On this page: What's broken
  1. What's broken
  2. What we install
  3. The case study
  4. Free answers
  5. Straight answers
  6. Book the diagnosis
SEO & AEO for B2B

A B2B SEO agency
that reports in closed-won.

Buying committees research for months before the first call. We know, because we sold through it — two people, founded February 2023 with zero startup capital, $227 first month of commission, grown to $1.3M a year in revenue, with roughly three-quarters of clients renewing on a lead engine we built ourselves. That machine, rebuilt for your category: bottom-funnel pages, answers AI assistants repeat, and one CRM line from first touch to closed-won.

Get your free diagnosis See what we fix
The receipts
Sellers first, marketers second $227 first commission → $1.3M/yr renewal book two people 4.9★ across 519 FreedInsure reviews
What's actually broken

Why B2B pipelines stall before the first call

Six leaks we see in B2B funnels. None of them show up in the marketing deck. All of them show up in closed-won.

Leak 01

The shortlist forms in silence

Buying committees research anonymously for months before anyone contacts a vendor. No form fill, no cookie, no signal — just reading. By the time the first call happens, the shortlist is largely set. Invisible vendors never make it. They just never learn why.

Leak 02

Content written for peers, not buyers

The blog impresses people who do your job. Buyers are searching "X vs Y," "alternatives to Z," and "does this work for my use case" — and most B2B sites never build a single page for those questions. Thought leadership wins applause. Bottom-funnel pages win deals.

Leak 03

MQL worship, no revenue line

Marketing celebrates form fills. Sales calls them noise. Nobody owns the line from first touch to closed-won, so budget flows to whatever produces the prettiest chart. A lead count is not a revenue number. We wrote out the fix in the MQL-to-SQL breakdown.

Leak 04

Long cycles, slow follow-up

Because the deal takes six months, teams decide the first response can take three days. Backwards. The buyer who finally raises a hand has been researching for months — they're at peak intent the minute they submit. Slow follow-up hands that moment to a faster competitor.

Leak 05

AI writes the shortlist now

Ask an AI assistant to recommend vendors in your category for your buyer's exact situation. It answers with names. If the machine can't read structured facts about what you do and who it's for, the names are your competitors'. This is happening before your first touch, every day.

Leak 06

Everything gated, nothing findable

Your best material sits behind a form. Search engines can't rank it and AI assistants can't cite it, so the engines recommend whoever published in the open. The gate harvests emails and starves the systems that build shortlists. That trade gets worse every quarter.

What we install

The engine, rebuilt for committee buying

We built a lead engine for our own company and bought vendor leads for years before that — we know what each one is worth. The full breakdown for B2B companies is on the B2B industry page — the wiring is below.

  • Bottom-funnel page architectureComparison pages, alternative pages, and use-case pages — one for every way a committee evaluates you. Low volume, high intent, and almost no competitors bother to build them. Software companies lean on the alternative pages hardest, which is why SaaS SEO has its own page.
  • AEO: structured answers for vendor-selection questionsWhat you do, who it's for, how you compare — written and marked up so AI assistants can quote you when they assemble the shortlist instead of guessing from your competitor's site.
  • Content sales actually usesEvery page built to be sent by a rep and circulated by an internal champion. If sales won't forward it to a live deal, it doesn't ship. Marketing that sales ignores is overhead.
  • CRM tracking, first touch to closed-wonSource captured on entry, carried through every stage, reconciled against revenue. When a deal closes, you know which page started it. No attribution arguments, just a ledger.
ResearchedComparison, alternative, and use-case pages meet the committee
ShortlistedStructured answers put your name in the AI's vendor list
ContactedThe demo request gets answered in minutes, on a written cadence
ChampionedSales sends pages built to survive the internal forward
CountedFirst touch to closed-won in the CRM, so the math is real
Simulation — how the machine treats a lead
20:04:11Lead arrives — demo request submitted
+0:00:08Source captured — first touch on the record
+0:01:42Dialed — prospect connected
+0:02:59Next touch scheduled on the cadence

Judge a B2B SEO agency by its own funnel.

Ours: FreedInsure, founded February 2023 by two people with zero startup capital. First month of commission, $227. The book grew to $1.3M a year with roughly three-quarters of the book renewing — fed by a lead engine the founders built themselves after years of running their own lead generation and buying vendor leads side by side. FreedInsure's clients left the verdict in public: 4.9 stars across 519 Google reviews.

Mike has sold for 30 years — ex-stockbroker, founded Puf Cigarettes on Staten Island (the SI Advance covered it in 2014) — and has trained Tino since Tino was 17. Tino has sold since 17, entered the industry at 20, founded at 22, and holds producer licenses in 42 jurisdictions. Long cycles, gatekeepers, compliance — we sold through all of it before we optimized for any of it. See how the machine maps to your company on the B2B industry page, or walk the entire build in the FreedInsure case study.

Free answers first

Read what we'd tell you anyway

The playbook isn't a secret. These are free, and they're most of what a first consult would cover.

B2B sales

B2B sales: how committee deals actually close

The buyer you meet is rarely the buyer who decides. Selling to the room you never see.

Read the rundown → Pipeline

MQL vs SQL: where B2B pipelines quietly die

The handoff nobody owns, the definitions nobody signed, and the revenue line that fixes both.

Read the breakdown → Search

SEO vs AEO: what changes when AI answers first

Rankings still matter. Being the answer matters more. What to build for each, in plain terms.

Read the comparison →
Straight answers

Questions B2B teams ask us

A B2B SEO agency makes your company visible everywhere a buying committee researches before it ever contacts a vendor — search engines and, increasingly, AI assistants. In practice that means bottom-funnel page architecture: comparison pages, alternative pages, and use-case pages that map to how buyers actually evaluate; structured answer content so AI assistants include you when they assemble vendor shortlists; content the sales team actually sends to prospects; and CRM tracking that ties it all together from first touch to closed-won. Rankings and traffic are inputs. The output a B2B SEO agency should answer for is pipeline that closes.
B2C SEO chases one person making a fast decision. B2B SEO serves a committee making a slow one: multiple stakeholders researching anonymously for weeks or months, comparing vendors, and building an internal case before anyone fills out a form. So the work weights differently — fewer, higher-intent keywords; comparison and use-case pages instead of high-volume blog traffic; content an internal champion can circulate; and measurement in pipeline and closed-won revenue, not sessions. The traffic numbers are smaller. The revenue per visitor is many multiples higher.
We don't quote B2B SEO services off a rate card. The free revenue diagnosis comes first: your current visibility, the vendor-selection searches you're missing, and your funnel from first touch to closed-won. Then the engagement is scoped to what's actually broken and priced against the expected return. You see the price and the math in writing before a dollar moves. The honest metric in B2B isn't cost per click or cost per lead — it's cost per closed customer, and that's the number we hold ourselves to.
Longer than B2C, and anyone promising results in 30 days is guessing with your money. Bottom-funnel pages move first — comparison and alternative pages can rank in weeks because few competitors build them — while broader rankings compound over months. Then the B2B sales cycle sits on top: a buyer who finds you this quarter may sign two quarters later. That's why the CRM tracking gets wired on day one, so when deals close you can trace them back to the pages that started them instead of arguing about attribution.
AI assistants now assemble vendor shortlists directly: someone asks for the best tools in a category for a specific use case and gets named vendors, not ten blue links. Those answers are built from structured, crawlable, plainly written content — exactly what gated-PDF strategies starve. AEO for B2B means publishing direct answers to vendor-selection questions in the open, marked up so machines can quote them: what you do, who it's for, how you compare, what evaluation looks like. If the engines can't read your best material, they shortlist the competitor whose material they can.

Get the free B2B revenue diagnosis

Your visibility, the shortlists you're missing, your funnel from first touch to closed-won — pulled apart for free by people who sell for a living. Straight verdict, in writing.

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The diagnosis is free. The shortlists being written without you aren't.
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