251: Tim Soulo Of Ahrefs On How To Rank Any Website In Search

Podcast: Download (Duration: 52:16 — 60.1MB)

Ranking in Google comes down to two things, according to Tim Soulo: confirm people are actually searching for your topic, and build links to the page. Everything else, hreflang, multilingual SEO, schema markup, is complicated and helps only a little.

Tim is the CMO and product advisor at Ahrefs, with 10 years in SEO starting from a junior job in Ukraine. I use Ahrefs multiple times a week and no longer write a blog post without running the tool first.

Below is his process for judging a topic before writing, how he decides an article is underperforming, why he refuses to explicitly ask for backlinks, and what he would do to rank thin ecommerce product pages.

Key takeaways

• SEO reduces to two fundamentals: verified search demand and links. The technical layer helps only marginally.
• Tim judges a topic by the total traffic the top 10 ranking pages get, not by the search volume of one keyword.
• Difficulty comes down to whether you can genuinely beat the existing pages, then how many unique referring domains they have. Over 100 is hard.
• Ahrefs treats articles as living assets, updating and relaunching underperformers repeatedly rather than moving on.
• They never explicitly ask for links. Their outreach shares an interesting fact and a link, with about a 5% hit rate per 100 emails.
• They spend $200 to $300 in Facebook ads per article, half retargeting past blog readers and half reaching new audiences.
• Under 30 cents per click promotes an article to their evergreen list, which they promote indefinitely with growing budget.
• Ahrefs ignored a negative SEO attack of thousands of low-quality links, disavowed nothing, and the page now ranks number one.

The two SEO fundamentals that actually matter

Tim’s entire SEO philosophy is two steps: confirm people search for the topic, then build links to the page. He is deliberately not a technical SEO and prefers the basic concepts.

Everything else in the discipline is genuinely complicated and produces small gains. Nail the two foundations and you will be fine.

That framing shapes everything downstream. When an Ahrefs article underperforms, the diagnosis is always one of those two: the search intent is wrong, or the page needs more links.

How to judge a topic before you write the article

Tim evaluates the total search traffic going to the top 10 pages for a query rather than the search volume of a single keyword. That is the number that drives his decision on whether to write.

His process starts by typing a query into Keywords Explorer in his own words, without worrying whether other people phrase it the same way. Google will rank the same page across all the phrasings people actually use.

Keywords Explorer pulls the top 10 ranking pages just as Google does, and then shows total search traffic to each of them. The individual keyword’s volume can be discouraging while the top-ranking page pulls large traffic from dozens of variations.

How Tim judges keyword difficulty

The first question is not a metric at all: can you genuinely create a better page than the ones already ranking? Rewriting the top 10 results in your own words will not work.

You need something original, something that will stick with readers more than what is already there. Ask why Google would rank you above the incumbents.

If the answer is yes, the second check is the number of unique websites linking to each of the top 10 pages. Fifty-plus referring domains across most of the top results signals a competitive topic, and 100-plus signals a hard one.

The calculation is against your own realistic capacity. Tim knows getting 10 backlinks is trivial for Ahrefs and 200 is genuinely challenging, so that ratio decides whether they pursue a topic.

Link quality does matter, and Ahrefs deliberately does not spend much time analyzing it in this screening step. The referring domain count is a fast enough proxy for a go/no-go decision.

How Ahrefs decides an article is underperforming

Tim’s definition is comparative: the article does not rank on page one for its target terms, and it does not pull as much total traffic as the top 10 pages for that topic. Both conditions together mean underperforming.

Time on page is the secondary signal, used to diagnose why. If people are not reading, the article either has the wrong information or a writing style that does not suit the audience.

There is no fixed baseline for time on page. Under a minute means nobody read a long article. Three minutes or more is acceptable, since averages get dragged down by people who bounce immediately.

The correct comparison is to your article’s length. Average reading speed is roughly 200 words per minute, so calculate the expected read time and see whether your average approaches it.

How Ahrefs relaunches underperforming content

Ahrefs never treats content as one-off pieces. They return continuously, review performance, and decide whether to invest in updating and re-promoting.

The first diagnostic is search intent: is this article what people searching that term actually want? If not, they rewrite with new information, sharpen the headline and the promise, add material, remove material, and sometimes make the article considerably shorter.

Then they relaunch it as if it were entirely new. Email list, Facebook ads, outreach emails, the full promotion cycle again.

Many articles start performing after a well-judged update. Some take three or four rounds to figure out what the article should be and to accumulate enough links to rank.

The search intent mistake Ahrefs made on “what is SEO”

Ahrefs published an article on “what is SEO” built from quotes by the most prominent people in the field, and it failed to rank. The concept was sound and the execution missed what searchers wanted.

They knew everyone would answer differently since there is no single definition, so they collected the answers, structured them well, and published. Several contributors tweeted it because their quotes appeared.

When the team discussed the failure on Slack, the CEO asked the right question: are people searching “what is SEO” really looking for advanced answers from top practitioners, or do they want the most basic possible explanation?

The lesson is putting yourself in the searcher’s position and asking what they actually need when they type that query.

Should you index your podcast episodes?

Tim’s answer is mostly no, unless the episodes are topically focused. Nobody searches for interviews with a specific guest, so a generic episode page will not attract search traffic.

The problem is that a wide-ranging conversation makes the page relevant to too many things at once, so it ranks for nothing. A transcript alone does not solve that.

The two viable paths are making each episode about a single topic and naming and structuring the page around that topic, or no-indexing episodes so Google does not see a large number of pages with no search traffic and no clear subject.

How Ahrefs builds backlinks without asking for them

Ahrefs has a firm rule against explicitly asking for a link. Tim considers requesting one directly sketchy and, frankly, stupid.

Their outreach instead shares a genuinely interesting fact. The email says they found the recipient’s site, noticed they cover this topic, wrote an article recently, and here is the surprising thing in it, with the link if that hooked them.

They track opens and replies. If someone replies enthusiastically, Ahrefs might respond that they are glad the content landed and, if the person ever has the chance to link to it, they would be grateful. That is as far as it goes.

The hit rate is roughly five backlinks per 100 emails within the week. Tim attributes even that to their existing brand and to consistently producing content better than what already exists.

Why outreach works even when nobody links

Tim’s argument for doing outreach as a beginner is that it puts you on people’s radar. The first article may get no replies, and so does the second, and by the third amazing article people start noticing.

He found several guest writers for the Ahrefs blog this way, because those people had reached out to him with articles he actually enjoyed.

The condition is that you only reach out with your best content. People who receive constant low-quality pitches do notice the person consistently producing something worthwhile, and may reference you later even without linking now.

My own view is that link building is largely social engineering at this point. Cold emailing a stranger rarely works, and a genuine relationship with another webmaster changes the odds entirely.

Tim’s framing of marketing generally is that it is interaction between people rather than campaigns or growth hacks. Traffic is individual people, not numbers.

Ahrefs’ own promotion strategy

Ahrefs promotes each article to their email list, posts it several times across Twitter and Facebook, and spends $300 or more on Facebook ads split between retargeting past blog readers and reaching new audiences.

That works because of who their audience is. In the internet marketing niche, nearly everyone has a website, and many have three, five, or ten of them.

Reaching that audience makes backlinks likely without proactive outreach. They get mentioned in roundups and posted in forum discussions organically.

Tim is explicit that this only works for companies at their stage, with an audience, a trusted brand, and a promotion budget.

For everyone else, the approach is to map your niche exhaustively. A travel blogger should have a list of every travel blogger, every travel website, and every ecommerce store selling travel gear.

When you publish, pull the subset who would genuinely care about this specific article and show it to them. Links may arrive in a month or two rather than immediately.

How to rank thin ecommerce product pages

Tim’s answer to thin product pages is blunt: put content on them, and the only reason people do not is laziness. Any product can support genuinely good photography and genuinely good descriptions.

His example is a car parts retailer where every competitor used the manufacturer’s standard photos. This company set up a small studio, asked manufacturers to send samples, and shot their own images.

Their product pages immediately looked better and held visitors longer, because shoppers could click through multiple angles. That improved time on page, which Google rewards.

For descriptions, the same company hired automotive bloggers to write real reviews of each part. The result was rich product pages that generated substantial traffic.

If your product pages genuinely lack content, Tim has no trick to offer. Whatever tactic gets you ranking temporarily, you will be outranked as soon as someone builds pages with real photos, real descriptions, and customer reviews.

How to build links to an ecommerce store

Nobody links directly to product pages, so build linkable resources and funnel the authority inward. This is the standard problem every ecommerce store faces.

Tim’s example came from shopping for wakeboards. One retailer built a sizing guide letting you pick the right board based on your height, weight, and shoe size.

That resource attracted an enormous number of backlinks. The store then funneled that link equity to its category pages, and from there onward to individual products.

The principle is creating something genuinely valuable to people who are shopping in your category, earning links to that, and letting the authority flow through your site structure.

Do social shares affect Google rankings?

Buying tweets and shares from Fiverr will not help you. Genuine buzz probably does, at least temporarily.

Tim is careful that correlation is not causation. Top-ranking pages do get more social shares, and ranking well produces search traffic which produces shares, so the direction is unclear.

What Ahrefs has observed repeatedly is that a controversial article generating real buzz on Twitter and Facebook can reach the top 10 for its keyword within 24 hours. Google appears able to detect that an article is taking off.

The effect does not last. When the buzz and traffic fade, Google drops the article and reverts to other signals, unless the article accumulated enough backlinks to hold a stable position.

Why Ahrefs runs Facebook ads to every blog post

The primary reason is reaching their own audience, which is otherwise impossible. Email open rates cap out well below 100%, a tweet to 10,000 followers might produce 15 clicks, and Facebook page posts reach almost nobody organically.

The secondary reason is generating the traffic and buzz that signals importance to Google. What they cannot buy is time on page.

Tim’s caution is that spending $3,000 driving Facebook traffic to a weak article accomplishes nothing. If people open it, scroll, lose interest, and bounce, Google will not rank it.

How Ahrefs decides which articles to keep promoting

Each new article gets a fixed $200 to $300, split evenly between retargeting previous blog visitors and reaching people who have never visited.

When that budget is exhausted, they compare its performance to past articles promoted the same way. The threshold is 30 cents per click.

Below 30 cents, they add budget and work on optimizing audiences, ad copy, and imagery to push the cost lower. Articles that consistently deliver cheap clicks move into an evergreen category promoted indefinitely with increasing budget month over month.

Ahrefs does not track conversion rate on this content, because every article demonstrates a use case for their tools. Tim’s position is that knowing whether it converts at 5% or 15% would not change anything, since he already knows it converts and the business is growing.

Should you disavow bad backlinks?

Ahrefs experienced a negative SEO attack, thousands of low-quality links pointed at one page, and chose to do nothing. No penalty followed, and that page now ranks number one for its term.

Tim polled his team and emailed friends for opinions, and got a genuine split. Some said disavow everything; others said a strong brand and a healthy link profile mean Google will recognize the attack.

His current position for a strong site is that preventive disavowal is unnecessary. Agency owners he talks to disagree and disavow actively on behalf of clients.

The unambiguous case is a manual penalty. If Google has told you that you have artificial links, remove what you can and disavow the rest.

Tim Soulo’s advice for a brand new blog

Do something extraordinary rather than repeating what other blogs say. That is Tim’s single piece of advice for starting from zero authority.

The universal beginner mistake is reading 10 blogs in your industry, learning something, and publishing an article covering the same ground. There is no value in that.

His weight-loss example makes it concrete. Instead of writing up a healthy breakfast recipe you read elsewhere, eat that breakfast for 30 days, track your weight, your health, and your mental performance, and write up your actual results.

Then you can report that you swapped the celery because it tasted bad and the substitution worked better. That is unique content people want to read.

Tim is emphatic that this means action rather than opinion. Your thoughts on whether something will work are not interesting; your firsthand results are.

You can find Tim at the Ahrefs blog, on the Ahrefs YouTube channel, and in the Ahrefs Facebook group.

Frequently asked questions

What are the two most important SEO factors?

Confirming that people actually search for your topic, and building backlinks to the page. Tim Soulo considers technical SEO elements like hreflang and schema markup complicated with only marginal impact by comparison.

Should you look at search volume or total traffic when picking a keyword?

Total traffic to the top 10 ranking pages, not the volume of a single keyword. A page ranks for dozens of query variations, so an individually low-volume keyword can still sit on a topic with substantial total traffic.

How many backlinks do you need to rank?

It depends on the competition. If most of the top 10 pages have referring links from 50-plus unique websites, the topic is competitive, and 100-plus makes it hard, so judge against how many links you can realistically earn.

Should you delete underperforming blog posts?

Diagnose before deleting. Check whether the article matches search intent and whether it simply needs more links, then update and relaunch it, since Ahrefs regularly needs three or four rounds before an article ranks.

Should you index podcast episodes for SEO?

Only if each episode covers a single focused topic you can name and structure the page around. Wide-ranging conversations make the page relevant to too many subjects to rank for any of them.

How do you rank ecommerce product pages with little content?

Add real content: original photography from multiple angles, substantive descriptions, and customer reviews. Tim’s example of a car parts retailer that shot its own product photos and hired automotive bloggers for descriptions outranked competitors using stock manufacturer images.

How do you build backlinks to an online store?

Build genuinely useful resources for shoppers, such as a sizing guide, earn links to those, and let the authority flow to category and product pages. Nobody links directly to a product page.

Do social shares help you rank in Google?

Purchased shares do not. Genuine buzz appears to produce short-term ranking gains, sometimes within 24 hours, and the effect fades unless the article accumulates real backlinks.