already shown us how to do it and he's going to talk us through the result I'm going to show him I think Sam's going to be super happy with how this is all gone before I hear from you Sam I just want to tell you listen to Sam is the founder of breaking B2B they specialize in B2B SEO and web design it's built for Revenue not vanity you're going to see

that in this episode because we've already got revenue from the work that we've done with Sam he's also the host of the breaking BB podcast which is another great podcast that's worth checking out Sam thank you so much for joining us again for this second episode thanks for having me mate looking forward to to diving in and seeing what we' abely absolutely okay so I'm just going to give our listeners a little context last episode we caught up and I told you I said Sam I want you to help me rank for our money keyword

and our money keyword is demand generation course because that's what we sell with the B2B Playbook we of course give out a lot of free resources around demand generation but for those who just want to finally implement it in their business that's what our programs there for it's a 12we program to help you do it now you very helpfully did some keyword research and you found I think there were two actually two keywords that were really useful it was demand generation course and demand generation training both are trending up and roughly 100 to 200 searches

per month yeah I think we looked at a didn't we when we did the previous episode and I think a couple we thought just weren't worth targeting mainly for the the search volume I also think the results pages that were showing for a couple of the keywords were just not really relevant I.E they were bringing up like long form howto articles when we want to be ranking a landing page so almost if we went for a couple of those alternative keywords that we were looking at last time that it would be an uphill battle trying

to rank a landing page where Google expects a how-to or informative based articles if that makes sense so I think we derived on demand gen course as one of our primary keywords because we thought that would be attracting High intent prospects market for your offer and ready to have that sales conversation if they do land on the page so that's the one that you gave us that's the one that you then gave us a strategy to execute I'm going to share with everyone what we did to execute that strategy and the results that came from

it before we got into that I also noticed Sam that probably quite a good thing is the year on year change in search volume for demand generation course 90% up year on year which I suppose suggests it again another sign that this is a keyword worth investing in because it is very closely aligned to our business and perhaps because it's growing too is that fair to say yeah yeah yeah I think if you rewind back probably three four maybe a little bit longer demand gen wasn't something that was really widely talked about certainly in my

circles anyway it wasn't until probably for me 2021 when I started listening to podcasts like Chris Walkers and other folks and of course your guys podcast that I really understood what demand generation even meant so I think it's I think it's becoming more and more known as a term and people are starting to realize that this is a a solid way to go to market and and like you say Google's reflecting that because more folks are searching for this kind of stuff trying to let's hope it continues to grow okay on to results Sam gave

us a strategy and then I think 60 something days later we actually hit number one which is pretty fantastic we were planning on having another episode Sam wh we between the one where you gave us the strategy and the one where we did these results because I thought we were going to get stuck somewhere maybe bottom of page one top of page two and we need your advice on how to really progress to number one but Sam number one you've done it Legend yeah it was it was quicker than I was exped you're going to

share the outcomes the result cuz that's the main thing actual book leads and sales revenue off the back end but it was quicker than I expected but at the same time George you were very proactive with the recommendations that I provided both for the landing page the technical SEO the content strategy and going out there and building some decent back links with potential Partners which perhaps we can dive into in a sack of because this is quite a competitive keyword and I don't know if you want to disclose some of the competitors it's entirely but

there were some big B2B SAS B2B kind of service-based giants that were ranking above us initially so the only way really even with a best-in-class page that follows good technical SEO guidelines has really useful helpful content that kind of shares on the landing page problem you fix impact of that problem proof that you're the the person or the company to help them with results addresses common questions concerns problems and all that good stuff and then ready positions you as a trustworthy source with social proof and all that kind of stuff folks would want to see

on a a landing page to be convinced that you're the right option for the course they they're looking to invest in but that aside without back links for these kind of competitive terms you're going to be fighting an uphill battle so I know you did a good job George sourcing partners and building some nice links to I want to take through some of those recommendations you gave me on how to go about getting them with not too much effort but look I'll disclose the competitors that we got past because I I think it's worth it

it's a good achievement we got past cognism cxl their own demand gen course the online marketing Institute Pavilion uh these are all our top competitors and we just absolutely flew past them as we continued to execute and implement the strategies that you gave us great stuff yeah and I think I saw HubSpot flying up for a few similar keywords so yeah so we created the page on the 2nd of June and for those listening I've just got up on my whiteboard a screenshot from our Google analytics created the page on the 2nd of June Sam

that you told me to create to really try and rank for this keyword we already had a landing page for the bdb incubator which is our demand generation course and you recommended if we wanted to keep that let's just create a whole separate new one and that's what we did so we created that on the 2nd of June and I think we hit number one spot on the 8th of August so it took us 67 days which is probably pretty quick in your view Sam would you say yeah there's a few things to consider first

and foremost I think we talked about on the previous episode but maybe not the the your website itself doesn't have a ton of domain rating or domain Authority so bearing in mind I'll check it in a sec whil we're whilst we're chatting but bearing in mind that was fairly low we were almost fighting an uphill battle so I'm sure if you looked at sites like cognism or cxl they're going to have a super high domain Authority probably somewhere 60 70 or even higher whereas I think yours was around 20 possibly a bit lower so almost

starting an uphill battle add to that we had to create a fresh page so we didn't have anything there already that we were enhancing we were almost going from scratch but of course you had the the template there that we could rejig take some good stuff out in terms of the design and framework but we still had to put together the content from scratch obviously create a brand new page then show G Google that this was a Page worth picking up and I think you might mention in a minute internally linking for some from some

other relevant pages on your site to help Google crawl it and then doing the stuff like once we decided on the focus keyword including that in the URL so as yourdomain.com demand generationen course including that in the H1 heading tag including that in the The Meta description meta title and I know you did a nice meta title so when you're when folks are scrolling scrolling through the Google results it's got a bit of a hook in that title that they see in the search end result page which also helps with click through rates what was

yours you decided on that right now so people can see it I think I actually went with the one that you gave me demand generation course then square brackets Crush 2024 Revenue goals so probably well aligned to the outcome that people want and then the description again mentions the keyword demand generation this 12we course gives you the strategy templates and tools you need to deliver a best-in-class B2B demand generation program top rated yeah yeah and I think what I've seen anyway confuses kind of B2B marketers and B2B Founders when they're getting stuck into seos there's

a lot of folks in the SEO World talk so much about technical SEO and I'm probably almost the opposite I'll do the very least technical SEO that I can get away with to get a page ranking because from experience anyway until you get to pages with hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of pages technical SEO doesn't matter that much from sites we've ranked and what I mean by that is worrying about kind of getting at 100 page speed as long as your P website loads fast it's fine making sure everything's perfectly at line going into

things like JavaScript and messing around with all that stuff and really worrying deeply about navigation As Long as You Follow the basics I.E the website loads quickly your main URL actually has the focus keyword in your heading one tag has a focus keyword in your metat Titan description have it within and then the actual page intent is built to what Google expects so what I mean by that is when someone searches for example demand generation course that activity comes up with landing pages but sometimes when you type in your keyword on Google that might come

up with product listicles or it might come up with a information how-to article or it might come up with a comparison article so you need to understand the intent of the type of page that Google expects to rank and then you need to review what the current top one top two organic pages are and look for gaps in those pages of how you can basically show Google that and your focus clients your dream clients that you're more helpful more useful more trustworthy you understand their world better you can differentiate your product your service your offer

all within that page so a lot of the tips and ideas I give are more around thinking about the end user or the end Prospect and how can we really show them as well as Google that we're well positioned not only to rank but we've got to remember we want to convert with this page so there's no point just chucking a bunch of text and doing some technical essay on a page we actually want someone to land us page and think this looks good y they understand the problem I they understand the problem I'm facing

rather y they understand my world yep that I am struggling with that and and yes I I do want to see some examples of other customers that they've helped in yeah let's book on to this or let's book a cool or whatever that cool to action is so I think that gets lost with a lot of kind of SEO advice it's more technical rather than thinking these are folks that have the same frustrations problems concerns that you do when you're investing in B2B offerings let's kind of position ourself in in their shoes that makesense we'll

get into a little bit later but perhaps why Sam the pipeline that came from this page was so strong and while we had if you look up we had what 120 sessions over 60 something days so look it's not an enormous amount of traffic but it's like very good targeted traffic and I think the reason why we'll see that this quality pipeline that's come from it is to your point there right we're speaking exactly to the pains to the problems the people who are searching this are facing that's it and that's another trap I I

think we talked about it in the first episode I was on with yourself a massive trap in SEO B2B SEO SAS SEO is that marketers Founders get stuck in the the traffic hi traffic keywords but unfortunately they tend to usually be more informational based so they'll go into tools like HRS or sem rush or Uber suggest they'll look for keywords relevant to their industry and that might be something like how to do something or best ways to do something or that kind of stuff and it has a ton of traffic but when it comes to

the more commercial keywords so in your case demand generation course or in my world that might be B2B SEO agency or SAS SEO agency like these real high intent keywords that folks type on Google when they actually want to speak to a salesperson or invest in the offer they often have way less search volume but because the the intent behind it is so much higher there's so much more commercial value it doesn't matter there'll be less people landing on the page but as long as your page does all those things we just talked about then

you're actually going to get more on the back end in terms of leads or demos or sales gos or whatever your end goal is so it's one of those things don't be deluded by high traffic as long as the kind of keyword represents what a Target client would actually search when they want to speak to someone it's fantastic advice just as part of the educational material that we try to create we did create a a landing page an article around what is demand generation which is something that gets way bigger search volume which is naturally

a lot more competitive but even as our page climbs up the rankings the person who's searching that could have a very different intent right to demand generation course it's much further up a funnel exactly and it's not that type of SEO doesn't have its place it's still useful it just means that person like you said is more looking to understand what demand generation is and they might get some tips from the page they might then check out your podcast or they might sign up to your email list or they might check out your YouTube channel

or they might check out another asset so you're keeping them within your ecosystem but because they're so much earlier in their Journey it's extremely unlikely that they're then going to sign up to your course but they might like you say subscribe to one of those assets and 6 months 12 months down the line they might become a customer or they might refer a customer great point and and I suppose this is why you say with SEO you should start from the bottom up in terms of the funnel because if someone is investing resources in SEO

we want to get a return sooner rather than later so that's generally your approach isn't at Sam is you do look for those money keywords first yeah exactly exactly I always think especially if I think you've said similar for demand generation but I always think of if I imagined the marketing budget as a barrel I would imagine things like outbound sales Google ads LinkedIn ads event marketing influencer marketing Partnerships and right at the bottom of that investment that budget Barrel would be SEO scraping the bottom fighting for its life to get budget or resource from

the team so I always think if we've got such limit limited cash or resource to invest in SEO let's make sure the work we do it's going to have the biggest impact in the shortest am space of time so for that reason yeah let's focus on what we call quote unquote money keywords I.E what is a prospect going to search when they're wanting to have a sales conversation around or offer now when they're directly searching for the product or service or when they're comparing us to Alternatives or when they're really they know what they want

and we just need to understand what are those Search terms that they're searching when they are needing that product or that service so start there and then work up the funnel whether that's doing that and then exhausting that bottom of the funnel for every Niche every service every industry and every variation of that keyword and then going up to more informational based searches once you have completely exhausted bottom funnel it totally aligns with our approach to Marketing in general makes a lot of sense take that bottom up approach speaking to what we were saying earlier

around some of the changes that we needed to make to our landing page that we created as I said we already had an existing landing page for the bdb incubator which is our demand generation course for those who are watching I've got that here on the left and I just wanted to show a little before and after just so people can get a feel for the kinds of changes we made on the page based on your recommendations on the before our H1 our title was just build your demand gen engine in 12 weeks so we've

got demand gen in the title but not demand gen course which is what we're trying to rank for so the page that we went and created we followed your advice and we just wrote the ultimate demand generation course across your Revenue Targets in 2024 so that also really nicely matches the title that we have when people view it on Google it matches their immediate need and it's good for Google too right because we have demand generation course in that H1 there yeah yeah yeah that's it H1 is a big impact when it comes to to

ranking a page and one thing to consider is you only want one H1 and then your other titles throughout the page can be H2 or H3 and some people worry how many times should I repeat the keyword in my copy or my other heading tags and I just say do it naturally if you're talking about a topic it's probably going to weave naturally when you do your body text when you talk about maybe the problem that your prospects are facing maybe when you're sharing your process let it down on the landing page when you're talking

about how it works or results you've got for others as long as you weave in that keyword nicely there and don't jam it in too many times you can't go yeah we just found opportunities where we'd already said demand generation and then stuck course after it which made more sense I probably should have done it before makes even more sense in the context of this page certainly doesn't seem to be any kind of punishment from Google and I'm sure if you went through and read the page if the average person went through and read the

page they wouldn't notice that there's any kind of keyword stuffing per se yeah just a few more before and after examples there underneath our H1 we had a like a little description before that used to just be we give B2B marketers and small teams the strategy templates and tools that they need to drive more revenue for their business we then change that to be our demand generation training course gives B2B marketers in small teams blah blah blah the same Spiel so we just added demand generation training course in there underneath that we have B2B marketers

love the B2B incubator and all the reviews and testimonials we get just a simple change reviews of our demand gen course from B2B Market is and I think that's an H2 and then I think if you scroll down you'll see instead of just FAQs it'll be FAQs of our demand gen course and so we just try and work it in yeah yeah that's it any way you can fit in naturally like I said it's not stuffing in that Focus keyword where it makes sense it's just going to help and I don't think we needed to

add a whole lot of length to the page Sam I think it was at least a couple of thousand words already I think it was I think the good thing was was that you already had a which not everyone not every marketer or founder is going to have in place but you had a decent sized landing page already that like you said had 1500 had 2,000 words and we did compare one thing perhaps we should mention is we did look at the top two organic pages that were already ranking for that keyword before we got

their demand gen course which I think was cognism and cxl and I think they had 2,000 or so words we thought to be safe let's try and bump that up a bit I always say if I'm trying to outrank a page and I've looked for my focus keyword what is ranking one two and three organic spots I always use use a bit of a blowout the water strategy so I'll think let's be safe let's not only look for gaps in this page in terms of where we could add value whether that's embedding a YouTube video

on the topic whether that's adding more hands on expertise content like we really know your problem we really know your world we know the impact it's having we're going to share some examples of customer results whether that's review videos testimonials quotes we're going to share the process maybe we're going to share the team involved we're going to drill down into FAQs like we're going to answer like all the FAQs you have around how muches it cost how long does it take to implement why should I choose you over a competitor and all that kind of

stuff that the the tough ones that come up on sales schols and basically just make this page as better as I usually go two to 3x better than I can on the competitors so for example if it was a comparison or a product listicle page like the top 10 Alternatives that you'll often see in the SAS world I'll try and double it or triple it in terms of value in terms of helpfulness and all that kind of stuff just so then I'm not going to be worrying one or two months later that this competitor is

going to outrank me because I've built something that's so much more helpful useful informative there you go you just got to make sure it's better don't you you've got to really prove to Google that you deserve that top spot do it better okay in terms of back links so Sam you told us that there's internal back link and external backlinks do you just want to quickly break down the difference between the two oh yeah so You' got something called internal linking which in short is just a simple way when you're publishing a new page to

your website this comes in handy especially if if the page might not be going on like a blog or resource section where it's easily navigatable in from your website menu but essentially when you're publishing a new page like George did for demand generation course you want to make it super easy for to find and Cru so look for any relevant pages that already exist on your website where you can put a little link to that new page and vice versa that you can link from that new page to other relevant pages so what's George got

here he already had blog articles for it looks like how to measure demand generation kpis the ultimate B B2B demand generation guide so he had a bunch of Articles already on the to topic of demand gen whereby within those articles he could link one of those keywords and link to that new page and that in short basically just helps Google CW the page a bit faster and then likewise from that new page that he created the landing page for demand gen course there might have been a couple opportunities where he could link back to those

useful articles in short it just makes a bit easier for for Google to CW the page and also helps the end prospect that lands on your site so if they want to if they're reading one of these how-to articles and then they think oh I'm actually ready for a demand generation course and they can click that internal link and that links to that new landing page so it's just a good for user experience and also good does it help with authority and relevance at all Sam so if I've got 15 articles all around demand generation

and a whole lot of things that you would want to know if you were taking a demand gen course and they linking back to that course is that a signal to to Google that maybe I am a bit more of an authority on this topic at all we've had clients that I can't tell you the exact impact but we have had clients that have said that just by doing internal links to to pages from other relevant articles that are on the topic or service Pages or landing pages whatever it has bumped up those keyword rankings

so it does seem to do the trick and especially like I said if you've got a brand new page that you're publishing that Google's yet to CW you want ultimately to signal to Google as fast as possible that this is page is active so if you can find relevant articles service Pages wherever on your site that you can link link to internally then it's only going to help the case and to try and confirm that context to Google we tried with our anchor text when we were linking between these Pages back to our demand gen

course page most of the time we just wrote the words demand gen course that was their anchor text meaning that's what was then linking back to the course page we swapped it up a bit with demand gen training join our 12 week demand gen course so we changed it up a little bit is there a danger of overdoing it if I just did it 20 times with demand call does that look bad yeah I think you've done the right thing because we normally encourage the same similar for which we'll talk about in a sec back

links but yeah I think with internal links with back links if you can mix up the wording so in your case rather than just jamming demand generation course as an internal link on every single page sometimes you've done demand generation training sometimes you join our our 12we demand generation course if you can mix up a bit the same for back links and make it a bit more natural it seems to help I think that's a I think that's a good idea if you can do that and just for those listening look we just listed it

out in a spreadsheet to keep track of what we were doing so we knew how many times we'd link to it what anchor text we use whether we that link came at the beginning middle or end of an article I'm not sure if that matters but just at least a bit of a record for a Sam because if something does go wrong then maybe we might be able to corate that with an action we did at our end don't you blame me you can look at one of those lines there and go I didn't tell

you to do that all right cool so that was internal links and then external back links so getting other people to link to you you had some really great yeah yeah so you've done a great job there some really great strategies for this Sam yeah yeah you've done a you've done a great job here you made a comprehensive list which is probably even more smarter laid out I I do just like on a previous episode where I talked about when we started breaking bb.com 6 months ago and I wanted to get just like we've done

for yourself I wanted to get our money keywords around B2B SEO agency SAS SEO agency ranking as as quick as humanly possible so as well as doing everything that you've done for those service pages and landing pages we wanted to juice them up outrank those big competitors and and get some keywords so we could start getting these competitive keywords ranking as as high as possible as quickly as possible so one of my favorite strategies to earn really solid back links and also it's good for repeat business building relationships and and much more is work out

make a list gole sheets Excel sheets wherever you want to do it of who are your partners clients customers suppliers friends colleagues in industries that serve a very similar ICP a similar Idol client profile to you but are not direct competitors and who can you have the quickest win to strike up a conversation with so in my case and I think you were the same like we both know a guy called Justin row who runs a LinkedIn ads agency called impactable and I think he's been on your show George and I think vice versa and

the same for us so that's like if you've got someone like that's going after the same ICP that you've already got a a good relationship with drop a message and then the whole point is you can create content together so it might it could be that it's a lowrisk ask for them so you might say look I'd love to write up an article for your website and within that article it might be something that's actually genuinely useful to their target market i. perhaps George gave some tips on firing up a demand generation engine or something

like that or maybe he shared his 5bs framework or whatever it may be and then within that article you submit that to this person so in this case Justin who runs LinkedIn ads agency he'd say yeah happy to collaborate because we've already got that relationship so it's probably quite an easy ask and then build out an article put an in put a back link within that article so maybe towards the end you try and weave in your link so in George's case it was demand generation course so you might just say when you're wrapping up

the article you might just say oh by the way if you're interested in firing up your own or if you're interested in checking out our demand generation course and then that's a do follow back link to that landing page and that it's as simple as that really that's what we call quite a lowrisk ass because you've already got that relationship if it was perhaps a prospect that you'd not done had much communication with or done much business with you might do something like invite them on to your podcast or you might apply to be on

their podcast there's good websites called chartable or listen notes where you can quite literally go onto a site like listen notes you can type in your industry and it'll bring up all the relevant podcasts so our example B2B marketing we'll see all those podcasts if you're in logistics type that in you'll see the top Logistics show you can filter it by podcast you filter it by the top listened like top 5% top 2.5% listened you can reach out to those guests or those hosts rather on whatever platform they hang out on be it LinkedIn or

elsewhere and I've got a bit of a cheeky way that I do podcast Outreach so I quite literally find the host on LinkedIn and I just dropped them a painfully short personalized request hey Steve or hey Janice had an unusual idea for your podcast are you against a conversation and they they'll accept the connection request like what the hell is this guy on about just put this really weird message they'll accept it I'll send them a little loom video with my idea with some concepts for their podcast and then that's maybe a 50% acceptance rate

do a valuable podcast with them once once you've done the The Helpful podcast you ask most folks will do an article page for that pod summarizing the podcast with the video with the audio the transcript and then you just ask for a back link to your target keyword but there's so many content plays guest article plays podcast plays that you can do with Partners customers clients friends to earn back links the only thing I'd say is try and check that the website that you're trying to earn a back link from has got some domain rating

or domain Authority and you can check that with a tool like H refs or Sam rush and and HR has got a free trial that you can use so there's that's probably some of the lowest kind of friction ways that you can do it that just take more Sweat Equity that's exactly what we did I I think we took your advice first and went for that lwh hanging fruit the people who i' had already peered on and they had a landing page and they hadn't linked to this I reached back out to them and I

think I managed to get three or four of those links in a week or so so that was really easy I think that got us to the the bottom of page one or so and then I think I had a chat with you on LinkedIn and you had a bit of a look into it and said look I think you probably need to Target some more of the Heavy Hitters websites with higher domain Authority and that's where you shared your advice of reach out to people that you know factors was one of them they've got

a much stronger website big SAS company I had a relationship with them and also tried to make it as much of a no- brander as possible as like these people are always looking for Content they want to written by experts so I did exactly what you said to do I wrote a demand generation guide and through it showed how you could use factors software to help achieve demand generation and do do it better and then I did the exact same thing with impactable with Justin I reached out to Justin told him that this is what

we would love to do and we'd be very happy to feature an article of his on our website and Link back to him make it a win and did the same thing except instead of talking about how you can do demand generation with factors talking about how you can do demand gen with LinkedIn ads so just tried to make it as much of a no-brainer as possible nice there's actually even one that should mention there's a really low lift way to earn back links that is not so applicable for brand new startups but if your

B2B company is somewhat established then you can leverage past press or PR that maybe your exact team leadership team or CEO or Founders or maybe marketing leadership have been involved in the past and you're quite literally just put in your website yourl on whatever SEO tool you use HF semrush whatever go filter it to the backlinks tab then start going to old links and you'll realize that in past articles press whatever they've probably just done a generic link to your website and in all these old articles so if you can reach out to the editor

or whoever you know that put the article together and just say look would you mind taking a sec to just update this link from a generic link to our website to this Focus page and I'll give you the copy I'll give you the exact text I want most of those will help as long as you can contact them they'll update that and another cheeky one is if your someone on your exact team is active on LinkedIn you'll probably notice that in some articles they've just linked to that person's LinkedIn and some press PR and ser

to your website so you can quite literally go on again an se2 HFS Rush go by search type literally copy and paste their LinkedIn profile or whoever the active person from your company is copy and paste their LinkedIn profile URL and you can see all the back links that have linked directly to their LinkedIn URL and a lot of those article pages won't have linked to your website and you again contact that editor and just say hey would I thanks very much for linking to my LinkedIn this is a cheeky ask but could you link

to this Focus keyword most of them will because they've already linked to your LinkedIn page so it's again another way of leveraging stuff that's already there in PR and just earning some nice back links off the back of it great tip they're really good if I can maybe add just one thing is when I made these requests for people to just update their website quickly I don't know if you do this Sam or if you think it makes a difference but I tried to make it as easy for them as possible so if I was

sending them an email with the changes I would copy and paste what was there currently and then cop have prepared written for them what to change it too so it was just so easy for them exactly every like everything if it's sales or marketing you want to remove as much friction as you can so that's a great idea or even offer them an incentive you probably don't need to if you're asking a mate or a friend but if it's someone that's coming in cold you might want to give them give them a bit of a

sweetener whether that's inviting them to your podcast or creating some content content for them or something like that they've got a bit of a sweee for giving we go into the results from this s like the actual pipeline something that's sprung to mind for me and actually what I was thinking of as I was going through this process is the benefit of having a media arm to your business because it makes these asks so much easier because all of a sudden you have something to give to that person so true so true I think you

and I almost I certainly do almost take it for granted because I've been running the breaking B2B podcast for four years I always take it for granted that I've got this show so I can just leverage it when I'm doing Outreach or messaging folks and I just say yeah we'll bring you on the show or yeah I've got this episode that you can check out or yeah I talked about that recently but it's the having a media I guess I I think of it as a just having a podcast but at the same time it's

so right if you've got a piece of media it doesn't have to be a podcast it could be a webinar it could be a different as but if you've got that way of communicating both to your idle clients through the channels that they consume whether that's YouTube podcast Emil list whatever but also a way of invit thought leaders prospects Target accounts whatever and then another way of using it within your outreaches it just makes these kind of asks when you do need to do stuff that's building a brand building your SEO building your demand gen

and all that kind of stuff just makes it so much lower lift for yourself and for those Target prospects and yeah having a podcast is is time consuming but at the end of the day there's so many rewards off the back of it if you're willing to put in the time to to set it up and and keep it going as well as the learning I made an excellent point we think about it as a meteor arm to those listening that might sound intimidating because that sounds like a really big thing but I think what

we're really getting at is as long as you're not just putting out product focused content and you have something that's helpful you said it could be a webinar a lot of people are probably doing webinars maybe they're mostly product focused can you start to integrate some kind of helpful content into it and now all of a sudden you have something to give people so when you go and make a request you have something to offer back yeah it's really useful I'm saying this because just like you George I'm a Founder so I I do a

lot of marketing but do a lot of selling as well and if you've got if you've got useful content on specific topics that are relevant to what you're selling really helps in the sales process it's like the amount of times where I don't know we've sent out a pitch like we've had someone come inbound we sent out a pitch then a couple days later after sending their plan of action I'll just say oh you might like this podcast episode that quite literally drills down into the exact strategies we're going to be using for your process

and I'll send that like a day or two before we have our call to go through pricing strategy and like people have literally said the reason they've chosen to work with breaking B2B is because I've shared the process in podcasts videos and examples and so they knew exactly what we're going to be doing so if you've got that stuff that you can create not only is it good for folks to find you or build trust and you want to leverage to build demand really good is sales enablement and actually close deals another great case for

why sales and marketing need to be more aligned imagine if your sales team listeners were able to as quickly as Sam could think of this relevant marketing material that you had created that answers all these questions and objections before they next speak to that Prospect people love to learn in their own time they want to do their evaluation in their own time and so this kind of stuff that they cons consume without you there is incredibly helpful okay let's go into results Sam unbelievable it's been what what did I say 67 days or something we

haven't been on page one for very long we actually got eight deals coming from it from what was it 120 sessions on the website or so one of them already closed one it's very good that's pretty fast way better than I expected way better than I expected we said I think maybe after our conversation in recording the first episode we said let's let's hope this works out nicely and it absolutely has I've been blown away I really saw the difference Sam from when we made it to the top three positions and then even more so

again once we hit that first one which I thought was quite interesting maybe because and I think I have the screen Scot here for this particular search it shows like the first result which is us and then it has these Snippets of all these coures underneath so to scroll down to the second result you've got to go pretty far that's true yeah you've got the people the people also asked section underneath and you've got a bit of a course section which I'm guessing only shows because it's a course-based keyword so like you say it takes

up if you're not in your keyword if you if you're not position one there's a lot of real estate you've then got to go past scroll past to get to organic 2 plus if some folks are doing ads which they probably are sometimes that keywords and you've got to scroll past the ads to the organic but yeah in your case if you're on the YouTube video you'll be able to see that George is taking up a nice bit of real estate Sam if our competitors do listen to this episode and they basically seeing what we

had to do to rank number one to defend this position is it just doing more of the same more backlinks doing all of that same stuff but just more of it yeah I mean we we probably want to keep it up I think just because you've only had you haven't had the organic one number one spot for long realistically and you've already got eight opportunities off the back of it and one closed deal so I'd say it probably just makes sense for you to just keep chipping away it and what I mean by that is

I.E if you're doing more podcast appearances which you will be as in when those folks Lish those article pages on the topic just ask them to to link to that one again to that Focus page and every now and then doing a an article submission for Relevant websites that have got a bit of authority and probably just adding to this page every now and then with what you think is useful so every now and then you might get a new question or FAQ that we can add to the FAQ Carousel section at the bottom of

the page that you might get on a sales call or prospecting call or you might get a new objection on one of your trainings that you can leverage in there or you might update the video that presents the C course or you might even do a process video perhaps in a few months time that you can weave in halfway down the page so just coming up with ideas that are relevant that are actually from those prospects that you're speaking to that they're going to find useful and just chipping away it just so that page it

does a few things really it gives folks more useful content when they land on the page and secondly it kind of signals to Google that it's not a redundant page and it's getting fresh content added to it every it's not a one and done that's not what I wanted to hear but that is the reality of almost everything in life isn't it you've already got the fruits of your labor George within a few days so you can't mean that much you're right I can't complain at all I'm absolutely stoked with the outcome and look I

knew you were good and you gave me a terrific process to follow it was really actionable and it's just amazing that it it happened at this point in time so thank you for the strategy thank you for your help with this yeah is there anything else that you would like to share Sam you're terrific at doing this for other businesses is there anything else that you'd like to share around your services and how you help others do this I appreciate you you're having me back on George clearly didn't piss off enough people on on the

first time but yeah glad to go through the strategies and break down I'm really glad it's it's got you some Pipeline and some deals in such a short amount of time so yeah there's three main ways if you want to carry on consuming our content on B2B and and Sass SEO strategies so you can follow me on LinkedIn Sam Dunning you can check out my podcast which is called breaking B2B or if you are perhaps tired of seeing your competitors ahead of you in Google search results every time clients are searching for what you do

how you help or comparing you to alternatives on Google then check out breaking B2B docomo a C thank you so much Sam listeners viewers make sure you check out Sam Dunning at least follow him on LinkedIn if you need help with SEO make sure you reach out to him go back and listen to episode one of this miniseries where he gave us the strategy so you can see how all of this ties together Sam thank you so much again and thank you for your time you appreciate it thank you sir enjoy the leads