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In this episode of Confessions Of A B2B Marketer, I'm joined by B2B Web Developer and SEO Expert Sam Dunning of Web Choice.
We get Sam to share how SEO can impact how you capture and create demand in 2022...
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If you have a demand generation strategy, you are gonna whim me your business. No doubts, but I think in the same breath, why not capture the demand that's already out there? I capturing people that are in the market right here, right now, they wanna buy your stuff, whether that's a service, a product. So getting a balance, in my opinion is smart.
Sam, how we doing? Yeah, all good. Thanks, Tom. Cheer found me on the EO man, The SEO man. The man of many SEO personalities, seo, Pyra, seo, man. You name it. I've probably seod it or been a superhero of the SEO sorts for sure. Well, I wanna talk about this specifically SEO and b2b and specifically, How SEO may differ between these two different types of strategies I keep hearing about on LinkedIn.
Right. So first wanted to dig into that and then hopefully he's gonna take us on a winding discussion through the world of SEO and b2b. Sounds good. So first, before you actually even get to SEO is, I'd love to understand what you believe to be the difference between capturing and creating demand, and kinda why it's important that us B2B marketers know the different.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's a really important topic as well, because in the B2B space right now, from my end anyway, Tom, feel free to tell me if you see differently, but if I just scroll on my LinkedIn feed, I'm connected to a whole bunch of B2B SaaS, B2B marketers, B2B leaders, you name it. And I often see posts and stories and videos about creating demand as if it's the be all, end all.
Like if you have a demand generation strategy, you are gonna win me your business. No doubts when I'm all for creating demand, but I think in the same breath, we should be creating demands. We should be creating customers revenue for our business. But why not capture the demand that's already out there? I e capturing people that are in the market right here, right now, they wanna buy your stuff, whether that's a service, a product.
So getting a balance, in my opinion is smart. So the difference being that creating demand could be things like, Posting content on LinkedIn. So over time, your target audience sees stories. They see tips, they see you as a useful resource. Over time, you're building trust, you're educating the market, You're providing useful insights.
So when they need your service, they reach out to you. Or maybe you start a podcast, maybe you do video content. So you're giving people this useful content, like I said, this useful media. So you're positioning yourself as the only choice. So if they eventually need your help or someone they know needs your help, they're gonna point you to them because you're the one that they, the only company they trust.
Whereas capturing demand can be things like Google organic search, Google paid search review sites, which arrive in the tech industry and b2b whereby someone needs something. So let's say they need, I don't know, CRM for a small business, they type it in on. They click your result or they click the review site and then they inquire.
They request a demo on your site, so you're literally capturing the small percentage of the market that needs your stuff right here, right now. It makes total sense and it's actually just like better business catching demand, like the acquisition costs by definition is gonna be lower because you have to spend time educating people about the problem they have.
Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. That's why I don't get it. So I'd like I said, it annoys me a little bit cause a lot of businesses right now seem to be super hot on demand creation, demand generation. I agree with it. It's an awesome long term strategy cuz ultimately it positions you as the only choice in your customer's minds.
But it is a long term play. And when you've got tools like Google search, Google ads, review sites, and various others where you can literally capture people in the market right now, why wouldn't you do both? It makes sense from a revenue perspective. It makes sense to fuel your sales team of leads. So it's a win-win in my opinion.
Totally agree. Now my next question is, do you think that SEO is more suited to either one of those? I think SEO traditionally is more geared and better suited to demand capture. However, I do think it can supplement creating demand. And I do think that it can be a good partner to demand generation strategy to fuel your efforts.
So we can certainly dive into that if you wish. Well, yeah. First I wanna cover like how you would recommend like a B2B task company with like 50 employees in the Let's go for niche, like a manufacturing software space. Yeah. How you'd recommend them leveraging SEO to capture demand. Okay. So manufacturing software.
Cool. Are they like a new, are they new to seo? Yeah, I would say they've got 50 employees. They've got like a three person marketing team. They're like very technical company. They've maybe been doing some like tinies things over the past couple of years, but not really. Okay, cool. So yeah, they've got 50 employees, they've got a small marketing team they wanna crack on with SEO and cap.
Just some demand. So first and foremost, one of the first things that you wanna do on when you start an SEO strategy is something called keyword research. So you wanna actually think about if you're capturing. What are potential prospects, the potential leads that we're searching for, gonna type into Google when they need our wears, when they need our services.
So if you're selling manufacturing software for, so for example, let's say if, if it was a manufacturing CRM or something like that. You might type in something like best CRM for manufacturing company, or best management software for a manufacturing company. So what we wanna decipher is what are these high buying intent search terms, which use you a long tail?
So that's typically when a keyword on Google is kind of more than two words or so. What are these things that are potential bias, these juicy leads that we wanna capture, actually searching for when they need? So, and apologies for cancel. So yeah, what are they looking for? So there's a bunch of tools you can use this Tom.
There's a way, a number of ways I recommend. So you can use tools like Neil Patel's got a tool called Uber Suggest, which I think's got free version AHF Sim Rush. They're a sponsor the show. So we're gonna say yes, ahs, cheeky plug. So you can use these kind of tools where you can type in keywords around your industry and you can get details like how much traffic do they?
What are the competitors? What are they up to in the industry? And you can get insights around how worthwhile these search times are going after. And a few things to consider when you're doing this is number of traffic isn't always the be all and end all. Just because a search term has a ton of traffic doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
I, I e just did a post about this morning. So if you're going after, let's say you provide manufacturing crm, if you just went after the keyword crm, it would almost be a never ending journey cuz you have competitors like Salesforce and Hub. You're never gonna beat them unless you've got like a 250 grand a month marketing spend and you've got a ton of resources, it's just not gonna happen.
Whereas if you go niche, like best serum for manufacturing company, it's quite targeted. It's quite specific. And the chances are, if Tom and someone searches that they're gonna go to your site and probably request a contact or to speak to yourselves with your demo. So that's the first thing, defining what people are gonna search for.
You can also ask your past customers, past clients, what would they use, what would they search for? What kind of terminology do they. Then there's basically two main elements to SEO Tom. So there's what's called on page or onsite seo, everything you do on your website, and then you've got off page SEOs, everything you do off your website, like building links, distributing content, all that good stuff.
So if you want your SEO to capture demand is important that you've got a, a decent. So a website that, for example, loads fast is clear in its messaging, so it clearly summarizes what you do, how you help guides people to get in touch with clear and consistent call to actions like Booker call, request a demo, et cetera.
It builds trust with things like social proof, so clear testimonials, video reviews, case studies, you name it. But then once you've got those kind of website conversion best practices in shape, then big part of on page SEO is making sure your content actually matches those search. So if someone's searching for like best manufacturing software and they kind of wanna get a demo, they might go to your homepage or they might go to a product specific page where it gives them like the inside scoop on a specific feature or a specific benefit of your manufacturing software, your manufacturing, cr, whatever we're selling.
So when they land on that page, it's Essent. Being your best sales rep. So it's giving them a clear idea of the value prop. It's answering any common questions they have. So frequent questions that you can leverage maybe on that page from sales calls, maybe it's got a video summary, maybe it's got a nice infographic, maybe it's got a video review, and then it's got a clear call to action to request the next step.
So yeah, making sure your content actually is in line with the search sums that you wanna find, and it's giving people the most useful, the most beneficial information. One thing you can do on. Quick tip is if you Google one of the search terms that you're going after, look at what your competitors are doing on their information pages and try and do the skyscraper technique.
So one up them in all areas. So if they've said, done, I don't know, 2000 words, try and think, Well, that's okay. We can add more insights here. We can answer more questions. We can use this unique data stat point, or these unique demographics, or this quiz or this survey where these unique insights that we can leverage.
So look for all angles that you can beat your competitors on the search term. And then there's something called technical seo. So this comes down to. Things like call web vitals, update with Google. So things like page speed, making sure that your website has a good user experience, so it's nice and easy to navigate.
So again, having things like pages for your main services, your features, having a blog, having a resource section, having a new section, making sure your website's easy to navigate on mobile, on desktop and pc, and making sure it's well tructure. And also doing technical things like your page titles, your heading tags, your meta descriptions, image op tags.
So quite a lot there that I've gone through on, on, on page seo. So feel free to quiz me if you wish. How like obviously to get inbound search like over the long term, you need the content to actually like be valuable for the person reading it. Now going back to example of the manufacturing company, like the person, I would assume that the people in the marketing team may not have like deep manufacturing experience.
So how would you recommend they actually get content that's gonna add value to the person, to the potential buyer? Yep. So in terms of that, I guess there's a number of ways to actually make sure your contents resonates. It answers questions, all that kind of thing. So you can do interviews with your existing customers, so existing clients, and you can ask them a whole bunch of things.
So if there's a specific feature or a specific topic around your manufacturing software. So let's say we are doing manufacturing crm, so maybe you could ask them things like, why was this useful to. What prompted you to reach out to us? What are kind of the main features that are most helpful in your day to day?
What are some of the problems that you faced before you came to our software and how we helped you tackle those? Who would you recommend using it? And you can do these interviews as a podcast. You could do it as a video. Then you could transcript it with various software tools that are available. So you can leverage that way to actually get those insights, cuz that way you're actually asking experts.
Of course if you've got people on your team, maybe you've got a technical tool person on your team that you can interview as well and maybe they can share them more detail. The more nuts and bolts that are a bit less relevant for kind of the day-to-day person. But people that are more technical might wanna know.
So those are quite good. Just understanding kind of your existing. Why they chose it, what they like best about the features, what's useful, what's unique, what are the problems it fixes, Transcription, those interviews or if we do 'em over the phone call, taking detailed notes and then leveraging those insights for the content.
Cause typically in the B2B space, usually if people come onto your site, they want answers fast. So people don't often mess around on sites usually. They usually wanna know kind of what you do, how you help. Can you fix my problem? Can you answer these quick questions that I've got? They'll probably flick to your pricing page and providing that fit, tick all their boxes.
Then they're gonna request a demo. Got it. Okay, So this, So that's like the roadmap for capturing demand. Essentially keep a research, understand what people are searching for, create their content, whether you're interviewing people or getting someone an expert within the business. Put it on a fast site as clear calls to actions, and a nice design.
If I was to fify the process, For on page seo. Yeah, but then the thing is, depending on the competitiveness of your market, you'll need to do some off page seo. So you might need to build back links to those site. To those pages. And now, I mean, there's a bunch of freeways. You can do that. I mean, you can guest interview on podcasts.
You can get the guests to do an article page and then link back to you. You can do guest posts on industry relevant blogs. You can build partnerships with similar companies in your space. So if there's like a complimentary company, so let's say you did manufacturing software, maybe there was a company that did a different type of manufacturing software.
Our company that did manufacturing media, you could partner up with them to do some content, do some videos and podcasts, put articles on each other's pages, and link that. There's a lot of ways that you can build links for free and that are relatively stress free. And the thing about back links is they boost the authority of your website and over time they're gonna boost your organic rankings for these pages that you actually wanna be found and generate the leads for.
Makes total sense. Okay. This is like the foundation, isn't it? Yeah. These are like the basics for our manufacturing company, but let's say the manufacturing company implement this, they start getting some like a nice inbound captured demand. Organic traffic and then they set their demo goals for the next quarter and it's like double what they got the previous month.
Just capturing demand and there doesn't seem to be much more juice in that. How would you recommend that the team that's now grown to five people would leverage create like SEO to create more demand? Purely seo. Let's start with purely seo. Yeah, sure. So I think, like I said, SEO traditionally is for capturing.
Now I believe it can supplement your demand creation strategy. So I'll give you a story here. So two or so years ago when I was looking to start my podcast business growth show. Didn't have a flipping, Scooby dude. Didn't have a clue how to do a podcast. I was nervous as heck. Didn't know what the heck I was doing.
So I think I searched on Google. Something like How to Start a podcast. Found a, one of the companies, I can't remember what they were called, to be fair. I think it was like podcast co, podcast.co, or podcast.co. Whatever. Started consuming their content. They had useful articles, they had videos, they had walkthroughs.
They talked me through what microphone to get, what software to use to record the audio, to the video, how to edit it, all the things that I needed to learn. And they even kind of set me up on an email nurture sequence. So each day they were giving useful tools, and over time I think I subscribed to something of theirs.
So it just shows you that I was clueless. I didn't know. I didn't, at the time, I didn't have the demand to capture, I was in the learning stage. So this company kind of built trust with me from my initial search, fed me the information that I needed, built trust with me by sharing, saying, Look, we don't need to sell you right away.
Here's all our courses, here's our guides, here's our video walkthroughs. These are the tools you need, this is the hardware, this is the software. And really held by how, through the process and nurtured me. And that started with the Google search. So, and at the same time, if you're, What you wanna think of on these, what we call top of funnel SEO strategies, is what are the common questions or what are the common frustrations that we get on sales calls with our prospects?
If you are not a sales rep, then kind of get some beers, get some coffees, meet up with your sales team and say, Look guys, I wanna make a list. Of the top frustrations we get week in, week out, and the top questions we get week in, week out, and let's create content that addresses that. Because if people are asking it more than once, that several other people are gonna have the same question or same objection.
So if you've got articles on your website, if you've got videos, you've got podcasts that address these, there's real demand there to search. But you know, it's higher in the funnel. So people don't necessarily wanna buy right now, but they wanna learn about it. So they might go to your website, they might search this question like in my.
How to start a podcast, but in this case, it might be what to consider when investing in manufacturing software, or maybe it's around improving processes. So let's say your CRM improves a certain process in someone's business. So like how to speed up manufacturing times for X. They search that head to your article.
Maybe they see a video, maybe they subscribe to your YouTube channel, and then over time they're enjoying your YouTube videos. Over that time you, they listen to your podcast too, and you've built so much trust that at that point then they're ready to speak to sales. So it's that kind of in between. Some businesses when they go purely for capturing the demand, when you can think, consider people higher in the sales funnel, they just wanna learn a bit more that you can nurture over time, if that makes sense.
Got it. So it's part of this, like part of the buying journey is somebody coming to your site, consuming the content on your site that helps them decide that actually, yeah, they do need to buy this thing. Yeah, because you've been the useful partner, you've been the useful resource, you've educated them, you've shared free tips, and it's a bit like if you think of LinkedIn organic content, it's a similar post it's, it's a similar kind of strategy whereby you're kind of posting data on LinkedIn, you're providing tips, insights, helpful videos, resources.
So over time people might come to you. But if you combine that SEO strategy I just mentioned, and you're also running like LinkedIn ads, trying to nurture people over time, you're sending people to case studies, you're sending people to useful resources if you do. And then people constantly are seeing your brand front of mind.
You are gonna become the only choice. Got it. So apart from like writing the content on your blog for this, for our manufacturing company, again, remember the case study, what other things would you recommend them do to create demand outside of seo? Outside of SEO now? Yeah. Yeah. So it's create demand. I'd probably just steal the strategy that I use for our company Web Choice.
So kinda start an industry podcast if you. Which I'm sure you've talked about a ton, Tom, cause this is your space. So where whereby you can interview ideal prospects, like ideal fit clients. So if there's like a list of 50 manufacturing companies you wanna bring on board as clients, set up interviews with them, invite them on your show, ask some smart questions, build up a relationship with them.
And also it gives you really great content that your target audience is gonna be interested in. Or if there's again, influences in your manufacturing. Get those guys on board as well to boost your credibility, boost some press releases, boost some pr, and at the same time, it's gonna help your SEO credibility.
If your B2B manufacturing company, then being on LinkedIn, having your main staff on LinkedIn, posting daily Insights, daily tips, daily helpful post is gonna be great. And likewise, you can also consider LinkedIn ads. To speed up the distribution and make sure that your content's actually going to the people that you wanna see, so your target decision makers.
Outside of that, we've talked about LinkedIn. We've talked about LinkedIn ads, We've talked about podcast video. So again, if you're doing a podcast, you might as well repurpose it for, do the interview on video, check it onto YouTube, maybe slice and dice those clips up into. Snippets. So you've got little promo video clips of each one that you can repurpose.
Again, chuck those on social and outside of that demand creation, webinars is another one. So webinars is along the same VA as podcasts, but again, you can either do your own industry insights where you invite on prospects and interview them, or you share your own. Kind of company ideas and you answer common questions.
Then you invite an audience to come on, and there's a lot of repu and repurpose and replay value in terms of turning webinars into podcasts, into video snippets that you can share on social, that you can distribute on, paid onto LinkedIn to your target decision makers, and they can kind of nurture them on over time.
Send them back to your website, send them to case studies, send 'em to useful items, and build trust. And basically the big point of it is positioning your companies that go to in your. Got it. And now like focusing in on your business, did you run that same approach where you were starting with more capture demand and then move to more creative demand?
And if you could just like walk us through how you've done that, that would be great. Yeah. For our own business. Yeah. So we very much did, very much. They did. I mean, we've been doing at Web Choice, we're doing SEO for years and years. So we've got like big hitting terms like web development company page one, and a bunch of other web SEO terms.
So Nice. The people search of those. We get a steady flow of leads for our website just through the SEO work. I'm just gonna test that by the way, so keep talking. I'll test. Yeah. Web development company page one in the uk. So if you, We didn't, this was long before the days of demand generation, creating demand and all those buzz words that we like to see and like to say.
This was back when we just knew SEO as a good way to get leads, so we did that first. Now, whilst that fast forward a few years whilst we're doing seo, moved into kind of some ads again to capture demand. What I thought is my way is not the way you wanna follow, by the way, because I started a podcast cuz I thought it was cool and I just wanted to initially interview sales and marketing leaders that I wanted to steal ideas, learn from, and basically make myself a better seller and a better marketer.
So literally just interviewed like industry experts and started off. Doing the classic podcast where you asked their story and then eventually ask tips, and it was a bit long winded. Then I refined the strategy, so I gear it more towards interviewing industry experts and also interviewing kind of potential prospects that would be a good fit to work with us, to build relationships and also provide value content that we.
Just gonna jump in with the results of the test. You are right number five and two of them above you are not actual agencies that like blog posts or like aggregate, so that's fucking awesome. Number three, essentially for web development company in the uk. How has that, like over time, have you just slowly climbed up there or did you spike up higher and then come down?
And so I'd love to know that. And then also what are you doing? Do you feel like actively trying to improve that? Oh yeah, it's, It's competitive, right? There's a lot of, lot of it. As you can imagine, there's like a hundred k plus web agencies in the uk. If you add on US and Europe and then some other countries that we rank on, there's tons.
So there's always competitors trying to basically get ahead of us and Fair enough, why wouldn't they? So, yeah, we do need to keep on top of it. We push out quite a lot of content. We build quite a lot of links. We often order our site, we check our site's performance all the time. In terms of speed, in terms of navigation, we talk to our customers a lot.
So we're often asking like ideal clients and customers who work of like, What do you think could be improved on our site to make it more useful? What's missing? What have you seen on others? So having that, don't wanna say growth mindset, but putting your ego to one side and understanding that you are not necessarily your target client and taking that feedback, but also being aware of what your competition's up to and not sleeping on it.
So it's not just one of those things where you can get the rank. Okay, great. Let's leave it for a few months. It's, especially in our industry, it's, it's something web seo, you've gotta be hot. So this is a good call to action actually for the listeners, especially in the uk Google Web Development Company.
Scroll down to right now, it's five, Could be higher, could be lower, and then click on the title is Web Development Company uk. The year out is Web Design Choice. Click on that cuz obviously if we can slightly increase the cta, we might, That helps with the rankings, right? Yeah. Yeah, if we can get a bunch of traffic, that's always appreciated.
I'm sorry Phil, I interrupted you. I think we were talking about how your journey of like from capture to create demand with Yeah, so it's basically saying, don't follow what I did cuz I did a podcast initially for messing around my own learning and fun and there's nothing wrong with that. But it wasn't that strategic.
And then I realized, look, that's invite industry leaders, like marketing experts in our case cuz we're gonna B2B marketing show and basically now we strategized it. So we interviewed potential prospect. Entry marketing experts, and also I do one solo episode a week with a specific website or SEO tip. We record that on video, put it on the YouTube slice and dice clips for LinkedIn, and then also put it on the audio podcast for Business Growth show.
So it gives us a mean of content, also gives content for the guests to share and promote, and like I say, builds up relationship with our target audience. That's one strategy I definitely recommend for b2b. And we also did the YouTube, and then another big chunk of it was LinkedIn. So in my case, as I've said on many shows, initially I just thought LinkedIn was a massive cv and then I thought it was a massive pitch fest.
So anyone I connected to, I just pitched saying Buy my stuff. Then I realized that wasn't that effective and was a fa sure far way to get blocked in about five minutes. And then kind of started seeing people actually being more of a useful resource. So over time, kind of a couple years ago, I started taking LinkedIn a bit more seriously.
So in my case, the LinkedIn, in my opinion, Clarity. So being niche, so going for one or two things that you wanna be remembered for. So what are those one or two things you wanna be remembered for? Connect with potential prospects and then share maybe one daily post around a specific tip, answering a specific question, something useful, something helpful that your target audience can remember you for in your sector.
Um, so over time you're stacking that credibility. And then likewise just engaging with other people in the feed. So if there's people that's posting similar content, Something you can throw your 2 cents and answer a question or give a different opinion. Um, that helps you get found on LinkedIn as well.
And then also gearing your, your profile as a landing page so it's nice and easy for people to contact you. So those are some of the key things that we've done to kind of build demand as well as the other stuff we talked about. Nice. Well, I feel like there is a great resource for like, An early stage marketing team who are gonna be doing seo, but then also once they have that captured, demand foundation can move on to other things.
So Sam, I wanna thank you for sharing that wisdom and then also thank you for sharing like how you've been doing it at your company. And of course, I think this should be the main call to action, obviously is Google Web Development Company. If you're in the uk, click on web design choice. But of course you can find Sam on LinkedIn search Sam.
And then what's the name of the podcast again? Podcast is Business Growth Show. Business Growth Show. Search for the Ann Apple Podcast, Subscribe. Awesome. Sam, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.
And thank you so much, Sam, for coming on and sharing your SEO related wisdom to this whole creating versus capturing demand drama that we're seeing in the world of B2B marketing. Right. If you have any feedback of the show or if you want to see any specific guests on the show, leave a rating or review at Apple Podcast, send me a screenshot.
If you do it, ping me on LinkedIn and I'll make sure to get you a shout out in an outro to this episode of ever. Thank you for all listening.