Tim Soulo Interview On Marketing, SEO & More

Welcome to another round of bloggers interview series.

This time, we’re interviewing the CMO of Ahrefs where you’ll discover a lot of insights on SEO and building a better blog.

Tim Soulo is the Chief Marketing Officer and product advisor at Ahrefs. 

Ahrefs is a popular SEO toolkit that offers everything from keyword research to backlink analysis, site audit, and more. 

Tim has over 10 years of experience in SEO and digital marketing. 

If you’re looking to find some interesting advice around SEO, this interview with Tim Soulo is a must-read for you. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started without much ado.

Expert Interview With Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs

1. What is the best SEO strategy for 2023?

I don’t think there’s an answer to this question 🙂

Create great content, promote it, build links to it, grow your brand – these things are very important if you want to build the kind of website that will continue ranking in Google for years to come.

Key takeaway: Obviously, creating engaging content is the key to building a high-traffic blog. You need a solid content strategy, build links and improve your overall brand to get more traffic from Google.

2. What skill sets do people need to possess to become an online influencer? 

If you want to build a following online there are only two things that you should focus on:

1. Acquire a unique skill, or unique knowledge, which would put you in at least 10% of the best people in your industry.
2. Learn to promote yourself, usually by creating engaging content to teach people some of your knowledge (or perhaps entertain them with your skills).

3. About keyword research – do you think keyword research is essential for every website and business?  

It’s very hard to grow search traffic to your website if you don’t know what people are searching for. 

By learning to do proper keyword research you can easily identify topics that might bring you a decent amount of search traffic from Google while not being insanely hard to rank for. 

If you’re new to this, I wrote a pretty extensive guide to keyword research at Ahrefs Blog.

Key takeaway: Keyword research is the key to get more search traffic. You need to find the keyword terms that people are searching for. Use proper tools like Ahrefs, Semrush for finding better keywords in your niche. Also, make sure to check out the keyword research guide from Ahrefs.

4. What does your typical day look like as a CMO of Ahrefs?

Most of my time goes into helping the marketing team operate more efficiently. Sometimes I need to give some advice to our team members on the things that I’m good at. 

Other times I need to actually listen to advice that my team members are giving me and make the right decision, even if I originally wanted to do it differently.

Other than that, I love to get my hand dirty and actually do some marketing projects myself. In many cases that involves creating content for our blog, youtube channel, or social networks.

5. What are the 3 marketing tools you can’t live without?

I wouldn’t be able to live without Ahrefs, obviously 🙂

But other than that, I would actually call Twitter and Facebook my marketing “tools.” Both these social networks help me to connect with existing and future customers.

6. What’s your #1 advice for a new blogger (or marketer)?

Stop rewriting articles you’ve read on other blogs and actually DO something interesting that you can later blog about. 

A good example of that would be a story of how we hired 3 different copywriting agencies to re-write the copy of our homepage. 

You might not have the budget for a similar stunt, but there are tons of interesting things that don’t require any money, but purely your time and effort.

Key takeaway: Create unique content that actually solves problems. Learn copywriting as it helps you generate better conversions. Also, you can do wonders by putting more effort into creating better content. Stop worrying about not having a budget. Instead, spend more time creating helpful content. 

7. How do you manage your time to keep your SEO and marketing work organized?

I’m afraid I can’t call myself an expert in time management. I have recently become a dad for the second time and my daily schedule is a mess. I just try to put in some work whenever I get a chance.

For example, I’m writing this on Saturday afternoon as I’m sitting in a cafe and waiting for my 5-year old son to finish his gymnastics class. 🙂

8. What’s the ONE THING that’s working well for Ahrefs?

The “thing” that Ahrefs has under the hood. I’m talking about all the technology and all the hardware that makes Ahrefs so powerful. 

Our Founder and CEO Dmitry has created an amazing technical team that can do sophisticated things which our competitors can’t replicate. If we didn’t have that advantage, our marketing would be as effective.

Side note: If you’re curious, here’s the photo of Dmitry, founder of Ahrefs.

Key takeaway: Having a great team helps A LOT in the business. Find the right people who can get things done. It sets you apart from the crowd. One reason behind Ahrefs success is their CEO who brought an amazing team to the table. 

9. You created a ton of content. How important would you say content marketing is for business? How did that work for you?

For Ahrefs, content marketing worked exceptionally well.

• It helped us to get tons of free targeted search traffic from Google
• It helped us to attract new customers
• It helped us to educate our customers on how to get the most of Ahrefs
• It helped us to position ourselves as thought leaders in this industry

I actually wrote a Twitter thread with my thoughts about calculating the ROI of content marketing where I shared many examples of how content helped Ahrefs’ business grow.

Key takeaway: Content marketing works like a charm. It generates quality leads, helps people understand better about your products, attracts more search traffic, and more importantly helps you build trust.

10. You are the CMO at Ahrefs. Is this something you aimed for or did it just come naturally? What’s the story behind it?

That was rather accidental really. I don’t remember having a specific goal to become a CMO.

In fact, at the time when Dmitry invited me to join Ahrefs, I was actually bootstrapping my own online business – I had a personal blog and I was developing and selling premium plugins for WordPress.

But joining an existing and rather successful company and becoming responsible for all their marketing seemed like an awesome challenge. So I accepted Dmitry’s offer and moved to Singapore.

11. What’s your biggest SEO win?

My biggest “SEO win” would have been to rank for the term “SEO.” But recently Google has published their own “SEO Starter Guide,” which ranks #1 and gives zero chance to anyone else to outrank them.

Key takeaway: Ranking for some of the competitive terms such as “SEO” is EXTREMELY hard. You need a ton of links, great content, and a proper understanding of SEO to be able to rank for high competitive keywords. 

12. What are some of your favorite SEO blogs, books, and resources?

I’m a big fan of the SEO resources that we create here at Ahrefs 🙂

Other than that, I follow a few dozen super-smart marketers on Twitter, which is how I stay in the know of what’s happening in our industry.

FAQs Around Tim Soulo & Ahrefs

Here are some of the frequently asked questions about Tim Soulo and Ahrefs.

Read: Interview With Alex Nerney from Create And Go On Earning Full-Time Income From Blogging

Final Thoughts on the interview with Tim Soulo

Tim is an SEO expert who knows how to rank even for competitive keywords. He’s also one of the main reasons for the massive success of Ahrefs. 

If you’re looking for solid advice on SEO and marketing, you should definitely follow Tim on Twitter and read his articles on Ahrefs.

Have you enjoyed our interview with Tim Soulo from Ahrefs? Do you have any questions? Let us know in the comments.