To their surprise, we immediately cut their advertising budget by 10%… and then increased their sales by 30% – (we hit similar numbers for a young legal tech startup with practically no budget as well).  

It wasn’t magic. By leveraging a combination of Google and Meta marketing, email campaigns, and a few of our other favourite tools, we made every marketing dollar count.

We focused on the data and what people were actually doing, rather than what they said they’d do.  We put tools in place to understand user behaviour on the site and figure out: 

• How they got to the site
• What kind of content (ad or organic) they had seen before coming to the site
• What they clicked on during their visit
• Which actions on the site preceded a lead becoming qualified
• Which actions on the site led to a sale down to the road
• What encouraged users to take “good actions” on the site

For those who think B2B = LinkedIn, we didn’t start using it until the company had established a baseline of data and experimentation in place ( and after driving cheaper traffic via other channels and retargeting those that took meaningful interactions via the LinkedIn Insights tag.

TL;DR: Sales and marketing can be cruel to those who don’t have the tools in place to adapt. We urge you to embrace the shifting nature of lead generation, AI search, and customer motivations. Whether you are rolling out your first campaign or your 500th, there are new rules to the same old game – and the buzzword “data” is more accessible than you may think.

What The Article Will Cover 

1. The digital toolkit needed for a startup or SMB.
2. How to shape your website to experiment and get leads.
   1. Example & application for Startups
   2. Example & application for SMBs
3. How to make sure your ad accounts don’t get banned.
4. When to run your experiments & how to test your messaging to get it just right.
5. How to keep tweaking and refining with other tools and strategies.
6. What comes next.

For a startup, our toolkit will show you how to take product marketing seriously from the start and define and refine your go-to-market strategy and flow. 

For an SMB, we’ll show you how to take a step back and evaluate what has been working for your marketing efforts, what hasn’t, and, most importantly, why.

The Digital Tool Kit

It doesn’t matter if you’re a nimble startup launching some groundbreaking AI healthtech product or an established SMB looking to optimize your online marketing efforts – make sure the basics are covered:

• Meta Business Manager Account (I promise you your customers are here – more later).
• Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel)
• Google Ads Account 
• Google Analytics (GA4)
• Google Tag Manager (GTM)Session monitor (We prefer Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar)
• Another specialized channel (for many, this is LinkedIn, but it can be Pinterest, Reddit, email marketing, etc).
• Asset Creation Software (Adobe, Figma, Canva, etc.)
• Time & Patience
• (and a Website)

Ensuring you have the above list checked off will help you understand your audience, track performance, and make the necessary adjustments to optimize conversions. It also might make or break your long-term success.

Without the above foundation, you risk inefficient ad spending, account restrictions, and a fragmented view of your audience’s behaviour. 

It might seem like a long list, but it’s not. It’s the scaffolding that will support every decision you make in your marketing strategy.

For a practical guide on setting up these foundational accounts, including Meta Business Manager and advertising accounts, explore our guide on Lesson 3: Getting Set up – Before you begin

How to shape your website to run experiments and get to sales

In the short term, here are the steps for your digital marketing journey: 

1. Set up your basic accounts and tools
2. Experiment with ‘good enough’ landing pages
3. Begin testing messaging and value propositions
4. Test and iterate
5. Integrate more powerful tools over time 

The ‘Good Enough’ Website

For any startup (and most small to medium-sized businesses), your online marketing efforts typically begin with a website. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. Functional and intentional is the goal, and you don’t want to waste time that could be better spent elsewhere.

With a ‘good enough’ selling site, you can begin to understand: 

• Engagement behavior
• Intent-to-purchase behaviour
• Follow through-to-purchase behaviour (even before you are actively selling!)

This is increasingly important as you build out sales and marketing best practices down the road. In the short term, it will also provide real data on scalability, such as MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), even if you have zero or low revenue numbers. 

If you capture the right data, you can leverage it across the stakeholder spectrum and utilize your existing momentum as a proxy for your business’s future success.

Start-up seeking validation or improving lead generation efforts:

Landing pages to test your offerings (whether the product is live or not). 

Your ‘’good enough’:

1. Should address a core problem directly.
2. Provides a concise explanation of how your solution works.
3. Has social proof or data of some sort.
4. Highlights a clear call to action (e.g., “Join Waitlist,” “Download Beta,” or “Learn More”). 

For each core selling pain point that affects your ideal customer, set up a single landing page. Write a compelling headline for each landing page, and let the language you have heard your customer use (pain points, aspirations, barriers)  inform the rest of the content on the page. Yes, it’s okay to reuse content for some parts of the page.

Startup Example:

If you’re targeting B2B with a new HR software:

1. Your “good enough” site might feature a landing page with a headline like ‘Stop Stressing Over Onboarding Chaos.’ It might go on to explain how your product works with the existing hiring process, and how 100s of companies are sharing the same problem and solving it with your solution today, and how they feel about it. 
2. You might also do another landing page, with a new headline: ‘Get The Most Out of Your Newest Hires, Fast.’ This might go on to explain how your tool will enable employees to get up to speed and contribute quickly.

The first headline example addresses a pain point in HR’s time management and cognitive load. 

The second is about employee productivity. Same solution, different positioning – thus, the experiment.

Seems simple? It is. It’s designed to learn if a specific pain point resonates with your intended audience and then leads to conversion actions. 

Once your different landing pages are set up:

1. Leverage ad channels (and email, and SMS) to drive traffic and measure results.
2. Track each pain point and the following customer actions on the site with UTM codes, Google Tags Manager, and Clarity, to see if different pain points or hero text leads to different outcomes. 

This minimalist approach allows for rapid deployment, enabling you to test core assumptions about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and see which offerings have the potential to gain traction and scale. 

Key Takeaways for Early Stage Startups

• You do not need a multi-page, award-winning website straight away.
• Build a couple of pages that are driving to a conversion that is meaningful for the business. 
• Track data collection and customer conversion behaviours to determine what works and what doesn’t. 

For insights into launching a functional website for early tests and what components it needs, refer to our guide on [Link to Lesson 4: “Launching a ‘Good Enough’ Website – 4”].  For a practical guide on setting up and running initial audience engagement campaigns, refer to our guide on [Link to Lesson 5: “Running a “Likes Campaign” – 5”].

Improving lead generation and sales efforts as an SMB or expanding into a new service:

If you are an SMB, your focus might shift slightly from building your first online presence (and testing your first product offerings) to strategically leveraging or adapting the existing digital channels to validate a new product, or bolster sales of an existing one. 

Even if you are looking to bolster existing offerings, the next section has valuable information to consider when you’re validating your next product.

Example of an SMB Trying To Market a New Product or Service

Imagine you are an established regional accounting firm looking to launch a new advisory service for family-owned businesses struggling with intergenerational wealth transfer. 

1. Your “good enough” landing page could live on the existing website or instead be hidden – unless someone is given the direct URL to reach it – like through an email outreach or an ad.
2. The landing page might feature a headline like ‘Ensure Your Family’s Business Legacy Lives On After You.’ 
3. This page should also offer a clear explanation of your solution, social proof, and a clear call to action (e.g., “Download Case Study,” “Speak With An Expert,” “Request A Free Consultation”).
4. You would then use targeted ads (e.g., Google Search Ads or Meta) for “family business succession planning” or adjacent topics that relate to the periphery of your audience in order to drive traffic to this specific page you are trying to test the messaging of.
   1. You can also use a sample size of your existing customers’ emails.
5. Like everything else we talk about in this article, measure results on the page (see the startup example above) or learn more about tracking conversions and messaging below. 

*A note if you are already having success with ad channels. Be sure not to cannibalize other ads you might be running (or closely related services) that are already experiencing success. Pick a specific geographic area to run the experiments in, or use specific keywords, to narrow the focus and avoid interfering with your other activities. 

Key Takeaways for SMBs:

• Adapt or add focused landing pages rather than overhauling your entire site for every test.
• The landing page should drive towards a single, measurable conversion that validates a new idea, message, or feature.
• Don’t let your past business and success bias what the data is showing you.

For insights into launching a functional website for early tests and what components it needs, refer to our guide on Lesson 4: “Launching a ‘Good Enough’ Website.

If This is Your First Time Advertising on the Channel, Prime Your Accounts So You Don’t Get Banned.

While working on your “good enough” landing pages, you should be warming up your ad accounts in the background so you don’t get banned.  

A smart initial step is to run a simple, low-cost engagement campaign, like a Facebook or Instagram Likes Ccampaign, Google Responsive Search Campaign, Pinterest Awareness campaign or a LinkedIn Awareness Campaign (be careful, though, LinkedIn is expensive).

This serves multiple strategic purposes: it signals to the ad platform that you are a legitimate business with real engagement, it helps build an initial audience base, and it warms up your ad accounts, preventing potential bans. 

Hot Tip: If you are an SMB running a validation experiment to try out a new product or offering, consider setting up a separate alias account brand to test in the earliest stages. 

For a practical guide on setting up and running initial audience engagement campaigns, refer to our guide on Lesson 5: “Running a “Likes Campaign”.

Start To Run Experiments and Test Messaging

Start by figuring out your pain points, and then make simplified ads that highlight your solution via headlines.

You don’t need fancy video or image ads to speak to the heart of the problem you are solving for your potential customer. Yes, you will want to get there, but going back to basics is the fastest and cheapest way to experiment until you get things right.  Move to the fancy ads once you can really make them count.

Other Tools to Add to Your Digital Marketing Data Foundation

I’ve talked about the very beginnings of capturing data and other resources that will help set you up for success for your online marketing and sales funnel. 

Once you have the basics, there are some other and measurement tools you can leverage to better understand on-platform analytics, track deal progress and score leads, create email activation flows –  all intending to let you spend more time on the customers who are going actually to contribute to your bottom line: 

• Core Analytics & Ad Tracking Platforms:
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems:
• Customer Feedback & Experience (CFE) Platforms
• Marketing Automation & Email Platforms:
• Competitive Intelligence Platforms

Tactical Lessons on How to Implement Your Digital Launchpad

Ready to build a robust digital foundation for your business? Explore our comprehensive guides for step-by-step instructions and best practices:

• For Setting up Essential Accounts: Lesson 3: “Getting Set up – Before you begin
• For Building Your First Website/Landing Page: Lesson 4: “Launching a ‘Good Enough’ Website
• For Priming Your Ad Accounts and Audience: Lesson 5: “Running a “Likes Campaign’

If you are a startup more SMBs you are actually fighting to get traditional Search Engine SEO right while increasingly having to adapt to the new wave of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

It’s difficult. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. 

For SEO (and definitely for GEO), it’s not just about including the right keywords anymore, but answering the most valuable questions users are looking for while ensuring your site’s user experience is top-notch, making it easy for search engines, AIs, and visitors alike to navigate and engage with your content.

Yes, you can complement SEO/GEO efforts by leveraging various digital marketing strategies, like social media advertising, email marketing, and pay-per-click campaigns (increasingly Performance Max across multiple channels), to drive additional traffic to your website – as each method reaches people in different ways, offering numerous touchpoints for users to discover and visit your site. But you cannot afford to ignore the changing nature of being found on the web. So, while the total amount of traffic going out from conversational chats and traditional search queries is going down, the silver lining is that the traffic that does click is more likely to become sales and/or leads (it’s more qualified traffic).

This means if you get it right, you don’t have to have a massive budget to win traffic and convert leads.

What To Expect In This Article

1. SEO Meets GEO Industry Trends
2. Creating An SEO/GEO Optimized Website
3. How To Write Content Specifically For GEO
4. Technical SEO/GEO Website Health
5. Measuring Results & Success For GEO & SEO

Here are my quick tips that are shaping the industry.

One of the major shifts is an increasing focus on conversational search. People are no longer typing in short keywords like ‘running shoes’ via search (or in a chat with a GPT). They’re looking for things like, ‘what running shoes might help me go the fastest and help my feet hurt the least when I’m running a half-marathon for the first time at the age of 47’. It’s a very complex question with multiple queries involved.

The second thing we are seeing is that search is becoming more multi-modal. It’s no longer just about text. It’s images, voice and videos. So if you haven’t already been doing it over the last 10 months, get your pictures, get your videos, get everything compatible with ALT text, be as accessible as possible, and make sure your data is structured so that AI’s can scrape and understand it. The last trend is that we’re starting to see that bots are becoming more sophisticated with shopping assistance. They are making recommendations based on past purchases or viewed history across your browser, interfaces and chats, and are increasingly able to compress the sales funnel. Instead of a potential customer returning to search over and over again, they can be educated, given social proof, and purchase all in one place.

Creating An SEO/GEO Optimized Website 

To ensure your website attracts the audience it deserves, focus on producing content that search engines and AIs love. Remember, SEO and GEO is not a one-time task but an ongoing process that ensures your site remains visible and attractive to both new and returning visitors.

A. Crafting Compelling Titles and Meta Descriptions

Your titles and meta descriptions are the first points of contact with potential visitors in search results. Make sure they accurately reflect the content of your web pages while also enticing users to click through. 

This means using relevant keyword phrases and questions that not only signal what your page is about to search engines and AIs, but also appeal to the searcher’s intent, as this will ultimately affect your ability to be cited and/or called on in search. Content should be created with keywords and meta tags that accurately represent the topics and themes of your site. Keywords signal to search engines the primary topics of your web pages, while meta tags, such as title tags and meta descriptions, provide concise information about the content of your page.

B. Create Use of Keywords & Content 

When it comes to blog content, integrating keywords effectively is essential. Use primary keywords that focus on answering highly important questions (not just keyword searches based on volumes you have researched) naturally within the first 200 words of your article.

Think of it as an inverted triangle of information. 

Start with the most relevant info first. Get to the point (answer the hard questions) and avoid keyword stuffing. Then aim for a natural flow that keeps the reader engaged (still using the framework of answering questions that a user might be searching for).

C. Incorporating Multimedia Elements

Including images and videos within your content can significantly enhance user engagement and dwell time, both positive signals to search engines and AIs. 

Ensure all multimedia is SEO/GEO-optimized with descriptive, keyword-rich file names and alt attributes to maximize their impact and help you with that multi-modal search behaviour.

Write Content For GEO Specifically

When crafting content for long-term GEO (and SEO), the question you want to ask yourself for all content or blog pieces you put on a website is does it follow the principles of EEAT. Experience. Expertise. Authority. Trustworthiness.

These principles are what will lead to long-term winning of citations (the real value for GEO), but if followed correctly, can also fit perfectly into the best practices for modern SEO practices as well.

i) Experience

Have you actually done the thing you’re writing about? Actually blogged or lived the life of the words you’re trying to put into the world and be a leading voice?  

This is the bare minimum for pretty much any piece of content you want to put into the world. For example, a recipe blogger who has personally tried and tested the recipe.

ii) Expertise

Do you have the knowledge and qualifications to speak on this topic?  

AKA, do you have the knowledge and the qualifications to talk about it? This is where professional credentials, degrees, or certifications come in. 

A doctor writing about a medical condition makes sense – not about artisanal soap – unless they have powerful experience with the soap side hustle business (then maybe). So not only have you done it, but you are also qualified to have done it and to be talking about it like you’re an expert in this space. 

This is why it’s super important to put an author’s name and a bio for the author somewhere on your site. It speaks to who you are, what you do, and why you are qualified.

iii) Authoritativeness 

Is your content recognized as a leading voice in your industry? 

This is achieved by gathering mentions and links from other reputable websites and publications. Sometimes this is backlinks (but not always and read below for things to avoid). 

Think of a major news outlet, universities, and thought leaders linking to your research or blogs.

iv) Trustworthiness: 

Is your website and brand safe and reliable? 

This includes having a secure website (HTTPS), clear contact information, and positive reviews. It’s the foundation of all the other E-E-A-T factors.

To effectively attract visitors to your website, it’s crucial to have a solid grasp of how search engines like Google and Bing operate. This includes understanding SEO practices that influence your site’s visibility.

Technical SEO/GEO and Website Health

To enhance your website’s visibility and health, it’s crucial to focus on technical SEO/GEO, which ensures that search engines can crawl and index your site effectively. This involves a meticulous audit and conscious improvements in site speed and user experience.

1. How Does SEO & GEO Work Behind The Scenes?

Search engines utilize complex algorithms to index and rank websites. The algorithms analyze factors such as site structure, content relevance to keywords, and user engagement (this is way more important than most people realize). It’s important for your website to be easily crawlable so that search engines can effortlessly index your content both from an SEO and GEO, making it available for user searches (directly by users, but also by AI).

2. Conducting a Technical SEO/GEO Audit

Begin your audit with the help of SEO/GEO tools like Google Search Console, which provides a direct insight into how Google views your website. Here, you can check for crawl errors, inspect your site’s URLs, and review indexation. Make sure to assess your website’s structure, including XML sitemaps and robots.txt files, to ensure search engines can navigate your site efficiently. Use tools like WordPress plugins, if your site is on WordPress, to streamline some of these processes. 

You can learn more about how to do this with some of our SnapPea resources.

3. Search Engine & AI Ranking Factors

Search engine ranking is influenced by a combination of factors, including site speed, mobile-friendliness, quality of content, and backlinks. Both Google and Bing prioritize high-quality, valuable content that satisfies the search intent. Ensuring your SEO efforts align with these factors will increase the probability of achieving higher rankings.

• Site Speed: Websites that load quickly are favoured by search engines.
• Mobile-Friendliness: As a significant portion of searches are done on mobile devices, responsive design is essential.
• Quality Content: Authoritative and comprehensive content ranks better.
• Backlinks: Inbound links from reputable sites can improve your site’s trustworthiness.
• Structured Data (Schema Markup): Read below
• Information Architecture & Content Structure: Read below.

Structured Data (Schema Markup)

AI models are trained on vast amounts of data, and structured data provides a clear, machine-readable “map” of your content. It removes ambiguity and helps the AI quickly identify and extract key information

Go beyond basic schema. Use it to define the relationships between entities on your site (e.g., a person is the author of a specific article, or a product is part of a specific collection). This helps the AI build a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s knowledge graph.  

Information Architecture & Content Structure

Use headings correctly to create a clear outline of your page. An H1 should be the main title, with H2’s for main sections and H3’s for subsections. This helps the AI understand the topic and subtopic

On top of that, be sure to place the most direct, concise answer to a user’s question at the very beginning of the page or a specific section. This is a tactic similar to optimizing for featured snippets, but it’s even more crucial for AI overviews.

Why does “listicle” content often perform well in AI answers? AI models find it much easier to parse information presented in bullet points, numbered lists, and tables than in long, dense paragraphs.

4. Backlinks

Backlinks, often referred to as “inbound links” or “external links,” are links from other websites that point to your site. 

There are a lot of people selling backlinks. Sometimes they work, what really matters is to get back to the idea of Authority for GEO and collaborate with authors of high-quality content/blogs. Those are the people you really want to be referencing your site (if major news outlets seem a little out of the realm of possibility).

Always aim to build natural backlinks that make sense for your content and provide value to your audience.

1. Search engines like Google view backlinks as a vote of confidence. The more high-quality backlinks you have, the more reputable your site appears, which can significantly boost your rankings.
2. Backlinks from popular and authoritative sites can lead their visitors to your site, improving your site’s visibility and traffic.
3. When your website receives backlinks from reputable sources, it enhances your authority in your niche, which can attract additional links and visitors.

To effectively use backlinks to get people to find your site, consider these strategies:

Create Compelling Content – Developing shareable, informative, and engaging content motivates others to link back to your site.

Guest Blogging – Publishing articles on other websites can allow you to place backlinks to your own site within those articles.

Make Use of Directories – Listing your site in relevant directories can provide easy backlinks.

Analyze Competitors – By looking at where your competitors are getting their backlinks, you may discover opportunities for your own site.

Remember, the quality of the backlinks is more important than the quantity. A few links from well-respected websites might be worth more than numerous links from lesser-known sites.

Measuring SEO Success and Analytics

When you undertake the task of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), measuring your website’s performance is fundamental. Google Analytics is a crucial tool that allows you to track a wide array of metrics. Monitoring these metrics can give you insights into your website’s SEO health and the behaviour of your visitors.

First, set up Google Analytics for your site to track key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some primary metrics you should focus on:

Click-through rate (CTR) – This reveals the percentage of users who click on your website’s link after viewing it in search results. A higher CTR indicates that your titles and meta descriptions are appealing and relevant to your target audience.

Bounce rate – Observe the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A lower bounce rate suggests that your content is engaging and encourages users to explore more.

Traffic sources – Identify where your visitors are coming from: organic search, direct links, referrals or social media. This helps you understand which channels are most effective in driving traffic to your site.

Conversions – Track the actions you desire from your visitors, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or any other key objective of your site.

Keyword research – Use the Analytics’ search queries report to find out which keywords users are typing into search engines to find your site. Optimizing for the right keywords can improve your visibility and attract more targeted traffic.

Measuring GEO Success and Analytics

For GEO, you are using the initial same metrics as SEO for the baseline, but then you are layering on top the following:

AI Answer Inclusion Rate – This is the most fundamental metric. How often does your brand or content appear in an AI-generated answer or summary for a relevant query? It’s the new “impression” and is a direct measure of your visibility in this new search landscape.

AI Citations & Attribution – When an AI answer is generated, does it explicitly link to or mention your website as its source? These are the new backlinks and are crucial for building trust and still driving some referral traffic.

Branded Search Volume – If an AI assistant consistently mentions your brand in answers, you should see a corresponding increase in users searching for your brand name directly. This indicates that your GEO efforts are building brand awareness and trust, leading users to seek you out.

Conversational Engagement – This is a more advanced and harder-to-measure metric. It tracks whether the user’s subsequent questions or actions are related to your brand or product after seeing the AI’s answer. It’s a sign that your content is not just being cited but is also persuasive and influential.

AI-Sourced Traffic & Conversions – While GEO is a “zero-click” strategy, some users will still click the source link. By using tools that can track referral traffic from AI platforms (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews), you can see if this new channel is driving qualified leads and conversions.

Why SnapPea

At SnapPea, the approach to increasing a website’s findability is holistic. By leveraging iterative testing and focusing on return on investment (ROI), the goal isn’t just to improve rankings but also to drive sales and conversions – ultimately ensuring that every aspect of your digital marketing strategy is working toward your business goals.

For success in SEO & GEO, attention must be paid to:

• User and keyword research/optimization
• High-quality content creation
• On-page techniques and data markups
• Mobile optimization and site speed

For SEM:

• Effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
• Targeted ad copy
• Strategic bidding and ad placement

For CRO:

• User experience (UX) audit and improvements
• Clear and compelling calls to action (CTAs)
• A/B testing of website elements

Each of these practices is critical in ensuring your website stands out in a crowded market. By optimizing each touchpoint that a potential customer encounters, from clicking on an ad to navigating your website, SnapPea ensures that your site not only attracts visitors but also engages and converts them.Learn more about how to fine-tune your marketing efforts for better results with Digital Marketing strategies from experts. Your site’s potential to attract and convert users can significantly increase with the right effort and expert guidance.