Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Paul Batarina, who's going to introduce himself and tell us why we should trust him as an SEO expert.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Yeah, my name is Paul. I've been in the SEO game for about 12, 13 years now.
I don't know if you want to trust me as an SEO expert, but I do work for a big publicly traded company called RevolveClothing.com or Revolve.com now, so. And I've been there for 13 years as well.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: Interesting. So all in the same, See, because usually when I talk to SEOs, we. We've bounced around, we played the field, we've touched in a dozen different industries. You know, I know I've worked with poop scoopers, I've worked with realtors, which is the same thing. Just kidding, guys. I love realtors.
Plumbers, actually. Sump pump guys who also deal with poop. I don't know why this is such a thing. But also, like, big enterprise entities like, you know, Logan's Roadhouse and Captain D's and done, like, the enterprise thing. What size of entity have you been working with and what's it like? What's it like to work in one niche for that amount of time? Tell me, please.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: I guess I've been extremely blessed to work with a company where, you know, I love the culture, I love the environment. I have a lot of respect for our CEO.
I'm not gonna lie, though. Like, even though I have this nine to five, I do dabble into, like. Well, I did dabble into a lot of affiliate marketing. That was, like, one of my biggest passions. So call it what you will. If you wanna call it the gray hats or the black hats, you know, there was that side of things that I was really interested in.
You know, while I also have my nine to five.
Fair enough, fair enough. But I would just say that it's really.
I don't know, like, maybe things change as we get older, but maybe when we were a lot younger, we were more.
Not saying everyone, but for me, let's say I was super driven. I wanted to make more money. I wanted to hustle as much as I could. But I'm at that point in my life now where I'm, like, pretty. Pretty content, you know, like, pretty happy with this company. I respect a lot of people in this company. I enjoy being, you know, like, I'm still here at home. After this interview, I'm gonna go to work.
You know, like, usually if you work at A at a typical 9 to 5, you gotta be at the office at 9, you gotta leave at 5. So there's that flexibility and that to me is pretty priceless.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Like as a matter of fact, even after this, I'm probably gonna pick up my daughter from school, take her home and then go to work. So that's usually unheard of. Like, and I'm not gonna get in trouble cause of that, you know.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: So, so tell me about the optimization world.
What type of site that you've been working on, what are some challenges or victories that you've had in that niche with that storied amount of time with them, with revolve.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: So I guess we'll backtrack a little bit. I joined in 2013, there was a SEO team. There's about three or four of us and it was just me for the last eight, nine years being in the company. And during that time span, a lot of it had to do with technical SEO.
And until this day we still have a lot of technical challenges. But it's been, and you tell me this too, but it's been a challenge with talking to C levels about how do we quantify whatever it is that we're going to change. Is it going to move the needle? Sure, yes. It's best practices. Sure. We know that from an SEO standpoint we need to make the site faster. We got to clean up the site architecture X, Y and Z.
But it's been very difficult, difficult in the past years on how to prove that doing this is going to move the needle. And it wasn't until maybe two, three years ago we started focusing on long tail category pages, long tail subcategory pages.
And because of that, and you know, my CEO actually likes the actual growth. Like it's actual, it's actually tangible. Like you can actually see, hey, if we created X amount of pages, we can see that this was the reason why we grew X percent. And so that's what I've been working on. Long tail pages. Pretty simple.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: I think it's something that's under looked at. Like it's in the E commerce niche, right?
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, E commerce. I worked, I did a console for a guy selling men's underwear that had like pouches on them. Like, okay, we're going back to the middle ages as far as stylies. But he's like, it's crazy how much reception we're getting with our TikTok videos and it's driving a lot of visibility there. But you know, we're looking for you Know, how do we, you know, make changes on the site that are going to make a difference? And I just seen post from, I think it was Mark Williams Cook was talking about how Google digests different types of queries.
And there was actually an exploit that he discovered and he was able to get query processing information out of this Google endpoint to show that they kind of fold and sort query information and that front side query filtering impacts the output. And so if you're thinking about your search, you know, your keyword bucket and thinking about the type of it will return different result sets based off of those different query intents. Like is it a yes or no question or is like a Boolean type answer? Or is this searching for validation or, or is this competitive analysis? There was only like really eight buckets that everything fell into.
And then e commerce queries fall into just a handful of those.
But knowing that you can then kind of approach, oh hey, this category page, if we understand this is, if we can add this additional information and make these category pages more useful to fill, that type of intent then becomes more than just a artifact of Shopify throwing everything into categories. You know, like, right there is like any, you know, whether you're on Shopify or Wix or you know, one of the other big e commerce platforms. You know, I had talked to a lot of people who are treating the incident or the existence of those category pages as accidents, you know, as opposed, as opposed to opportunities.
So he, he did some smart things and did some bad things.
The smart thing was to actually create and research what are some niche or specific categories that our one clothing item can fit into. And I did this too for Metaflex Glove.
It's a glove that prevents or is helpful for arthritis. And they just had one product. But creating multiple category pages allowed them to address, hey, this is a glove for arthritis. Hey, this is a glove that's for rheumatoid arthritis and kind of address that side of things and create a category page with specific information.
The bad thing that he did was that for one of those category pages he actually went and bought like 500 anchor text links from comment spam sites just to that page.
Which I was like, you gotta stop that. The scary thing is that it actually worked.
Which just goes to show that Google is in some ways not as advanced as we often take it. You know, we would expect, hey, you know, Penguin would have slapped that down so a bunch of comment spam would have no value. But you know, if you're going from having no anchor text to even a handful of those terrible hacked sites, you know, that have tons of other things. It's going to send value but it might not last forever. So we're like gotta, you gotta switch up to a more long term strategy. But yeah, category pages all the way.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: That's, that's interesting that you mentioned about one product and creating multiple category pages for that because usually we have a rule. So we have about 260,000 products. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to create thousands of pages.
I have this typical threshold where it's a minimum of three products. Then it can, if there's three products or more, then we could create a category page for that. If not, then we just leave it alone.
A good friend of mine, she works for Sephora, another you know, large E commerce and that was like her rule of thumb.
It's just a theory that if it's like less than 3 then the page could be considered as a soft 404. It's thin content or whatever it might be.
I haven't really fully tested that out yet. But for us right now we're just doing three minimum or more, three or less and we just kill the page.
[00:09:28] Speaker A: I think that's probably for a bigger E commerce. Like she was a very niche and had one specific product and she was working on making a pro version and then a men's and women's version. So like the development was just kind of slow but we really augmented that particular page pretty hard with, with medical information.
Yeah.
Quotes from an interview and then the product was focused on, you know, embedded into that. So kind of more content heavy than actually most E commerce are going to be able to pull off. But so, and that's the case of it's like more if it's more of just product listings. I would agree anything less than three, it was kind of a niche. But I could see the rule of three being a good, good rule of thumb.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: Although that could be also an opportunity for us to test as well. Just for what it's worth, we, we don't have any like content type of pages like blog content or anything of that matter.
I think we're, you know, for us we're very protective over our brand or brand voice not saying, you know, the argument is like, you know, when it's SEO, like you can clearly see at times where it just seems like it's super for SEO purposes versus for the user. No matter how much we want to argue saying oh yeah it is for the user. But then when I don't know, just because of revolve, you know, it's high fashion, it's more on imagery, it's more on, you know, the brand messaging. When there's a ton of block of text, it kind of just steers away from the consumer and it's more focused on SEO, although we know that it could help with SEO purposes. So it's like a battle that we go through or that I go through, you know, from a day to day basis.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: No, I definitely hear that. And that is something that it seems like ironically, the higher dollar the item, the harder it is as an SEO to argue for more text and you end up losing more often to.
It's an image, you know, and they spent $5,000 shooting that image and spent maybe $20,000 shooting that image. And so they're like, yeah, we paid a lot. So we're a picture. And you're like, okay, this is a file name, maybe alt text.
Can I put anything more on this page? Like, I know Google can tell the difference between a landscape and a cat now. You know, it can process and understand images a little bit better nowadays. But still, you know, like, it gives you so much more work to work behind the scenes to try to create other relevant signals when there's such a heavy emphasis. It says on just images.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep. Hey, real, real quick, tell me about your, your shirt. Plucking ops. Awesome. Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: This is my Thanksgiving shirt.
So every Thanksgiving we get a batch of T shirts that everybody wears and everyone just wears them on Thanksgiving, but I wear it every opportunity I get.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: Do you, do you play the, the guitar by any chance or.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: I do happen to, but it was plucking. As in like plucking feathers for a tur.
My wife has one that says may the forks be with you.
[00:12:50] Speaker B: Oh God.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: So they're all Thanksgiving and food based pun shirts.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I, I do plunk around, pluck strings a little bit. Not as good as. Not good enough to, to publish anywhere just for. I. I mostly just do acoustic covers of video games. Like, okay, cool.
Like Legend of Zelda playing Gerudo Valley on acoustic guitar and mashing that out is something that's really cool.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: Gotta have time for video games too, you know, that's.
I love video games, man. So
[00:13:34] Speaker A: tell me about link building in E Commerce. What's the status on that? What are some of the approaches that you've seen churn and burn or something? That's been true for a while.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: So in 2013 I got hired as an SEO link builder. And I thought I was actually going to link build. All I did for like a year straight was disavow links.
I would just literally audit and go through and just, you know, send out emails first. And after like three weeks or so, if they don't respond, then we add it to the disavow list. But for us personally, like we don't do any link building. We had hire an SEO team to do link building. But then what happened was we also have a PR team, you know, a brand marketing team. And so now, you know, C level was saying, well, why do we need this SEO team when we already have pr? And to that argument, you know, they have relationships with all these, if you want to call them influencers, right, that do have blogs that do have a strong following. And so honestly we're at this point now where we, we do still go out for influencers. But now it's trying to quantify like how does it really help with the overall site? You know, the argument is reaching out to an influencer, having them like do a shout out back to revolve. There's like this halo effect. But now we really want to be more analytical about it. Like how does it really help, you know, like what's the expected impressions, what's the expected visits? Is there any correlation of by reaching out to these influencers, does it actually improve our brand search volume as well?
So they've been like working with me on that, on how to like improve on that. We're still in that process, but I would say right now it's really just we have a full on brand marketing team. They have this whole process where they work with influencers, big time artists, big time celebrities, and a lot of like press as well. Like recently we just opened our first physical store in Los Angeles. So that's been helping out. And then of course we have the festival coming up in April, Coachella and we have a really big festival there where we have various music artists that's playing. So there's going to be a lot of press as well. But in terms of like strategically for an SEO perspective, there is no like specific link building at all.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: I'm curious, my thoughts, Friend Matt Brooks of Seoteric says that ChatGpt is your least trained but most popular customer support representative and you can stretch that over to other AI tools. Is there anything that you're thinking about for brand as far as like how are you approaching AI visibility? Is it folded into the SEO suite? Is it seen as a PR type of thing that you don't have to worry about as much. Or is it something where, you know, at your level of brand value, you know, your. Is it something that C Suite has brought up to you of hey, we want to show up in these AI overviews and AI tools. Is that in your den or is it something they're taking on elsewhere?
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Good question.
It's definitely in conversation.
It's in my den right now. A lot of it is just whether you want to call it speculation.
So researching just for some context. Right now we're around 20,000 visitors per month with all of LLMs. Whether it's ChatGPT perplexity, of course. ChatGPT probably is taking 90% of the traffic and gross purchase revenues at roughly $58,000 a month, which is very low compared to the entire business.
But is there opportunity? I think so.
Now here's the challenge and I just want to hear your thoughts. Is maybe on LinkedIn or maybe on Slack or wherever it might be, we might see this new strategy that hey, getting an increase of like, you know, more comments or working on your brand reputation on Reddit, more citations, you're going to show up and then three weeks later, oh, the number of citations have dropped with Reddit. And then later on someone's going to say, hey, do some FAQs on all of your product pages or your PLPs. And then soon enough there's a new algorithm that's going to take place and that's not going to show up in a, in these LLMs no more. I think we're a bit concerned or we're kind of like, we're cautious in a way that, hey, we just want to be very careful if we want to go all in on something, you know, like is it going to last in the long term? And then this kind of goes back to maybe it's really just best practices the way that we've always known and then that ultimately, you know, we would get rewarded with AI visibility.
You know, I don't know. I love to hear your thoughts.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: I think there's two conversations I had that stand out. One was with alejandra Meyerhans of GetMe Links and Jason Bernard of Kalicubes. And we both dug into kind of understanding the architecture behind these LLM based AI search tools.
I lean towards calling it LLM optimization because it's it as a system.
It's not heavily based off of rag retrieval, it's not a data information retrieval system.
So if you understand that contextually what's happening when you put in that prompt, it's processing it and it's looking first to its existing training database of information and then if it doesn't have a solid answer there, it's going to run a query and pull fresh information results. Maybe it might do a query fan out, maybe it might research multiple modes off of that. So it's kind of spread out and clustered. But that's just a fancy wrapper for Google rankings.
So there's that and then there's the original training data set of whether it's AI overviews or whether it's third party data set, whether it's coming from Bing's index or whether it's Google's index.
You kind of have this two, three layers that you can influence as an SEO. So you can work on optimizing Google and others understanding of your entity of a business and try to solve and make sure that the things that need to be done to confirm to Google that you are an entity, that this thing is, this has the backing of the write directories. Like you know, if you're a podcast, you know, get it entered into the IMDb database. IMDb is seen as a valid source. If you're an author. There are four or five repository type sites for author information where if you actually published a book, then your book shows up with an IBN and shows up and that is used by Google to do the knowledge graph entries, right? So you can either optimize for the entity and that gets pulled into the training data or you're optimizing again for the results. And so that comes back to just standard best practices and mapping and understanding how can I rank it might involve some additional work. There's some fantastic stuff that's coming out. Mike King loves the query fan out concept and trying to craft content whether on your own site or elsewhere to support that. I think the one thing that has kind of changed or shifted or is kind of loosey goosey at the moment is you can, for something like Top Chef in Seattle, you can literally just ask what are the top citations that you used to determine who is the best chef chef in Seattle and use that as a proxy for can I get on those specific cited sites, are they lists of chefs, are they directories, are they newspaper articles? And then get listed on similar sites or get listed on those Top Chef lists.
But that's just link building PR but with better visibility.
Like it's almost like you know on that side like Google's not going to tell you directly what links it valued towards answering the question of who is the Top Chef in Seattle. If you did that query LLM tools will give that peek under the skirt.
So whatever they do there. But that won't tell you, you know, if they like, if they used query fan out information.
It's still going to go back to Google in part.
But there is that side of it of, hey, this is a lot easier to make an argument to C Suite of, hey, we want to find more places to get our brand mentioned and possibly linked versus okay, there's this PageRank algorithm and I need to get on sites that have a specific authority that's measured in Dr. But that's not an official metric. That's just a proxy metric published by Ahrefs. They used to have a real page rank and it was the little grain bar. And you sound like a crazy person.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Like trying to argue for budget for link building.
I don't know how we ever succeeded at it. It just kind of came down to either they trusted you and like, okay, I guess we need this link thing and I guess it's the most expensive thing that this SEO guy is going to do. And hopefully. And I heard that, you know, my friend got burned. You know, they, they got links and they did link building and their site got trashed. So it's, you know, like you were doing those disavows when you first came on. Like, it's like, okay, but it's a lot easier to say, you know what these tools try to find who's the most well known and we're going to get you in more places so that you're known better. And hopefully we can do that for Google. At the same time, way easier to get that approval and people are hungry for it right now because they're like, okay, I guess there's AI overviews everywhere. Everything's AI tools. If you go on LinkedIn, it's AI this, AI that, SEO's dead, blah, blah, blah. It's not. It's zombified, it's back from the dead again.
But those fundamentals are still there. But how we talk about it in C Suite can shift to be easier on us. Like, we don't have to talk. We can talk more generally about authority, visibility, brand concepts.
That's my take on it.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: You got me thinking then, because again, we have our digital PR team, we have our brand marketing team, we do have, I don't know if you've checked the site, but our metrics are really high. Our domain rating is really, really high as well. We've got a bunch of links Coming from really big sites, whether it's fashion Week or Bizarre Voice more in the fashion niche. But it would more interesting if we could make a strategic approach especially for AI or LLMs.
Maybe try to see, you know, where, where is it getting cited more. Are we lacking that site? You know, not only are we lacking it, but maybe the context like the link that we're getting the surrounding content around it, like does that trigger it? Will we have more visibility, you know, versus just try to get relationships and get a link out of it, you know, who knows something to just be more strategic about.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: I kind of broke down with Alejandro and he we agreed on some of the things that we understand that could be signals of different degrees based off of either Google's statements, their published patents. If you've never read Bill Slosky's work from SEO Bilacy, go back or ask Claude to give you summaries of those. Is it very technical? But before he died he did some incredible work on patent breaking down. That's super helpful to understand.
But we agreed anchor text is a signal the overall relevance of the page, the distance of your site and that site's link to seed. So a seed is like in you know, let's say zoology. Zoos are authority sites. Anything that isn't a zoo is dis. Is distant from it.
That's a very simple one. So any the, the further how, how many further hops you have to go to get to have a site that's linked from a zoo. That's how that it lessens your authority. Right. So that's kind of the trust rank factor that was behind the page rank factor less popular to understand but equally important. So distance to seed, anchor text, co occurring text before and after gives context. So that lens of ads relevance and whether or not the anchor text is understood to be a brand name or not.
So branded unbranded, let's see. And then of course you know how many other links were on the page and then how many links were coming to that page. So overall authority is this a homepage link that has a ton of juice or is this a niche page? So those are all the, the factors that came came into it.
So thinking about, you know, the context in which your brand is mentioned.
Yeah. A little bit of nudging from your PR guy could get your, you know, your raw domain instead wrapped in, you know, revolve which is known for its men's cargo pants, you know.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:10] Speaker A: And that link link goes to your car like cargo pant page. That's probably Going to send as much value to that cargo pant page as if you linked on cargo pants.
In fact, some of the link building I've done, people some of the SEOs I've worked with have specifically asked, hey, can I get a brand?
But in a sentence that has this keyword or phrase.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: Right, right. So this.
Have you ever met Bill? You ever spoke to him before he passed or.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: No, I did, I did get to. I talked to him a good number of times for different articles a couple of times. But yeah, he's a good guy.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: There's a, I never met the guy, but there was a guy that I worked with years ago and you know, a lot of his methodology came from Bill. His name is Coray Tugberg. Does that ring a bell?
[00:29:02] Speaker A: It does, yeah.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So yeah, the guy from Turkey. Yep.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: I have his course. It's a challenge for me to, to grasp. I have to like go over it multiple times to really understand the concepts and whatnot.
So
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Analyzing patents is infuriating but illuminating because it, it's like looking at the architecture plans for something but the company filed like 10 different plans and you're not sure which one actually got built but you know that they had to have patented it.
So you know it got you if it's being used then it was one of these things.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: So like it can't not have been patented.
So analyzing it is valuable but it's always a guess of is is the way that they imp they implemented it or are using it in their system the same as what they originally specced out as the patent. The function will be the same. But you know one of the cheat codes you can always the tell of a Google liaison that they're lying is that their lips are moving.
But when they're lying, they lie in a specific way. They have. It's like have you ever read any like fantasy novels about elves and the fairies? Like, like they can't tell a lie but that doesn't mean that you can't get trapped in their, their world for a thousand years because you misunderstood what they said.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: Never read a, a book but got it, got it.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So for example, they'll say they said for a long time that no, we don't use click data in ranking in as a ranking factor.
And they got away with that because it wasn't a ranking factor, it was part of a ranking system.
And you know, so it's that type of minuscule thing of any time that they give a nugget. There is an aspect of truth to it. But it's always said in a, in such a specific way that it's the least amount of helpful disclosure about that. And if you.
And the hard part is that the SEO journalism and the SEO ecosystem will take, you know, a snippet of, oh, Matt Cutts said this and so that. Or Gary Eisch said this this one time and that means this. They're like, well, let's, you know, I hate to be that guy, but we have to look at the context very closely of what they're saying and what they're not saying very carefully.
Because you can definitely go wrong if you take them at their word.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Right, right.
Going back to like, you know, AI visibility, I guess something that we are, that I have like more control of testing, you know, exclude like PR and whatnot. I'm running a test right now. You know, I have a test control group with these long tail pages that I've created that I talked to you about. That's working.
I think I'm looking at it. Two parts. One is do we see an increase in traffic in organic, which is adding content above the fold and below the fold, but more so to your point to really see. Okay. Because right now I'm running the test. We're four weeks in, we're seeing a 25% lift on the test group versus the control group. The control group is actually down 5%.
So that's interesting already. So that is already a signal that I could roll this out to all the long tail pages, which we have about 40,000 of those.
But the other part now is maybe strategically looking and understanding the content, the context, and maybe that like I could maybe go into these LLMs, type in something and it would source out from those long tail pages saying that, oh, it came from this content right here saying, you know, what I'm saying is maybe people like to type in what's a dress that I can wear for spring? And because I have a piece of content saying, you know, this X dress is great to wear during this festival during the spring, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. And you know, ChatGPT is going to reference that. So that could be another layer of, hey, you know, this is how our visibility is growing.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I would add that to the bucket list. And I love to hear the implementation of the SEO testing. I know Gus Perugia of who I interviewed, he definitely is a big fan of implementing that. So love to hear it.
[00:33:58] Speaker B: I'll share the results with you when it's completely done.
There's other tests that we're doing. I mean, it could be simple as title tags, putting the brand in the beginning, maybe adding free shipping and returns at the top with the title tags. I mean, adding subcategories to the main keywords.
All sorts of tests.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Love it. Well, thanks so much for your time and insights.
Where do you hang out? Where can. If people want to chat, chat you up, have conversation. Where can they find you?
[00:34:30] Speaker B: I mean, on Slack, you know the SEO community I'm on there.
I was pretty active before, but I could still be somewhat active there. I'm in this AIs group, Asian in Search. I think it's run by George Wynn. I'm pretty sure you know him on LinkedIn and he could find me there too.
And then if you guys all go to conferences, I don't know if you go, Jeremy, do you go to Brighton SEO or something or.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: I, I occasionally I get out over a couple of years and my wife, my wife has a hard time running things without me at home. So having gotten out to as many SEO conferences. But, but I do want to get out to Brighton one of these years. Maybe I'll take the fam with me and we'll do English adventure or.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: Come out. Yeah. Or the one in Cal. Yeah. In San Diego. That's the one that we go to. Right.
Come out. It's pretty over here in California.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: I grew up in Yucaipa, so I totally familiar with the skills with the wonderful three seasons of California.
There's.
There's sunny, hot and on fire.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: Today's gonna be on fire, apparently.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: So starting the season early.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I know
[00:35:53] Speaker A: this is usually when you grow back the grass.
I know.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: So yeah, that's where everyone could. Could find me. So yeah.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Thanks so much.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: Yeah, likewise. Thank you, man.
