I had the pleasure of speaking with Tim Soulo from ahrefs. Tim has been instrumental in ahrefs growth starting as the sole marketeer for the business in 2015 and growing the business to over $40million in ARR today. He has done this by doing every marketing activity himself before hiring experts to take over and improve his processes. Today they are flying in the world of SEO and create some of the best content on the topic. This episode is filled with takeaways so enjoy and let me know what you think.
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Last 5 questions:
What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
I think we’ve talked about my best piece of marketing advice quite a few times today, and that is, focus on the actual product. The marketing team should not only promote what the product team and the developers team are building, but they should also try to give some input to the product team, to the development team, so that they could build something that market wants. Marketing is not about promoting a product, but also figuring out what the product should look like to be successful.
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
One of the latest books that I’ve read, and quite enjoyed, is The Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday. And, actually, I think anything by Ryan Holiday is worth reading.
What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Well, let’s say that lately, we’re trying to move everything, like all our to-dos, and all our operational notes, into a new trendy tool called Notion. Previously, we were mostly using Basecamp. We also tried Wrike, but, right now, we’re using Notion. And I think it’s pretty cool, so, right now, I’m enjoying it. I cannot say that I wouldn’t live without it, but so far I find it super useful in terms of organizing our marketing department, our development, our roadmaps, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I’m afraid I don’t have any examples of marketing campaigns, because, to be honest, I don’t think of marketing as campaigns. Like I said, I see marketing as just building as superior product and trying to get found with whatever ways are possible.
Which other podcasts do you listen to?
To be honest, I don’t have any specific podcast that I would listen to regularly. What I do is I would just look for different podcasts and whenever I discover a new one, I would just browse their episodes, and I will just pick what is relevant to me, because, quite often, no podcast would have 100% of their episodes relevant to me. So I would just download, on my phone, all the episodes that peak my interest, that catch my eye, and listen like that. Often times, I don’t even remember names of the podcasts, I mostly remember the insights that I’ve gained from them.
Transcription:
Matt Byrom:
Hello, and welcome, to this episode of The Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Tim Soulo who’s head of marketing and product strategy at ahrefs. Tim’s been fundamental in the success of ahrefs, driving their business to over $40 million of recurring revenue, and growing at the rate of over 60% year-over-year. What’s more impressive is that he does this with a small team of marketers. I’ve been a big fan of ahrefs for a long time. I love the product and I’m particularly impressed with the content they create to help their users and prospects. I know Tim has a lot of value to share, so let’s dive right in.
Matt Byrom:
How are you doing today, Tim?
Tim Soulo:
Hey, I’m doing great. Thanks a lot for inviting me and thanks for such an awesome introduction. What I should immediately say that I’m not, of course, not the only person contributing to ahrefs growth. Basically, what gets often left out is the smart developers that are behind there too. And, of course, our CEO, who actually oversees everything that we do. So, yeah, I mostly contribute to marketing and a little bit to product, but this is teamwork really, here.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. You’re very modest, obviously, but it is true, many people that come on this podcast, there’s a fantastic product behind the marketing, and that’s certainly true for ahrefs, as well. It’s a lovely tool to use for anybody who hasn’t used it and it certainly shines through as the star of the SEO product world. Kick us off, I guess. It would be great for anyone who’s listening, who hasn’t heard of ahrefs. Tim, could you please start by telling us about the product, what you do, who your customers are, and the problem that you solve, as well.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, sure. It actually sounds like a question that I should get asked a lot, and I should have, already, my elevator pitch, like explain what ahrefs does in two minutes. But the fun thing is that every time someone asks me to define ahrefs, or explain what we do, I tend to struggle, because there’s so many angles to it. ahrefs is basically tools for marketing professionals and SEO professionals in the first place. But because there’s such a big variety of use cases, it also might be relevant to journalists. It also might be relevant to product founders, to copywriters, to everyone. So depending on what you do, but eventually, at the end of the day, it, of course, connected to digital marketing.
Tim Soulo:
I just say that ahrefs is a pretty unique tool for digital marketing professionals, because I think that one of the things we pride ourselves for is that we try to create some features, and functionalities, that no one else has. So that the people, who are using ahrefs, our customers, the marketers, they would have a slight competitive advantage over people for using other different tools. I would say this is what ahrefs do, we create awesome tools for SEO professionals and for marketers.
Matt Byrom:
That was in a nice succinct way at the end, there, as well. Yeah, I guess that’s true. It’s everything from keywords, to content, to site health, to everything, really. Isn’t it? That’s interesting that you say about you’re creating features that give people a competitive advantage. How do you actually go about that? Where the data that you can get, and create, is obviously, I guess, limited by what’s available and what can be found out from Google search. How do you actually go about creating things that give those people a competitive advantage?
Tim Soulo:
As a general overview, we have two main sources of ideas for features for product development. One source of ideas, it comes from our CEO and founder, because he’s super technical guy. He’s big on development, like building all those servers, systems, and stuff like this. Some times, just based on the technology, based on the data that they collect with the backend guys, she can see some interesting things that other people would have never guessed that it can be even done. This is one of the source of amazing features that other tools cannot suggest, because their founders are not as technical as ours.
Tim Soulo:
The other source is industry. This is where I come in. I talk to fellow SEO people. I talk to follow marketers. I try to read a lot. I try to stay on top of the latest marketing fads. Whenever I see some people discussing some new challenge, some new problem, I always try to think like, “If we have the necessary data, or tools, to solve it.” Then I go and get discussed with our team, the backend developers, if something can be developed. Then we do that.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, we have two inputs. One comes from the industry, from talking to customers, from research the niche. And the other one is purely development driven, and is based on simply what technology can do today, and what we can use technology for.
Matt Byrom:
You guys have a huge dataset, as well, at the backend of data that you’ve actually collected and can show people. I’ve been following your success for many years. I’ve been using your product for many years. I used to love those short videos that you made, where you talk to camera. You know, where you discuss an ahrefs’ feature and how people can use it to improve in the data, at their SEO mainly, as well.
Matt Byrom:
I know things have evolved from there. You don’t seem to be on the videos these days, and I guess you’ve built a team around yourself, as well. Tell me a little bit more about how you started the marketing for ahrefs, and how you’ve grown your team over the last few years, as well.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah. I joined ahrefs more than three years ago, and back when I joined, I was the only marketing person in a team of, I think, 16 people in total. Yeah, I was trying to do everything myself, and I was testing what’s the best use of my time, since I’m the only marketing guy. And I have to work on everything, I have to rewrite the copy of the homepage. I have to oversee the pricing page, the testimonials, blog, educational materials, and everything. Like you said, I tried to create videos for YouTube that would be partial in marketing and partially teaching people to use our product.
Tim Soulo:
And, eventually, I found a person who is much better than I am on video, and has English as his major language, which has always been my problem. I just had to do too many takes to create a video that would satisfy me, too many takes. Yeah, this was a huge problem. I just came as the first marketing person. One of the main things about me, growing within ahrefs as a marketer, was that I talked to customers. So, I actually did a lot of support. I was replying a lot of support chats. I think we were using Intercom, from the start, so I was sitting in Intercom for hours, and hours, and hours.
Tim Soulo:
I scheduled Skype calls with our customers. I tried to help them to understand ahrefs, while they were helping me to also understand ahrefs from their perspective. It was like a huge learning experience. And, usually, people who build products are quite disconnected from their customers. So, in my case, I tried to be as close to customers as possible. I also tried to be as close to community as possible.
Tim Soulo:
Now, I have a tradition, like once in two years, I would launch a thread and write it. I write it for HR professionals. And I would launch a thread that I’m Tim, from ahrefs, and we’re looking for some feedback on how we’re doing, and what we should do next, blah, blah, blah. I just talk with everyone who would criticize us, who would say good words about us, who would suggest us features, like who would show us our pros, our cons. Yeah, just try to mostly talk.
Tim Soulo:
That’s where our marketing gets most of the ideas. And, over time, because you mentioned building a team, I was just trying to find for everything that I was doing, for blog, for videos, for outreach. I was trying to find a person who would be better than me at something, because I’m not the best copywriter. I’m not the best blogger in the world. I’m not the best person to do videos and other stuff, so I was constantly looking for someone who could do it better than me, and this is how I was gradually building our team.
Tim Soulo:
It’s still small, so the entire ahrefs team, I think, right now, it’s 45 people out of which, I think, our entire marketing department is 10 or 12 people. I don’t remember. It also depends on how you count, because some people get promoted from support department into marketing department, as they learn about our customers. If you compare the entire ahrefs team of 46 people to the guys that we’re competing with, like Moz and SEMrush. I think Moz has 200 people in their team, in total, something around those lines. And, SEMrush, I think they have 500 people, or something like this.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, so you can tell that’s how efficient we are and how small we are. And we still manage to compete with those guys.
Matt Byrom:
That’s quite incredible and it’s great to see your success. Coming back to something you said there, it’s actually a recurring theme on this podcast, where people who come on they say, “The closer that you can get to the customer, understanding the customers’ needs, understanding what the customer wants, understanding the customers’ pain points, the better that you are going to be positioned to, actually, market to those people, help those people, and support those people.” Which, effectively, is what marketing is, really, is supporting people, helping people, building that brand awareness, as well.
Matt Byrom:
It’s really interesting that, that’s the area that you’ve started in, and fell into, when you were starting at ahrefs, as well.
Tim Soulo:
Absolutely, absolutely. I can say that not only I try to be as close to our customers, as possible, but I also try to be the power user of our own tools. The other day I was watching the recordings of some product management conference. One of the speakers, she was offering advice along the lines of how to be a successful, or effective, product manager, and blah, blah, blah. One of the items on the list was you should start using your own product. I actually, yeah, I actually laughed at this, because I am using our own product every day.
Tim Soulo:
Well, I’m in a unique situation, because I am a marketer myself, and we’re building a marketing tool. So it’s natural that I would use our own tool. But, for example, if you’re a marketer and your tool does, I don’t know, let’s say, productivity. It might be a little more challenging for you to get in the habit of using your own tool. But, yeah, for me, it comes natural, because I’m probably the heaviest user of our own tool out of all people in our company. Yeah, it’s a no brainer, for me, totally.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic. Okay, let’s dive into the marketing. Tell me a bit about the marketing strategy at ahrefs. What areas do your team focus on, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?
Tim Soulo:
There are two fun things about our marketing. The first something is that our marketing is, I would say, pretty random. We don’t have any quarter goals, or monthly use, or some KPIs that people from our team need to report to me, or any of that stuff. Actually, I think it comes from our CEO and he transmits that down to me that we try to build a company of people who are self-sustainable. You don’t have to, necessarily, have them report to you, stand over their shoulder, and all that stuff. We think that people in our team should bring value on their own, and they should care about our tools, and they should think about how they can contribute more and more.
Tim Soulo:
We don’t really have any specific marketing plan or something. We just meet once in a while, discuss what each of the members of our marketing team wants to do next. What excites them? What they think they can do best than other people in our marketing team, and that’s what they do. Another fun thing about our marketing is that we, in our marketing, we actually try to rely a lot on product development.
Tim Soulo:
We think that the best marketing you can do is by building a superior product. It is hard to market something that is lame. If you know that your competitors are better than you, I don’t know, you have to be some super creative, some super awesome marketer, to be able to become a leader in your industry, if your product is not superior than your competitors, and if everyone can see this.
Tim Soulo:
In our case, it’s actually easier for us, because we have awesome development. We have awesome product behind us. We have super smart people who are building this product, so all we have to do, in marketing, is basically have people compare our product to the products of our competitors and see the difference. I’d say that our marketing is relying a lot on our product team, and our developers team, to realize new awesome features that, we then, can promote. It’s not about buying ads. It’s not about even creating content, but it’s about building a product that you could tell people about.
Tim Soulo:
Actually, our content comes from our product. Whenever we release a new feature, we will create new content around the use cases of this feature. Our marketing is super product driven.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and that’s really evident, as well. Even since back in the day, when you were doing the videos that I talked about earlier. The videos that you would do would all be based around a feature, but it would be an end goal. So it would be how to use this to do this, really. The end user wanted to do the end goal, and you were showing them how to do that with ahrefs, but it was all very product focused to achieve that goal. And it’s still evident today. When you’re looking through your blogging things, every post has tons of screenshots, a lot of which being, ahrefs showing people how to use the product to actually achieve their goal.
Tim Soulo:
Some people might think that if you’re running a company blog, it should be purely educational, and you shouldn’t try to promote your product, and sell to people. But it doesn’t make sense business wise, because why would you create educational content, and educate people, not getting anything in return? What’s the value in that? Well, whenever you land on educational blog, that blog will most likely have some info product to sell you, or the blog might have some conference behind it, where they will grow an audience to get more people to visit their conference, or the blog simply might be sponsored by some other companies who are buying, I don’t know, banners or slots there.
Tim Soulo:
At the end of the day, every blog that teaches you something, they get some sort of revenue out of this. In our case, not only we think that it’s totally fine that on our own blog, because it’s called ahrefs Blog. How come it won’t mention ahrefs, because it’s ahrefs Blog? Yeah, it comes totally natural to us. And on the other hand, we have tons of customers, customers who are on paid account customers for our own free account. And these customers, they need education. They want to know how to use our tool better. They want to know how to achieve their goals with our tool.
Tim Soulo:
Why not, how to say, kill two birds with one shot, or whatever is the saying in English. We create awesome content that trends in Google and has marketing value. This same content, it also educates our existing customers, helps them be successful at what they do, and retains them, so our retention goes up, and it also generates word-of-mouth. Whenever our customers learn something from us, and they see how they can use our tool to achieve something, they would then go and share this hack, this tactic, this strategy with their friends, peers, coworkers. This is how we get more, and more, people to use our tool.
Matt Byrom:
So, word-of-mouth, in that case, must be a big driver for you guys, as well, in that case.
Tim Soulo:
Absolutely, absolutely. It’s one of our biggest customer acquisition channels.
Matt Byrom:
Diving into that, what have been the most successful user acquisition channels for you?
Tim Soulo:
It depends on what you define as a customer acquisition channel and how you believe that a certain channel works. But, in our case, I believe, of course, the biggest customer acquisition channel it, again, comes back to the actual tool. Because, if the actual tool, let’s say, works, if it gets you the results you’re looking for, if you use it and you get the output that you were expecting, you will go and talk about it with other peoples. Because whenever you become successful at something, whenever you achieve a certain goal, you will naturally want to, let’s say, brag about this to your friends, to your family, to, I don’t know, to everyone around you.
Tim Soulo:
If the tool, if it actually works, people will talk about it. This is called the word-of-mouth. I think creating a great product is a marketing channel, and a customer acquisition channel, in itself. Then I think the next best thing that works for us is our content and I already explained how this works. There are two sides to it. The first side is that we actually educating people on how to get that ah-ha moment. How to get the wow factor. How to get impressed by what you can do with the tool and go and actually do it. This is the first use case of our content.
Tim Soulo:
And the second part of the value that comes from our content is that it actually ranks in Google. Whenever people are looking in Google to solve their SEO rated problems, a lot of the times they will land on our articles. And within our articles, we’ll show how to easily achieve something, if you’re using our tools. So people will naturally get interested, go into our tools, and then go into the word-of-mouth state where they would start telling their friends about what they just learned.
Tim Soulo:
I think creating an awesome product, which people will natural talk about, and creating content that helps people find your product, because you talk about their problems, and their issues, and funneling them towards a product, are the two biggest drivers for us.
Matt Byrom:
Do you find that’s why you started this crazy sort of content? I feel like, over time, from reading your blog, it’s actually improved, and improved, and improved. Do you feel that’s something you’ve learned more over time that, that is the best way to market your product?
Tim Soulo:
My two biggest takeaways, and I’ve already touched on both of them, but still I think it pays to highlight them again. The first one is that you should create content around the things that people are actually searching for, because it gives you the opportunity to get found in Google, or other search engines. And gives you the opportunity to get consistent traffic. Every month a certain amount of people will be looking for solving the same issue. And every month this will be new, and new, and new people.
Tim Soulo:
If your content ranks for whatever problem people might have, you will get a constant stream of potential customers who are looking to resolve this issue. It seems super obvious, but when I examine blogs of different, I don’t know, businesses, tasks, platforms, tools, applications, I don’t see them doing this. I’ve been in this situation. I was running a blog for ahrefs, at first, and even though ahrefs was an SEO tool, I just didn’t realize that we could SEO to get customers to our tool. This is super important. It’s amazingly simple. It’s stupidly simple, but a lot of people are simply overlooking it.
Tim Soulo:
The next thing is that once you have that article, once that article ranks in Google and gets you traffic, it has to bring you customers. You should be able, within your articles, to mention your tool and to show people the value of your tool, and how to use it, show some use cases, show some examples. Because, if you write an article that gets a ton of traffic, but you don’t see a natural way to plug your product within your article, the conversion rate will be super low. Because, for example, I know that topics like, creative covers for Facebook pages, people are searching for this things in huge masses. So there are tons, and tons, and tons of people, every month, who are looking for some creative ideas for Facebook covers, or Facebook avatars, or whatever.
Tim Soulo:
But if we publish an article on our blog about this, there’s no way for me to plug ahrefs, other than, at the end of the article, saying, “Hey, you know what, you were looking for some, I don’t know, social media advice, but we have a tool about SEO. Probably, you might be interested in this article, as well.” Now, it doesn’t work this way. We try to target topics that are closely related to what we do. For example, we rank for SEO tips. Whenever people are looking for a list of actionable SEO tips, they will find our article. And within those SEO tips, we’re actually showing some awesome use cases for ahrefs. So people, who are looking for SEO tips, they actually, within the article, they learn how to use ahrefs, and they become interested, and they check our trial, and eventually become our customer.
Tim Soulo:
Two super simple things; write about topics that people are actually searching for, and make sure that this topics are something where you can naturally mention your product, your service, your tool, your business, or whatever you do. This is simple, but it’s the core strategy, the foundation, of our content marketing blogging strategy.
Matt Byrom:
I’d like to just dive into those in a bit more detail. I think that’s fantastic advice. Literally, it sounds so simple, but it’s, as you say, it’s something that a lot, and lot, of people are just not doing. We work with hundreds of customers in our agency and we just find the same thing, that people are just not creating content that will naturally rank and be supportive to their customers. I want to dive into those two things separately. First, the ranking and creating content that’s based around something the customers will search for. Then we’ll dive into a little bit more about how to make that content bring you customers.
Matt Byrom:
First off, we create videos and marketing content for our clients through our two brands, one called, Wise Owl, and one called, Publish. What were finding, particularly, successful, at the moment, is the notion of content opportunities. That’s searching through top pages of your competitors, keywords, the search engine results pages, and then finding opportunities to rank for things that our customers might be searching for. I mean, ahrefs is a great tool for that, that we can do research and find those opportunities. Then we create content to support those people, and to actually try and rank for those particular opportunities that we find. It might be that we find opportunities where the top 10, there’s three good posts, and then seven that are not so good, for example.
Matt Byrom:
Or some of them are particularly old, or some of them are particularly short in what they say, and we could actually improve upon that. Then we find those opportunities and try and rank for those. Is that what you’re saying here, as well? That you’re looking for opportunities that your customers will be interested in, that fit the intent of what they might be searching for, and also fit around the features and solutions that you have with your ahrefs product, as well?
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, well, to be honest, this is quite a complicated question. I will explain why I think it’s complicated. Because, on one hand, opportunity, it means that this is something that you can do fairly easily, right? Let’s say, you start researching your niche and you see that whatever keyword, whatever topic, you want to rank with your page, your biggest competitor’s ranked there and they have tons of back links to their pages. So you know that it would be hard for you to rank, unless you get this many back links, and you’re unsure how to get that many back links.
Tim Soulo:
You will be looking for less popular topics, where, for example, your competitors didn’t bother to create pages on this topics. And there are always super unpopular topics, but there still relevant to your business, and you’re still able to convert those people into your customers. You might be looking for these opportunities that don’t promise you tons of customers, should you publish an article about this, but still you will be able to rank fairly easily and get a little bit of customers to your website. This is one side of the coin.
Tim Soulo:
But, on the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to create 50 small articles targeting unpopular topics and try to get a little bit of traffic here, a little bit of traffic there. Let’s say each of your articles will get 10 to 20 visitors per month from search, so to make it a thousand, you’ll have to create 100 articles, right? That’s a ton of work. On the other hand, you can just take a single keyword that is highly competitive and directly relate it to your business. And you can put all of efforts, even if it doesn’t sound like an opportunity. Even if you see that it’s crazy competitive and all your top competitors are ranking there, and their pages are awesome, and they have a ton of back links.
Tim Soulo:
But still, you might go for it, you might invest more effort than they did. You might promote your page better and you might, eventually, crawl to the top of Google rankings and start getting the traffic with just a single article. You see, I’m not really sure. It depends on the situation. It depends on what kind of resources you have. It depends on what you’re good at. If you feel you can wrestle with the big guys, and you can create pages that will be better than they have, and if you feel that you have some, I don’t know, connections within your niche, and you know that some people will link to your content and, thus, help it rank better in Google. Then you should probably go for keywords that are competitive.
Tim Soulo:
If you’re just starting out and you’re totally lost, then, probably, you should be looking for those easier opportunities that don’t promise you tons of traffic overnight, that will give you just a little bit of traffic, but it would be guaranteed traffic, because no one of your competitors bothered to create content around these topics.
Matt Byrom:
I know it’s a very complex area and there’s no real one way just to nail that either. It’s particularly interesting that the opportunities can surface themselves by using, say, a tool like ahrefs, even it that’s all typing in various searches and finding out what people are searching for, the suggested searches, or Google search console, as well. Just finding, using, these tools that are available to us will surface these opportunities, whether they’re more difficult opportunities to actually fulfill, or whether they’re less competitive opportunities to fulfill. Having that knowledge, and having that understanding, of the competitive landscape, and the market of search, will help you actually create content that could rank in those various different areas over time.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, of course. It pays to actually know what you’re looking at. Like you said, you can use a tool, like ahrefs, to plug the website of your competitor, and you can instantly see a chart of their best performing pages. You can see which pages bring them more traffic from search, which pages are performing weaker, which bring them less traffic. And you can see how many back links these pages have, because the number of back links to a page directly relates with the amount of search traffic that this page gets, and how well it ranks in Google. So, at a glance, you can see all the conduct of your competitor and, while it took them a lot of trial and error to publish all this pages, to promote them, and through start and rate in traffic, you can cherry pick those opportunities, those pages, that get a decent amount of traffic without having a lot of back links, and the same with keyword research.
Tim Soulo:
While a lot of marketing departments run their blogs, run their content marketing strategy, based on, I don’t know, based on things they see on Twitter, whatever, or just look what their competitors are publishing. While their competitors are not necessarily good with content marketing themselves, you can just use a keyword research too, and you can see the actual search volume behind certain search queries. So you can see which topic is more popular, this topic, or that topic? Then you can make a decision which on you want to target.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, of course, if you’re doing content marketing, if you’re doing SEO, if you want to get search traffic to your website, I don’t even know if it even makes sense to do that without using the tools, like ahrefs, Google, Keyword Planner. Actually, ahrefs, is a premium tools, so it’s mostly if you’re serious about your research in marketing. But if you’re just starting out, there are plenty, and plenty, and plenty of free tools that do everything. Of course, they’re limited to some extent, but still for starters, they’re enough, and you can get a ton of value, even from free tools. But, one thing for sure, you have to use the tools, because you have to understand the search potential behind different topics, and the difficulty of ranking for them, and getting traffic from these topics.
Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely, and we actually, also, to support our efforts, we use a free tool called Keyword Everywhere. That’s just a tool that helps us see, right within the browser when we search, what the search volume might be for various different phrases. That just helps us actually say, okay, as a very simple starting point, “Are we going to write more along that topic or that topic?” What words would be better to use? Where are people actually … What types of things are people actually searching for in that area? Then we can start to dive deeper into things from there, but what we’ve also found is, we’ve have particular success with things like ahrefs top pages, where we’ve … Which is, for anybody who’s listening, it’s a list of pages that us, or our competitors have, that are performing best in search.
Matt Byrom:
What we found particularly useful is just mining our competitors’ top pages and, like I say, about opportunities, it’s finding those opportunities for content gaps that we might have in our own content. Where we might not have written on a particular topic, whereas one of our competitors has that page around that topic, and it might be strong, it might not be particularly strong page, but it might be. For example, one of our competitors had one of their top five pages was something that we hadn’t written about, but was highly relevant to our business. So that was an opportunity for us to write about something that was highly relevant, and something that was bringing one of our competitors a lot of traffic.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah. To be honest, I can’t even imagine how people were creating content marketing strategy, or SEO strategy, back in the days where those tools didn’t exist. Because, right now, it’s so easy to get ideas just by researching what your customers have. You don’t even need to replicate their pages, but simply just by looking at what brings traffic to them, you can instantly come up with your own ideas, which would be unique. So it’s that simple. But if you’re not using any of this tools, I don’t even know where to start. What kind of brainstorms and what kind of, I don’t know, marketing meetings would help you to create content that would be on point, and that would rank in Google, and bring new customers?
Matt Byrom:
Yeah. To go into this just a little bit further, one of your blog posts said that you’ve had particularly strong ranking, and organic traffic increases, since July, or August, this year. Looking at your site, on your own tool, it’s clear that your organic search traffic there seems to have almost doubled since that period. Talk us through some of the changes that you’ve made to it, that have actually contributed to the success of your blog and your organic traffic in that period of about six months, or so.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah. I might sound boring here, because a lot of the times when people are asking, or are looking for, I don’t know, content marketing advice, and advice on promoting their content advice, on writing awesome articles, they’re looking for any tips, but a simple tip create great content. People are ready to follow any advice, but not follow the create great content advice and, actually, I see there’s even some shake in the industry, in regards to create great content advice. But, now that you’re asking me, what worked for us. What worked for ahrefs and our search traffic for our blog it has really doubled this year, so the graph looks almost like a hockey stick, so it’s growing like crazy.
Tim Soulo:
What works for us is we simply try our best to create the best freaking article on the topic. Whenever we pick a topic, be it SEO tips, or SEO audit, or keyword research, or a list of marketing tools, or whatever topic that you want to write an article about, we will actually have a few core people of our marketing team who have a small brainstorm, in a simple Google document, and will try to exchange ideas on how we could make our article in the topic unique, or how our article would standout from the articles that already rank at the top of Google. How would we make that article interesting to both people who are new to this, and people who are already have some experience in the industry? How are we going to impress all these groups of people?
Tim Soulo:
People who are new to this, these are the people who will find this article in Google, because they have never heard of it, and they’re searching for it, and they need a good explanation. But people who are already familiar with your industry, and who have experience, are the people who will promote the article for you. The article should be equally interesting for people with experience, because they have the audience to read this article too, because they will link to your article, because they will mention it in their, I don’t know, presentations during the conferences, or whatever.
Tim Soulo:
And, at the same time, once your article ranks in Google, it should be easy enough, straightforward enough, and simple enough for people who are new to this to follow it. This is the kind of brainstorm we have whenever we pick a new topic. We try to identify anyways we could make our article awesome, interesting, and unique, high quality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And from there, everything gets easier. Once we decide a unique angle of our article, once we decide how our article would be better than alternatives, it just snowballs from there.
Tim Soulo:
For example, I can tell you that quite often our articles get posted to, I don’t know, Growth Hackers without us doing it. Actually, our readers will like articles so much that they will go and post it in Growth Hackers. Quite often, a lot of people, a lot of influencers in our field, will treat our articles without us having to actually ask them. You know, there’s a promotion strategy where you will reach out to people who have some audience in your field and ask them to promote your article, to tweet it, to send it to their email list, whatever. What we see is that whenever we publish an awesome article, people will, sooner or later, find it and they will share it.
Tim Soulo:
Just yesterday one of my articles about Google Page Rank is Not Dead, it actually was at the top of Hacker News. It was there for just a little while, but we had a bump in trial registrations through ahrefs, and I didn’t have to do anything. You know, there are different strategies of content, right here, on the front page of Hacker News. People are studying the best times to post on Hacker News. People are studying if there’s a way to game Hacker News. How to create an account with good karma or whatever so that you won’t get banned from Hacker News?
Tim Soulo:
For us, it happened naturally, just because we wrote a great article and eventually someone enjoyed it so much that he decided to discuss it with Hacker News. This is how we were on the front page for a while and we got, I think, 70 comments, and quite a bit of traffic from Hacker News. For us, like I said, it all starts from figuring out how are we going to create an amazing piece of content on the topic, and from there everything just gets easier.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic, yeah. It’s like, somebody said similar to me, the other day, how can I build more back links? Or how go about building back links? I need new back links. And I said, “You know, it’s just about not actually going and building those back links. It’s about creating content that people will link naturally to you, so that, actually, you can build so many more back links than you could possibly build yourself, just by creating great content and having those links occur naturally.”
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, exactly. Because other than naturally, the only way to build back links is unnaturally, right? If people are not linking to you naturally, it means that you have to look for some loopholes, for some hacks. One famous word in SEO is PBNs, private blog networks. This is where people will create fake websites with the only goal to link to themselves, to their own websites, and to boost their Google ranking, and to boost their traffic. But the fact that this is not natural, the fact that this is gaming the system, gaming Google, means that Google is after it, and Google is trying to have all measures to prevent it. And they’re actively penalizing those websites.
Tim Soulo:
If you’re trying to find hacks, if you’re trying to find easy ways to build back links, if you’re trying to find artificial ways to build back links, you have to consider that you have a high chance of getting penalized and losing all your traffic overnight. If you’re okay with those risks, then it’s your choice. In our case, we only advocate natural ways of link building, natural ways of marketing, legitimate marketing strategies. And they’d stress, we don’t do this and they’d stress, we don’t teach our customers to do this.
Matt Byrom:
Looking back on it, you mentioned creating great content has been your success this year, but has something changed then, since July, about the way that you’ve gone about that, or have you just seen stuff that see particular success? Since then, you mentioned, it’s obviously, on a hockey stick and you can see that looking at the tool. Has something changed around that time?
Tim Soulo:
Yes. One strategy that I can share. It’s that we’re updating our content. Again, it’s not like a secret strategy, or whatever, that I’m trying to hide. It’s actually something that people are discussing almost on every SEO and content marketing blog. What we do, like I said, we have a brainstorm and we try to figure out a way to create an awesome article on a given topic. Then we’ll actually write this article. We will publish it. We will throw some money into Facebook ads. We will reach out to some relevant people to show it to them. And we’ll see if article will get traction. If people will start reading it, if people will comment on it, if it will appear in different, I don’t know, link roundups, if it will get posted to sites, like Growth Hackers, or whatever, or forums, or websites where people in your niche are sharing content they like.
Tim Soulo:
Then we’ll just wait for a while and see where this article ends up ranking with the kind of promotion, and with the kind of exposure that it got. Quite often, some of our articles, they don’t rank as well as we have expected them to rank. So we’ll go back to the drawing board, and we’ll try to figure out why this article didn’t rank as well as we were hoping for. Why it didn’t get as many comments. Why it didn’t get as much feedback from the community as we were hoping for. Or why people are not linking to it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Tim Soulo:
And what we do is we simply rewrite the entire article from scratch. Of course, using the same URLs. The URL will remain the same, but we’ll republish an article as if it is brand new, because the actual content of the article we’ll rewrite everything from scratch, but just retain the same URL, so that Google would see that the article got updated, and it has new content, and it again gets a new type of traffic, because we’ll promote it again. We’ll put some money into Facebook ads, we’ll reach out to people again, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, this is one of our main content marketing strategies, other than creating new content around the topics that we didn’t cover, yet, on our blog. We will go back. We will review which of our articles didn’t perform well, which of our articles don’t get the search traffic that we were hoping for, and we will find the ways to rewrite them to make them better, and to publish them as new, and to promote them, in hopes that the second take would be better. And from the second take, we’ll be able to achieve our goals ranking in Google and certain search traffic.
Matt Byrom:
So it’s like you know you’ve got great idea for a piece of content, but you know sometimes it just doesn’t hit the market, from a search point of view, so it’s always about going back to those pieces of content and just working on them, and working on them, until they actually do see success.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, exactly this, because what I’ve noticed is that Google does, actually, pay attention to the traffic that is coming to your article. I don’t think they have ever admitted it publicly, but they have Google Chrome, so if they want to get data about which pages are visiting, and how long people are staying on this pages, they can easily get it from Chrome. What I’ve noticed is that whenever we publish an article, or whenever we republish an article as new, and we’ll send some traffic to it by sending it to our email list, and by promoting it on Facebook ads, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Tim Soulo:
It will get a slight increase in ranking, so Google will start sending, to the article, some more traffic, as well. Probably, it might be because Google recalled the page. They saw that we have all new content on the page and they might test it. They might try ranking the article for more, and more, search queries, sending us more, and more, traffic. Then seeing how people will behave. And if people will stay, if people will read this, if people will like it, they will push the article higher, and higher, up in the search results. But if Google will see that all the traffic that is coming to our article, and then bouncing, no one is reading it, no one is reading it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Google might just drop us in rankings, as well.
Tim Soulo:
What we do, we simply try to update our article in a way where we think we’ll make it more engaging, and more relevant, and nail the searcher intent better. Then send some traffic to it, so that Google will see, if they do track it, that this article is generating some buzz. Then Google will also test it with their own search traffic. And, eventually, the article might just start performing better and Google will push it higher, and higher.
Matt Byrom:
It’s really interesting isn’t it, the amount of different ways that Google can collect their data these days, as well? You say, about Chrome, and even without being in a search engine and, perhaps, for a term they could actually collect data about your site and how people are interacting with it. So that, actually, when they do rank it, then they know where it might fit better.
Tim Soulo:
What I notice, quite often, is that whenever we publish an article that gets traction, that is higher than our regular article … Let’s say it goes viral, but it’s not viral in the sense, like something goes worldwide, but just performs, let’s say, three to five times better than our average article. What I see is that this article will rank in Google for its target keyword within less than 24 hours since the published date. Within in less than 24 hours, our brand new article might start ranking in Google top five for its main keyword. But that only lasts for two to three days, then it goes to page two, page three, et cetera, et cetera.
Tim Soulo:
My theory about this is that Google can actually see that the article is generating some traction from other channels and not search. So they will put it to the top of their search results to test with their own search traffic. Then, based on how the article performs, they might then make some conclusions on where they want to put this article in the search results. What to do next with this article. Yeah, this is what I’m seeing. Quite often, our articles will rank in the top of Google within less than 24 hours, our rank there for a while, and then go down. Then move back up really, really slowly.
Matt Byrom:
That’s interesting, very interesting. I’d like to actually just bring us back then, as well, to something that we said we’d talk about before, which was generating customers. Obviously, we talked about creating content that ranks and is interesting to your users and are also relevant to your product, but then also said the next important thing, now, is to make sure that your content is generating customers. Tell us a bit about how the tactics, or the ways that you actually use your content, or use your marketing, to bring customers in and start new trials effectively.
Tim Soulo:
Yeah. Like I said, we only try to write articles on the topics that are closely related to what our tool does, so that we had a chance to naturally feature our tools and features within our articles. I have blogging course, and within that course, I explain the concept of business potential. It’s a nice concept, but we don’t actually use it in the literally way. The concept means that whenever you have an idea for an article, you should rate its business potential with just three grades. Grade three, three is the highest business potential. It means when the topic that you’re covering with your article is something where your business is totally an irreplaceable solution. If someone is having some problem, well, let’s just talk about surgery. There are certain illnesses that can only be solved with the surgery. If you don’t do a surgery, you’re dead. I call it business potential number three. There’s no way around this issue other than using tool, or service, or product, or whatever.
Tim Soulo:
Business potential number two it means that there are different things that could solve this issue, different approaches to this issue, but your tool is still preferable decision. Business potential number one means that people can actually solve this issue in a variety of ways, and even if they won’t use your tool, they still will be fine. They will solve it easily, but they might decide to use your tool for whatever reason. That is business potential of one. And business potential of zero is if there’s absolutely no way to mention your tool in the context of the issue that people are having.
Tim Soulo:
Those are the grades and in our marketing spreadsheets, and our low cost ADS, we don’t actually use this idea of business potential number three, business potential number two, blah, blah, blah. But whenever we are discussing the new topics that we want to target on our blog, we keep that concept in mind. Whenever we’re discussing a new article on a certain topic, we will think like, “How does our tools, and services, and data fit into this article? Is it an irreplaceable solution? Is this something we can mention? Or there’s no way to mention it, at all?”
Tim Soulo:
This is how we pick the right topics, and this is how we then, later, integrate the mentions of our tools, our services, our metrics within the articles. This is eventually, because when people are reading your article, they’re giving you permission to explain them something. I absolutely enjoy the concept, I think, was invented by Seth Godin, that there’s permission marketing and interruption marketing. Whenever you open YouTube and you want to check out some interesting video, and before that video you have to watch an ad, that is interruption marketing. You weren’t asking for that ad to play.
Tim Soulo:
But then, within the actual video, if you’re watching for some, I don’t know, travel blogger and the travel blogger starts talking about a new ad that he’s using to book flights, and it’s so easy and convenient. This is actually permission marketing, because you’re giving, by watching the video of the blogger, you’re giving him permission to deliver any information that he wants to you.
Tim Soulo:
So it’s the same with articles. If a person started reading your article about something, they are giving you their permission to teach them something. So use that opportunity to teach them about your product, to show them some use cases.
Matt Byrom:
I love that. That was particularly interesting and you mentioned about the cost, as well. It teaches people more about blogging. Where can people find that?
Tim Soulo:
It’s actually a paid course, so I don’t want to promote it so much. But let’s put it like this, five people who are listening to this interview, if they just tweet any takeaway from this interview, of course, with a link back to the episode and mention me, I will give them free access to this course. If someone is looking to grow their business blog, if someone is looking to type into content marketing and learn how to grow their business, or their company, with a blog, you have a chance of getting my course for free, and all you have to do is tweet about that episode and mention me in a tweet, and I will take five people and give them a free course.
Matt Byrom:
That’s fantastic. Well, thanks very much for that offer. It’s very, very kind. I hope a few people take you up on that. I know we’re running out of time here, so I’ll try and wrap things up soon. But we’ve talked a lot about SEO. I know you do a lot of other things in your marketing team there. Maybe you could just take a little bit of time to run through a few other things other than, maybe, searching content that are showing particular success for you guys, at the moment.
Tim Soulo:
One of the areas that we focused quite heavily this year, 2018, was videos. I see that a lot of people, they prefer to consume content in a different way, so some people like reading articles, other people prefer to watch a video on the same topic, other people like to listen to podcasts on their commute to work or back. So what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to create content on all mediums and, this year, we have focused heavily on YouTube. We have created a lot of great YouTube tutorials. And even with some of our best articles, we just repurposed them into a video, published that on YouTube, and also promoted it a little bit.
Tim Soulo:
This year the videos are getting some nice views, I think. On average, we’re getting around 3000 views, which is quite good for a video on the topic of SEO. And sometimes the videos, like the views, go to 10000 views, 20000 views, sometimes even 100000 views, but that’s when we hit a nerve with some topic. The next thing, as you can tell, we’re also trying to appear on some podcasts, trying to have almost the same content, because of all the things that I was talking about today, are the things that are covered on our blog, on our YouTube channel. But some people will never come to our blog, some people will never stumble upon our YouTube videos, so we’re trying to repurpose our content to different mediums and reach different people with different types of content.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. It’s great to get that insight and it’s been a real pleasure talking to you today. I know we’re short on time, so I’m going to have to wrap this up. But I feel like we could have talked for quite a lot longer today. I ask all our guests five quick questions. The first one is, what’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Tim Soulo:
Yeah, I think we’ve talked about my best piece of marketing advice quite a few times today, and that is, focus on the actual product. The marketing team should not only promote what the product team and the developers team are building, but they should also try to give some input to the product team, to the development team, so that they could build something that market wants. Marketing is not about promoting a product, but also figuring out what the product should look like to be successful.
Matt Byrom:
Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Tim Soulo:
One of the latest books that I’ve read, and quite enjoyed, is The Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday. And, actually, I think anything by Ryan Holiday is worth reading. For example, Trust Me, I’m Lying, but The Perennial Seller is his latest book.
Matt Byrom:
I’ll also link that in the show notes, so if you go to mattbyrom.com, you’ll be able to get a link to that book, as well. What software tool could you not live without, aside from ahrefs’?
Tim Soulo:
That’s a hard question, what software tool? Well, let’s say that lately, we’re trying to move everything, like all our to-dos, and all our operational notes, into a new trendy tool called Notion. Previously, we were mostly using Basecamp. We also tried Wrike, but, right now, we’re using Notion. And I think it’s pretty cool, so, right now, I’m enjoying it. I cannot say that I wouldn’t live without it, but so far I find it super useful in terms of organizing our marketing department, our development, our roadmaps, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Matt Byrom:
That’s really cool. I’ve not actually heard of that tool, which is nice, so I’ll check that out after this call. What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?
Tim Soulo:
I’m afraid I don’t have any examples of marketing campaigns, because, to be honest, I don’t think of marketing as campaigns. Like I said, I see marketing as just building as superior product and trying to get found with whatever ways are possible.
Matt Byrom:
That’s all right, good to get your view on that still. Finally, what other podcasts do you listen to?
Tim Soulo:
To be honest, I don’t have any specific podcast that I would listen to regularly. What I do is I would just look for different podcasts and whenever I discover a new one, I would just browse their episodes, and I will just pick what is relevant to me, because, quite often, no podcast would have 100% of their episodes relevant to me. So I would just download, on my phone, all the episodes that peak my interest, that catch my eye, and listen like that. Often times, I don’t even remember names of the podcasts, I mostly remember the insights that I’ve gained from them.
Matt Byrom:
That’s cool. That’s cool. No problem. If you think of any, just drop me an email, I’ll include those in the show notes, as well. But, Tim, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. Thanks very much for all your time. If anybody hasn’t checked out ahrefs, please do. The blog is awesome. The videos that they’ve got on YouTube are really cool. The product is great and please, also, remember to tweet Tim with a quote from this episode and you’ll also get access to his course, as well, or five people will, as well. Tim, what’s your Twitter username?
Tim Soulo:
Tim Soulo, T-I-M S-O-U-L-O.
Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. Thanks again, Tim, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today.
Tim Soulo:
Thanks a lot for inviting me.
