From Link Building to AI Workflows: Expert Insights with Steven Coufal

Thibaut de Lataillade: Welcome to Let’s Talk Marketing, and today we are joined by Steven Coufal live from Austin, Texas. Steven is a growth expert who has navigated the full spectrum of digital scaling from PR to content, SEO and products with years of experience helping software companies build sustainable organic systems. He is here to share with us the stories behind the strategies. Steven, it’s great to have you with us and let’s dive in. Can you tell us first more about you?

Steven Coufal: Yeah. Thank you, Thibaut. Gosh, what a generous and nice introduction. It’s so nice to talk with you again. I’ve respected you and your thought leadership and your strategy and business acumen for so many years. So I’m really excited to talk in this capacity. It’s really cool.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, you overviewed it. So just I guess the 30,000 foot view, I really got my start in growth marketing via content, making content for a software system that detected money laundering. And so it was doing kind of compliance and money laundering detection, fraud detection for small community banks. So it was a great way to start your career thinking about how do you make content that performs on channels like – we were a small team, so it’s like, how do you make a piece of content that can perform on a webinar, that could perform in email, that can work for SEO, do it in a way for a kind of like technical, regulatory audience. Was a great way to start my career.

Steven Coufal: And then we worked together for a number of years doing like B2B software generation reviews, user generated content at sites like Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice, and they’re the full spectrum. I’m sure we’ll dive into it more, how it was and like how a lot of these practices are evolving. But at that point, link building was what I really got started with. Content, SEO, technical SEO. We obviously collaborated on international SEO quite a bit. And then finally in that role there, moving into kind of a digital product role, which is really exciting.

Steven Coufal: And now I work at a company called Retired.com. I’m the VP of Growth. It’s a really awesome organization that is providing, right now exclusively Americans, the opportunity to have different sort of assets that they can include in the retirement accounts and retirement plans. But it’s a small but growing shop, so it’s back to having to wear a bunch of different hats, which I think will be fun to talk about here. How we manage that and use tools to do that.

Thibaut de Lataillade: All right, perfect. Thanks a lot for that intro. Good. So when you think about growth, do you see it as a system, as pieces that are moving together?

Steven Coufal: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re doing growth it becomes an all-company sport, right? Everybody’s on the team together. I think for growth leaders and marketing leaders, you really need to be thoughtful about what is the strategy and what are the roles that everyone needs to play. But I really think there’s a team for everyone. Like you think about operational or customer support or sales roles, right? A lot of those can bleed, I think, very seamlessly into what you would think of like your traditional growth marketing role, whether that’s getting ideas for content or campaigns from those sources, but also using often these people as extensions of themselves, right? Like how can you use your sales team, your CX team to further your objectives and your mission, right? Whatever that might be in the moment.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, I think more and more it really is like a mindset for companies and teams. And I think as leaders, it’s what is the right strategy? But then I think there’s an important piece of like how do you evangelize and how do you make sure that everybody in the company understands it. And our old coworker Robert Belvin always used to talk about how things like SEO, the kind of like education of it, is just as important as the execution, right? Making sure that all your stakeholders know like why is this important? What are we doing? So yeah, I think it’s really something where it’s best done when everybody’s involved.

Thibaut de Lataillade: So it has to be a culture for the company and a mindset for everyone. And so would you say that the companies that are doing it wrong are the ones that are not following this kind of, not implementing that culture across the different teams?

Steven Coufal: I think it would be something that I would look into. Now you of course might have a bad strategy or maybe you execute it poorly. There’s probably multiple reasons that you could come into that. But yeah, I think if you see those resistance points where somebody’s like “oh, I don’t wanna do that, that’s not my job,” it can cause problems. Now obviously you wanna make sure that you’re not asking too much of folks. But yeah, I think it can be easy for companies to have that “not my thing, not my deal,” which isn’t necessarily gonna accelerate the growth of the company really.

Steven Coufal: If you think about growth as a broad concept, that should be everyone’s core responsibility, right? Like at the end of the day, everybody’s job is to sell. So everyone’s job is to make the company more profitable, right? And we all take our different lanes in that. So I think as a growth leader, if you can help your executives and your sort of C-suite shift to that mindset, if they’re not already there and a lot of great companies are, I think that’s a really important kind of first step.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And so do you, without maybe naming the company, but do you have projects that went wrong where growth was not done in the right way or not considered in the right way? And so do you have examples or analysis on what happened?

Steven Coufal: Yeah, I think when you think about things that don’t go well, I’m thinking about some kind of like projects that we had worked on and collaborated, right? I think sometimes it’s helpful to have all the options on the table at once, and then like really firmly understand like what is actually the destination that you want to achieve.

Steven Coufal: So I’m thinking about a project that we were tangentially involved on, a site migration that we were working on. Not a site, but a sort of an infrastructure behind the site. And I think –

Thibaut de Lataillade: I see what you mean.

Steven Coufal: Yeah. One of the pieces that I think about like, how would I have done this better? And so just for context, we had a website, we wanted to maintain as much of the sort of public-facing website. We wanted to maintain as many of the URLs as we could. We wanted to keep this continuity for Google’s sake and for users’ sake. Link redirects, all that. But the technology we were on, kind of old technology, and so we wanted to modernize a lot of these pieces.

Steven Coufal: I think everybody had their head in the right place. But I think that was a great example of maybe different people had different perspectives of what should be done, and we just would rush into a few different paths that then we’d get a little bit down and discover “oh gosh, this wasn’t actually the right thing. This doesn’t actually meet those core objectives that we had.” So it took I think two or three sort of false starts to really come back and be like, okay, what is our core objective? Our core objective is to retain as much traffic as possible. Let’s then work backwards in terms of what we actually need to do from a technology perspective, from a product perspective, from a marketing perspective.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, that I think is a good example of where you can have your heart in the right place, right? But unless you kind of have those tough conversations and think what is that core objective? Let’s start there and then go back. And not what I think we were doing, which is like how do we cleverly accomplish this, maybe falling in love with our own words a little bit – that’s what got us in trouble in that circumstance.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And that leads me to my next question, which is Google and the updates. You’ve been in SEO and all of this for a long time. So how obsessed are you by Google and by the frequency of the updates and the surprises that they are giving us every week or month?

Steven Coufal: My wife always jokes. She’s like, you have the relationship of an ex-religious person with God, with Google. You’re like a disenfranchised Catholic or something with how you talk about Google now. It’s some sort of a God that you’re frustrated with. I would say, I think somebody that we worked with as a consultant, Glen Gabe, who’s a really great SEO consultant, I think in the later years of working with him, he helped shift my perspective on this.

Steven Coufal: I feel early on it was, you stay like razor-glued to it. And obviously it’s important for every SEO and growth marketer to keep broadly abreast with what’s happening, particularly as there’s specific news and benchmarks around page speed and HTTPS back in the day and mobile-first indexing. Some of these things from history where you had to have the prep time. But I think one of the pieces that I got from Glen was it could be easy to get almost like too obsessed with every little update and every little thing that’s happening.

Steven Coufal: And we’ve seen over the years, right? You and I, we’ve been at this for a long time now, right? Like sometimes the ball kind of shifts in one direction and then it shifts in another and it’s easy to feel like, oh, I invested all of this in links and now links don’t matter – they matter differently. Or I really tried to do this specific content strategy because I thought it would fit. So what I’ve tried to shift to now is obviously the broad awareness, but how do you try and look for what the North Star is?

Steven Coufal: And I think the North Star really is what you hopefully will get from users, right? And so obviously you need to think about how the best practice applies. Like users can sometimes not necessarily give you the best insight in every case, but broadly speaking, I think a lot of times if you have a piece of content or a landing page or a website, getting in front of users that are going to be likely customers and saying like, how does this help? What kind of information do you wanna see? What kind of content do you wanna see? What’s the arrangement of that? How much is on one page or on multiple pages?

Steven Coufal: I think as much as possible, if you can start there, if growth marketers can start there and then obviously build up channels, do it in a way that hopefully is optimized with Google. There’s still a lot of technical best practices you can implement behind the scenes. But do all of those things. But don’t get caught, don’t get lost in the sauce with every little update. Think broadly and systemically. How can I create awesome pages, awesome websites, awesome experiences for my users.

Steven Coufal: I think if you start there, it will hopefully help folks get a little less caught up. And the environment is fracturing, right? We saw firsthand in our business that Google’s not a reliable partner for paid or organic search, right? Even on the paid side, it’s increasingly I think a frustrating point for a lot of growth marketers. And then we see the emergence of things like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity. More and more people are turning to these other tools to do their searching and looking for information. Yeah, I don’t think it’s the mid-2010s anymore. I think you gotta think what’s best for you and your users and then try and build the best practices around it without trying to chase the ball of Google.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Delivering and providing value to your customers and to the users first, and then the Google or the LLMs will recognize that and will give you some kind of visibility in their tools.

Steven Coufal: I think so. And then like how do you build up your own channels? I think it’s easier to build up, whether that’s an email marketing channel or a social media channel or whatever other kind of YouTube, whatever other kind of platform that you’re using. If you have awesome content, awesome experiences that help your users, they’re gonna want to come back to channels like that. You’re not just like broadly casting this sort of Google net that will catch some fish, right? So I think that way you’re gonna be better prepped for Google and LLMs in the long run. But I think you’re also gonna be much more likely to have success with kind of that more direct channels, because users will resonate with it. It’ll stand out more in a marketplace.

Thibaut de Lataillade: So do you have an example that you can share with us of a moment where you realized that a growth strategy that you implemented started to work really well?

Steven Coufal: Yeah. I’m thinking of kind of towards the end of our time together. Working on sites like Software Advice was one that I was responsible for. It’s been interesting. I guess I’ll share kind of personal anecdotes. You can cut these or keep them. I’m happy to air my therapy live on the internet. We were working on a lot of these sites. Like when we started working on them, they were best in breed, like top of the line kind of pieces. And it was really cool to work on those and maintain them for a number of years.

Steven Coufal: But the environment at the end of the 2010s and 2020s, our space became a lot more competitive, both in terms of direct competitors, big publishers getting into our space. The SERP pages started to turn much less friendly towards organic. We were starting to see the LLMs eating into some of our search traffic. So for a number of years, I was like a little sort of professionally depressed because it felt like you’re gonna go in there and get your butt kicked. Try and just lose by 50 and not lose by 70.

Steven Coufal: And so I think that was like a challenging place professionally. But when I kind of moved into this last product role, I felt like I really had all the kind of keys to maneuver everything directly in my own ability. And I feel like we were starting to really implement what we were talking about. We were starting to really take this user-centric approach to how we were developing Software Advice. And I feel like it was really working. It was really like the first time in a couple of years where we started to see some of our traffic numbers, definitely our conversion numbers, some of our position top-three keywords start to really turn around.

Steven Coufal: And it really did come back to: okay, what are the kind of best practices that we see on the SERPs today? And I like to use that as like a starting point. So if you wanna rank for a keyword, what are the top five sites doing? Okay, cool. This is like your benchmark, this is your floor now for what you need to achieve. And then how do you then use user research or get user feedback, and how do you get information to take that kind of like baseline experience and take it into something that’s like a little bit beyond that, a little special and get that in a place for Google to rank.

Steven Coufal: So I feel like some of the experiences we were building targeting types of software, sort of CRM software, some of the experiences that we were building to target people searching for individual pieces of software like a Salesforce or HubSpot, or comparisons of those – I think we were really starting to execute on that and start to see some of those numbers really turn around. Some of the revenue numbers were beating forecast, which was really exciting.

Thibaut de Lataillade: But so what you are saying here is that the product responsibility that you had at that time, combining with SEO expertise, content, and all of that as a system, as one strategy – that combination made the difference. So it’s not these little pieces all separate. They all have to be put together and managed together to deliver the right strategy.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think in the sort of like modern web world that is really the case, right? I feel like it used to be when I was first doing this, it’s okay, cool, we had a product team and they worried about the conversion flow and we had an engineering team and they just kept the website alive. And then SEO was making content below the fold and getting links, and if you did that really well, you could drive a lot of traffic.

Steven Coufal: But I don’t think it’s really like that today. Like you said, it’s user experience and kind of product, and then engineering making sure that the experience is great and fast and efficient, and SEO bringing in their best practices and content making information that’s valuable to users and search engines. I really think it is everybody in the same boat rowing. So I was fortunate in that role to have done a little bit of everything.

Steven Coufal: And it’s also funny, every company kind of structures things differently in terms of what is the website. Like this new role, it’s much more like marketing content – does the website, let’s just go nuts. Versus where we were at was much more of an engine, much more of an organized kind of thing with processes and workflows and everything. So it’ll depend from team to team. But I think having that broad scope of stuff is important.

Thibaut de Lataillade: So when we also consider growth marketing, we also think about tools and the stack of the tools that are important to understand what we are doing, to monitor and to test. And I’d like to hear more from you on the tools that really changed the way you worked and the ones that delivered additional value and that added disproportionate impact on your performance.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, man, I’ll be honest, I feel like the big accelerator for me right now is Claude, and using Claude in conjunction with a lot of SEO tools. So that’s where I think some of the magic has been. I think the LLMs are extremely powerful. But if you can supplement them with your own data and insights from these other tools, I think that’s where it can get really exciting.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Can you give us an example of how you’re using that?

Steven Coufal: Yeah. So one, I can try to walk through maybe the content workflow that we’re working with now. We have a lot of information about our website loaded into Claude, so it knows about our brand. And we have, there’s a series of brands that we work on under the Retired banner, all dealing with kind of different types of retirement and assets that you can invest in. But so we’re competing with sites in the financial space.

Steven Coufal: I guess I’ll walk through two examples. One, we’re working on a website redesign right now, so we have gone through and mapped okay, what are the major page types that we want to really develop and implement on these websites. And so what I’ve done is, okay, we think we need like a product page. This is an example, right? We sell products, we think we need a product page, right? You could have a blog, article page. It’s like, okay, we wanna be really comprehensive. So what’s a way that we can do competitive research but do it at scale?

Steven Coufal: So we know we have these different competitors in the financial space. What I’ll do is I’ll go and I’ll capture screenshots of say the top five results ranking for a term, right? So we might wanna rank for a term like “self-directed IRA account” – that might be a type of keyword that we wanna rank for. So we put that in. What are the top five sites that are ranking? You can use the inspect tool. They have a command under inspect. There’s plugins like Chrome plugins. It’ll do this too. But you can capture a full screenshot of the page that you wanna look at. Do that maybe for a couple of different keywords.

Steven Coufal: Now you’ve got a set of seven to twelve sites that all have awesome product pages that you know rank. And so then I’ll feed that into Claude and say, hey, I’ll give it a prompt. Hey, I’m trying to create a page and redesign a page. Here’s a bunch of my competitors. Can you provide an inventory of the components that these pages have and how often they appear across these different competitors? And so this is something that previously I would’ve just done manually. I would’ve opened up the page and I’m like, okay, this site has a header, Fidelity has a header. Cool. Okay, this is like a pull quote, NerdWallet has a pull quote. Okay, cool. But now all you gotta do is capture those screenshots, dump that in there, then you get a menu, and then you can say, okay, there’s 30 different possible components. Six of these every single site has. Okay, those are probably table stakes. And then what are the unique ones within? So you’re not just like loading it up into the AI and saying go nuts, make these decisions for me. But you can really automate and scale the backend research. Maybe we would’ve taken a day to do that project before and now you can do it in a couple hours. And have a lot more time to do other things.

Steven Coufal: The other kind of workflow I guess that I’ll mention is you can supplement all these different things into Claude. So I’ll say we’re trying to rank for a keyword for a blog, right? We’re gonna create some new blog content. But what we’ll do there is a sort of similar step, right? So I’ll build a content brief. I’ll say, hey, here’s the top five sites that are ranking. I’ll include screenshots in there. Also copy and paste the AI results for the keyword. So if Google on the surface is providing a result, I’ll put that in there. I’ll put the target keyword in there. I will do a little SEMrush research on that keyword. So what are the primary keywords, the secondary keywords that we wanna rank for? SERP features. So People Also Ask. And then I have a long prompt – I can share if people are interested – but I’ll say, hey, here’s all kind of all this background research. Can you build me an outline for this content? What makes it different? How do I set myself apart?

Steven Coufal: You could start there and then you can even have it fill in gaps as you go. And then the other piece that we’ll do is we’ll then go and you can load in Ahrefs data as well. Say here’s relevant backlinks related to this topic, can you cite these sources? And then the final piece that we do to make it special – we’re really lucky. We have one guy in particular that’s done a bunch of video interviews and he’s like a real thought leader. And so the other piece that we’ll do is okay, cool, we have this great kind of like B-plus style content, right? It’s still largely algorithmically driven and generated. You go through and edit it. But we can load up YouTube transcripts that he’s done, all these interviews, hours and hours of interviews. We can put that in Claude and say okay, cool, can you vet this against this and then find places to actually insert quotes from our kind of internal thought leadership throughout this content, as well as internal links.

Steven Coufal: And so that way you’re getting something that’s really powerful. It’s unique, it’s specialized for you. I’ll then take that back into SEMrush and then use, they have a tool creator. We can go through it and find what are complex sentences you might simplify, what are wordy things. So that’s kind of my final step, to put it in there and do my editing check for originality. But that’s my workflow. So it’s like you get these data sources from SEMrush and Ahrefs, load that into Claude, Google search, competitive – load that into Claude, help that get your outline, even rough drafts of your content. Figure out what are those special sauce, the special touch that you can provide. Because I think that in of itself is fine, but probably isn’t gonna get you into ranking. It’s not unique or special. But if you have other resources, other thought leadership out there that your company has gathered that you can easily plug into, to repurpose that content, and then go from there.

Steven Coufal: So yeah, that’s been like a couple of specific use cases, but I’ve found the combination of SEO tools for data and Claude for analysis, rough drafts, getting things started – how do you do the 70, 80% of the task – has been extremely powerful for me.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And how do you also use Claude or other tools connected to track the performance?

Steven Coufal: Yeah, so one of the things that we’re experimenting with right now is there’s a data connector called Windsor. It’s a tool – there’s a bunch of these – but it’s a tool that you can connect all of your Google Analytics, your AdWords, your Search Console, more of those kind of data sources. I don’t believe they have connectors into SEO tools right now, but your analytics and your Search Console. And then that can then be one of the plugins to Claude. And then you can essentially have Claude in real time access these tools and build dashboards and reports and provide recommendations, which is really powerful.

Steven Coufal: As well, if folks don’t have that, and I found for even just quick wins, you can also just dump a big Excel file into Claude and ask it to build you an interactive graph, like an HTML-driven graph or charts. I was doing a big backlink audit and analysis. And so that was something that I just dumped a bunch of Excel data into Claude and then was asking it to build new visuals and compare against these different sites and compare for different factors. So yeah, stuff like that I think is extremely powerful. In the past you’d have been having to do a bunch of different polls in the tool and kind of copy-pasting or a lot of Excel work, and now you can offload a lot of that thinking straight to Claude.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Can you name that tool again?

Steven Coufal: Windsor AI. I think it’s Windsor AI.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And for the UX analytics – so are you looking at a solution that can help understand the experience, the user journey, or the buyer journey on your site?

Steven Coufal: Yeah. We haven’t, at this new company, I haven’t used it as much. I think previously at the last role when I was in digital product, we were using it a little more.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Yeah, FullStory, right?

Steven Coufal: FullStory. Yeah. So that one was the one that I was looking at more and I found that to be pretty helpful. I think we’ll get there. And we have tools for that at Retired. We’ll get there. I think there’s some more foundational stuff that we’re working on right now. But FullStory was, I think, a super helpful tool, both in terms of being able to see kind of heat maps, click maps, but then also just watching individual journeys. I always think that was super helpful.

Steven Coufal: You get a little of this in the user testing when you’re asking people to walk through the site, which I think is helpful too. But it’s always nice when somebody doesn’t know you’re over their shoulder and you can just observe like, where are you clicking? What are you doing? I’m surprised you’re clicking on that. Like, why are you doing that? Yeah, I think that’s helpful. I haven’t – it’d be an interesting place to potentially use AI as well to automate some of that. That’s something I haven’t done. Be curious if there’s other folks you’ve interviewed that have done that. That’d be really interesting.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And one more use case, which is probably still a struggle for SEO experts, is to understand how we rank on the LLMs, on these engines. So how do you track that, and do you have a specific set of tools or agents to review that?

Steven Coufal: Yeah, I’m using SEMrush for that too. They have a decent tool that provides like how many citations you’re appearing for. I suspect the data availability of it is probably the biggest knock against it. But it’s a pretty good, pretty cool tool set, at least for your sort of basic needs. Like what are the citations you’re appearing in? They group them topically, so here’s your retirement advice topic, in our case, right? And then it’s like, okay, here’s a bunch of different queries that have some commonality. They’re rolling up into queries. Here’s the ones you’re appearing for, here’s the ones you’re not appearing for.

Steven Coufal: And then they do a good job of actually showing in that tool like what are the sites that are getting cited for these types of things. Between the job that I was at and this current one, I was doing some freelancing. And it was for a local med spa here in Austin. In that local business – I hadn’t done that for a long time – but they of course were interested. And they ran pretty well for core terms. But they were really like, how do we get more AI search? That was something they were interested in.

Steven Coufal: And so I was using the SEMrush tool and what was really interesting – some of the citations they were showing – two things. One, I initially told them, I was like, yeah, I don’t think you guys really need to bother with LinkedIn. I don’t think that’s really a big channel for you. But I was seeing some competitors with a LinkedIn page that was publishing content. Not a lot of content or even very recent, but it was just filling these unique content gaps in the AI results. And so this competitor’s LinkedIn posts were getting pulled and added as citations.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Wow.

Steven Coufal: In these pieces. And SEMrush also uncovered – this will depend on the business, but it discovered some profiles for this doctor that ran this med spa that hadn’t been filled out or were maybe he had filled out 10, 15 years ago that were now really outdated. So if people were trying to search for more information about him or his practice, you were getting this outdated old information from these profiles that SEMrush was citing. So it’s like, okay, cool, this is very tangible stuff. We know that there’s these queries out here that are getting put into – I think they primarily have ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google. I don’t think they have other engines. I think it’s just those three right now. But in those places, here’s citations that are getting picked up, sites that are getting picked up and pulled into the results for AI search that you have old or no content for. It would take an hour to go through and fill these out and update them and get the right address and contact there. And just doing that is gonna strengthen your online presence and the results that you’re pulling in for Google.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed SEMrush. I think it’s probably – I know there’s more dedicated tools for it, but I think at least for getting a lot of folks started, I think it’s pretty helpful.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And do you have a reliable way to track the click-through rate from AI reviews or other LLMs to your content, to your sites?

Steven Coufal: I don’t. I’d be curious if you do. If one of these interviews somebody has a good idea, please send it to me. It still feels a little bit like a wish and a prayer, I think. I think what I’ve seen – I think it was G2 that had published this – there are less clicks that are coming through from the AI results, but the clicks that they get, because you can see referral clicks in Google Analytics, those clicks tend to qualify and convert at a very high rate.

Steven Coufal: So I think that is gonna be just a little bit more of the game in general for SEOs. I think getting those click-through rates will be tough, but knowing particularly for queries that are important for your commercial keywords, right? What are the keywords that really make you money? Are you appearing in those? What is the referral traffic that’s coming in, whether you’re measuring from Google Analytics or a different tool? And monitoring those. Because I do believe that that’s gonna be the game. It’s gonna be less volume and more – hey, the days of huge traffic might be disappearing, but people are still going to be searching online.

Steven Coufal: Particularly when people are gonna be spending money and big money. I think people still wanna go to sites. They still wanna do their commerce on sites with partners there. And definitely for bigger things, any sort of B2B purchase, people aren’t just gonna be buying that straight from the LLM. Maybe that’ll happen for commercial or consumer goods. But it might be less clicks than there used to be, but I think there’s still value out there for growth marketers. It’s just going to be a little bit of a calibration to this new world.

Thibaut de Lataillade: So just to summarize on the tools and the stack – you’re still using the traditional tools that you had before AI, but you’re using AI and Claude in particular to make them better and to link and to connect and to get more from these tools.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s what is also helping. When we were doing some AI content generation before, and when I compare that versus what I’ve been doing with this sort of SEMrush-powered and SERP-analysis-powered results, I think you’re just making a deeper, much more comprehensive document as well as finding what are gaps, right? What are topical things related that these top sites aren’t covering. So it’s not only are you able to do something that’s comprehensive compared to competitors, but you’re able to already get those niches in there. But I think that’s the advantage of doing both – you get deeper insights from the tool versus if you just go to the tool and say, hey, make me a blog post about what the best CRM software is. I think you’re gonna get something much more generic. But the more that you can feed it, the better the output I think will be on the backend. So yeah, that’s still my big perspective – together is what they’re gonna really be powerful with.

Thibaut de Lataillade: So let’s now look at different growth stories that you might have experienced in B2B. We can look at your experience but also what you’ve seen outside. What’s the one that you would have loved to work on or to have experienced? But let’s start with your own. The one that you are most proud of, the best thing that you’ve ever implemented in growth.

Steven Coufal: Gosh, so many amazing options for me. Cool things that I’ve done. A modicum of fake modesty here. I think a couple things jumped to mind, so maybe I’ll share kind of two quick examples.

Steven Coufal: One, I think was the project that we collaborated on early in your tenure at Gartner, which was just this big expansion of all of these ccTLD sites. I think taking this set of three brands – Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp – and then scaling them across the world. I think we had 70 ccTLDs. I don’t even know, dozens and dozens of different countries that we were in with localized content, localized reviews, local-language reviews, transcreation, right? As we were really not just working to throw up another language on there, but making it really good and relevant for those particular users. I think that was something – it was really cool. I know that was a project that we worked on, so maybe that’s why it pops to mind. But seeing that and building that up from nothing, and obviously a lot of that was under your leadership, which was really cool. But building that from nothing to then being one of the main traffic drivers for our business and revenue drivers for our business for years and years I think was really cool.

Steven Coufal: And I think it was encouraging for me not to just be stuck in a box. To think wider, think bigger around – there’s opportunity out there everywhere you go, right? Across the world, people are coming online and surprising – the different countries that can drive a lot of traffic and revenue for you.

Steven Coufal: And then I would say second, kind of early in my tenure there, I think we just did a really good and clever job building out link-building engines. Which I think is still something that’s really important. And in the world of more volume it’s gotten harder somehow – how do you really build a name and a brand for yourself? I think there is still power in links. I think there’s power in brand. I think there’s especially power for that in AI. I think in this AI world, if anything, it’s actually more impactful.

Steven Coufal: And so anyways, I just think we did an awesome job of being on that team and then leading that team of how do we go and create data that is really compelling for the industry, right? How do we create insights that people really wanna talk about and share about? And in doing that we build a name for ourselves in these markets as well as earning a lot of links. And so that would be a couple of ideas that I think really spring to mind in terms of something that I was really proud to participate on.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And on the other side, any projects that failed, but good learnings for you and for the organization you were working at at that time?

Steven Coufal: Yeah, that’s a good question. I haven’t been at my new job long enough to fail, so I’ll bucket that one.

Steven Coufal: I would say, I think one thing that we got wrong at the company that we worked together is, I think we got a little – I talked about the value of user feedback. I think at different times we got almost too myopically focused on some of the feedback, which then led us into a little bit of a place of being stuck, right? We had a sort of experience that worked for a long time and was super productive for SEO and for conversion rate. And I think we all knew, okay, we need to shift and evolve this experience. But what exactly does it look like? And we knew we wanted to have a user-generated path for that, right? We wanted the users to help us inform the direction that we go.

Steven Coufal: But I think we, in retrospect, got too focused on showing them our experience or a sort of plus version of our experience. I think we were maybe a little too narrowly focused on just people that wanted to just buy right then. And not the full spectrum of – there are people that wanna buy, how do you create them a path? And there also might be people that want to educate themselves a little bit. And how do you create a path for them on your same experience where you’re not just trying to force a purchase decision on them right away.

Steven Coufal: So that’d be an experience that I would share. And I think the lesson that I learned from it is, as much as I’ve been advocating user feedback, I think it is really impactful and important. But you have to make sure that you’re not either getting the answers that you want to get or are being too narrowly focused on one subset of users. Or even thinking about the old Steve Jobs analogy – nobody wanted a touchscreen until they had a touchscreen in their hand. And then everybody ditched their BlackBerry, right? So sometimes you can’t iterate your way out of there. Sometimes you have to show somebody, hey, here’s a wild new experience.

Steven Coufal: Which is another area where I think AI is really helpful, right? Like one tool that we didn’t talk about that I guess I’ll circle back around and hit real quick. That we were using at the end there at our time together was – there’s different ones. I know Figma has a great tool for this. We were using V0 from Vercel where you can do this vibe coding for designs. And I think that’s another way that you can really accelerate or potentially avoid some of this. You don’t have to incrementally improve your way out of these. It’s easier now than ever to be like, hey, here’s a totally new experience. You don’t need to pull in a bunch of engineering resources or technical help. Pretty much anybody can vibe-code themselves, at least to a mockup, right? It might not need to be fully functional, but at least until a mockup that you can get a user to interact with.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, that’s one lesson learned and one way that I think these new tools can help marketers and growth professionals take bigger swings in their user testing.

Thibaut de Lataillade: And then if you look at the broader markets – can be in B2B software or outside – the growth stories that you would have loved to be involved with?

Steven Coufal: Yeah. I think one of the interesting things that we saw at Gartner Digital Markets is sites that are increasingly – some of the competitors we had were big brands like Forbes, right? And so Forbes – people know, there’s a lot of notoriety. You’re gonna get more click-through rates. So Forbes started competing in our space. And they had a lot of success because they have a lot of brand equity.

Steven Coufal: I think the other area – this might depend on the business you’re in, like how broad and how many different types of verticals that you might be in. We were in a bunch of different software categories. But the other thing is seeing some of these other sites – I think Black and White Zebra was one of the first that kind of jumped on this, but others are doing it as well now – where it’s like how do you create more really focused communities or sites that are targeting users where you can almost hack the brand awareness, right? You’re not trying to build Forbes, which everybody will know. You’re just trying to build notoriety in a very specific pillar or very specific brand of type of person, right?

Steven Coufal: Like you wanna be the resource for doctors, right? And you have everything related to being a modern doctor. You build a site there. So that was one that I think was really clever. It was like, oh, if we had to go back and do this again, this might be the approach to take instead of having one monster site that does everything. It’s like you have a collection that does a bunch. I think that would be one.

Thibaut de Lataillade: So I just want to wrap up and get your insights on how you see the evolution of your job and the evolution of growth and the digital world. What’s your perspective on what’s going to happen?

Steven Coufal: Yeah, I think the easy cop-out – I think these AI tools will continue to become more prevalent. I do think we’ll get to some inflection point though, where there are so many tools and so many systems and processes that are being built out that I kind of wonder if there’ll be some sort of turning point for businesses, right? Where just from an IT perspective and governance perspective, it becomes really challenging to manage if you have a big workforce and they’re all doing AI stuff and they all have a variety of tools and the output is increasing so exponentially that – how do you manage it?

Steven Coufal: So I think we’ll continue to see a proliferation. I do wonder if there will be some point in the next few years where there is some sort of consolidation, even if that’s just from a kind of like corporate governance perspective, right? Where as the big models get bigger and bigger and kind of swallow up a bunch of different functionality, instead of “hey, you have six different AI tools,” it’s “you have this tool and this kind of does everything.” And that way it becomes easier for the people to manage it. So I think we’ll see that.

Steven Coufal: And then I think we’ll continue to see this stuff like we’re doing here, right? This kind of bespoke, more curated, in-depth, human type of thing. I suspect content like this will increasingly resonate, just as there’s more and more content. There’s just more stuff than there ever has been. Things that hopefully are genuinely insightful and interesting and engaging, I think will be the type of stuff that people really gravitate to.

Steven Coufal: So I think we’ll start to see more stuff. Eventually it’ll get called back. But I also think the stuff that takes the time to be really excellent will be continuing to break through. Yeah, it’s hard to replicate that at scale. It’s a two-pronged game for marketers. It’s like how do you play the volume game where you need to, but then where do you put your bets down in terms of signature content, signature assets, things that you really wanna use to take your organization to the next level? I think marketers are gonna balance both.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Yeah, this is exactly why we wanted to hear you and get your insights on this experience because we strongly believe that the voice of subject matter experts is really important. And it can of course live with AI because we can get a lot from that and extract the juice and make it great. Thanks a lot, Steven. It was a great talk and I hope you enjoyed it as well. And we may do another episode soon with you as well.

Steven Coufal: Yeah, please. This was super fun. So yeah, I’d love to come back and do another chat anytime, Thibaut.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Perfect. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.

Steven Coufal: Talk soon.

Thibaut de Lataillade: Thank you.

Steven Coufal: Bye.