Philippe Gamache  0:07  
What's up, guys, welcome to the humans of martech podcast. His name is Jon Taylor. My name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing, what's up everyone today, we have the pleasure of sitting down with Sam Oh, VP of Marketing at Ahrefs. As a fresh Toronto grad out of university, Sam started a service based e commerce site and got into black hat SEO. He grew traffic to his site, and eventually sold it. And this led Sam to retire briefly before experimenting with niche sites. He had one of those also acquired. And he also built an Amazon and eBay business where he would buy pallets of return goods from big merchandise stores, and started a refurbishing center and reselling those goods online while sharpening his SEO skills, he founded money journal, where he published long form guides to help entrepreneurs grow their traffic and drive revenue. This naturally led to him to co founding a successful SEO and digital agency. But after a while, he was on kid number two and realized he wanted to leave the hustle lifestyle a little bit. He tried to get Ahrefs as a client for his agency by applying for a job and trying to turn it into a contract basis. But in the end, they won out and turned Sam into an employee. He started without a title at first, and was just asked to create educational content videos, and he turned that into a Director of Product education role, and today, Sam is VP of Marketing at Ahrefs. Thanks so much for your time today, Sam really pumped to have you on. Thanks

Sam Oh  1:42  
for having me. I feel like you guys are like spying on my life. This

Philippe Gamache  1:48  
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Sam Oh  4:03  
yeah, I think I was like, like, there are many facets to the decision, and I think part of it is that, like, I kind of got sick of the hustle and grind and so, like, from my first company, e commerce site, like, I like working with new things and, like figuring out solving problems, and that site was going well. And yeah, like, I was basically ready for a seven figure exit and and then I got smashed with Penguin, which was a fun little experience there for me, and a nice little learning experience. But yeah, like, I basically, like, took some time off and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And so I was just like, trying new things. That's why I wanted to niche sites and like marketplace businesses, like eBay was all the rage, Amazon, FBA was all the rage. And I was like, you know, does this actually work? All right? Well, like, let me try it. And so I figured things out I would turn into a somewhat profitable company. And then, you. I think it's just like we had our second child, and like, I was working like, maybe 16 hour days, 1617, hour days, and I was, like, going through this, like, quarter life crisis. Like, you know, is this what life is like? Is this what I'm gonna be doing all the time? Like, am I gonna have time to watch my kids grow up, to coach them in their sports teams or whatever, or am I just going to be focused on making money? And then it came to that point where I was trying to get Ahrefs as a client, and, yeah, like, Tim and I were just talking and, like, negotiating for like, eight months, and then we're just like, like, let's try this. And I still held on to my agency because I didn't know what's going to happen. Yeah, happen. And yeah, things just went really, really well. And Ahrefs is a little bit of a different company I feel, where they have given me, like, full autonomy over the things that I do, and, like, pretty much all creative control. I just have much bigger budgets now than I than I had before. And so in many, in many times I feel like Ahrefs is my company, but clearly it's not, but it's like they just treat like they give you ownership of those of those areas, and as long as you're able to execute like there's, there's really no questions or anything like that.

Jon Taylor  6:17  
Something you said earlier around the Penguin update, you know, smashing your site. This is something that is very familiar in SEO land, as some algorithm comes down the pipe, some experimental feature all SEOs, it seems like rush towards this new thing, but I'm busy enough. Like, as an SEO consultant, I'm so busy doing SEO, I can't keep up with all these updates. Like, I'm trying my best, of course, to keep up with what's new and what's fresh. But like, what's been working in SEO seems to be always, kind of continuing to work, like, the white hot stuff that we do. How on earth do you recommend that listeners and people like me keep up on all these changes?

Sam Oh  6:54  
Very honestly, I don't think you need to, like, if you keep your head down and, like, keep your head in your work and it's working for you. Like, why do you need to know about every about every single update that's happening? Just keep doing what you're doing, and then when shit hits the fan, if it does, then at that point that it might be worth looking into what happens. Like, obviously, if you're doing things that are like, for example, like, if you're just, like, buying links at scale, and you already know that that's against Google's webmaster guidelines or spam policies, or whatever it's called. Now, yeah, like, you should know what's going on, because you're intentionally trying to kind of get around their, like, their rules. But for the average person, like, if you're doing technical SEO and like, you're not, you're basically working on the technical side of things with, like, internal linking or or crawling, or, like, whatever it might be. I don't think you need to keep up with everything. Is it helpful to know? Yeah, but I don't think that you need to worry. And just like, with things like chat GPT, like, people go crazy and they start creating, like, crazy noise. Like, if you're a lawyer, you're gonna lose your job tomorrow. And then, like, some people start panicking and stuff. And like, you know, the the intern that just started their job is like, did I, like, go to school for the wrong thing? Did I get the wrong career path? But it's like, you know, like, we got to learn to to avoid the noise and feel like that's important.

Jon Taylor  8:18  
I think that folks within the industry like to kind of relish in the death of SEO. Like I feel like, in my career as an SEO, people have always delighted in telling me how soon SEO is going to die. And I think that there's something in the industry and maybe you can address this. Of like, there are the people who do SEO every day with like, the white hat tactics, the technical SEO, the great content, like these truths are probably going to stay, you know, objectively true for the course of the internet. However, there is a section, a subsection, of SEOs who are always on the latest thing, doing black hat tactics, giving the rest of us of a bad name. What do you think about this? I do think, you know, do you think SEOs got a lifeline? You know? Do we have an expiry date now with AI, where do you land on this?

Sam Oh  9:11  
So I don't think that SEO is gonna die as an industry anytime soon. Basically, like, if there's an index and it needs to be sorted, like SEO is going to be around, like, people need to do that, whether it's Google, whether it's YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit, like, in the end, they all have search features, and people are optimizing for that, right? Like, being an SEO you know that Reddit has had like, insane traffic that has happened over the past many months now, and so now people are like, there are spammers now that are abusing Reddit, but then there's also people that are optimizing for Reddit SEO, whatever that might be, for however long that might last. So I don't think it's going away anytime soon. As for the people who just, like, want SEO to die, like, I feel like there's this on like, everything. Like, even with the stock market, there's bulls and there's bears and, like, if you read some of the comments, like, on some of these forums, it's hilarious. Like, people are trying to, like, get you to sell, sell, sell. Like, crashing, coming. But it's just like, whatever their purpose, like, whatever their motivation is. Like, I don't really know, for some people, I understand because, like, people are complaining that Google search results are getting worse, part of that is because of copycat content. And from the perspective of an SEO we're thinking about search intent, like Google is telling us that searchers want to see a tutorial here, but like, a tutorial on how to do keyword research, which is targeting mostly beginners, like, so you can't really get into the advanced tactics and stuff. Like, everyone ends up just kind of slightly copying each other. It's just told in different ways, and that's to actually rank, because if you can't match intent, then you're not going to rank. And so people are like, Why am I seeing all the same stuff? Why am I not seeing something interesting? But everything is just copycat, and so they think that it's the SEOs fault, like blame whoever you want, whether that's Google, whether that's the SEO, whether it's the black hat or the white hat or the gray hat, or whoever. But it's just the way that the game is played right now. And like, SEOs are just doing their job. Their job is to help Google understand that their result, that their page, is the best result for a given query. And so, like, there are rules that we play by. There are rules that people bend. And yeah, like, I understand why some people who don't know what SEO is and how it works, like, why they would hate it, because they they're stuck to that stigma. But, yeah, it's here to stay for as for as long as I think, I don't think that, like we're being replaced tomorrow, like lawyers,

Philippe Gamache  11:57  
yeah, despite this, like, ongoing claim that SEO is dead. If you look at, you know, Google's user base, how many people are still using search? Like, it's remained pretty flat. There hasn't been major changes to it in the last year or so that, like, we've had this AI hype cycle, so to speak. But I wanted to ask you, like, considering this, like flat usage, how should content marketers and SEOs adapt in this, like aI age, where this idea of, like, creating informational content possibly is starting to change the game for a lot of SaaS companies, right? Like you require technically less writers and potentially more editors. You know, there used to be a world, I think you came up around this time also where, like, you'd be able to, like, assign $1 to the writers that you're adding on your team. Because you know that if you're ranking for this keyword, and you have certain amount of articles for that, and a writer can create X amount of articles per month. Those articles have this average of conversion rate, and they're driving this dollar. So like you could assign a number to content writers, but it's such a different game today with chatgpt, or a lot of the folks are thinking about this differently because the scale of creating informational content, where chatgpt is pretty okay, like not story based or emotional based content, but yeah, just curious. Your thoughts there on this idea of potentially a world where we start to have less writers, less content folks, less SEOs, and more editors that are editing SEO based content like, what advice do you have for content marketers and SEOs listening, and how can they future proof their careers in this world?

Sam Oh  13:51  
Yeah, so a lot to unpack there, I think, with with content marketers and the idea of future proofing. Ryan law, who, who works at the hrefs, he wrote an article recently called, I think it was like how to stand out in a sea of AI content or something like that. And I agree with his, his three, his three core points, which I believe were effort, experience and experimentation. And I think that was kind of his idea of, like, this is how you can kind of stand out. And I stand by that. So when we're talking about informational content, like we talked about it just earlier, is a lot of it is naturally going to be the same. Like, how much like information gain really is there on a topic, like, how to tie a tie, like, how are you going to change someone's life? Compared to the way that the other 10 to 3000 results are saying the same thing, like, how to tie a wins or not? Like, we all know how to do that. But I think where, where effort really comes in here is understanding who. User is and what they really want to see. So for us, at least for myself, at Ahrefs, when I first started creating videos, like, one of the things that I put a ton of effort into for like, three years, like, I was relentless about flow and about, like, simplifying concepts, because, like, people look at SEO and they're like, That's complicated. Like, that's computer science. And like, you know, it's not as complicated as it has to be. And when you do that, you make something like SEO, which is, yeah, again, something that people look at as complicated. You make it more accessible to the general public. And people keep coming back, because now they're learning they're trying things. They're like this actually makes sense to me for the very first time, like I've tried to learn this for 10 years, but now it makes sense. The same can be said for things like budgeting or personal finance, like things that people are interested in and everyone should care about, to a certain extent. So I feel like effort can be done in many ways as for like experimentation. Recently, for our more recent YouTube videos, I've kind of pivoted from like tutorials, because I feel like I've I've said everything that I need to say, like anyone can can look at our tutorials, and they can learn SEO, and they can get hundreds of 1000s, millions of visits, if they're able to execute on what's taught there. Like, nothing is revolutionary. Like, it's been very much been the same for the past, like, 15 years that I've been an SEO but now I'm getting into experimentation, and the effort is there in trying to do storytelling. And so now I'm trying different tests. I'm sharing how that works in somewhat of a story format. And I feel like, and actually like, if you look at our latest videos, the last few where there were more, like experimental have done significantly better. Like, retention is much better. More people are interested, and, and, yeah, so that's kind of working out there. What was it so effort, experimentation and experience, and so I think that the experimentation or the experience comes with the experimentation. And like, people are afraid to get things wrong. But like, if you want to get good at anything, you have to get it wrong more than you get it right. Like, you just got to put in your reps and, like, if you're, like, putting in this content, and you're taking, like, hours and hours and days and days to write this masterful piece of content, like, and if this is especially like, your first year of writing content, I promise you that, like, months later, a year later, you're going to look back and be like, this is terrible, like, no matter how good you thought it was, and it's just because, like, if you look at each whatever content you're creating. So for me, I do mostly videos now. So when I create a video, I always look back at that video, the retention graph, and I see where people are dropping off. I try and make guesses, like, why are people dropping off here? And then the next video, I just try and make it 5% better, 10% better. What was it that made like, all of a sudden? Like, this graph, I guess from here, it goes like this, and then it just goes like this. Like, what made this happen? Then I'll go and I'll watch that, and I'll, like, obsessively, like, discuss with people, like, what is going on in this one area? Why are people dropping off here? Oh, I just drag things on too long. Okay, let's cut that down next time, or let's try and rework this thing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but each time, it's progressively getting better. And I feel like that's kind of like, it's the compound effect of effort, and like, through that effort, gain experience. And so I feel like those, those three things are like, not just future proofing in content marketing, but like future proofing in your career, wherever you might be, is that I feel like, yeah, you can. It's underrated to try. And I feel like a lot of people just go and just try meet status quo, fly under the radar and and, yeah, so that that's how I feel like it would work? Well,

Jon Taylor  19:01  
yeah, your your YouTube channel, and for all of our listeners, they got to check it out. Like, the Ahrefs YouTube channel is packed full of great information for folks getting set up with SEO. But I also think, like I was watching your one of your recent videos where you're taking Tiktok influencer tips and then testing those out. Like, not only is it entertaining? It's, it's actually really informative. It's, it's a good way to gut check things. I want to kind of go back a little bit around this idea of SEO is dead, and the way that folks might perceive of it, the way you were talking about SEO there, particularly around the expert experiment, a mental kind of aspect of things, I feel like the actual skill set for a lot of top tier SEOs isn't creating content that ranks. Obviously, that's a core part of what we do, but is understanding what people want to find when they're searching for content. Now you're doing a great job of this on YouTube. The Ahrefs blog is a fantastic resource and. Maybe you could unpack a little bit of that for for listeners, like, how can they see SEOs and what SEOs do in a broader picture around content ideation, I guess what I'm I'm trying to tie a connected.in between the work that you're doing with the Ahrefs YouTube videos. Like, I feel like the skill set of the SEO is really around understanding intent. And, you know, we look at keyword data, and we hope to find intent from there. But there's another layer to that, to understanding what are people actually looking for? Like, if you're looking for keyword research, best practices, I've been doing this for 15 years. Like, I don't need another simple how to guide on that. I want to know. Like, how do we go deeper? How do we go further? And then, how do we as SEOs and folks within the marketing department interact with SEOs to understand that?

Sam Oh  20:49  
Yeah, so I think, I think, like, there's a lot of like, telltale signs through words, so through a query, we can understand where somebody is in their journey of of whatever it is. So let's take the example of, like, somebody who's getting into landscaping. Okay, so like, I'm not, like, a landscaper or anything, but I'm a beginner landscaper. And so, like, I like to grow grass. And so, like, real, like, not, not that kind of grass, lawn, grass and and so you might, like, somebody might search for like, how to grow like grass for your lawn. So you already know that this person is a beginner, just from that query, like a professional landscaper is like, Dude, that's like, the easiest thing to do. Like, how do you not know how to do that? And then you say, like, which, like, type of fertilizer is best? Or, when should I plant grass seed? These are all queries that tell us that this person is a beginner, and so the way that you're writing, like a professional landscaper is not going to be searching for these things. Or, I hope they're not. They're going to be creating more like intense content. Or they're going to be like, looking for more like intense content and more very, very specific content around like, like, soil pH and like, you know how to raise soil pH by like, point 4% like, you know, things that you really need to get into. So I feel like the query tells us a lot, then the SERP also tells us a lot too. So when we look at a SERP, there's people also ask boxes, and people often use this and like, I feel like people just get lazy with this kind of stuff rather than really thinking about it. But they'll see something like, so if we have, like, how to grow grass. Let me actually just Google it and see what pops up. So like, already, it says the people also ask. Box shows me, how do you grow grass for beginners. So this is telling us a little bit of a profile of who this is for. So like, you don't need to try and impress people with how to grow grass. Just tell me how to freaking grow grass, right? Like, and tell me in the easiest possible way, like, the introduction, how do we connect with that person knowing that they're a beginner, like, it might be daunting. Like, being a beginner to growing grass. Like, I don't know what you would, I'm just making this up, but like, you know you wouldn't be like, you're about to learn the most advanced tactics to grow grass like, like, you don't need to. So the way that you speak to them, like, is the way that you connect. What is the fastest way to get grass seed to grow? Right? They want fast results. How can I throw just throw grass seed down on the existing lawn? Right? So what that tells me is they're lazy. Like, not that they're lazy, but they don't want to do a lot of work, so you want to give them an easy way to do it. You don't want to give them the most like, detailed guide to have a perfect, lush lawn, because that's not what the Serb is telling me here. And then, how do you prepare the ground for grass seed? So that's probably a subtopic that should be covered. So we're starting to uncover, like, what people actually want to see when, like, they actually search for this, and Google is telling us these hits, and then we see videos. So should we have a video on this? Yeah, we'll probably create a complimentary video on creating grass. And like, I'm sorry that I'm using this weird example. It's just like, kind of the first thing that was top of mind. But like, we start to see these things as we go through this cert and like, you look at the other results, and when you actually start visiting the results, then you might start to find interesting things in there as well. And so like spending the extra 30 minutes to profile who is searching for this. And not every person is the same, but if you can get 80% of the population like your user experience, signals are probably going to be better, and you're probably going to get more clicks, and people are going to stay on the page longer, and whatever it might be, and people are going to naturally, just like I would hope that Google would eventually rank these pages higher over time, all other things being equal, like links, et cetera, et cetera.

Philippe Gamache  24:57  
I love that you picked grass as a. As an example here in it, it segues really nicely into a question that I wanted to ask you about like this episode was brought to you by our friends at customer IO, oversold on a legacy marketing automation platform that is still struggling to update its user interface. I've done a tour of duty with all the major marketing automation platforms, and many are definitely similar, but customer IO is the most intuitive and beautiful platform. I'm talking about the industry's top visual workflow builder to design and implement your unique messaging strategy. Powerful AB testing features inside your workflows, not just on subject line sends, hold out testing functionality to see the incremental impact to your messages queue draft mode so you can QA messages and conditions in production with real users before anything is sent, copy workflow items so you don't have to repeat the building process again and monitor campaigns tests and keyless membership growth from your personalized dashboard. The icing on the cake, marketers using customer IO have seen a 20% increase in conversion rates from strategic messaging. So stop using clicky, old tools and adopt a multi channel approach that creates joyful interactions with your customers. Start a free trial without a credit card@customer.ao and tell them we sent you. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census, the number one data activation and reverse ETL platform loved by Activision, Canva, Sonos notion and more. As you might know, I'm pretty opinionated that the future of martech is composable, and that the single source of truth for your marketing data should be your data warehouse census helps marketers solve an age old marketing problem, getting real time complete access to your customer data without needing to write a line of code. Also, if you want your own face as a humans of martech style image, we're doing a fun monthly raffle with census for a personalized t shirt. Enter to win at getcensus.com/humans at yourself as an SEO how often with like chatgpt coming out, have you still stuck to using Google to answer some of these questions versus using chatgpt for that. Because your lawn care, example, I use chatgpt for it like, and it was still kind of like last summer, so it wasn't a hype cycle. So I was like, probably testing it out more than I should have been, but I was asking chatgpt based on where I live in the world, where my lawn is, in correlation to, like, how much sun it gets during the day. Like, give me a simple step by step approach, what do I need to buy and what tools do I need to get there? And it ended up getting, like, pretty close. And I compared it after to like, a couple of like, how to articles on on Google. But I thought what the coolest part of it was, and I'm looking at, like, my notes right now, with the output of it is like, it ended up giving me a list of everything I needed to buy and all the tools that I needed. And then I asked it to shop on Home Depot, like local Lawn Care stores or whatever, and give me a list of, like, what that budget would look like. So I don't know, just just curious or like, as an SEO how often do you go to chatgpt for some of these queries, versus, like, sticking to Google?

Sam Oh  28:16  
Yeah. So like, one thing I should preface is that, because I'm in SEO, and I use chatgpt like on the regular, and same with with you guys, I'm sure, like, we're not, we're not, like, the average population, right, people who are doing this kind of stuff, right? And so I feel like, sometimes we feel like we are because when we talk to each other, it's like, I get you. I get you. I was doing the same thing last year with chatgpt, but it's like, for me as a regular like, Google user, chatgpt. User, I do have certain like, when I'm doing things that are very specific, and I have, like, as I'm growing the grass, for example, like, I'm like, Oh, I'll be doing it. Like, should I detach first? Or should I like, aerate first? Or, like, I don't know what to do. Like, like, how do I know whether it's time to do it? And then chatgpt will say things like, look and make sure that your soil temperatures at least this, you know, many degrees. And I'm like, oh, okay, cool. I got my answer there. Whereas, like, how do you search for that in Google, especially where they're, like, starting to rank or not starting to but they've been ranking pages more generally. Like, there was a time where health lines, article on how to lose weight, was getting, like, I can't remember, like, 300,000 monthly visits. Like, according to Ahrefs estimations, and I would look at the keywords that they're ranking for, and they're ranking number one for the keyword, diet plan. But it's like, maybe a diet plan is embedded in there, but that's not going to be helpful. Like, I'd much rather go to chatgpt and be like, I'm allergic to this. I weigh this many pounds and I want to reach this many things. Like, how many calories do I need to intake? Which food should I do now make me some recipes like that is so much easier. It's so much more helpful. So, yeah, with. With Google, I've noticed that my my search behavior has changed, changed and and I bet if you if you guys look through maybe it's because we're in in like marketing, SEO. But if you look through your Google search history, and you compare today versus, let's say, five years ago, which you probably don't have history for, I think what you're going to find is that the majority of your searches have gone navigational, meaning you're now looking specifically for where to go. So grass seed Home Depot, how to grow grass? Reddit, why? Well, we have preferred brands now, like, it's very clear, and like the internet has been around now for a while, and so we know exactly where we want to go. We become more digital, digitally literate, so we know how to get there, and we know how to get the results that we want. And so naturally, search behavior is going to change. And so like, when I'm looking for navigational queries, like, if I want to find a Mexican restaurant around me, I'm not going to go to chatgpt for that. I'm going to go to Google, and I'm going to go through reviews when I'm in Best Buy and I want to buy a new camera or whatever it is. And I don't know whether this one's good or not. It's on sale, but, like, I don't know if it's good. Where am I going to go? I'm going to go to Amazon, I'm going to go to YouTube, and we're going to start looking there. And so I feel like with so many sources of content in so many different formats, just naturally, like the way that we search in Google is changing. So being an SEO, yeah, of course, I still use Google, but now I also have these other tools, like chatgpt, but I've always had other tools, like amazon.com, to do my searches and research as well. So yeah, I feel like our search behavior is naturally going to change, and it has changed, but it's kind of been sneaky under the radar for a while. I think

Jon Taylor  31:56  
it's pretty fascinating discussion to have, and I think it comes back to the to the earlier question I had around like, you know, how do SEOs divine the intent behind what's happening on the queries, if more and more people are going to chat GPT like SEOs again, I think are challenged to come up with ways that people are looking at intent and what are people actually looking for. How do you see, you know, I know you mentioned like we're in this bubble. We think that chatgpt is the bomb, and we're using it all the time, but I think there is a broadening impact around this. Like you said, like navigational searches, the rise of Reddit, these ideas of going to forms. Do you think we'll see the broadening of the SEOs mandate, you will see like SEO not just being like, hey. Like, for the last 15 years has been SEOs about Google, but now we're going to start seeing more and more SEOs thinking like, you work on YouTube, working on Reddit. Like, are we just going to become more about like, optimizing content for the audience, wherever they may be?

Sam Oh  33:00  
Personally, I think it should have always been like that. Like, I think that we should have always been going for multiple touchpoints, like, naturally, just over time. Like, if you think back to, I don't know when you guys started, like, in online marketing, or, like, we're in that world, but like, when I was starting, there was a lot of those, like, like, Hey, look at my boat. Like, buy my course. Like, and there's like, the scammi is kind of page, and people are like, click, click, click, yeah, I'm gonna buy this. I'm gonna buy this. And so it's just like, people were like, all you had to do was focus on SEO and ranking that page. Like, when I had my E commerce site, and I just had to rank for the product name. And, like, literally, it was like, printing money. And I didn't have to try and sell anyone. I didn't have to try and educate anyone. I literally just had to rank for it. But now it's like, you still gotta rank for it. That's definitely helpful. But like, they're not just searching on Google anymore, because they can go and search on Tiktok or on Instagram, or they might just scroll through it on Twitter or Facebook or wherever. And so I feel like Google SEO, like it's still important, and I think for the foreseeable future, for the probably for the rest of my life, it will be relevant and and I feel like it's still important. But I do think that diversification is also important for the purpose of of hitting as many touch points as possible. And I think there's, like, I read a study every year where it's just like, now you need, you know, 100 touch points. Now you need 580 now you need 10,000 now, like, now it's impossible to measure an attribution is a joke. Like, you know, we've basically become that way over time. Is, is we can't measure it with like, we can't attribute like, oh, it's, it's my video that made somebody convert. Like, was last touch. No, well, I. Did you hear us on the podcast somewhere? Like, did you see someone tweet about us? Were you at a conference and like, we weren't even there. But then the person beside you, you looked at his laptop, and you saw that he was using Ahrefs, like, and you were wondering what that was like? We don't know anymore, yeah. And so the idea is just to be everywhere, and search is is amazing, because the ROI can be insane, because, like, once you're ranking, like, it's not a set it and forget it kind of thing, but like, it's free traffic, it's organic traffic that you get for high intent queries. And so yeah, I feel like it's still important to do that, and some people will convert on the first visit, but now most people aren't going to so you kind of just got to be everywhere to educate. And yeah,

Philippe Gamache  35:44  
I love your training world. I love your point about attribution there. Sam, like it's a it's a topic we we go down on in several episodes on the show being kind of a marketing, ops, martech focused podcast, I want to pull that thread with you, if you're cool with it. I've heard you talk about this before on other podcasts, to this idea that H refs is, like, not even using GA to track, like, where, you know, even website traffic, like how people are coming to the page and stuff, how, how was this compared to, like, how you were doing this when you were running an agency, like, obviously your clients probably asked you crap, like, you know, the work that you've done, like, how much revenue did that drive? Like, how are you proven the results of that so, like, for listeners that you know are listening and thinking, like, I would love to work for a company like Ahrefs, where Tim and Sam are just like, hey, I could give a shit about attribution, we just kind of see revenue go up and we assume that like, the content we're doing is doing good, like we're doing the right thing, revenue is going up. Like, why should we worry about attribution? Like, how do listeners convince their teams and their bosses to do that when, like, all they care about is performance based marketing and last touch and multi touch. Like, would love your thoughts there.

Sam Oh  37:11  
Yeah, this is a really, really tough question, and it kind of reminds me of that whole thing that you were asking about, like, why do people want SEOs to die or something? But it's like, it's the same. Thing is that there's two sides to attribution, right? There's people like, Die Hard attribution folks, and then there's people who are like, Yeah, you're probably wasting your time, yeah. So I think this actually comes from the top. So our founder and CEO, Dimitri, he was the one who really challenged this, I believe, within the company. And when I joined in 2018 I had a very tough time adjusting to this idea of of no attribution. Back then, I think we had Google Analytics, but like, it wasn't set up properly. And like, yeah, it was never a real priority because, like, like, basically what I said before, like, how do you really know what caused, like, what was the driver of that? How do you assign a value to that? And, like, yeah, there's so many different models that you can do, but there's so many flaws in every model. And sure, like, it's like, I don't want to say it's probably better to know, but it's because, like, bad data can lead you to worse decisions. But yeah, I feel like it comes from the top, and when the when there's alignment in the view, and over time, like I came to see where they were coming from and how like, any attribution model can be challenged. And when I realized that like product is king, that it's not like the content or this blog post that's generating this much revenue. And I realized, the better we continue to make our product, the less we have to focus and waste time on on like, meaningless or not meaningless. But let's just say like data without context, with enough context, and that's kind of what's happened, is now I just keep my head down and I focus on, like, how can people best use our product? And like, that's kind of all we really do with our content. Is just like, Where does our content fit into people's journeys? How does it solve people's problems? And not only does that help us create a better product, but it helps create better content. And naturally, that content, we assume, converts, and I also think that something that's severely underrated is sentiment. And so like, we see, we went through periods where we're like, where we would see on Twitter, like, every day, like, Ahrefs content, like, there's none like it. And then, you know, people are like, Oh my gosh, this video content is getting so much better. And it's like, okay, so like, that's kind of what we're working on. Like, all right, cool. And so, like, we see the sentiment, and we start to see people saying things, and we're like, okay, so like, revenue is going up into the right things are going. About with our content. Our product is embedded in, like, there's product placement in pretty much all our content. So, like, what more can we do on that side? What Give it? Give an artificial number to it, to, like, make us feel good. Like, to get a raise. Like, what at the end of the day, we just want to grow the company. And I feel like the way that we're doing it now, it just kind of makes sense logically. So let's just keep doing it. And I feel like Tim was, Tim was definitely a pioneer of this, with with with the content, and so I learned a lot from him, on that side,

Jon Taylor  40:39  
what just to switch gears a little bit while we have you march 2024 we saw Google released a core update which took aim at AI generated content, or it seemed to, I should say, I think there's some fine print that we'll get into as well. I've seen on your channel. You've experimented with chatgpt, quite a bit. I know I have as well for content creation and some of the implications there. But we've seen in the last month, certainly, of March 2024 that quite a number of websites have been hit with this. You know, websites have popped up over the last year. Yeah. So it's a bit of a hot topic, but I know I myself, was starting to feel this pull towards what I kind of felt like we're more black hat tactics, like, I didn't really want to use GPT to create content, but it felt like, competitively, to keep up with everybody else, I needed to start jamming my content full of GPT isms, instead of just using it as like a an assistant or an ideation partner. What do you think about the future after this core update? What you take on on the update and the impact it's having on SEO right now?

Sam Oh  41:46  
Yeah, so I think, like it's interesting, because I feel like Google was just being Google. So like, from my observation, they have this tendency to overcompensate when, you know things appear to be getting out of control. And that was happening with with AI generated content, with, like, literally a new AI generating tool coming out every single freaking week, like it was just non stop. And it takes me back to the penguin times when linkspan, like PBNs were out of control. Like you would literally just buy links from a PBN and you could rank very, very, very, very quickly. And so what they do? They just, they smashed all these different sites like mine, included, and mine deservingly, but others didn't deserve to get hit. They weren't necessarily buying links, but they just overcompensated. And I feel like that's kind of what happened with with the march core update, is that, like, yeah, there were a lot of casualties that, yeah, they didn't deserve it. A lot of great it happened a lot in the niche affiliate space, but a lot of the them were great sites. Why did they get smashed? I have no clue, but, like, we can just guess and speculate. But I feel like it's just Google being Google, and sometimes you just got to wait and and see what happens. And that's kind of what happens like, anytime when, like, money and fear are involved. Like, we hit the panic button, right? And so people start, like, disavowing their links, even though, like, they weren't. But it's like, Are you confessing to Google that you were buying these links before? Like, like, what are you doing here? Are you you start pruning your content that, like, you might have thought was low quality, but like, was that the one that was low quality was that even what you were hit for, like, just relax and let's, let's kind of see what happens. And so, like, in terms of, like, AI content and whatever, like, I don't think that no matter what Google says or does, it's not going to stop people from using AI to create content like this is like crazy, like what you can do with with conversational AI and like the content that you can create. So I think it's here to stay, and I think I think a problem is the way that people use it, so people want to put in, like, some one single prompt, Hero prompt, generate an article on x, and then to all of us and have this amazing content, but, like, that's just not the way that it's meant to be used. And so that kind of content, yeah, is it possible for Google to know what that is and detect it eventually. Yeah, probably. But like, as AI gets better, and it's getting better fast, and as people start to understand, like, where AI actually fits in content creation, it's going to be an unstoppable force. Like, I don't think there's any stopping it, and I don't think there's a point in trying to resist it either for me, I use AI in my content, but I use it mostly for research. It speeds up my research process like crazy. And yeah, like, I've like, if you in the more recent videos, like winning Featured Snippets, like, I think AI is better. I. That than I am. So why would I try and do it? That doesn't make any sense. It's better content for the user. So why am I going to give them worse content just to say that I wrote it with my hands like that doesn't make sense to me. So I feel like, as people start to understand, like, the real use cases of AI, as they start to like, really find, like, new ways to use it in their existing workflows. Like I said this for a very long time, and like this is maybe an unpopular opinion, but like since, since chatgpt came out, like I feel like freelance writing is is, is a dying industry, and it's just that, like I said it from the beginning, like since February, I think of 2022, or whenever, or whenever chat chickadee came out. Has it already been over a year? Geez. Yeah. Like, but, and I feel like the shift is to a is is going to be to AI operators, and the better you become at being an AI operator. I'm not talking about like a prompt engineer or anything like that, but I mean, like you really understand, like, where AI fits into into, like, content creation. Like, these are the freelance writers of the future, and I feel like everyone needs to start learning how I feel like I feel like I'm getting ahead of the curve, because I still see so many people just being like, like, even in the last video where I said, like, I'm gonna use AI content to rank number one in Google. Like, I got like, 20 people saying click bait. And I said I was thinking. I was like, why is that clickbait? And then I realized, as I continued to read the comments like the title is called. I use chatgpt to rank number one in Google in one hour. So does that sound like clickbait, maybe, but that's what I did. But they were thinking that AI content means fully generated, one prompt hero content, right? And the fact that they think that they thought that, like, it blew my mind, and that's what AI is also doing. So I'm going, I'm going off topic here, but it's like, that's kind of what people are expecting, and that's what people are doing. And so do they do their sites deserve to get punished? Yeah, absolutely that that content is trash. And I think I wrote back to one person. I said, Oh, I think we disagree on what AI content is. I call that spam. And so like, I feel like, as people start to adopt like that, AI can actually be used to make your content way way way better, way faster. I'm not talking about just hiring an editor like generating one content through one sentence or paragraph, and then hiring an editor to do that. Like, I'm talking about actually, like, engineering your entire post in sections, and going through these different points and having like, conversations. Like, do you think that this or like, I used it for one of the videos for like, I couldn't think of a good example. And I was like, and then I think I used the prompt like, Give me. I was like, I'm writing a script on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I need an example to really drive home this point. Can you give me an example using a company that most people will know? And boom, they give me an example with Apple. They give me an example with Groupon, made my content better, right? And then I worded it however I would say it. But like, why are people working on, like, focusing on this? Like, like, write me the best blog post ever on how to tie a tie that will change someone's life. Like, you're not going to do that. So don't try, like, just use it what it's good, use it for what it's good, good at. Yeah.

Philippe Gamache  48:43  
Thank you for your comment. Thanks for engaging on my video. But clearly you didn't watch my video. If you think that that's what AI content is, like, at least watch five minutes and you see what I'm actually doing here. It's interesting,

Sam Oh  48:55  
though, because, like, those comments where people are like, this was misleading, have like, the most upvotes, and I'm just like, interesting. Like, this is just the way that people think of AI content. It's the stigmas again, right? It's like, AI content is, is no work, no thought, content that you can write in a sentence. And I'm like, like, where are we heading? Like, it's not like, the fact that people think this way, it's like big advantage for people who are actually learning to use it properly, but it's kind of scary. I'm like, Oh, shit, what are my kids generation gonna be? Like, I sound like my parents saying that, but yeah,

Philippe Gamache  49:35  
yeah. I mean, I don't blame the folks for thinking that, though. Because, like, I don't know if you saw the copilot, like Microsoft's copilot Super Bowl ad and like how they aren't necessarily saying, like, learn this new skill and use AI as a tool and an assistant to help you along your journey, kind of how you're using it to rank. They're essentially like portraying all these like young folks now. Actually learning how to like code a new game, or like how to like create concept art, and they're essentially saying like learning is really hard use our AI Copilot to do things for you instead. And it's perpetuating this idea that AI is replacing this learning. And I think it's uh unfortunate, for sure.

Sam Oh  50:21  
It's what sells, right? Yeah, Sam,

Philippe Gamache  50:23  
this has been super fun. We're looking at time, and this is definitely flown by JT. You want to hit him with the last question?

Jon Taylor  50:30  
Yeah, Sam, you're a VP, an agency owner, a father of three, an avid golfer, world renowned YouTube creator, Ahrefs channel, everybody should check it out. One question we asked all our guests on the show is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy

Sam Oh  50:49  
world renowned? I don't know if I've ever been called that. Thank you for the kind words. I don't know that's true, but yeah, so I think the number one thing for me is self awareness. So naturally, with with YouTube, like, I don't remember how many views we're getting each year, but I think it's like upwards of, like, five, 6 million, or something like that. So lot of people have seen me, and naturally, the more people that see you, the more trolls there are. And like, I freaking love it because it's, it's like, it's the idea of like, you know, I'm not Beyonce, I'm not like Sasha Fierce, but it's the idea of like, having a different identity. When I look at my content is I know who I am, like who I actually am, and I know whose opinions matter to me, my family, my friends, the people that I love. And so naturally, like I see great comments come in about our content, and then I see awful comments come in and just knowing that I don't care what anyone says, because it doesn't define who I am. And I feel like a lot of people, especially YouTubers, they burn out because they let it get to them. And I feel like that really keeps me grounded and unfazed. I love it when people leave leave constructive criticism, happy to discuss, and I'm happy to agree to disagree, and I'm also happy to say that it was wrong. So I feel like that really keeps me saying sane. As for balance, I think a lot of that is just like, it's health related. So like these days, for the past, like two or three months, I've been obsessed with morning routines and just like, scheduling things in and so underrated. Because, like, before, like, I was always that person who's like, No, I'm spontaneous. Like, I don't need a routine. Like, gotta roll with the punches. Like, you know, that kind of guy. But then just recently, I was like, All right, so, like, what would happen? Like, okay, so I want to do, I need to do these five things throughout the day. Like, what does that look like in a day? And so I started, like, printing up these, like printable weekly calendar or like hourly calendars. And I said, What could I possibly do, like, in the summer? Is it possible to work, to spend time with my family, to golf, to work out, whatever, like do, all those things in a single day? Because before I would say, I don't have time for this, so therefore, like, push to the side until I have more time. And so after I started doing that and kind of optimizing that, I feel like balance, like, I just feel a lot happier in the sense that, like, my life feels balanced, that I get a little bit of, I get to do a little, a little, or a lot of everything it feels that requires me to now wake up at five in the morning, but it's like, you know, doing that I feel like, has been game changing for balance, for health and for overall happiness.

Philippe Gamache  53:51  
Love it, ignoring the trolls and focusing on people whose opinions actually matter in embracing morning routines. Awesome advice. I'm really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being on the show. Today, we'll share links to all the stuff you're working on, obviously the href blog and the YouTube channel there, I feel like we could have kept picking your brain for several hours now, but definitely appreciate your time and thanks again. Thanks for having me. Music folks, thank you so much for listening this far. We really appreciate you being here. Just wanted to call out two things before we go. Number one, the best way to support the show is by signing up for our newsletter on humans of martech.com we send you a quick email every Tuesday morning, letting you know what episode just dropped, we include our favorite takeaways, so if you don't have time to listen to that one, no pressure. We have you covered with some learnings anyway. And number two, proceeds from sponsors this year have allowed us to venture into video. We recently launched a YouTube channel where we published. Length episodes. So if you want to see our radio faces, check that out. That's it for now. Really appreciate you listening again. Thank you so much. You.