Session #7 - What is Actually Working Right Now in B2B Organic Growth?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you're a marketer in B2B, you don't have to look far today to see LLMs. TXT works. No, it doesn't work. We talked a little bit last episode about referral traffic from LLMs converts better than organic and others saying no it doesn't. So there's a lot of contradicting stuff out there right now. And so we have spent some time preparing for this episode to very much dig into what we know is working, what we are seeing working with clients and really just kind of sticking to the facts there. So that's we're going to do for today's session. I am Nate Turner, co founder of 10 Speed and I'm going to turn it over to Kevin, my co founder. [00:00:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm excited. There's a lot to talk about as it relates to like, you know, what we're hearing in the industry, what's working, what's not and you know, when we look at our clients and our client data, there's a lot of, you know, validation in terms of just not only some of the stuff that the industry's talking about, but stuff that I think they might maybe getting wrong or speaking inaccurately about. So I'm excited to talk about it. A lot of real insightful stuff here. [00:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And we just had a few folks from our team were out at Brighton SEO conference in San Diego. Was that last week? I think last week. And that was kind of one of the, the takeaways was there was actually a lot of contradiction, you know, a healthy dose of fear mongering a little bit and totally, you know, some, some decent doses of weak data, you know, to support arguments as well. So I think a, maybe a bit of an IRL reflection of what's happening online. [00:01:41] Speaker B: Yes, for sure. [00:01:42] Speaker A: You know, ultimately. So anyway, with that I'm gonna kind of be just teeing up topics for you and kind of interviewing you almost on, on some of these. So yep, you know the, the first piece that we've seen is Evergreen and Tofu. So top of funnel content driving brand visibility. So I want to start there. [00:02:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And also to preface all these things, topics, points that we're going to talk about, it's all going to be about, you know, different content types that we're seeing successful. So that's obviously you just alluded to that with that like top of funnel and top of funnel content but also stage of stages of the funnel. [00:02:22] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:02:24] Speaker B: And you know what's driving real good visibility, there's some stuff around like what is driving Lower funnel intent and conversions and stuff. But I just want to point that out beforehand. But yes, evergreen and tofu content being, you know, a natural, good starting point for the conversation. [00:02:42] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:02:43] Speaker B: Is it's still effective. Let's say that. But why is the real big thing. So when digging into our client data, one of the big things that I noticed in another caveat is like hyper relevancy to product and icp. Right. So like reframing what top of funnel is, I think historically and this isn't like a mind blowing insight, but it used to be a lot of stuff that was not super relevant. Right. Just things that drove traffic. [00:03:17] Speaker C: Correct. [00:03:17] Speaker B: Right. So I think the thing that we're seeing is if you are super focused on the right core concepts around the top of the funnel, so again, high traffic drivers, but do help educate that audience, you're still going to get some really strong visibility. Yeah, I can stop there. [00:03:38] Speaker A: Keep going. [00:03:39] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. I will also say too, one of the things I observed recently, and this is through the like search lens, SEO lens is, is that because it's super recent, the stuff I looked at was like the past three months there's a lot of, of positive impacts to businesses from some of the like Google algorithm updates that have happened that's driving this. And it actually seems like Google's like giving up. They're actually rewarding really targeted content strategies. That's like another big part of all of the points we're going to get. [00:04:13] Speaker A: Which isn't probably getting as much attention because of everything else going on with. [00:04:17] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. So yeah, I think like, you know, so on that point like there was an update and in August there was a spam update which is very relevant to this tofu relevant tofu content driving visibility that we saw a ton of really helpful evergreen high quality, like longer form content increasing in traffic in search which you know, made its way into a bunch of different areas including AI overviews, good rankings, all that type of stuff. But like specifically content types like Listicles. Yes, think. And I'm trying to keep some brands anonymous of course, but like things that are like really big tips to doing the thing that you do in your space around a specific product. [00:05:11] Speaker C: Right. [00:05:11] Speaker A: So hyper relevant like you said. [00:05:13] Speaker B: Yeah, right. But like I think right now there's a conversation around that type of content will be really eaten up by AI and LLMs and all that. And I, I don't think it's as black and white as that based on the data we're seeing. Like that piece of content which could be like 50 tips to do XYZ within your space to do your job better, et cetera, which would naturally be a top of funnel piece, is not only growing in traffic because it's getting, if it's hyper relevant, super competitive, differentiates in some way. It's getting increased visibility in aios which I already mentioned, but but also getting cited in LLMs too when there's conversational prompts happening around that. So there's a lot going on. But like the narrative online right now would be that don't go create that piece of content. [00:06:03] Speaker C: Right? [00:06:03] Speaker B: Like you don't need to because AI and LLMs are going to. No, we're seeing like really significant traffic gains. [00:06:10] Speaker A: So yeah, kind of an old adage like you should always kind of question anything that's positioned as always or never. I guess I just said always but you should question that. So anyone who's saying in that kind of framing like don't create this. I think it's kind of in a never type of tone. Whereas kind of what you're saying is context matters, the actual topic, how relevant it is to your product and your ICP versus just trying to write to get traffic and any and all traffic, which is again the spam update long time coming and kind of like been evolving from the eat stuff over time. So you mentioned. I did want to clarify when you said like driving brand visibility, you're saying kind of across everything like LLM visibility, aios which again AI overviews which would be the kind of the top part of Google search and then organic search as well. So like not just the aio but also still some kind of typical blue link graphic as well. [00:07:23] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Because it ties to also some other stuff we'll talk about in a little bit further down the funnel where you know you can get into more branded content. But like these top of funnel pieces that are high relevancy, helpful tactical too really help improve awareness around us, even existing brands. Like so I looked at it across like bigger brands that we're working with as well as smaller brands. If you have a lot of domain authority, right, like and you've been around a long time, you're gonna, you like you should be doing that type of content, you're gonna crush it. Because if you're you know, again trying to keep things a little vague in terms of the brands but, but like it's, it's worth going after to create that type of content and keep it. The other piece here is keeping it evergreen so when I was digging in a handful of pieces I saw published like you know, spring of 2024 initially and like all it is is just kind of ticking up. So it's like basically the breaking through. If you were to plot out all of the like AI LLM updates and all of the like things that would say that this thing should pro just never succeed. It's been continuously growing as all of those not only iterative updates to like LLMs have happened, but AIOS have gotten more powerful. Like so you can see that that content is actually feeding those things and it's winning on its hyper relevancy and helpfulness essentially. [00:08:51] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:08:52] Speaker B: If I need to be more specific. [00:08:56] Speaker A: Is there any evidence that like the cadence for updating is changing to like keep something evergreen? [00:09:05] Speaker B: I think it's still like kind of the. I don't want to like con. I don't want to say old playbook a lot, but I think the fundamentals around updating content, there's like a spectrum of like depending on competitiveness. And so like, you know, if it's a really high traffic driver, hyper relevant and there's a lot of competitors in your space, you should probably be looking at revisiting that like quite on a quarterly basis. I did see that some of the stuff that we were looking that I was looking at hadn't even been updated that often. So it could even use some more. If we were to nurture it even more, it probably would gain do even better. Yeah. But I would say like more competitive. Make sure you're looking at it quarterly. You can probably be getting away with like maybe once a year depending on if it's not as. But yeah, yeah. [00:09:53] Speaker A: So I have one observation and one question. Observation is last episode we talked about the search engine journal State of SEO 2026. I think it is one of the things that we kind of noticed in that survey data was SEO is talking about measuring brand visibility and how that was sort of a departure from the past. So this definitely seems to kind of like paint that picture with a little more detail, I would say. And then the question I have is if you're saying top of funnel type of topics, very relevant to your product, you know, like 50 tips of how to do this thing which is relevant to your ICP and can be done with the company's product, would you say that also just has benefit to customer marketing too? If ultimately like sort of a adoption of the product and everything there, like it's not even just top of funnel awareness. It's almost like Customer marketing for sure. [00:10:59] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:11:00] Speaker B: Specifically being like then how to do this, how to do so taking it one step further being like how to do that thing with product. That product. [00:11:08] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean you certainly could, could branch off and have far more detailed content. But I mean I even just thinking back to sprout days, like there was constantly social media managers using our tool who would love tips or you know, a quick thing that was like we had a huge guide of like all the holidays or like you know like the national Burger Day or whatever. Like that's a very top of funnel type of thing but it's actually like super helpful for the client and not that like the product does anything for that but like you're going to use the product to, to build around that. That's what I mean by like there seems like a tie to customer marketing. [00:11:46] Speaker B: Absolutely. Some of the stuff the examples that I pulled to like get the data were exactly that, you know, the tips that you would like get or tactics that you would get from these pieces of content would directly apply to the product. So like product can easily be mentioned but then also you could repurpose that content into actual customer marketing like initiatives as well. So like the content serves multiple purposes as well. Yeah, it's not so broad and like unbranded. Right, that's what I'm getting at. [00:12:19] Speaker C: Yeah. Cool. [00:12:22] Speaker A: And then the second thing to cover was like targeted aio. So specifically I guess in this case are you referring more to AI overviews or optimizing for. More like geo optimizing for. [00:12:42] Speaker B: It's a bit of both. What I really heavily looked at was AI overviews in this specific instance and the way we were able to roll up the data. But it does apply to both. Like I looked at, did some prompt analysis on some of the content that we're looking at but. But yeah I'd say it's a little bit of both leaning heavily into aios just because I don't know, there's also some thoughts that we have internally around like Google being like under, under not valued but like they're the, the underdog right now. I think a little bit in terms of like, of the, the narrative around AI search and all of that. Right. Like there's been a big emphasis on LLMs like ChatGPT and that like eating their lunch. But the reason I kind of pulled on this thread when it came to targeted AI overviews was that like the conversation around that is that those are equaling zero click searches. Right. So like it's just summarizing Everything. And like, you know, I guess like it's maybe not worth even trying to rank or get visibility there. And what we're seeing now that the dust is settled, it's actually very worthwhile to not only like analyze those AI overviews like you would previously for other things, but to like very aggressively put your time into that because that's where we're seeing a lot of that traffic growth and again valuable traffic. Like there's going to be a lot. I'm talking around traffic, but this is super relevant content we're talking about here. [00:14:13] Speaker A: Well, it's definitely. If you go back and map from the introduction of it, like very early on the AI overviews were essentially a rich snippet and just pulling that text. And now when you expand that result there are a lot of. It's like there's structure, there's headers, there's links from that. And so. Yeah, so that's an interesting point. So what do you mean by targeted in this case when we say targeted? [00:14:42] Speaker C: Targeted. [00:14:43] Speaker B: Yeah, good question. I mean it's kind of more like keyword targeting to some extent. But like in it's the intentionality behind going after AI AI overview optimization essentially because I feel like it's become a bit of an afterthought. Not to be redundant in my previous point, but like it if you really analyze how the query what queries are driving that, you should be able to find yourself into multiple AI AI overviews for a specific topic that seem to have compounding growth based on what we're seeing. And for transparency too, we're looking at, for AI overview reporting because that's clear, that's very important in this conversation. So it's not just BS that we're, we're using ahrefs, their AI overview reporting because they do have one where you can see on the SERP you can isolate not only top pages that are getting traffic from overviews, but like keywords that you know are triggering an AI overview and all that. So you can really get very good data on that. [00:15:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:15:49] Speaker B: So this just in case anybody's like Google doesn't give you that information because they don't correct. Very important point to clarify. But yeah. And then that actually even ties to the first point that we talked about, which is like the evergreen it's. It's not all top of funnel like targeted AI overviews. There's they're triggering throughout the funnel, branded middle funnel, lower funnel, all that. So that's what I also mean by targeted is like really analyzing the stages of the funnel, you can almost create what it seems to be based on these pieces of content. Like an understanding of how to map discoverability through each of those stages by understanding what AI overviews are triggering at the top to then feed into content that would come in. In the middle. [00:16:36] Speaker C: Right. [00:16:37] Speaker B: Which will. I don't want to jump into the next point, but all these are tied together. But there's some other interesting observations there. [00:16:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:16:46] Speaker A: So fair assessment that not all AI overviews are equal and some, like, by being intentional and, like, really looking at which ones to go after, which ones to optimize for, like, they can have more significant impact on your business. [00:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think another point to be specific about it, too, is when we first got our ability to actually look at performance in AI overviews again, even through Natures or any other tool that might be doing that people might be using SEMrush, all you were able to really understand was, all right, so now AI overviews are here. Where do we happen to be? And it was mostly those, like, broad, generic kind of terms and legacy content. [00:17:31] Speaker C: Correct. [00:17:31] Speaker B: But now we've had enough time out with AI overviews out there that you can do really targeted work to not only go, like, we don't want to be in these AI overviews and we want to be in these AI overviews. So it gives you an even more specific roadmap for, like, the new way to optimize your content for those things. [00:17:51] Speaker C: Yes. [00:17:52] Speaker B: And it goes back to fundamentals, like, all right, we're getting an AI. Clearly, we're getting an AI overview for this question that is adjacent to our category because we have that piece. We don't want that. Right. So let's tighten up our content footprint and then understand where we're not triggering on brand queries and all that, and go and create those pieces of content. So it's fruitful. [00:18:18] Speaker A: Are you seeing more, like, intent matching and the actual, like, content, or is it more heavily weighted on, like, the structure, schema, part of it? [00:18:32] Speaker C: Both. [00:18:33] Speaker A: Like, just from anyone who's kind of trying to think practically about. [00:18:36] Speaker B: I do think it's a bit of. I do think it's a bit of both. I mean, I think the. The schema stuff, like, schema and everything can give you an edge like it. And has in the past to some extent. But, I mean, that makes it sound like you shouldn't be doing it as a fundamental best practice. I think if you do all those things, then you give yourself the best shot at being included in those, and then at that Point if you've done everything, it's all about competitor analysis. Just going like, all right, so that first summary has one link citation. That brings up the four links on the side. Who's the number one one in there and all that. And then the other part of this too, that I also don't want to forget is that there is a actual strong correlation or observation I had with getting a lot of traffic growth from AI overviews, but also not having a strong ranking position in the blue links, if that makes sense. [00:19:40] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:19:41] Speaker B: Which one shows that, like, the AI overview, like the AI overviews might be pulling from further down. So, like, it isn't all about optimizing for position one within the traditional links because of a variety of factors. Could be domain ratings, whatever. I think it's actually what we're seeing is that it's just citing the best content or sources, regardless of being maybe a backlink profile to that specific piece or anything. Which was like one of the more interesting takeaways from this. Probably me more analysis. But like. Yeah, yeah, like all the pieces that were getting traffic didn't have just a strong organic position on it, but it was getting good clicks from an AI overview serp. [00:20:21] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:20:22] Speaker B: Which is interesting. [00:20:23] Speaker C: Totally. [00:20:25] Speaker A: And one more question on this. So for any B2B marketer listening and kind of thinking about where they're focusing time, how to approach all this, safe to say that basically what you're seeing, I kind of asked at the start of this question around or this point if you meant AI overviews or optimizing for LLMs. So this in particular, the data you're citing and stuff is AI overviews. But it's not that this process is terribly different. Like, you should be seeing benefits around citation and stuff as well. It's not like there's a separate set. [00:21:10] Speaker C: Of. [00:21:12] Speaker A: Things to be doing with that same content to try to make it work for both. [00:21:15] Speaker B: No. [00:21:15] Speaker A: And if there's overlap. [00:21:17] Speaker B: No. And if you did, then you could possibly be like, competing with your. Creating competing priorities to some extent that, like, would make you not successful in one or the other. Yeah, no, there's definitely a big overlap. The freshness thing is a big part of it. Which mean, like, meaning just making sure it's up to date. It seems like LLMs are citing things that are more relevant and up to date, which, again, like, feeds into everything we've just talked about, like keeping it super relevant to product, relevant to strong intent and authoritative. Right. Which we'll get into a little bit with some other stuff. [00:21:53] Speaker C: But yeah, but yeah. Cool. [00:21:55] Speaker A: So then the next one was product content that solves real problems. [00:22:01] Speaker B: Yes. [00:22:02] Speaker A: Parentheses, middle funnel and bottom of funnel. [00:22:05] Speaker B: Yes. This is actually one of the like more exciting ones I think because it's rewarding something that I think historically harder to get done content wise but is absolutely like a worthwhile effort. So couple other I guess caveats or not caveats. Preferences. Middle funnel being like high intent content that can be like not as branded. We talk about it a lot in a variety of ways. But let's just for simplicity say that so like you know that can be like the best X software content. Right. And then bottom of funnel being more branded. Right. So definitely something that's heavily considering influencing a purchase. [00:22:54] Speaker C: Right. Yep. [00:22:56] Speaker B: But like a good example of something I saw like paying off really big dividends that was created this past year and I will again keep the brand anonymous was a piece created by the company that we helped create that really breaks down in more transparent language the they're like pricing structure. [00:23:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:20] Speaker B: And it being like really getting a lot of traffic. [00:23:23] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:23] Speaker B: Which you could see tying to like a lot of the discovery that they're seeing at the top of the funnel. [00:23:27] Speaker C: Yes. [00:23:27] Speaker B: And then pushing people further down the funnel but like builds trust, gets people concrete answers before signing up. It's something I think we have always been very big advocates of in terms of just like let's put it out there. [00:23:41] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:42] Speaker B: I think the days of being like really opaque about like your pricing and how you do that, I know on the enterprise side that's still tough but like I think anybody who has the confidence and to just go forth with that type of stuff, as long as it doesn't put you in a weird position from a sales standpoint, I think it's like probably a pretty blue ocean or, or you. [00:24:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:24:05] Speaker B: Because your competitors are probably not doing it. Like I haven't seen a ton of companies doing it, but there's a few that we've done it for and it looks like it's doing quite well in. [00:24:13] Speaker A: So when you say quite well, is that across organic search and LLM or are you. [00:24:19] Speaker B: Yes. [00:24:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:24:20] Speaker B: That's the other thing is that the, the, that type of content is even more powerful for the LLM referral traffic because you're taking control of the narrative. One of the things that we won't get into as much on this one, on this probably in this convo is citations in general. Like you want to get like your brand on all the review sites and it's going to like weigh some of that stuff heavily. You want to have, still have a control of that conversation on your website. [00:24:53] Speaker C: Totally. [00:24:53] Speaker B: Because it's taking that into consideration. If it doesn't. The talk track we've always had with our, our clients and prospects is that like, you know, you want to take control of that, plant a flag. If you're not telling that story, someone else will because they will. Like some competitor is going to see you not doing that and then they can tear you down or tear down your pricing and all that. [00:25:14] Speaker A: Or just say completely wrong stuff too. [00:25:17] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:25:18] Speaker B: So like, yeah, and this is something I would say anybody should have been doing for a long time. I. But I'd say it's more of a. I don't. I guess it's table stakes now. Like you should be doing it because there's a real big significant. When they're in the AI search world. [00:25:35] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:25:36] Speaker B: More so than it ever was before because I think people were just afraid that like, oh, those branded queries aren't there and anything, but I think they're there now. [00:25:43] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:25:43] Speaker A: Which is interesting because I know when the AI overviews were starting to roll out, that was one of the things that almost seemed like a killer of the like, whatever. Best project management software query is that view where like it would just, it would pull in project management software. [00:26:07] Speaker B: Right. [00:26:07] Speaker A: Tiles, you know, into that SERP and it seemed like, oh, that's, that's dead. And then like, obviously like G2 and some of those sites have also created content that seemed like maybe they were going to primarily dominate that. I don't. I feel like that's sort of all evened out. But yes, now on the LLM side, sort of the GEO perspective, there's certainly a lot of leverage there in that type of content. [00:26:36] Speaker B: Yes. And also to give a couple of other examples too, because the one that like really got me excited was the one that was about like, like, you know, plans, pricing, all that type of stuff. Because that's like a harder one to get people to buy into being like even more transparent about. And if you can write that in a voice that's not even as like, you know, product marketing, Y, like write it as if you're another brand doing it in a sense. But that'll be super, super impactful. But the other stuff is like longer tail, like use case specific content, anything. How to do XYZ with my product for XYZ industry function, use case, whatever. I pulled like 10 different examples of that across multiple clients and they all seem to be doing really, really well. So they're branded but they're also. It can also be depending on the space like an unbranded term too. [00:27:32] Speaker A: And that makes sense because that kind of matches the lengthening query. [00:27:40] Speaker C: Well the. [00:27:41] Speaker A: Length of queries that are much longer on LLM. So instead of just saying best project managed software, it's like I'm a whatever marketing ops director at this type of company at this size and we need to integrate with blah blah blah blah. And therefore yes, the more detail you have there. And that's like we talked a while ago about help center content too being ungated and for a long time has just been so basic. Like the amount of here's how to cancel your plan and you know that kind of here's how to add another user but like to really leverage that which is meant to be far more detailed in product type of stuff. Like yep, here is exactly how you integrate with this tool. Here's exactly how you set up this bi directional sync or whatever those things might be Totally. But not entirely from just the customer support lens or like a product engineering lens. It's like let's make sure we're solving the problem and matching intent and stuff too. [00:28:58] Speaker B: Absolutely. We were talking about this on an internal strategy review for a newer client earlier on, but we were talking about help center content as a thing that probably makes sense for them in this space and they don't have it yet. But like anything we've talked about, prioritization is important. So there's a few key things we need to do first. But it's. It was on the heels of all of these like new insights that we're, we're talking about now which is that like this stuff is super helpful. We always use, we always recommend like arming that content. That's probably a weird way to phrase that. But like if you have a help center, we see it a lot with AI data companies, more technical products where they have like really robust either like developer documentation which would be more that or help center stuff that's you know, spread across maybe multiple subdomains. So there's a lot of nuance in like business decision making that probably has to go into some of this, but sometimes they're not indexed and like I just, there's a lot there. If you've been around for a while and you have a ton of that and it's not necessarily driving organic traffic, this is the time to revisit it because you can absolutely be feeding into LLMs and you might already have like a treasure trove of just like Automatically created content because your developers created it or. [00:30:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:30:16] Speaker B: And so if you're in house at a company like that, then. [00:30:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I was six or seven years into my time at Sprout when when we kind of took on the project to ungate, the SO Help center was only accessible to customers who were logged in. So kind of ungating that, making it publicly facing and moving it onto the root domain in the subfolder. Yeah, was a big project, but it was like nearly overnight, the amount of like added traffic that came from that and then I don't think we ever fully like explored all the ways that we could have optimized it even then. And that's obviously, you know, well ahead of anything that's happening on the LLM front now. [00:31:07] Speaker C: So. [00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there, there's a ton of opportunity there. [00:31:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:31:13] Speaker A: So I mean, you think this area of optimization for companies, do you think it becomes more important over the next few years or no? [00:31:26] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean it's exciting for some key functions too. We always talk about product marketing is sometimes not existent at a company and I think having the right people to collaborate on this type of content is going to just be so again to use it fruitful as LLMs continue to grow in terms of referral traffic. But just AIOs, all of this. And then I know we're talking about this through that lens of AI search because it's so big top of mind, but like it's worth noting that this stuff is conversion driving content or influencing content. Like it isn't just to drive branded awareness or clicks at the bottom of the funnel. Or clicks at the bottom of the funnel. This is stuff that has intent, that is clearly around either people searching on how to use your product because they're thinking about using it. [00:32:26] Speaker C: Yep. [00:32:27] Speaker B: Or again on the customer marketing side too, they might be using it and they just know how to find it because your site's massive or something. But there's so many opportunities there and it's worthwhile focusing in on it. [00:32:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:32:40] Speaker A: So to add to that, I mean you just mentioned brand visibility, you know, influencing pipeline and conversion. Like a number of things we're kind of talking through there. Let's talk about authority. Oh, so you know, data backed and like trend content, which you know, is. Is authority building. Maybe we can kind of shift to that. [00:33:04] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. A few categories we work with seem to be working. What seems to be working well is hyper focused trend or data informed content. I would say like if you could think, like if I were to Use an example. It'd be like maybe like an Airbnb or something. Could use something like this where it would be like, you know, pricing in specific areas. It's not a local play necessarily, but like there's a scalable motion there where you can build use data that your company probably has around trends or pricing or things like that within specific areas. That seems to be working really well because people are searching for that as their. I know I'm going to probably put this through the lens of like a travel or hospitality lens because that's kind of like the category I was looking at on top of some other ones. But there were some standouts there. [00:34:05] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:34:06] Speaker B: But I think it just logically makes sense to figure out a way to do that within whatever category you're in. Is like how do you use your data to. And this is stuff we've talked about before, but integrated into your content in a way that gets cited in the AI overviews or LLMs. Again, because that's going to be the two most prominent first touches for a lot of people these days, or at least what they see. And they're going to want to see unique data. It just increases your chances, it looks like, of getting cited in these things. I'll stop there. [00:34:39] Speaker C: Yeah, okay. [00:34:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot. We've talked plenty already about the need for first party data. Original research. Original. Just data and content from your product and your audience. I do think it's interesting some of these things can also just be some types of products. There's just a really good product marketer or solutions engineer, someone in the company who's really good at using the tool, who can go use your company's own product to get some really interesting cuts of data and insights to then kind of go publish around that too. So it doesn't even have to be what are we pulling from our own database and aggregating of like how our customers use our product. It can also just be like the use case side of it too. But totally. [00:35:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:35:44] Speaker A: Maybe talk a little bit about how like. So that makes sense. We've talked a lot about like the importance of having that data, how that translates into actually building authority, you know, in search engines or in elements like any of that. [00:35:59] Speaker B: The key things still are like, you know, if you have unique data points, your likelihood of getting like the new thing is citations and obviously LLMs and things like that. But backlinks. Right. Like, so if you have data points that are unique, they give you a strong motion for like the digital PR component. [00:36:17] Speaker C: Right. [00:36:17] Speaker B: You arms your that function or person or however you're doing it with material to reach out to reputable sources to get cited. Which also helps like all these things all kind of funnel back to the LLM stuff to some extent. Because if you get it on an authoritative website, your site, your stack could still be cited through that. Right. And then hopefully people find your way their way back. But, but that's a big part of it is like backlink building citations and LLMs. The backlink building influences domain authority which is ranking, you know, that is a ranking influencing factor within search and then all these other things. So like there's a multifaceted authority building component. There's. And if you know, if it's good data just, I mean I know this is more qualitative in the eyes of like the buyer but you will be viewed as a more authoritative source if like you're presenting your own research, really thoroughly researched report like it's gotta be clear, like it's gotta be. Or sorry data. Thoroughly researched data. Like you know, cite how you did found that data or how you aggregated it and all the things that we learned in school in terms of like that. But, but that like don't make up data I guess is maybe what I'm saying there. [00:37:35] Speaker C: Yo. [00:37:35] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. [00:37:36] Speaker B: Just to be unique. [00:37:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:37:38] Speaker A: And then just to, to clarify like one of the things that you're saying can make it more powerful is it's not just that your company or product or service might get mentioned. There's a difference between being mentioned in an LLM and being cited. And so the citation is actually linking. There's actual source note citation that links to that data directly versus which it may also pull in a summary of it or whatever. Versus just summarizing. Yeah. 10 speed is great for SaaS companies like sort of generic takeaway like linking to that is the actual citation versus mention. [00:38:23] Speaker B: Right. The citations are big because well that's going to be. That's like the new. One of the newer north stars for AI search is getting those. Because if you do get mentioned that's great and if you can like, you know, if you can attribute that to anything that it's harder. The citations are what leads to the actual referral traffic which I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that probably you know, kind of poo poo that. But like we have dashboards like AI referral traffic dashboards we talked about. I think on the last episode the GA4 is like incorporating that as a channel yeah, that's where you're getting those that traffic. So it's really big and you want to. It's really important to try to get those because people are clicking on them obviously. Then once you get them, you have to figure out how to improve the visibility or clickability of it. But that's a whole other thing that we as an industry probably are not there yet. [00:39:14] Speaker C: Yep. Cool. [00:39:17] Speaker A: So I think that's probably the extent of that one. [00:39:19] Speaker C: Yep. [00:39:19] Speaker A: Especially since we've talked about it a bit more. We're also going to talk about core pages as conversion anchors. So maybe start by defining what we mean by core pages. [00:39:30] Speaker B: Yes, Core pages, core marketing pages. We. That's anything. Let's say that historically when we were in house it was like product marketing did own. So that's like product pages, feature pages, solutions pages, industry page. What's that? [00:39:46] Speaker A: Homepage. [00:39:47] Speaker B: Home homepage. The most. Yeah, yeah, the big one. Yeah. Industry pages. Anything that like you are deliberately putting on the primary domain subdomain to market the product. Right. That isn't educational content that funnels to those pages. Yeah. So it could be any of those. Um, I'd say the majority of the ones that you see these days are like, in that we try to push for our. I mean it depends on where you're at as a business. But like solutions pages. But see, especially to tie it back to what I saw in our data, those seem to be the ones that are big. Any other clarification on that? [00:40:25] Speaker A: No, no, I. Before you got into all of it, I wanted to. [00:40:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:40:29] Speaker A: Make sure you clarified what we meant by that. [00:40:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You were gonna say something. [00:40:34] Speaker A: No, go ahead. [00:40:37] Speaker B: No, this one was a good one because like we've heard and seen third party data that talks about homepages getting a lot of the referral traffic and like having their heyday again from. Because of LLMs, pointing back to those. And that is true. I think we've touched. Touched on this a little bit. But again the data just validated that like solutions pages were really big and I do think that that's a product of. A lot of the companies we work with just tend to lean towards that and I think we create more of those too. [00:41:06] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:41:08] Speaker B: So that should be noted. But an interesting one too on that one was in the overtime data that I visualized in the roll up. There was another strong correlation in the March 2025 core update that shot the solutions pages visibility up. [00:41:27] Speaker C: Yes. [00:41:27] Speaker B: I'm sure there were a bunch of other things that happened in March that probably included and did it. But yeah, that was the big one that I could see within the tracking tools we had in like, I'm talking like, like a 40k jump in traffic and weekly traffic from like one week to the next on Salute across these solutions pages. I will also caveat. We have one client that has like a ton of solutions pages because their product does a lot of. So they saw massive gains because they just have tons of use cases that surface here. Yeah. But that lends itself to. If your product does have many use cases, which, you know, hopefully it does, like go and create those pages because if you don't have them and a lot of times we. They don't have them. We work with clients all the time or we have in sales combos. Like, that's a big thing we point out right away is like, we need to increase the footprint of the website because you have all these different use cases that you've told us about from like an ICP perspective and this is what you're targeting. And like, like, we don't see it in the nav. We don't see it anywhere. So that is like money being left on the table and at least in terms of traffic. But it's also. Those are technically bottom funnel pages. [00:42:40] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:42:42] Speaker B: So there I can keep going. [00:42:43] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:42:43] Speaker A: Well, I think it's interesting. I'm curious to see where companies go with that because I feel like I've lived through a couple pendulum swings on that total. Like, it felt like people were extremely granular and, you know, creating a feature page or a use case page for every single thing. And then I think it swung the other direction where there was a desire to try to roll up and consolidate. Let's not have all these fragmented things. Let's try to tell a more cohesive story. And then does this now cause it to actually go swing back the other direction of take a really granular thing like Shopify software. You could do just a distribution page. The ways you can sell on Facebook and all these different channels or whatever. Or you could literally have a page for every single one and all the different channels and methods and things. Here's one that's just this in your settings and that tool, it's a small section of your screen, but you do a whole page on it. Just curious to see how that. [00:44:05] Speaker B: Yeah, hard to tell. I guess I'd say. [00:44:10] Speaker C: It. [00:44:11] Speaker B: It makes logical sense that you would create like individual pages for those types of things versus, you know, one. I don't know it. Hopefully it doesn't swing back the other way because I feel like with the way it's the way it looks now, it seems like the way it should be. [00:44:24] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:44:26] Speaker B: But you never know. I mean that's harder to predict based on like how the not only algorithm will change, but I think it's getting better at rewarding logical solutions. Not just solutions, pages like solutions to the mark marketing motion there. [00:44:40] Speaker C: Right. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:44:43] Speaker A: And I'm also just curious to see how that like what's on those pages. Like if there starts to be some like we talked before about like FAQs, like. [00:44:57] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [00:44:57] Speaker A: That's kind of had some. Some pendulum swings as well. Like do things like that start to emerge as you know we're just like the way people approach optimizing those pages. [00:45:09] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. But well I guess to all that. To one last thing I guess is you know every business and every SERP and all that is always. It's going to be different. So like I can imagine someone sitting there listening to this going like I've reviewed the SERPs and like it's rewarding like one page and not multiple pages. Like we see that a lot still. So like just I caveat that like do your research on what's actually happening for you. Like I'm talking about things I'm seeing for specific businesses that's working. All of this should be like do the research which is important which again I can't necessarily do for you and then make the right plan. [00:45:52] Speaker A: But yeah, you know, it's not going. [00:45:55] Speaker B: To be universal always. [00:45:56] Speaker A: So I think maybe you. You mentioned this but I'll just ask real quick before we move on. Do you think that like core pages is still an area where most companies are kind of under. Undervaluing. Undervaluing what they could contribute from like the exposure standpoint. [00:46:14] Speaker B: Yep. Mainly because too and there because the ones when we. Even when we see a product that has them a lot of times especially early time days which is a big part of why someone may be coming to us to. To work with us. Yeah Is like that content's super thin. Like yeah. They thought like hey we should do this and they have or they've created a ton. But again like they. They might have taken approach where they were like we're gonna programmatically maybe in some cases because they had a lot or just like we're going to be like hey we identified a bunch of them. We just, we just kind of turn these out. Everything requires thought and more. A little bit more effort than that. Like think from a value first standpoint like what can you do to provide it goes back to the. [00:47:01] Speaker C: The. [00:47:02] Speaker B: Even the helpful content we were talking about earlier. Earlier. [00:47:04] Speaker C: Yep. [00:47:06] Speaker B: Like treat the. Yes. They're undervaluing them because they're mostly likely not putting forth all the like comment and value or content and value that should be on the page. [00:47:18] Speaker C: Yep. [00:47:18] Speaker B: And maybe not creating them at all. [00:47:20] Speaker C: So yeah. [00:47:22] Speaker A: Awesome. And then the last one. [00:47:27] Speaker B: Which we. [00:47:27] Speaker A: Heard definitely got some love at Brighton as well. Technical SEO and site experience still being kind of a multi. Multiplier for performance. [00:47:38] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:47:39] Speaker B: I'm like, yeah, this is, I mean it's near and dear to our team's heart and I think ours as well. [00:47:47] Speaker C: Yep. [00:47:49] Speaker B: It's kind of like one of those logical things again where you know, if your website doesn't load fast like you should be fixing that no matter what regardless of if you understand that LLMs and you know, and all these searches tools are weighting that heavily. [00:48:08] Speaker C: Yep. [00:48:09] Speaker B: So like saying that to begin with is like fix your site, make sure it's a good user experience. But then the real like real life benefits of that are that you can actually increase your visibility and traffic quite a bit because there are ranking factors. Like we know for a fact that Google still looks at it from a page beat perspective. There's lots of variables there. We core web vitals is kind of like the historical version of what for many years that was what was weighted but they've kind of de weighted that as like the core thing. But there are many principles within that that people still look at. And then the LLMs we now know like the tied to freshness is just like the ability to retrieve that information quickly. And we've seen many examples of like if you update your page and do some research, update your page with specific things, you could see yourself in an LLM citation like a day later which I think is a real big reflection of not only you understanding like what content should be on there, but of like the site being really well structured, being having chat bot or sorry LLM bots can access that really quickly. So like to I guess put a pick a finer point on it. The real time response is big. The LLMs can't. And AI overviews can like really put together put you into those sources a lot quicker if the site's fast. Oh another thing that I found in some of the research and some of the stuff that we was shared with us too is that like AI crawlers, like if you have heavy JavaScript like they're going to ignore it a lot of times or they'll move on. It's kind of like that crawl budget thing of the old days. But they're. They're lighter weight crawlers I guess is what I'm getting at. So making sure that your site doesn't have all these things on it is a benefit there. Yeah, I'll stop because I know it's can be super heavy in terms of a topic. [00:50:12] Speaker A: Yeah, my, my only real question there. I think it all generally makes sense because it's all the stuff we've talked about before of the way they work with rag and all that stuff. Is there any evidence yet that you mentioned Google still weighs page speed and some of those technical factors. And again there's like degrees. So I'll pause my question for a second. There's degrees of that. There are certainly technical things that can just literally create a very negative user experience that can be detrimental. You can literally just have it set to no index and there's kind of some really obvious stuff. But then there's the more nuanced. [00:51:09] Speaker C: How. [00:51:10] Speaker A: Asynchronous code is loaded and just a lot of different things within the site. So we know that that's still a factor for organic search. Is there any indication that LLMs weighed it more heavily? [00:51:23] Speaker B: Yes, I think there's probably a lot to unpack there maybe for a future episode. But in the research I saw it said that they do. It seems to be that they are. Despite them being lighter weight. I think that that's also part of that is that they are weighting those things heavier. I don't know exactly why. [00:51:47] Speaker C: Right. [00:51:47] Speaker B: But yes, I. Yeah, it's tbd. But yes, I think that that's the case and I think the, the people who are winning with some of those quicker updates and things like that. Like I bet if you would really dig into the. The their under the behind the scenes. I was going to say undercarriage. That's weird. Of the site. It would. [00:52:09] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:52:09] Speaker B: It would show that they're probably pretty fast and pretty well optimized. [00:52:12] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. [00:52:15] Speaker A: I mean when you mentioned like technical being important to our team, near and dear to our hearts. [00:52:21] Speaker C: Yes. [00:52:22] Speaker A: You and I definitely personally bonded a lot over Thai food and oh my gosh. And technical SEO projects and all kinds of stuff. [00:52:29] Speaker C: So. [00:52:30] Speaker B: Late night Thai food. [00:52:32] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:52:36] Speaker A: So yeah, I think there's a lot there. But like what's interesting to me, you know, again, a B2B marketer thinking through Q4, looking ahead to next year, like what we've talked about today are evidenced. We've seen that again, everything's nuanced so someone could be seeing the opposite of what we're seeing. So everyone kind of needs to do their own thing. But we've talked about, we work on this clear framework for measurement, conversion, loyalty, engagement, awareness, reputation. This, this covers that like it is. You know, we talked about authority, we talked about brand visibility, we talked about conversion, we talked about customer marketing, like all of these aspects that are going into that. So like this, like if you just feel twisted up in knots because you don't know what to believe, what not to believe, what to do. Like, I think there's, you know, certainly a degree of experimentation that's needed. [00:53:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:53:44] Speaker A: But I think there are a lot of things that are pretty clear, manageable to go into your plan to continue to grow that cover those, you know, core areas of, of marketing and yeah. And really kind of help move you forward. [00:54:00] Speaker B: And if there's anything that layers through this that anybody should also take away is like, which should be what you're doing anyway is like, think about your icp. So like, don't ignore a stage of the funnel or a content type just because the industry or someone is saying like that doesn't work. If your audience needs that or your ICP needs that piece of content or you in some way and it's super relevant to your product, create it and don't be afraid that it might be, oh, a high traffic driver or top of funnel or anything like that. [00:54:38] Speaker C: Right. [00:54:39] Speaker B: And then also just, you're just with that, your ICP slash user, like make sure the experience is really great. I think those two things should bleed into every decision you make and it touches on everything we talked about and. [00:54:50] Speaker A: Helps you avoid the problem. Like the thing that's really had people railing against top of funnel is it's irrelevant, it's not relevant to your icp, it's not relevant to your product. Like, right. That's just going to be a negative thing in any part of your marketing. Like you don't go bid on keywords, you know, that are irrelevant to your business. So why, why would you approach anything else that way? And totally. [00:55:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:55:17] Speaker A: So I, I think that those, those are good points to, to really kind of keep it focused. [00:55:21] Speaker B: Yeah, we talked about it months ago. Like, everyone really jumped on the HubSpot. Oh, their top of funnel went away. Like, look at this. And like everybody wrote about it and it was just like, don't do like this old playbook doesn't work. And it was like, yeah, the old playbook of creating irrelevant content didn't work and shouldn't work. And now you can see what should have always been is that there's a top of funnel that is hyper relevant that can continue to grow and you should always focus there. [00:55:45] Speaker C: Yep. Yeah. [00:55:46] Speaker B: As a part of your strategy. [00:55:47] Speaker C: Yep. Cool. [00:55:49] Speaker A: Well, as you mentioned, we talked to a lot of companies. You know, if this is something that's weighing on you and you're kind of thinking through planning, we would love to chat, visit 10speedio podcast for more of this or just obviously a homepage to reach out to us and chat more. Please like and subscribe for future episodes. And also you can Visit newsletter Tenspeed IO, which is our substack where we do once a month kind of medium dive topic. And then you get early access to these episodes as well. So with that we'll wrap it up. Thanks, Kevin. [00:56:25] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you.