🎙️ Unscripted SEO Podcast
13 Years at REVOLVE: Paul Baterina on Long-Tail Pages, Link Building & LLM Visibility
Solo SEO at a 260,000-product fashion brand — what 13 years teaches you about proving SEO value, long-tail category strategy, and AI visibility.
Paul Baterina joined REVOLVE in 2013 as a link builder — and spent his first year doing nothing but disavow audits. Thirteen years later, he’s still there, now as the sole in-house SEO on one of the most recognized names in fashion e-commerce. We sat down on the Unscripted SEO Podcast to talk long-tail category page strategy, what link building looks like when your PR team is bigger than your SEO team, and how he’s thinking about LLM visibility in 2025.
Proving SEO Value to C-Suite Without a Blog
REVOLVE is an image-first brand. High fashion, big photography budgets, no editorial content. For most of Paul’s tenure, the SEO argument has been a hard one to make — especially on the technical side.
“It’s been a challenge talking to C-level about how to quantify whatever it is that we’re going to change,” Paul said. “Sure, it’s best practices — we know we need to make the site faster, clean up the architecture. But it’s been very difficult to prove that doing this is going to move the needle.”
The breakthrough came about two or three years ago when his team shifted focus to long-tail category pages and long-tail subcategory pages. With 260,000 products across the site, the opportunity space was enormous — and crucially, the results were attributable.
“My CEO actually likes tangible growth,” Paul explained. “You can see: if we created X amount of pages, this was the reason we grew X%. That’s what I’ve been working on — long-tail pages. Pretty simple.”
The Rule of Three — and When to Kill a Category Page
One of the most practical frameworks Paul shared: a minimum product threshold of three before a category page gets created. Fewer than three products? The page gets killed.
“A good friend of mine who works at Sephora had the same rule of thumb,” he said. “The theory is that if it’s fewer than three products, the page could be considered a soft 404 — thin content, not enough substance.”
No Link Building Program — and How That Happened
Paul joined REVOLVE specifically as a link builder. He thought he’d be building links. Instead, he spent roughly a year doing nothing but disavow audits — cleaning up toxic link profiles, sending removal requests, and pruning the bad from the domain.
“We have relationships with big artists, big celebrities, a lot of press,” Paul said. “We recently opened our first physical store in Los Angeles. We have Coachella coming up. There’s going to be a lot of press. But in terms of strategically for SEO — there is no specific link building program at all.”
LLM Visibility: Caution Over Tactics
REVOLVE is pulling around 20,000 visitors per month from LLMs, with ChatGPT taking roughly 90% of that traffic. Gross purchase revenue from those sessions is approximately $58,000/month — meaningful but small relative to the overall business.
Paul’s honest take on the LLM visibility space: he’s skeptical of chasing tactics that evaporate.
“Every few weeks on LinkedIn or Slack there’s a new strategy — more Reddit comments, more citations, FAQs on every PLP. Then three weeks later, the signal drops. I don’t want to go all-in on something that won’t last.”
“Why Your Customer Is the Hero (And You’re Not)” — Bruce Ashford on message clarity, StoryBrand frameworks, and what most small business owners get backwards about their own marketing.
— Bruce Ashford, The Ashford Agency | Listen: Why Your Customer Is the Hero →
The A/B Test: 25% Organic Lift at Four Weeks
Paul is currently running a live controlled experiment on his long-tail category pages — adding structured content above and below the product fold on the test group, leaving the control group untouched.
Four weeks in: the test group is up 25%. The control group is down 5%.
“That’s already a signal I could roll out to all ~40,000 long-tail pages,” he said.
Contextual Brand Mentions & The Link Signal Framework
Drawing on Bill Slawski’s patent research and conversations with Alejandro Meyerhans, Jeremy broke down the key signals that determine how much value a link actually passes:
- Anchor text — branded vs. unbranded, and what that signals about context
- Co-occurring text — the words before and after the link give Google (and LLMs) context about what’s being linked and why
- Distance to seed sites — the TrustRank concept
- Page-level authority — how many links come into the linking page, and how many go out
Reading Google’s Statements Very Carefully
“Every nugget they give has an aspect of truth,” Jeremy said. “But it’s always said in such a specific way that it’s the least amount of helpful disclosure. You have to look very closely at what they’re saying — and what they’re not saying.”
Where to Find Paul Baterina
Paul is active in the Asians in Search Slack community (run by George Nguyen) and on LinkedIn. He also attends Brighton SEO San Diego.
Listen to the full episode at unscriptedseo.com. Connect with Jeremy Rivera at jeremyriveraseo.com.
