Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Ben Senescu, who's going to introduce himself as a solopreneur founder of Open SEO, an open source SEO platform.
Tell us why we should trust you as a builder in the SEO and marketing space.
Hmm.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm actually fairly new to SEO.
Before I started working on Open SEO, I was building other open source projects and I wanted to start doing SEO for them.
And I was doing research, I was looking into the tools and they were all pretty complicated and bloated and too expensive for me as a solopreneur.
So I started doing some research online if there were any alternatives.
And I found out that lots of people were vibe coding their own dashboards around this API called Data for SEO.
So I asked him, I was like, hey, would you guys like it if there was like an open source project that you could start from for building your dashboards? So I posted in, I think R Tech SEO and a bunch of people were like, yeah, this would be something we'd want.
So I spent a week building like the first Vibe coded version of Open SEO and I posted it and everyone was like, this is awesome. Like, this is totally what we need.
Um, and then I've been working on it ever since, taking it from like a Vibe coded, you know, kind of experiment to now. I think it's like a really robust piece of software that people are finding really, really helpful. Um, and I think it being made. So I started working on in February, and it being made post kind of Claude code becoming really good has really shaped how I've thought about building the product.
And so it's very AI native. Like, I mostly just use it through the AI or yeah, through Claude, even though there's like a really good UI too. So, yeah, so I'm becoming an intermediate SEO now after talking to all the customers and getting all the feedback and getting feature requests.
But it's really exciting times with Claude
[00:02:16] Speaker A: code and SEO clear up a misconception for me.
Open source doesn't mean free, right?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: No. So Open SEO is not free.
You need either a Data for SEO API key or to pay us $10 a month and then you can use us through the platform.
And the reason this is is because the biggest gotcha when I'm like, it's an open source SEO tool is professional SEOs are like, but what about the data?
Because everyone knows the data is really expensive.
Um, so that data costs money, which is what how we make money is. We, we charge a Little fee on top of the data you use.
Um, and yeah, but it's going to be like significantly cheaper than if you're using it through SEMrush or ARF. So most of our customers never go past the $10 a month. But if you're an agency with a hundred clients and you're no, you're spending a thousand dollars a month on software, you might be able to get away with spending $50 a month on open SEO because we let you have unlimited projects and you just pay for what you use.
[00:03:19] Speaker A: I think that's a great return shot. I come from a background in SEO SaaS. I worked with Raven Tools originally. They brought me out of homes.com and brought me into Tennessee and they were, you know, aside from Moz at that time in 2010, 2000, actually 2008 era, they were one of the best well known SaaS tools in the, in the space besides for mods. Ihrefs wasn't even a thought that had had been had yet. But there has always kind of been this Challenge, this hundred dollar ninety nine a month level for SaaS tools in the SEO space.
With Semrush entering with Moz and with Raven Tools, they were able to build something and get enough of a following that anybody that was an indie SaaS creator working in the side space, we had to, you know, if we made anything, it was always held up. Oh, well, is that already in Semrush or Ahrefs was the first question. And then the second question was, okay, well, do I need to pay for this on top of Semrush or does it do enough, you know, where you can get away with it? So there's kind of been this pressure point for, you know, signups and it's gotten worse over time because, you know, Semrush went public, they got investors. Ahrefs kudos. Hats off to Patrick stocks, hats off to their team for continuing to develop and expand. But it's, it's, they haven't increased their price point too much from $99 as, as their baseline. So it's created this pressure cooker situation where there's so many tools and solutions that have kind of died in the crib because, you know, you can, you can't reach that.
If you try to pass $99 in the price point as a SaaS, you kind of then get immediately compared to Semrush. And if you don't have their full crazy suite of all the stuff that they've done, you're not going to make it so everybody has to play small or go to enterprise.
So I really appreciate the opportunity to leverage the open source moment. For those that aren't more familiar with the workflow or process around, what exactly does that mean in terms of development? Does that mean, you know, on a Tuesday I can just come in and say, oh, the backlinks should all say, you know, they should get rid of Dr. Because I don't believe in it. Or is there a more official process? Like, how does that collaborative nature work?
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah, remind me to come back to that. But I just want to address something you were saying in the beginning about the $99 price point. Yeah, I think what's really interesting.
So when I initially posted in that Reddit forum, it was a lot of like, professional SEOs that were like, yeah, we want an open source alternative because we want to be able to customize our own tools. Yeah.
But what I found is a lot of the people that are like, paying for the hosted solution of open SEO aren't professional SEOs.
So they aren't comparing against SEMrush, because they've never used SEMrush before because it's just was totally inaccessible to them at that price point. But not only at the price point, but also it's really hard to do SEO. It's really hard to do SEO. Like, it took lots of time. You need to like spend like 10, 20 hours a week doing it. But now these people are able to start dipping their toes into SEO with Claude.
So, like an affordable SEO tool didn't make any sense because you were going to spend so much time doing it anyway. But now I think it makes a little bit more sense.
But onto your point about Open Source.
Yeah. So.
What's cool about it is the code is like totally available for anyone to use. So you can pull our code down and then open it in a folder with Claude and then say, add me this feature and Claude will just add you whatever feature you want or change anything that you want about the app, or if you want to bring in some integration that we don't support, you can just have Claude build it for you on your own computer and then it can work just exactly how you want.
So you could do that all from scratch.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: But.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: But I mean, I've spent five months trying to make it so that this works, you know, really well.
And my background's as a software engineer, so there's lots of things with like, design patterns and making sure that, you know, you add one feature, you do it well, and then the next feature is A lot easier to add.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: So, yeah, from the open source angle, it's pretty community driven. We have like, I think like 50 issues open right now of people requesting different features or bug fixes. So it's really easy for people to kind of contribute like, and fix paper cuts. But then some things, like someone put up this awesome PR and maybe I'll give it to you in the show notes where he added content, a whole content optimization page to open SEO. And it's not something we necessarily want to like add into the main products right now, but that's something that, you know, he was able to post it and share it online. It got pretty good engagement. So it's just kind of a cool community driven thing.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: It's, it is, it does seem a moment. And it's funny because like even a few months ago for me, you know, before I interviewed, you know, Mason McCumber, he, he took time afterwards to move me off of Claude on the, on the website and suggested move to Claude desktop in one interview and then actually got me into Terminal and Claude code.
And it's just kind of this crazy level of unlock in my mind of like the capability.
It's, it's, it's. As Adrian Nikolov, who I interviewed, he said, this is our moment where SEO goes on steroids the way that it should have been all along. Because as a longtime SEO, I can tell you that there were times where we didn't have access to good tools. We had basic access to the UI UX that you wanted and it gave you what you gave. And everything else was copying and pasting in Google Drive and spreadsheets and more spreadsheets, Google Docs, Google Drive spreadsheets, Copy paste and then WordPress or you had to log in, go to the page, open it up. It would take 10 minutes just to go and edit a meta title. Which you had to, you know, download a WordPress plugin to be even able, you know, you had to get Yoast and you had to know what Yoast was. And there's all these things where now it's like, oh, hey Claude, here's the rest access for WordPress.
Here's the application password.
Can you add a meta title to this page following these rules? Let's make a skill for it, okay? And then it'll do it. And then you check and you're like, that's better than I could have wrote it.
But it's also, you know, there are, there's downsides and there's temptations as you get access to all of this power.
What are some of the hard lessons? The crash outs, the. The crash and burns. Like, yesterday I accidentally crashed my little sass by asking Claude Code to build me something and I wasn't paying attention and it was down and I'm like, oh, I didn't know that I could kill it that way, but.
Noted.
So what are some of the hard lessons you've learned along the way?
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, resisting the temptation to just like, release things is certainly real. I mean, so yesterday I just posted kind of an update in the community.
So traditionally in open source projects, one of the ways the community contributed was they would implement features for you or fix bugs, and then you would review the code and then you'd merge into the project.
But open SEO over the last month in particular has gotten a lot of kind of people paying attention to it and excited about it.
So there are like 60 PRs open right now from random people.
So I had to like, just declare bankruptcy on addressing those where, like, I'm sure Most of the PRs are really good, but I can't just like add a hundred things to the app all at once because I'm certain, even if only one of them breaks, it's like, how do you track that all down? Yeah.
So, yeah, and then like, I could probably implement every feature in Semrush almost in like three weeks with Claude code, but it would be like, they'd all be so slightly broken that it would just be impossible to fix. So resisting that temptation is certainly real.
I don't know if I have any specific examples of it, but yeah, I think that's like the biggest thing in the AI era is figuring out, like, I can do anything. What's the one thing I should do
[00:12:57] Speaker A: as a business owner? Is this your first, like, official, like, venture venture, or do you have like a handful of previous projects or did was your previous work at a particular company dig a little bit into that software development background and some of the projects that you've worked on previously?
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah, so in college, I've always wanted to like have my own company. In college I started a Patreon for musicians. So we worked on that for two years, which is a really good experience.
We were able to get like 10 artists kind of using it and then we had to shut it down, but it was a great experience.
And then I worked at this company called Klaviyo, which is like one of the biggest email marketing companies for Shopify stores in particular.
And I learned a ton there. That was an awesome place to work.
Yeah. Because there were just so many smart people there to learn from. And then I, after that I moved to an other startup in the e commerce space where I was the first like employee. So that was a really good kind of like trial run as a, as a founder where what we did was the.
The company is called Patrol and basically the same rules that apply to like restaurants to have ramps for like people in wheelchairs applies to people using the Internet that are like def. So all the labels or all the images and links all need to be labeled properly. It's like called Accessibility and we kind of wrote like a coding agent to fix all of their accessibility violations in Shopify.
So it's kind of funny doing the site audit. Someone just raised an issue with our site audit for Shopify stores. That was an issue that we dealt with at your Patrol, which made me laugh yesterday because it like it'll render two H1 tags and then it, when it renders in the browser, it deletes one. So we were flagging it as a violation even though it's not like technically one.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: That makes sense.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So, yeah, pretty extensive software engineering experience.
New to SEO.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Where do you think things are going, you know, as a relative newcomer into IT and you know, getting your hands dirty and moving pieces around.
What's the shape of things for you as you're coming into this game here? You've got AI cross traffic as a new traffic source. You've got AI overviews.
What does it look like coming into it right now? Just curious.
As an old dirty dog who's been doing this too long, what's it like stepping into this world?
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really crazy. There is just so many, you know, takes online. So it's been interesting, like trying to parse them and learn about them all. Like you mentioned domain rating earlier. That's been an interesting kind of idea to wrap my head around how, you know, a lot of people want to increase their domain rating like that are entrepreneurs because that's kind of what everyone talks about and what companies are marketing. Like, we'll buy you all these backlinks to increase your domain rating, but it's like, is that going to get you any organic traffic?
So it's been interesting parsing all the takes and then the geo stuff in particular has been interesting and I'm excited to prioritize that more than next six months.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:23] Speaker B: Because with, you know, the traditional SEO stuff, it's pretty clear what I should be building.
Like keyword research is like essentially a solved problem.
Backlinks, you Just show the backlinks with the geo.
It seems like there's a lot less definitive answer on how it works.
So it's been interesting listening to your podcast, hearing people running their own experiments to try to understand it more.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: But
[00:16:53] Speaker B: it's very interesting and I think the rate at which things are going to change too, since it's so much easier to write code now and it's so much easier for Google and ChatGPT to monitor the ways people are taking advantage of their system. I think the cycle is just gonna close and close and close and I think at the end of the day it's just like, are you doing good marketing? Are you communicating your brand properly? Yeah, if you kind of just put blinders on, I think it will work work out in the end.
[00:17:21] Speaker A: It does seem to be a moment of such wild fluctuations and uncertainty. Again, it's kind of exciting for me because it's, there was definitely a time where, you know, things fe felt pretty stale. You know, everything, everything was a rehash. There was, you know, there'd be a, an update that came, came around and rolled in and roiled stuff and we'd always find something to argue about, usually around the updates be, oh, SEO is dead. You know, again, the, the, the eternal zombie of, of SEO. But I think it's because we always, as an industry, as a fledgling industry, I think people forget this like this SEO as an industry is completely new in the 2000s, you know, it was barely even a concept in the late 90s as enough websites drew enough traffic for and got enough businesses. But it's a multi, multi billion dollar enterprise now. And at the moment where that investment has started to sort of peak, we now have such insane levels of insane uncertainty. You know, we've never had as little clarity into these data sources for, you know, there's zero data on, from, from Google.
For us that's accessible on AI overviews, impacts, CTRs, click through rates, it's, it's obfuscated. And then you know, we get small, we've gotten small sneaks and peaks. Microsoft Clarity added, you know, query fan out visualization, Google Webmaster tools added a small tool and with some data, but I don't know if it's available through the API or if it's just through the UI right now.
And you know, I'm certain that the billionaire, the millionaires and billionaires who are getting to play around right now with ads in ChatGPT are being given some sort of metrics, but us peasants haven't yet seen that and that's locked under NDA. I haven't seen anybody leak or show even a screenshot of any of the data inside from the people who have signed up for ChatGPT advertising and probably because they had to sign an NDA and we get sued or, or just haven't thought about it. I don't know if anybody is listening and is can steal a screenshot to show us what kind of metrics ChatGPT is is serving out to justify spending. Ad seen anecdotes of people who've said, oh, I've run this and this has been the outcome, but I haven't seen any interface that's shown a data point. And as somebody who worked in the SEO SaaS space, I'm like, where's the data? What does the data look like? Their anecdote of like, oh, it worked, it didn't work is nice but A, I don't have the access to GPT ads and B, I don't know when they're going to be releasing it to us and maybe this is outdated by the time this comes out. With the pace of things, maybe ChatGPT is announcing right now that they're releasing statistics and data, but I highly doubt it.
They, Google and being Microsoft and the others have so little incentive in this system to show companies real actionable metrics, it's insane.
We're marketing in the dark.
So the only hedge, the only protection against that is what you suggested, which is pursuing your brand, you know, doing good foundational work for marketing. You know, take the moment and. Okay, well, I don't know, don't know the impact and the clarity of the attribution. I can just focus on fundamentals, get my brand out there and hope that some of the data like can come along and help support that as much as possible.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm really thankful to have entered this SEO industry because even if I think the job of SEO maybe changes a lot, I think it like rewired my brain to think about like marketing totally differently.
Because in the past maybe I thought about marketing from like a TikTok or like posting on LinkedIn or X is like how you get customers. Like just post whatever you think customers want. But I think the SEO of thinking about what are people searching for, what are people asking is just so useful to as a way, a framework to like view how you should be talking about your brand.
So I think even if maybe SEO changes a lot, I think that whole framework of looking at things is extremely useful.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: And I think there's a core there's a heartbeat too. Like, you know, the business intelligence tools out there that kind of look competitively like in a market space, you know, how many clients do they have, what's their annual income, you know, how many units are they selling? Is not as good as that Same viewpoint of that marketing of looking at Google Ads, API, look at the search volume and build a cluster of keywords for that industry to show you what's the online demand for this. Like what is the, the digital representation of that physical business and you know, who is the strongest, you know, in terms of total overall rankings and then estimated traffic based off of what we know about click through rates, which is not as solid as it used to be. But advanced webrank is doing a pretty good job there. But we, we can still see data. So I guess to walk back like the moment of like we're totally in the, in the dark, we do have the fundamentals and as I said to Ann Smarty yesterday, like, you know, SEO is in the heart, you know, this is SEO and AI sits behind it and it overlaps it entirely.
So everything new about AI is outside of SEO. Everything else, I can't think of an aspect of SEO, very many aspects of SEO that, that don't impact in one way or another. Your AI visibility, you know, keyword choice, your targeting, how you write about things, your technical SEO, your crawlability, your indexation, all of those things, they all matter. They still matter. It's just there's more stuff and it's so murky, so there's so few data points out there and you know, it's going to be a wild, wild west for a little bit as we kind of have so many people trying to solve this.
But smart people are coming up with some interesting solutions and it's starting to become more clear the more conversations I have with agencies of what their strategy is and how to adapt to the moment. But, but it certainly is a moment of big change.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: I'm curious, when it comes to open SEO, what's your thought process around being selective about the direction of which PRs and how horizontal that you want that adoption process to be?
You know, because you can always tack on, you know, horizontally another different feature set that tackles another aspect of it versus going deeper in the vertical to kind of hone. Oh, within link building we've got this basic data, but then, you know, you can do the secondary thing and go deeper with it and go deeper and improve, you know, that one particular feature. What's your mindset for the next year in terms of depth versus horizon.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a really interesting question.
I think More. More horizon. So I actually just posted like a roadmap. When I was saying I'm not taking external PRs anymore, I said here's the roadmap of like how I'm. I want to get through this roadmap, which is why I'm not taking external PRs.
So that's things like local SEO, improved AI visibility, like prompt tracking, something I really want to add.
And I want to give people just all of the data they need so that Claude can kind of do stuff on their behalf.
And then we are so like I want open SEO to always be the tool that people just getting into SEO for the first time. So like business owners that maybe can't afford to hire an SEO consultant yet, they're kind of entry point to the world of SEO. So I want to keep the interface simple in that sense, but then also provide more advanced skills and data for agencies and freelancers to kind of be a starting point for them building their own custom workflows.
In terms of going super into depth about us providing, you know, new SEO insights that's not available anywhere else, we'll probably leave that to other products.
And then open SEO will more be like your source of truth for all data.
The place we're storing, you know, your rank tracking, your prompt tracking, kind of the brain for your Claude. And then if you want to pull in other more advanced SEO analysis tools, then you can go to other tools for that.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: Absolutely love it.
Give a shout out for the site if you're active on any particular social channel channels. If people want to learn more about open SEO or want to sign up and you know, start their own PR or just get connected. What does that look like?
[00:27:32] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn just Ben Senescu and then I'm also on X also Ben Senescu. I do talk more about just programming on there than, than SEO, but I, I'll maybe start posting more about SEO there as well. But those are the two best places to find me and then join our discord.
So we're not taking external PRs right now. We probably will in the future, but the best way to contribute is just to write really good issues, which is like just describing what do you want it, how do you want SEO to work? Open SEO to work.
So those are still super helpful. And then helping people in the community and asking questions and sharing things you find useful in discord is also a great way to kind of be involved.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: Fantastic. I'll make sure all of that gets linked up on the show Notes.
I'll also make sure this episode goes up on both unscripted SaaS and unscripted SEO. If you want the full transcript, the full recap, screenshots, and what's going on@open SEO, check out unscripted SEO.com thanks for stopping by, Ben.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Thanks so much, Jerry.
