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 publishers that consistently grow from those that plateau
- How Hank would spend 10 hours on SEO for a new website
- How he would approach a mature website that has lost revenue or traffic
Hank also shares lessons from working across editorial, engineering, product, advertising, and executive teams, and explains why modern SEOs need to become better experimenters, builders, and decision-makers.
⭐️ Hank Azarian on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hankazarian/
⭐️ Hank Azarian's website - https://hankazarian.com/
⭐️ Hank Azarian Is Not Hank Azaria - https://hankazarian.com/hank-azarian-not-hank-azaria/
⭐️ Hank Azarian's AI SEO testing - https://hankazarian.com/ai-seo-testing/
💎 Compact Keywords - My SEO Course - Get paying customers through SEO - Clear step-by-step video breakdowns - SEO templates to be copied and adapted for your products and services: https://compactkeywords.com/
00:00 Meet Hank Azarian
00:19 Accidental SEO Start
01:41 First Million Run Rate
03:28 Agency Life and Big Clients
04:15 Scaling Like Selling to Google
06:30 Miami Move and Refinery29
10:11 TMZ Tech Migration
11:39 Winning the News Box
17:51 Raptive SEO at Scale
20:54 Tooling and Network Keywords
25:23 ChatGPT Changes Investment
28:53 Decision Architecture Products
33:57 Actionable SEO Plays Today
39:27 Career Advice and Testing
44:13 Experiments and What Works
48:10 Peers Schema and Knowledge Graphs
49:47 Testing Beyond Best Practices
51:19 Why Entity Disambiguation Matters
54:31 Building a Distinct Personal Brand
58:59 SEO Patents Worth Watching
01:02:08 Volatility and Probabilistic Rankings
01:05:39 Entity Disambiguation Playbook
01:09:50 What Makes Publishers Grow
01:14:11 How to Spend 10 SEO Hours
01:19:03 Why Pages Don't Get Indexed
01:23:44 Rapid Fire and Wrap Up
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#searchengineoptimization #seo #enterpriseseo #publisherseo
