What Most Founders Get Wrong About SEO and How to Fix It (ft. Pat Ahern)

Host: Welcome to Making Martech, where we spotlight innovative Martech companies and leaders who are driving growth, highlighting valuable insights and actionable strategies to stay ahead in this industry. Today we're joined by Pat Erhearn, Managing partner at Intergrowth.

Pat Ahern: Uh, my name is Pat Ahern, I'm the managing partner over at Intergrowth and we are a digital marketing agency that helps B2C brands who see their brand as an asset get more customers from search engines like Google and AI tools like ChatGPT.

Host: And you co founded Intergrowth nearly a decade ago. So can you take us back to the early days? What was the spark that led you to found Intergrowth? What did that journey look like in the early years?

Pat Ahern: Great question. Entrepreneurship has been something I've fallen in love with since I was in high school. Frankly me probably not being a great employee would be the second thing that comes into play. But Inter Growth specifically really started out when I was working at a previous marketing agency and what I found is that agency did things very well in a lot of regards. I would say it was a very successful full service marketing agency. They did a lot of different things but ultimately I saw some opportunities that I really wanted to implement. I saw, saw uh, some things that I thought would be huge improvements for the business, huge improvements for the quality of services we were offering to clients. And so I tried talking to the founder about quite a few of those recommendations and understandably so you know, the founder had been running his agency really successfully for a decade. I'm coming in there as like this 20 something year old kid who's trying to tell him how to run his business better. Understandably so the guy was pretty skeptical of a lot of my feedback. Um, and I can't fault him for that. I wouldn't have, you know, trusted some blind 20 something year old to uh, to share feedback and you know, just implement everything they said from there. Uh, but I ended up meeting my then business partner working at this, this agency and after I would say six months of being there and realizing that hey, this agency is going in the right direction, but they're not as open to some of the recommendations that we'd really like to see pushed forward, we decided to start our own business. So Dave and I started what was then Junto, now rebranded to Inter Growth. Three, four years ago, Dave actually branched off and started a SaaS business while I stayed focused on the agency side and really narrowed our focus down to SEO and content. Um, but ultimately Intro Growth started out on a belief of two central concepts. The first is that the freelance economy is the future, which I would say, frankly doesn't sound that revolutionary now in 2025. I think any business out there would say that they work with freelancers, that they on, you know, a platform like Upwork, Fiverr, whatever it may be. But at the time, the trend that we saw in the market was so many agencies out there were working with these different platforms that allowed them to hire really great talent across the world and they would sweep that under the rug. And we never understood that they had said they'd act as if every person doing the work was all like these employees that were within 15 minute drive of their office headquarters. To us, we said, no, no, we're not limiting ourselves to that small of a radius. We're finding the best people in the world. Not focusing on a 15 mile radius, we're focusing on global. We're bringing the best people we can together. We're giving them this platform that they can share their expertise in and you get to work with the best of these people. So the freelance economy was a huge premise that we built the business on, but the second big thing we saw, and I still feel this is an issue with a lot of agencies. Agencies oftentimes will bring in really great people who are exceptional at one area of the business or the other, whether it be email marketing, whether it be SEO, content writing, you name it. And the trend that many of these agencies experience is they'll bring in these great people and then these people will leave and all of the processes that these people used go out the door with them. And agency services can really suffer if that happens. So we built our business on the belief that what we needed to do was be completely obsessed with process, make sure that we had guardrails in place that every team member needs to operate on, while giving people the freedom to showcase their expertise, and giving people the freedom and encouraging them to push back when the process holds them back. So really, the two premises that have led us to get to about 30, 35 people today is one, embracing the freelance economy, hiring the best people we can across the world rather than people that are within a 15 minute drive of our office. And two, focusing on process and pushing the team to say that the only way that we're going to be great in the future is, is if we operate within this framework when it works for us, and call the framework out when it doesn't so that we can make it stronger for the future.

Host: That's brilliant, man. And fast forwarding to today, what are some of the biggest wins or successes that you've had recently.

Pat Ahern: I think the biggest thing I would say is back in 2018, maybe 2019, we had a, uh, business owner named Justin who came to us. You know, at the time their business had been historically completely reliant on email marketing. And a big part of what they did is they would buy up email lists, they would contact people and would use this as a tool to drive customer acquisition. They reached out to us shortly after their email had been blacklisted and ultimately they could not deliver to any of these new email lists. So just like that, they saw their biggest customer acquisition channel go out the window. So we came to them and we started working together on SEO, focusing really heavily on creating the best content on the Internet for their target audience and using that as a tool to get customers to their site. So at the time they were getting about a thousand people that were coming to their site every month. Uh, when we wrapped up our work together, I think it was back in January 2024, they were getting about 30 to 40,000 people coming to their site every month just from search engines like Google. Um, in total that led to about an 800% growth in lead flow during that time span. And, and frankly I would describe them as the industry leaders at this point. So everything that we did there came from A, our team doing exceptional work and then B, them having a really exceptional team that was able to give great feedback on the content, was able to help us with topic ideation, and I would say really did a lot of the blocking entrusted in us to drive the results that we needed to SEO. You know, I always say it's a long term play and it can be, uh, at times really scary to invest in that channel, especially when you're going into it with a team maybe that you haven't worked with before and they're asking you for 6, 12 months to let them drive results before you're going to start seeing that return. I mean, that's, that's terrifying. Say, having someone say, hey, pay me for six months, pay me for 12 months and then you'll start seeing the return. But Justin and his team did exactly that. And as, uh, a result, their business has really taken over since that time.

Host: And I think that's actually a great segue into what are some of the misconceptions that you find that a lot of people have?

Pat Ahern: I would say the first thing is SEO is really hard to accurately benchmark growth for. I would say in the early days of our company, we tried to forecast how much we would expect to grow a, uh, specific business based on specific growth benchmarks, specific content investments, you name it. What we found over time is SEO is a great long term investment and, but it's really hard to say exactly how much growth you're going to get and when exactly that timeline is going to come into play. We have general benchmarks. You know, I can say with confidence that the first three months of working with a new client, there's going to be next to no growth that comes in terms of business results. Once four through six is going to be gradual growth and then months seven through 12, they're going to get 95% of that growth that they see in that first 12 month span of working with us. So it's going to be this exponential impact that comes into play with SEO. But beyond that, I like to say if you're working with a team that says that they're going to get you results within a very specific time parameter, if they promise you anything in terms of first page rankings, I'd be really skeptical. Um, I have yet to see any sort of accurate forecasting tool, especially if it's less than a 12 month time window. So approach with caution if you hear anyone making you a promise of results that comes into play. Uh, the second thing I would say that comes into play is I talk to a lot of businesses who almost look at SEO as this either one time thing or this checkbox mentality where they say, oh, we have a team that's doing SEO for us. We're totally covered here. In reality, there's different degrees of investments you can put into SEO. So there are some firms out there that will quote you 500 bucks a month for SEO if you just want to check the box. I mean technically you can do that, but you're probably not going to see anything in terms of results. They're probably going to white label a monthly report from some SEO tool and maybe they'll set up a monthly reporting call and probably aren't going to do much else beyond that. On the other hand, there are some great SEO firms that are charging like 20k a month for services. You know, for us we're typically in like the 4 to 8k per month range. Some businesses are a little bit higher, some are a little lower, but we feel that's a really good number for businesses that are doing about 2 to 20 million in annual revenue to invest in SEO while still growing exponentially over time. So abridging, uh, that a little bit, SEO is definitely not a one time thing. It's something you can invest in in the long term. You can see incredible business growth from. But on top of that, SEO works in a much different manner than that checkbox mentality. If you invest in writing four articles a month, you're going to see way better results than if you're writing two articles per month. Let's say all things equal, assuming you're writing good quality content. So those are some of the first things that really come to mind for me.

Host: And I think that's a great way to frame it because a lot of the times what people forget is like you do get what you pay for, right? And I think one of the best analogies that I've heard when is advertising is like a 401k. You're gonna put investment into it now, but you're not gonna see returns for a while. But you gotta be okay with that because you're investing for the long term. And if you expect to go and see results overnight, that's just unreasonable.

Pat Ahern: I love that. And I, I would even take it a step further than that. I love that analogy. Oftentimes I've thought of SEO as really playing one of two approaches. Let's take the investing equivalent example, cause that's brilliant. 1. SEO can be your primary driver. If you invest in creating helpful information for your users that people are looking for online, SEO can very quickly become your number one source of acquiring customers. We see it all the time. I would say most of the clients we work with see SEO as their primary growth driver. The exception is the businesses that invest really heavily in Google Ads that are going to see more revenue coming in from a steeper investment in Google Ads. So 1. SEO can be this primary growth driver that drives compounding growth over time. 2. SEO can be almost more like a dividend play. If you're getting some revenue from SEO, some customer acquisition from SEO today, in many cases you'll find that if you do some of these smaller SEO projects, you can get, you know, that 5%, 10% revenue lift for a one time effort and you may see a 5% growth in revenue from SEO for the next two years as a result of that. So if you're looking for almost the smaller scale SEO investments and you're getting some revenue from SEO today, that can be a really great way to look at it as well. I mean, to your point, any form of advertising, you have to be willing to put a little bit of trust into it to say, hey, I'm not going to see this return overnight. But I know that the Time window is going to be 60 days, 90 days or a year, depending on the marketing channel, let's say.

Host: And on the flip side, with success, there's always challenges. So what are some of the biggest challenges you've been facing lately, either with scaling the agency or with client needs evolving?

Pat Ahern: I think there are two really big things that stand out. Attribution from marketing is becoming significantly more challenging by the day. You know, Google Analytics shifted from their universal analytics model to GA4 or Google Analytics 4, uh, which has made it I would say even more challenging at times to pull in some of that data. But on top of that, nowadays you have so many different touch points that customers can find your brand through. Whether we look at something like Google Ads, which maybe that's the channel that drives people to actually click on your business from a search engine results page and become a customer. But prior to that, maybe they heard about your brand and maybe they were following you on social media and checking out every other post that you published for the course of six months. Google Ads gets all the credit for that and you pull back on your social media spend. How long is it until you completely lose that customer the next time m that they come around altogether because there's no one there to introduce them to the brand. So it is becoming really challenging for like CMOs in particular to understand how are customers getting to their site, how are people getting exposed to the brand and really what channels should they be investing the most resources in. The second overarching thing, and this is a massive topic in of itself is the broad topic of AI and how that is impacting the world of customer acquisition. That I would say very broadly is like the big topic number two that everyone is asking about. And I would argue that every, every customer acquisition marketer is thinking about and has at the front of their mind.

Host: So with that, can you tell me a bit about how you guys are integrating AI into your business?

Pat Ahern: I would say I am really excited about AI. I come at it from an angle of, I like to think of it as a healthy degree of skepticism. So the overarching sentiment that I have on AI today, specifically large language models, is treat AI as a virtual assistant that will stab you in the back if you place too much trust in it. And what I mean by that is AI is exceptional at doing a lot of things that ah, being said, AI also has a track record of hallucinating or making up facts. It has a track record of making up sources that don't exist. There are certainly some legal and ethical Concerns that come into play in terms of if AI generates something for you, who truly owns the rights to that content that it creates. So with that, if you approach it as AI is a tool that is way better at human beings at certain activities, but has some risks that come with it, you can use it as this really incredible resource that's going to help you to get maybe 2x more output from your normal work than you would otherwise. So a couple things I always like to clarify. You know, we're a team that largely focuses on writing blog content, writing product page content, and doing technical SEO and link building for clients. So content creation is a huge part of what we do. We run a lot of tests on sites that we own as a company to see how far can we push the envelope with AI. How good a job can we do of creating content that sounds like a human being through AI? We do not use AI for any content that we are creating for clients. That being said, there are things that we will use AI for in the content creation process. So a couple tangible examples. Let's say that I'm running a, uh, razor blade company. One really helpful use case for AI is if I'm trying to come up with content ideas for a razor blade company. Maybe what I do is I go to ChatGPT and I say, hey, ChatGPT, give me 20 potential blog topic ideas that a, uh, 16 year old who has never shaved before and is about to buy their first razor blade might be asking or might be struggling with before they actually go out and buy a razor blade. Within those 20 ideas, maybe 15 of them are garbage, but if five of those ideas actually carry some potential, that just saved me like a two hour brainstorming session to come up with those five ideas. So from there I can take those five ideas. I can conduct my own research either A looking at my existing customers and see, hey, is this something that I've seen come up in customer support emails? B I can look on social media and see, is this a topic that people are talking about on Reddit or whatever other social channel I care the most about? C I can plug it into a keyword research tool that's going to help me to see, are people actually going to search engines like Google and looking for these types of topics and I can validate with relative ease, are these topics that people are actually interested in hearing about? And if so, that's great, maybe I have five really great topics. Call that two months of my content strategy that are accounted for and it took five minutes of talking to AI tools and maybe another 15 minutes of me doing some backend research. Topic ideation as a starting point, really powerful tool where it can be dangerous, where you can have that virtual assistant potentially stabbing you in the back, is if you ask ChatGPT to predict 20 blog topics that people are interested in looking for and you just blindly say, oh, those are 20 topics that we're going to write about. That's our entire year of content strategy. Uh, there's no, no validation of the outside market. There's no validation that people actually care about those topics. But maybe five of them are great. Second, big opportunity that can come into play. AI is really exceptional at playing devil's advocate. So one of my personal favorite things to do if I write a blog article about a topic, especially if I'm baking some assumptions into that blog article, maybe I'm assuming specific pain points that my reader has. Maybe I am assuming the way that someone might respond to a particular argument that I'm making. I can ask ChatGPT, hey, take on the role of CMO at a company that's doing $10 million a year in annual revenue. Read through this article in one. Poke holes in the article for arguments that you don't feel are fully formulated or articles that you think are weak that you can poke holes in.

Host: 2.

Pat Ahern: What follow follow up questions would you, playing the role of this CMO have after you read this article? And from there you can take this feedback again. Not all of it is going to be perfect, but let's say that a tool like ChatGPT gives you 10 ideas and out of that, maybe five of those ideas are really pretty solid thoughts. You know, maybe they point out a couple arguments that you made that are frankly just kind of half baked. Maybe they point out some really great follow up questions and out of those 10 follow up questions, five of them are really solid. You can then use that to inform your article and take it to the next level so that you're using AI, and granted you're using a lot of assumptions, but you're getting this outside perspective on your content that otherwise might be really difficult to do. Historically. If you wanted that sort of feedback, maybe you would have to send it out to 20 different CMOs and hope that one or two of them responded to your email. And even that is probably going to take a couple of weeks and they're probably not going to read through your full 2,000 word article. So that's revolutionary, being able to do that. My other favorite thing that I love to use AI for is What I would broadly call synthesizing information. AI is really good at taking a large data set and either simplifying what that data set means, finding trends in that data set. Let's say you survey a bunch of your customers, you get a hundred survey respondents to share feedback on all these different topics about your product, about your software. Plug that into ChatGPT and start asking it follow up questions. Or better yet, plug it into NotebookLM along with other data points that you have about your customers, about your products, and look for group trends in that data. Um, we did this for a blog article that I published about customer acquisition for E commerce brands. We took our entire season one of our podcast, I think it was 25 different guests that we had interviewed, probably 15 hours of audio. And we plugged all those different audio pieces into NotebookLM and just asked it follow up questions and said, hey, tell us about some of the guests who talked about brand building. Tell us about some of the guests who talked about customer retention through email marketing. And we asked it to like, just cherry pick. What are some quotes that stand out to you? What are some key takeaways? Again, playing the role of, uh, of assuming it's going to stab you in the back. We also said, hey, pull together this specific timestamp and that specific audio transcript that you're referencing. Then when you pull together these data points, of course some of them were fabricated. So again, quality assurance checks make sure that you're not making stuff up. I'll wrap up with that though. But there are so many things that we're using it for on a daily basis.

Host: So how are you specifically consolidating those into your business? Because a lot of the times people make the mistake of just following the hype where people are like, okay, yeah, ah, everyone's talking about AI chat bots. Uh, I should get an AI chat bot. Uh, but it's like, how much traffic do you actually have coming to your website? Like, how useful is that actually going to be for you? Should you be getting an AI chatbot? Or should you instead be putting those resources into this process over here where you're losing like $10,000 a month? I feel like one's probably going to be a lot more profitable than the other, right?

Pat Ahern: Yeah, I mean, you know, as I always like to say, like, yeah, unlimited resources. It'd be great to do all those things. But you know, we're capped in terms of what, what we can do as human beings and capped in terms of what we can do in terms as businesses. What I would say is I look at it from a couple lights. You know, one, I set aside a little bit of time on my calendar every single week to test out new AI tools. And I would say a little bit of additional time on top of that to try and read various newsletters, whether it be, uh, like people in the SEO or marketing space that I really respect and want to hear the opinions of, or two, whether it be like different ways that people are using a today. So I have two overarching time blocks. Three on top of that, our team does something every month, we call it Whiteboard Thursday, where one member of our team sits down and ultimately walks through broadly. I would say one thing, one tool, one exercise that they've been experimenting with and present it to the rest of the team. So, um, some of those are focused on AI tools. NoteBookLM is one of the tools that I discovered from one of my team members, Chris, who did an entire session on it. And I love that tool. I use it all the time now. Similarly, Fathom is another tool that came out of that as well. We've tested out a couple different, like SEO and AI integration tools. So those are, I would say, like the three learning data points that come into play where I get to assess, you know, one, what are some of the potential AI use cases and two, what are some of the potential A.I. tools that I should be putting more time into and then having dedicated time every week that I can test them out and ultimately say, how high a priority is this in terms of AI prioritization? From there, what I would say I place the most focus on is asking the broad question of what are a couple of things that we can do this quarter, what are a couple of things we can do this month and what are a couple of things we can do this week that are going to help us to grow based on the vision of the company. So couple really big things that come into that is going to be first and absolute number one priority is helping customers to grow their business, helping them to get more new clients, customers coming to them every day, to making sure that we're doing that profitably so that we can keep doing that in the long term. And three, is trying to create a really exceptional place to work for every member of our team, whether they're a full time employee or whether they're a freelancer on the team. So when I look at those three priorities, that's how I go about assessing, like what sort of AI tools do we want to embrace today? I firmly believe that now is a Time that regardless of how experienced you are in whatever your trade is, you need to as, as an individual and as a company, be testing out AI and be stress testing the things that you do to ask yourself really to the best objective ability that you can. Are we going to enter a world where AI is going to be better at this particular task than I am? And if so, that's okay. You know, think about when the Internet first came out. You know, pre Internet, there were people that were doing a lot of things that now were done in a fraction of the time. And those people still have, or people still have jobs today. It's not like the Internet took away jobs. If anything, the Internet created more jobs. But in the moment, it can be really scary to say this thing that I've become an expert in, AI is better than me at this thing. And I think the best thing I can offer is try to be really objective. Do you see a world where this thing is still done by human beings or does this become an AI task? And if so, how do I start embracing AI today for this task? And what's the new thing that I focus on beyond?

Host: A lot of people are making the mistake right now where they're hearing about AI, but they're jumping on the wave too slow. And then on top of that, there's the whole idea where you have to recognize when you're integrating AI into your business, the way you have to do that is not by integrating AI into your processes, but design processes around the AI. And when you can design processes around the capabilities of the AI, that's when you get a really powerful use case.

Pat Ahern: I think the only thing that I would challenge within what you said there is I, and I agree wholeheartedly with you that if you can build processes around AI, that is ultimately the path to success. I think it's a really important step to start out with that level one of figure out how can you integrate AI into your existing processes. But as you said, like ultimately recognize that that's just step one. Um, and the reason I say start out with that step, start figuring out how can you get AI to take over like, like 10% of the processes that you're currently doing for like one specific task. If you can start out by doing that, you're going to start learning very quickly, where is AI really good and where is it really bad? Where do you need to have a human being versus where should AI be doing this? And no one on your team should physically should manually ever do this again. And if you can, then do that. That is where I see your recommendation coming into play. Like, once you understand this is what AI is good at, that's was, this is what it's bad at, then to your point, rebuild those processes and say, okay, here's what humans need to do, but we're going to build this process so that AI is able to do 80% of the heavy lifting. I think about it, and this, I would say, comes into play with hiring any sort of expert. But let's say specifically with AI, anyone can. And I would encourage everyone to sit down and start experimenting with AI tools. I think it's going to be really important for future careers having at least a baseline understanding of how various AI tools work. And that's a continual process. But, um, I talk to clients about this a lot and it applies directly to AI as well. You know, if I look at my, my trade, SEO, content marketing, anyone can go out and can learn how to do those things. It's not like you have to pay some crazy fee. You don't have to sign up for any of those courses that are out there. You don't have to get a degree to be an SEO expert. You can go out, you can read blog articles. Any of the things that our team is doing on a daily basis. We've probably written one, if not two blog articles about it. Like, you can go out, you can read those things, and you don't have to pay us. You can do it all on your own. At the same time, though, you're going to spend a lot of hours figuring out how is it that we go about doing those things. We've already, we know because we've spent a lot of hours doing those things and then a lot more hours documenting how we do those things. So at the end of the day, like, the question I always say to people is, any sort of opportunity that you decide to pursue is a question of how do you want to pay for it. Do you want to pay with your time or do you want to pay with your money? And there's pros and cons to each approach. In every single case, you need to assess it and figure out which of the two expenses makes more sense for this particular scenario. The more that your business grows, the more important it is to save your time and spend your money instead. If you're in the early stages of a business, yeah, maybe you have to put in a little bit more time because you don't have money that you can put into it. So I think of it with AI in the same regard that every business in my eyes, should be going out and learning how to do these things. But understand that in order to become an AI expert, it's going to take a lot of time and maybe that pulls away from opportunities that are on the table. So if you hire an AI expert instead, yeah, it costs more money, but it's going to save you a lot of time of becoming that same AI expert. And you still get a lot of the benefits in a fraction of the time.

Host: Exactly. And this isn't something that we want to necessarily gatekeep, but we want to help you do it faster. And it's like instead of spending nine months trying to figure out how to do this for this process, you can do it for you in a month. And then we can also train your team so they know how to do it this. And now we've saved you nine months of not just time, but also the money that you were going to put into trying to figure this out. And then you can go and, like you said, direct that to the high leverage stuff that's going to actually go and drive results for your business. I think when it comes down to any agency, that's how it works.

Pat Ahern: Couldn't agree anymore. I love.

Host: Yeah. Honestly, I think this is a great place to leave off. I do have one final question that I ask every single person that comes onto the podcast. So what's the most overrated piece of advice you've ever encountered?

Pat Ahern: Man, that's a good one. I can think of underrated pieces of advice. I'm totally stumped.

Host: All right, well, I guess in that case, give us something underrated.

Pat Ahern: So underrated piece of advice, I guess I would call it a song. If you look up Everybody's free to wear sunscreen by Baz Luhman. It was based off of, like, an anonymous opinion piece that was submitted to a newspaper. I think it was in, like 1997, maybe for the graduating class of that year. Um, and it's chock full of just really great advice that I listen to at least once every couple of months. And every single sentence in there, I'm reminded of, wow, that is really great to keep in mind. I would say one just individual piece of advice that I'll offer that I think is underrated is the idea of just starting now with whatever it is that you're really excited to work on. And that can be applied in a lot of different ways. It's super vague advice, but, uh, you know, a couple tangible examples. You know, one, if you are picking a general time that you're looking to start a workout regimen, I would say just start today, start with a set of doing planking and maybe do 10 pushups. See if you can do 45 seconds of planking, see if you can do 10 push ups. If you can, that's great. Do the same thing tomorrow and then maybe add 5% onto it until you can't do that, and then stick there for a little while. If you are thinking, hey, I really hate this job that I'm at and I really want to start my own business, start out small, start out doing it nights and weekends. I did that for the first six months of our company and frankly, it's really exhausting when you do that. But there is no better way in my eyes to start a business than to do it while you have a full paycheck coming in. Because the reality is when you start a business, you're probably not going to have a paycheck coming in for that business. If you're lucky for the first year, if you're unlucky, it might be a couple of years. So, yeah, maybe. The broad advice I'll offer that I think is very underrated is if you're looking to start something, just do it today. Start with a really basic version that you're going to be embarrassed about. You know, a year, two years down the road if everything goes well. Um, and try not to judge yourself too hard. You know, give yourself credit for just trying new things. Even if they fail, you're going to learn a ton from the experience.

Host: Awesome piece of advice, Pat. Awesome piece of advice. Because it really just is about that, right? Become 1% better every day, and when you look back, you'll realize that you've grown a lot. So thank you, Pat, for coming on. That's a great conversation, really fun. It was awesome having you on, man.

Pat Ahern: It's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me on today.

Host: Of course. As we end today's episode of Making Martech, I'd like to thank all our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to share this and subscribe to our show so you don't miss the next one. I'm your host, Hymnish Jindal, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.