llm seo: how to use ai to drive demos, not just rankings

Ishaan Shakunt, Founder of Spear Growth, joined Digital Banter to talk about what happens when buyers turn to ChatGPT instead of Google. We break down how B2B marketers can stay visible in AI search results, rethink content strategy for LLMs, and start using AI as part of their SEO workflow. From early experiments to building a new approach, Ishaan shares where traditional SEO falls short and what to do instead.

Podcast Transcript

Andy: What’s up everybody? Back again for another episode of Digital Banter. I do have to come up with a new intro and kind of hype theme there, James, because I’m starting to struggle with just hearing my own voice over and over. Sounds fantastic. Uh, anyway, uh, today we are talking about something that I’m not gonna lie, I am very fascinated by and I am really intrigued to hear.

How today’s episode is gonna dive into it, but we’re talking about LLMs and SEO kind of, uh, contradictory a little bit, uh, and definitely, uh, something that a lot of people are trying to crack the code on. So joining us today is Sean Shaun, founder of Spear Growth and chosen [00:01:00] Lee Sean, thank you for joining us.

Ishaan: Thank you so much for having me. By the way, I love the intro. So the, the music, the entire theme is just has five. So Yeah, like please, he’s hyped. Look at him. He’s hyped.

Ishaan: ready

Andy: to roll. It’s all those 12:00 AM demos that he is roll, rolling through right now. Anyway. Uh, Sean, one of the things that we like to start off each episode with.

There’s a question from James to you, so go ahead man.

James: All right. How did you, what’d you want to be when you grow up? When you were a kid and how did that, how did you end up in B2B? Because nobody wants to, nobody. Nobody wants to be in B2B. I don’t say nobody wants to be, nobody wanted to be in B2B I still, to this day, I mean, I was really thinking about it yesterday, leaving and starting an excavation company.

’cause that’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid. So where’d you start and how’d you end up where you ended up?

Ishaan: So I, I had a very good plan when I was a kid. And then, or I, I, I would, I don’t know if this is a good plan or not, but I had a plan when I was a kid and then as I [00:02:00] grew up, that it’s, it’s slowly getting bearded by the day.

So when I started it, I, have you seen the, uh, uh, the cartoon SWAT cats by any chance? No one’s ever seen it. Anyway, so it was about these two cats that flew around in a plane and shot down. Um. Monsters. That’s what I wanted to do as for a living. And then I thought the government would pay me big bucks. So there was an entire plan where I started as a mechanic, and I reached the sweat cat, like built my own plane, which is going to the, anyway, I had a plan, right?

And then I somehow fell into B2B SaaS marketing. Uh, in the middle. I actually, uh, was selling Virgin Motos on the, in front of my college campus. So yeah, I took a detour.

Andy: I mean, you, you went engineering to engineering, so I guess there’s something to be said for that, right?

James: So now we’re talking about GTM engineering.

The new, yeah, the new latest greatest B2B [00:03:00] marketing buzzword.

Ishaan: And, and finally left the college. I, I am a CS grad, so I’m a CS engineer on paper. But yeah, that’s it. I’m just, yeah. Building software to

James: marketing for software. I think it, the journey makes sense. I mean, so far what do like, uh. One of our guests was a preacher before he got into B2B SaaS.

What else did we

Andy: have? Yeah, some, some other good stuff. I forget what Drew wanted to be, but it was also something that was like completely out. Oh, he wanted to, didn’t he want to be like a ping pong player or something like that? He wanted to be a ping pong, uh, spy. That’s what it was. That was a good one.

Yeah. I don’t even know how that, how that unfolded. Anyway, back to today’s topic. So Sean, one of the through lines, I think around this topic is the fact that everybody is starting to see chat, PT and other LLMs pop up in their attribution reports, and they’re trying to crack the code of how can I incorporate [00:04:00] LLMs into my marketing strategy?

And when we think about that from the perspective of, let’s say like the, the staunch foundation of SEO, they’re completely different. But also I think the big thing here is like, let’s a, let’s get right out. There are people actually moving away from Google and the major search engines to chat GBT.

Ishaan: Yeah, I, I’ll give a short answer to this one.

You guys run an SEA, like you, you do. SEOI. I’ve been doing SEO for a while. Spear Growth is an agency that does SEO and will continue doing SEO. It’s not going away at, at all. In fact, like when I looked at where is the traffic moving from, like there’s obviously a movement from Search to search, Google Search to LLM, search per se, right?

In search. But there’s also. Uh, we’ll, there’s also a lot of the queries which are longer, which are more similar to how people talk to their peers or how people would talk to or ask questions in a community. So that’s [00:05:00] actually moving away from communities

Ishaan: As well. So it’s, it’s not. I, I don’t know how much search is going to get impacted, but right now I don’t think it has.

Right. So the biggest impact to search or even traffic or all of that is definitely not LLMs. It’s maybe the AI overviews, which is still ai, but not lms, but not, yeah, I, I, I haven’t seen any movement yet. If I’m wrong, I’ll get to know a couple of years down the line. But right now, so,

James: well, it’s, it’s interesting ’cause you keep seeing all these posts on LinkedIn, the HubSpot traffic tracking, getting like, and it seems to be, I mean, HubSpot is probably the first example that kind of blew up, but it seems like a lot of, um, like publisher content, so not like, not like blogs or like SaaS companies, like specifically losing their traffic, but more like.

Third party publishers is where I’ve, at least it’s like I’ve seen a lot of the, yeah. And I haven’t looked into this at all, but like the people posting the [00:06:00] graph of look at the SEO traffic went from a million visits to 10,000. Like, and that’s what has me wondering, I mean, I feel like everybody’s making the claim that SEO is dead.

And you know, to an extent I agree that it’s not, but it’s also a lot harder. I think we can at least agree with that.

Ishaan: Oh yeah, it’s harder I guess. But people are still like, it’s been decades still since SEO’s been around, but almost no one still does it well, so it’s harder for sure. It’s, but it’s still not so hard that you cannot already make money.

It’s still in a good place. I say like I still get clients all the time and we just say, Hey, your companies are doing this most things wrong. So we just have to be slightly above average to win. And so that’s still. I think SEO is still something that people haven’t figured out some somehow even after decades.

So it’s,

James: you mean just asking chat GBT how to run a good SEO strategy isn’t like the [00:07:00] best way to go about it?

Ishaan: Uh, sure. Like please, that’s exactly what everyone listening, that everyone’s my competitor’s SEO should be doing.

Andy: When did you start to see, I mean, you’re, you’ve obviously been in the LLM kind of game of trying to figure things out, uh, by also launching chosen lead, like you, like we were talking about before coming on live here just the other day.

Um, I’m curious like, what, what was like the aha moment where you finally started to see like, hey, there is, there is something that’s transitioning here, right? And what is Yeah. Like what, peel back the curtain a little bit and talk to us about what kind of led you to believe there was not just an opportunity, but like uncovering what those LLM opportunities might

Ishaan: be.

Yeah. So I’ll give you some quick context. So Spear Growth is an agency we do as an SEO. Now in that we, when, when this [00:08:00] entire LLM tag, GBD, that entire thing was happening, I went and I spoke with a lot of our SaaS. We, we work with SaaS companies, so I know a lot of SaaS founders. Spoke with them, spoke with VCs, tried to figure out, Hey, should I really care about this thing?

Or should, is it just hype? There’s been too many, uh, huge hype events in the last couple of years and actually I really care about this and the conclusion was I should. So what we did was, in the agency, we actually hired a four person dev team, like an entire full-time dev team to try and automate as much as we could.

So this was, um, I. The third quarter of last year, they came in and started automating a lot of stuff. They were working very closely with our marketing teams, SEO teams. They were already optimizing stuff there, automating a lot of stuff, so, okay. That was working. And so we were in a very peculiar space where we had a dev team that’s working very closely with an SEO team to do SEO.

Mm-hmm. And then in that [00:09:00] timeline, uh, we, our SEO team has some spare time back in about November. Just, which is very recent. Um, and so we, because we had this weird, we were in this weird place. We just said, Hey, you know, could we show up on lms? Mm-hmm. Right. We did a bunch of experiments, took the tech team’s help and their understanding of it, did a few experiments, showed up, but then we, we, I was sure this is useless.

I, I, even after I did it, even after I showed up, I’m like, Hey, this has such a low share of search. I had prospects coming to me where I would say, just don’t focus on this. This is completely useless. Don’t do it. Right. So that, that’s where I was in November. Uh, then in Feb, uh, me and Anos our head of sales, I had a growth.

We were on a sales call and they told us, they heard about us from Chad, JPT. Yeah, that was the aha moment where like, Hey, this, this fun thing we did could actually be worth money. And then we built the platform to try and see, okay, this is still [00:10:00] maybe a year early, but let’s build it out. And then suddenly again, I got lucky again.

Like where we saw that, hey, like people who are coming like the. Our prospects, we’re seeing 20% of the pipeline come from L lms, and that was, I thought it’s not going to happen. But now I have three companies that I have seen data of where 10, 20 and 30, like not 30, but I’ve seen up to 20% of the entire quarters pipeline B2B SaaS generate from lms, which I just could not have imagined even after.

Still, I had built, chosen later it was going to go live. I didn’t know that was happening, but it apparently is, and then every, it just blew up. Everyone started talking about it on LinkedIn. Everyone started posting like screenshots and stuff and like, Hey, great. We just happened to have a great platform to work on it.

So it was honestly, by luck. Um, and we, we, yeah. So the aha moment just came to us. Yeah. Just got lucky. Is that

James: coming from like basically self-reported [00:11:00] attribution as far as like how you’re. Getting the information. So almost

Ishaan: everyone’s looking at that UTM last touch tracking. Yeah. So because lms, if you click on a source, it adds UTM sources.

So then you can see it in your Google Analytics. You can see in your CRMs, everyone’s seeing that. And those are all the graphs being posted. Some people are saying self attribution, but those things don’t go viral. So you’re

James: having,

Ishaan: so I’m sorry,

James: get technical for

Ishaan: a second,

James: but like there’s TMS added for.

Yeah, chat gp. I didn’t even know that.

Andy: Yeah, it’s actually like kind of sneaky where like they will add UTM of like chat GPT or open AI as like the source or medium when you’re like asking it to like bake in like a link or something like that, it’s, and then you have to like catch it. Otherwise it, you’re giving it credit rather than the credit that you want to give it or track it elsewhere.

It’s like I said, super sneaky.

Ishaan: But yeah, like what else would you, because it’s like Google search, [00:12:00] right? Google would get credit if it’s sending you traffic, and here Ls are sending you traffic. So I think it’s, it’s on, I think it’s fair. I actually think it’s very under-reported because for a lot of these things, right, it is gonna say the name of the company in the chat.

People don’t go to the sources, copy it, post on Google, search it there, and then now. You don’t even know that it was LLM. So I think it’s very under-reported, just based on the behavior of people. It’s most probably much higher than what even it’s being shown through sources, but even the sources is quite a bit,

Andy: I don’t wanna go like too crazy in depth on this point, per se, but when you’re talking about like, let’s say the 20% of pipe being influenced by lms, like those brands that are seeing that drastic of a lift.

Yeah. How. Yeah. How unique are they in terms of like the categories that they operate in? Like, is there only like three other competitors and therefore you would not be [00:13:00] surprised by pipeline being so drastic versus, let’s say a more competitive market? So

Ishaan: it’s even in comp, so I’ll tell you though, I’ll, I’ll describe the companies, right?

Yeah. So the one thing that’s in common across all of them is that, uh, they’re all part of companies where. Their audience had search, like search would work early on. So now their users were searching, now searching in a different place. So if SEO is working for you, if, if Google Ads is working for you, then L-M-S-E-O is a good channel.

Otherwise, probably not, is the way I am describing it right now. How competitive are these places or, or these industries? I ha Um, so if you are competing against. Salesforce, right? Like Salesforce has one module where you’re competing against them. You’re probably not the, they would probably get recommended very often, but then there are ways to win, beat them.

So I think that was the o only [00:14:00] commonality I found early. I thought would only work with SMBs or companies selling to SMBs. Uh, that wasn’t the case. I saw one of our prospects is seeing this for they sell. Their a CV is close to $50,000 a month, which is definitely not like small ticket sizes. Uh, sorry, it’s $50,000 a year.

Definitely not small ticket sizes. So even in larger ticket size like that, I’m seeing companies where, oh, like 10, 20% of the pipelines being driven from that, which is just still absolutely wild to me. Like I, I have no, I don’t really understand how that’s happening because I, I would expect it to be much lower.

Like I, I would still like, based on the share of search, I. Would still expect it to be much, much lower. But I, I’m just seeing this data and I’m still trying to figure out like, how is this even happening? So, uh, some companies are also reporting the, the conversion rates be much higher, but that’s also not very consistent.

Like, so half the companies say, Hey, my [00:15:00] conversion rates from LMS is higher. Some the other half, when I actually look at the data, it’s actually. Closer to what you would see in on Google Ads.

NA: Mm-hmm.

Ishaan: Right. Um, so because on Google Ads, everyone’s sort of, and the, I think my reasoning behind that is on Google Ads you’re focusing on high intent button funnel searches.

And on LMS, if you search for, like, for example, uh, if I write the best blog, oh, uh, and I have written a, by the way, pretty interesting blog on how to show up on lms. But if you ask charge GPD that. And it references my blog to surface information. It’s not going to say, okay, written by chosen ly and it’s answer, it’s going to be in the source.

And people might not go to source and click on it. So LM traffic. But if, if you ask for, hey, top tools or top agencies, and it’s naming the agency and naming the tool, uh. You know, that’s where you might get more clicks from [00:16:00] lms. So by default, LM traffic is more bottom funnel and that’s why maybe people are seeing higher quality, higher intent in LMS versus otherwise.

So yeah, like those are some patterns. If Google ads or SEO O would’ve worked for you, LM traffic should also work for you. Uh, but yeah, I won’t make, if it is your top first or second channel, don’t do it. Yeah. Like this, definitely. It’s still, it’s um, third channel onwards.

James: It’s interesting because like when I do searches like that and I’m just looking for like the top five paid media agencies for B2B SaaS, right.

It’s kind of just like.

Andy: It’s always us for spear and we win every day, but Okay.

James: No, but like, but to an extent, like I kind of do it as like a joke because like nothing that I would actually trust. I’m just like, I’m curious what would show up here. And I could imagine people at HubSpot and Salesforce and all the other SaaS companies are just like doing the same and not, I don’t know, not taking it in a very meaningful way.[00:17:00]

But at the same time, I feel like search is, I don’t know, search is kind of the same way at this point, so I could see why it is driving as much pipeline as it

Ishaan: does. So there’s this two types of searches, right? So one I call simple search, which is what we are all doing, like top something something agency software.

All those are like the same thing that you would do on Google. That habit is just sort of moving to the search platforms. That’s what I call simple search. The other are contextual where people just go ahead and write entire paragraphs because responds like a human being. They start talking to it like a human being where they just.

Say in one prompt or in follow ups across all that, Hey, I’m a CFO, I work in this company. We based on this, I have a budget of X, Y, ZI, I want, I’m looking for a financial reporting software. So those are contextual searches. Now my, um, so when, so since we are on Google ads, right? So one of the [00:18:00] things that I’ve always thought of is if.

Truly every single person searching for a bottom funnel search was actually in the market looking for something. The conversion is, we would see would not be 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 at max nine, 10% right, would be much higher. Right. That isn’t true. But when you are doing something like a contextual search, and then Chad, so those searches, my belief, and I don’t have a lot data to prove it yet, I think.

They would actually convert at a higher rate, but they have higher intent. They know what they’re looking for, they have the requirements ready. So I think there the quality of traffic actually is better. And also chat g when it responds, right, it responds with, Hey, here are the sources. Even if it’s all like, even if it’s not accurate.

It sounds so freaking confident that, hey, I’ve sced the internet and this is the best one for you. People actually believe it. Like when there is sources there, people believe it. So I mean, yeah, I think [00:19:00]

Andy: so. One thing that I’m curious about, and you might, I mean, just take a shot in the dark here of what you believe.

If you have nothing to back it up with, but like Yeah. What, so with with Google and any other search engine you have personalization and that personalization not just affects your results, but obviously impacts rankings and things like that.

Andy: think about LLMs, right, you can both share learnings that are powering the models right across the entire ecosystem, or you can constrain that just to you.

And I’m curious, like does that same personalization. Happen not just for your account per se, but any learnings that you are empowering the, the machine to use, and does that then influence

Ishaan: Yeah.

Andy: Others models

Ishaan: and others’ outputs, others models? I, I believe it does not, and also add, GPT very clearly says it does not so.

I, I sort of believe them. Is, is how I, my, my answer is literally I believe them. [00:20:00] They say they don’t, and I believe them. It’s sure literally my answer, because if that didn’t happen, it might start like. I, I literally, I, I was telling you the stories before we start. I uploaded chosen lease code based into charge GPT, and then I asked her to code a bunch of modules for demos that might just show up when someone searched something.

If it was, that was useful training, and then if that did happen quite a bit, they would lose way too much. In negative press and just companies not banning them. Yeah. Like it just makes business sense. Also not to use it for training. Well, I’m also feeling

Andy: about the contextual component that we were just talking about of like, mm-hmm.

Great. So if you’ve got, you know, this curated list of the top five or these things match up because X, Y, Z, or what I’m looking for, you know, is that influencing others? Results in their own chat, [00:21:00] GPT or LLM account based off of any feedback that you’re giving. You know, you’re giving a plus a a thumbs up to like, I I Good response.

Ishaan: Yeah. I believe it does not. Um, so the thumbs up and thumbs down, I’m sure that’s influencing not the, I, so I think it’s a lot more technical. For example, um. It. It’s not like, Hey, if these were the top five, sure, and you give it a thumbs up, then that’s more likely to show up. It’s more like, Hey, the way the LLM actually connected the nodes, and that that got reinforced per se, more than.

These top five are good. Yeah, that’s, it’s less of the end result, but more of the process. I agree

Andy: with you. I just, I, again, this is like some big question that keeps going in my head of like, when we think about from that perspective of traditional SEO and [00:22:00] personalization and now L lms, like yeah, what crossover does exist or doesn’t.

You know,

James: so no, Andy, you can’t pay 3000 people to write. Dragon 360 is the best B2B paid marketing agency in chat. Well, hang, hang, I know the scores are better citing

Andy: us as in the top five. So yes, actually you could make that happen. And the up,

James: I mean that’s like, I mean, Shauna, you can give your opinion on this, but like the sighted sources, it seems like a big part of SEO for LLMs is getting is traditional SEO work of like getting yourselves in those sighted sources.

That they’re pulling the top five or whatever information from.

Ishaan: Yeah, a hundred percent. So, uh, I, I’ll tell you like what we have seen, I’ll talk about the differences more. So yes, citations work. Yes, citations. So a lot of people talk about citations when you use web search, your sources, which are the citations.

So sure they work. I’ll tell you about a few things that people don’t usually talk about. Right, so one is if charge goes to 10 [00:23:00] sources, and I didn’t know that until recently. If it goes to 10 sources and then it says, Hey, seven of these are useless, but it got to know that after reading it, and it’s only using the last three to actually write the answer in the source.

It’s only going to mention the three. It doesn’t mention the seven, even though it went to the seven. That’s just a fun fact. I don’t know what you’ll do with it, but hey, that’s a fun fact. So the second thing is there’s a few, like I, I’ll give you a few examples of things I’ve seen, which again, it is, I, it does not work in SEO, but it works on lms.

Like there was one company where. Uh, it like lms the top citation. And one of the things that chosen as a tool does, it helps you prioritize with citations to get into. So in that priority list, the top, the top result was this market research company where you can go and you can buy these market research papers at three to five, a couple of grand, right?

And then you can say, [00:24:00] and so they had a sample section of the report exposed it, went in there and said, Hey, you know, this looks like the best research. About this industry and it, it’s kind of correct. And then it went in that, read that and there were a few companies listed. That was it. What? That’s what it picked up.

It didn’t pick up the top 10 listicles, it ignored all of those things. And I said, Hey, this is the best document that I, that, that’s the document I like, which is, I have never seen that. That’s one source that’s different. So the takeaway from there is, yeah, just mention as many stats as you want. Uh, that’s going to be useful.

Mention quotes, mention stats, mention dates, mention research method. Like this. I’m just, I’m just quoting from what I’m seeing. It’s using, so I’m seeing it saying that, Hey, this is our method of how we did the research. If you sort of, if even if you’re making a top 10 listicle, instead of just saying, Hey, top 10, this is how it looks like, just talk, talk about your method, talk about numbers, talk about all that [00:25:00] stuff.

Charge B sort of understands that this source is better research than the others because it, it actually reads and understands pages versus just. What Google and other, uh, search engines were doing. Yeah. It’s not just looking at

James: H one, H two meta title. It’s actually reading the content. Yeah.

Ishaan: So another very example I saw was, uh, there was one exact match domain that showed up.

Mm-hmm. Which didn’t show up on Google or Bing, and it just felt like early 2012 SEO varies by an exact match domain and it just worked. So, yeah, I mean, they, are they, I mean charge degree does hybrids on search, uh, crawlers?

Andy: Yeah.

Ishaan: There are probably, and at least in that one instance, it’s probably similar to earlier Google search crawlers, so maybe blackhead, SEOs back.

Right. But

James: I mean, I, let’s be honest, I feel like that’s really the question that a lot of people are thinking, right? It’s like, [00:26:00] okay, it’s so early on in the SEO game for, yeah. Chat, GPT, like. You know, what are the, can we buy a bunch of backlinks and it’ll work? Because like the system isn’t very sophisticated backlinks as an example, like,

NA: yeah,

James: that was more of a SEO thing, but like what’s the backlinks for LLMs, right?

Yeah.

Ishaan: So the most reliable way or the most useful. So that’s how I’ve been thinking about all of this is, Hey, how can I get data to get an insight that’s very useful? The way I’m defining useful is you can actually take action on it, and if I do take action out, that’s likely to drive revenue. That’s how defining useful we, we literally had to sit and define what useful means.

But anyway, so the way we find useful insights on hey, where to show up, there’s a couple of different approaches. One thing that we’ve done is we just say, Hey, you know what? We are gonna take searches that are likely to be happening on lms, and [00:27:00] then we are gonna find all the different variations. We’re gonna do them multiple times, and we are gonna see which sources are being referenced more often.

And then we are going to prioritize them based on that and say whatever shows up very, very often is get referenced very often. It’s probably important. Definitely show up there. So that’s one set of places to show up on. The other interesting one is, so that’s from a simple search report. There’s a contextual search report as well where it shows, I’ve seen things like, for example, I am not a big fan of, I, I was not a big fan of pr.

Um, I would think it’s pretty useless. Um, being very honest, right, but probably shouldn’t be saying this out loud because I’m now trying to partner with PR agencies. But, um, I thought it wasn’t very useful as a marketing function, but I’m seeing charge GPT, like for one of our clients was just referencing PR web.

Uh, it is just like these, I know these are paid placements, like old school, pr, [00:28:00] web, that’s, yeah. Yeah. These are, these are very obviously paid charge. Loves it. For some reason, for one more of our clients who is referencing Financial Times. For the third one, it’s referencing routers and it’s also referencing a lot of Wikipedia pages.

So it’s, it’s all like, Hey, these are things that I, I had almost given up on. And now it’s all just like coming up in top sources that you should do. So you can also do things like, Hey, maybe I need to take PR more seriously now. It’s almost like a reemergence of PR because of this entire new channel that’s coming up.

And the another interesting thing is like for, because we work with B2B SaaS companies, almost all of our clients collect the reviews on G two and Capra. Like those are the two sites, you know, for one of our clients. Everything is being, everything that referenced was. Uh, this company called Select Hub, again, I hadn’t heard of it, but that was the top source for review.

So they literally went back and said, Hey, you know, guys, [00:29:00] we love you. You’ve already given us reviews on G two and Capterra. We went to the best clients and said, Hey, can you please also drop one on PR or on Select Hub? Right? Just to sort of see if that works. But those are the kind of experiments you can do and just how do you prioritize what to go after.

So we are just seeing, hey, what is the current behavior? And then seeing okay, can, what is the best way to influence it? And that gives you the highest chance of things working out. Interesting.

James: Yeah. I’m gonna ask directly, ’cause I’m sure you probably know the answer. In the agency space, how’s it favoring Clutch?

Ishaan: I have, I honestly don’t know the answer because every single one of the companies that has, um, that has signed up with this is a B2B SaaS company till now, like a hundred percent.

Andy: I know the answer. Yeah, it does favor clutch. Yeah. Yes. So it favors those marketplaces along with, yeah, a range of other things to Han’s Point, like pr, but more so like thought leadership.

Um, yeah. And a [00:30:00] combination of those kinds of things. Does it favor Forester reports? It does not favor well,

Ishaan: not for us. I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen Forrester. I have seen top 10 list stickers in the space being referenced the most often when you’re talking about, hey, what are the best agencies and all that stuff, it does reference the those quite often.

Like we get sourced for some of those answers because a lot of other agencies also talk about, Hey, how we are one of the best in the B2B space and. That’s the source for its answer, so we show up in the answer as well, which is pretty cool. Yeah,

James: yeah. It’s a win. Yeah. Well it’s interesting like the whole like G two Capterra and the amount of effort that goes into that, like I feel like that’s interesting piece of information for people to know as there.

Yeah. What does it cost to have a G two sponsored account these days? 50, a hundred grand a year. Like a lot of money.

Ishaan: Much lesser, but yeah, it’s still, yeah, it’s,

Andy: you’re thinking of the intent, I’m, you’re [00:31:00] thinking of the intent signals and everything else. Yeah. I’m thinking of the full,

James: yeah.

Andy: Not have a profile, but at the end of the day ads, it’s just showcasing the need for social proof.

Andy: That’s a core component of everything in the marketing world and how you buy, and it just, yeah, reiterates the fact that you have to be doing something out there, particularly when it comes to lm.

Ishaan: Yeah, about social proof. I just did, just before this call, like 15 minutes before I joined here, I was speaking with the product marketer and they were just, we were, we were discussing this thing like, Hey, when you are building websites, how do you think about, so there’s a design component, there’s SEO component, there’s the dev component, then there’s the product marketing component.

Right? Now, how does that, when you think about that, right, so I have this entire concept I call, uh, conversion ecosystem, where we think about, hey. What are all the data points that you should think about before or your, your customers would want to know before they take a buying decision? Which is like, Hey, if I [00:32:00] am, um, you know, do you, do you integrate with the same software I use?

Right? That could be an important thing to know. Do, can I afford you? Mm-hmm. That information, even if you don’t put it on the landing page, people want to know before this Hitler call, the same thing is happening on LLMs. So the same behavior, again to Andy’s point, like, Hey, is this social proof? There’s the same behavior that people would want to know by default, like whether they use LMS or not.

LMS are just like doing all the research across your web presence, whether it’s on your website, whether it’s on some other place, and it’s just bringing it in one place. So I think even things like product marketing. Um, making sure your brand presence is great. Those things are also becoming more and more important now.

Well, to

Andy: keep building on then, it’s like we’ve always approached organic with like FAQs and answering the questions that people are asking. I mean, the same holds true, particularly as you build it. On sites [00:33:00] or answer those questions in your content. Yeah. And how that feeds into the LLM system, because that’s what people are inherently trying to figure out.

I mean, you gave up a great point, like, oh, does this tool integrate with x, y, Z of my tech stack? Like, yeah, why am I gonna waste my time on Google when I can just go there and hopefully get a trusted response? But, um, the common

James: objections are a huge piece. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve like gone in to get.

Pricing on products that don’t offer pricing ’cause Right. Instead of me, was it trolling Reddit? Trying to figure out like who’s used it before? I’ll just ask the question then maybe I try to like justify it later, but at least at that, at that point though, that’s probably enough for me to decide whether or not I’m going to do a demo call.

Ishaan: Yeah, so, so one very interesting thing there is, because now this is important for lms. And we are now, we built an entire module in which chosen only to focus on this part. So we get things like, Hey, what criteria are important? And we are collecting a lot of that from the sales team. So this information existed wi within [00:34:00] the organization.

We asked it because we need for lms, but even if you never thought of lm, we should have already optimized for those things, but people just never did. Now, just because they’re coming to us for LLM optimization, now they are. Doing things that they should have done, irrespective whether LMS existed or not.

And, and I think there’s also, it’s also directionally more useful. For example, you brought up the pricing page. So some companies cannot put the pricing up. But then one thing, so for one of our clients, but we are building out, is a pricing page where it’s, it, they cannot put up the pricing, right? So what, but what they are doing is they’re saying they’re giving LMS data to estimate pricing.

They’re saying things like we are asking them to say things like, Hey, do you typically cost less than 30% of the team you replace? Right. Are you typically, do people see an ROI within two months? Or, um, you know, like, typically, are you two x cheaper than most of your [00:35:00] competitors?

Ishaan: Right. So those things you can still say, even if you don’t want to call out your pricing, you could give charge GBTA way to estimate it.

That’s one interesting, uh, component. The other is, um, so let’s say you can show a pricing. There’s one piece of information that I now realize only because I look at LLMs, but we should have always been doing, for example, like when it’s a free trial based product. A lot of companies say that, Hey, you know, we, uh, we start a hundred, do like a CRM, we, I’m speaking with A CRM.

Their plan started a hundred dollars a month. Now that makes them look more expensive than HubSpot. Because HubSpot starts at free and they start a hundred. Yeah, but they’re obviously not more expensive. They’re much less expensive. But then even in their own pricing page, they don’t call it out that, hey, if you compare something like a comparable plan, they are actually the better fit.

They don’t ever say it, but that even if you ignore lms, [00:36:00] that would be such great information to add to those pages. And I’m only realizing like, oh, I don’t know, six, seven years into the industry that, oh, I should have probably written that forever. And that’s is the most obvious thing to do. But yeah, like that.

That was a great just realization.

Andy: All right. So I’m gonna throw a bomb into this entire conversation. Mm-hmm. How scalable is this? Like when you think about it, right? We all, we all operate in B2B, the whole demand gen brand, marketing feeds, demand capture mm-hmm. Things like that. Like, does that same theory and approach exist?

Like, does that create scalability with LLM or does it not?

Ishaan: I, I don’t have a good answer for how scalable it is. I, I, I know this though. So what I do know is what the lagging indicators are leading indicators are. Mm-hmm. And what the action items are. So those I’ve been able to clear out very well, uh, that [00:37:00] I know that, hey, what actions should show this in the short term and then should show this in the long term.

What is the. Complete market size for any company. That’s something I haven’t been able to estimate though. So if you ask me that, if I did this, me and everyone else in my, like if you do it for SEO, you know, search volume, right? You can estimate. So you can do something. You know what the market opportunity is here.

I don’t have a good answer for that. So I don’t know, but I do know how to track how things are moving. So if you are deciding that, Hey, should I do this or should I not do it? Yeah. Uh, the best you decide is that, hey, if you’re already seeing some traffic from it. If it’s not, you aren’t planning to make it a top two channels, invest in it or don’t.

Right? That, that’s basically how I think musicians should be taken. This is an experimental channel. It’s a very interesting experimental channel, but it is an experimental channel. And uh, if you want to be more careful, if there is no search volume [00:38:00] on Google for your industry, don’t do this because it’s the same people, right?

If they weren’t searching earlier in one platform, it’s not like they’ll just. It’s because the new platform exists, they’re gonna change their behavior. So that’s when not to work on it. And otherwise, yeah, like if you have the AppRight experiment, definitely try it out because some companies have said like, I just seeing massive results from it more than I could ever estimate.

Like there’s no ever I ever called out. You see like so much of it, I come from this, but some companies are and I’m just like baffled. Yeah.

Andy: The devil’s advocate me. Wants to argue a little bit of the point of like, if you don’t have search volume for what you offer, because it, it doesn’t answer the scalability question ’cause it’s still not scalable, it doesn’t.

However, it does make me think like Google is not giving you a response and therefore that might be leading to a lack of search volume. But because of the customized nature of a question being asked in chat GPT, you might get a better response [00:39:00] and therefore may look to use that as. A solution for figuring out what you need or whatever the case may be, more so than Google.

Well, so it’s contextual searches, it’s still not scalable. There’s still no scalability there. Yeah. The

James: contextual searches are the ones that are hard to scale. And those, like you said, those are the ones that are also probably more value, more likely to lead to being customers versus just So when

Ishaan: you say like, Hey, how can you, can you, so for contextual search, I still don’t know how much.

Is the total pipeline. It can drive, but I know that how much of it, I have very clear leading indicators we built in into the product that you know that How much of it are you probably capturing? So using that, you could back, Hey, I know I’m probably capturing this percent. And I know this is what I’m getting.

So this is probably the overall market size that you can do. But the one problem with that argument is I don’t know how much of simple, how much is that split with simple and contextual. So again, you cannot, so I only know that, hey, off [00:40:00] simple, this is the total off contextual. This is the total, this is what you are getting and this is what, you know, what’s the total, but you know, I don’t know, split between them and I don’t know the total market size.

So it’s hard to know that. But if you are seeing any search volume, you can just see, okay, how much of the total, what percentage of total am I getting? And then you can back calculate the market size. And then you can, based on that, decide, hey, should you build entire program out of it that you can do?

Andy: I mean, I think the bottom line in all this is if you’re doing, if you have a strong SEO foundation and you’re approaching it with best practices in mind, naturally you are.

Starting to capture an LLL market. It’s a matter of starting to figure out where that diversion starts to happen. Where you’ve got your organic side of things. Yeah. Now you need to take it up a notch to hit LLMs in a different way. Would you agree with that, Sean?

Ishaan: Yeah. Yes. To a very, very large degree.

Yeah. Because a lot of the sources, if like for example, there’s a couple of things you can do, [00:41:00] right? So for simple search, sure, you can show up in the citations, but one of the things that our tool helps you do is sort of figure out where were the citations, very vague. And if they were. Can you just make up your own page so it becomes the citation, which is very similar to how we thought of, hey, should we create content to rank for this thing in SEO?

So that is very similar here, that, hey, like if it is vague. We, we, we’ve, again, vague is a word we had to define technically as well. But anyway, yeah. So it’s, is is there useful and vague? Wow.

Andy: I never thought we’d have to define, is there any

James: favorability though between like brand side content and publisher content?

Ishaan: Um, so I, if you look at data. I, I can very easily say this per, I have data on this person comes from this and this person comes from that. The problem with share, I don’t, the reason I don’t want to share it is because it’s, it’s [00:42:00] not the right way to look at it because, you know, like by default there is more publisher content than,

James: yeah.

Ishaan: So like, I don’t, like if I see the person, it doesn’t mean anything and it’s just going to like mislead everyone. So I have the data, I’m not sharing it on purpose. Yeah, yeah, but, but if your brand is mentioned, like if someone says peer growth, if someone says chosen ly, it definitely goes to chosen D website.

Like I’ve never seen it not go to the Chosen D website if chosen LY was mentioned or any other company website if the company was mentioned. So if someone is trying to compare between you and your competitors, it’s definitely going to reference your competitors on your websites. Along with other things.

So that’s the one pattern. Apart from that, yeah, there are some preferences per industry. Like, hey, like these PR sites are being, like, I shared PR sites, review sites, like what are the preferences by industry? Again, I don’t know why the preferences exist, but there are different preferences across [00:43:00] different industries and they, that’s, that’s, I, that’s what I’ve seen.

So if you know what the preference is, irrespective of what the reason for the preference is, you can just, you know. Do more to show up there and things like that. So, yeah. That you could. Cool.

Andy: All right, Sean, so before we close out today’s episode, we’re gonna do lightning round. Mm-hmm. This is something we started like two weeks ago, or two episodes around.

So I’m gonna hit you with five fast questions, all right? Mm-hmm. The first one up, what’s one SEO myth you wish would finally die?

Ishaan: Oh, oh, I talk about this one quite a bit. Um, everyone says SEO takes, takes time. It, it doesn’t have to just focus on like the most obvious things. Focus on board and funnel, focus on the things that are quick wins.

Sure. It’s probably where you’ll see pipeline impact in like three months. Right. It’s a don’t, it shouldn’t take time. Yeah.

Andy: Okay. All right. Next one up. What? This is a good one. What’s a marketing hill that you encountered recently that you were [00:44:00] willing to die on?

Ishaan: Oh, so this is actually by a mistake I’ve made. Okay. So I, I, I think, um, I, I have been half-assing too many things for too long. So if, if you just did fewer things. And it’s the first advice almost everyone gets. If you just do a few things really well, it’s gonna work. So I think that that holds true. Every time I’ve done a link post where I spend two days on one post versus I send two days on seven posts, it’s two dose, two posts bring in more results than those seven.

So it’s just like do less. So, yeah, like that. That’s my biggest recent realization. Where of just like accumulative fuck ups I’ve made throughout my

James: You’re not alone. You’re not alone. Yeah, exactly. Uh, that’s the reason

Andy: people give that advice. What’s a tool that you swear by besides your own?

Ishaan: It [00:45:00] has to be Chad g pt. I’ve been coding on it, I’ve been speaking with it. I’ve been asking how to get rid of lizards at this, and the next day I’m coding like, it, it, it’s like it’s the best multi like it that cannot, and I’m now chosen be, it’s built on it.

So I obviously I’m making money from because of it. So, you know. Well, hang on now,

Andy: now you opened up the sixth question. Why are you trying to get rid of lizards? My wife

Ishaan: hates them. My wife absolutely hates them. I, I, I, um, if we have time, I’ll give you a pepper spray, uh, story from today Okay. About blizzards

Andy: and me.

Ishaan: But

Andy: anyway,

Ishaan: yeah.

Andy: Uh, next one. What’s a marketing trend everyone’s talking about that you secretly think is over-hyped? Um,

Ishaan: I, I think people still keep talking about. A BM and still no one really knows what they mean when like who, what others mean when they say it. Like just define the [00:46:00] damn term for like, someone just needs to like, let’s all agree on what it means before we all talk about it.

And just like that’s the one, like no one knows what the other person means when they say a BM. Everyone has a different definition, so. Yeah. That’s fair. That’s

Andy: very true. All right, last one. If you could instantly give every B2B marketer one new skill. What would it be?

Ishaan: I, I’ll, I’ll repeat my earlier answer.

It just has to be this. So I think I, I was discussing this in internally. Uh, what is one, like we, we’ve been taught about pipelines. We would talk about all of these things, but we’ve, there should be this like a tipping point theory or something, and you need to put in a certain amount of effort into a channel before it really, really scales up.

Ishaan: I wish I was taught that because I have, like, I, I’ve, I’ve failed in like outbound so many times and I’ve done so many things. I’ve seen companies just like completely been doing SEO for two years, but all they were doing was publishing two [00:47:00] blogs, get two backlinks every month. There’s been two years another not getting anything, and then they come to us like if you just put in enough effort for a month.

Just so, yeah, like I wish I knew that. I wish everyone knew that and this, yeah, all the entire marketing industry, at least in the B2B space would be a better place, so, yeah.

Andy: Awesome. Well, Sean, thank you so much for joining us today. How can people connect with you and learn more about Spear as well as chosen ly?

Ishaan: So the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. I’ve been talking a lot more about SEO lms. How do you sort of show up on LLM start G pt? Um, and I’ve been sharing a lot of the insights that we are finding as well as the journey of launching the product, including revenue numbers, what working, everything that I’m, and mostly what I’m, all the mistakes I’m making, I’m sharing all of that stuff.

So yeah, if you wanna follow me in one place, you can just search for, um, me on. LinkedIn. This is [00:48:00] Han I-S-H-A-A-N-S-H-A-K-U-N-T on LinkedIn. Yeah.

Andy: Awesome. Well, like I said, Han, thank you so much for joining us today. I learned a lot. It was a great episode, and I think everybody that listens to this is gonna think of great episode.

So next time guys, we will catch you later. See you in the next episode. Digital Banter. See ya.