The Quiet Shift: How B2B Teams are Winning Post-SEO

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far, we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt.

Hey, Brendan. We've been chatting a little bit behind the scenes, but now we officially hit record and super excited to have you on today. Brendan is the founder of Growth Sports Sprints and also just kind of like one of those legendary B2B marketers. He's been in like all of the cool shops, has a ton of experience. You've definitely seen him on LinkedIn. He runs a really cool community called all in for in house SaaS marketers. I still have an application pending by the way.

Ooh, okay. Sometimes convertkit breaks. I apologize. That actually happens where I'm like, people are like, don't tell anybody but it auto approves like I do. We do a lot of filtering in the thing, but I don't, I don't have them. I used to like wait for Every application to come in, and I'd be like, yes or no. But that just felt weird and bad and I didn't want to have to open everybody's LinkedIn and see if you looked like you worked at a SaaS company. But really, you're going to sell us backlinks? Like, yeah, I just say yes to everybody now and you'll filter out. There are people that come in and they immediately self promo three times and we're like, you got to go. Or they DM everybody to sell backlinks.

And we're like, get out of here.

You're out. But that's so rare.

We have that in Exit 5, too. But more about you. I'm excited today. I want to learn a little bit more about what you're doing now. I think something really cool in your background that I love seeing in marketing is that you were actually a high school teacher the first half of your career. So, yeah, tell me. Just give me the lore. What's the Brendan lore?

The lore. So I was a high school teacher, and I think it's like the best training for this because I was like, half nrt. So I also. I taught high school. I taught psychology and sociology. I also taught government. I taught a really cool course that we invented for the kids called College Careers and Skills, which was literally. Danielle. I was literally assessed on, like, whether the kids believed in themselves or not. Because I was teaching in Gary, Indiana, on the south side of Chicago. And like, all teaching is hard, but I'm good at that. Hard. I am good at. You don't believe in yourself. You see nobody successful in your community. I can hype you up. I'm not good at the rich, preppy, helicopter parent part of teaching.

Yeah.

Because I'll just be like, I hate you and you're dumb and bad.

Different beast.

Very different beast. But I did really well there. The thing is, I had to be the show, and I had to be good at making kids believe in themselves and teaching them life skills. And I also spent a lot of time learning by teaching psychology and sociology. You can only see this looking back, but it was a perfect path to what I was doing. Now I spent 10 years having to educate and entertain every single hour. I had to create material. Like the stuff that worked first hour, you kind of like, test it again the next hour. I had kids that would switch during the day. Like, I had kids that were in, like, second period or first period, and later they would be in. I had a kid come into eighth period and he's like, I'm back. And I'm like, his name is Jaz. I was like, jaz, why are you here again? Like, I thought, he's funny. His name's Jaz. You can everybody pictures jazz, right? So Jaz just came in and sat in the back of the room. I'm like, get out. And he's like, no, I'm here. He shows me the schedule. He's like, guidance just told me to stay here. And I'm like, all right, cool. Start teaching my lesson. I start doing a little bit of, like, I don't know, whatever. I'm talking about some stuff. And he's like, huffer, do that joke. Do that joke. You do. And I'm like, they know. They know it's material at this point.

And, like, it's almost like you're like a standup comedian. And he's like, wait, from the last set?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, he's gonna do it. I love this one. Like, it's so silly. But it is perfect for this, right? You go on podcasts, you share similar stories. It is material. I do sales calls. I say the same thing on a lot of sales calls that I know are going to get a laugh or seem funny or resonate. That is what we do as marketers.

And also, you know, like, the psychology of teaching, of how people learn. And that is a lot of what we do in marketing. That's. I'm just like, I'm so bullish on teachers. If they want to be marketers, I would hire a slew of them if I could.

Yeah, if you get a good, charismatic teacher that understands things like curriculum and how to, like, take people through stuff and not explain it. Like, I'm five. But treat them with respect. Like, you are smart. You can fill in the gaps here, but I'm going to lay the path out ahead of you. Like, there's so many things that overlap. Teachers are also, like, super organized and, like, meet deadlines. Not me. I'm a hot mess. But, like, most of them are better than me.

So now you're not a teacher anymore, and you're the founder of Growth Sprints. But how did you get from there to where you are now? What was the story again? The lore?

Yeah, I. So I was teaching, and I had become an assistant principal. I tried climbing that ladder, Danielle. Like, sincerely. I tried everything I could. I got my master's degree in educational administration. I became a principal for the privilege of making $45,000 a year. I was the lowest paid assistant principal in My state, you can look that up. And I looked it up and I was the bottom. I was at the end and it sucked. Like, it was really hard. I realized that I climbed a ladder and the ladder was leaned up against the wrong wall. And it was all for the privilege of like having an extra 25 pounds around my midsection like a knot. Super great relationship with alcohol. And Monday morning panic attacks. Like, I genuinely had a panic attack driving to work Monday morning. And I would have to regularly, like in the middle of the day when I had some time, I would leave and because there's some really cool beaches on Lake Michigan just outside of Gary. And like I would drive to the beach and just like stare out my front window. Just like trying to cope and dreaming. Dreaming of one day doing exactly what I'm doing right now. That's why stories like Lachey and stuff. Who's been a guest on here before, like that and why she's a friend now. Like, that resonates with me so much of taking full ownership of your life and your career and figuring out what that career mix looks like for you. Not everybody needs to like quit their job and do their own thing. I think that's terrible advice. Most of the people telling you to quit your job are also selling you something to get you to quit your job.

They're selling you a course on how to quit your job.

Yep. A hundred percent day job to dream job. Okay, got it.

Yeah.

But I came up in that world too. And I thought you had to hate your job and quit your job. So every summer I would be like, I'm not going back next year. I'm doing my own business. And I kept trying and trying and every. It was so defeating. Every August I'm like, shit, back teaching again. And it was just so heartbreaking. And then one day I was sitting in my. I'm a big guy, right? Like we've met. I'm a large human. I was sitting in my Nissan versa during my 20 minute lunch break. I looked like Mr. Incredible sitting in his tiny car. But I'm on my phone with a friend and he goes, why don't you just go work somewhere and do marketing somewhere? And I had come up in that like online marketing world where you hate your job and quit your job. And I was like, holy shit. Like, I never considered that. I never considered working professionally in marketing. I was not a very good teacher. The rest of that day I went back in, probably sent out 50. I went in like Built in Chicago and all the Chicago tech job Boards filled out, like, 50 applications. Did a ton of interviews, oddly enough, one of which had activecampaign, which they said no, but I ended up working there later. A couple years later, I got a job at a really great web design agency, being their SEO lead. I became SEO director there. I literally ended the school year on a Friday, and the agency was like, do you want to, like, take some time off in between? I'm like, guys, I have been ready for this for 10 years. Let me cook. I want to get in. I showed up overdressed in my teacher clothes. Like, I showed up, and the owner of the agenc was like, wow, shirt and tie. He's like, it's your first day.

He's like, let's get you a T shirt.

He's like, respect. Don't wear that again. And I was like, oh, we can wear T shirts here. This is crazy. Like, I had no idea what it was like to be an adult. Like, I just had no clue.

Yeah.

So I worked at that agency for a few years, realized it would always be a web design agency, it would never be a marketing agency, but learned a lot. Wonderful team, incredible leaders. Like, I could have worked there the rest of my life. They're so great. Went to another agency, learned a ton. Paid a pretty heavy toll with my physical and mental health working there, but left there, got a job at ActiveCampaign. Worked there, worked for one of the best bosses I've ever had, Benjamin Elias, who left and now is. It is actually back there, funny enough. And then after a couple years at ActiveCampaign, it was stupid to not do my own thing. This sounds like such a dumb flex. I told my wife in the car after, like, a really rough spot Benjamin had left, I had a new boss who was, like, an absolute nightmare. And I looked at my wife, and I'm like, when GROSS Rents, makes $500,000 in a year, I can quit my job. My wife kind of, like, looked at me like, really? She put her hand on my leg really, like, compassionately. And she's like, brendan, they pay you $97,000. Why do you need 500 to leave 97? And in my head, I was like, I'm an idiot. Like, I don't know. I just kept moving the goal posts, and I think a lot of people do that. Like, you just keep being like, when we hit the next milestone, you know, I made, like, 97 at work and 97 in my side gig. And I was like, okay, cool. But what if I made 200? What if I made three. And I just kept like moving it and it was like, why? Because I was just scared.

Yeah.

I think we've seen over the last couple of years, like, yeah, you're taking.

Away that level of security, which is that full time job. Whereas, like, you maybe have a little bit of scarcity mindset with like, the work coming in of like, oh, it's going to dry up tomorrow and I'm not going to have either of them.

And it does.

Which isn't gonna happen.

I've seen people quit their jobs and it dries up. They exhaust that initial demand and then they're like, oh, I don't. I have to build a pipeline of like, people continuing to want to hire me. And it's like, yeah, everybody was chomping at the bit. You got your first 12 clients, you thought you were gonna make a million dollars in a year.

Yeah.

And then you didn't. And now it's hard. And there's no. I hate it when people feel shame. I felt so much shame about my career for so many years. People will put shame on like, oh, you're going back in house because you. No, no, no, no. Everybody has a career mix that's right for them.

No, you're doing whatever is right for you.

Yep. And being in house is not that safe. We've seen, if you go to layoffs, FYI, you can look at all the tens, hundreds of thousands of. It feels like hundreds, not, but like an exponential amount of layoffs in tech in the last three years. Like, it's not that safe. So you have to figure out, like, how do I build a defensible career where even if my client worked right up tomorrow, this is gonna sound very arrogant. I could probably call 10 friends and be like, hey, do you know of anything? And I guarantee half of em would be like, I could probably make something for you here. Like, you're really going in house. Can I come work? I'd hit you up. I'd be like, hey, are you guys hiring?

Yeah.

And you'd be like, are you kidding? I'm not saying you would hire me. I'm not arrogant like that. But like, it would elicit a conversation. Right. Because we built enough trust and enough audience and all of the buzzwords. And I think that's where, you know, if anybody approached you, if any, like past guests that are amazing, Lachey or Anthony Perry or whoever, you would have that conversation, you'd be like, wait, yeah.

And I feel like that's how you build that defensible career is like your network too. Which sounds, like, really cliche and cheesy.

But your network is your net worth. Yeah.

Yeah. That was very similar to me. I ended up taking this awesome role and I thought I was going to be amazing, and it didn't turn out that way at all. And then I kind of find myself flailing and I was like, what do I do? And then I didn't even realize I had built this network. And I was talking to someone and she was like, fuck, I would hire you to do this for me. Come in next week if you want. And then I was like, wait, I could get a client. And then I slowly got so many more, and I was like, oh, awesome. And then one of them turned into full time again and it was like. So I was like, okay, I'm ready for this now. I did what I wanted to do.

Yeah. Somebody asked me if I'd ever go in house again, and the answer is, of course. Of course I would.

Yeah.

If it makes sense. It makes sense. Like, I don't know. I don't know what the future. I am so excited about this adventure in my career of, like, I have no idea what the next couple of years. Couple years ago, I had no idea we would be doing this. Right now. I'm just super excited. I just, like, have, like, a bit of puppy energy. Of, like, I'm just really happy to be here every day. I don't understand how this is working. I don't understand how we're talking right now. I'm very flattered. Like, this is all still crazy to me.

I love it. All right, cool. So tell me more about growth sprints and what you guys do, what your. Your little niche is right now. What's lighting you up? Tell me about it.

So with gross sprints, it's wonderful because I push back against the retainer model. I don't like working on a retainer specifically. That was for SEO. I thought it was always silly that you'd be on a 6 to 12 month retainer because, like, SEO quote unquote, takes 6 to 12 months and it fricking doesn't.

Ooh, spicy.

That's how they sell the retainers. So I pushed back against it. I'm like, what if I just did sprints? I invented sprints inside of ActiveCampaign. Working with Benjamin, I was, here's what I want to do. We're going to run in sprints and I'm going to check off these things. And it wasn't checkbox marketing of like, let's just run the repeating Thing every week, month, year. But it was just like, these are short sprints. I'm going to do an internal link sprint. I'm going to do this sprint. I'm going to do this boom, boom, boom. And that turned into like how I run client work. So that means I get to work with a ton of different clients. And I like that. That fuels me of like, I get to see inside a lot of different companies have a lot of impact and all this different stuff. The thing that lights me up the most, the way that I break things out is usually like, I think in bets a lot, like, I really was influenced. What's that? I think it's the title, like Thinking in Bets, Andy Duke's book. I was in very, like, inspired by that idea. So I think about, like confident bets and quick wins. I think about making bigger bats. That looks different, but it's almost always content. So the stuff that lights me up is there's still an SEO bend to what I do. We travel in the world of Martech a lot and marketing to marketers. So it's like, well, it's super saturated. SEO is so saturated.

It's like, yeah, if you're HubSpot, SEO is dead.

If you're HubSpot, yeah, it is. And like in a lot of industries, yeah, it is. But if you're an AI call trainer for sales teams, it's not. If your revenue cycle management, which 99% of people listening to this have no idea what that is. And I didn't know what it was a couple years ago. It's the business of between medical providers and insurance companies, they do so much back and forth. It's called revenue cycle management. They do so much back and forth communication of like getting things paid and submitting this and do that and blah, blah. It's a nightmare. Revenue cycle management, wide open. There's so many wide open where it's just like, there's nobody doing this and there's nobody doing it well. And there's some industries that are super small where it's hard to figure out where. It's like, nobody's really googling this, so what are we going to do? But people are googling it. SEO is just wrought with flaws. We can get into like how even the SEO tools are probably wrong about a lot of things and why based on where they get their data. But that's still a win for a lot of clients. And then what's cool is like, they also get to see me doing stuff. So they're like, wait, you built a 20,000 person email list. Can you help us with ours? Yes. You have 40,000 followers on LinkedIn. Can you help us on LinkedIn? Yes, that sort of thing. And then you just build, you do it once. I have like a semi productized service. You do it once and then you're like, this could work for a lot of different people. So those like weird questions of can you help us build our community and figure out how to manage it and leverage it for content? Yeah, I can. Because that feels crazy to do this one off, but now I have it forever. It's an asset for me. It's something I can help other people with. And that's the stuff that lights me up. Of True, true. Like multi channel. Like, what is our content strategy? Like I said, they come in being like, I need help with SEO. And I'm like, what about these seven other things? Like, I think I can provide value here. And they're like, for the same price. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you would love that.

Because no one's like an easy no brainer.

Yes. And I love that. I want like the biggest impact possible and I want it to be like you said, an absolute no brainer to work with me. That's the stuff that lights me up is like figuring out what their content strategy really is and then like, how do we have impact with it and what does that even mean at their company?

So how do you do that? Like, we were talking a little bit before we started recording around content strategy and how it's not just this document you write once. That's like, we're going to go after a newsletter of B2B SaaS, marketers, and that's the strategy. But how does that actually come to life and how do you measure that impact?

Like, okay, so I push back on. Like, they always have like a Persona. Like, we sell the B2B, Brendan, and it's like, don't, don't create some dumb generic Persona. Personas are really cool and interesting when they're backed by qualitative information and quantitative information. Like, that can be really interesting when you're like, hey, we know these people really deeply. We know that people in revenue cycle management struggle with these five things. And this is what makes them hate their jobs. But this is also what makes them scared of a solution like ours. Because this, this and this. Like, oh, I love that. Like, when you have really good understanding of your audience, that's a dream for me. So I think, like, it's first of all understanding that stuff and the way you asked me the way I do it. I start in, like, a weird way that I always thought was really bizarre of just, I'll joke with people. I'll be like, if there's a place PDFs go to die at your company, I want to live there for a while. I want to watch all the old webinars. I want to read your last 30 sales decks. Like, I want to just let it wash over me. And I thought it was really crazy. And then I read Ogilvie on advertising. And in there he talks about, like, how he would just read the technical manuals for these products and how I want to say, I forget, is it Bentley? It's like, hey, you know Rolls Royce? Yeah, Rolls Royce. What is the. What is the line? Like, at whatever kilometers per hour, the loudest sound you'll hear is the clock.

Yeah.

And he was like, that came out of, like, page 212 of a technical manual. And I was like, if that has worked for 50 years before me, maybe I'm not nuts. It's cool. We arrived at the same, like, conclusion independently. But that is very much a part of my product. Like, I just really obsessively want to understand three things. Your product, your audience. And also, this is something I don't think a lot of people spend enough time on is like, understanding the business, whether you're in house or coming outside in understanding, like, things that I do well, meaning and maybe the right decision are also going to cause a lot of problems for you. I need to know that ahead of time. I'll use a lot like this analogy. A lot of, how big of a withdrawal is this from the, like, social bank account, the emotional relational bank account with your peers, with your boss. And sometimes people are like, that's going to be a big one. That if we push for this, that's going to be a big withdrawal. And I don't know if I have the social capital to pull it up. Good. I'm glad we know. Because if I was hardline focused on this or you were hardline focused on it, it's probably going to screw things up more than it helps.

Yeah. So, like, you don't want to go in and propose this huge initiative with the person that you're working with. They are not, like, on the fence. Like, they don't have the, like you said, the capital to go and say, like, hey, we're going to invest in a podcast.

Yep. Let's use a completely hypothetical example and say, like, hey, we're an email marketing company. We should have an email newsletter, because we don't have that. And then it becomes like this. If you didn't know the big bureaucratic stuff of, well, the design team needs to design the emails and the product team wants input and that we're going to need a copywriter. We also need to talk about the team that sends emails, because that's a separate team. All of a sudden you're, like, straight to jail. Absolutely not. I don't want to do this anymore. You have to understand, like, how companies work internally. And I think we've gaslit a lot of marketers into being like, if you can't sell this up to leadership, that's your fault. I come from, like, such a deep place of empathy, of, like, some situations just suck. It's not your fault if you can't explain marketing to your CEO. Dave joked a long time ago of, like, life's too short to work for a CEO that doesn't get marketing. And, like, sometimes there is a level of education. But the reason I left, like, the web design agency back in the day is, are there things I can change internally? Yes. Have I changed everything I can change? Yes. But in its DNA, it would always be a design agency, and I would be getting the design clients that we sell marketing on the back end to. And that makes them, like, bad marketing clients most of the time. And then it's like, okay, cool, I can't change the DNA here. Time to move. And the same is true for my work now, where it's like, do I have the potential to have impact?

Yeah. And there's always going to be this kind of limit on what you can and can't do as you yourself a person, and also, like, the other person involved at the company or people. So, yeah, I think knowing that is really smart.

I mean, you asked, like, how do I do what I do? How tactical can we get?

Let's get super tactical. I want to hear about a play that you've run. Like, tell me about a sprint. I want to know the nitty gritty ins and outs.

I'll just give it. Here's the thing. It's like, I want everybody listening to this. Cool, cool, cool. If you want to hire me, awesome. But my best clients are the ones that have, like, been following you for years, ran a bunch of your plays already. We got these big results, and that's why we're bringing you in, because you already just by sharing stuff freely, like, you know, it's just good content marketing. Right? Educate, empower, entertain, do all those things. So mostly Like I said, I think in bets, like it's confident bets and quick wins, bigger bets, there's some authority building pieces in there. I think the stuff tactically, here's where I begin with a lot of clients is if we have the easiest wins and the most confident bets. If you already have a base for let's do. Can we do SEO first and then like move on to other pieces, other channels? I don't think everything has to be channel based either. But if you're thinking about SEO specifically improving what you already have. In fact, I'm also happy if you want to link to it in the show notes, I'll give you my checklist. Like I created a checklist when I was at activecampaign. We were getting like 200,000 visitors to the blog every month and we took it and this is again traffic. It's not revenue. We went from 200 to 240amonth in 30 days and then like kept growing from there. I'll give everybody my checklist. I don't care. I'm happy. If it helps, great. But I It's improving content. You already have one of the easiest levers there is. Just looking at how Google's AI and machine learning parses content and using a tool like Clear Scope, Market Muse, Fray. I use phrase only because my friend Bill used to work there. How much martech have I bought just because my friends work there? I don't know all of it because.

My friend used to work there. I know all of it.

People are like why do you use nutshell for your CRM? And I'm like, I don't know. My friend Jack and Ben used to work there and my other friends like partner owned the company. Like I just bought it because I like I'm loyal and it works. It works and it's not broken. Cool. And switching costs are high.

Today's episode is brought to you by ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences, and make smarter business decisions. In the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks. You can even understand how much organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place with Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself. One of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like Chat, GPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today.

Go check them out anyways. I use phrase but getting those entities right sometimes. I'll give you an example. I was working with a buyer intent software that shall remain nameless. They had an article about intent data and in that article about intent data they never talked about revenue, the buyer journey, sales cycles, all these entities that Google's AI and machine learning would say an authoritative article probably should talk about these phrases. We never use them like the risk is then you just cram them in and turn it into word salad. Don't do that. But improving your articles with those goes a long way. It also from a human side of it should still do it because like it just makes it more rich for human like, can you imagine talking about intent data, never talking about revenue. Probably should as a human, but fixing that sort of thing. The other easy win is internal links. Like connecting. If we have a page we want to rank on a certain topic, find all the places on your website you use that phrase that you want to rank for and just hook them up. Sounds dumb. It was one of the first things I did at ActiveCampaign is a big contributor to that. That internal links. We did it with. Person on my team did it when I was at an agency with Allstate Insurance. And they've ranked just from internal links, ranked number one for car insurance for like the last five years, worth, like hundreds of millions of dollars. Just. It wasn't like a cute campaign. It wasn't. It wasn't even a campaign. We just set 200 internal links. Like, it worked.

Really dumb question.

Yeah.

So, like, SEO is not my bread and butter. I'm like dipping into it a little bit right now with like, the new articles thing at Exit 5. And like, I know internal links are important. I'm doing it wherever we can. And then like, when we publish something new, I'm making sure to go back and if there's an opportunity, like, link it. Why does that work? What are the search engines looking for? Is it that you spend more time on the website? Because I am reading an article about ABM and then I click on something about paid media and I'm spending more time there and it's relevant. Or is it something with how Google, like, catalogs it? And you said, I think you said you ran a whole sprint on this. So, like, I know this is maybe a weird place to kind of like, dig a little deeper, but it's one of those things I'm so curious about.

So just to wrap the last piece in a bow, like the make sure your stuff you already have, if you have nothing, different conversation, right? You're starting this thing with the articles. Different conversation than some of this. But, like, the internal links. And like I said, I'll give everybody my checklist. They can run through it. I don't have a strong sense, like, we also have more info in the algorithm that we've ever had for Google. Like, there was a huge leak that happened and people like Mike King and a bunch of others did a lot of digging into that. And it turns out like Google's been protecting its stock price because the stock price goes down when everybody, when it gets leaked, that we're really manipulating their algorithm and it's not good search results. Because marketers ruin everything. But we have more info than ever. But spoiler, it's still content and backlinks are the main things. But we know that to your point, links from other websites matter. Connecting to our stuff shows like it's almost like a social graph of like they have a bunch in there or a bunch of connections to this one page. Same thing with internal links. It looks at the words that we use to connect it and when they are that exact match phrase that tells Google this page is very is the most important page on this website on this topic versus like a messy anchor text. Like it just Google's crawlers are dumb. They're robots. The simpler you make it for it to understand, the better good news. It also makes us better for human. I keep caveating with like it makes it better for humans too because when I click a link I know exactly what page I know it's going to be about those words. Yeah, I don't think Google knows how much time people spend on the site. I think it knows if you pogo stick like if you google something, click a link and then come back, it knows that and it doesn't like that.

Interesting.

And I think especially in B2B you're going to open if I'm googling things with a level of distrust, like I'm going to open a couple in different tabs. It's not like I click a link, read it, click the back button. Maybe some people do, maybe I'm an oddball, but I'll open a bunch of stuff in different tabs and it can tell those things. So it's not that it's keeping you on the site longer or it can see in your analytics or something like that. I don't think it's pulling any of that especially I mean what an absolutely catastrophic thing that would be if it was like hey, Google was actually spying on your customer level data. Like I don't know, like I feel like that would be bad news. Especially in GA4. That thing can go straight in the trash.

I hate it so much.

Yeah, it's a mess. So there are some like levels to like these signals that matter. The problem is when we hear signal like these SEO signals, the marketers brains are like how do we manipulate that? How do I get them with more time? We always use. I had people in the past that were like we need more time on page. No you don't. Most of the time when people are spending a lot of time on Page, they're confused, they can't find what they want. Like, unless you're writing like long prose and you're like a really good writer. Like Nobody's reading your 16,000 word article on what is marketing automation? Like, they're just. Most people are not. So if you see them only, wow, the bounce rate is super high. Yeah, they probably came, found what they needed and left. It's okay. Especially in B2B. You're not going to earn a conversion off a blog. Like, you're just not. They're gonna Google the brand later and come back and SEO will get miscredited for it. Cause it probably has 20 other points of influence which we can talk about. But like, that's very much. I think where I start is like the easiest wins. There's also some technical stuff we. Danielle. I used to do these like 90 point technical audits. Like I was like a real big brain smart boy and I was like, the more, the more rows in this spreadsheet, the more value I'm giving them.

And it seems super legit, right? Like if I'm investing in that and you show up with a 90 point technical check sheet, I'm gonna. Yeah, I hired the right person maybe.

But I also had a CMO be like, this is when you know you're in trouble. When they lean close to their monitor to like look at something and she goes, if I'm math in this, right. This is about 50 dev hours. It's pretty expensive for us. What's going to be the ROI of this? If you want to see a large human become a very small human very fast. That was me. I just like Homer Simpson into the bushes fully. Yeah. You're just like, oh God, I don't have an answer. And I went with. Because it was somebody on my team when I was at an agency that recommended it. And I was like, it's a. I don't know. It's just like a best practice. Just like everything we should do, we just want to pull out, you know, I like finessed it. This is the other thing you get really good at when you've been a teacher. Like just finessing stuff, AKA lying. Like put a nice name on it, we'll market it. Is lying. But I. And I was just like, I don't ever want to do that again. So I figured out what matters, right? And these are the things that matter from technical. And I would love for somebody to argue with me about it because I'll die on this hill. Are we accidentally burying content on the website? Like, if. As long as we can crawl everything Like, I had a client the other day, one of their competitor pages, like an alternative competitor page set to no index. I was like, why? And they're like, oh, I think like a year ago, somebody got mad. So we set it to not show up in Google anymore. And sales was using it. And I'm like, can we turn that back on? You'll find those types of things where it's like. Or you'll find like a small hinge that swings a big door where it's like, every page has this dumb thing on it. If we get rid of it, they all do better. Right. But sometimes we just bury content on the website. Stuff is 15 clicks from the homepage unintentionally. It's just how our website was built.

Yeah.

Whenever the last time was built and people aren't thinking about that, they didn't have any oversight. But Google's like, well, if our crawlers can't find it, humans can never find it. Decrease the ranks. Don't prioritize this. It's not that important. So stuff like that happens too. Outside of that, as long as like. And we're also. I'm also looking for like, correlations of. As we've made more pages, you know, you can hop into an SEO tool like Ahrefs. As we've made more pages, has traffic gone up in correlation? If not, let's dig into that. As we've got more backlinks, does traffic go up? Are they moving up together? If not, if they're going opposite directions, something's wrong. Yeah, let's dig into why that is. But outside of that, I don't think anything really matters on the technical side, like, it's really not worth, you know, nobody needs to know if your gzip file is functioning or something. Who cares? This is the other thing with SEO. This is a my spicy take on the industry. A lot of SEO people are web developers. They're not marketers. They are technical website people who want to live on the website and live in their SEO tools and run their crawls and their audits and do their keyword research. They don't want to talk to people. They don't want to interview a customer. They don't want to write creative copy. That's why you see a lot of this, like, proliferate is like a lot of people who are not multifaceted marketers have become the ones running the content on the website. And the content strategy for years was like, export all the keywords that use CRM in it, sort for most volume Lowest difficulty. And that's the content strategy. And that's how we've gotten here. That's how we've arrived where we are. Where with people being like, SEO is dead. And it's like, it's not. But the thing that used to work 10 years ago doesn't work anymore.

So something you said earlier, speaking of hot SEO takes, when you were talking about like retainers and you're like, okay, it needs to be like a six month retainer because that's how long SEO takes to work. And you said, no, it's not. Why tell me more about that. Because that's the common kind of thinking, right? It's like, oh, SEO is an investment. It's going to take at least three to six months to start seeing results. Tell me why that's wrong.

Use that analogy anywhere else in your life. If I came to your house, I fixed your water heater and I was like, I fixed it. I need you to pay me every month from now on because you're enjoying the benefits of it. You'd be like, get out of here. I'm paying you to fix it. Get the fuck out of my house. Sorry, I'm a little cursy over caffeinated.

I like it.

It's good. Like, that sounds absolutely out of bounds in every other place in our life. The way I explain to people is, yes, play the long game, don't pay the long game. You're smart. Now maybe it's, I'm being selective with my clients. I only work with really smart people with capable teams. They're smart enough they can run with it. I've given you all the tools, all the everything, the education, like, that's usually also a part of what I do. Like, I'm also teaching your team and helping make sure that we're aligned. Talk a lot about aligning incentives. I want the incentives to be aligned the right way so that you're able to like, keep running with this. And you don't need me. I don't want you to be indebted to me. Where like, and some people want it as like, they want a retainer is like, I just need to know somebody's there and somebody's keeping an eye on it. And there's some organizations where that makes sense. It is not most organizations in my experience. So there's just no reason to pay me while you're doing all the work. And if I'm doing all the work, I mean, can you imagine signing a contract with me? And I'm like, hey, there's a six month contract and you're like, cool, can you tell me what you're going to do? And I'm like, well, generally these things, but I can't tell you what I'm going to do in months four through six. Yeah, that doesn't feel aligned. Those incentives aren't the right way. Also incentivizing me to drip things out to you. Do the checkbox marketing of I'm going to give you two content briefs every week. One content brief a week, four per month. Like it just. I don't need to drip it out to you because behind the scenes, let me tell everybody here, spoiler behind the scenes, they're doing all the work in the first couple months anyways and then they're just dripping it out. And if they're not dripping it out, if they're really like can't figure out more than two content briefs in the first month or they're making two content briefs for you or writing two articles for you. God forbid you're letting your SEO agency write your articles. Don't. Sorry. I know more hot takes. But like if they're Dr. I love it. They've only thought through two and the next month they are genuinely starting fresh and thinking of two more. You're working with somebody who doesn't understand strategy because they haven't planned that out. And if they have planned it out, give it all to you right now, give it all to you up front in the first two or three months and then maybe they stay on for part. I don't know. There's a lot of ways to, to do engagements. I just don't, I don't like paying the long game. I don't think it's the right way to do it.

Well, like you said, it's kind of that, that old system of how we used to do it and what do you think the new one is? Like, what are people doing now that's just like not working anymore? Chasing the keywords and what's an approach that you're seeing that is working now?

So there's a lot of things that aren't working. I think newsletters are really hard. I love your newsletter. I think more people with and we'll talk about like SEO and other things as well. But I think that like more newsletters should be what I call an immortal newsletter. Everybody listening to this should steal this idea where it's 50% what we know. Behind the scenes is essentially a nurture sequence, like an autoresponder series. You're going to get the greatest hits. And then we're going to intersperse that with the ephemeral current events value that makes the whole thing feel current. Like I get. I send out my like evergreen emails on Wednesdays and then on like Sundays the. I sent two emails a week, maybe too much, but drop me a DM on LinkedIn. They're like, loved your email today on a Wednesday. And I'm like, I have no idea what one they got. They're.

You're like, what did you just get?

I even sent one out on like the six month. It says like, did you miss our anniversary in the subject line. It's the most opened email. And I'm just like, hey, hey, we've been. You've been reading for six months. It's our Ann six month anniversary. Congratulations. Like, it's so silly, right? Yeah, but like I can do that because I don't have to send that out fresh. It lasts. And got. What if I miss a week? Who cares? It's fine. The other stuff is still running, right? It means we have to produce half as much. And I also hated when I wrote like a banger of an email and everybody loved it. And I'm like, well, that goes in the trash. We never use it again. Well, what about when I double subscribers next year? Can I. Do I have to just send it to everybody again? Do I have to set up filters? Yeah, screw it.

That's the thing. They've never seen it. And just putting it out there once is not. I even get that too. Like, I've written, I don't know, maybe 30 or more issues so far of just the Tuesday newsletter. And I'm like, well, I need to get a bunch more before I can start reusing. And I'm like, but we've grown subscribers by so much. There's so many people who haven't seen this. And even if they have, there's no guarantee that they've like read it in depth enough that they're going to be like, nobody complains. We saw this seven weeks ago and.

You said this like 2003. I looked it up and I'm mad that I've read it twice. Well, it was good. It was good and everybody loved it. And you're welcome for the reminder. That doesn't happen. Nobody's pissed like that. We're attention strapped as it is. You've seen it more than once and.

If it's good, it doesn't matter.

Yes, it's a quality debate, right? The tactics debate. Like the think about how many Times you've watched a movie more than once or listen, how many times have you listened to the same song? A lot.

So many.

A lot. Everybody has. But some reason with marketing, we think it's weird and like we can't ever repeat ourselves. It's like you're going to get sick of your crap way before your audience does. So I think the first thing that like, let's leave the old game behind is like we have to constantly be on this hamster wheel treadmill for email newsletters. Like just Immortal newsletter all the way. Half ephemeral, half evergreen. Good, let's run with that. I think the other thing is I push back a lot on checkbox marketing. We've kind of like teased at that a little bit. Like figuring out what the what matters, what resonates, having functions for that. I don't mean to be vague about these things, but a lot of that comes with like naming a problem and not your category. I call this Content ip. I thought at Drive, Kyle did a great presentation about it. I was pissed when he got off stage because you all opened it up to Q and A and he was like, here's the problem. Here's the problem. We named the problem. It's revenue leak. When I was at Clary, it's go to market bloat at Copy AI Problem, problem, problem. And I'm like, this guy is, it's just pure facts. And I loved it. You opened it up to Q and a. He got 27 questions about how to create a category and what about your new category and old category and how do you name your category? And he was like, well, he's so polite and like buttoned up. But he was like, very politely. Did you all notice that I didn't mention our category name because like, that's not the most important thing. And people are like, cool, cool, cool. So if I choose a bad category, it's like, oh my God, stop. Like this whole category creation thing has gotten off the rails. And I was like, this is content ip. Like he's naming this, right? There's a company called Operator that talks about the great ignore. They do that really well. Our mutual friend Mark at User Evidence has the evidence gap. Great Problem based ip. They've named the problem. They own it in the minds of their icp. Like that's the cool thing about it. It's almost like a conceptual scoop, right? Like, yeah, the great Resignation or Quiet quitting. There's tons of examples of this. You could. People should Google conceptual scoops. It's great training for how to think about this. But you're just observed. The whole point is you observed a trend, you observed a problem, and now you're giving a name to it. And people. That resonates. I think that's.

You're the first person to name it. That's really powerful.

And I think we're also. If I could put like a third one in here. The third biggest issue is not understanding that content has to do more than one thing for your company. And what I mean by that is, have you ever heard of the Eisenhower boxes? For anybody who hasn't, like, basically have four boxes, urgent versus important on two separate accesses on axis axes. I don't know.

Not a math guy accesses axis.

I was told there'd be no math, but essentially. And I struggled with this and I was like, cool, I understand what's urgent. That's very obvious. This is urgent. Or it is not. Goes in separate boxes. But it's. Everything can feel important. So what is actually important? And this guy at a conference, he was just this random dude working. Wasn't even an attendee. He was working at a conference. And we were just rapping about something and he was like, oh, important means it does more than one thing. And the more things it does for the company, the more important it is. Oh, my God. Like, when you want to talk about, like, a turning point in my life, I was like, that is going to inform my work for the next 30 years. I didn't know it then, but it has. And not 30 years. I would. I didn't learn this when I was 10, but it will. So that's how I think about content. What are the things that are going to do the most for our business? And if we created some criteria about, like, yeah, I need distribution and search, but I also need this to be highly shareable. But I also need this to be part of buyer enablement and sales enablement, which I think are sometimes two different things. How many things can I attach this to? And that helps me prioritize what to produce. That is also not, in my experience, super common. What is super common is like, we did a webinar. Make it a blog post. We did whatever blog posts. And it's like, well, what's it doing for us? And more specifically, like, what's it doing for our audience is maybe the better question to ask. And the more things this can do for your audience, the more of service it can be to them. The more reason we should make it.

Yeah. The more important it actually becomes. Not just because it's like, oh, we had the webinar last week and it's important that we do this. And it's urgent because we had it last week.

Yeah. A good tactical example of this is your common. I say common, but so many people I work with don't have these pages. Just like a common alternatives page. Let's say who is a company you love right now? Like a tech company.

Ooh, Fathom.

Great. So Fathom should have a page for fathom alternatives. I want to be in that conversation. If somebody is vetting alternatives to my solution and saying me by name, they're aware of me. Right. If we think about the old Eugene Schwartz, like problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware type of framework, they're not just solution aware. They don't just know our categories exist, they know that we exist, but they're looking for alternatives. I who better to tell? And if you do this right and you're putting your old school sales technique, you pull in person sales, you pull their chair on the same side of the table as you, it's like a psychological thing. Versus me selling you across the table, I'm going to pull the chair. So we're on the same side against the problem. Pull their chair on the side of the table and be like, hey friend, you're looking for alternatives to us. Here's some great ones and here's why they're great and here's why we're different than them. I want you to make the best choice for you. I don't want a bad customer that's going to churn out in two weeks. Right?

Yeah.

So create fathom alternatives. Then all of the their competitors, let's make alternatives to those pages and then let's go even one step further. Let's make versus pages. Competitor versus competitor. I don't know who all of their competitors are, but because I use fathom.

Yeah, I do too.

Unaware. Unaware who the competition is. Let's make versus pages and really break those down. We are experts in this type of stuff. I want to know all of them. Let's make a status quo like versus the status quo, like fathom versus whatever they're doing now. Right. That is super important. That's something I learned from Jen Allen Knuth. Like the status quo is your biggest enemy. You have to create something around that. So I'm saying all that to say we create all these pages, they're going to do great in search because I'm. All I want to do is be in the consideration set. I want to give Our sales team or our product led motion, the best possible chance. But we're going to get distribution through search. We know that people are going to share this with each other. It's highly shareable if we do it well. Sendoso has a great one where you can be snarky on some of these pages. You could say, hey, the other competitor's support team usually takes about three days to get back to you. They're also a gifting platform. You'd probably be better off sending their support team a gift because you'll probably get a response faster. That's aggressive, but it's true. Or you can say, like, we have more support agents than our competitor has total employees. It's funny and it's snarky. But you know, on those pages they put like a big yellow sticky note that's like, hey, are you trying to make a business case? Click here to copy this note and send it to your boss. We're not. They're not enriching it. They're not going to inbound, lead outbound or whatever. Vomit. Like, ideas. Those are of like, let's SDR them into the ground because they click copy this on the clipboard. Yeah, vomit. But like, you know what, I'm sorry. Strong opinions on these things. But like, it's just good buyer enablement. So it's good buyer enablement. The sales team is going to use it to follow up. Oh, you're vetting these other. You know, you're fathom. You're vetting these other things. Hey, we actually put together guides on those products, like, here you go. And it'll give you a very fair as. As updated as information as we could get. Here's good information. It does a lot of things for the business. That's what we want. I just wanted to make it like, I'd give everybody a tactical example of like, let's create stuff that has more distribution. Let's survey people and get quotes from them and then say like, hey, we added your quote to this page. If you want to comment on our LinkedIn post about it, you can. Or if you want to send it to anybody because we featured you, you can do that. Like, there's so many cool, creative ways to do these types of things. I think it's helpful when we, like, make it concrete.

I think it's also a great mindset shift too. I think of how do you tell something is important, like you said, and going into it thinking like, okay, we're yeah, it's a competitor page, but here are the things that it's doing for the business and here are the things I need it to do versus like okay, we just have to go make a competitor page because it's something we're supposed to do and we're not going to index it or link it anywhere. Like it just makes you think through the impact much more. Which I think is a really important framework especially when marketers. We have a thousand a trillion things going on every day of that we could be doing and that's a great way to prioritize the high impact ones. I think I'm going to use that at exit five.

Yeah. I think the Natalie marcutullio also gave a great talk at DRIVE about her framework for the choosing what to do and what not to. I think she's got good ideas as well. But I think as long as we're staying anchored in this and I know that we're talking of specifically from like a content angle. Everything I recommend to clients is very specific on it has to do more than one thing for the business. And if it is, if it is SEO stuff, that's our core case. If we want to pull in traffic from search or we want to treat this like a campaign, we need content that's going to build backlinks on their own because we don't want to buy them, they're too expensive and we don't want to send out emails begging for them. If you're going to do outbound, you might as well be an STR and get demos, not backlinks. Waste of time. There are other ways to like make even those. This page is just built to get backlinks organically. Like that feels really myopic and just like that's one thing it does for the business. Cool. How do we make it do 3, 4, 5 things for the business?

Yeah.

What could that look like for us? There's lots of creative ways if you, as long as you keep pressing your team of like how do we get this to do more for the business? That is very much how I think about what I do for clients.

Yeah, that is a great mindset. I'm gonna steal it. This was awesome. Brendan, thank you for joining us today. I'm super excited. Tell people where they can find you. LinkedIn, your newsletter, the community. Yeah.

Well, can I make an ask before I tell them where to find me? Cause I don't care if they find me. I want them to just have really enjoyed this. Do me a favor and maybe we could even. I'll be meta about this. I'm really competitive. I want this to be the most popular episode ever. Can you please share if you enjoyed anything in here, don't reach out to me and tell me. Make your first thing you do sharing it in a community you're in or sharing it on LinkedIn, share it in Exit 5. Like Share this interview. Share the link and I don't care if it's the Spotify link, that's where I listen or wherever else. Share the whatever link you have and how you found this. Share this in a community you're in or with one friend. That's the ask. Don't find me.

Love it.

If you want to find me, you can google my name. I'll pretend it's because I'm good at SEO. It's not. I just have a very unique name. You can type Brendan Hufford. Obviously you see it in somewhere in the notes for this episode, but then you can google me. You'll find all this stuff. LinkedIn is where I share everything I'm learning along the way. And also I just hope people, like I said, will share that checklist with people. If you're trying to figure out what's working in SEO and stuff. This isn't a checklist for everything we talked about, but if you're looking for specifically that, I'm happy to give people my process that I've seen work really well in the past.

Awesome. I love it. I'm already thinking of title ideas. Spicy SEO 100%.

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