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Ahrefs is killin’ it.

They’ve built a $100MM ARR SaaS business in ~10 years with 0 sales people. And they focus almost entirely on content marketing SEO (duh).

But they don’t follow the “rules” when it comes to content marketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBaSly-k86c&feature=youtu.be

❌ They don’t use pop-ups

❌ They don’t use calls to action

❌ They don’t use lead magnets

❌ They don’t use analytics or track conversions

🤯 🤯

So how are they able to achieve such incredible success with their content marketing without using these standard practices? What makes their strategy work so well?

I had to chance to sit down with Tim Soulo, the CMO of Ahrefs, and ask some of these questions.

We dug into the Ahrefs content marketing strategy and discussed:

1. Choosing keywords/topics
2. Selling their product with content
3. Measurement and ROI (or lack thereof)
4. Content promotion and linkbuilding

Here’s what I learned.

Choose Keywords Based on Business Value

First of all, I wanted to learn about how Ahrefs chooses and prioritizes topics for their own content marketing.

Ahrefs prioritizes keywords based on 3 metrics:

1. Traffic (Volume w/ clicks)