Lenny's Podcast

The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Ethan Smith is the CEO of Graphite, a boutique growth agency that’s helped companies like MasterClass, Thumbtack, Robinhood, Medium, and Honey develop and execute their SEO strategies. SEO is one of the least-understood levers for growth, while also one with the biggest payoff. This episode is a true master class on all things SEO. Ethan shares a wealth of information, including when you should begin investing in SEO, how to build an SEO team, and the three main buckets of SEO. He explains the difference between topics and keywords, gives the exact heuristics and tools to help you be successful in developing and implementing your own SEO strategy, and also goes deep on how to deal with roadblocks and advocate for resources. — Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-seo-ethan-smith — Where to find Ethan Smith: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethan_l_s • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanls/ • Graphite: https://www.graphitehq.com/ — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible: • Coda: https://coda.io/lenny • Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/startups • Lemon.io: https://lemon.io/lenny — Referenced: • Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy https://a.co/d/2wkN4dx • Topical Authority Analysis: https://bit.ly/topical-authority-tool • SEO Link Analysis: https://bit.ly/diagnostic-internal-links • SEO Links API: https://bit.ly/graphite-internal-links-api • Screaming Frog: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ • Brandon Lee of Power: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonhli • Similarweb traffic analysis: https://www.similarweb.com/ • MasterClass: https://www.masterclass.com/ • BetterUp: https://www.betterup.com/ • NerdWallet: https://www.nerdwallet.com/ • HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/ • Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/ • Semrush: https://www.semrush.com/ • Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about • Clearscope: https://www.clearscope.io/ • Yuriy Timen on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-grow-a-subscription-business-yuriy-timen-grammarly-canva-airtable/ • Gokul Rajaram on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/gokul-rajaram-on-designing-your-product-development-process-when-and-how-to-hire-your-first-pm-a-playbook-for-hiring-leaders-getting-ahead-in-you-career-how-to-get-started-angel-investing-more/ • Luc Levesque on Twitter: https://twitter.com/luclevesque • Search Off the Record: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/search-off-the-record/id1512522198 • GPT-3: https://gpt3demo.com/apps/openai-gpt-3-playground — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Ethan’s background (07:53) Why technical audits are the biggest myth in SEO (10:05) When to invest in SEO (16:09) Heuristics to determine if SEO is worth it (18:36) The three buckets of SEO: programmatic, editorial, and technical (23:30) The process for creating an SEO strategy (27:00) Why you shouldn’t be too formulaic (28:33) What is site engagement? (29:31) Which pages need to be indexed (31:49) Topics vs. keywords (36:33) How to mine competitors’ sites for information (37:41) Useful tools for developing your SEO strategy (40:14) How long will it take to see results? (45:16) Factors to consider when looking to hire an SEO person (47:33) The functions of a programmatic SEO person (49:19) How to do testing (54:06) Editorial SEO strategy (57:14) How to scale based on the size of the site (59:51) Page types (1:01:53) How to win in a topic category (1:03:12) How to build solid hypotheses and test them (1:06:13) How to deal with roadblocks and advocate for resources (1:08:54) How topical and domain authority are determined (1:16:43) The power of internal links (1:24:32) Why AI is not usually useful for content creation (1:28:31) Final tips for getting started with SEO — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

Ethan SmithguestLenny Rachitskyhost

Nov 30, 20221h 30mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Demystifying SEO: Strategic, Product-Led Playbook From Graphite’s Ethan Smith

Ethan Smith, CEO of growth agency Graphite, breaks down SEO as a product and growth discipline rather than a bag of technical tricks. He explains when SEO is worth investing in, how to assess your addressable search market and authority, and why most companies dramatically under-resource SEO relative to paid acquisition. The conversation dives into programmatic vs. editorial vs. technical SEO, the importance of topics and topical authority, internal linking, and how to structure an SEO team and workflow. Throughout, Ethan emphasizes rigorous competitive analysis, testing, and execution as the real drivers of SEO success.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Don’t invest heavily in SEO until you have basic authority signals.

Ethan recommends reaching roughly 1,000 non-search visits per day and ~1,000 referring domains before treating SEO as a primary growth channel; Google wants to rank credible brands, not pure SEO plays.

Evaluate SEO by addressable market and channel tradeoffs, not hype.

Use tools like Similarweb, Ahrefs, and Semrush to size the total search opportunity, compare potential SEO conversions to paid and other channels, and decide if SEO is the best use of marginal resources right now.

Think in topics, not single keywords.

A single page typically ranks for 200–2,000 related queries; clustering these into topics gives a truer sense of search volume, avoids redundant pages, and ensures content covers all key sub-intents (e.g., definitions, benefits, templates).

Match your page type to what already ranks for your queries.

Reverse-engineer Google’s intent: for a target query, look at the dominant page types (articles, category grids, product/“item” pages, tools, etc.); if you don’t use the same page type pattern, you’re unlikely to rank.

Editorial SEO is often the highest-leverage strategy; programmatic is specialized.

Most companies can and should win with editorial SEO (high-quality articles, guides, listicles), while programmatic SEO (Zillow-, eBay-style database-driven pages) requires deeper technical and product expertise and is applicable to fewer models.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

If you're gonna spend $100 million on ads, why would you spend $50,000 on SEO? That doesn't make sense.

— Ethan Smith

The way that you grow is with programmatic and with editorial SEO… technical SEO is mostly internal link architecture and a few other things, but that's not how you grow.

— Ethan Smith

Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site. They want you to be a credible domain before they rank you.

— Ethan Smith

Testing validates a hypothesis, but the hypotheses come from analyzing other people's sites and analyzing my own site. That's where the valuable hypotheses come from.

— Ethan Smith

This is probably the most important, least understood part of SEO: it's not your total domain authority, it's what you're known for.

— Ethan Smith

When and whether a company should invest in SEOProgrammatic vs. editorial vs. technical SEO and core page typesAssessing addressable market, authority, and topical authoritySEO team structure, hiring profiles, and execution challengesTopic-based keyword strategy and content operationsInternal link architecture as a major overlooked growth leverUse and limits of AI-generated content in SEO

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