SEO is always a top priority for high-growth marketing. And in the age of LLMs, ranking high has gotten more and more competitive, which means you need to be more strategic. Welcome to Marketing Facts and Hacks. Strong SEO is a must for all marketing teams, but boosting your rankings and keeping them at the top is getting harder and harder. Between increased competition and new innovations. Don't worry, we've got the hack. But first, let's get the facts. According to Search Engine Journal, algorithm changes are the top SEO challenge marketers face in 2025. HubSpot says that 88% of marketers plan to increase their SEO spend only to get the same rankings they've always had. And the biggest disruption to their SEO performance? Generative AI in Search. But even with all this change, organic search is still the number one traffic source for most brands. And as always, you've got to be on the first page. Less than 1% of searchers click on the second page of Google results per study by Backlink Co. And the pages with the highest number of backlinks usually rank the best in Google. Backlinks come from everywhere. PR, other blogs and podcasts and online reviews. And when people search for the type of product your company provides, you don't just want to show up in the first or second result. You need to be mentioned in the top 10 or 20 results. Today, we have the expert of all SEO experts, Alex Birkett, who has pioneered SEO programs for HubSpot and is now the founder of Omniscient Digital, serving high-growth startups and Fortune 500 companies. Alex, give us your best hack for surround sound SEO. Hey, Vanessa. Here's my hack for surround sound SEO. First off, surround sound SEO is a reframing of the traditional SEO paradigm, where in the past, you would look at a keyword and you would hope to rank your website for that keyword in a high position. In surround sound SEO, your goal is to be ubiquitous in categorical terms and phrases that relate to your product or solution. So simply put, you're going to get more referral traffic by being mentioned more frequently, and that's going to result in more conversions. Second off, there is an exposure effect that applies to SEO as well as it does advertising. So essentially being listed on position one, position two, position three would be similar to going to a cocktail party and asking a group of friends, what TV show are you watching? And if one person in that group mentions a TV show, let's say Mr. Robot, you might check it out. Maybe other people mention other shows. You might check those out too. If everybody in the group mentions the exact same TV show, Mr. Robot, you're probably going to check out episode one. And point number three is the future of SEO is trending towards LLMs. So perplexity, chat GPT, AI-driven search, AI-driven answers. And there seems to be a very strong correlation with your ubiquity of mentions in relation to categorical keywords and your appearance in LLMs for those terms. So if you're looking to play into the future of search in LLMs, this is a really good way to start. So how to go about that? There's really three ways. First, writing your own content. If you haven't written a post on the best CMS software or competitor alternatives, do that traditional SEO playbook. Second, look for friends, look for other pages where you can do outreach, where you could write a guest post, where you could essentially leverage other websites to get yourself mentioned on those lists. Finally, the hardest part is the UGC component. So looking at sites like Reddit, sites like Quora, potentially review sites, if they rank on your SERPs, figuring out a customer marketing playbook to become ubiquitous, to become salient in those places as well. All right, that's my hack on surround sound SEO. Back to you, Vanessa. Really interesting stuff, Alex. Marketers, surround sound SEO can make a huge impact on lead generation. So to get you started, go ahead, download Alex's checklist by clicking the link in the comments or by visiting our show page. And while you're at it, get a jumpstart on your LLM strategy too. Join us next time on Marketing Facts and Hacks, where we discuss how to lead with thought leadership. See you soon.