The 12 Month SEO Lie: Sam Dunning’s 90-Day Plan to Win

“SEO takes 12 months to show results.” That’s the lie every marketer tells themselves. I asked our new SEO hire Sam Dunning what he’d do if he had 90 days to start CRUSHING competitors with organic search. Here's his 7-step plan:

1. Start where we win already

Drill down into the top aspect of your product & industries you serve best and use cases that you have sold well into historically, solve expensive problems for and have demand for.

2. Build a moat like no other

Map out every way that a prospect could search for your offering, compare vendors/alternatives, look for use cases/integrations etc. when they are in buying mode for our solution.

3. Craft and improve

Build pages for each of the above. Look what type of page (article, listicle, landing page) ranks already and blow it out the water. Fuel your page copy with customer research, unique stats product visuals, proof points, or reporting and address tough questions from sales calls. Ensure each page goes into detail and is chunked up (e.g. for use case or industry pages to serve up niche specific content that can be served in LLMs).

4. The cheat code for LLMs (listicles)

Find every website “Top X software” listicle for your niche. Reach out to the author of each and offer them a sweetener to include your brand (and a backlink is a bonus).

You could offer to have them on your own listicle, offer a podcast slot, service exchange, social shoutout, etc. Some are pay to play. Many are up for value trade.

Make sure you build your own listicles for each competitor alternative term, best X software term, etc. Again craft yours to blow current pages out the water and chunk up to be easily digestible for LLMs on searches into offering/use cases etc.

5. Leverage past media

Find an exec from your team that’s done a lot of press, podcasts etc. Put their Linkedin profile url into an SEO tool. Reach out to all relevant sites citing them that did not give you a brand mention or backlink to amend article. This is a huge quick win.

6. Control the narrative

Google & LLMs love to cite Reddit and Quora. Start being helpful on relevant threads. Only mention your brand where it’s relevant. Start guesting on the top podcasts in your industry. Focus on a useful show for your ICP. Ask hosts to mention your brand and a backlink in the published article. If you can do all this and have resources for your own YouTube channel and podcast great, if not, prioritize the above tasks.

7. Speed beats slow moving giants

Do all the above with speed and you will chip away at giant slow-moving competitors. They have slow approval processes with layers of management, legal etc. Speed will be your unfair advantage.

Join us tomorrow, Tuesday 9/30, on Unf*ck My Startup LIVE (3pm ET) and Sam will give you the exact blueprint for optimizing your content, technical foundation, and link-building efforts for rapid SEO results.

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0ngothOlTTyHnwFvdENCRw#/registration