S6E6 – How Top B2B SaaS Companies Are Dominating SEO in 2025 with Tom Shapiro

In this episode, we talk about how top B2B SaaS companies are winning with SEO in 2025. Our guest, Tom Shapiro, is the founder and CEO of Strata Beat. He shares his knowledge and experience, including how he helped grow iProspect from $12 million to $75 million in yearly revenue. As an expert in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral intelligence, Tom offers a fresh way to think about SEO and audience engagement.

The Importance of Internal Links

Tom highlights how internal links in a blog can quickly improve SEO. Internal links connect different pages, making it easier for Google to index them. They also help users navigate a website. Websites that use internal linking get more organic traffic, making this a simple but powerful SEO strategy.

AI Overviews in Search Queries

The discussion moves to Google’s AI Overview feature, which gives quick summaries for search results. Some people think AI overviews reduce SEO traffic, but Tom explains that only 17.1% of B2B SaaS keywords include an AI overview. This means over 82% of searches still rely on traditional SEO, leaving a huge opportunity to attract visitors.

Ranking in AI Overviews

Tom explains the advantages of appearing in AI overviews. While not always guaranteed, getting included can increase traffic. He suggests making content look trustworthy and studying Google’s search results to understand which information is most important.

Audience Segmentation for SEO Success

Audience segmentation is a key SEO strategy. Websites that target specific industries, like healthcare or finance, see 50.4% higher organic traffic growth. This approach improves SEO, attracts the right visitors, and builds expertise in a field, which helps with sales and marketing.

Leveraging Free Tools for Organic Growth

Adding free tools to a website, such as ROI calculators or name generators, can greatly increase traffic and backlinks. Tom shares that websites offering free tools see 80% more organic traffic growth. This makes free tools a great way to improve SEO and lead generation.

The Power of Original Research

Original research is a strong method to boost traffic and backlinks. Unique data and insights can be shared across multiple platforms, increasing brand authority. Tom also notes that original research can lead to speaking opportunities at events, further spreading a company’s influence.

Blogging Frequency and Custom Graphics

Studies show that blogging more often leads to higher traffic. Companies that post frequently get more visitors. Also, using custom graphics instead of stock images increases traffic by 44.7%. This proves that original visuals are worth the investment for SEO success.

Building a Content Hub

Top SaaS companies don’t just have blogs; they create content hubs. These include different types of content like webinars, white papers, and reports. This strategy helps repurpose content and reach different audiences, maximizing the return on content investment.

The Role of Behavioral Intelligence

Understanding user behavior on a website helps improve SEO. Using behavioral intelligence tools, businesses can analyze user actions and make content better. Tom suggests studying user interactions to improve conversion rates, enhance the user experience, and drive business growth.

Conclusion: The Future of SEO

Tom ends by emphasizing the need to align SEO with audience needs and use data-driven insights to stay competitive. By focusing on audience segmentation, original research, and content optimization, B2B SaaS companies can continue to grow and maintain a strong online presence in 2025 and beyond.

Key Timecodes

• (0:48) – Guest Introduction: Tom Shapiro and his background
• (1:32) – Discussion on SEO performance report by Strata Beat
• (2:17) – Explanation of AI Overview by Google
• (3:01) – Importance of ranking in AI Overviews
• (4:27) – Misconceptions about AI overviews and SEO
• (5:52) – Strategies for optimizing for AI Overviews
• (7:04) – Reverse engineering approach for AI Overviews
• (8:08) – Audience segmentation and its impact on SEO
• (9:53) – Explanation of audience segmentation
• (12:27) – Content strategies for effective audience segmentation
• (14:01) – Adding free tools to websites and their SEO impact
• (15:31) – Evaluating the effectiveness of free tools
• (17:02) – Benefits of free tools for lead generation
• (18:34) – Creating simple vs. sophisticated free tools
• (19:47) – Original research and its benefits
• (21:09) – Uses of original research beyond SEO
• (22:10) – Effort involved in producing original research
• (24:30) – Blogging frequency and maximizing organic traffic
• (25:59) – Impact of custom graphics in blogs
• (27:42) – Importance of internal links for SEO
• (28:53) – Best practices for internal linking
• (30:13) – Summary of top SaaS companies’ SEO strategies
• (31:30) – Content hubs and different content types
• (33:10) – Contrarian views on SEO and AI Overviews
• (34:36) – Importance of targeting relevant keywords
• (36:13) – Strategies for SaaS founders in 2025
• (37:27) – Importance of ICP research
• (39:00) – Advice for SaaS founders aiming for 10K MRR
• (40:41) – Advice for SaaS founders aiming for 10 million ARR
• (43:21) – Testing and optimizing CTAs
• (44:56) – Conclusion and contact information for Tom Shapiro
• (46:22) – Summary of the episode and closing remarks

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Tom

If you’re not including internal links in your blog, this is low hanging fruit. It won’t take you a lot of time, but it’s something that you can start doing immediately. Very actionable. Only 17. 1% have an AI overview answer included. Meaning that you’re talking about over 82% of the queries that your audience is conducting in Google do not include an AI overview. If it’s a topic that’s going to resonate with your ideal customer profile, your target audience, then write it anyway. If it’s going to resonate, if it’s going to be something that your audience values, then write it. That should be at the crux of all of your writing anyway.

[00:00:48.400] – Joran

Today, we’re going to talk about how top B2B SaaS companies are dominating SEO in 2025. My guest is Tom Shapiro, founder and CEO of Strata Beat, an agency that helps SaaS to drive traffic, leads, and revenue. Their approach is centered on neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral intelligence, allowing them to engage with their audience more deeply. Before starting his own agency, he worked at iProspect, which he helped grow from 12 million to 75 million in annual revenue. Tom is also an author as he wrote two books. His first book was, Rethink your marketing, seven strategies to unleash revenue growth, and his second boost was, Rethink lead generation, advanced strategies to generate more leads for your business. Without further ado, welcome to the show, Tom.

[00:01:32.310] – Tom

Thanks, Jervan. It’s great to be here.

[00:01:34.400] – Joran

Nice. I noticed that Strata Beat brought out a report about SEO performance. You guys looked at 300 PDB SaaS websites and more than 15,000 data points. Is that correct?

[00:01:45.610] – Tom

That is correct. 300 different B2B SaaS websites and over 15,000 data points in trying to figure out what’s working in B2B SaaS SEO today.

[00:01:56.830] – Joran

Yeah, so cool. Let’s just dive right in. I read the report First section you guys have is the AI Overview. Google now offers a lot more AI answers, which you refer to AIO AI Overview. How does the AI Overview actually work and how would you explain it to people who are still clueless what I mean with this?

[00:02:17.560] – Tom

Sure. So Google is leaning on AI-generated answers for many more queries today. If you query accounting software or CRM software, it could be any search, more and more often, Google will provide a synthesized summary at the top of the search results page, what we call the SERP. It’s just a very brief answer, and it’s trying to give the person who’s conducting the query. It’s just a very brief introduction to the answer to their question. Sometimes it might be sufficient for them and they don’t need to search any further. Oftentimes, they do need more information beyond that, but it is just meant to be a quick, brief summary.

[00:03:01.490] – Joran

As you mentioned, they already provide the information in the results. Why should we care about ranking in this AI overview?

[00:03:08.810] – Tom

There are a lot of misperceptions about AI overviews today. There are a lot of people running around saying that, Oh, SEO doesn’t work anymore because there’s AI overviews in the CERP. That’s not the case at all. If you look at what’s happening with B2B SaaS keywords, what we found in our study of these 300 B2B SaaS websites is it’s really only 17. 1% of the keywords that are ranking in the Google top 10, so those are the ones that are going to drive traffic to your website, really. Only 17. 1% have an AI overview answer included, meaning that you’re talking about over 82% of the queries that your audience is conducting in Google do not include an AI overview. And so it’s not a case that you want to give up on SEO, that it’s time to look for other channels. Seo is still a a fantastic opportunity. For many, B2B SaaS, it is the number one source of traffic to the website, even today, even with AI overviews. We just have to be realistic and look at the numbers. 17. 1% is a factor for very specific keywords, but for the vast majority of your keywords, it is likely not a factor and you still have open rate, and there’s no reason for you to give that market share away to competitors.

[00:04:27.650] – Joran

Yeah, so I guess only for a small percentage it will show up, which means there’s still a huge opportunity to start ranking for all the others. How often would they include a link towards your website?

[00:04:39.580] – Tom

Sometimes it does include a link to your website in the AI Overviews if you were one of those answers that Google provides. Google might link to two, three, maybe four options in the AI overviews. And so there’s no guarantee that yours is going to be included, but that shouldn’t deter you from trying to get get included over time. And so you want to structure your information as much as possible. Google is really looking for outside validation that you are a trusted resource. Any time you can be included in reviews, roundups, or high-quality third-party sites helps you get included in AI overviews as well. But really what we find is you want to be very surgical about it. Identify which specific keywords are triggering an AI overview, and the ones that are not entering an AI overview, you have free reign to take whatever content strategy you want to. If there is an AI overview that’s appearing, it doesn’t mean that 100% of searchers are going to just look at the AI overview and move on. A certain percentage are also going to scroll down the page. It makes absolute sense to capture that traffic as well.

[00:05:52.770] – Tom

Why give that market share away? It’s the question that I often asked.

[00:05:57.400] – Joran

If you’re going to target certain keywords to to end up in the AI overview, you’re probably also optimizing your sofa all the other them, right? Like ChatGPT, all the others. We see a lot of growing traffic coming from the other AIs. Is that the case?

[00:06:12.660] – Tom

Yes. The way that you would optimize or ChatGPT or perplexity or Clawed is the same exact way that you would optimize for AI overviews. But the very, very best strategy that you can take for ranking in an LLM is reverse engineer the results. So do a on your critical keywords where there is, say, an AI overview being triggered, where it is visible in the SERP. And then reverse engineer, what information is Google including? Why is it including that type of information? Then try and make sure that you’re at least aligning with the type of information that Google is looking for, and that will give you the greatest opportunity for that particular keyword or that set of keywords for being included.

[00:06:58.130] – Joran

I think that’s a really good advice on how to start ranking. Any other advice to showcase yourself?

[00:07:04.560] – Tom

Specifically with regards to AI overviews, I really do think that the reverse engineering approach is something that’s not talked about enough, and it’s something that there’s a lot of hype and the panic in terms of AI overviews, LLMs, and what’s happening to SEO. I would like to reiterate that, look, it all comes down to not these generic numbers and stats that you’re seeing online. It all comes down to your specific set of keywords that you are targeting and what’s happening with those keywords. With Stratebe, with our own agency, for the keywords where we rank in the Google top 10, only 3. 5% have an AI overview, only 3. 5%. You really wanted to take your own company’s data and look at the percentage of your keywords triggering AI overviews. You can probably ignore a lot of the hype that’s going on out there and just follow really Very solid principles of structured data, getting cited as much as possible, and reverse engineering at the keyword level.

[00:08:08.950] – Joran

Yeah, it makes sense. If there’s no overview, it means you’re ranking in the top three. Either way, you’re at the top, either with the overview for the organic result.

[00:08:17.670] – Tom

Yes. One more thing to consider is if it’s a topic that’s going to resonate with your ideal customer profile, your target audience, then write it anyway. That’s going to resonate. If it’s going to resonate, if it’s going to be something that your audience values, then write it. That should be at the crux of all of your writing anyway. We’re not doing SEO for the sake of ranking. We’re not doing SEO for the sake of SEO. We’re doing it because we need to connect with our audience, resonate with them, and we want to engage with them. Focus on topics that matter.

[00:08:50.630] – Joran

Exactly. Every SaaS company has their ideal customer profile, so don’t just try to start ranking for all keywords. We did that mistake in the past, and we’re now doing that in the last year where we dropped a lot of content, deleting it to start ranking for the right keywords rather than as many keywords as possible.

[00:09:07.510] – Tom

Yes, that’s very helpful. We have a term for that, content pruning. It’s like gardening. You want to prune content that’s not That is relevant to your ICP. And what that does is it helps Google understand where you are authoritative. Those critical topical areas, you do make a big difference to your audience. And that’s what we want to do is it’s not about going broad with SEO. Instead, we want to go narrow and really make sure that Google understands where we are a definitive authority.

[00:09:38.380] – Joran

I think that goes into the next topic, which is audience segmentation. You mentioned in the report that if a website does audience segmentation, they achieve 50. 4% higher organic traffic growth rate. What does audience segmentation mean in your words?

[00:09:53.090] – Tom

We looked at audience segmentation was based on industry. For example, if you’re a B2B SaaS that’s targeting healthcare, or you target financial services, government, manufacturing, technology, hospitality, you’re targeting specific industries. In your website, are you making it very clear that you are targeting specific industries? Do you have content targeting specific industries. We looked at the websites that were leaning into audience segmentation as a website structure versus those that did not have any type of industry focus or industry targeting. It was interesting how effective audience segmentation is. It’s not a topic that you hear about in SEO circles very often. You go to an SEO conference and no one ever talks about audience segmentation as an SEO strategy. We were very curious in our study to see, does it make a difference? Does it actually move the needle on SEO? And yeah, it does. As you were saying, Juran, it produces an organic traffic growth rate that’s 50. 4% higher than those websites that are not leaning into audience segmentation. There’s also the benefit of referring domains. Those websites leaning into audience segmentation achieved referring domain growth of 46. 5%. That’s fantastic for SEO. The more backlinks you have, the greater your SEO strength.

[00:11:16.380] – Joran

And then probably the better quality traffic you get because if you are targeting a certain industry, you’re actually attracting the people from a certain industry.

[00:11:24.550] – Tom

Yes, absolutely. That’s another reason why we love audience segmentation as a marketing strategy, not just with SEO, but for any B2B SaaS, we strongly recommend it. There’s less competition if you narrow the focus and target hospitality, health care or financial services. With SEO, specifically, there’s less competition on those types of long tail keywords. But the faster way to achieve SEO success, domain expertise will help in your sales pitches whenever you’re talking with someone in healthcare. You have healthcare case studies, you have healthcare testimonials, you have lots of examples, you have expertise in health care, for example, where it’s going to make your close rate higher in healthcare if you have all of that healthcare marketing behind you, for example.

[00:12:09.490] – Joran

There’s one question I want to ask. A lot of SaaS companies have at the top in their header, they have four industries or at least something like that, but it’s often just one page. They target every industry. They drop down of 10 industries. You mentioned case studies, testimonials. What other content should they be doing to really nail audience segmentation?

[00:12:27.630] – Tom

Yeah, beyond case studies, beyond testimonials, some things that you can be doing, blog posts is a great one. It’s interesting because a lot of companies have the industry page, but then they don’t do any blogging that is industry-specific, and that’s a big mistake. What we want to be doing is not just having one page that’s targeting an industry, but you want to have an ecosystem of content targeting each industry. And let’s just say healthcare is an industry that you want to target. I’m not talking about just having one blog post targeting healthcare, but I would say have 10, have I have 20 blog posts targeting healthcare. I have 10 or 20 targeting financial services, whichever industries you want to target. Another fantastic way to cut through all the noise with an industry-specific targeting is to conduct original research and then have original research reports for that particular industry. It’s something that executives love. They just love consuming data that’s original, that’s unique, that’s proprietary, that speaks to their particular industry so that they understand how they’re doing against their competition. Original research tends to get more links than other types of content, helping with your SEO efforts as well.

[00:13:39.650] – Joran

For people who don’t know, original research, this is what we’re talking about today. Tom did a research on their BDV SaaS companies, so we made it super specific for SEO. So targeting BDV SaaS companies doing SEO, they made the research. So this is a great way to get free organic traffic.

[00:13:58.060] – Tom

That’s right. It’s very powerful. We strongly I recommend it.

[00:14:01.930] – Joran

Nice. Before we go back to the research, the next topic you discussed, which more SaaS companies are doing, which is adding free tools towards the websites, and they offer all kinds of free tools. And nowadays, from ROI calculators to online Wizards. What effect could adding free tools on the website have for your SEO?

[00:14:20.640] – Tom

Free tools are powerful in many different ways in terms of SEO, but also in terms of just getting people sharing your content, talking about your content, and coming back again and again to your content. So online tools, as you mentioned, could be an ROI calculator, a total cost of ownership calculator, or business name generator, whatever type of tool you offer for free online as a powerful effect in SEO. So what we found in studying these 300 B2B SaaS websites is those websites that offer free tools, they were able to increase their organic traffic on average by 20. 7% versus those websites that didn’t offer free tools, their growth in organic traffic on average was only 11. 5%, so an 80% difference in organic traffic growth rate by offering the online tools. Also, people link to these tools. They’re a fantastic source of links. And so what we found was that those websites that offer the free online tools, on average, increased their referring domains by 88% year over year. Phenomenal growth rate.

[00:15:31.190] – Joran

Yeah. Let me argue the importance of adding free tools. People find them by googling free X, free Y. Is it actually the traffic you want? Is it still good to add it rather than getting quality traffic in who is not adding free towards their inquiry?

[00:15:49.600] – Tom

Yeah, and that’s a really great question. That’s something that I think that each B2B SaaS is going to have to decide for themselves, what is the objective of the online tool? For instance, if you were new, you just launched, it’s a way to get your name out there. If you were more established, you might not want to attract that type of traffic that’s going into Google and typing in the word free into their query. If a certain percentage of those users come to your website and a certain percentage do ultimately convert into a paying customer, then it would be worth it. You need to do that calculation yourself. You need to really look at the analytics and see whether it is converting. The other objective might be purely an SEO perspective. You might have an SEO objective of increasing the number of backlinks you have. And so in that case, it’s not a matter of targeting those who are looking for a free product versus one where they’re willing to pay for it. You’re simply, your objective is to increase the number of external links pointing at your site because that’s one of the most effective things for SEO.

[00:16:51.910] – Tom

In that case, it might be very effective simply from a backlink perspective. If you offer an ROI calculator, getting a lot of backlinks, great. From From an SEO perspective, it’s helping you.

[00:17:02.230] – Joran

If you get more backlinks, your domain authority goes up, so your other content is going to rank better as well. So you’re probably going to rank better for the keywords which are more money keywords.

[00:17:11.770] – Tom

Exactly. Yes.

[00:17:13.580] – Joran

I guess this is already another benefit to adding free tools. Are there any other benefits like lead generation or any other things you guys have seen?

[00:17:22.790] – Tom

Lead generation is a very positive outcome with online tools. If you gate your tool, meaning that you might allow them the input upfront, but in order to get the answer, they need to enter their email. That is a fantastic way to grow your database. When I first spoke, I spoke with the CMO at Tableau Software, and I asked her, what was one of the most effective things you’ve ever done with lead generation? And it was offering a free online tool. That was the first thing that she mentioned. She said it skyrocketed growth. They got millions and millions of backlinks from that. It certainly doesn’t hurt. And obviously, with millions of backlinks, you skyrocket your SEO result. Also, she was explaining that many of those people who started with a freemium version, with a free tool, converted to a paying customer later. It was fantastic for lead gem, but also for customer acquisition as well.

[00:18:21.070] – Joran

Yeah, it’s really interesting. For people now thinking, I definitely need to start building free tools. How sophisticated does a free tool need to be? Could it be super simple? Do you see What’s the difference between simple versus more sophisticated?

[00:18:34.010] – Tom

It can be very simple. It can be just a few inputs from the user. It does not need to be anything that takes you six months of development time. This could be something that you can knock out in a day, in a week. In fact, as long as it’s user friendly, then it’s going to probably be more effective for you. I would say you can lean on the simpler side of tools and you’ll have the same lead generation results and you’ll have the the same backlink results, you have the same SEO results. It does not need to be complicated.

[00:19:03.600] – Joran

So in the end, there has to be a search volume and the tool can be as simple as possible.

[00:19:08.320] – Tom

Absolutely.

[00:19:09.730] – Joran

Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile? At Reditus, we just launched the second side of the marketplace, which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates, which have access to the audience you’re looking for. We do this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getReditus. Com.. Com. You mentioned it in the segmentation already, on original research, could get you a lot of links, like what you’ve done now with this research. Are there any other effects doing original research, having it on your side, besides, I guess, the backlinks you can gain from it?

[00:19:47.380] – Tom

Original research is fantastic from many different perspectives. There are SEO benefits. In our study, there was a 67% higher organic traffic growth rate for companies publishing original research and offering referring original research reports on their website. From a purely organic traffic perspective, it’s fantastic. We also saw an 80% growth in referring domains. From a backlink perspective, it’s fantastic. And like we’ve been saying, that’s really effective for SEO in raising all of your SEO results. Now, let’s go beyond SEO. Original research is really fantastic for you to expand reach, for you to jump on to podcasts or webinars and be a featured speaker, just like today. We’re talking about original research, and it’s one of those things where it’s so valuable to the audience. This is not something that is broadly available. Typically, it’s data that is very new. These are new insights. They’re very current. And so it’s really valuable. In this case, we’re talking about data that’s unique to B2B SaaS. And so for any B2B SaaS, it’s really valuable to understand these unique of what’s happening in SEO today. And that’s very different from going to, say, an evergreen blog post or white paper talking generically.

[00:21:09.170] – Tom

The value scale is very different. Our perspective, there’s so many ways for you to use the original research beyond SEO, where you’re getting speaking time at conferences. We’ve spoken at about five different conferences so far about our original research, just in the past year, just in the past 12 months, a lot of original research Search has a lot of value for you from a content marketing perspective, from an SEO perspective. You can promote it on LinkedIn or social channels, email it to your audience, to your entire database. You can conduct webinars, you can jump on webinars and podcasts, but also lots Live in-person industry events. Think about getting in front of thousands and thousands of your target audience live, having these original insights that no one else in the industry has. You can share with them and talk with them live afterwards. It’s invaluable and something everyone should consider.

[00:22:01.810] – Joran

You guys analyze 300 SaaS websites, right? Any idea on how much time and effort it took to produce a report like this?

[00:22:10.000] – Tom

It took us about three weeks’ worth of time to go from data collection all the way through creating the report itself. And so from A to Z, from start to finish, it was about three weeks of effort.

[00:22:24.630] – Joran

Let me ask you something. We don’t do three weeks. We’re a small team, so you have to do it with the resources you have. Do you also consider original research if I, for example, interview 20 people within the affiliate marketing industry about their thoughts on a certain topic, we produce a blog article out of it, so we just have a questionnaire. They provide their insights. We produce the blog. Which is not my writer, so it takes me maybe a total of 2 hours. Is that also considered original research?

[00:22:50.730] – Tom

Yes, absolutely. That is easier, faster, more lightweight, and it’s fantastic. It’s a fantastic strategy. I love hearing that, and it’s something we recommend to all our clients, something we do for our own agency, being able to email a number of experts and including those unique voices. And because they’re sending back a quote to you, it’s not something that appears anywhere else online. It’s an effective way to cut through all the AI mediocre content and have something more valuable. Google loves that. Google loves seeing expert advice and something that’s unique and original. And with what we call information gain, if you look at the results in Google Page 1 and 2 for a specific keyword, if you can come up with information that goes beyond any of those content pieces, Google really loves that. It loves the added value, the information gain. If you have a smaller team or you’re just starting out, that is a fantastic way to do original research. Email a number of experts, collect those quotes, and put those unique insights into your blogs, and you’re off and running.

[00:23:59.120] – Joran

Yeah, and in the end, it doesn’t It costs you too much time. So if you connected to the audience segmentation you mentioned, if you build a list of experts in a certain industry, you can do it for all industries you’re in. You can do certain researches quickly. It won’t get you on a conference stage or maybe on webinars, but at least will allow you to start building this. The bigger you are, the more time you can invest like Tom. Cool. When we go further into the research, you guys also talk about how often do you need to write a blog to maximize organic traffic. What are the results Yeah.

[00:24:30.580] – Tom

So frequency does matter with blogging and SEO results. What we found, the top 10% of 300 websites were blogging 11 times per month on average. It doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to blog 11 times a month, but it certainly will help your SEO results. If we look at a more granular level, just the entire database, if we look at those companies blogging nine times a month or more, they on average increased their organic traffic 20. 1% year over year, and those blogging 5-8 times a month increased 16. 2% year over year, and those blogging 1-4 times a month, increased traffic by 5. 6%. If you compare those blogging nine times or more per month versus those blogging 1-4 times a month, it’s a difference of 3. 6x in organic traffic growth. And so we do encourage you, if you can, if you have the bandwidth or if you can hire a writer to be writing for you, as long as you are writing content that your target audience really cares about and is going to find very valuable and it’s going to resonate, then we can say, Absolutely. You want to be targeting at least nine blog posts a month for maximum organic traffic.

[00:25:45.530] – Joran

One thing you guys mentioned is having graphics in a blog. Often people use stock images or the same image all the time, but you said custom graphics do a lot more and better in articles. Can you share more about that?

[00:25:59.410] – Tom

With all AI-generated content, we were curious. There are companies trying to do things quickly, not putting any effort into it, not a lot of thought into it, probably throwing a lot of stock photography into it. And so we thought, Okay, Google is probably going to care about the opposite. It’s going to care about any type of signal to Google that this company put a lot of time and effort into their content. We said, Let’s do a study on the value of custom graphics versus stock photography or having no graphics, just not having any effort to make your content visual at all. And it was amazing what we found. Those websites that did include custom graphics in their blogs, they grew their organic traffic by 44. 7% year over year. Those that didn’t have any graphics in their blogs or that leaned on stock photography, actually, their organic traffic declined by 2. 6%. When you consider growing by 44 4. 6% versus declining, traffic is a no-brainer that you should stop using stock photography in your blog post. Instead, lean on any type of original graphics that you can be creating yourselves.

[00:27:14.450] – Joran

When you combine both. If you can’t do 11 plus blocks, you might even want to do less blocks, but add custom images to it because it still have the same effect rather than doing more blogs, but just using no photos or even stock images.

[00:27:28.320] – Tom

Completely agree.

[00:27:29.070] – Joran

You’ve been listening links a lot with the original research, with free tools, et cetera, but those are external links. How important are internal links? Have you guys looked at it and what effect does it have?

[00:27:42.500] – Tom

Yes, and we did look at that in our research. It’s shocking how big of an impact internal linking has on the organic traffic growth rates for B2B SaaS. In looking at those websites that did conduct internal linking in their blogs, for example, you might go to a blog post and they have links to their product pages, solution pages, use case pages, other blog posts or webinars. Providing users with useful internal linking guidance increased their organic traffic by 37. 1% year over year. Those that did not include internal links in their blog, their organic traffic declined by over 25 %. So a massive difference. And so, yeah, if you’re not including internal links in your blog, this is low hanging fruit. It won’t take you a lot of time, but it’s something that you can start doing immediately. Very actionable.

[00:28:37.840] – Joran

Yeah. Nowadays, when you use tools like WordPress, and I think you have all these plugins which even suggest them for you. Maybe not ideal, maybe not the most relevant, but at least takes out some heavy lifting into finding which articles should you link to in your blog post.

[00:28:53.010] – Tom

Be a little bit thoughtful and careful with your internal linking. Make sure that it really is contextually relevant to the page. So whatever that topic is you’re talking about in that particular blog post, make sure that the internal links are very relevant. You don’t want to just do internal linking for the sake of internal linking. Sometimes the automated tools, they do what we call over optimization. You just want to be a little bit careful with that and just be mindful not to have too many links and make your links very valuable and contextually relevant.

[00:29:28.070] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. Would you recommend looking at a maximum number of links on a blog?

[00:29:33.770] – Tom

We don’t count the number of links in a blog post. One may be 2,000 words, another may be 3,000 words, another may be 4,000 words. The longer the blog post, the more internal links you can have where it feels very natural. We would just say, focus on value and what feels natural. Don’t overdo it, don’t force it, don’t add internal links that don’t make sense, don’t add links just for the sake of adding links. Make sure they’re really useful useful to the user.

[00:30:02.170] – Joran

Let me ask this, when you look at the report, what do all the top SaaS companies have in common when we look about SEO? If you would try to summarize the report in a couple of sentences.

[00:30:13.330] – Tom

The top 10% of performers growing organic traffic the most, on average, grew by 112% year over year. In an SEO environment where a lot of people are running around claiming that SEO doesn’t work anymore, no, actually, it does work if you do it the right way. And these B2B SaaS companies are absolute proof that is still working today if you do it right. One of the things that they were doing was original research. We found many of the top 10 % were doing original research more than the rest of the B2B SaaS companies. They were leaning into audience segmentation more than the rest of the B2B SaaS companies. They also did internal linking. There were more of the top 10 % who were doing internal linking in custom graphics than the rest of the B2B SaaS companies that we looked at. Also, they tended to have a content hub, not just a blog, but a hub of different types of content, different types of resources. All content, but different types of content. So they tended to have a content hub more often than the rest of the websites we looked at.

[00:31:23.870] – Joran

When we talk about different types of video, text, any other things to keep your mind here?

[00:31:30.700] – Tom

Yeah, they might include webinars in their content hub, white papers, a combination of videos with PDF reports or HTML reports. Companies tend to atomize their content. Let’s say you come up with a white paper on a topic. Instead of just having that one white paper, and that’s all you have for that topic, you want to slice and dice it in many ways. So you have different blog posts speaking to different excerpts from that white paper. You can have videos, a video series, a webinar speaking to it. You can have lots of different types of contents. For one white paper, maybe you come up with seven different industry-specific versions. You don’t have to recreate it from scratch. You can reuse most of it and just make it specific to that industry. That’s a very efficient, effective way to atomize your content. Instead of having one piece of content, you have 10, 20, or 30 pieces and you’ll get much more ROI out of your content that way.

[00:32:34.800] – Joran

Yeah. It’s interesting. Everybody in marketing knows Gary Vee in his videos. You’re taking it next level towards an actual proper content piece, which is not just an hour of recording, but You turn that into a lot more, the webinars, the blogs, the articles, et cetera.

[00:32:50.600] – Tom

Anytime you find yourself putting time and effort into a content piece, consider what are five easy ways to slice and dice this information into small smaller components or directed at different audiences. It’s a way to multiply your content marketing easily. Interesting.

[00:33:10.370] – Joran

Let’s go beyond the research you guys have done. What is one contrary take you have when it comes to SEO? What is a popular belief right now which you completely disagree with?

[00:33:22.250] – Tom

A lot of people are saying top of the funnel SEO is dead because of the AI overviews. Let’s go back to the data we shared Over 82% of queries that we looked at for these 300 B2B SaaS companies, AI overviews is not appearing in the Google surf. They are not competing against Google AI overviews for 82% of these keywords. Another thing we looked at was the top 10% of performers, companies doubling, tripling, and quadrupling their organic traffic year over year. How are they doing against AI overviews? Companies doubling, tripling their organic traffic had stiffer competition from AI overviews. In other words, AI Overviews was appearing about 12% more in the CERP for those particular companies, the ones that were performing best. The notion that you can’t beat AI Overviews is ridiculous. The data is completely contrary to that. What we want to do is not look at AI overviews data that’s generic. That’s not your competition. That’s totally irrelevant. Look only at the data that’s to B2B SaaS and that’s specific to your company, and it will give you much better insights.

[00:34:36.620] – Joran

It’s almost like the old-schooler approach, like SEO only target the clients which are interesting to get right. It still remains exactly the same with AI tools driving you traffic or showing clips of the content you have. Make sure you keep it relevant towards your audience, which sounds super simple, but you see a lot of companies not doing this.

[00:34:56.850] – Tom

Yeah, I agree. It’s a crazy concept. We took a B2B SaaS client in the CRM and customer support space. And shockingly, one of the very, very first things we had to do with them from an SEO perspective as part of the SEO program was to delete 60% of their blog posts. We literally, the first thing we did was delete 60% of their blog posts. Why? Because they weren’t relevant to the target audience. They had pages dedicated to telephone area codes. 53% of their Google top three results were area code pages that were meaningless. It was just traffic for traffic’s sake. So we deleted all of them. It was so ridiculous.

[00:35:38.660] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, they probably had quite a bit of traffic on it. But coming back to what you said earlier, building up an authority didn’t actually help them because most of that traffic might be for area code, which had nothing to do with what they actually do, right?

[00:35:50.450] – Tom

Exactly. It takes away from Google understanding what they do, where their value is, and where they’re authoritative. It’s just traffic for traffic’s sake. Those pages never produce a conversion.

[00:35:59.680] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, it has no relevancy to the actual product. We talked a lot about AI already. Are there any other biggest risks or opportunities SaaS founders should prepare for in 2025, in your opinion?

[00:36:13.860] – Tom

The very best, most effective, most strategic thing you can do, considering all the AI content that you’re competing with online today, is ICP research. So understanding your target audience, your ideal customer profile, As deeply as you go deeper than your competition with your ICP research, it will solve 99% of your marketing problems. You will understand them better, meaning you’ll be able to improve the messaging in your website, the offers in your website, the pages in your website, what you speak about in your blog posts or your white papers or any type of content, your webinars. What you want to do is have that as the foundation of all of your marketing. How do you do it? It’s easy to say, go deeper with the ICP research, but it’s harder to know how to do it. What we love to do is measure how much of your time is spent talking with actual customers. Is it less than 1% of your time to improve that? Sales call recordings are fantastic. If you do have salespeople, you want to be talking with them regularly and gathering insights from what are people talking about today? What are their concerns, their pain points, frustrations?

[00:37:27.760] – Tom

What are they trying to do? Talk to your salespeople, listen to sales call recordings. If you use GONG, fantastic. If you use Chorus, Sales Loft, it doesn’t matter. Just use any technology to record your calls and glean insights from those. Another thing you could do is conduct CRM win-loss analysis. I can’t tell you how many B2B SaaS companies don’t do this. They have a CRM, yet they never spend the time reviewing it together with whoever’s doing marketing and understanding why are people buying today? Why are they not buying today. You need to be recording this in your CRM at least once a month. You should be doing a CRM, win-loss analysis that gives you deep insights into your audience. There are also surveys and posts you can be doing. But also, Jaron, like you were saying earlier, if you are conducting outreach and asking for ICP’s expert opinion on specific topics and include that in your blog post, that’s another way to understand what they care about, what they’re thinking about today on the topics that matter most to them. There are lots of different ways to glean audience insights, but we think that will give you a strategic weapon versus other companies that think that, Oh, just using the latest AI tool to be more efficient is going to be the way to their success.

[00:38:43.700] – Joran

I think nowadays, it’s not just producing as much content as possible, even though doing 11 plus does help. But if the content is not good for just AI generated, it’s not going to help. I really use saying this, go deep and make sure it actually adds value towards the reader.

[00:38:58.710] – Tom

Absolutely.

[00:39:00.470] – Joran

Nice. We are going to wrap things up. I love these final two questions. When we talk about growing a B2B SaaS, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who just started out in trying to grow to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:39:14.930] – Tom

I would go back to understanding your audience as deeply as possible, understanding your ICP. It all starts there. Should you lean into different types of organic marketing, whether you’re talking about SEO, content marketing or PR, absolutely Absolutely, because those are things that are going to be relatively less costly for you, and also they’re more enduring. They compound in value over time. It’s the only marketing that accrues value over time, that increases in value over time. And so that’s very important. At the foundation of that is your ICP research and understanding your ideal customer profile as deeply as possible, whether talking with your customers as much as possible or listening to sales call recordings or if you have salespeople, then talking with your salespeople regularly or doing CRM win-loss analysis. So all of this is critical. When you combine deep audience understanding with organic marketing across SEO, content, and PR, you’re creating a moat around your business. It’s a lasting moat, and it’s a moat that compounds in value over time.

[00:40:26.770] – Joran

Yeah, because it’s going to compound even after you reach 10 10K MRR. So if we now have passed that milestone and we’re going towards 10 million ARR, it’s a big step, I know. What advice would you give SaaS founders here?

[00:40:41.190] – Tom

So going from 10K to 10 million, what we’re looking to do there is you want to lean into optimizing your conversion rates as much as possible. That would be our recommendation there. Because you already have a certain level of traction, you already have a certain level of traffic. Imagine capitalizing on that traffic to a much greater extent. In other words, monetising the traffic that you already have much faster and into a much greater extent. And so conversion optimization can take many forms. One of the things you want to look at is your messaging. Can your messaging in your website or your messaging overall across all of your marketing, can that resonate more deeply? Can there be more urgency? Can you hit on their pain points more? A lot of B2B SaaS talk about features and benefits, but they might not We’re not going to talk about pain points and frustrations of the user as much. And so lean into those frustrations in as much detail as you can. That’s very effective. Other ways that you can look at improving your conversion rates might be doing CTA testing. A lot of B2B SaaS, what they’ll do is they’ll create CTAs across their website, and then they’ll forget about them.

[00:41:51.080] – Tom

It’s just set it and forget it. But what we find is if you do a CTA analysis, you’ll see which CTAs are working and which aren’t getting any clicks. And then that gives you the opportunity to change them up, to do A/B testing of different CTAs, which is very easy to do nowadays with lots of different types of software. I’ll give you an example. We looked at B2B SaaS recently. The six-week period, all of their CTAs across their website. And over that period, zero people clicked on Contact Us. That means they were wasting a lot of real estate around their website. It just wasn’t something that resonated with them. People didn’t want to talk to a live human being. The book of demo, CTAs were working very well for them or to watch this video, that was working very well for them. And so load up on the CTAs that are working well, double down on those, and get rid of the CTAs that are not driving any clicks or only driving minimal clicks. Another thing that I would recommend is behavioral intelligence. So looking at what are they doing on your site? Where are they clicking?

[00:42:54.930] – Tom

How far down the page are they scrolling? What are they paying attention to? And where are they skipping over? And optimizing your site based on their behaviors.

[00:43:05.220] – Joran

Love it. One question, a podcast went live with Peter Loving last week regarding UX. He mentioned you should have only one specific call to action on your site, so not have book a demo and get started. What is your recommendation here? Should it be one or could it be two as well?

[00:43:21.460] – Tom

We believe it could be two, and you have to test it. You have to test it because it all depends on your particular SaaS product or your SaaS solutions and your particular audience. It’s so easy to test CTAs now. We would strongly recommend that you test. Even if you don’t want to do A/B testing, you can test in different periods of time. It’s very easy to see the actual results with your actual audience. And your audience will make it very clear through their data, through their clicks, what they care about and what they don’t care about. And so we would say, lean on your audience to give you the insights that you need.

[00:43:59.500] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, you have the data, you have the audience, look at your own metrics. Let me see if I can try to summarize. Based on the SEO study, you did over 300 SaaS websites, 15,000 data points. Only 17. 1% keywords have an AI overview included. Try to identify keywords which are tracking an overview or not to find potential for yourself. If you do want to rank in an LNM, try to reverse engineer the result and deliver content in a structured way. Try to look for audience segmentation, target certain industries. Ideally, you create an ecosystem of content targeting a certain industry. Think about case studies, testimonials, blog posts, etc. It will allow you to get more backlinks, more qualified traffic. Think of adding free tools to your website. It’s a difference of 80% in organic traffic growth if you add free tools, but it’s also a great way to increase domain authority, more backlinks, increase lead generation, and it could be as simple as possible, but doesn’t have to be a sophisticated tool. If you are creating content, think about doing original research. It could get you a lot of links, higher traffic, being able to share it with a more extensive network on podcast, events, social media, newsletters, etc.

[00:45:06.300] – Joran

If you want to do it the lazy way, create a list of industry experts and get their reviews on a certain topic. Ideally, when you are creating content, turn one content piece into multiple pieces so you are able to get the blogging frequency which you recommended, which is 11 blog posts per month or 11 plus posts per month. If you are creating these, add custom images because it’s helping you to increase traffic, 44. 7% increase if you add this. And when you are creating these blog posts, add internal links. It also has a massive difference. Make it contextual, relevant though, so don’t add internal links for the sake of it. But in the end, your content should be different type of resources. So think about webinars, white papers, report, etc. But make sure you focus everything towards your ideal customer profile. So when you are going to do this, do proper ICP research, go deeper than your competitors, and you will be able to create better content than they do. So leverage cold recordings, win-loss analysis in your CRM system, or any other research. If you are on your way to 10K MR, understand your audience.

[00:46:12.530] – Joran

If you are on your way from 10K MR to 10 million AR, optimize your conversion rates, monetize your traffic faster, track and test everything, ideally on behavioral intelligence.

[00:46:22.270] – Tom

That was great summer.

[00:46:23.930] – Joran

Thank you for coming on, Tom. If people want to get in contact with you, we’ll definitely add a link towards the report. But how can How can they contact you?

[00:46:31.940] – Tom

They can contact me on LinkedIn, and they can also contact me through the Strata Beat website, so stratabate. Com, and either through the contact form or the Book of Strategy call form.

[00:46:44.040] – Joran

Cool. Maybe one of them never got clicks. Who knows? We’re going to add a link to the report, a link to Start a Beat, a link to your LinkedIn profile so people don’t have to search for you. They can just click on it. People listening on Spotify, please leave us a review and please answer the poll. We’re heading to Spotify. Always happy to hear what you thought of this. Thanks again for coming on, Tom.

[00:47:05.140] – Tom

Oh, thank you, Jérôme. This is really fun.

[00:47:07.120] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your BDB SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. Want to sponsor the show. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reddit, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.