Tim Soulo, Ahrefs
How Ahrefs Used SaaS SEO to Grow from 15K to 250K Monthly Visitors
Tim Soulo is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Ahrefs, a SaaS startup that provides SEO tools to help grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your market niche. In 2015, Tim joined Ahrefs as head of marketing. The company had spent several years building their blog, but it still was not generating much traffic or leads. Tim decided that publishing higher-quality content regularly on their blog was going to be one of his top priorities. But after a year, he still had little to show in terms of traffic and leads. Eventually, Tim figured out the problem. They were creating high-quality content, but they were not optimizing it for SaaS SEO. They were not doing keyword research or doing on-page optimization. That is not uncommon. A lot of companies make that mistake. But the startup that Tim worked for was in the business of SEO and their product helped their customers to grow search traffic. So it was pretty crazy that they were not thinking about SEO on their own blog. Once he figured out the problem, Tim made a simple change - he started by doing keyword research to find out what people were searching for and then focused on creating the best content around those keywords. And in a couple of years, their blog traffic grew from 15,000 to over 250,000 monthly visitors and has become one of the biggest drivers of new customers and revenue growth. But the real story here is about a SaaS startup that is incredibly product-focused and breaks a lot of rules and conventional wisdom about marketing and growth. They do not have a target customer or persona. They do not do growth hacks. They do not use analytics software or track conversion rates. They do not even do traditional SaaS SEO optimization. They focus on building a great product and educating people on how to use that product through their blog. And that approach is working - they are bootstrapped and doing over $40M ARR with just 45 people.
