As part of my “SaaS vs SEO” Interview Series, I’m talking to founders and marketers on all things SEO, content, and growth for SaaS companies.
“We have zero flexibility with the topics we write about.”
Hello! Can you give us a little introduction and background on yourself and what you are working on?
My name is Si Quan (SQ for short) and I am currently working as a Customer Success & Marketing Manager at Ahrefs.
Why did you decide to use SEO to attract users and grow your product and what results did you achieve?
We’re an SEO tool, and so it was pretty natural for us to use SEO as a key marketing channel. It also allowed us to dogfood our own product, and figure out issues with our product (because we were using it ourselves to do SEO!)
Right now, according to our tool, we’re receiving about 406,000 visitors a month from organic traffic.
In what phase of the business lifecycle have you started your blog and when did you start to see a significant ROI from it?
I think the blog was around since the beginning (i.e when the product was launched). However, there wasn’t anyone who was responsible for its success (there wasn’t a marketing team then).
About 3 years ago, the team was following blogging best practices and publishing 3 articles per week. However, traffic was plateauing. It was only after Tim Soulo (our CMO) joined when the blog really started picking up.
He decided to focus on quality over quantity and that has been the real difference.
Here’s a nice case study about this: https://ahrefs.com/blog/increase-blog-traffic/
What’s been working well for you and why (with SEO)?
Our biggest marketing channel has been word-of-mouth. And I think it’s because we genuinely try to make one of the best products on the market.
Because of that, plenty of people link to our tools and our posts because they like what we do. They love our product, they’re our customers, they like the content we produce and they’re happy to link to us anytime.
If you check out the Best by links report in Ahrefs, you’ll see that the pages that get the most links (besides the homepage) are our tools.
Besides that, for our blog, we only write about topics that have search potential. We don’t follow the latest trends, we don’t write about whatever that interests us. We have zero flexibility with the topics we write about.
We ONLY publish posts with organic search traffic potential. (These topics are found via keyword research.)
And once we have a list of keyword ideas, we prioritize them by ” business potential”. Here’s a simple scale we use.
“3” — our product is an irreplaceable solution for the problem that people want to solve;
“2” — our product helps quite a bit, but it’s not essential to solving the problem;
“1” — our product can only be mentioned fleetingly (mostly for “brand awareness,” rather than a “sales pitch”);
“0” — there’s absolutely no way to mention our product.
And lastly, we focus on the quality, uniqueness, and authority of our content. We spend a lot of time creating it, and never publish anything less than great.
What have you tried that hasn’t worked very well (with SEO)?
To be honest, not anything I can remember.
What kind of link building or promotion have you tried if any?
Some of the link building projects we do are guest blogging, unlinked mentions, and just pure outreach.
We also do plenty of repurposing. Our blog articles get turned into videos for our YouTube channel (and vice versa). These articles and videos also get turned into content for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Quora.
We also spend money on Facebook Ads to promote our content.
Have you ever hired any external SEO help? If so, How did that go?
Not that I know of.
What would you like to know more about regarding SEO that you currently don’t know?
For me personally, the technical aspects of SEO.
Is there anything I can help promote for you? Any other places where readers can find out more about what you do or just get in touch with you?
They can check out Ahrefs, the Ahrefs blog, and the Ahrefs YouTube channel.