Your Path To Online Success: Navigating SEO in the Age of AI with Sam Oh

It started to kind of become a game of like copycat because, you know, where is that line between like unique content and, you know, actually serving the intent of a searcher? Which is important because that's essentially what a search engine wants to do, is give relevant information for any giving.

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am here to help you create a business with systems work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger. So that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy. Hey, what's going on? So this episode, I am stoked to do another one of these traffic focused episodes with you. And this one's about SEO. So search engine optimization. We've done a few of these already in a series. We've had Gert Malik, a good friend of mine, SEO master. And these have always been popular episodes. Everybody wants more traffic, more attention, more eyeballs and leads ultimately. So that's why I'm doing this one for you. And you know, in this changing world of AI and different tools that can generate content really quickly, there's kind of this ocean of sameness. And this is what we talked about on this episode. So I brought in Sam oh, who is the VP of marketing over at Ahrefs. And Ahrefs is an incredible company that has put together a suite of tools that you can use to monitor, audit, and really analyze everything when it comes to SEO and other types of traffic. So I highly recommend you go check them out. They've been gracious enough to sponsor this SEO series of episodes, so. So go check out their free tool. They actually have this webmaster tool that you can use to audit and improve your website and it's totally free. Just go over to www.a hrefs.com awt. Again, that's a h r e f s.com awt that gets you there. Sign up, go check it out. And Sam oh is here. He's got a wealth of knowledge outside of just running the marketing and the education at Ahrefs. Which is a lot of cool education and videos he puts out. So go check him out. Just go look up Sam, oh, and Ahrefs, and you'll find them. And then this one, you know, he's gonna talk about how to really break out of that sameness trap when it comes to creating content these days, because it's not a lot of unique stuff. If you're just relying on ChatGPT or some of these other automated tools to generate content, sure, it's great to get the ball moving, but if everyone's playing the same game, how. How do you stand out? So we talk about that. We talk about how that also translates to YouTube and doing things there, because Sam does a lot of work on YouTube for Ahrefs and so many other things to keep in mind when it comes to this blend of SEO and this organic traffic and algorithm changes with Google and other search engines and how that pairs up with all this emerging tech. So definitely a great episode to check out. Take some notes, and once again, go get the Ahrefs webmaster tool, totally free, over at www.ahrefs.

All right.

Check in the episode. Enjoy it. All right, Sam, appreciate you joining me today and all of us here on Hustle and Flowchart. Man, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so you're the. The VP of marketing over at Ahrefs, and we've used Ahrefs on all my content for. For years now. And you guys have been gracious to featuring this whole SEO series that we're putting out, which I think it's timely. You know, we were talking about how things are changing all the time. You know, we. You have AI, you have Google doing its thing, Bing, but also YouTube, which I know you have a lot of knowledge around and produce some great content as well. So I think talking about that as a whole, as part of this series could be very beneficial for a lot of the content creators that are listening and entrepreneurs.

Yeah, sounds good. I'm an open book, so whatever you want to talk about, like, I'm ready to go with. And then, yeah, I'll share my opinions. May or may not be right, but, yeah, we'll go from there.

Well, you have. You have a real time experience, man, and I know you report a lot over at Ahref, so maybe give us a quick background of your background and how it plays in this world of SEO, because you. You do report a lot of your findings, you know, publicly. And I think that's. That's how I first knew of you even before of getting Introduced. So I guess walk us back that way and then we'll start picking things apart there.

Sure.

Yeah.

So my story, I guess, begins in 2008. 2008 or 2009, I don't even remember anymore. But yeah, I started my e commerce site, long story short, didn't know what I was doing, realized I got to get traffic there somehow. I learned about search and I just really dug into search and that was the first time where I discovered the power of search, because I was making a very healthy living for a very young 20 person because of SEO. Made a lot of mistakes. Went black hat my first time around where I was buying links and things like that, and lost around seven figures in valuation because of that. Because I got smashed by Penguin, sold the company for a lot less than I would have liked to. But it kind of sparked the journey of SEO to, for me, at least. And, yeah, I went the agency route, went niche sites, did just about everything. And then I eventually ended up at Ahrefs. And so it's kind of a natural transition because I had been a paying customer for many years. And so when I joined, I was literally just like sharing what I've been doing for the past 10, 11, 12 years at that time, things that I had done well, things that I'd done poorly. And so it was basically. It's almost like a public journal is what it became for me at that point, which also helped help to sell the tool because I'm just sharing how I used to use it or how I used it. And so, yeah, a lot of fun. Very happy here.

Yeah, well, I think that's. I mean, it's the most valuable to teach as well and, you know, get other folks doing the right thing from. From previous learnings. So, yeah, so at Ahrefs, I mean, it's interesting because you have the Webmaster tool. I think it's great for people to help monitor traffic and positioning and competitor data, I guess. Like, what are some of these foundational things that you recommend, folks? I'll just start with what you know best. Obviously you're from Ahrefs, so what are some of these tools? That one's free. I know of that and I guess I'll shout it out since it's. It's. This will be the ad anyway, that I would drop in, but over at hrefs a h r e f s.comawt gets you to that tool for free. Tell us a little bit about that. And maybe some of these other tools or assets that we should be, you know, should have and know about.

Yeah, so like, AWT is definitely like Webmaster Tools is kind of like search console in that you can get your backlinks data, you can get your organic keywords data. And, you know, beyond just like kind of like meaningless rank checking, where you're just kind of seeing where you're ranking and you're like, oh, yeah, that's cool. And then you move on with your day, you can actually extract some pretty actionable insights from that. So, for example, like, featured snippets, we all know that takes up quite a bit of real estate on the first page of Google. And naturally we want to be there. And to be there, you don't have to be number one. You can actually be top five, top seven, top eight, top nine, top ten. And so you can essentially steal that spot. And within the organic keywords report, you can literally just filter for keywords where there's a featured snippet where your page isn't ranking, and then you can just focus on those optimizations all day, all night, depending on how many keyword rankings you have. So for a site as big as Ahrefs, that is ranking for a lot of keywords, like, I wouldn't be able to even get through all the possible optimizations in a year if that's all I was literally doing. And you know, in the case that I'm able to grab, let's say 10, 15% of those snippets. And that's a significant portion of traffic that I'd be bringing into our site just working on that alone. And so, yeah, there's a lot of actionable insights that you can find there. Other tools that I think are kind of cool. We have a lot of free tools as well, so that we have a backlink checker, we have a keyword generator. All that stuff is free on our site. Obviously, our paid tools are much more powerful. There are other tools that are free or freemium versions. So for, I guess, technical SEO, something that I use from time to time is screaming Frog SEO Spider. I also use chatgpt, but I don't use chatgpt in, in the sense of like, you know, tell me which keywords I should go after or what the volume is because it literally just makes up numbers. But yeah, it's good for other things, like smaller tasks with ideation, basically getting those creative juices flowing, which helps with like, title tags with the more technical things, like schema. Yeah, lot a lot of stuff that you can do in there and kind of mash together to be Your own set of SEO tools.

Nice. I like it. On, on the Chat GPT side, are there any. Cause I know there's plugins, like there's one AI PRM that's an awesome plugin that kind of layers over and gives you some, you know, it's all rated and reviewed and some of them say, hey, here's a SEO rich blog post, you know, format. But are there, are there like resources that you go to or kind of, I guess flows to make sure you're actually, you know, asking it the right thing. That's not going to give you a bunch of false data.

Yeah, so like the plugins, I've, I've tried them but I've haven't had much success with any of them. So I like, I have GPT4 the, the page, ChatGPT plus or whatever it is, the browsing doesn't work as I would hope it would work. And yeah, basically I think it's important to have the foundational knowledge of SEO. So for example, if you say something like write me an article on this topic that is optimized for search, it's not going to do the job properly. Whereas if you tell it specifically what you need to do to optimize for search, then it's actually quite good at doing that. So let's say for example, you have a list of potential subtopics that you've gone through and you've had someone on your team write an article for you and you want to go through and you want to make sure that certain topics points are made. And you have these bullet point forms, you can paste those in and say are these included within the post? If not, then where can I include them? Then you can actually get this information from it and you're able to insert those things that may be important to actually rank in search. Things like, I don't know, some people obsess over like keyword density and stuff. I don't. But if that is something that you're pro for, then you can technically ask about the density of the keywords that are used in the content and that's actually helpful in doing that. Or coming up with good title tags that will be more click worthy. This works both for YouTube, for search, for ads, for social media. It works everywhere. And that's kind of where I find that ChatGPT works well. It's kind of when you're stuck and when you've been looking at something for so long and you kind of just can't get out of that bubble, it's Able to kind of break through and give you some new ideas, new perspective that you may not have had before.

I like that. Yeah. And I found the same with the plugins. They might be a great starting point, at least to get the wheels moving or a sticking point, like you're stuck. Yeah, you've been, you've been mulling over it too long or. And I found like, there's a few templates I use for the podcast. Like there's show notes templates that the guy, Gert Malik, who's also been on this SEO series, he has a format that he recommends with SEO, you know, with all these different elements. So that's what I've been using. Like, hey, format it with this kind of pop up. And that's, that's where I've found it being very helpful. It's almost like more machine learning.

Yeah, for sure. I've used it for landing pages too. You give it a specific format and then you ask for like, you tell it what you want in a specific section, what your goal is to achieve through that copy, and it gives you something and you're probably like, I don't really like this. But then at least you're like, oh, but that's a kind of a good point. Maybe I'll integrate that in with this. And then you end up with whatever model you end up with at the end. So, yeah, templates are huge.

And fair warning to those listening. The hallucinations that AI gives us, you know, those are like the very like, hey, this is the right answer. It's like, well, not so much. So always use your logic and reasoning as us humans. You know, I want to get into the idea of like, you were talking about content creation, specifically on YouTube, where, you know, there's some changes that are happening over there. And I know you're on YouTube and you know quite a bit when it comes to SEO over there as well. There's a lot of sameness. You were saying. And you know, ChatGPT is a perfect example of that. You can prompt it with like a title or a keyword and then, hey, I have a blog post or I have a YouTube script, but it's a bunch of sameness. You know, it's just pulling in from other ideas that aren't necessarily unique. So I'm curious of your perspective and then we can dive into kind of some of the key things when it comes to, you know, the factors with SEO and maybe leaning in more on the YouTube side as well.

Yeah. So I think, I guess over the past Several years when, at least when search intent became a much more pronounced ranking factor, at least a lot of people were talking about it. Now people know what search intent is. For anyone listening who doesn't, it's basically just represents the reason behind a searcher's query. So if someone searches for, like chicken soup, then the top ranking pages will mostly be recipes. And so if you want to rank, then you got to create a recipe page in order to rank for that query. And so since that happened, it started to kind of become a game of like, copycat, because, you know, where is that line between like, unique content and, you know, actually serving the intent of a searcher? Which is important because that's essentially what a search engine wants to do, is give relevant information for any given query and they want to give the best answer that they can. And so if we all, if everyone is using these tools, so if everyone has access to ChatGPT, and as far as I'm aware, almost everyone around the world does for free, we can all essentially create the same content. We can make it slightly different by using different prompts, different workflows. But if everything starts to sound the same, then the way that we behave with search is going to naturally change. And for me, it already has. Like, I was literally talking with, with one of my colleagues and I was looking through my Google search history. Now I encourage you to do this, like, look through your Google search history, look at what you've searched for, and if you are able to compare it with something that you did a year ago, I'm guessing it's going to look vastly different. So, like, from my searches, I think around 95% of my searches in the past week were navigational, which means that I'm looking for a specific place to go. So for example, if I want to just looking around my office here, so I have a Yeti mug here, if I want to know a review about this, I'm going to go straight to Amazon and I'm going to read the reviews there. If it's something different, like a product, like let's say I'm planting new grass and I want to buy this grass seed, then I want to get the answers from real people, like from Reddit. So I'll look up like Jonathan Green, Black Beauty, Ultra Reddit, and like, I'm specifically looking for these places because I know that a lot of these blog posts that I read are going to be written with the intent to sell it for affiliate purposes or it's just going to be a bunch of trash. That's made up from ChatGPT and everything's going to sound the same or I'm going to go straight to YouTube and I'm going to look for that human who is holding that product, actually testing it there and showing me exactly what I'm going to be getting when I decide to spend my money. And so, yeah, I feel like naturally this is going to change a lot over time in the way that we search. Especially with now with sge, the search generative experience, or whatever it's called that's coming out, which just opens up completely different doors. Like with, with ChatGPT, it's almost like people used to always joke that they don't want people to see their Google search history because it's kind of embarrassing. Like, I feel like ChatGPT is like going to be like 10x more embarrassing because of the kinds of questions that we ask, the kinds of questions that we can ask and actually get an answer from, whether it's like made up or not. Like, we can still ask and kind of try to discern, like, is this made up? But yeah, I feel like it changes the game completely and it's not a bad thing. It's just different.

You make a great point with the certain search intent and the way that we think, because I haven't looked at my history, but I just know the way when I'm thinking about an answer. I'm. I'm using a variety of sources now for different reasons. And you're right, like Google, it's very, very directional. Like Reddit and that's one. Yeah. And Amazon, you know, like with that keyword associated with whatever key, other keywords. You know, I'll use things like ChatGPT for certain, maybe organizational aspects. Another tool I've been using is Perplexity AI. I love it.

I haven't seen that. What does it do?

Check that out. It's. It searches real time and pulls in a bunch of different sources that, that are. That are real time from the web. So it'll give you lists and you can kind of dive deeper into whatever topic you want and it'll pull in Reddit and Amazon. All those things too.

Nice.

Yeah. And I guess that comes up because I think that's similar to what you were mentioning about sge. Is that like essentially. Is that conversational chat with like, like Google essentially or, or Bing?

Yes, it's conversational AI really like, or at least that's what it appears to be like. ChatGPT already does it, but now go more information than. Than chatgpt does Bing. I haven't been able to get behind it yet. Yeah, quite yet. Like, there are certain use cases that it's okay for, but, like, the way that conversational AI is going, at least in my opinion, is going to change the game is oftentimes we search for things. Like if we're thinking about information, we search in the macro sense. So I'm going to go to the example of a lawn renovation. So in the case that you want to do a lawn renovation, you might not know what you're doing. So you might say, like, how to plant grass seed, right? Something like that. And you come across some articles, you realize that it's chat GPT mumbo jumbo. You don't really want to read through it. And then you go to YouTube and you see this guy or girl or lady whoever, who's planting this beautiful lawn, and you're like, I want to listen to this person because he can see what they've done. And then they give you the steps. You take your notes and you say, okay, step one is to do this. Step two, three, four, five, you have your little notes, you go, you buy all the stuff that you need, and then you go and you do it.

It.

But then when you do it, you start to have questions like, am I supposed to dethatch before I aerate? Or should I, like, do I even need to dethatch? Do I have to buy something for that? The aerator is like 3, $500. Like, can I rent it? Like, what do I do? And then you go to ChatGPT. And now you can ask questions like, you're a landscaping expert and your only mission is to make sure that I have a lawn that looks like a freaking meadow. This is what I want to do. And these are the steps that I have. Does this look right to you? And then it can say, yeah, that looks right. And then you can say, do I really have to dethatch and aerate? Like, you know, which one do I need to do first? And then you go through and it's like, oh, like, you can do one or the other. You go along, you're like, all right, cool. And so you go and you plant your grass and stuff. And then it's like, oh, how often am I supposed to water it? And then you go to it and you, you, you can go to Google and you can say, like, how. How long should I water my grass? Well, that depends on whether you're in, like, a cool, cool climate, warm climate, whatever. And you get all this crap that you don't want to go through, you just want the answer you need to water three times per day or you need to water this much per day. And so you go to ChatGPT and you ask a very, very specific question that just like it's borderline, like weird because it's so specific and like no one is going to answer this question for you. And I feel like in that sense, search is going to change quite a lot because we're going to these very, very specific queries. Even Google, there's a certain percentage of queries that are brand new to Google who you would think has seen everything by now, but they haven't. And then now that we can ask very, very, extremely specific questions which no one has the time to answer all of them, like, naturally conversational AI is going to change things because now it's catered to your specific situation. And I think that's super cool and I'm really excited to see where that's going to go and what that means for SEOs or marketers as well.

Yeah, man, that's so what you describe. It's. I would take that knowledge and go to perplexity AI and mess around with what you were saying there because. Exactly right. And I feel like this is like a glimmer of what will happen in Google and I'm sure Google will do it way deeper, you know, and I'm curious of how, I guess content creators will be cited, you know, and how the visibility will change in terms of what it is like right now. Do you have any insights on that?

Well, that's, that's a big issue within the SEO community is sources like Google is not, at least so far in, in their demos and what people have been showing so far have not been citing their sources, which is. Doesn't seem really fair. Right. It's because they're taking all this information from someone and they're basically doing it so that no one has to click to your page, click on your links, buy your products. And so, yeah, not a fan of that, but that's essentially what ChatGPT does too, is it's learned based on our content. Right. It's taken so much content from around the world and now it's able to not, not necessarily spit back that content to you, but it's able to logic and reason what it considers to be true and to answer questions based on probabilities. And so I don't know if there's anything that can really be done. I don't know what that's going to look like in the future. But essentially these LLMs, the large language models, they need to be trained on some kind of data. So that's us. Yeah, that's people with expertise who are actually sharing this information. What happens when everyone's using these AI tools to create content and then it's just being trained on its own information? I don't know. But, yeah, I don't know what's going to happen with sources, and I hope that there is a way to fight that. I feel like Bing is trying to do that or has tried to do that from the beginning is they actually cite the sources. Right. But I've clicked on sources before and what they say has nothing to do with, like, the source that they're citing. So sometimes I'm. I'm kind of wondering what's going to happen with that. But, yeah, that's a really good question. I'm curious to see what will happen.

Yeah, it's early days and I'd imagine there's going to be multiple ways to search, probably because of just our nature. You know, I'm sure Google will probably give a variety of ways to find information. You know, it's not just going to be the S. GE style, but we'll see, I guess. Do you. Do you have any idea of, like, when some of this stuff's going to get rolled out? I'm sure you've been testing this probably more than most people. Stuff from Google and maybe even YouTube.

Yeah, I actually haven't been with. With Google. With SGE.

Yeah.

I feel like when things were coming, so Bing was like, oh, ChatGPT was first and then Bing came out with theirs and I was super excited to try that. And it just didn't live up to expectations. Then Bard came out and Bard was even worse. And then I was just like, all right, let's just see what happens. Like, people tweet about it enough. There's nothing for me to test there. So I. I don't really know. Like, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't think that Bing's AI ch or Bard are good enough to use as a replacement to Google and to the world's information. Really?

Yeah.

But yeah, in terms of, like, search habits, I feel like that is already changing for a lot of people. For me, maybe it's because I'm deep in search that, like, I know when, if I search for, I don't know, best golf clubs, I want to buy a golf club and I just want to. I don't Even need the best one. I just want to know what a good golf club is. What I already know. Yeah, exactly. Like I know that I just need to search for best golf glove if I want to get a listicle with different models and brands. But I know that I'm going to be hit with a whole bunch of affiliate stuff which like nobody has touched before. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and I'm going to look at that. I'm just going to take down the list, the models and then I'm going to take them to YouTube and I'm going to look at people who are actually wearing these gloves kind of giving pros and cons and you see their channel with a million subscribers because they're a golf instructor and they can actually give you like valuable information. So yeah, searches, like search habits are going to change because more and more people are going to realize this. And even my wife who's not in the search industry at all because I tell her these things, like she feels like I've ruined like information for her because she's like, I know that when I search for this, like I'm going to end up with this crap and I know I can't trust it. Yeah, yeah. And so like more and more people are going to realize that, that this is often true. And because like Google can't rank necessarily the best result for any given query. It's just impossible because best is subjective first of all. But then there's also different, you know, ranking signals that help it. So yeah, anyway, I'm rambling at this point but basically I, I think search starts, I think search has already changed and it's going to continue to change in some ways for the better and in some ways naturally more and more people will abuse it as well.

Yeah, and that's the, I guess the taking a step back, that's all this large language model thing is it's a neural network of all of our content and brains. It's us, us as inputs and of course, yeah, it's going to keep training and getting smarter the more it's used and I'm sure Google will has a big plan for that. And yeah, who knows where we're going to show up. But you're right, it's like looking for the human side of information. I've heard it from a few people, guests on here. It's like technology does not go backwards. It's going to keep progressing but there's still that humanity element and yeah, and you touched on that immediately. Like, even before we started talking about YouTube is like there's. It's, it's more of that piece. It's the sameness is more of the technology, I would say in chat GPT, it's the easy stuff. It's the automated videos with 11 labs or whatever, you know, and an avatar.

So yeah, for sure. And like we can take the same script. Like if you and I took the same script and we read it differently, it's a different video. If we add one of those like AI voices in there right now, like, like it's even worse, right? Like, it's going to be the worst of, of the three that we create because naturally people want to connect with humans. Like they are interested in our voices and the way that we like the intonations and like the different ways that we speak. Like even these hand gestures, like, like I can't remember what, what the saying is, but it's like a certain percentage of communication is in the body language or something like that.

Oh, it's a lot, man. It's instant too. It's way faster than language processing, right?

Like we read each other's faces. Like if I say something to you and you kind of make like a face like that, then I'm like, oh, like, did I offend him? Or like that's kind of weird. Like we, we pick up on those signals. But naturally with AI, at least for now, and I hope it never gets to the point that we don't know whether it's a human or AI. But yeah, it can't do that right now. And naturally we want to interact with humans, whether that's digitally or physically. Like we're not going to want to interact with robots.

And that's where, yeah, information finding. And as a content creator, you know, and going back to SEO a little bit, you hit a good point where we're not going to stop creating written content, or at least I don't think we should, because who knows how content will be sourced by Google or even littler sites like Perplexity. I mean, and I'm sure there's going to be spinoffs and because they sort YouTube, there's social posts. I mean, their sourcing is actually pretty good. That Perplexity site. And I'd be curious of your thoughts after this show. Just tinker around with it a little bit. I'm curious of your thoughts of what would be a decent strategy when it comes to YouTube and showing off the human side, because he said, I think you mentioned that YouTube's kind of changing, of course. I mean, it's a Google property as well. Any insights on the YouTube side of things when it comes to SEO and bringing that.

Yeah, like, it's kind of interesting. So for us being in B2B and essentially like selling software, like we want to show how our tool works. If we call our video Ahrefs Site Explorer Tutorial, it's not that exciting, right? Like, there's not much to get from that unless you're an Ahrefs customer and you wanna learn how to use Site Explorer better. But if I say like this trick ranked us number one in Google every time, then that's interesting to anyone who wants to rank in Google every single time. And so if I go there and then I say like, hey, it's Sam and welcome to this Site Explorer tutorial and let's clickbait and you're gone. But if I start to walk you through a process and I tell you a story about walking through that process, how I came to this discussion, or this discovery of ranking number one in Google, quote unquote, every single time, still clickbaity.

I get it.

Hypothetical examples, okay. But you can follow that story and our product can actually be integrated as a part of that story, even as the hero of that story. And we're able to guide through story, we're able to guide through instruction, all as one video. Because now YouTube, like, it's an informational center, but it's also an entertainment center. And now like infotainment is becoming a real thing and we're starting to see it more and more. And then there's, you know, other things like people are still looking for, like how to do keyword research because they learn better through video than they do through text. And in many ways it's more passive because you can just kind of sit back and watch. There's also the power of audio plus video that we can actually combine together. So I could talk over a screencast and you could be walking through that screencast. I can make a subtle joke about something that I think, you know, I'm not looking for somebody to start cracking up and rolling around at home, but like, you know, they might, you know, crack a smile and it keeps you entertained to keep going through this tutorial and more entertaining for most people, I guess, than, you know, reading a 4,000 word blog post.

Yeah. Pillar post style. And you mentioned it's, it's storytelling. Right. At the end of the day, we're humans. That's not going to change in us and our DNA. And what. What excites our brains, keeps our attention, is we're all goldfish anyway with our attention spans. So if we keep. Yeah, I mean, start with, hey, it's not clickbait. If we could deliver on it. Right. So start with something engaging like that with the title thumbnail, and then deliver in that video probably immediately. Sooner the better. And then. And then tell a story. Yeah, it's a journey. And then integrate. I think that's a. It's a perfect way to put any valuable content in there. Salesy or. Salesy or not. You know, if you have a tool or just giving content out for entertainment purposes. It keeps the attention. Yeah, for sure.

And it sells too. At the end of the day, it sells.

Right. Well, before we wrap up. Yeah, I just want to make sure. Any strategies. Because we haven't really done any basic strategies around YouTube when it. When it goes to SEO. So I guess in your mind just to rattle off some foundational things to think about as someone is possibly pursuing to go and create some videos and make that consistent, what are some things that you think about or you advise people on when they're doing that?

So for an industry like ours, where there are a lot of searchable topics, keyword research was foundational in the beginning stages of our growth. So I think I took over the channel when we were at like 11,000 subscribers. And I know subscribers doesn't mean that, you know, it doesn't mean everything, but like, I think maybe our channel was getting like 50,000 views per year before that. It was very inactive, though. And now we're getting 4 or 5 million views per year, which is all, you know, targeted and built around our product. Keyword research was massive in the beginning. And basically I would just look at. So I would use Ahrefs and I would just look for SERPs or keywords that popped up video results on the first page. And then I would look, I would take that keyword and then I would put it into YouTube and then I would see, okay, well, are these videos getting viewed like a decent amount of times? And if the answer was yes to both, then I would optimize that video with a title, the description, the tags, like I would for anything that is SEO related. Right. And over time, it started to rank in both Google and YouTube. And so I called it double dipping kind of thing. And even though you wouldn't get that viral explosion of like, you know, 200,000 views in a week, like, it's just kind of slow and steady growth. And then when that when you continue to do that, it just compounds. And that's kind of what happened with, with our channel is that it started to compound and our search traffic like literally started to go. I don't know which way. Yeah, it went that way. One way or the other. It went. It went up into the right. And I felt like that was foundational because now not only were we getting the views that were like directly centered around our product, which would also convert into customers and also help retain our existing customers who would learn to use our tools better, but we were reaching new audiences and we were earning that subscription. People wanted to actually subscribe because they're like, that tutorial was valuable to me on how to get backlinks and ahrefs happened to be a part of that story. And so, okay, I want to see more of what they have to say. And so naturally. And then that grows our channel to eventually where we are today. I would say it contributed up to around 150,000 subscribers, which is like quite a lot for a B2B channel. And then later on, as our. Our strategy changed, it became more about interests as well as still, you know, our bread and butter, which are like the search related tutorials. And now we're at, I don't know, like 415,000 subscribers and yeah, consistently still kind of slow and steady growth is the game. Yeah.

And compounded effort, that's for sure. What, what matters. And I think the bigger or the biggest takeaway as well is you're doing it in a way, storytelling, brand association associated with it. It's kind of like with podcasting as well. You have this, this attached person now, this person that can connect with your brand or personality stories. And it's deeper than just an ad they found on Google or Facebook or whatever. Yeah. But they're actually integrated into where the journey that you're leading them on.

Yeah, I think that's super important.

Yeah. Especially with the SaaS. Some kind of tool where it's continuity. It's like you want retention. So it's. It's helping on all fronts. So I feel like any business owner can. Can benefit from those strategies too. Cool. Sam, is there anything that like, you think I left unturned, at least in the topics we're exploring here before we wrap?

No, I feel like that was pretty good. Like I. Yeah, I feel like that's kind of what's happening right now. AI is obviously at the forefront of many people's minds. For those that are wondering whether it's going to take over your job Tomorrow? I don't think so. Yeah, the human elements of marketing of SEO and even how SEO is changing in the sense that it's less focused on just, you know, content and links, you know, which are still important, but yeah, just the foundational information and using the tools that we have now at our disposal to actually become more efficient, I think are pretty important things. And so, yeah, I feel like we covered the majority of those things.

Cool. Yeah. And it's a big unknown for all of us, but I really feel like the next couple of years are going to be very interesting. It's tough to plan too far out, you know, with the movement of technology, but keeping in mind that humanity, the human side storytelling, I think, is super crucial. It's a pretty good through line with everything you said here too, so. Makes me happy. I like humans. Technology is cool. All right, Sam. And definitely check out go get the webmaster Tools free. We talk about it here on some of the other episodes over at www.at a h r e f s.com awt and that'll get you there. Sam, any anywhere they should follow you. Specifically some of the videos you're putting out.

I'm on Twitter. I'm not too active, but I do respond. If you at me, it's Samsgoh. And for our YouTube videos, you can just look up, search forahrefs on YouTube and you should find us there.

Right on. Cool. Sam, appreciate your time, man. And we'll chat again sometime soon.

Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

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