This week on Unscripted SEO, I had Paul Baterina on the show — Senior SEO at REVOLVE, the publicly traded fashion e-commerce brand. And Paul has been there for 13 years. Not 13 clients. One company. One brand.
The Big Win: Long-Tail Category Pages
For most of Paul's tenure, the challenge was the classic enterprise SEO problem: how do you prove that technical work moves the needle? C-suite understands revenue, not page speed scores.
The answer Paul found: long-tail category pages. With 260,000 products on the site, REVOLVE created a simple threshold — minimum 3 products = category page opportunity. The result is tangible, attributable growth. And when your CEO can literally see 'we created X pages and grew X%', the conversation changes.
This is exactly what I've been writing about in our opportunity sizing in SEO guide — connecting keyword and page data to actual business outcomes.
The LLM Traffic Reality Check
REVOLVE is tracking their AI/LLM traffic. Current numbers: ~20,000 visitors/month from all LLMs, generating about $58,000/month in gross purchase revenue. Low relative to the overall business — but growing.
The strategic move Paul and I discussed: use LLMs to identify your citation targets. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who the top sources are for a query your brand should own. Then build relationships and links from those specific sources. It's link building with AI-guided targeting.
The Context Around Your Link Matters
We got into the signals that determine link value: anchor text, co-occurring words before and after, distance to seed sites, and branded vs. unbranded anchors. Want to understand how Google groups related queries and why that affects your keyword clusters based on SERP data strategy? That's a good place to start.
"Revolve, known for its festival fashion" + link to category page = almost as valuable as an exact-match anchor. Nudge your PR team on how to frame those brand mentions.
