Webinar: Duda Webinar Fireside Chat with Tim Soulo and Nik Ranger

There’s a certain energy you feel when someone’s pushing the boundaries of their field—and Tim Soulo brings that spark to SEO.

As CMO of Ahrefs, he’s led a team that’s changed how pros approach search, data, and content creation.

From writing the beginner’s SEO bible to building a creator-friendly search engine, Tim’s story is full of big ideas and bold moves.

Join Peter Mead and Nik Ranger as they get up close with Tim, uncovering the mindset and vision behind the Ahrefs powerhouse.

Ready to meet the mind setting the pace for modern SEO?

Full Transcript of the Duda Webinar Fireside Chat with Tim Soulo Webinar

Peter Mead:
It’s Peter Mead and welcome to this Duda webinar fireside chat with Tim Soulo and Nik Ranger. So excited for this chat. We want to find out all the inside details, but firstly, let me just do a couple of introductions. I’ll introduce Nik Ranger first of all. Nik Ranger is Dejan Marketing Senior Technical SEO, Google Woman Techmaker Ambassador, and Chair of SEO Collective Australia, and she’s a great musician. Welcome, Nik Ranger.

Nik Ranger:
Thanks so much, Peter. It is awesome to be here and, of course, to be doing this fireside chat with Tim, who rarely gets on to have a discussion about him, his role, and his impact on the search engine landscape with Ahrefs and—yep.

Peter Mead:
So yes, I would like to introduce you, Tim. Tim Soulo is the Chief Marketing Officer and Product Advisor at Ahrefs. It’s an industry-leading SEO tool powered by big data, with years of practical experience in SEO and digital marketing. Tim eagerly shares his knowledge by giving live talks at various digital marketing conferences around the world and publishing blog articles on Ahrefs’ blog. He’s the author of many data-driven SEO research studies and a number of detailed marketing guides. And I have to add, Tim is also a great DJ—I found that out!

Tim Soulo:
Thanks, Peter. Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for having me.

Peter Mead:
You’re very welcome.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, thanks so much. I want to now hand it to you because we have to, of course, talk about you, Peter Mead. You’re a Senior SEO Consultant, you’ve been awarded a Special Recognition Award by SEMrush in 2019, and you’re the facilitator and promoter of the SEO Community. You’re a very much-loved member of the Australian search community here, not just in Melbourne, Australia, but worldwide. So, it is really, really great to have you here as well. Shout out to you, Peter.

Peter Mead:
Thank you. Thanks so much, Nik. Well, today, I thought this would be a great opportunity since actually going to Singapore to the Ahrefs one-day conference and then going to Chiang Mai, where Ahrefs was a major sponsor there, and just sort of hanging out with you a little bit, Tim. I thought, yeah, there’s more to this—CMO at Ahrefs. We’ve got to find out the inside scoop. What’s going on? So, I mean, I’m just really interested, and perhaps I’ll start off the conversation with a little bit about your background, because you’ve been at Ahrefs for well over 10 years now?

Tim Soulo:
Eight years, actually.

Peter Mead:
Okay, eight years. Right, great. So before that, what was your sort of career journey? How did that set you up for success, and what kind of things did you perhaps learn that might have got you into this role?

Tim Soulo:
I think I started learning SEO maybe five years before joining Ahrefs. I held a bunch of roles in different—no, maybe even six years before joining Ahrefs. It’s been quite a while, but still, it’s a bit strange because I remember that at the point when I joined Ahrefs, I felt like I knew nothing about SEO. But at the same time, I was in the digital marketing industry. I was working as a digital marketer for quite a few years, for six or seven years already. So this is why it felt that when I joined Ahrefs, I was completely clueless, but at the same time, I was in the industry for so long. I guess that’s because I transitioned specifically into SEO while I was more like a marketing generalist.
Yeah, and I worked at a bunch of companies. They were mostly Ukrainian companies, but they were targeted at the US market. Plus, I had a bunch of side projects myself. I had a personal blog, I was developing plugins for WordPress, I was guest posting for a bunch of different sites, I was doing a little bit of consulting for people. I also did launch some MFA—made for AdSense—websites back in the day, so played around with those kinds of things. So yeah, did quite a few little things before joining Ahrefs, and Ahrefs was kind of the big thing that I started working on.

Peter Mead:
That’s really interesting. It sounds like your main focus was kind of digital marketing. So I have this theory that SEO is like the technology side of marketing, of digital marketing. You have this kind of—a lot of people have this umbrella view of marketing and digital marketing, and down below that sort of hierarchy is your SEO. Whereas I look at SEO as really kind of the flip side of digital marketing, from the technology side of doing everything that you want to do for your—your tech SEO brain is showing. Well, what are your thoughts, Nik? How would you frame that?

Nik Ranger:
Oh, absolutely. I think I’ve always been agency-side, so it’s really, really great to have friends who work in, I think, more in the business aspect. It’s such a multifaceted area. Tim, what sort of drew you, maybe outside of just the challenge, to pursue a role within Ahrefs? What really attracted you to that role?

Tim Soulo:
So, first of all, I’m not in the same camp with you guys because I’m not very technical. I don’t call myself a technical SEO. I don’t think I even can call myself an SEO to start with. But my look at SEO is that it’s—for lack of a better word or phrase—it’s kind of like the function of the business or the property of the business. So if your business is ultimately something that people are actively searching for, you can use SEO on it.
For example, having a dedicated page on your website for every service that you do. For example, if you do pool maintenance and cleaning, there are lots of moving parts to it. There are pumps that pump water in the pool, there are some chemicals, so having a page for each chemical—it’s not a technical thing, it’s more so kind of a business thing. So you create materials around your business, you put them on your website, and if you have something to show for—if you can actually show people that you’re an expert in pool cleaning, that you’re using all the latest technology, that you use the right chemicals so that, I don’t know, the kids in the pool won’t get poisoned or something—you are going to rank and you’re going to get customers.
So for me, this is not technical. But if we’re talking about websites like booking.com with, I don’t know, millions of pages, with a lot of those pages generated automatically with different categories, and you have to know what to index, what not to index, how to interlink them, where you have thin content, where you need to block the robots, blah blah blah, of course it gets technical. But again, if we look at the entire web, there are only so many of those big websites that require the technical knowledge to run them properly, while the majority of the websites just need the kind of common sense approach to SEO.
Okay, your question was why did I decide to pursue this role? Let’s say Dimitri was quite persuasive. Dimitri is our CEO and founder. Basically, I was sitting in a small town in Ukraine and I was already contemplating that I need to go somewhere else. I feel bored where I’m at, and it just—serendipitously, Dimitri saw some of my work online. Specifically, he saw that I published a few articles on the Moz blog, who were our main competitors back in the day, and my articles have won some annual awards on their blog. So Dimitri thought, let me reach out to this guy and offer him a job. And yeah, the rest is history, basically.
I thought, I’m sitting in a small town in Ukraine, I can move to Singapore, seems interesting—so I did. It wasn’t a very well-thought-out decision. I just thought the company seems interesting, I’m Ukrainian, the company is founded by Ukrainians, it’s in Singapore, it’s in the digital marketing industry, which I’m naturally interested in, let’s give it a shot. The company was quite small back in the day, I think we were doing less than $10 million in annual recurring revenue. That was eight years ago. Right now we’re doing more than $100 million, so we’ve grown 10x in those eight years. So yeah, that’s it.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, so yes, it’s massive. It’s huge. You just said a couple of things there about growth, which I’m actually really interested in because once you started, you serendipitously took on this role, and then, of course, the next task was to grow. From what I’m looking at, some of these stats that I’m looking at, it really has grown a lot. What was your strategy? What kind of ideas did you have that helped you to grow?

Tim Soulo:
It’s interesting because, like I said, I was quite clueless when I joined Ahrefs. It’s not like I had a track record of being CMO in any other companies and I was kind of the only marketer in the team, so everything was kind of on me. The team was quite small back in the days, it was like 16 people total in the company. Right now we’re still relatively small for our size—we’re about 100 people in the entire company. That is very, very small compared to any of our competitors.
Yeah, I was clueless. Of course, effective, efficient, but also small. We’re proud to say that. But yeah, I was absolutely clueless.
And so what’s interesting, just earlier today I was interviewing Rand Fishkin for my upcoming podcast launching next year, and one of the things that we discussed with him is, I was asking Rand if they have a lot of strategy behind how they’re growing their company SparkToro and how much of it is opportunistic—as in, you see an opportunity, you pursue it, while it wasn’t on your plate just like two days ago. And for Rand, he says that for them it’s like 80 to 90% opportunistic rather than strategy. And that resonates with me a lot because back in the day when I just joined Ahrefs, I was figuring things out, I was looking for opportunities.
So of course I tried to plan things: okay, we need to improve the content on our blog, we need to improve our homepage, we need to put more information on our landing pages, we need to talk to thought leaders in the space, to influencers, blah blah blah. But at the same time, whenever some specific opportunity would pop up, I would often just put everything that I was doing aside, explore this opportunity, work on it, and then come back to the backlog of whatever I had.
So yeah, it wasn’t strategic, it was just going from one thing to another. But as long as you can consistently make good decisions and you can execute well on the decisions you’re making, it just works out. Plus, of course, let’s not forget that Ahrefs is just an amazing product by itself, so heads off to the engineering team. If the product wouldn’t be as good as it is, I would probably not be talking to you guys and not telling you how to do marketing and such, because if the product would be shitty, I would probably not be as effective as a marketer as well.

Nik Ranger:
I think you’re extremely modest in the way that you’re sort of summarizing your impact, just from what Peter was saying before with some of the stats that really milestone the growth that Ahrefs have had under your CMO leadership there. I want to just talk a little bit about the blog, though.
Yes, Ahrefs is a great tool, it’s a great product, but I think it’s a real testament that from the earliest sort of integration with Patrick Stox and utilizing a lot of this subject matter experts and prioritizing the content and prioritizing content that is really, really going to be impactful. I know that myself and a lot of other of my colleagues love to look at the Ahrefs blogs specifically because they are quality, they are lengthy, but they are detailed and they are written quite literally almost like, you know, I’ve got someone like an ex-SEO consultant that’s sort of at the same or higher tier sitting next to me, sort of guiding me through something new.
And I think that’s really quite something that you’ve done very well to leverage, and I think that that’s also been a really great market for growth because that’s really just going back and doubling down on those assets. So from an SEO perspective, just purely looking from a content and technical aspect, I think that’s something that you’ve done very, very well under your tenureship.

Tim Soulo:
Thank you. It wasn’t a question, right? You didn’t ask a question? Thank you.

Nik Ranger:
Because, yeah, sorry, that is just an appreciation for the Ahrefs blog.

Peter Mead:
Oh yeah, the blog is awesome.

Tim Soulo:
Yeah, the blog is awesome and it’s very much a go-to reference for the SEO industry.

Nik Ranger:
Speaking of something else that is really quite impressive—now I do need to, you know, I mean, when you look at the Ahrefs website, you quickly come across this idea that we’re powered by seriously big data and the numbers are impressive. 3,400 servers, four petabytes of RAM, and hundreds of petabytes of hard drive, 63,000 CPU cores—this is seriously big data.
This also, this figure here which says you’ve spent $900 million on cloud computing to run this data—

Tim Soulo:
We saved. Saved. We have very different context when it’s saved. Our structure, with our structure, we were able to save $900 million. So if we were in the cloud, that would be basically a billion dollars in the past three years, but because we were investing in our own infrastructure, we were able to do the computing that we need—the crawling and computing and storing—a lot cheaper than it would cost in the cloud. Yeah, cloud is just exorbitant fees.

Nik Ranger:
Okay, that’s pretty significant though. I mean, you’ve built this technology stack. How did it all work?

Tim Soulo:
Like I said, heads off to the engineering team, heads off to our CEO Dimitri. He himself has an engineering background, so he’s not like a business person, he’s not a marketing person, he’s an engineer, he’s a mathematician. So he studied mathematics in university, so he’s very smart, he’s very technical, he’s still very hands-on, he would look into things, he would code some of the things himself, he would dabble with technologies.
So yeah, Dimitri kind of understood from the start that it’s better to develop our own, and other than just building our own infrastructure and owning our data centers instead of renting them—well, we still rent a room in the data center, but the servers are ours, we build them, we maintain them, so it’s kind of like our data center, so to say.
But other than that, there’s a lot of work on the software part, because one thing is hardware infrastructure, another thing is basically you need to have a database that hosts the entire internet. There’s no kind of open-source solution for that, so we need to hack it all together.
Yeah, there’s a lot of engineering talent and we’ve been doing that for—Ahrefs I think is maybe 11 years old at this point, so I joined the company like three years after it started. So yeah, all those 11 years were spent figuring things out: how to crawl the entire web, how to store the entire web, how to be able to query our database of enormous size and be able to return you all those insights in seconds.
And when people say, “Oh, Ahrefs is down one day a week,” like, come on, we give you access to the entire internet, give us a chance to be down once in a while. It’s an enormous thing that we’re doing here and it all loads in seconds, it produces you insights in seconds.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, 12 years, 2011. So yeah, it’s like engineers. And this is the reason why there aren’t so many competitors in our space, especially when it comes to link, because there are some tools—for example, Neil Patel has Ubersuggest, it also gives you information about keywords, it gives you information about the traffic of the websites—but when it comes to link data, where you need to crawl the entire web and you have to crawl it consistently because new pages appear, old pages disappear, you have to pick up all those changes, so you not only have to crawl the entire web once, you have to recrawl it all the time to pick up all the changes. And this is a huge engineering feat.
And when I see people on Twitter saying, “Someone needs to build an Ahrefs competitor,” I’m like, “Good luck, guys,” as if it was that easy to do. This is why you see lots of rank tracking tools, this is why you see lots of keyword analysis or keyword generator tools, but not so many link indexes, because this is very, very hard to do—extremely hard to do.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, and just on that, I love that this is the direction that Ahrefs as a company is wanting to invest in its future, with scalability, with performance, with processing, and data management. Which sort of brings me to Yep.com. Like, I think with Yep.com, it’s a search engine, its focus is really on just supporting content creators, where a significant portion of its ad revenue—up to 90%—goes towards creators, to be able to really provide a fair and supportive ecosystem for people who do produce content online.
Just to sort of encapsulate this for people who maybe are not familiar with Yep.com and where you see its future, what was the sort of, I guess, driving considerations that you had behind creating your own search engine? And then I want to ask maybe some more questions around the revenue sharing details and the incentivization programs that you’ve set up as a competitor, really, to Google.

Tim Soulo:
Imagine this: you have the entire copy of the internet on your servers and you’re able to keep it fresh and you’re able to query it and get some results, but you don’t have a search engine. So I guess Dimitri, our CEO and founder, he just had this itch that half of the work is already done. We already have the copy of the internet on our servers and we have accomplished so many technical wonders there, and he just wanted to kind of push it further and try to create his own search engine, because all the data is—we already did half of the work, all the internet is already on our servers, we know how to update it, we know how to keep it fresh.
And because we’re an SEO tool, building a search engine and figuring out how to rank the best pages at the top helps us understand which tools and features and metrics we need to give to our customers for them to be successful with SEO in Google. So those two projects are extremely interconnected. They run on the same infrastructure, they use the same index of the web, and thanks to the search engine, we are digging deeper into all those technologies, we’re hiring a lot of data scientists who are playing around with language models, playing around with different open-source technologies for understanding topics, understanding entities, you name it.
And then whenever we implement something in the search engine and we see that this can be copy-pasted into Ahrefs, we just do this. So the way I’m explaining our search engine to our customers is that it is a research and development department of Ahrefs, because our search engine is where all the cool stuff is happening, so to say, all the cutting-edge technologies, all the smartest data scientists, they’re all involved in this project and they’re just working on the fringe, they’re working on a lot of things that have a dead end, so they would try to figure out and they just can’t, but sometimes they would figure it out and we would implement this.
So this is very cool. In terms of revenue sharing, it is still early to talk about this because the search engine isn’t generating any revenue, so there’s nothing to share. And right now we don’t have a goal to generate revenue with it. Like I said, it’s a research and development department, so we’re playing around with all the latest technologies and right now we need to figure out how to make it useful, how to make it unique, how to make it in a way complementary to Google.
Because a lot of people are thinking that we want to overtake Google with our search engine—well, that sounds silly, right? Overtaking Google—I mean, Microsoft tried it and they failed, but now Ahrefs will overtake Google? But DuckDuckGo still exists, they’re still growing, they have their audience, they have their market share. And again, we’re not in a hurry, we don’t have any deadlines or something, we can work on this search engine project, we can figure out interesting technologies, we can play around with hardware, with software, with open-source stuff, we can develop our own things until we figure something out where we can say, “Look, Google cannot do this and we can do this, so you can use us for that.”
And then we can start, I don’t know, promoting it, then we can start building audience, building user base, and then we can start monetizing it, and then we’re going to share the profits with people whose content we are using for our search engine. So yeah, we are not in a hurry. That’s not a priority—to promote the search engine, to make money with it. Priority is to experiment with cool tech and figure out something that we can do that no other search engine does, and I think we will be able to eventually do something like that.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, and I think that’s really, like, if you go on Yep.com and you start to play around with it and see what kind of results populate there, just right below the above fold you’ve got, like, “Try also searching on Google and Bing and DuckDuckGo,” as a way to sort of, you know, I guess share some of that.

Tim Soulo:
No, this is because we understand that our search engine is not perfect. This is why we don’t want to limit people to, like, if you didn’t find what you were looking for, go use Google. Like, we’re okay, because we’re not trapping people within our search engine because we know that right now it’s not perfect. Once we are more confident with the search results that we give people, we of course would be removing those things. But now, because some people are actually using Yep, we want to make sure that they have an easy way to go to Google if they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Nik Ranger:
Okay, so I have to ask, you’ve got your own search engine and you’ve got your own algorithms. Do you have a helpful content algorithm?

Tim Soulo:
That’s a great question about algorithms, and I guess this is another reason why building our own search engine helps us understand the search ecosystem better, because even at our level we don’t really know how our algorithm works. So there’s a machine learning model where we feed a bunch of parameters, like anchor text, like number of links, like number of keyword mentions, like the title of the page, you name it.
So again, like Google is saying they have, what, 200 ranking factors or something? We also have about 100 different parameters that we feed to the model, and then we grade if the search results are good or not. We have different ways to understand if the search results are good or not, and the model trains, it says, “Okay, I applied these parameters, how good are the search results? No, we’re not good, let me try different parameters.”
So in the end, engineers don’t really know what combination of parameters was used to give you these search results. We just know that the model has selected them because historically that combination for a keyword like that, it worked the best. Which is why I don’t see a point of asking Google engineers, “How does your algorithm work?” or “What is the weight of this factor?” They don’t know. They train AI, they train machine learning, and for different queries it would be completely different.
So they can, of course, tell you what these parameters are, what exactly they’re feeding to the machine learning models, but they cannot tell you how exactly those models end up applying those things.

Nik Ranger:
I think that’s a really, I think that definitely echoes things that we’ve heard from Google representatives.
So in terms of search quality and relevance, do you have something similar to Google Webmaster Guidelines—oh sorry, manual quality rater guidelines—where individual results are then used and tested to sort of tweak that a little bit?

Tim Soulo:
Yeah, internally we do have some things that we’re looking for, but again, this is all at a small scale right now. We have our kind of internal testing, our internal QA, and they’re looking into those things, but yeah, we’re still kind of in the infancy with all those things.
And as you can see, the entire search industry is now at an interesting point in time with AI, with chatbots, and all that stuff. So we don’t know where things would go from there, and we’re also experimenting with those technologies. So we’ll see what happens and we’ll try to adapt.

Peter Mead:
Yeah, okay, Tim. So I was wondering how long before the AI bomb would come into the conversation. Of course, lots of SEOs are really excited about the future of AI. I mean, I know as an SEO, AI is very helpful, but also lots of SEOs are actually quite terrified by the prospect that AI might take away the search engine per se, right?

Tim Soulo:
More excited. Well, we can—yeah, I mean, you know, there are all kinds of stuff, AGI coming, IBM’s got the great big new quantum computing supercomputer. There’s just so—I think this explosion of technology is coming, and I just don’t know. Tim, do you have a crystal ball where you can look into?

Tim Soulo:
No, no, I won’t be one of those people who seem to have all the answers or opinions. I genuinely don’t know. So I’m in the position where I’m observing stuff, I am attentively observing what is happening and trying to kind of react as fast as I can, because I’m not only doing marketing for Ahrefs, I’m also heavily involved in the product. I am kind of an author of many of the features that you see in Ahrefs today.
And again, we’ve been asked this question internally in our company meetup, some people were asking, “What happens to Ahrefs if Google changes their model of displaying search results?” And my answer is, because we have so many experienced and smart marketers on our own marketing team, I feel that we’ll be able to—because marketing will still exist, digital marketing will still exist regardless of how Google behaves, how they would show search results, and what changes in Twitter, what changes in LinkedIn, blah blah blah. Digital marketing would still exist, and digital marketing professionals would still need some software tools and some data to help them make decisions, to help them get confidence in their decisions.
And I’m quite confident in our ability, in the ability of our marketing team and engineering team, to pivot and figure out, like, if search changes like this, we should be able to come up with ideas of how we can help our customers leverage the way that search has changed. So I don’t know what would happen, but I like to think that we’re going to figure it out.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, this is a little bit about what we were chatting about in Singapore, particularly around reporting and attribution. But to maybe follow on from Peter’s question, maybe not a crystal ball, but from creating the search engine and being on the front lines of products and rolling out features, what have been some things that have surprised you from creating the search engine and seeing results that has sort of led back to enriching or enhancing or tweaking some of the features that are available on Ahrefs?

Tim Soulo:
First of all, I’m afraid I’m not as involved in building the search engine because work that is happening there is extremely technical. I don’t have the kind of knowledge and experience to be able to look into it and say, “How about we do this?” No, it’s very high-level from the technical perspective, so I’m not very involved there.
But I can give you one example of the feature that appeared in Ahrefs because we needed that for the search engine. So we started storing the full content of the pages—both HTML content and text content—the history of it, which is why for almost any page, if that page is popular enough, we have a lot of historical snapshots, kind of like the web archive.
So what you can do is you can simply compare different versions of any page. So if you see that your competitor suddenly started outranking you, you can open their page, you can go a few weeks back, and you can compare the content of their page and you can see what they changed on their page. So this has become possible because we were investing in our infrastructure and because we started saving both the HTML content and text content because we needed that for the search engine. And now, within our main product, we kind of have a copy of archive.org.

Nik Ranger:
Wow, that’s—from a technical perspective, sorry, I know on the question, please. I was just going to make more of a comment here and I’ll divert the next question to you, Peter. But from a technical aspect, having a case of HTML snapshots that is sequential in time is so, so useful to be able to go back and say, this change was made and this had its requisite impact, and we can be able to track that and have at least some timestamp as we can literally see here, on this date the HTML presented is this, on this date this is the change, and this is now the impacts that we can now make comments on.
And for a lot of the time, from a technical perspective, that is really challenging to do, so that’s a really, really great thing that I think has resulted from a lot of this work. I will divert the question to you—sorry, I’m just coming off the back of what you said, because this idea of crawling, you know, of course, in SEO we’re always talking about crawling, indexing, rendering, this kind of thing. But the perception is that that’s actually quite expensive to do, it’s quite expensive to crawl, to render, to store the HTML, to store all that data, and then data retrieval as well is—so, I mean, this is quite significant, that work there, Tim.

Tim Soulo:
Yeah, the prices are very high. And for example, we are now also training our own language models, because obviously there are some language models that are trained by companies like OpenAI, Meta, etc. But for example, if you want to use ChatGPT within your product, you have to pay for their API, and the more customers you have, the higher your expenses would be for their API.
But for some simple things, for example, I want to generate a list of synonyms for a given word, you don’t really need a sophisticated language model to do that. So paying to ChatGPT to perform simple tasks like this one doesn’t necessarily make sense. But because we have the infrastructure and because we have the engineering team, we are going to train our own language models, which means that costs of performing some simple tasks of that kind for us would be peanuts.
So we would be able to essentially offer them for people even for free, so we would be able to launch free tools that do some interesting but simple AI tasks. So yeah, this is just one of the examples of how our infrastructure and engineering team, both of which are thanks to our search engine, what kind of things they would allow us to do in the next few years.

Nik Ranger:
Wow, absolutely amazing. Nik, do you have—I mean, I’ve just, I’ve seen that you do already have some free tools on offer, some AI writing-related tools on offer. Do you, maybe Nik, do you have thoughts around that—the artificial generative, that kind of stuff? How does that, I mean, is it helpful? Are we going to generate our meta descriptions? Is that something that we’re going down this track?

Nik Ranger:
I think absolutely. I think APIs can be able to pull a whole range of different data sources that we can leverage generative AI to be able to build into natural language to be able to present that in an automated way that makes it interesting. But that being said, and there are sites that sort of do programmatic SEO, but a tweet from John Mu, I think, also highlights the fine line between doing a strategy like that in which it’s very much seen as spam, which is why I think, you know, going back to the Ahrefs blog and how they’ve used subject matter experts and facilitated this with Google E-E-A-T—expertise, experience, authority, trust signals—for their site, I think that’s a really, really great model for a lot of people with websites out there that are sort of a little bit ambiguous as to whether these guidelines are going to be impactful.
As we’ve seen with search generative experience that’s going to be live globally, if Google keeps a timeline of February of next year, this is very much going to be a huge factor. As we can see, you know, I love that Ahrefs has said it’s much easier to get a knowledge panel on Yep than Google—true. But I think, you know, leveraging this and leveraging a lot of where we can be able to have more authoritative sources and site citations now start to really play in the spaces, particularly with the way that they’re picking and choosing different results, which is, I think, something that is really, really impactful for anyone to consider.
A question maybe going back to Tim, which is judged from the comment section. Hans Naps said, you know, you saved $900 million overall, but how much did you actually spend? Like, what does that ratio look like in comparison to one another?

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Tim Soulo:
That’s—again, we saved $900 million by not going to cloud, and I believe that is the statistics from our big data page. So if you Google for Ahrefs big data, you’ll find our big data page, and the statistics is taken from there. And if I am not mistaken, there’s a link to an article that we published on Medium—or rather, our tech team, because our engineers are also blogging once in a while and they have some interesting content for engineers.
So if you are interested in server costs and this kind of stuff, the article is pretty detailed, it explains, I believe it explains what kind of bandwidth we’re looking for, what kind of computing power we are looking for, and how was the calculation done. So the article goes into quite some specifics of what we have, what it would cost in the cloud. I believe that article at a certain point was ranking at the top of Hacker News and a lot of people were discussing it. So yeah, just read the article. I don’t know the details, I’m not an engineer, so I cannot say how much we’re spending.
Yeah, so I think if you hover over that question mark under $900 million, there would be a “learn more” link forwarding you to the article with all the details of how much we’re spending on our infrastructure.

Peter Mead:
Okay, so the numbers are there. I mean, this page is quite impressive—14.4 billion pages in your index size. So that’s quite significant, and I’m sure you do get these kinds of questions when you’re at conferences, because you do go to quite a lot of conferences and sponsoring conferences and speaking at them.
So I’m just really interested in, you know, Tim Soulo as the CMO, how does that strategy of conferences, how does that play into Ahrefs’ success in general?

Tim Soulo:
It’s hard to tell because marketing attribution is pretty much impossible. And historically, we’ve been a self-served platform, so it’s not like we were converting any enterprise leads at those conferences. And to be honest, it’s only last year that we’ve ramped up our presence at conferences, both as speakers and as sponsors.
I think last year we sponsored about 20 different conferences around the world, to a different degree. With some conferences, we were actually speakers there, we had our booth there, we had lots of branding like roll-ups or lanyards, things like that. With some other sponsor conferences, it was more minimalistic—we would maybe have a roll-up and a bunch of brochures and flyers to give away, and that would be it.
And before that—so that was 2023—and before that, for almost two years, there was COVID, which meant almost no conferences at all, with the exception of online conferences. So, and before that, we sponsored maybe three or four conferences per year, and it was mostly to meet with our customers, to give out some swag, to get those personal conversations going, and to present something from stage.
So right now we’ve been working quite a bit to develop our enterprise offering. We’ve expanded our platform quite a bit towards big teams, towards enterprises, towards large marketing teams with lots of users, where they can have different projects, they can share permissions to different projects, and we started going upmarket, which is why we now have sales at our booth, and those sales are looking for kind of qualified customers, and we finally have a CRM where we’re adding those qualified customers and we’re continuing conversations with them.
And we are now seeing the value of sponsoring conferences from the enterprise perspective, because we still believe that things like awareness, things like personal connections, talking to people, being on stage—they are helping our kind of self-serve model, where people just come to our website, sign up by themselves without talking to anyone.
But to get bigger deals, to get enterprise clients, you have to meet people, you have to talk to them, you have to establish connections, and for that, traveling around the world, going to conferences, and actually talking to people, that helps a lot. But we are still in the infancy here, so I don’t have any numbers for you in terms of even which of the conferences were the most lucrative for us, we’re just starting it out. But so far it looks pretty promising.
Again, I think what helps us a lot is that we have this brand that is already trusted in the SEO community. It’s like the other day I was talking to a marketing manager from Cloudflare in the Asia Pacific region here in Singapore, and he was also telling me that Cloudflare obviously sells a lot to big enterprise customers, but he says that what helps a lot with getting the foot in the door is their brand. So everyone knows Cloudflare already, and I believe their lowest package starts at $20 per month or something like that, so you can also sign up for it yourself for your blog or your little website, and then those people might be working at larger companies and they would help to get in touch with leadership and help to get those big enterprise deals.
So I think in our case it also helps a lot that for so many years we’ve been building our brand, we’ve been building a big community of people, a big community of fans, so right now it is much easier for us to land enterprise deals, because in almost every big company where we want to sell a high-ticket account, we would have fans who would tell their boss, “Yeah, Ahrefs is the tool we need to buy, don’t even hesitate, just take them.”

Nik Ranger:
Well, that’s certainly—I mean, enterprise is a different category to your normal user base. I mean, Nik, you’ve had lots of enterprise experience. What are your thoughts, perhaps?

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, how would you think of this, per se, in terms of—I think with using Ahrefs, well, I’m a—you know, we pretty much have the largest account you can possibly have with Ahrefs, and we’re always constantly finding the ceiling of the API, so I guess we would be considered power users.
And we run this with a whole bunch of different things, different projects that we run—a lot of that is with machine learning, hence why we always are finding the ceiling even at the enterprise level of the account.
The thing that I think—so this is your strategy for 2024 and beyond, you know, really want to get out there on the ground and sort of guerrilla marketing and strengthening brand relationships and being there front-facing with the customer.
So maybe I want to direct the next question from a customer perspective: what are some really exciting things that are going to be released within the Ahrefs tool that you’re really looking forward to rolling out for 2024, if there’s any sneak peeks that we can be able to look forward to?

Tim Soulo:
One of the cool features that I’m looking forward to personally is that—we all know that backlink data is noisy. As soon as you browse the backlink report of any website or URL, you’ll see lots of low-quality backlinks there. This is why we have so many data points, like what’s the DR of the linking website, what’s the traffic of the linking website, what’s the traffic of the linking page, how many external links does the linking page have, is it coming from a subdomain, is it coming from content.
So we actually counted—for every URL in our database, we have 68 data points that you can use to sort and filter and find the needle in the haystack, so to say.
And then we realize that what our customers do when browsing our backlinks report, they activate five to six to seven filters to be able to filter out, “Okay, I just need dofollow links, I need to exclude links from subdomains, I need to exclude links from domains that get zero traffic,” blah blah blah.
So we’re now working on implementing a sitewide smart filter where basically you configure it once, you put in all the filtering options that help you to filter out the low-quality, noisy links, and it would be applied across Ahrefs. So whenever you’re browsing a website and you see those graphs of how backlinks are growing, or you go to different reports like what are the best pages by links, or which websites are linking to you, and that filter would be implemented everywhere.
So it would be a very handy feature to save you time and to make you focused on links that matter, not the generic syndicated spam that the internet is rife with. So hopefully we’re going to release this maybe even by the end of this year, and I’m really looking forward to that one.

Nik Ranger:
Oh, that’s really, really cool, because of course the things you can do with Ahrefs is you can check the backlink growth or decline over time with daily granularity, you can inspect the backlinks and the source code, and a whole range of other things.
And I love that this is really where you’re wanting to go and start to tweak tools and have more of a personalization for each of the accounts, and that’s something that other tools like Screaming Frog have implemented—thank you, Screaming Frog, that’s very handy.
Would you sort of take that maybe in the future one step further even and say, you can have different saved configurations and you can save different types of things and say, “Okay, today we’re going to be doing reporting for this type of client, this type of client, and this type of client, we just now apply different settings of configuration to suit different report types”?

Tim Soulo:
Yeah, yeah. We basically call it filter presets. So you’ll have presets for different use cases, and instead of every time you work with—for example, you work with e-commerce websites and you use one set of filters to help you find what you’re looking for, or you work with content websites and you use a different set of filters.
So yeah, we plan to introduce those presets to help people save time and get to where they want easier. And as you were speaking, I remembered another cool tool that we’re working on, which is kind of enhanced with AI.
So this is more for people who are doing international SEO, because when you need to translate your website to different languages and translate your content to different languages, you also need to do keyword research in different languages.
So something that our team right now is working on—we take a list of keywords that you want to target in English and we ask AI to translate them into a different language. But here’s the key curve: you can basically put those keywords in, I don’t know, Google Translate, and it would translate them for you, but AI can be smarter than that. You can ask AI to list all terms which this keyword can be translated into.
So you have one keyword—for example, I know that the term “backlinks” in Ukrainian has two or three different ways how people say it. So “backlinks” in Ukrainian would give you three options of how you can translate it. So yeah, this would be a report where every word is being matched to the variations of how it can be said in a different language. So again, this is one of the features that are coming soon.

Nik Ranger:
Oh, that’s impressive. Does it have additional contextual things next to those translations to help non-native speakers to make assessments? Like, if there’s two different ways to say the word “backlinks,” I would imagine that would be for different situations.
Dawn Anderson does a really great analogy for this—when you’ve got a word that has multiple different contexts. So does it have the word and maybe a little bit of a helpful guide to be able to select the right one?

Tim Soulo:
That’s a good idea. Unfortunately, not yet, we didn’t think about it, and this is—I’m excited about it, though.
This is the beauty of those one-on-one conversations with people, because then you come up with interesting things that our team didn’t think of. So yeah, right now we’ll just evaluate those keyword variations by search volume. We’ll check, like, if those—for example, if we’re translating from English to Spanish and we’re giving a few variations of how people in Spanish would say this kind of thing, we’ll just append the search volume if we have it, because these variations are coming from AI, they are not coming from our keyword database.
So then we’ll check if we have search volume for this keyword or not, and then you’ll see which are the more popular ways to say something. And overall, this functionality kind of implies that you have to understand the language to which you’re translating, too, because I cannot do international SEO in Spanish because I don’t know Spanish, so how do I know what we’re writing about?
So that feature was suggested by our Spanish marketer who does marketing for Ahrefs in Spanish language, because he needed that. He’s translating a lot of our content, a lot of our resources in Spanish, and he just—he has to do a lot of that manually, he needs to input a keyword and he has to look for variation and understand which variations he could use. So he pitched this idea and the product team was like, “Oh, that’s actually pretty cool, let’s do it.”
So yeah, we eat a lot of our dog food and we actually come up with our own dog food, what we want to eat, so we make our own menu.

Nik Ranger:
Speaking of—that’s not, no, that’s not dog food, that’s—this is actually maybe in the Fallout universe where dog food is actually beneficial for you.
I mean, this is a great book. I’ve been referring to this, it’s helped me with some conversations with some clients, you know, for beginners. So what was the idea behind that, Tim? Was it another opportunity?

Tim Soulo:
Yeah, it’s not an opportunity, it’s more so inspiration. So some five years ago, we were using Intercom as a company for quite a while—everyone knows Intercom, right? So some five years ago, I was browsing their website and I saw that they have created their own hardcover book—I think it’s called Intercom on Starting Up, something like that.
I ordered this book—I don’t remember if it was just like I pay for shipping and the book is free or the book was also paid, I don’t remember that one—but I ordered this book because it was from Intercom, it looked very well-designed, and it seemed to be—I just enjoyed content on their blog, so I ordered it.
And when it arrived, it was basically same quality as this one, and as I was holding it in my hands and I was experiencing this kind of physical connection with the brand that I appreciated, I thought to myself, one day I’m going to do this kind of book for Ahrefs. So basically, this is a kind of like stolen idea or inspired idea, and the inspiration—the thing is, I reached out to the folks at Intercom and I asked them which printing company they used to print their book because I enjoyed the quality so much. They connected me with that company and we printed our book in the same place where they printed theirs.
So I went as far as copying the exact company that they used for their book. So yeah, it’s not that there’s a strategy behind publishing this book. In a lot of the things that I do as a marketer, I look at myself and how I react to things, and because I was kind of in awe from receiving this book, I enjoyed having kind of a physical representation of this brand on my shelf, I like to sit on the couch and just read from a book and not from a computer screen for a change.
I decided I want the customers and fans of Ahrefs to have this kind of experience that I had with the Intercom book. So as simple as that. It worked on me, so I figured it should probably work on someone else, and I see that people are genuinely enjoying the book.
And again, we invested a lot of effort to make it beautiful. It’s a souvenir, because for people like you, you already know all the information that’s in the book. This is the book for beginners, but it’s so beautiful, it’s a souvenir, it looks nice on your shelf, and if you search YouTube for Ahrefs Book, you’ll see our advertisement, and it’s very funny because it says nothing about the content of the book, but it says how beautiful it is and how stylish it is. So yeah, it’s a souvenir.

Peter Mead:
Wow, we’re out of time, Tim. Unfortunately, we’re out of time because I could just see how passionate you are about this kind of marketing, and I mean, it works. But thank you so much for sharing today, and Nik Ranger, thanks so much for the conversation. So, so happy to find out a bit more about the inside workings of Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs.

Tim Soulo:
Thank you, guys, it’s been a pleasure.

Nik Ranger:
Yeah, thanks everyone so much, and thank you so much to you, Peter, for hosting this awesome fireside chat. Shout out to Duda, and shout out to Anon for putting this on. Please like, subscribe, hit the notification bell for any new videos that come up. There’s a wonderful library of fantastic videos, so go reward that with a comment and with some continued subscription to Duda. Thank you so much.

Peter Mead:
Awesome, thank you, and we’ll see you at a conference soon. Woo!