Christian Klepp  00:01

Search engine optimization can be somewhat confusing, and it’s become even more confusing in the age of AI, both because of how people use AI to generate content and because of how Google search itself is changing. There are those out there who claim that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is dead. It isn’t. In fact, it’s more competitive now, which means you need a more refined approach. So how can B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) companies get AI to recommend their business? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers on the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Adrian Dahlin, who will be answering this question. He’s the Founder of Search To Sale, who creates content strategies that drive revenue from organic search and generative engines, tune in to find out more about what the B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp  00:52

All right. Adrian Dahlin, welcome to the show. 

Adrian Dahlin  00:55

Thanks for having me. 

Christian Klepp  00:56

Great to have you on. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because it’s super pertinent to content marketing. It’s something that B2B companies should be paying attention to. So I’m going to cut to the chase, and we’ll just dive right in. 

Adrian Dahlin  01:13

Awesome. 

Christian Klepp  01:13

Fantastic. So Adrian, you’re on a mission to help B2B SaaS companies show up in AI interfaces. So for this conversation, let’s kick it off with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. So the first question is, what is it about generative engine optimization or GEO that you wish more B2B SaaS companies understood, that’s the first question. And the second question is, where do you see marketing teams struggle regarding you both.

Adrian Dahlin  01:42

We have right now is a stage of evolution where we’re overlapping between the Old World and the New World. And the tactics that work to get you ranked in Google, get you mentioned by an LLM (Large Language Model ) are relatively similar to the way SEO hasn’t working for years, but the paradigm is fundamentally shifting, and basically what that means is that you can do pretty well at getting mentioned by ChatGPT by doing a good job at traditional SEO, but the risk is that you’re not preparing for the future by not actually changing the paradigm of how you think about this.

Christian Klepp  02:23

Care to elaborate on that a little bit more, especially that last sentence, like, you know, preparing yourself. How should companies prepare themselves? Right? 

Adrian Dahlin  02:32

And I think it actually, it probably starts with timeframe for your goals. If you’re in an organization that has short term incentives, like your startup that needs quick wins to get a couple of enterprise customers so that you can raise your next round of funding. You’re probably sticking a little bit more with the tried and true stuff that has always worked. But if you have the ability to think long term, then you really want to work on changing your thinking. If you have the ability to plan long term, you want to change how you’re thinking about digital marketing fundamentally. And one of those shifts is from a channel strategy to what I’m calling an authority strategy. So a channel strategy is a big way about how marketers would think about particularly the go to market process, where you’re deciding initially where we should even be investing in the first place. You consider who your audience is, you do some research about where they spend time online, and you pick a couple of platforms, you’re probably not trying to be everywhere. We’re trying to focus on a couple of channels. And most channels, I think you can describe as a place where supply and demand interact. And if you play by certain rules and best practices, you can do pretty well. 

Adrian Dahlin  04:02

So Facebook, like, 14 years ago, I was like working on Facebook as a marketing channel, interactions between customers and companies play about certain rules you can do well. Tiktok today, paid search another channel. What’s different about AI is that ChatGPT, or any other AI chat bot is not a channel, because the supply side is not present. It’s not engaging directly with the customer. You have customers engaging with a large language model, which is looking at the entire Internet. Well, rather, its brain is trained on the entire internet, and then when you give it a query, it’s looking at some of the Internet to help inform its answer. In many cases, when you’re doing a kind of a search, type of a query in ChatGPT. Yeah, so this AI is making choices. It’s doing curation and filtering among all the information on the web to give you an answer to your query. 

Adrian Dahlin  05:12

And the analogy that I’m starting to use a lot is that AI is like a consultant working for your customer, you actually want to think of it like a person. The way a person reads a bunch of information, it consumes a bunch of information, synthesizes, it comes up with a point of view that’s, that’s what AI is doing. It has the ability to look at it much more information than a human can, and it’s not as good yet as we are at synthesizing that information. But when you think about AI more like a person, like a brain, then I think the strategies that emerge from that are going to work in a longer term way. Those will be more durable strategies than just doing the tried and true stuff that hasn’t worked for SEO for the last bunch of years.

Christian Klepp  06:06

That certainly is an interesting analogy. I’ve never heard of AI being compared that way before, like the one that I always hear is you treat it like an intern or you treat it like a co-pilot. But there’s, there’s definitely something to be said about treating it l