Episode
The SEO Lessons From Working With 5,000 Publishers
- Podcast
- The Edward Show
- Published
- Jul 16, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5480
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Summary
E1108: Hank Azarian has worked in SEO for more than 20 years across LegalZoom, Like.com, Refinery29, TMZ, Raptive, and thousands of independent publisher websites. In this episode, Hank explains what he learned from working with more than 5,000 publishers, scaling major media sites, building SEO systems, and testing what actually improves traffic, engagement, and revenue. We cover: - How organic search helped take an ecommerce company from zero to a $1 million annual run rate - How Refinery29 grew from roughly 1 million to 18 million monthly search visits - How TMZ increased its search traffic by updating breaking-news pages instead of publishing multiple competing versions - Why publishers who stay close to their content tend to outperform those who outsource everything - Why testing matters more than blindly following SEO best-practice lists - How to choose which old pages to update - Why SEO teams should focus less on raw traffic and more on revenue, returning visitors, and email signups - How to turn basic FAQs into pages that solve specific customer problems - Why narrow, focused pages can perform better in AI search and passage-based retrieval systems - Why generic programmatic SEO pages are becoming less useful - How to find information that AI systems are missing, uncertain about, or getting wrong - What Hank means when he says SEO is moving from keywords to "key people" - Why LLMs.txt has not shown meaningful results in his testing - How entity disambiguation helps Google and AI systems distinguish between similar people, brands, and businesses - How Hank separated his identity from actor Hank Azaria in search and AI results - Why third-party mentions, podcasts, structured data, media pages, and Wikidata can strengthen entity recognition - What separates publi…