In a world of AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and zero-click search, a lot of B2B marketing teams assume SEO is losing its power.
Tom Shapiro, CEO of Stratabeat, argues the opposite. Google SEO is still highly effective and should still account for the majority of the qualified leads secured through your website.
However, for him, this is the moment to evolve your search strategy from focusing exclusively on classic SEO to a more multifaceted approach that enables you to achieve greater results across today’s broader online discovery landscape.
Tom’s team has seen this play out in the numbers: one client achieved a 544.4% increase in SEO-sourced sales meetings compared to the same period last year while increasing monthly traffic from the LLMs by 366.7% YoY. Brand visibility in ChatGPT for the client has grown to 91.9% coverage across approximately 50 tracked non-branded prompts.
The common thread isn’t a hack. It’s a smarter, 360-degree approach to audience targeting, content strategy, and building an intent engine.
He highlights four moves B2B marketing leaders should prioritize:
- Lead with original, data-driven insight
AI systems and buyers both reward originality and depth. Tom leans heavily on data-driven original research that surfaces real benchmarks, patterns, and lessons. This kind of content earns links, shares, and mentions, and gives AI systems a strong reason to “choose” your brand in answers and overviews.
- Deliver industry-specific content
Publishing Industry-specific content is a powerful way to cut through the noise and resonate more deeply with your target audience. A dual benefit of this approach is that (1) it is easier (and faster) to achieve high rankings in Google than broad, horizontal content, and (2) many queries in ChatGPT, Gemini, and the other LLMs are long-tail and industry-specific. Instead of competing against everyone for every market, being selective with vertical targeting often achieves outsized results.
- Align content with pain and intent, not just keywords
Instead of chasing search volume, Stratabeat focuses on the questions and problems that keep buyers up at night, even when search volume is low. Tom favors MOFU and BOFU content that speaks directly to evaluation and purchase decisions: how-to content, JTBD content, comparison pages, “alternatives” pages, ROI/TCO tools, and product-led walkthroughs that show exactly how to remove your buyers’ pain points.
- Structure your content
For Tom, optimization for greater Google and LLM visibility means making it easy for both people and models to understand you. That includes key takeaways, summaries, structured Q&A, FAQs, and decision trees, plus tightly aligned SEO & GEO strategies. The goal: when Google or the LLMs scan your site, they find clear, structured answers that match real buyer questions.
For Tom Shapiro, search optimization is about more than surviving a new search era. It’s about building a marketing engine that delivers overwhelming value, earns trust from both buyers and AI systems, and, as he likes to say, helps teams destroy mediocre marketing for good.
