Mika Lepisto: 00:04

Welcome to the back ops podcast. I'm your host, Mika Lepisto. My focus on the show is to highlight what happens behind the scenes driving success and the people who are doing just that. Today, I have Paul Batarina with me, the man in charge of SEO for Revolve Luxury Fashion Ecom. Welcome, Paul.

Mika Lepisto: 00:20

Happy to have you here.

Paul Baterina: 00:21

Likewise. Thanks.

Mika Lepisto: 00:22

Fun fact, the office that you see behind him, Paul built from scratch as what would you call that? A man shed?

Paul Baterina: 00:29

Yeah. Man cave, office shed.

Mika Lepisto: 00:32

For all the thousands of people joining us on audio, you'll have to hop on over to YouTube if you wanna see it. What made you decide to build the shed?

Paul Baterina: 00:41

I looked online, and there's all these pre built sheds going for 30 grand, 40 grand. That's not even including the electrical work. So I figured, you know what? Maybe I could just build this on my own. Because if you go to Home Depot, they have those pre built sheds.

Paul Baterina: 00:55

And they were going for 5,000, $6,000. And so I broke down the numbers and I said, okay. Home Depot, they're gonna come in, set up the shed. Now it's up to me to do the drywall, insulation, the floors. I figured, let me just YouTube this and see if I can actually do this.

Paul Baterina: 01:09

Mind you, I've never built anything in my entire life. I did get help from my fiance's dad and my fiance too. She helped me as well. But when I broke down the numbers, I probably spent 10,000. So basically, I'm saving myself $20,000.

Paul Baterina: 01:24

Before having this shed, I was in the garage, just a complete mess. Obviously, there's a lot of imperfections. But you could see that little kind of mark over there. But at the end of the day, you know what? I did that.

Paul Baterina: 01:36

The cool thing was I was able to build this relationship with my fiance's dad. And just the whole journey, it was just pretty fun. You know what I mean?

Mika Lepisto: 01:43

For sure. I've done some construction myself. Nobody notices the imperfections like you do. Right. So if you wouldn't have pointed that out, I probably wouldn't have seen it.

Paul Baterina: 01:55

For sure.

Mika Lepisto: 01:56

I really like what you said too about being able to build a relationship with your fiance's dad. Those kinds of things, you can't put a price on that. Alright. Let's dive into the career of mister Paul here. 10 years at Revolve, that sticks out to me.

Mika Lepisto: 02:11

It's a long time. You're obviously happy enough to stick around. 10 years is a long time in tech, especially. What are your reasons for being at Revolve for 10 years?

Paul Baterina: 02:20

It's a very good question. The younger me would jump ship. I always thought, okay. The more pay, the better it'll be. I'll be a lot happier.

Paul Baterina: 02:28

But I would say the company culture is the biggest thing. And now being a dad and having a family, I could tell you at any given moment, if my daughter needs me or if my fiance needs me, I can leave the office. You can't put a price into that. That's where I just feel extremely happy. My stress level is probably at a negative 1000%.

Paul Baterina: 02:50

A couple hours ago, I just had a meeting with my CEO. It was stress free. Whether things go well or not, And that's another thing. I love my CEO so much. I have so much respect for him that even if things weren't going well, it's the way how able to give me feedback or how do we figure out x, y, and z.

Paul Baterina: 03:07

There's no, like, what the fuck are you doing kind of thing. That's where I have a lot of respect for our CEO. I I think back then, I was all about the pay. But now, as long as bills are paid and I can enjoy the money, I don't see the need to leave But it's Sunday night. I don't think about, oh, shit.

Paul Baterina: 03:25

I gotta go to work tomorrow. It's more like, oh, heck yeah. I can't wait to figure out x, y, and z. I can't wait to meet up with this teammate, or I can't wait to have lunch with this teammate from this department. I think that's the beauty of me working at Revolve for over 10 years.

Mika Lepisto: 03:41

Yeah. Definitely. There's a lot of unquantifiable things, flexibility, stuff like that. That's one thing that I've enjoyed as a consultant. Yeah.

Mika Lepisto: 03:50

I can really appreciate that and the the lack of stress. Those are really good reasons in my opinion.

Paul Baterina: 03:55

For sure.

Mika Lepisto: 03:56

Alright. Let's dive in a little bit more on Revolve. Do you know offhand what's the most expensive product you have? Because you're a luxury fashion ecom retailer, and I remember seeing some of these prices. They were like, oh, you're cheating because you're looking it up.

Mika Lepisto: 04:11

But I

Paul Baterina: 04:15

am. I wanna give the well, I'm not gonna give you the exact number, but we do sell this watch. And it's about a $100,000. So that's probably the most expensive item.

Mika Lepisto: 04:24

Ouch. Nice.

Paul Baterina: 04:26

I know. Right?

Mika Lepisto: 04:27

How many do you sell from SEO?

Paul Baterina: 04:30

Watches? Not that many.

Mika Lepisto: 04:32

Specifically, the $100,000 product. Have you sold 1?

Paul Baterina: 04:36

I don't think we even sold 1, but that is the most expensive item right now.

Mika Lepisto: 04:40

I was kinda hoping you could be like, yeah. I sold 1, and that's like a huge huge win. Right?

Paul Baterina: 04:47

Oh, speaking of that, 10 years ago, because of the landscape of things with the SERPs SEO was, let's just say, 40% of the overall traffic for Revolve. Today, it's around 6 to 10%. So much has changed. You've seen it. I'm sure people can relate.

Paul Baterina: 05:01

You got the organic listings. But not just the organic listings. You got PLA. You got product grids all over the place. It's just changing so much.

Mika Lepisto: 05:09

Interesting you brought that up because I was gonna ask you if you could give a ballpark of what percentage of the revenue comes from SEO.

Paul Baterina: 05:18

Thankfully, this past year has been pretty good. There was this new project that I brought on board, and I worked on this long tail keyword strategy. Say you have dresses as your pairing category. So now you wanna create red dresses. Or if you wanna go even more specific, say red dresses for Christmas or whatever it might be.

Paul Baterina: 05:36

We never really tapped into that space. So we went for those pages. I created about 40,000 of those pages. Mind you, I am very aware of what we call doorway pages. So I was very, very 1 is very aggressive on this.

Paul Baterina: 05:50

2 is being very cautious. And what I mean by being cautious is if I don't see these pages ranking or if they're not doing really well, I immediately kill those pages. We actually saw a huge lift where these long tail pages is about 10 to 12% of the total organic traffic. The goal for me is to get it to 25%. But I will say it's been quite a long time where we saw something that was tangible for SEO.

Paul Baterina: 06:13

And when I say that, no offense to anyone, but like, when I was at the conference and just hearing a lot of people in e commerce, they always talk about technical SEO, fixing this technical issue.

Mika Lepisto: 06:25

And the

Paul Baterina: 06:25

the biggest challenge is, if you were to make this change, how can you quantify it? How can you really see that you can see an increase in traffic and even revenue? I'm sure you can, but what makes it difficult is now you're collaborating with engineers. You're also collaborating with the UX team. This is where it gets a little wishy washy when they say, well, how do we know it's from the SEO team?

Paul Baterina: 06:46

Or how do we know if it's from Paul? Versus creating these long tail pages, I know that, hey, I created these amount of pages. This is the amount of growth that we've seen. So we can totally quantify that. Just wanna say that's one of my proud moments this past year of finally growing traffic compared to how we've been at 6 to 8% for quite some time now.

Mika Lepisto: 07:06

That's awesome, dude. Yeah. Being able to have a win that you can bring to the table like that is fantastic and just being able to contribute to the success of the company. One thing that I find unique with Revolve is you still have the m dot site. Why don't you explain that a little bit for people who might not even be familiar with that?

Mika Lepisto: 07:27

Because it's been a it's been a while since most people have seen that.

Paul Baterina: 07:30

Yeah. So quite some time now, Google prefers or recommends that we have a responsive site. Right? Just one URL. But from the very get go, we've always had 2 separate URLs, the desktop version and the mobile version.

Paul Baterina: 07:43

And, of course, we've added our canonical tags, the alternate tag, and so forth. It's just been a challenge. Everything here is done in house, and this company launched in 2003. So there's a lot of things on the back end that how would I say this? A little bit of an older side of coding.

Paul Baterina: 08:01

And I think transitioning might take years and a ton of resources for us to do that from the UX side of things, from the back end side of things. That's one of the major reasons. Now, of course, with SEO, we're seeing that continuous growth now with traffic and revenue. So it's really just a decision for all departments to say, okay. Is it worth spending the time here, or can we still grow our traffic?

Paul Baterina: 08:23

And luckily, we are.

Mika Lepisto: 08:25

What percentage of traffic do you see coming to your mobile site versus your traditional sites?

Paul Baterina: 08:31

I mean, 80% would probably be mobile. It might even be a 90 at this point. Right? There was something that stood out that you told me at the conference. I don't know if you remember this, but people had all these amazing presentations, and they had all these examples.

Paul Baterina: 08:45

And you said it best, why is it that they're not showing examples of the mobile version of the website? Because majority of the users are going through mobile. And that really stood out like, you got something in there. Like, why is that? Right?

Mika Lepisto: 09:01

That's something that I've been on for a while. And what's this version? Mojave or something like that? It has iPhone mirroring on it. It's not literally my phone.

Mika Lepisto: 09:11

So I can run it on the screen, and I can interact with it easier. I feel like it's just been a challenge for people, and you default to desktop because you've got a lot more screen real estate. But that's not how your customers are accessing things.

Paul Baterina: 09:24

Right.

Mika Lepisto: 09:24

If we're saying 80 to 90%, should you be spending 80 to 90% of your time looking at that from a mobile perspective? I don't know why people aren't talking about that.

Paul Baterina: 09:35

But that stuck with me. Like, even now, if I'm about to create a Jira, I'm telling myself, I wanna show examples from the mobile site. You know? So thanks again, man. That that really helped out a lot.

Mika Lepisto: 09:47

Yeah. I'm glad it did. It's just such a simple little comment, and that's how my brain works. It's like, well, why? Why aren't we doing this?

Mika Lepisto: 09:55

It just brews on these things, and it spits something out. And, 1 in 7,000 has some intelligence to it, but I I appreciate you calling that out for me. Are you a one man team still?

Paul Baterina: 10:10

I remember. Yeah. To backtrack a bit, when I joined, there was a director of SEO. And then we expanded with the SEO manager, and we had a SEO specialist, and then there was me. Fast forward to 2016, 17, it was just me all the way till 2024.

Paul Baterina: 10:24

Just recently, we hired a SEO specialist from the Philippines. I think that's the beauty now where companies that are remote, you get so much talent from all over the world. That's pretty cool. Simultaneously, I also think that becomes a bit more challenging for those here in the US that want to find a job. It just seems like the stakes are high.

Paul Baterina: 10:47

Competition's more steep with that, but just something that I've noticed. Wanna hear your thoughts on that too.

Mika Lepisto: 10:51

Yeah. That's an interesting discussion. I really appreciate you saying that it opens up the talent pool. There is obviously more competition that way. One of my thoughts around your tenure tenure there, tenure tenure?

Mika Lepisto: 11:03

Well, say that quickly. I had to wonder, is there just like a huge employee discount that you're staying for?

Paul Baterina: 11:13

We definitely do have a employee discount for sure. But it just goes back to the freedom, man. Nothing beats it.

Mika Lepisto: 11:19

So do you have this $100,000 watch? Did you buy it at a sweet deal?

Paul Baterina: 11:24

No. No. No. No. That's too much.

Paul Baterina: 11:27

I was late to the Brighton SEO conference because I went to the mall and I bought my very first watch. It was this Omega Moon Swatch kind of thing. Because omegas could be expensive, 1,000, couple of 1,000. It was this cute, $350 watch, but who cares? I just wanted to reward myself just because of a pretty good year.

Paul Baterina: 11:45

That's why I was late to the 1st day of the conference.

Mika Lepisto: 11:49

Is it literally your first watch?

Paul Baterina: 11:50

I have an Apple Watch if you wanna count that. But, like, just to wear, my first watch that I ever bought for me was this Omega watch.

Mika Lepisto: 12:00

I had a Folex I bought from some guy in New York. Just like in the movies, he opens his jacket. Like, do you wanna buy a watch? He's got watches hanging on both sides. Sides.

Mika Lepisto: 12:11

It was, like, $40 back in late nineties maybe. I had that watch for, like, 20 years. I wish I still had it actually. So going back, now you've got one person, on your SEO team that reports to you. What support do you have from other teams?

Paul Baterina: 12:27

Yeah. I think if it's a site wide change on Revolve, definitely communication with the project managers, especially on the UX side of the team. Business intelligence, I spend a lot of time with just because we wanna make sure, not just from an SEO perspective, how does it impact the user behavior, returning customers, does it also give this long term effect? Are we retaining? Are we protecting the revolve voice?

Paul Baterina: 12:50

All of that and also just looking at bounce rate. That's ultimately the goal to see if we have a much improved bounce rate, time on-site, conversion rate is something that we also look at as well. Of course, there are things in SEO where you can just pull it from GA 4. You can look into search console. But we do have our own internal analytics.

Paul Baterina: 13:09

We use page tracking. Business intelligence, they use their own crazy math equations to figure things out. They let us know based on the data that they see whether or not this is something that we can do at scale or if it actually works. Can we do a site roll out with it? Then going back to the UX side of things, same thing with the project manager.

Paul Baterina: 13:27

Just an example. We know that having breadcrumbs is ideally best practices or it could help. But can having breadcrumbs, especially for mobile, because if it's at the top, it's gonna push down the products a little bit lower on the product listing pages. Can that affect conversion rate? Can that affect the user behavior?

Paul Baterina: 13:45

Before even considering, do we just do a full rollout, we have to test this out first from the UX side of things. Do we put the breadcrumbs on the top? Should we change the layout of the bread crumbs? Should the font change? Or well, if you notice on Apple, the bread crumbs is is actually at the bottom.

Paul Baterina: 14:00

Okay. Maybe if it's gonna help SEO, but at the same time, can we maintain the overall user experience? Maybe that might be better. So that's just an example. Definitely a lot of communication with the engineers, UX, and business intelligence team.

Mika Lepisto: 14:18

How would you describe the size of your design UX dev team?

Paul Baterina: 14:24

In the engineering department, I would say there's probably a minimum of 10. But there's 2 to 3 that works for this department, say accounting. Another one for customer service. Whatever it might be. And we have at least 3 dedicated engineers for marketing.

Paul Baterina: 14:40

Those engineers have to split the work from all channels whether it's paid, paid social, email, and SEO. So technically, 1 or 2 people is what I have for the engineering team. And then the UX team, I really just work with the project manager. And then business intelligence, they also have a 10, a team of 10. And UX team also has a team of 10 or more.

Mika Lepisto: 14:59

You got a lot of people on some of these teams. I I'm not familiar with the the intricacies of a a company like Revolve, but it seems like a a lot of people on a UX team.

Paul Baterina: 15:09

Yeah. Quite a lot. We have desktop and mobile. We got the app. We have someone working on accessibility.

Paul Baterina: 15:16

It's pretty big. We have about 1300 employees. When I first joined, it was about a 120 people. So we definitely expanded in the last 10 years.

Mika Lepisto: 15:27

That's like 10 x in 10 years as far as headcount goes. Yeah. I didn't hear you say a CRO. Do you do you not have a dedicated CRO on your team?

Paul Baterina: 15:37

We do not. No. But I think that just goes back to I guess business intelligence would help us out with that. I know UX, they work on heat maps and whatnot, but I don't really spend much time on it. Although I should, and I think I will.

Paul Baterina: 15:52

Gotta expand the skill set somehow.

Mika Lepisto: 15:56

Yeah. Definitely. I've suggested to a lot of people is just look at stuff. Look at the friction. How would you use that website?

Mika Lepisto: 16:04

I'd like to ask you some questions about what it's like working in house in this type of environment. What would you say is the biggest challenge that you have?

Paul Baterina: 16:14

I think over the past years, our hands get a little handcuffed. And with the right reason, I I I think a lot of SEOs come in with these are best practices. It's what we should do. But you have to meet I don't know if it's halfway, but brand will always come first. Protection of the brand.

Paul Baterina: 16:34

And there's just times where whatever methodology you might have, especially if we just think of the fundamental of SEO, it just might not make sense to the company or other departments. So you're gonna have to take a step back and think, okay. How can I be a little bit more creative here? And how can I collaborate with, I don't know, the VP of PR or with this person, especially if you wanna get links, links? If you wanna do some type of outreach, or how do you optimize better for your GMV.

Paul Baterina: 17:04

You can't just go in there and just do x, y, and z. You have to collaborate with every other department. Same thing with, let's say, if you wanna just do your headings. Maybe you wanna add a long tail keyword or you wanna add an additional keyword in your h one tag. Well, it's not gonna pass if you're just gonna go in there and do it.

Paul Baterina: 17:19

You're gonna have to talk to the UX team. You're gonna have to talk to the merchandising team. You're gonna have to talk to the buyers because at the end of the day, and I think this is important too for SEOs, is to maybe try not to think that you know everything. Try to drop the ego and really listen to them and see what they know, what they see, what they understand. They probably know the product.

Paul Baterina: 17:39

They probably know everything a lot better than we do. Our goal is really just to drive traffic and hopefully, have the best customer experience. But we can't just go in there and try to optimize x, y, and z. We have to really collaborate with all these other departments. And that's something that I that took me years upon years to to get used to.

Mika Lepisto: 18:00

Was there like a switch all of a sudden they helped you accept that?

Paul Baterina: 18:06

It was pretty gradual. I think just all the meetings with my CEO and then also with the VP of UX just with constant emails and communication and now just really understanding what the the overall goal is. And the overall goal is really to give the best user experience, giving whoever it might be. And when they go on this site from point a to point z, we gave them the best experience. And that that took some time.

Mika Lepisto: 18:34

So were you frustrated during that time?

Paul Baterina: 18:37

No. No? Not at all. That's awesome. Yeah.

Paul Baterina: 18:42

And I think it's just because of the mutual respect that we have for each other. Right? If they were to disagree with me, they will give their reasons in a respectful manner. It's not like, that's fucking stupid. Why would you do that?

Paul Baterina: 18:54

So no. Didn't didn't bother me at all.

Mika Lepisto: 18:57

Well, that's actually really good because I know that a lot of people could be very frustrated in that type of a scenario. And Yeah. One thing you mentioned there is that they're giving the reasons, and I find that's really helpful. People want to know why, not just like your mom used to, because I said so. Right.

Paul Baterina: 19:18

Yeah. So I think that's another thing about what I like about the culture here at Revolve is explain the reasons why you agree or disagree. And can you justify it? Can you actually show some evidence why it could help or it can't help?

Mika Lepisto: 19:31

Have you had challenges getting buy in on things? Yeah.

Paul Baterina: 19:37

A lot of e commerce sites, they have content on their product listing pages. And the ones that are ranking really well, say for broad categories and a lot of our competitors, they have content. We don't. And I I get it. That content that you see when you go on an ecommerce page and you go on a product listing page, that's really for SEO.

Paul Baterina: 19:58

Unless someone can really say they're actually gonna read that paragraph that's gonna say, you're now shopping for dresses, for midi, maxi, mini dresses, blah blah blah blah blah. Shop now. And then you have all the products. Right? The product grid.

Paul Baterina: 20:12

I just feel like you're squeezing in additional long tail keywords. I think that's what the intent is. So Google can read it and understand the context of it. I would like to challenge anyone here that's in e commerce to tell me that, hey, not only did it help with traffic I know it could help with traffic. I know for sure.

Paul Baterina: 20:31

But can it help with the longevity of the the customer, new customers, existing customers? Does it not negatively impact everything else on the site? That's what I wanna know. Does conversion rate remain the same or does it actually improve when you have that block of text in a product category page? And I've been fighting with that for a very long time.

Mika Lepisto: 20:53

Fighting with trying to get that implemented?

Paul Baterina: 20:55

To get that implemented right. Now, going back to what I was saying about how we recently launched 40,000 long tail pages, this is within my own ecosystem. They are revolve pages, but they're not anywhere on the navigation menu. They can be found from an internal linking script at the bottom of a product page. Those pages, I have the flexibility to do all kinds of SEO tests.

Paul Baterina: 21:22

One being adding content above the fold or below the fold, which is what I'm actually gonna do for 2025. But it took years just to get to this point. Before that, there was no way in hell I was able to add a block of text into our main categories like dresses, bags, brand pages. And I don't think we ever will, but I could with the long tail pages.

Mika Lepisto: 21:47

When you say it took you years to get to that point, is that because they just had to build trust with you?

Paul Baterina: 21:53

No. It's it's because it again, it goes back to I now have that ecosystem. We brought on a company to help me with these long tail pages, and it creates a subfolder. It's a reverse proxy kind of thing. But you will never see these pages on the home page.

Paul Baterina: 22:08

You will never see it on the top menu. There's no internal link that's super visual for the customer to get to those pages unless it's from Google or from the very bottom of the product listing page. It's really trying to figure out, how can Paul have his opportunity to grow? So like I said, I'll take anything that I can get. And so if this was never in play, this whole long tail category strategy, till this day, I would not be able to create any content.

Paul Baterina: 22:36

I don't think I'll ever be able to create that type of content. Well, I can never say never, but it's gonna be very hard on the pages on revolve where you can navigate through from the top menu, from the left navigation menu. But because I created all these long tail pages, I have the flexibility that I can do that of adding that block of text.

Mika Lepisto: 22:57

So what was the process for you to get that buy in to make that happen?

Paul Baterina: 23:03

It's continuously showing. Hey, look at this competitor. Not only are they ranking for the broad keywords, but now they are ranking for these long tail category p, pages. And look. We see rank number 1, 2, 3, and 4, whoever it might be.

Paul Baterina: 23:17

They all have content. Can we can we plea can we please now test this out? Can we please try it out? I think that's what it is. It's just my CEO saw that.

Paul Baterina: 23:25

I was like, okay. Go for it.

Mika Lepisto: 23:28

So there's a little bit of, competitiveness that you had to bring into that. But you're also saying, let me test this versus saying, let me change something radical. Right?

Paul Baterina: 23:39

Right. So, like, the next couple of weeks were, if you wanna call it, prompt engineering, working with AI, using chat gbt, just finding the perfect prompt to create that piece of content above the fold on the long tail category pages. And I'm probably just gonna go into Google search console, export the top 1,000 or whatever pages, and then just do test control test control test control, and then just see. We'll launch it. We'll test it out, see what happens for the next 3 months.

Paul Baterina: 24:08

If all goes well, then we'll just fully roll it out. And the next test that I feel like that would be even more beneficial is the opportunity to add internal links into that piece of content. I would like to think that maybe Google likes to understand the context and the meaning behind the internal link based on the pre text or the post text. Let's say there's a sentence saying, these dresses from x brand blah blah blah blah. Now, that gives a signal to Google saying that there's a correlation of this dress to this brand because they saw it in the text.

Paul Baterina: 24:43

There's an internal link now going to that page, but that's the second layer that I wanna add on. Assuming that having content first, strictly just content, works. My gut tells me it's gonna work, but I think that just comes with the right prompt. I know some might argue, why don't you just have a writer do it? But I feel like with e commerce, there's more of the use of AI.

Paul Baterina: 25:05

And especially if you have a site that's super authoritative like Revolve, you can use AI to do things at scale. And because we have 40,000 pages to test, well, 20,000 of those pages will have the content or whatever the top pages might be. I just feel like to do it at a fast rate and to see some results, we would have to use chat gbt or some other LLM.

Mika Lepisto: 25:28

There's a couple points there. I believe it was Walmart that is using AI for a lot of their product descriptions, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. So that might be similar to take a look. I think that you're right having a a strong brand. And is the content valuable for users, not just for SEO?

Mika Lepisto: 25:47

That's what I'd probably be looking at myself there. Also, with internal linking, I do agree with your position that having what's around the link matters maybe even Right. More than just the link anchor text. I've spoken to a couple people who use that with link building tactics as well where they're not trying to shove a keyword in the link. They're really just trying to get their brand mentioned in the right context.

Paul Baterina: 26:15

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Mika Lepisto: 26:17

One thing that you mentioned a couple times here is testing. How much time do you spend testing things?

Paul Baterina: 26:23

On the category strategy, there is no testing. It's me just going really fast and seeing what sticks. If something's not sticking, I just kill the page. Last year, probably 90 to 100% of my time had to do with testing. Now is it me pulling the data?

Paul Baterina: 26:41

I think the beauty of being part of a big company. No. It's bothering the business intelligence team, and they pull the data, and they quantify whether or not. The most recent test that we've done, and I I think you've heard me, is AMP. We fought so much to not implement AMP, but several other departments wanted to implement it.

Paul Baterina: 27:03

And finally, we put the nail in the coffin. We saw that there was no lift in having AMP. It wasn't worth the time and resources. And, again, that had to be done through, you know, a test.

Mika Lepisto: 27:15

It sounds like you have to support a lot of your recommendations with some data internal or

Paul Baterina: 27:21

For sure.

Mika Lepisto: 27:22

External. Yeah. Amp is interesting. I haven't heard that for quite some time. There there was kind of a potential, like, it could provide a lift.

Mika Lepisto: 27:30

I never saw any kind of lift on the sites that I put that on. It was great that it it loaded really, really quickly, but you lose a lot of control with what you can have on that page and your user experience. So I I think that it just didn't get much adoption because of that. Frankly, I'm glad that it's gone. It's just another level of complexity that really didn't help anything.

Paul Baterina: 27:55

Same here. Random question. Were you ever into the affiliate side of things? Whether you wanna call it the gray hat, the black hat, that part of the SEO world. It's a whole different breed, whole different set of people.

Paul Baterina: 28:09

I'm curious to know if you're ever into that or just wanna hear it.

Mika Lepisto: 28:14

Yeah. I spent quite a bit in the affiliate space. There's different levels of what that affiliate looks like.

Paul Baterina: 28:22

Yeah.

Mika Lepisto: 28:22

I never got into the full black hat stuff, but push boundaries on that. And depending on the site, if you're trying to build it into a business, an affiliate is essentially nothing more than a business partnership. You can see that a lot in the travel space, especially like meta search. And so what I mean by meta search is like the searches for, say, hotel inventory from all the different sites. That's legitimate partnership.

Mika Lepisto: 28:47

Right? And some affiliates we're seeing it now in Reddit. People are manipulating Reddit because it's showing up in search, and it's basically just another method of spamming. So, yeah, I'm pretty familiar with how that space works. Just never got into the fully black stuff.

Mika Lepisto: 29:07

First of all, it's just not that rewarding. You know, I'm not motivated purely by money. If I was, I'd probably be Reddit spamming right now. It's hard to create something with the mindset that it's okay if that gets pulled out from under the rug because I'm just gonna do it again in a different way. Speaking of black hat, you are a link builder for Revolve.

Mika Lepisto: 29:34

Wow. Okay. That's full circle. Were you in SEO before?

Paul Baterina: 29:37

I was in SEO before. I'll tell you. So I went to Cal State Long Beach, and I got a degree in communication. And I literally just got a degree just to make my parents happy, especially my dad. Rest in peace.

Paul Baterina: 29:52

Because I'm the 1st person in the family to to have a a degree. And after I graduated, I didn't know what the fuck I was gonna do. All I did was play video games, specifically this game called league, League of Legends. I played that all the way till, like, 6 in the morning every day. And it got my girlfriend, my fiancee now, concerned.

Paul Baterina: 30:12

You know, like, well, where does the future hold? I just felt like I was useless. What am I doing? I got desperate. And I literally typed in, how do I make money online?

Paul Baterina: 30:21

That led me to the Warrior Forum. All the information was there, and I was asking all kinds of questions, questioning everything, and just testing out websites. That's why I asked you earlier if you were into affiliate because that's how I got into it. It's creating blogs, whether I'm monetizing from AdSense or Amazon. It was the best way of me learning SEO.

Paul Baterina: 30:42

And a good friend of mine from school knew that I got into SEO, and that's where he told me there was a position opening up for Revolve. It was a link builder position. I never built links in my entire life, but the whole that entire role as a link builder, Revolve, all I did at that time was disavowing links. Either I was sending out emails saying, hey, could you remove a link? Or if they would not respond after, I don't know, 3 weeks or so, after 2 or 3 follow-up emails, I'll just put into a disavow list.

Paul Baterina: 31:18

That was my entire role as a link builder at Revolve.

Mika Lepisto: 31:20

That's awesome. That's, I think, the first time I've ever heard that a link builder was actually a link destroyer. I think we need to change your title there.

Paul Baterina: 31:31

I know. And then that was it. And after that, I was just learning more about technical side of things using Google search search console. A lot of it has been self taught. That's why I still have a place in my heart with the affiliate space.

Paul Baterina: 31:48

I would take it pretty close to a lot of the guys on the gray hat, black hat side of the world. There's this guy that I wanna add into the SEO community, but I think several people don't want him in there. I don't know. We'll see. It might be fine.

Paul Baterina: 32:05

There's this guy. I don't know if you know him. His name is Grindstone. I don't know if that rings a bell.

Mika Lepisto: 32:09

I have heard the name. Yes.

Paul Baterina: 32:13

Yeah. So, yeah, we're we're we're all part of a Skype group. But I think that's the beauty of it is whether we disagree or agree, I think it's good to have an open mind in seeing how that strategy works and whether or not, you know, you wanna implement it or not and see if it it works. I I think it really helps me out. It keeps me on my toes.

Mika Lepisto: 32:34

Like you said, what can you learn from what they did, and how can you implement that? And then risk mitigation with that. How does that hit the brand? Is it positive or negative? You mentioned Grindstone.

Mika Lepisto: 32:44

I'm curious other people in your life, and it doesn't have to be an SEO, but who would you give credit to for some piece of advice that you live by?

Paul Baterina: 32:56

Oh, Even outside of SEO?

Mika Lepisto: 32:58

Yeah. Anywhere.

Paul Baterina: 33:01

Well, there was this huge guy in the SEO space at the time, affiliate SEO. He had a really big publication site. He was my mentor, Rob Atkinson. I don't know if he gave me any specific quotes and whatnot, but there was just so many self development stuff that he would teach me, whether it's, like, getting things done. I still apply stuff like using the EOS model or just really trying to stay organized.

Paul Baterina: 33:24

I I really thank him for that. The other person outside of SEO is my best friend. He's a guitar player. He played for numerous artists. His first artist that he ever played for was Nas.

Paul Baterina: 33:36

And then his most recent, gig was with, Bruno Mars. I think watching him throughout the whole journey, from the very beginning, was a blessing. Because a lot of people, we see the end result. But to see what it takes to get there, to be fucking great at something, That's a lot. I remember I would go to school, then I'll come back, and I'll just see him.

Paul Baterina: 34:05

He's, like, practicing night in, night out. But not only was he practicing playing the guitar, it was a smile on his face. It was him appreciating the most boring, in my opinion, the most boring technical scale shit ever. But he would do it for hours and hours. And I'm like, wow.

Paul Baterina: 34:21

This is fucking amazing. And it led to where he is today. But I what I got out of that is the mindset. He would always say this. Yes.

Paul Baterina: 34:29

There's skill involved, but it's 90% is all mindset. That's all it is. And it'll take you fucking far. So it's that positive mindset that he had and also believing in yourself. Now some might argue, maybe you're being arrogant or cocky.

Paul Baterina: 34:43

But I think it's not that. It's just being confident. It's just really just believing in yourself that you can do it. If you believe in yourself, you're gonna do pretty well. So I would give a lot of props to to my best friend.

Paul Baterina: 34:53

His name is Luke.

Mika Lepisto: 34:55

That's pretty cool because I've heard interviews with athletes. And when they ask, how did you get to where you're at? And one theme that I hear is they will say, I was just the one that was willing to do the boring work, sit there and just shoot free throws for weeks. They're just refining their skill. And so it was basically just determination and dedication.

Paul Baterina: 35:19

My mind you, he would have his fun too. We we go to a party together. We would drink. We'll get drunk. We'll get home.

Paul Baterina: 35:26

I'll go to sleep. And guess what he's doing? He's sobering up. But while he's sobering up, he's playing the guitar again. That's the difference right there.

Paul Baterina: 35:32

That's when you see, okay. This guy's gonna do something fucking great. He's not just saying it. He he doesn't even say much. He just keeps his head down.

Paul Baterina: 35:38

He just does his thing. I think just when you show that skill set, it gives you more opportunities. And then the right place, right person, right thing, right time, all of that just opened up for him. I just it just felt like yesterday, man, just seeing him playing the guitar at a local coffee shop for free and then a couple gigs in Hollywood for a couple bucks and then now playing in front of a 100000 people. It's amazing.

Paul Baterina: 36:04

I'm really, really happy for him.

Mika Lepisto: 36:06

Yeah. That's a pretty awesome journey. Is there a book, a movie, podcast that has also influenced you in a way like your friend Luke has?

Paul Baterina: 36:15

Back in 2016, 2015, I would listen to a lot of Joe Rogan podcasts depending on the person that he would interview. I think that that was the beauty is that he interviewed all sorts of people. It's a large pool and depending on who it is. And I can't pinpoint the exact person, but there's just little things that they would say, like, oh, okay. That would resonate with me.

Mika Lepisto: 36:37

So like the hive mind or these nuggets that you could pull out by listening

Paul Baterina: 36:40

to Yeah. Little nuggets. Or even that one guy, David Goggins. I'm sure you know who that is. Navy SEAL.

Paul Baterina: 36:46

He ran ultra marathons. And sometimes while he's running, he would end up at the hospital. And then after they're done with the procedure, he goes back and he's running again. And he just talks about just having that strong mindset. Very interesting stuff.

Paul Baterina: 37:00

He does a lot of things that I don't think I would ever do, but it's just a cool reminder that it's all about the mindset.

Mika Lepisto: 37:06

I'm curious. How's that manifesting in your daily life now?

Paul Baterina: 37:12

Yeah. I think it just goes back to how I collaborate with teammates. I don't get pissed off or anything if things don't go my way or whatever I propose. Right? And then just waking up in the morning and having this mindset that I'm gonna crush it today no matter what.

Paul Baterina: 37:26

And then also being a father, maintaining this positive outlook in life. I would say, and knock on wood, I haven't snapped on my daughter. She's 3 years old. And I think just me being very patient with her and just reminding myself of just how grateful, not just me, but we are on this planet. We have a very short life here.

Paul Baterina: 37:45

Let's just make the best of it. I think that's how I wanna apply to just everything from work, health, time with family, time with yourself, whatever it might be. Even if it sucks, even if it might be challenging, I think it just goes back to the mindset. You can just make the best of it.

Mika Lepisto: 38:02

That touch is close to me. You know, I had cancer, and that's a hard thing to grasp, but it really propelled me to say, you know what? I'm not gonna waste my life. And I think people who face certain things, that's a very common change. It's not like I felt like I wasted my life before that.

Mika Lepisto: 38:18

That was always about experience more than money. I've had a great life with all these experiences, and I hope that I continue to do so. But, yeah, I can really relate to that. Just enjoy the days that you have because you don't know how many that you have left.

Paul Baterina: 38:33

How are you now? You mentioned that you were diagnosed with, cancer?

Mika Lepisto: 38:37

Yeah. 2015. 2015. Thyroid cancer.

Paul Baterina: 38:41

All good?

Mika Lepisto: 38:42

Yeah. There's been some bumps in the road, but, yeah, I don't have it anymore. They took it out.

Paul Baterina: 38:46

My fiancee so back story is she had an issue with her thyroid. And so doctors told her there's a high chance of you not being able to have a kid, and that hurt her. Our mindset was always, like, if we have a kid, great. And if we don't, great. But it did hurt her knowing that there's a high chance that she can't have a kid.

Paul Baterina: 39:07

And so she had to get I 131 radiation done. So it basically kills her thyroid, and then it would reverse it, and then she would be on medication. And, coincidentally, she got pregnant. And she was probably a couple days pregnant during the time when she had the radiation done. During that time, the doctors told us there's this high risk that this child, 1, might not make it, or 2, might have all sorts of complications because that radiation might kill the child's thyroid.

Paul Baterina: 39:42

That was a really tough situation because they gave us option, and they said that you could terminate or you can move forward. And thankfully, everything came out okay. Like, you know, our baby is doing fine. And I think this just gives you perspective in life. Like, hey.

Paul Baterina: 39:56

Just be really thankful and just live the very moment. Try your best to just have that mindset of just being thankful.

Mika Lepisto: 40:03

I don't have kids, but I can relate to that from the aspect that I got radiated. And I had to isolate for 7 days by myself during that process. That wasn't something that I was expecting to talk about. Oh, yeah. And I'm fine with it.

Mika Lepisto: 40:19

It's just a perfect example of when you talk to people and you open up, you find that people have challenges, and it brings you closer to that person. Yeah.

Paul Baterina: 40:30

For sure, man. It's not only just ranking and banking.

Mika Lepisto: 40:39

That might be the title of the episode, ranking and banking.

Paul Baterina: 40:42

I know.

Mika Lepisto: 40:44

Yeah.

Paul Baterina: 40:45

Do you plan on sharing this with this community? I don't mind.

Mika Lepisto: 40:49

It's not something that I expected to discuss, but in our industry and tech, people were talking about mental health. Physical health is part of that. I'm having a hard time kinda circling back now to it. Yeah. So give me just a second here.

Paul Baterina: 41:07

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Mika Lepisto: 41:08

If you had to change out of SEO, what would Paul be

Paul Baterina: 41:11

doing? Oh, that's a good question. There's that part of me because I was always surrounded by music, whether I'd be in the music management industry. It would be that or maybe real estate. I like the idea of properties and potentially selling a home to people that wanna buy their first home or whatever it might be.

Paul Baterina: 41:34

I think. 1 of those 2. But I took a personality test. And the recommendation, if it's strictly with a 9 to 5 kind of career and I think I would be really good at it is probably the a student council counselor or something.

Mika Lepisto: 41:52

What are the reasons behind that?

Paul Baterina: 41:54

I I'm very interested in people, and I I I wanna know, like, what they could be good at. Hopefully, I could be that person to guide them and tell them, hey. Maybe you can explore this. Because me growing up, I rest in peace, dad. But I grew up with someone that was an alcoholic.

Paul Baterina: 42:11

And looking back, I really didn't have any guidance on what I could get into. Can I be that potential role model? Can I be that extra person that would care for that child? Because that child or that person doesn't have that support. Can I be that person?

Paul Baterina: 42:24

You know? Maybe.

Mika Lepisto: 42:26

Wow. There's always volunteer opportunities. You can make a lot of money There is. And then just start volunteering.

Paul Baterina: 42:32

That's also true. Right?

Mika Lepisto: 42:33

Yep. Yep. Different ways to skin a cat as they say, but no no animals were harmed in that metaphor. Never. As we start wrapping this up, Paul, I know that you're into cars.

Mika Lepisto: 42:47

What was your dream car growing up as a kid? And did you buy that when you were able to?

Paul Baterina: 42:54

Yeah. Cool question. I was 8 years old when I saw my dream car. It was a red Acura NSX, and I immediately fell in love with that car. And I bought it in 2013.

Paul Baterina: 43:08

And I got in trouble for buying that car because that's right when I got a job at Revolve. And people are like, why the fuck would you buy this car? You're wasting your damn money. Maybe. But when I look back at it, good thing I bought that car because at that time, I bought it for 20 something $1,000.

Paul Baterina: 43:24

And now, it's worth like 80 for that particular model. And the most recent one, like a 2005 model with 2,000 miles, was sold for 300 something 1,000 dollars. I would never spend that much on on this car. I'll tell you that. But that's my dream car even after having it.

Paul Baterina: 43:43

You know it's your dream car when once you have it and you're still getting super excited about it. That's the dream car.

Mika Lepisto: 43:49

So you still have it? Right. That's awesome. So how many cars do you have?

Paul Baterina: 43:54

Just that and the family car. So it's just this one in a electric vehicle for the family.

Mika Lepisto: 43:59

You have literally your dream car from when you were younger. What is your dream car now?

Paul Baterina: 44:07

Oh, it's always 2003. I don't know why. Like, a Murcielago would be cool. But I'll be honest, I've lost interest in cars, especially with the electric vehicle. It just ruined the moment.

Paul Baterina: 44:19

Instant torque. You just go, and I don't know. In California, it's very strict on going fast anyway. So, like, is the ride comfy? Does it take me from point a to point b?

Paul Baterina: 44:30

Is my kid safe? Am I safe? If I'm honest with you, I think the dream car is still the NSX.

Mika Lepisto: 44:37

You have your dream, and you're content with it. Yep. So I think that's actually really, really cool.

Paul Baterina: 44:44

Yeah. Yeah. If you're ever in town, feel free to drive it.

Mika Lepisto: 44:47

I will take you up on that. It's been a really long time since I've driven an NSX.

Paul Baterina: 44:53

How'd you know I was a car guy?

Mika Lepisto: 44:54

You told me, I think.

Paul Baterina: 44:56

I did. Dang, my memory sucks.

Mika Lepisto: 45:00

It was total ESP, Paul. I could read it. I just wanna say thanks for being on the show and appreciate you sharing your experience, what it's like to drive success for a company like Revolve in a very unique space.

Paul Baterina: 45:13

Awesome. Thanks for having me, man.

Mika Lepisto: 45:15

That's a wrap for the first episode of the back office podcast. I hope you learned something new about in house SEOs, how they do magic behind the scenes like Paul here does. Keep the lights on. If the sound of my voice hasn't irritated you too much, I'd love for you to subscribe. All the options for doing the ding smash, whatever they tell you on social, is available at back ops podcast.com.

Mika Lepisto: 45:35

Plus, you can help drive the direction of the show. I have a feature board where you can vote for people to be on the show, topics to discuss, and tell me what you didn't like about me.