January 21, 2025 • 44 mins
Meeting Rob Delory from Ahrefs
In this episode of eCommerce Masters, Ethan Giffin sits down with Rob Delory, Enterprise SEO Advisor at Ahrefs, to explore how AI is transforming SEO strategies. Rob shares how tools like Ahrefs help businesses, from startups to global brands, optimize their websites and outperform competitors. He explains the importance of technical audits, competitor analysis, and crafting content that ranks well and converts visitors into customers.
Rob dives into how AI is reshaping search engine results and why SEO is still crucial for driving traffic. He discusses how businesses can leverage insights from AI to improve keyword targeting, identify high-value opportunities, and gain a competitive edge. Practical advice, like creating engaging blog content and connecting it to product pages, offers actionable takeaways for boosting eCommerce performance.
The episode also covers emerging trends, such as "always-on" audits and real-time updates to prevent costly site errors. Rob’s insights make this a must-listen for anyone looking to stay ahead in the world of eCommerce SEO.
Chapters:Welcome to eCommerce Masters - 00:00
Rob’s Path to SEO Expertise - 04:10
Ahrefs: An All-in-One SEO Tool - 08:32
SEO’s Role in eCommerce Success - 13:48
The Power of AI in SEO - 18:50
Content Strategies That Work - 24:00
The Importance of Blogging in eCommerce - 29:00
Competitor Analysis and SEO Strategy - 34:1
Ahrefs’ New Features and Insights - 39:2
Final Tips for SEO and eCommerce Growth - 43:00
Resources:Ahrefs - https://ahrefs.com
ChatGPT - https://openai.com/chatgpt
Google Analytics (GA) - https://analytics.google.com
Google Search Console - https://search.google.com/search-console
BigCommerce - https://www.bigcommerce.com
Shopify - https://www.shopify.com
Klaviyo - https://www.klaviyo.com
Perplexity AI - https://www.perplexity.ai
Yep.com (Ahrefs Search Engine) - https://yep.com
IndexNow - https://www.indexnow.org
Cloudflare - https://www.cloudflare.com
About our Guest, Rob DeloryRob Delory is the Enterprise SEO Advisor at Ahrefs, where he helps SaaS, SMBs, and eCommerce brands optimize their SEO strategies and drive growth. With over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and sales, Rob specializes in SEO strategy and audits, competitive analysis, and data-driven solutions to help businesses outperform competitors.
Before joining Ahrefs, Rob worked with leading agencies, providing online strategies that encompassed eCommerce, social media, and paid advertising. He has advised thousands of businesses, combining technical expertise with a passion for fostering meaningful client relationships and delivering actionable insights.
About Our Host, Ethan GiffinEthan Giffin is the founder and CEO of Baltimore-based Groove Commerce, a premier eCommerce agency that helps mid-market brands design, build and grow their eCommerce sites.
Ethan is an industry expert in eCommerce, e-marketing, and the dynamic technologies behind them. For years, Ethan has lived and breathed conversion rates, search engine visibility, and web analytics.
When Ethan isn’t obsessing over SEO, conversion rates and eCommerce architecture at Groove Commerce, he can be found speaking as an industry authority, both nationally and internationally. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, traveling, DJin
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(01:00:01):
(Upbeat Music) What's up everybody and welcome to the
E-commerce Masters Podcast. I'm your
host, Ethan Giffen and CEO of Groove
Commerce. And I'm excited here today to
be talking about all things SEO with Rob
Delorey who's the Enterprise SEO Advisor
at Ahrefs. And what I first wanna say is
(01:00:22):
that this podcast is a video first
podcast. So if you'll go check out our
YouTube channel at atgroovecommerce and
give us a like, give us a share or leave
us a comment. We love hearing from you.
Rob, welcome to the show today.
Ethan, thanks for inviting me on. I
appreciate it. I'm really
looking forward to this.
Oh yeah, are you sure
(01:00:43):
you're looking forward to it?
Oh yeah, yeah. I'll talk about SEO
anytime somebody gives me a chance.
(Laughing)
Well, I'm excited to have you here on the
show today. We're a big fan of Ahrefs. We
love the tool, we love working with it.
And quite frankly, I love seeing your
content on LinkedIn and your travels. I
know you were just recently in Singapore
(01:01:05):
for the big Ahrefs event, which looked
awesome. I really wanna go to that
airport, by the way.
Yeah, I mean, it was my first trip to
Singapore. That's where our headquarters
are. That's where we had the conference,
but it was great being there. I can't
wait to go back next time.
That's awesome, that's awesome. So tell
me a little bit about how you got into
(01:01:26):
the SEO business. Usually people are real
scoundrels and pirates
or they're kinda, oh, you?
(Laughing)
I mean, listen, I've been going to SEO
conferences for 25 years, since 1999 at
this point. And there's a cast of
characters that show up there. So I would
(01:01:47):
probably put you in a
cast of characters as well.
All done. As long as I get the pirate
hat, then I'm good to go.
(Laughing) So how did you get into the business?
Yeah, for me, I actually, years ago, I
was in the printing industry and doing
direct mail and things of that sort. And
that's when digital really started to
(01:02:09):
take off. I started getting into selling
web design. And I should really make sure
I clarify on that. I'm more on the sales
side, but I've worked for many agencies
for years. I literally have talked with
thousands of businesses over the years
about their strategies, what they're
doing, what the recommendations I would
(01:02:29):
make to them. But ultimately SEO just
became something that I was so intrigued
by. I really started spending a lot of my
own extra time learning more about it.
And here I am, I think about 12 plus
years later, having worked with web
design and a number of other paper click
(01:02:51):
and so forth. But that's how I got into
SEO. It still intrigues me till this day.
That's cool, that's cool. I mean, listen,
don't sell yourself short on that. Like
you're out here looking at sites, showing
the product, talking about SEO. You're a
part of all the things. And so I think
there's just a lot of different cans and
resources that go into something like
(01:03:13):
this. And so I think you're carrying the
flag for the industry, providing
education, providing knowledge, all of
that are kind of valid
steps there of what people need.
So tell our audience just a little bit
about what Ahrefs is and who you kind of
serve as your ideal customer.
(01:03:34):
Yeah, sure.
Ultimately, we're a marketing
intelligence platform or SEO for digital
marketing in general. We have more data
on how websites are performing keyword
research. So ultimately, if you're part
of a large SEO team or even just a
(01:03:55):
straightforward digital marketing team,
or you're a small business owner who's
trying to get insights into competitive
analysis, understanding what the
opportunities are out there for them
before they put in all of the work, our
platform's there to be able to provide
that resource, that research and
information for people to make decisions
(01:04:17):
based on data rather than,
hey, let's see what happens.
So ultimately, anything you need for
having an all-in-one solution for SEO to
be able to do research, run technical
audits and so forth, that's
where our platform comes in.
Awesome, awesome. And it's for both folks
like Groove that are agencies that have
(01:04:39):
SEO practices, but it's also for
individual companies and users that may
want to leverage the
platform as well, correct?
That's correct. And I always look at it
from the standpoint of how far down the
rabbit hole do you want to go? If you're
a small business owner and you're just
looking for some basic information, but
(01:05:00):
just want to have a really strong
understanding of what's going on out
there in search, in digital marketing,
that's where our platform comes in. But
for technical teams, you won't find a
product that has more technical
opportunities within it than ours.
Yeah, I think we really love the product
from the technical standpoint. Well, we
(01:05:21):
love all parts of the app, but we really
leverage it from a technical standpoint,
especially when talking to new folks that
are interested in optimizing their sites,
like looking for ongoing optimization.
We're kind of trying to get people with
that kind of holy grail, what is like a
91 or 92 grade within the system what
(01:05:41):
they consider excellent, right? And so
we're trying to get all of our folks into
that kind of range because when they do,
they tend to see results much faster when
things are not holding Google back or the
other search engines back from working.
Yep, I mean, again, even starting out
from step one of a new website, or if
(01:06:06):
you've had a website for years, sometimes
you'd really be amazed at some of the
small changes you can make that will lead
to big improvements in results. So yeah,
but thank you for saying that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, for listeners
that aren't as aware of the product,
you're able to load your website into
Ahrefs. You are then able to perform an
(01:06:28):
SEO audit and then recurring audits
around that. You can grant it access to
your webmaster tools, you
can do Google Analytics.
There's a lot in there of how the sausage
is made, but it's kind of cleaning up
those technical errors and issues that
are generally the first step out of the
gate to make sure there
isn't anything that's creating,
causing anything that would prevent
(01:06:50):
search from search engines from kind of
scanning your site and kind of figuring
out what the theme and what type of
content that you have there.
How do you answer, do you ever have
people ask you in your kind of, in your
journeys that SEO isn't
as important these days?
Oh, SEO is, I don't get that question as
(01:07:12):
often as I used to, but to me, the answer
is no. I mean, SEO is still probably the
biggest driver of
traffic to people's websites.
It's something that you've got how many
different search engines, how many new
search engines that
have come out recently.
It's absolutely still relevant. It's
(01:07:33):
still a huge percentage of the actual
marketing channel that's
out there and available.
So for me, I used to have those
conversations more often when SEO was
fairly new. I usually don't get that
question, but I'm excited you asked it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you think
AI is affecting what you're doing with
(01:07:57):
the app and the evolution?
So we're gonna take the whole
conversation and we can just talk about
that for today. We
absolutely, absolutely.
AI transformative, it really is, again,
I've been doing this for a dozen or so
years, heavily into search engine
optimization. And I haven't seen anything
(01:08:17):
that's going to really, I think disrupt
search over the next few years.
When you're talking about some of these
companies that have come out, chat, of
course, everybody knows chat, GPT, but
even perplexity and a number of these
others out there, I really see that
they're going to start gaining a lot more
(01:08:37):
share because Google was always the big
one for the 20 years or so. And they're
gonna continue to be for a long time, but
you're definitely going to see a lot of
other companies that will start pulling
some of those percentages away, I
believe, but even Google itself, you're
getting into AI with their AI overview,
(01:08:59):
that zero click, that top of the search
results that they're providing,
whether intentional or not, they're
definitely providing answers without
people having to click as often. But
again, we're talking about small
percentages right now that possibly will
grow or we'll see if Google changes the
(01:09:22):
direction. They've surprised me a number
of times over the years.
Yeah, I think it's gonna be interesting
to see how that kind of evolves and
there's a lot of people within the
industry have different feelings about
Google kind of stealing people's content
and other things and that's a
conversation for a whole
other day to kind of talk about.
One of the things that we actually had
happen to us just last week was a
(01:09:44):
prospect that kind of loaded his
requirements for an e-commerce site
migration into chat GPT and asked for a
list of agencies back that he should talk
to and we were on that list. So I think,
yeah, I love it, I love it, but I think
again, some of that is coming through
content being spied and ingested and I
(01:10:06):
think making sure that your site can be
spied and ingested and kind of learned
from is gonna really be a piece, an
effect of that. You wanna be seen in that
and I guess what is the other term, it's
EATS, the all of those types of panels of
information that's gleaned from data and
(01:10:26):
the hard coding of information within
your site are all very, very important
with that and I think it's really gonna
change the industry of how it works and
it's gonna be very different for many
folks because back in the day, I
remember, prior to starting Groove, I was
director of e-commerce for a large global
(01:10:47):
staffing firm and I created the website,
their website had 800 visits a month from
Google and I created this dynamic system
of all their job postings that was
optimized for state and cities and by job
titles and industries and it went from a
50 page website to thousands of job
(01:11:10):
postings and individual categories and
all of that went to almost a million
visits a month from Google and I think
that game is kinda changing, that old
school kinda game is changing but at the
same time, it's like how are you gonna
use, how are you gonna leverage the
search engines to get
people to see who you are?
Right and you know, too, something that
(01:11:31):
you said just a few moments ago of the
prospect that reached out to you because
I think you said they used chat GPT and
ended up finding you from there. The only
reason that chat GPT found you is because
you had a presence online. Now, whether
you were ranking for the term that they
were searching for, no matter what, chat
(01:11:53):
GPT found you because of that. So even
moving forward, a lot of people are
starting to say, you know, oh, well, SEO,
is it still as relevant as it was? You
need to have that online presence even
for those types of AI tools to be able to
find you in the first place and then put
you in their database. I'm not saying
(01:12:15):
that they're stealing Google's search
results per se, I'm just saying that you
still have to do very similar work. Now,
exactly what algorithms
they're using, we don't know yet.
We don't know yet.
We don't know yet, I mean, it's all very
new. I know everybody's been talking
about it for a few years but really
people haven't been using it as an
(01:12:37):
alternative to search the way that they
are now. They're finding pretty good
results. And like you're saying, you're
showing up in that result. It's because
probably the work that you've done for
SEO, I say probably because again, I
can't make any definitive statements
because it's all too new.
It's all too new, it's all too new. Yeah,
(01:12:58):
yeah, yeah. So what are you seeing, you
know, when you're talking to folks that
are looking at the product, like what
kind of features are they looking for,
right? Like how are they looking to use
Ahrefs as, you know,
within their campaigns?
Sure, well, you had mentioned being able
to do technical audits. That's absolutely
(01:13:20):
important for search engines. They, you
know, being able to go ahead and make
sure that their crawlers can crawl
through your website, that you've got
lots of things like structured data in
place and you're sending the right
signals. But with our actual strategy, if
you will, being able to determine, you
(01:13:42):
know, what type of backlinks are possible
out there for us. How are our competitors
doing? That's probably one of the largest
things, the largest opportunities I keep
hearing about lately is people wanting to
know what's going on with my competitors.
Are they succeeding in certain areas? Can
(01:14:02):
I go ahead and get that information? A
lot of people don't even realize there's
so much information. You can really
reverse engineer success that's out there
using our platform and doing so.
Yeah, I think that that's very, very
true, right? I think that if you're able
to look at competitor sites through the
tools, you're able to determine what kind
(01:14:23):
of links do they have, you know, what
kind of strategies are they using to
build links, right, how many do they
have? Like what, do they have a bunch of
trash links? Then you kind of know what
strategy they're using for that. Do they
have like Forbes, you know, which is kind
of a hot thing that people are, you know,
always talking about Forbes. You know,
what is it that is driving that kind of
footprint and then being able to
(01:14:44):
duplicate that in many ways? And so, you
know, I think there's still, you know,
there's some highly, highly, highly
competitive keywords, mortgages, Viagra,
you know, all of those kind of things are
gonna always be like highly competitive,
but there's many
industries have a huge opportunity
to drive more, you know, with that. And
(01:15:06):
so we just, I see, you know, people that
are publishing a lot more content these
days or tend to be the ones that are
winning. I was at a conference in the
fall called PubCon, a big SEO kind of
internet marketing conference
in Las Vegas and just a lot of talk
around AI generated content versus human
generated content, how it ranks, how it
(01:15:28):
performs, you know, people that are
publishing content at scale versus just
publishing, you know, two,
three, four blog posts a month.
You know, we're really thinking that
people need to step up a lot of their
publishing to a certain level. Like you
don't have to be publishing a hundred
pieces of content a month, but I do think
Google, you know, if you're publishing
(01:15:50):
kind of somewhere between 15 and 30
things a month, Google, like on a daily
basis or every other day basis, Google
starts to think that these folks are
interesting and very active with their
websites and that does play into how you
get ranked and the types
of traffic that you get.
Yeah, I mean, as far as being able to go
(01:16:14):
ahead and create content at scale, I
think it's like so many other tools and
ideas that have come along over the years
of, hey, we're gonna go ahead and use
this because it's gonna make things
easier and they start producing lots of
content. And I've seen the numbers where
it has gone up, but eventually the
algorithms start picking up on it. The
(01:16:37):
reason being is because if you're talking
about some of these big search engines,
they of course have technology where they
can go ahead and identify AI generated
content. And Google said they don't have
a problem with it as long as it's useful
out there. But like you're saying, some
of these companies are just building out
so much content and getting it out there.
(01:17:00):
And they'll probably get short term
because again, that's what was happening.
Everybody was using it, everybody was
seeing results, everybody started to run
in that direction of, hey, let's put all
of this on our website. And I've seen the
numbers where they've gotten that peak
and it started going down. So what you're
gonna find is that the AI tools are
(01:17:20):
great. I'm gonna say AI a lot during this
conversation, but they're great, but I
wouldn't use them just for creating
content. They should be there to help
assist you, not do it for you. I agree.
That's my opinion,
one man's opinion of it.
I agree, I agree, I definitely agree with
that. I think it streams on, it can
streamline a lot of the process. And I do
think there's an over, people can over
(01:17:42):
post. I saw a case study of somebody that
posted like 100,000 blogs in a year for a
modern size company. And I was like, what
kind of mess is that? And
so you wanna be able to cover
all of your keyword themes, your pillars.
And so what are the, within your pillars,
(01:18:02):
what are the iterations of each keyword
and how do you cover all of that? But I
don't think that there's a magic number,
but I think that having a more active
website, a reasonably, let me rephrase
that, a reasonably active website, puts
you in a better light, like Google keeps
coming back to you if you're not just
(01:18:23):
doing one blog post a month where you're
doing something a couple a week, kind of
situation performance.
I have no problem, by the way, with
putting out a lot of content. But I'd
rather see content that was written by a
person with all of its grammatical
(01:18:43):
inaccuracies, which again, I would use an
AI to help me, hey, help me refine this
sentence, let me go ahead and use it for
outlines. But I'd rather see that, and I
think we'll see proof positive from that,
from the search engines over time that
actual written content will outperform
(01:19:03):
just straightforward AI generated. And
that's my prediction for this upcoming
year, we're gonna definitely have a lot
of data to be able to sort through on
that. A lot of it, a lot
of it, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, for those people that know me,
they know I've been a nightclub DJ or a
DJ and a party DJ in general for the last
30 some years. And it's
funny, when I go out to events,
(01:19:26):
if I hear somebody play a DJ set in a big
club, and there's no,
it's completely perfect,
I'll know that that's a prerecorded set
usually, right? I wanna hear the
occasional slip up or maybe just that
kind of, like part of a second off,
right? And it doesn't have to be like a
(01:19:47):
full train wreck of a mix, but it's like,
I wanna know that the person is actually
kind of mixing that, and it's not a
prerecorded kind of set that they're
working from, that they actually are a
human kind of, like mixing the music. And
so the same thing with content, right?
Like fully automated is not the way to
go, but I think that there's a level of
that, it's been very helpful from helping
(01:20:08):
to create content plans and briefs and
all of those things. How are you
leveraging AI within Ahrefs? Like what
are some of the things that you're using
AI for in terms of
making the product better?
We've been very selective on where we've
added in any AI assisted tools, and
(01:20:32):
probably some of the newer things that
have come out is being able to go ahead
and determine intent of keywords. If
you're gonna go ahead and go after a
keyword phrase and you put it into our
platform, you're going to be able to run
an analysis on the pages that are
(01:20:52):
actually succeeding. For that, AI will go
ahead and read through, it used to be, I
tell people, look at the top three pages
on Google, read each article and try to
have an understanding of what the
important topics were on that and what
the intent of those pages are. We
actually have a tool within our SERP
(01:21:13):
overview that will go ahead and do that
analysis for you, saving, that's where AI
should come in, to be able to save me
time in doing what I need to do. And
it'll allow you to be able to look
through and see the commonality of the
major topics. It'll give you more keyword
information, but it really comes down to
the topic so that you can write better
(01:21:35):
optimized SEO friendly content. Hmm.
Yeah, so that's the majority of where our
AI tools are coming in. We have it in a
few places with a content writing
assistant. Again, it's not writing it for
you, it's gonna go ahead and measure and
give you feedback on are you optimizing
it well for this particular term or set
(01:21:57):
of terms? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What else, what are you seeing, how are
you seeing people leverage the tool,
right? Like, are there any specific areas
that as you're having conversations or
you're giving demos that you think are
most worthwhile or like what's kind of a
hidden gem within Ahrefs that people like
(01:22:18):
aren't paying full attention to?
Man, boy, I'm trying to go through the
list in my mind on this one, but
oftentimes you'll find the competitor
analysis. Being able to
put in your competitors
and be able to see what keywords they're
ranking for as a group. So for example,
(01:22:41):
if I was, had an e-commerce website, I
would load in my top 10 competitors and
see what keywords they're ranking for and
that they have commonality in because
content strategy is one of those
situations where you're putting out
content, you're creating pages, you're
creating, you know, loading products and
so forth. But if you're able to see that
(01:23:03):
five of my competitors are trying to rank
for these 15 keywords and I'm not even
showing up for that, that's one of the
big signals to you. You may wanna take a
closer look at that. Maybe you don't
provide that product or for whatever
reason, it's not been on your radar, but
at least it brings it to your attention
(01:23:25):
and it gives you actionable data to be
able to go ahead and continue doing your
research. It isn't just a matter of I put
in a keyword and I got 150,000 keywords
back with matching terms. We of course
have great tools and filters for being
able to work on that, but knowing my
industry, my competitors are trying to
(01:23:46):
rank for this, is this something that I
should be going for as well? That's
probably one of the biggest use cases I'm
recommending when I'm talking to,
especially e-commerce companies.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you know,
sites that have big catalogs especially,
like working to optimize those catalogs,
like working to think about which
(01:24:06):
keywords are they ranking for, like
looking at that competitive research is
something that we do pretty regularly.
A lot of people aren't creating unique
content for their product pages. They're
not creating unique content for their
category pages, for
their product listing pages.
And so, as we're kind of going through
our steps to optimize a site, you know,
(01:24:29):
it's have we eliminated, you know, are we
comfortable with the score that comes
back? Have we fixed all the kind of
technical kind of issues that are
preventing the spider
from kind of completing,
completing to be able to scan the site?
Have we created unique content for
category pages? Does there enough content
(01:24:50):
on the category pages? Which product
pages, you know, should have, you know,
high amounts of content? How are you
linking your blog pages,
connecting your blog pages to your
product pages, right? It's another
problem that retailers and brands have is
that they have an active blog, but they
haven't figured out how to merchandise
(01:25:11):
within the blog to drive traffic and
create any sales from that, right?
They're gonna create this content, but
it's not really connected to anything or
like moving any part
of their sales funnel.
You know, there's lots of ways like
fundamentally out of the gate to be able
to help make a difference. And we've seen
significant results just by going in and
(01:25:32):
fixing those, some of those items pretty
quickly and getting them moving.
I'm really glad to hear you talking about
blogs when we're talking about online
stores. It's something that,
like I said, I've had so many
conversations over the years. A lot of
e-commerce websites usually have a blog,
but it's not been something that they
(01:25:53):
found value in because they're trying to
drive traffic directly to their products.
And I always see it as probably one of
the biggest opportunities out there for
e-commerce stores because if you look at
the search results, you'll oftentimes
find that there's certain keywords that,
you know, there's certain keywords that
(01:26:14):
you'll find category pages and product
pages in the top 10 results of Google.
You'll find other matching terms that are
not completely transactional in nature
that are extremely related. It would be a
great pass-through of, of course I want
to go ahead and do research on the best
bird feeders for hummingbirds because
(01:26:35):
that's probably going to be a blog
article that's out there ranking for it.
And so it's really great to hear you say
that. I rarely hear anybody who talks
about, you know, online stores and blogs
together. So that's usually one of my
biggest recommendations to companies is
get your blog going and improve it
because there's so many benefits to it.
(01:26:56):
Yeah, yeah. And so it's, it's intriguing,
you know, so some of the major platforms
like just Shopify and big commerce,
right, that we work with shop where, you
know, like sometimes it's a commerce
engine first, right, and a blog engine
69th, right? And so, you know, how do
you, like we've, I know that we've made
some enhancements to how we implement
(01:27:16):
blogs with certain widgets to be able to
monetize products right out of the
catalog with calls to action right in
their blog posts. It makes it very easy
to kind of create that, that kind of hook
and get it there. And so it's, you should
be making, driving revenue from those
blog posts, right? Now some of your blogs
might be very, very, very top of the
(01:27:38):
funnel to build awareness about your
organization, about your company, about
your brand, about your products. So they
may be kind of like low intent, like high
volume keywords, but if you can figure
out how to get those, those SEO clicks
into your, into your Clavio welcome
series, right, to be able to collect that
email address or with your retargeting
and remarketing programs, right? You can
(01:28:00):
figure out how to take advantage of that
and maybe get them back to your site a
second time or a third time and
eventually you hook them into a purchase,
but you've got to have, you know, we're
kind of thinking about like, high volume,
low intent words, but what are the low
volume, high intent words that also drive
conversions? We had a brand that we
(01:28:21):
worked with that had a random, they
ranked for a very random keyword kind of
adjacent to their industry, but they
could have assembled a handful of their
own products to kind of meet this term
that people were looking for. And they
got, you know, I think they were getting
600,000 visits a month to this like one
(01:28:43):
blog post. It was absolutely
astronomical. And they had never like
worked to monetize that. I would have,
you know, if I would be ranking for, it
was a how to make something and it's like
their products could be used to make this
thing. I would have like put together a
package with like, here's the kit to make
this thing. And then they probably would
have sold 50 or 100 grand, you know, of
(01:29:04):
those a year, at least enough to pay for
their content marketing effort, or part
of their content marketing efforts or
having a videographer, right? Like drive,
you know, being able to drive revenue
from that. And that's something that
people just don't pay attention to.
Right.
Again, for the blogs, there's so much
benefit that you can get from it. Years
(01:29:25):
ago, I was doing research for a client.
So I'm not talking about the client. I'm
talking about when I was doing the
research, I was looking at the
competition that was out there and I ran
into a website. They were an e-commerce
website. They sold sandblasting. Somebody
will probably end up finding it. But
again, not related to me, but one of the
genius things that I found was, is that
(01:29:47):
they had realized that the top of the
funnel, that research of people who do
sandblasting are usually people who are
looking to start their own small business
doing sandblasting. So what did they do?
They didn't just do a blog. They actually
did a whole another
subset of their website.
Not just how to start a business, but
(01:30:09):
they actually provided starter packages
on how to start a sandblasting and told
you all of the things that you needed to
do. And of course you can buy our product
that's right over here. They got so much
content, so many backlinks to both sides
of the website. It was just pure genius.
I love when I see strategy like that. So
sometimes you're doing research like that
(01:30:32):
and it can expand even beyond that.
Well, they're just not, most brands in
general, most brands or manufacturers in
general are not creating a community
around their commerce. And that's a pure
example there of they took, people had a
desire to get into this business. They
just didn't know how to do it. You kind
(01:30:54):
of broke it down, you gave it to them.
You kind of gave them some steps to that.
And it's like, all right, well, here's
what you need to start. And again, like I
would, if it was me, I'd be like, here's
what you need to get
started. Here's what you need to,
what you need to get your business going,
right? The kinds of documents, templates
you may need or the types of things. Like
(01:31:16):
you could very, very easily create a very
straightforward campaign
that with content and video,
that would really just do very, very
well. And so, and I purchased from sites
that I've learned from. I'll actually, I
have a certain buyer persona, but I will
(01:31:37):
spend more, like to buy something, I will
spend reasonably more to buy something
from a site that does better educating me
and providing me the information that I
need to go forward, then going and get it
from the cheapest, lowest vendor. Because
I wanna support the people that are gonna
educate me, help me grow, help me learn.
(01:32:01):
That's both personally and professionally
that I think about that. If you've put
the time in to creating videos on
YouTube, I'll use your affiliate links
all day to buy this stuff and rock and
roll with it, right? And
happily, happily do that.
And I have to pat our team on the back
here at Ahrefs. Years ago, they made a
(01:32:23):
concerted effort for YouTube and for our
blog to be number one in the industry for
both of those. And I can't tell you the
value that that has carried forward over
the years of confidence, of building that
community and just loyalty of customers
who not only love our product, but love
(01:32:43):
that we're very active with SEOs and with
digital marketers worldwide. So yeah,
there's a ton of value and it's kind of
sad sometimes only because you take
e-commerce as an example, oh, who would
be our community? Would they be really
interested? I can't believe how many
(01:33:05):
niches I found out there where people are
gung ho and excited about products that
you just wouldn't think because we're not
limited to localization anymore. We put
something out there. We don't have to
worry about, maybe they'll sign up for
the newsletter. There's so many different
avenues to be able to reach out to your
community. Just the United States alone,
(01:33:27):
people who are interested that will
eventually find you if you're putting out
that proper content there.
So you just got back from Singapore
a couple of weeks ago or so for your big
user event. Like were there any big
topics of note that people wanted to talk
about while they were there?
(01:33:50):
Probably one of the bigger things is all
of the changes with Google that's
occurred, that was top of mind for
everybody. One of us, I think it was
Cyrus Shepard did a great talk on that
helpful content update that had occurred
and basically the joke about Reddit,
(01:34:13):
basically taking over all of the search
results that are out there and what's
going to be the future involved with
that. And it really comes down to, I
believe that things are going, we're
already starting to see some of the
algorithm changes where Reddit isn't
conquering every single search results
(01:34:33):
anymore. But between AI and Google's
algorithm update, those were probably two
of some of the hottest
topics that were out there.
That's cool, that's cool, yeah.
People, it's good to see some of the
shift in evolution of the algorithm.
Anytime those things happen, it's both
positive and negative generally, but it's
(01:34:57):
being able to maneuver through those
changes overall. What's coming next for
Ahrefs as a product? Is there anything
that you mind sharing or that I'm not
asking you to go behind the curtain, but
is there anything that's been recently
launched or that's public and coming soon
that you can share with our audience?
(01:35:18):
Yeah, at the Evolve conference, we
actually made the announcement about our
always on audit and what that involves.
We're finding that with the market out
there, more customers are looking for not
just to know about issues on their
website, but actual monitoring that can
(01:35:41):
occur. And what happens with this new
always on site audit that will be coming
out very soon, is it's going to allow you
to be able to be notified of any changes
that are occurring on the website.
We're actually utilizing index now, and
(01:36:01):
if you're not familiar with them, that
they're a service that's out there that
will go ahead and update search engines
whenever something changes on your site,
whether you're adding a new page or
you're making changes to pages. And it's
being submitted directly to the search
engines. Well, we here at Ahrefs, we
(01:36:21):
built a search engine a few years back
called yep.com, but we're actually
registered with them. So as changes are
being submitted, we're actually getting
the feedback data from that. And we're
gonna be able to almost in real time be
able to update, especially for e-commerce
websites. The larger the website, the
(01:36:42):
more that you can benefit from it.
Because if there's something that's going
on with your website, you wanna know
sooner rather than later, rather than a
month later looking in Google search
console and seeing those drops that are
occurring because somebody no indexed 100
of your pages and so forth.
Well, that's happened by the way. We've
seen it happen, but we've seen those
(01:37:03):
types of things happen. And people come
to us like crying of like, hey, what
happened to our, what's going on with our
site? Not current customers of ours, of
course, but like people coming to us and
saying, can you help us with this?
Right.
And so what happens is we're able to go
ahead and give that feedback loop is what
it comes down to. It's gonna be something
(01:37:24):
that's very fast. And along with that,
we're actually even starting to work with
being able to make update changes to your
website through our site audit. And what
this will allow for is, for example, if
you have CloudFlare and
you're using CloudFlare workers,
(01:37:45):
our platform doesn't have to touch your
website, it would be able to go in and
make changes via those workers in, I
think they're called edge servers, and
basically present to Google and to the
public those changes without ever having
to touch your website. A lot of, I have
(01:38:05):
more technical people on my team who
could explain it better than I can, but
it's getting ready to come out and it's
pretty exciting. That's
cool, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And aren't you doing some
web analytics stuff as well?
We just launched that as well for people
who don't, you can still have Google
Analytics on your website, but we've
launched a web analytics where basically
(01:38:27):
you'll be able to see right within our
platform how the website's performing,
page source, pages, how active. We're
going to be building that out over time,
but it's even available on our free
version right now so that people can log
in, set up, and they've got basically an
analytics monitoring that's going to be
(01:38:48):
going on. There's a lot of great things
that are going to come out associated
with that, but right now it's very basic,
very simple, but yeah, we're trying to be
that all-in-one digital marketing
solution, marketing intelligence.
Nice, very nice, very nice. Yeah, I mean,
I think that there's, nobody likes GA4,
like nobody likes GA4, right? I'm glad
(01:39:09):
you said that and not me. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, I can say it. I can say it,
like fuck GA4 basically is like what I
want to say. You can bleep that out
Spencer. One of the things is that,
and there was an entire session around
this at PubCon, and there's some
conspiracy theories on what's happening
and why they got rid of GA, right? First
(01:39:30):
off, it was to kind of destroy all of,
literally 90-some percent of the
internet, of websites on the internet use
GA, right? So it was a
tremendous amount of data.
And so there's some rabbit holes out
there about why they got rid of it and
how they're leveraging, Google's
leveraging Chrome to basically spider
websites for their index. It's very, very
fascinating to get into. It's much deeper
(01:39:52):
than I'd want to get into on today on the
podcast. But there's a very fascinating
video from this presentation online
that's like, wow, this is like some
interesting stuff. So it's very cool to
see all these new types of product
improvements. I know that I'm excited for
the always-on audits.
I see the buttons kind of coming,
(01:40:13):
starting to be faded out within the app.
So excited for all that to come.
I guess one question that I like to ask
every guest is that if you could give one
tip to a brand or manufacturer to grow,
what would you recommend to them?
(01:40:34):
Okay, are we talking about
search engine optimization?
From SEO, right? One thing to look at
that in terms of, if you have 100 sales
conversations, is there a common tip that
you would give folks, that you commonly
give folks as you're going through your
enterprise conversations?
Yeah, boy, again, so many
(01:40:56):
to choose from. However,
success, being able to go ahead and find
successes out there. A lot of people
spend a lot of time researching their own
website. I really wish people would spend
more time doing competitive analysis.
Knowing so much about your competitors
out there, what's working for them, how
(01:41:19):
are they driving traffic? Can we go ahead
and, again, reverse engineer their
strategy? I really wish people would
spend more time doing that type of
analysis, because again, that
information's available out there. It's
not like 15 years ago when it was really
hard to understand. You definitely have
data. You've got all sorts of ways to
(01:41:40):
analyze those competitors.
And being able to figure out where their
traffic is coming from, so that's my
recommendation. I would pick the top
three competitors and know their websites
as well as I know my own, and you
wouldn't believe the opportunities that
you'll uncover by doing so.
Awesome, awesome. That is a great tip and
(01:42:01):
something that I wholeheartedly agree
with. And we're, a couple things here. If
you're a brand or manufacturer and you
don't wanna know how the sausage is made,
you can reach out to us and we'll do a
free SEO audit for you. We'll take a look
at things, we'll look at your website,
we'll provide recommendations. And even
if you give us three or four competitors,
we can tell you how they're doing and
(01:42:22):
what they're doing that's different from
your overall strategy. And so we'd love
to talk to you and just fill out the form
on the page for this
blog, or this podcast.
So really, really appreciate it, Rob.
Really appreciate you spending the time
with us today to talk about SEO.
(01:42:43):
Again, to all of our listeners, just
remember that we're a video first podcast
so go on over to our YouTube page at At
Groove Commerce. Give us a like, give us
a comment, give us a subscribe please.
And if you think you'd be a great guest
on eCommerce Masters, don't hesitate to
reach out to us. Rob, if people wanna
(01:43:04):
reach you online, where
can they find you, LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a fantastic place to find me.
That's where I post the most. I don't
know why everybody finds their social
media spot, but that seems to be mine.
Nice, not Friendster.
I don't even know what that is.
(01:43:25):
(Both Laughing)
Yes.
Is that old or new?
It's old, it is old, it is old. You never
know these days, but it's old, it's old.
Yeah, it's very old. Okay, I gotcha.
Again, 12 years ago, I got into digital
marketing. I have no
idea how old that is.
It's well before that. I'm showing my
age. Okay. I'm showing my age, you know,
I'm showing my age. Well, Rob, thank you
(01:43:46):
very much for taking the time today. And
we wish you a great 2025.
Same here and thanks so much
for having me today, thanks.
(Upbeat Music)
(Upbeat Music) What's up everybody and welcome to the
E-commerce Masters Podcast. I'm your
host, Ethan Giffen and CEO of Groove
Commerce. And I'm excited here today to
be talking about all things SEO with Rob
Delorey who's the Enterprise SEO Advisor
at Ahrefs. And what I first wanna say is
(01:00:22):
that this podcast is a video first
podcast. So if you'll go check out our
YouTube channel at atgroovecommerce and
give us a like, give us a share or leave
us a comment. We love hearing from you.
Rob, welcome to the show today.
Ethan, thanks for inviting me on. I
appreciate it. I'm really
looking forward to this.
Oh yeah, are you sure
(01:00:43):
you're looking forward to it?
Oh yeah, yeah. I'll talk about SEO
anytime somebody gives me a chance.
(Laughing)
Well, I'm excited to have you here on the
show today. We're a big fan of Ahrefs. We
love the tool, we love working with it.
And quite frankly, I love seeing your
content on LinkedIn and your travels. I
know you were just recently in Singapore
(01:01:05):
for the big Ahrefs event, which looked
awesome. I really wanna go to that
airport, by the way.
Yeah, I mean, it was my first trip to
Singapore. That's where our headquarters
are. That's where we had the conference,
but it was great being there. I can't
wait to go back next time.
That's awesome, that's awesome. So tell
me a little bit about how you got into
(01:01:26):
the SEO business. Usually people are real
scoundrels and pirates
or they're kinda, oh, you?
(Laughing)
I mean, listen, I've been going to SEO
conferences for 25 years, since 1999 at
this point. And there's a cast of
characters that show up there. So I would
(01:01:47):
probably put you in a
cast of characters as well.
All done. As long as I get the pirate
hat, then I'm good to go.
(Laughing) So how did you get into the business?
Yeah, for me, I actually, years ago, I
was in the printing industry and doing
direct mail and things of that sort. And
that's when digital really started to
(01:02:09):
take off. I started getting into selling
web design. And I should really make sure
I clarify on that. I'm more on the sales
side, but I've worked for many agencies
for years. I literally have talked with
thousands of businesses over the years
about their strategies, what they're
doing, what the recommendations I would
(01:02:29):
make to them. But ultimately SEO just
became something that I was so intrigued
by. I really started spending a lot of my
own extra time learning more about it.
And here I am, I think about 12 plus
years later, having worked with web
design and a number of other paper click
(01:02:51):
and so forth. But that's how I got into
SEO. It still intrigues me till this day.
That's cool, that's cool. I mean, listen,
don't sell yourself short on that. Like
you're out here looking at sites, showing
the product, talking about SEO. You're a
part of all the things. And so I think
there's just a lot of different cans and
resources that go into something like
(01:03:13):
this. And so I think you're carrying the
flag for the industry, providing
education, providing knowledge, all of
that are kind of valid
steps there of what people need.
So tell our audience just a little bit
about what Ahrefs is and who you kind of
serve as your ideal customer.
(01:03:34):
Yeah, sure.
Ultimately, we're a marketing
intelligence platform or SEO for digital
marketing in general. We have more data
on how websites are performing keyword
research. So ultimately, if you're part
of a large SEO team or even just a
(01:03:55):
straightforward digital marketing team,
or you're a small business owner who's
trying to get insights into competitive
analysis, understanding what the
opportunities are out there for them
before they put in all of the work, our
platform's there to be able to provide
that resource, that research and
information for people to make decisions
(01:04:17):
based on data rather than,
hey, let's see what happens.
So ultimately, anything you need for
having an all-in-one solution for SEO to
be able to do research, run technical
audits and so forth, that's
where our platform comes in.
Awesome, awesome. And it's for both folks
like Groove that are agencies that have
(01:04:39):
SEO practices, but it's also for
individual companies and users that may
want to leverage the
platform as well, correct?
That's correct. And I always look at it
from the standpoint of how far down the
rabbit hole do you want to go? If you're
a small business owner and you're just
looking for some basic information, but
(01:05:00):
just want to have a really strong
understanding of what's going on out
there in search, in digital marketing,
that's where our platform comes in. But
for technical teams, you won't find a
product that has more technical
opportunities within it than ours.
Yeah, I think we really love the product
from the technical standpoint. Well, we
(01:05:21):
love all parts of the app, but we really
leverage it from a technical standpoint,
especially when talking to new folks that
are interested in optimizing their sites,
like looking for ongoing optimization.
We're kind of trying to get people with
that kind of holy grail, what is like a
91 or 92 grade within the system what
(01:05:41):
they consider excellent, right? And so
we're trying to get all of our folks into
that kind of range because when they do,
they tend to see results much faster when
things are not holding Google back or the
other search engines back from working.
Yep, I mean, again, even starting out
from step one of a new website, or if
(01:06:06):
you've had a website for years, sometimes
you'd really be amazed at some of the
small changes you can make that will lead
to big improvements in results. So yeah,
but thank you for saying that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, for listeners
that aren't as aware of the product,
you're able to load your website into
Ahrefs. You are then able to perform an
(01:06:28):
SEO audit and then recurring audits
around that. You can grant it access to
your webmaster tools, you
can do Google Analytics.
There's a lot in there of how the sausage
is made, but it's kind of cleaning up
those technical errors and issues that
are generally the first step out of the
gate to make sure there
isn't anything that's creating,
causing anything that would prevent
(01:06:50):
search from search engines from kind of
scanning your site and kind of figuring
out what the theme and what type of
content that you have there.
How do you answer, do you ever have
people ask you in your kind of, in your
journeys that SEO isn't
as important these days?
Oh, SEO is, I don't get that question as
(01:07:12):
often as I used to, but to me, the answer
is no. I mean, SEO is still probably the
biggest driver of
traffic to people's websites.
It's something that you've got how many
different search engines, how many new
search engines that
have come out recently.
It's absolutely still relevant. It's
(01:07:33):
still a huge percentage of the actual
marketing channel that's
out there and available.
So for me, I used to have those
conversations more often when SEO was
fairly new. I usually don't get that
question, but I'm excited you asked it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you think
AI is affecting what you're doing with
(01:07:57):
the app and the evolution?
So we're gonna take the whole
conversation and we can just talk about
that for today. We
absolutely, absolutely.
AI transformative, it really is, again,
I've been doing this for a dozen or so
years, heavily into search engine
optimization. And I haven't seen anything
(01:08:17):
that's going to really, I think disrupt
search over the next few years.
When you're talking about some of these
companies that have come out, chat, of
course, everybody knows chat, GPT, but
even perplexity and a number of these
others out there, I really see that
they're going to start gaining a lot more
(01:08:37):
share because Google was always the big
one for the 20 years or so. And they're
gonna continue to be for a long time, but
you're definitely going to see a lot of
other companies that will start pulling
some of those percentages away, I
believe, but even Google itself, you're
getting into AI with their AI overview,
(01:08:59):
that zero click, that top of the search
results that they're providing,
whether intentional or not, they're
definitely providing answers without
people having to click as often. But
again, we're talking about small
percentages right now that possibly will
grow or we'll see if Google changes the
(01:09:22):
direction. They've surprised me a number
of times over the years.
Yeah, I think it's gonna be interesting
to see how that kind of evolves and
there's a lot of people within the
industry have different feelings about
Google kind of stealing people's content
and other things and that's a
conversation for a whole
other day to kind of talk about.
One of the things that we actually had
happen to us just last week was a
(01:09:44):
prospect that kind of loaded his
requirements for an e-commerce site
migration into chat GPT and asked for a
list of agencies back that he should talk
to and we were on that list. So I think,
yeah, I love it, I love it, but I think
again, some of that is coming through
content being spied and ingested and I
(01:10:06):
think making sure that your site can be
spied and ingested and kind of learned
from is gonna really be a piece, an
effect of that. You wanna be seen in that
and I guess what is the other term, it's
EATS, the all of those types of panels of
information that's gleaned from data and
(01:10:26):
the hard coding of information within
your site are all very, very important
with that and I think it's really gonna
change the industry of how it works and
it's gonna be very different for many
folks because back in the day, I
remember, prior to starting Groove, I was
director of e-commerce for a large global
(01:10:47):
staffing firm and I created the website,
their website had 800 visits a month from
Google and I created this dynamic system
of all their job postings that was
optimized for state and cities and by job
titles and industries and it went from a
50 page website to thousands of job
(01:11:10):
postings and individual categories and
all of that went to almost a million
visits a month from Google and I think
that game is kinda changing, that old
school kinda game is changing but at the
same time, it's like how are you gonna
use, how are you gonna leverage the
search engines to get
people to see who you are?
Right and you know, too, something that
(01:11:31):
you said just a few moments ago of the
prospect that reached out to you because
I think you said they used chat GPT and
ended up finding you from there. The only
reason that chat GPT found you is because
you had a presence online. Now, whether
you were ranking for the term that they
were searching for, no matter what, chat
(01:11:53):
GPT found you because of that. So even
moving forward, a lot of people are
starting to say, you know, oh, well, SEO,
is it still as relevant as it was? You
need to have that online presence even
for those types of AI tools to be able to
find you in the first place and then put
you in their database. I'm not saying
(01:12:15):
that they're stealing Google's search
results per se, I'm just saying that you
still have to do very similar work. Now,
exactly what algorithms
they're using, we don't know yet.
We don't know yet.
We don't know yet, I mean, it's all very
new. I know everybody's been talking
about it for a few years but really
people haven't been using it as an
(01:12:37):
alternative to search the way that they
are now. They're finding pretty good
results. And like you're saying, you're
showing up in that result. It's because
probably the work that you've done for
SEO, I say probably because again, I
can't make any definitive statements
because it's all too new.
It's all too new, it's all too new. Yeah,
(01:12:58):
yeah, yeah. So what are you seeing, you
know, when you're talking to folks that
are looking at the product, like what
kind of features are they looking for,
right? Like how are they looking to use
Ahrefs as, you know,
within their campaigns?
Sure, well, you had mentioned being able
to do technical audits. That's absolutely
(01:13:20):
important for search engines. They, you
know, being able to go ahead and make
sure that their crawlers can crawl
through your website, that you've got
lots of things like structured data in
place and you're sending the right
signals. But with our actual strategy, if
you will, being able to determine, you
(01:13:42):
know, what type of backlinks are possible
out there for us. How are our competitors
doing? That's probably one of the largest
things, the largest opportunities I keep
hearing about lately is people wanting to
know what's going on with my competitors.
Are they succeeding in certain areas? Can
(01:14:02):
I go ahead and get that information? A
lot of people don't even realize there's
so much information. You can really
reverse engineer success that's out there
using our platform and doing so.
Yeah, I think that that's very, very
true, right? I think that if you're able
to look at competitor sites through the
tools, you're able to determine what kind
(01:14:23):
of links do they have, you know, what
kind of strategies are they using to
build links, right, how many do they
have? Like what, do they have a bunch of
trash links? Then you kind of know what
strategy they're using for that. Do they
have like Forbes, you know, which is kind
of a hot thing that people are, you know,
always talking about Forbes. You know,
what is it that is driving that kind of
footprint and then being able to
(01:14:44):
duplicate that in many ways? And so, you
know, I think there's still, you know,
there's some highly, highly, highly
competitive keywords, mortgages, Viagra,
you know, all of those kind of things are
gonna always be like highly competitive,
but there's many
industries have a huge opportunity
to drive more, you know, with that. And
(01:15:06):
so we just, I see, you know, people that
are publishing a lot more content these
days or tend to be the ones that are
winning. I was at a conference in the
fall called PubCon, a big SEO kind of
internet marketing conference
in Las Vegas and just a lot of talk
around AI generated content versus human
generated content, how it ranks, how it
(01:15:28):
performs, you know, people that are
publishing content at scale versus just
publishing, you know, two,
three, four blog posts a month.
You know, we're really thinking that
people need to step up a lot of their
publishing to a certain level. Like you
don't have to be publishing a hundred
pieces of content a month, but I do think
Google, you know, if you're publishing
(01:15:50):
kind of somewhere between 15 and 30
things a month, Google, like on a daily
basis or every other day basis, Google
starts to think that these folks are
interesting and very active with their
websites and that does play into how you
get ranked and the types
of traffic that you get.
Yeah, I mean, as far as being able to go
(01:16:14):
ahead and create content at scale, I
think it's like so many other tools and
ideas that have come along over the years
of, hey, we're gonna go ahead and use
this because it's gonna make things
easier and they start producing lots of
content. And I've seen the numbers where
it has gone up, but eventually the
algorithms start picking up on it. The
(01:16:37):
reason being is because if you're talking
about some of these big search engines,
they of course have technology where they
can go ahead and identify AI generated
content. And Google said they don't have
a problem with it as long as it's useful
out there. But like you're saying, some
of these companies are just building out
so much content and getting it out there.
(01:17:00):
And they'll probably get short term
because again, that's what was happening.
Everybody was using it, everybody was
seeing results, everybody started to run
in that direction of, hey, let's put all
of this on our website. And I've seen the
numbers where they've gotten that peak
and it started going down. So what you're
gonna find is that the AI tools are
(01:17:20):
great. I'm gonna say AI a lot during this
conversation, but they're great, but I
wouldn't use them just for creating
content. They should be there to help
assist you, not do it for you. I agree.
That's my opinion,
one man's opinion of it.
I agree, I agree, I definitely agree with
that. I think it streams on, it can
streamline a lot of the process. And I do
think there's an over, people can over
(01:17:42):
post. I saw a case study of somebody that
posted like 100,000 blogs in a year for a
modern size company. And I was like, what
kind of mess is that? And
so you wanna be able to cover
all of your keyword themes, your pillars.
And so what are the, within your pillars,
(01:18:02):
what are the iterations of each keyword
and how do you cover all of that? But I
don't think that there's a magic number,
but I think that having a more active
website, a reasonably, let me rephrase
that, a reasonably active website, puts
you in a better light, like Google keeps
coming back to you if you're not just
(01:18:23):
doing one blog post a month where you're
doing something a couple a week, kind of
situation performance.
I have no problem, by the way, with
putting out a lot of content. But I'd
rather see content that was written by a
person with all of its grammatical
(01:18:43):
inaccuracies, which again, I would use an
AI to help me, hey, help me refine this
sentence, let me go ahead and use it for
outlines. But I'd rather see that, and I
think we'll see proof positive from that,
from the search engines over time that
actual written content will outperform
(01:19:03):
just straightforward AI generated. And
that's my prediction for this upcoming
year, we're gonna definitely have a lot
of data to be able to sort through on
that. A lot of it, a lot
of it, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, for those people that know me,
they know I've been a nightclub DJ or a
DJ and a party DJ in general for the last
30 some years. And it's
funny, when I go out to events,
(01:19:26):
if I hear somebody play a DJ set in a big
club, and there's no,
it's completely perfect,
I'll know that that's a prerecorded set
usually, right? I wanna hear the
occasional slip up or maybe just that
kind of, like part of a second off,
right? And it doesn't have to be like a
(01:19:47):
full train wreck of a mix, but it's like,
I wanna know that the person is actually
kind of mixing that, and it's not a
prerecorded kind of set that they're
working from, that they actually are a
human kind of, like mixing the music. And
so the same thing with content, right?
Like fully automated is not the way to
go, but I think that there's a level of
that, it's been very helpful from helping
(01:20:08):
to create content plans and briefs and
all of those things. How are you
leveraging AI within Ahrefs? Like what
are some of the things that you're using
AI for in terms of
making the product better?
We've been very selective on where we've
added in any AI assisted tools, and
(01:20:32):
probably some of the newer things that
have come out is being able to go ahead
and determine intent of keywords. If
you're gonna go ahead and go after a
keyword phrase and you put it into our
platform, you're going to be able to run
an analysis on the pages that are
(01:20:52):
actually succeeding. For that, AI will go
ahead and read through, it used to be, I
tell people, look at the top three pages
on Google, read each article and try to
have an understanding of what the
important topics were on that and what
the intent of those pages are. We
actually have a tool within our SERP
(01:21:13):
overview that will go ahead and do that
analysis for you, saving, that's where AI
should come in, to be able to save me
time in doing what I need to do. And
it'll allow you to be able to look
through and see the commonality of the
major topics. It'll give you more keyword
information, but it really comes down to
the topic so that you can write better
(01:21:35):
optimized SEO friendly content. Hmm.
Yeah, so that's the majority of where our
AI tools are coming in. We have it in a
few places with a content writing
assistant. Again, it's not writing it for
you, it's gonna go ahead and measure and
give you feedback on are you optimizing
it well for this particular term or set
(01:21:57):
of terms? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What else, what are you seeing, how are
you seeing people leverage the tool,
right? Like, are there any specific areas
that as you're having conversations or
you're giving demos that you think are
most worthwhile or like what's kind of a
hidden gem within Ahrefs that people like
(01:22:18):
aren't paying full attention to?
Man, boy, I'm trying to go through the
list in my mind on this one, but
oftentimes you'll find the competitor
analysis. Being able to
put in your competitors
and be able to see what keywords they're
ranking for as a group. So for example,
(01:22:41):
if I was, had an e-commerce website, I
would load in my top 10 competitors and
see what keywords they're ranking for and
that they have commonality in because
content strategy is one of those
situations where you're putting out
content, you're creating pages, you're
creating, you know, loading products and
so forth. But if you're able to see that
(01:23:03):
five of my competitors are trying to rank
for these 15 keywords and I'm not even
showing up for that, that's one of the
big signals to you. You may wanna take a
closer look at that. Maybe you don't
provide that product or for whatever
reason, it's not been on your radar, but
at least it brings it to your attention
(01:23:25):
and it gives you actionable data to be
able to go ahead and continue doing your
research. It isn't just a matter of I put
in a keyword and I got 150,000 keywords
back with matching terms. We of course
have great tools and filters for being
able to work on that, but knowing my
industry, my competitors are trying to
(01:23:46):
rank for this, is this something that I
should be going for as well? That's
probably one of the biggest use cases I'm
recommending when I'm talking to,
especially e-commerce companies.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, you know,
sites that have big catalogs especially,
like working to optimize those catalogs,
like working to think about which
(01:24:06):
keywords are they ranking for, like
looking at that competitive research is
something that we do pretty regularly.
A lot of people aren't creating unique
content for their product pages. They're
not creating unique content for their
category pages, for
their product listing pages.
And so, as we're kind of going through
our steps to optimize a site, you know,
(01:24:29):
it's have we eliminated, you know, are we
comfortable with the score that comes
back? Have we fixed all the kind of
technical kind of issues that are
preventing the spider
from kind of completing,
completing to be able to scan the site?
Have we created unique content for
category pages? Does there enough content
(01:24:50):
on the category pages? Which product
pages, you know, should have, you know,
high amounts of content? How are you
linking your blog pages,
connecting your blog pages to your
product pages, right? It's another
problem that retailers and brands have is
that they have an active blog, but they
haven't figured out how to merchandise
(01:25:11):
within the blog to drive traffic and
create any sales from that, right?
They're gonna create this content, but
it's not really connected to anything or
like moving any part
of their sales funnel.
You know, there's lots of ways like
fundamentally out of the gate to be able
to help make a difference. And we've seen
significant results just by going in and
(01:25:32):
fixing those, some of those items pretty
quickly and getting them moving.
I'm really glad to hear you talking about
blogs when we're talking about online
stores. It's something that,
like I said, I've had so many
conversations over the years. A lot of
e-commerce websites usually have a blog,
but it's not been something that they
(01:25:53):
found value in because they're trying to
drive traffic directly to their products.
And I always see it as probably one of
the biggest opportunities out there for
e-commerce stores because if you look at
the search results, you'll oftentimes
find that there's certain keywords that,
you know, there's certain keywords that
(01:26:14):
you'll find category pages and product
pages in the top 10 results of Google.
You'll find other matching terms that are
not completely transactional in nature
that are extremely related. It would be a
great pass-through of, of course I want
to go ahead and do research on the best
bird feeders for hummingbirds because
(01:26:35):
that's probably going to be a blog
article that's out there ranking for it.
And so it's really great to hear you say
that. I rarely hear anybody who talks
about, you know, online stores and blogs
together. So that's usually one of my
biggest recommendations to companies is
get your blog going and improve it
because there's so many benefits to it.
(01:26:56):
Yeah, yeah. And so it's, it's intriguing,
you know, so some of the major platforms
like just Shopify and big commerce,
right, that we work with shop where, you
know, like sometimes it's a commerce
engine first, right, and a blog engine
69th, right? And so, you know, how do
you, like we've, I know that we've made
some enhancements to how we implement
(01:27:16):
blogs with certain widgets to be able to
monetize products right out of the
catalog with calls to action right in
their blog posts. It makes it very easy
to kind of create that, that kind of hook
and get it there. And so it's, you should
be making, driving revenue from those
blog posts, right? Now some of your blogs
might be very, very, very top of the
(01:27:38):
funnel to build awareness about your
organization, about your company, about
your brand, about your products. So they
may be kind of like low intent, like high
volume keywords, but if you can figure
out how to get those, those SEO clicks
into your, into your Clavio welcome
series, right, to be able to collect that
email address or with your retargeting
and remarketing programs, right? You can
(01:28:00):
figure out how to take advantage of that
and maybe get them back to your site a
second time or a third time and
eventually you hook them into a purchase,
but you've got to have, you know, we're
kind of thinking about like, high volume,
low intent words, but what are the low
volume, high intent words that also drive
conversions? We had a brand that we
(01:28:21):
worked with that had a random, they
ranked for a very random keyword kind of
adjacent to their industry, but they
could have assembled a handful of their
own products to kind of meet this term
that people were looking for. And they
got, you know, I think they were getting
600,000 visits a month to this like one
(01:28:43):
blog post. It was absolutely
astronomical. And they had never like
worked to monetize that. I would have,
you know, if I would be ranking for, it
was a how to make something and it's like
their products could be used to make this
thing. I would have like put together a
package with like, here's the kit to make
this thing. And then they probably would
have sold 50 or 100 grand, you know, of
(01:29:04):
those a year, at least enough to pay for
their content marketing effort, or part
of their content marketing efforts or
having a videographer, right? Like drive,
you know, being able to drive revenue
from that. And that's something that
people just don't pay attention to.
Right.
Again, for the blogs, there's so much
benefit that you can get from it. Years
(01:29:25):
ago, I was doing research for a client.
So I'm not talking about the client. I'm
talking about when I was doing the
research, I was looking at the
competition that was out there and I ran
into a website. They were an e-commerce
website. They sold sandblasting. Somebody
will probably end up finding it. But
again, not related to me, but one of the
genius things that I found was, is that
(01:29:47):
they had realized that the top of the
funnel, that research of people who do
sandblasting are usually people who are
looking to start their own small business
doing sandblasting. So what did they do?
They didn't just do a blog. They actually
did a whole another
subset of their website.
Not just how to start a business, but
(01:30:09):
they actually provided starter packages
on how to start a sandblasting and told
you all of the things that you needed to
do. And of course you can buy our product
that's right over here. They got so much
content, so many backlinks to both sides
of the website. It was just pure genius.
I love when I see strategy like that. So
sometimes you're doing research like that
(01:30:32):
and it can expand even beyond that.
Well, they're just not, most brands in
general, most brands or manufacturers in
general are not creating a community
around their commerce. And that's a pure
example there of they took, people had a
desire to get into this business. They
just didn't know how to do it. You kind
(01:30:54):
of broke it down, you gave it to them.
You kind of gave them some steps to that.
And it's like, all right, well, here's
what you need to start. And again, like I
would, if it was me, I'd be like, here's
what you need to get
started. Here's what you need to,
what you need to get your business going,
right? The kinds of documents, templates
you may need or the types of things. Like
(01:31:16):
you could very, very easily create a very
straightforward campaign
that with content and video,
that would really just do very, very
well. And so, and I purchased from sites
that I've learned from. I'll actually, I
have a certain buyer persona, but I will
(01:31:37):
spend more, like to buy something, I will
spend reasonably more to buy something
from a site that does better educating me
and providing me the information that I
need to go forward, then going and get it
from the cheapest, lowest vendor. Because
I wanna support the people that are gonna
educate me, help me grow, help me learn.
(01:32:01):
That's both personally and professionally
that I think about that. If you've put
the time in to creating videos on
YouTube, I'll use your affiliate links
all day to buy this stuff and rock and
roll with it, right? And
happily, happily do that.
And I have to pat our team on the back
here at Ahrefs. Years ago, they made a
(01:32:23):
concerted effort for YouTube and for our
blog to be number one in the industry for
both of those. And I can't tell you the
value that that has carried forward over
the years of confidence, of building that
community and just loyalty of customers
who not only love our product, but love
(01:32:43):
that we're very active with SEOs and with
digital marketers worldwide. So yeah,
there's a ton of value and it's kind of
sad sometimes only because you take
e-commerce as an example, oh, who would
be our community? Would they be really
interested? I can't believe how many
(01:33:05):
niches I found out there where people are
gung ho and excited about products that
you just wouldn't think because we're not
limited to localization anymore. We put
something out there. We don't have to
worry about, maybe they'll sign up for
the newsletter. There's so many different
avenues to be able to reach out to your
community. Just the United States alone,
(01:33:27):
people who are interested that will
eventually find you if you're putting out
that proper content there.
So you just got back from Singapore
a couple of weeks ago or so for your big
user event. Like were there any big
topics of note that people wanted to talk
about while they were there?
(01:33:50):
Probably one of the bigger things is all
of the changes with Google that's
occurred, that was top of mind for
everybody. One of us, I think it was
Cyrus Shepard did a great talk on that
helpful content update that had occurred
and basically the joke about Reddit,
(01:34:13):
basically taking over all of the search
results that are out there and what's
going to be the future involved with
that. And it really comes down to, I
believe that things are going, we're
already starting to see some of the
algorithm changes where Reddit isn't
conquering every single search results
(01:34:33):
anymore. But between AI and Google's
algorithm update, those were probably two
of some of the hottest
topics that were out there.
That's cool, that's cool, yeah.
People, it's good to see some of the
shift in evolution of the algorithm.
Anytime those things happen, it's both
positive and negative generally, but it's
(01:34:57):
being able to maneuver through those
changes overall. What's coming next for
Ahrefs as a product? Is there anything
that you mind sharing or that I'm not
asking you to go behind the curtain, but
is there anything that's been recently
launched or that's public and coming soon
that you can share with our audience?
(01:35:18):
Yeah, at the Evolve conference, we
actually made the announcement about our
always on audit and what that involves.
We're finding that with the market out
there, more customers are looking for not
just to know about issues on their
website, but actual monitoring that can
(01:35:41):
occur. And what happens with this new
always on site audit that will be coming
out very soon, is it's going to allow you
to be able to be notified of any changes
that are occurring on the website.
We're actually utilizing index now, and
(01:36:01):
if you're not familiar with them, that
they're a service that's out there that
will go ahead and update search engines
whenever something changes on your site,
whether you're adding a new page or
you're making changes to pages. And it's
being submitted directly to the search
engines. Well, we here at Ahrefs, we
(01:36:21):
built a search engine a few years back
called yep.com, but we're actually
registered with them. So as changes are
being submitted, we're actually getting
the feedback data from that. And we're
gonna be able to almost in real time be
able to update, especially for e-commerce
websites. The larger the website, the
(01:36:42):
more that you can benefit from it.
Because if there's something that's going
on with your website, you wanna know
sooner rather than later, rather than a
month later looking in Google search
console and seeing those drops that are
occurring because somebody no indexed 100
of your pages and so forth.
Well, that's happened by the way. We've
seen it happen, but we've seen those
(01:37:03):
types of things happen. And people come
to us like crying of like, hey, what
happened to our, what's going on with our
site? Not current customers of ours, of
course, but like people coming to us and
saying, can you help us with this?
Right.
And so what happens is we're able to go
ahead and give that feedback loop is what
it comes down to. It's gonna be something
(01:37:24):
that's very fast. And along with that,
we're actually even starting to work with
being able to make update changes to your
website through our site audit. And what
this will allow for is, for example, if
you have CloudFlare and
you're using CloudFlare workers,
(01:37:45):
our platform doesn't have to touch your
website, it would be able to go in and
make changes via those workers in, I
think they're called edge servers, and
basically present to Google and to the
public those changes without ever having
to touch your website. A lot of, I have
(01:38:05):
more technical people on my team who
could explain it better than I can, but
it's getting ready to come out and it's
pretty exciting. That's
cool, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And aren't you doing some
web analytics stuff as well?
We just launched that as well for people
who don't, you can still have Google
Analytics on your website, but we've
launched a web analytics where basically
(01:38:27):
you'll be able to see right within our
platform how the website's performing,
page source, pages, how active. We're
going to be building that out over time,
but it's even available on our free
version right now so that people can log
in, set up, and they've got basically an
analytics monitoring that's going to be
(01:38:48):
going on. There's a lot of great things
that are going to come out associated
with that, but right now it's very basic,
very simple, but yeah, we're trying to be
that all-in-one digital marketing
solution, marketing intelligence.
Nice, very nice, very nice. Yeah, I mean,
I think that there's, nobody likes GA4,
like nobody likes GA4, right? I'm glad
(01:39:09):
you said that and not me. Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, I can say it. I can say it,
like fuck GA4 basically is like what I
want to say. You can bleep that out
Spencer. One of the things is that,
and there was an entire session around
this at PubCon, and there's some
conspiracy theories on what's happening
and why they got rid of GA, right? First
(01:39:30):
off, it was to kind of destroy all of,
literally 90-some percent of the
internet, of websites on the internet use
GA, right? So it was a
tremendous amount of data.
And so there's some rabbit holes out
there about why they got rid of it and
how they're leveraging, Google's
leveraging Chrome to basically spider
websites for their index. It's very, very
fascinating to get into. It's much deeper
(01:39:52):
than I'd want to get into on today on the
podcast. But there's a very fascinating
video from this presentation online
that's like, wow, this is like some
interesting stuff. So it's very cool to
see all these new types of product
improvements. I know that I'm excited for
the always-on audits.
I see the buttons kind of coming,
(01:40:13):
starting to be faded out within the app.
So excited for all that to come.
I guess one question that I like to ask
every guest is that if you could give one
tip to a brand or manufacturer to grow,
what would you recommend to them?
(01:40:34):
Okay, are we talking about
search engine optimization?
From SEO, right? One thing to look at
that in terms of, if you have 100 sales
conversations, is there a common tip that
you would give folks, that you commonly
give folks as you're going through your
enterprise conversations?
Yeah, boy, again, so many
(01:40:56):
to choose from. However,
success, being able to go ahead and find
successes out there. A lot of people
spend a lot of time researching their own
website. I really wish people would spend
more time doing competitive analysis.
Knowing so much about your competitors
out there, what's working for them, how
(01:41:19):
are they driving traffic? Can we go ahead
and, again, reverse engineer their
strategy? I really wish people would
spend more time doing that type of
analysis, because again, that
information's available out there. It's
not like 15 years ago when it was really
hard to understand. You definitely have
data. You've got all sorts of ways to
(01:41:40):
analyze those competitors.
And being able to figure out where their
traffic is coming from, so that's my
recommendation. I would pick the top
three competitors and know their websites
as well as I know my own, and you
wouldn't believe the opportunities that
you'll uncover by doing so.
Awesome, awesome. That is a great tip and
(01:42:01):
something that I wholeheartedly agree
with. And we're, a couple things here. If
you're a brand or manufacturer and you
don't wanna know how the sausage is made,
you can reach out to us and we'll do a
free SEO audit for you. We'll take a look
at things, we'll look at your website,
we'll provide recommendations. And even
if you give us three or four competitors,
we can tell you how they're doing and
(01:42:22):
what they're doing that's different from
your overall strategy. And so we'd love
to talk to you and just fill out the form
on the page for this
blog, or this podcast.
So really, really appreciate it, Rob.
Really appreciate you spending the time
with us today to talk about SEO.
(01:42:43):
Again, to all of our listeners, just
remember that we're a video first podcast
so go on over to our YouTube page at At
Groove Commerce. Give us a like, give us
a comment, give us a subscribe please.
And if you think you'd be a great guest
on eCommerce Masters, don't hesitate to
reach out to us. Rob, if people wanna
(01:43:04):
reach you online, where
can they find you, LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a fantastic place to find me.
That's where I post the most. I don't
know why everybody finds their social
media spot, but that seems to be mine.
Nice, not Friendster.
I don't even know what that is.
(01:43:25):
(Both Laughing)
Yes.
Is that old or new?
It's old, it is old, it is old. You never
know these days, but it's old, it's old.
Yeah, it's very old. Okay, I gotcha.
Again, 12 years ago, I got into digital
marketing. I have no
idea how old that is.
It's well before that. I'm showing my
age. Okay. I'm showing my age, you know,
I'm showing my age. Well, Rob, thank you
(01:43:46):
very much for taking the time today. And
we wish you a great 2025.
Same here and thanks so much
for having me today, thanks.
(Upbeat Music)
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