106: Tim Soulo On Ahrefs Growth, Their Search Engine & Being a DJ

On today’s episode!

* How Tim went from being a DJ, to CMO at Ahrefs

* The Story (and an update!) on The Ahrefs Search Engine

* How Tim earned 200+ backlinks on one piece of content on his personal blog

* How Ahrefs Estimates Traffic Numbers

* The SEO mistake they made when trying to rank for “what is SEO”

* And Tim answers your questions from Twitter

Listen Now!

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Show Agenda and Timestamps

Episode Introduction and topic overview [0:22]

Tim’s Introduction [0:53]

Twitter Question: Abhi Kurve – I’d love to hear Tim talk about his early career days and his journey in general–From a DJ to SEO. [1:10]

Tim’s Bloggerjet website & Guest Post ROI post [4:37]

Tim’s work at Ahrefs [9:41]

How did Tim start with Ahrefs [10:51]

Tim’s role at Ahrefs  [13:42]

Twitter questions – 1. Marie Haynes- I’d love to hear more about how they grew their business.  2. Frank Olivio – They’ve seen tremendous organic growth with their blog the last couple years. I’m interested in how that has affected their sales and if any specific post formats have driven more conversions than others. (Also Tim’s course giveaway) [22:15]

Recommendations for lesser known websites on how to attract attention [26:46]

What did Ahrefs do to grow their YouTube Channel to over 50,000 subscribers [29:48]

Search Engine that Ahrefs is creating versus Google [37:30]

Twitter Question – Richard – Has this happened yet? Would be interested to hear their early phase plans on competing with Google search – do they have a goal of x% of market share in [the] first couple of years? [41:49]

What will make it a better search engine experience for the users? [43:05]

Twitter Question – Omar Ortiz – I’d like to hear his thoughts on Google ranking entities and on all the Google issues over the past couple of months (e.g. deindexing, what they are seeing from a ranking perspective because of it, etc) [45:40]

Jeremy Rivera – How they’re looking at organic CTR in their “Estimate” projections for traffic at different ranking positions, are those static numbers or are they dynamically adjusted? [46:25]

When can people expect to see an Ahrefs search engine prototype? [50:29]

Twitter Question- AntBorgarin – which criteria they follow in order to group similar keywords [51:57]

How should people leave feedback on the Ahrefs tool? [54:00]

How does Tim think about Ahrefs in the market and how to grow traffic further? [54:53]

What did they learn from their “What Is SEO” post when it didn’t rank well? [58:45]

How did Tim get on the Smart Passive Income podcast? [1:01:36]

Where the listeners can find Tim online [1:03:09]

Tools Mentioned

Ahrefs- https://ahrefs.com/team

Awesome Screenshot – https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/

Jumpshot- https://www.jumpshot.com/

Articles, Resources, and Links Mentioned

Twitter Questions- https://twitter.