SEO Alone Won't Sell SaaS. Sam Dunning's "Deadly Trio" Will.

Sam Dunning runs Breaking B2B, where he helps 45-plus SaaS companies do "SEO and AI search for revenue, not vanity." His core argument: SEO on its own rarely closes a high-ticket SaaS deal. You need a system. He calls his the deadly trio.

Key Takeaways

SEO done as a silo rarely works for high-ACV SaaS. Sam pairs it with LinkedIn and YouTube in what he calls the "deadly trio."
Chasing top-of-funnel traffic is a trap. Sam says start with the 3–5% of buyers who are in-market now and have sales intent.
AI-generated "slop" can spike traffic fast, then crater. As Sam puts it, three months later "the traffic drops off because Google picks up... seriously unhelpful content."
Build a "money keyword matrix" — four columns mapping how buyers search, the industries you serve, your real competitors, and your customers' jobs to be done.
Video is the trust layer. Sam says it needs commitment: "at least like three, four, five months. Sometimes we can see impact in 90 days."

Why SEO alone won't sell SaaS

If a company comes to Breaking B2B asking for SEO and nothing else, Sam often talks them out of it.

"If someone comes to us for SEO, I usually say don't do it. If you just want to do SEO alone as a silo, I don't recommend it." — Sam Dunning

The reason is the math of a SaaS sale. Buyers don't see one search result and decide to spend 20, 30, 40, or 50 thousand dollars. There's a lot that happens behind the scenes before that. So Sam runs his own marketing engine as a trio of channels that reinforce each other: SEO and AI search, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

What is the "deadly trio"?

The deadly trio is Sam's name for three channels working together instead of in isolation.

"Our own marketing engine runs really well from the deadly trio... which is basically SEO and AI search, LinkedIn organic and founder brand boosted with paid ads, and then YouTube." — Sam Dunning

Each leg does a specific job:

SEO and AI search capture demand. When a buyer is actually looking for a solution, your brand gets recommended.
LinkedIn builds the demand. Sam uses it to educate, entertain, and share case-study breakdowns, then boosts that content to website visitors and cold lists.
YouTube adds the trust layer. If someone finds you in search, a video proves there's a real person and a real point of view behind the brand.

A lot of Breaking B2B's SaaS clients run that same engine, and Sam says it works.

What is the "top funnel trap"?

One of the biggest mistakes Sam sees is what he calls the top funnel trap, or the traffic trap.

Companies churn out how-to and "what is" articles that drive lots of traffic, but the people reading them aren't buyers. As Sam puts it, they're "tire kickers" or people "looking to learn the niche." Old-school SEO agencies leaned on this for years because the traffic numbers looked good.

His fix is to invert the order:

"Work out what dream clients search... when they have sales intent for your solution, your service, your software, [when] they're comparing options, or they have a crisp problem to solve. Start with that kind of three to 5% that are in market now. Exhaust every way they can search... and then work backwards from there." — Sam Dunning

Why does AI-generated content lose traffic over time?

The newer version of the traffic trap is letting AI run your whole content workflow. Sam is blunt about the "slop" play — the "zero to 10 million traffic in 30 days using this simple prompt" posts.

"What you don't often see is three months later the traffic drops off, because Google picks up... seriously unhelpful content gets penalized, and maybe even worse." — Sam Dunning

Dane adds a signal he's watching: Anthropic hiring in-house video producers and directors for human-made content. If anyone could make slop work at scale, it would be a frontier AI lab. The fact that they're leaning into organic, human content suggests the pendulum is swinging back toward trust.

How do you find high-intent keywords? The money keyword matrix

Sam's practical tool for this is a "money keyword matrix" (or money prompt matrix). It's a simple four-column sheet, best built by a founder with input from sales, customer success, and marketing:

Every way someone refers to your solution — e.g., proposal software, quoting tools, proposal platform.
The industries you serve best — ones with the problem, the motivation to solve it, and the cash to invest.
The competitors that come up on sales calls — the names you keep getting compared against.
Your dream client's jobs to be done — their struggling moments and most expensive pain points.

From those columns you build long-tail queries real buyers search, like "best proposal software for sales teams," plus the high-intent comparison terms: "competitor alternatives," "competitor one vs competitor two," "competitor pricing," "competitor reviews."

Sam points out where AI genuinely helps the research:

"You can literally link up your sales call recording, like Gong, Fathom, Fireflies, as an MCP into Claude and pull that research to help with this, as well as your content engine." — Sam Dunning

How does video save time and money on content?

This is where Dane's "pre-purposing" approach meets Sam's playbook. Instead of repurposing content after the fact, you plan the video first as the core ingredient, then turn the transcript into text assets for AEO and GEO.

Sam's example: a "best proposal tools of 2026" listicle video where you screen-share through 10 tools with pros and cons. The repurpose value is high — that one recording becomes a listicle article (with a TLDR, screenshots, social proof, and CTAs) plus a comparison piece.

He's also seen a direct SEO benefit from embedding the video on the page:

"When you embed a YouTube video, that if it's relevant into the article landing page... it gives an uptick in Google results. Sometimes you get that thumbnail as well in the results." — Sam Dunning

Why video builds trust at the bottom of the funnel

Dane's take is that video is one of the few places you can own the conversation, because the video speaks for itself — it's clearly not ghostwritten, and right now it's clearly not AI-generated. That makes it a trust-building activity at the exact moment a buyer is deciding.

Sam agrees it matters, but he's honest about the commitment it takes. Just like SEO, you can't do video for a month and hope for the best.

"It needs at least like three, four, five months. Sometimes we can see impact in 90 days... We only took YouTube seriously a year or so ago and we've slowly reaped the rewards." — Sam Dunning

His advice to a skeptical CEO: you need someone — a founder, a thought leader, a product expert — who's comfortable on camera and willing to commit. Do that, and video adds the next layer of trust, with a lot of replay value across LinkedIn, your website, and your blog.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why doesn't SEO work on its own for SaaS?

Because high-ACV SaaS buyers don't convert from a single search result. Sam Dunning says SEO as a silo rarely pays off — he pairs it with LinkedIn and YouTube in his "deadly trio" so demand creation, demand capture, and trust all reinforce each other.

What is the "deadly trio" in B2B SaaS marketing?

It's Sam Dunning's marketing engine: SEO and AI search to capture demand, LinkedIn (organic plus paid) to build demand, and YouTube to add a layer of trust. The three channels work together rather than in isolation.

What is the top funnel trap?

It's when companies chase high-traffic informational keywords ("how to," "what is") that attract learners and tire-kickers instead of buyers. Sam recommends starting with the 3–5% of dream clients who have sales intent now and working backwards from there.

What is a money keyword matrix?

A four-column sheet that maps how buyers refer to your solution, the industries you serve best, the competitors that come up on sales calls, and your customers' jobs to be done. You use it to build high-intent, long-tail search queries and comparison terms.

How long does video marketing take to work?

Sam Dunning says treat it like SEO: commit for at least three to five months, though impact can sometimes show in 90 days. It took Breaking B2B about a year of taking YouTube seriously before they slowly reaped the rewards.

Full Interview Transcript

Dane: Hello everyone, my name is Dane Frederiksen and I am a video expert in the B2B space and I'm on a mission to help B2B companies grow their visibility, trust, and pipeline by using video more effectively. So today I'm joined by Sam Dunning, who is from breakingb2b.com. And welcome to the show. Sam, what else do we need to know about you and what you're up to these days?

Sam: Oh, I appreciate you having me. What am I up to? If I'm not messing around on LinkedIn rambling about SEO, AI search or SaaS marketing, then yeah, like you said, I run Breaking B2B. We essentially do SaaS, SEO and AI search for revenue, not vanity. Also run a podcast with the same name, Breaking B2B, interviewing SaaS marketing leaders. And also we do solo episodes around what's working today in SaaS marketing. I share solo episodes on how to actually drive pipeline through AI search and SEO, as well as building in public my own service agency. And if I'm not doing that, messing around with the kids or playing soccer, football, and gym. So yeah, I appreciate you having me. Look forward to the chat.

Dane: Right. Yeah, absolutely. So getting right down into it, what's top of mind for you right now with what you're working on? We all hear the word AI maybe 70,000 times every single day, but how do you chop that up right now? Where are you putting your attention and what do you think is important to talk about?

Sam: Yeah. I can only speak to my world, which is that we deal with a lot of tech and SaaS marketing leaders and founders. And I think a lot of them, like you said, there's a lot of overwhelm. Every website is trying to ram AI into their headline. Doesn't matter if it makes sense or reads properly or not. And a lot of folks, in my opinion, are trying to use AI to overcomplicate stuff rather than simplify stuff. But in our world specifically, we talk to a lot of marketing leaders and founders that basically get frustrated. They've probably got to a point where they keep seeing their competitors recommended on AI search or LLMs or Google AI overviews when their dream customers are searching for their software, or comparing options, or have a problem to solve, or need a use case. And their competitors are basically getting a free lunch because they keep seeing them recommended instead of their own brand or company. So that's the main bottleneck we see and we tend to help folks with.

Dane: Yeah, so that's kind of what I want to get into here. Me as a video expert in B2B, especially here in the San Francisco Bay Area with all the SaaS companies, I'm right here saying, hey guys, you need to be doing more with video and I'm the guy to talk to. And I think you and I, if we put our heads together, we can maybe look at the playbook for what these companies should be doing — what are they doing right and what are they not doing right, and how can we help them with the video media approach. Do you think?

Sam: Yeah, so I'm up for it. I enjoy this kind of chat. Like I say, you're the video expert; we do more on the AI search stuff, but we invest a fair bit into YouTube and video. The thing perhaps I can speak to is some of the mistakes I see, and then you could chime in with what you see on the video side. Quite a lot of the time, one of the biggest mistakes used to be where companies get stuck in something we call the top funnel trap, or the traffic trap. And what that usually means is companies churn out a bunch of articles using a tool like ChatGPT or Claude, or they rely on AI or an LLM to actually do their SEO for them. And they think it's great. We're talking about slop, we're talking about LinkedIn comment guides — "this is how I grew my website from zero to 10 million traffic in 30 days using this simple prompt." What you don't often see is three months later, the traffic drops off, because Google picks up on it as seriously unhelpful content, gets penalized, and maybe even worse. And I think a lot of founders or marketers see these posts or videos and think there's a magic bullet. Sadly, in marketing, rarely is there one if you want long-term growth and sustainability. What happens is often those quick hacks or tips drop off — whether that's using AI to completely run your content workflow, or historically a lot of SEO agencies used to push top funnel articles, like how-to posts or what-is posts, like how to build a website or what is a KPI. They used to drive tons of traffic, but we know that those people searching for those informational queries are not buyers — they're tire kickers or they're looking to learn the niche. The crux of SEO — I'm a simple guy, so a lot of the advice I give is very simple — is: work out what dream clients search, not when they're messing around or gathering information, but when they have sales intent for your solution, your service, your software, when they're comparing options, or they have a crisp problem to solve. Start with that 3 to 5% that are in market now. Exhaust every way they can search when they need your solution, and then work backwards from there. So that's where it starts.

Dane: Yeah, I'm glad that we're giving it a name and identifying it. I see similar problems as well. Big picture, I think B2B SaaS companies have not really valued marketing quite as much as they probably should have. And the more mature companies I'm seeing that are doing it right are embracing content that is tied to the pipeline like you talk about. There's obviously top of funnel, mid-funnel, late funnel, but the idea of creating content that builds trust rather than the slop is something that feels like it's sinking in now. I've seen posts from companies like Anthropic hiring video producer and director roles for in-house human content that they're creating. And that's a signal to me that if anyone could create slop that worked, it would be companies like that. They are perfectly suited to take advantage of that strategy if it did work. And the fact that they're leaning into this more organic human content is a strong signal that the pendulum has gone from "let's all crank out a bunch of slop" — that didn't work, we realize it — and now we're going back the other way. So I want to get into: how do we create this late stage, bottom of funnel content that's going to actually convert? What is the play there with video that's going to actually close those deals?

Sam: Yeah. So again, I'll chip in from an SEO and AI search lens. The good news is we work with maybe 45-plus SaaS companies, and there's only so many ways people can actually search for software, which is a good problem to have. I used to often talk about something we recommend folks build that could feed into a video strategy as well, called a money keyword or a money prompt matrix. The simplest way — you can make it more complex — is you can probably do this with a ChatGPT prompt, but I used to do it on a Google Sheet, and you make four main columns. It's best if a founder does this, or if you're a marketing leader, get with your sales team, your customer success team, and your marketing team. Column one: what's every way someone can refer to our solution or software? Column two: what are the main industries we serve best — the industries that have the problem we solve, are motivated to solve it, have historically invested well into our solution, and most importantly have cash to easily invest in our offer? Column three: what are the main competitors that come up on sales calls to an annoying level, that we always get compared against? Column four: what's our dream client's jobs to be done, their struggling moments, their most expensive pain points? Then just fill those out with your team. So if you're in the proposal software space — we've got a client called Proposify — there's only so many ways people can refer to that: proposal software, quoting software, proposal tools, proposal platform, quoting tools. Then the industries: what industries do you serve well that have bought well into your product historically? Check your CRM data — HR, finance, sales teams, recruitment. Column three, competitors in the proposal space: could be Qwilr, Proposify, PandaDoc, GetAccept, and a bunch of others. Column four, jobs to be done: "I don't know how to build quotes that close" or "how to put together proposals that convert." Tap into your sales calls for this research. The beauty of where we're at now with AI is you can literally link up your sales call recordings, like Gong, Fathom, Fireflies, as an MCP into Claude and pull that research to help with this, as well as your content engine. And from there you can build long-tail prompts or queries that folks actually search when in market, like "best proposal software for sales teams" or HR teams or fintech. One of the quickest ways to get inbound in SaaS is if you know clients often switch from competitors because they get frustrated with the customer service, the support, the pricing — they'll look for stuff like "competitor alternatives" or "competitor one versus competitor two" or "competitor pricing" or "competitor reviews." If you know who those are, you can map those search terms out and build the right piece of content — a blog post, a listicle comparison — that speaks to those specific pain points, attacks why folks looked for better options, and positions you as the new better way, backed by research you pull from sales calls. So that's a quick and dirty way of doing it at a high level.

Dane: Yeah, that's beautiful. I feel like you should charge us for that. You just gave us the playbook. So it got me curious — okay, that's the plan. What's the challenge with implementing that plan? It seems like you've just laid it all out there for us.

Sam: The bottleneck, like most things in marketing, is usually time and resource in house. I imagine you see similar, Dane. It's "we kind of know what we need to do, we kind of know what we're missing out on." But most SaaS teams have very small marketing departments, usually anywhere from one to three folks. So they're spinning a lot of plates — probably paid ads, events, maybe managing the outbound sales team, maybe they've done a bit of SEO but hit a roadblock, maybe partnership plays. SEO is just one piece of the puzzle. So usually it's "we kind of know what we need to do, we just lack the resource or time." It's like working with a partner or a contractor that knows the playbook, outlines the strategy, and gets the work done — that's usually the bottleneck.

Dane: Yeah. So let's put our heads together and think about if we use video as a way to streamline the time and money invested in creating this content. I've always advocated for this pre-purposing strategy, as I call it. It's basically using video content as the core ingredient that then gets repurposed — or pre-purposed, because we've planned ahead. We take the transcript and put that into the machine, which reformats it for text, and all this stuff helps with AEO and GEO strategy. What does the playbook look like if we use video as the cost and time saving element? How do you think that could look for a SaaS company rolling out a smart video strategy?

Sam: One that comes to mind straight away — there's a lot of debate in the SEO industry, but from our experience of roughly 45 SaaS clients, they still work pretty well with the right playbook and structure, and I think these perform on YouTube still. If you did a video about evaluating the best proposal software in 2026, maybe a list-based video — "we're testing out 10 of the top proposal tools of 2026" — and you actively screen share and go through each one, the pros and cons. The good thing is the repurpose value would be quite high for a listicle-based article. You could take that, with some edits — for the article you'd do a TLDR, why trust us, do some research, format it correctly, add screenshots of the product, relevant CTAs, social proof. Similar with a competitor review piece — you could do a solid video on that and work some of the transcript into the article. And I don't know if you've seen the same, Dane, but we've seen quite a lot of the time that when you embed a YouTube video, if it's relevant, into the article landing page, it gives an uptick in Google results. Sometimes you get that thumbnail in the results, sometimes in the video section, and as you probably know, in AI searches. So it seems to give almost an unfair advantage, as well as the evergreen value on YouTube if it's got search demand behind it.

Dane: Yeah, I think this really does feel like the playbook for me now, because the transcripts are getting cited by AI search results, and because of the trust and visibility angles that come with video. And the fact that in the Google world, YouTube is obviously a big part of that and they're going to be leaning into that as much as they can. I think one of the things I hope people get is that YouTube and video in general is one of those places where you can kind of own the conversation in a way you can't really elsewhere, because the video speaks for itself. It's right there, you can look at it, and you know it's not ghostwritten. Right now it's not AI generated. Maybe one day we're going to be avatars having this conversation, but at the moment this is still a trust building activity. So I think it's one of those few places where you can leverage the advantages of video in showing up in AI search as well as moving further down the sales funnel. And at that critical moment you talked about, right at the bottom of funnel, this is the thing that could tip people over to making that decision. It's like, okay, now I'm convinced, I've seen the video, I've looked at the comparison, I've seen everything I need to know, now I'm ready to buy. Does that hold water for you?

Sam: It does. In fact, we use something like this as our own marketing engine. A lot of the SaaS clients we work with — we call it the deadly trio. If someone comes to us for SEO, I usually say don't do it, if you just want to do SEO alone as a silo. I don't recommend it. Because a lot of the folks we talk to are B2B SaaS, probably a high-ticket ACV. So folks don't see you once on Google or AI or ChatGPT or Claude and suddenly decide to spend 20, 30, 40, 50K on your product. There's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes. So our own marketing engine runs really well from the deadly trio, which is basically SEO and AI search; LinkedIn organic and founder brand, boosted with paid ads — thought leadership ads; and then YouTube. YouTube builds the extra layer of trust. So if anyone's searching, in our case, anything around SaaS SEO or SaaS AI search, whatever's relevant for your niche, we're recommended there, and we've got a video for trust. Then LinkedIn for building demand, educating, entertaining, funny memes, sharing case study breakdowns around our niche, and boosting that to folks that visit our website or our cold list. And then SEO and AI search to capture the demand when people are ready and actually seeking out the solution — then your brand gets recommended and you can collect the demand for your website. So yeah, we're big believers in video as well as SEO and LinkedIn. We call it the deadly trio and a lot of our SaaS clients run that engine. It seems to work quite well.

Dane: Yeah, it sure sounds like it. I'm going to steal that term, by the way — or I'll pay you a quarter every time I use it. So, final thought as we part ways here: what would you say to a skeptical CEO or decision maker thinking about video as part of their strategy? How should they be thinking about it? How critical is it in this deadly trio matrix?

Sam: The video piece, yeah, it is important for sure. Like a lot of things — I'm one of those founders, marketers that pushes away a lot of business. Usually if someone comes to us for SEO, I'll try and discourage them. I'd say don't do it unless you're going to do it as part of a marketing mix. You've got to have runway, you've got to have clear product demand, you've got to understand how it works. So video is the same. You've got to have someone — whether that's the founder, a thought leader, a marketer, a product expert — who's somewhat comfortable on camera and willing to commit. Just like SEO, you can't do it for a week or two or one month and hope for the best. It needs at least three, four, five months. Sometimes we can see impact in 90 days. Someone's got to commit to it and understand it's not a one-and-done. Speaking from experience, we only took YouTube seriously a year or so ago and we've slowly reaped the rewards. So I'd say those things. But if you do, it's going to add that next layer of trust, and there's a lot of replay value in video — running stuff on LinkedIn, embedding them onto your website and into blog posts. So yeah, that's what I'd say. We're big believers in it, just like SEO and AI search.

Dane: Right, excellent. Well, this has been a great conversation, Sam. Thanks for sharing your insights. If people want to find you, what's the best way to get in touch?

Sam: Yeah, enjoyed the chat. A couple of ways: LinkedIn, Sam Dunning — I share daily ramblings on what's working today to drive pipeline with SEO and AI search; the podcast, Breaking B2B; or if you're just annoyed that competitors keep getting recommended on the AI searches when folks search for your software, you can have a chat with our team at BreakingB2B.com.

Dane: Excellent. All right, Sam, thanks again and I'll see you online.

Sam: Cheers.