The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

1. 0:00 – 7:53

   Ethan’s background

   1. ESEthan Smith0:00

      I think people under-resource SEO a lot of times, and over-resource ads. So if you're Zillow, you're gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads, or if you're eBay, you're gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads. Why would you not have a really great SEO team? W- like, the amount of traffic you get is probably equal to that, so if you're gonna spend $100 million on ads, why would you spend $50,000 on SEO? That doesn't make sense.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:23

      (instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Ethan Smith. Ethan is possibly the smartest person on SEO you will find. Ethan has worked with companies like MasterClass, Thumbtack, Robinhood, Medium, and Honey to develop and execute their SEO strategies. One of my goals with this podcast is to give you tactical and actionable advice for how to build and grow your own product, and SEO is one of the most powerful and least-understood growth levers. This episode contains more advice, tools, tactics, and guidance on how to win at SEO than anything I have ever come across, and I suspect it will blow your mind. We talk about when to focus on SEO, whether you ever should, talk about all the things you need to get right to win at SEO, when to hire, who to hire, the most useful tools, and so much more. I will now stop talking and get right into it. And with that, I bring you Ethan Smith. This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda's an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers, and it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast. Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources from many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul, and Shishir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there, like Pinterest, Spotify, Square, and Uber, use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping-ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get $1,000 in credit on your account. This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel, offering powerful self-serve product analytics. If you listen to this podcast, you know that it's really hard to build great product without making compromises. And when it comes to using data, a lot of teams think that they only have two choices: make quick decisions based on gut feelings or make data-driven decisions at a snail's pace. But that's a false choice. You shouldn't have to compromise on speed to get product answers that you can trust. With Mixpanel, there are no trade-offs. Get deep insights at the speed of thought at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel builds powerful and intuitive product analytics that everyone can trust, use, and afford. Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com. And while you're at it, they are hiring. Check out mixpanel.com to learn more. Ethan, welcome to the podcast.

   3. ESEthan Smith3:55

      Thank you for having me.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky3:56

      It's my pleasure. So you're the CEO of Graphite, which is one of the top growth agencies in the world, and you guys are especially good at SEO, which to a lot of people feels like this huge dark art. And so, I am really excited to dig into a lot of the nitty-gritty of SEO, and the tactics and the strategies around winning at SEO, and I suspect this episode's gonna end up being very rich and very tactical. But before we get into that, could you spend just like a minute talking about how you got into growth, how you got into SEO, and then just a bit about Graphite and what y'all do over there?

   5. ESEthan Smith4:31

      Yeah, for sure. So, uh, my career started in user research and user experience design, so very different from SEO, and I would do, uh, user testing, and ethnography, and things like that, and, uh, UX workflows. (clears throat) So I was working at this commerce company in 2007, and I made what I thought were pretty nice designs and nobody was using them, so I wanted to figure out how to get people to actually come. We were buying ads, but they were really expensive. And so, by necessity, I basically, in my spare time, decided to also learn SEO on top of doing user tests and things like that. And so, I got into it, number one, by, we hired an SEO consultant, and so he sort of... And we hired several SEO consultants, but, uh, and, and several of them were not good, but this one was great. It was Leo, uh, Hariano from, uh, Shopping.com, eBay. So he kind of gave some playbooks, and then we took that and did a bunch of testing. And most of the tests failed, some of them succeeded, and so we sort of iterated over about three years and came up with, uh, what at the time was the programmatic SEO search page type of a strategy. And then since then, I went into growth and product broadly and SEO was part of what I did. Uh, and then four years ago, Whirlpool bought the company th- that I was at before, and then I decided to specialize in SEO, but most of my career actually was in product and growth broadly and SEO was just a, a part of that, which I think is interesting because t- to do SEO well, I think it needs to fit into a broader product context and a lot of what's effective in SEO is actually making core product changes, so I think that that's actually a, a perfect profile, even though it was somewhat unintentional.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky6:06

      I haven't heard of someone's company being bought by Whirlpool yet. You've, you've, uh, you're the first. Can you talk a bit about Graphite, which is the company that, and the agency that you run now?

   7. ESEthan Smith6:15

      Sure. So when I left, uh, my last company, I was doing consulting as a, as a solo practitioner, and I, and I had been doing it on the side since 2014, starting with Thumbtack, but then I decided to do it full-time. Um, I actually didn't intend to do that because I always thought of consulting and agencies as sort of distasteful and, you know, not something that I wanted to get into. And it, it was somewhat by accident where, uh, Masterclass reached out to me, Honey reached out to me, Ticketmaster reached out to me. So those are the first projects that I worked on, and I hadn't been planning to have that be my full-time role. I, I was planning to sort of explore and maybe build a product. Those projects went really well. And then I got more inbound from, uh, in- inbound interest from companies when Masterclass did well and Honey did well. So I decided to start an agency, and we built out SEO and content strategies. So I thought broadly about all the different things that I could do and where the biggest need was, where the most underserved market was. And SEO was by far more underserved than anything else that I was good at. And so Graphite focuses on building those SEO and content strategies, and a lot of it's inspired by the early work we did with Masterclass and around editorial SEO. So that's Graphite. And I think one unique thing about us is that I've found that getting things done is actually more important sometimes than the strategy, so a lot of what we've tried to do differently is to, is for us to build as much as we can on those projects. So I think the, the d- the distinguishing characteristic is that we can get things done and that we can build stuff. S- so that's a bit about Graphite.

2. 7:53 – 10:05

   Why technical audits are the biggest myth in SEO

   1. ESEthan Smith7:53

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky7:53

      Awesome. Just off the bat, what are some of the biggest myths about SEO?

   3. ESEthan Smith7:57

      I think the number one biggest myth are, uh, technical audits. So we, we have people reaching out saying, "We want a tech audit." And essentially what that is, is give me a list of bugs to fix, which is different from help me grow. And so a tech audit is basically, it's this strange thing in SEO where you basically get Screaming Frog, which is this tool. You buy it for, I think it's $150. You crawl the site and then you give a report and you say, "Here are bugs," which is not that useful. What the company actually wants is they want to grow. And so we'll try to reframe that. And number one, technical SEO I think is misunderstood. You want a strategy around your technical components, and you want a general SEO strategy to help you grow. So I think that that's the biggest, biggest myth. And then I think similar to that is that people over-index on technical SEO and not enough on editorial SEO. Some companies can benefit from programmatic SEO, which is related to technical SEO. Technical SEO is mostly internal link architecture and a few other things, and bugs, but that's not how you grow. The way that you grow is with programmatic and with editorial SEO, and I think editorial SEO, and by that I mean articles and, and, and content, manually written content, is underappreciated. So I think those are the two biggest myths.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky9:17

      Okay. I have a, a billion questions I wanna ask, and you're touching on a bunch of these things already. Before we get into that, I just wanna kind of frame our conversation and start at the top a little bit and come back to some of these things, 'cause this is really important foundational stuff. There's kind of three things I wanna focus on today. One is when to SEO as a company, two is how to SEO, and three is just to cover a few important concepts that folks need to understand if they wanna be really good at SEO. Does that sound good as a, as kind of a base?

   5. ESEthan Smith9:45

      That sounds great.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky9:46

      Cool. And, uh, a quick shout-out to Brandon Lee, who's the co-founder of this company called Power, which I'm an investor in, who is all about SEO and asked him what to ask you, and he gave me a bunch of great questions. So those are gonna be interspliced into our chat.

   7. ESEthan Smith9:58

      Awesome. Plus one for, for Power. I'm, I'm also an investor.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky10:02

      Okay. (laughs) Awesome. Oh, man. Okay, great. Go

3. 10:05 – 16:09

   When to invest in SEO

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky10:05

      Power. Okay. So to start, I wanna help people understand when to focus on SEO, when it makes sense as a growth channel and timing around when to invest in SEO. So question for you, what are just attributes of a product or a company that tell you that SEO could be a growth driver and/or a massive growth driver? Because I imagine SEO isn't useful for everybody. How do you, how do you think about that?

   2. ESEthan Smith10:28

      There's two big things. Uh, the first thing is, is the addressable market large? So is the addressable market for SEO large? And for most categories it is. The second is, do you have authority? Do you have existing traction? If you start from zero and you have no traction, so we, we, we talk with, uh, seed, seed stage companies and series A companies, typically they don't have a lot of authority and it's too soon. And Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site and they want you to be a credible domain before they rank you. And if you're starting from zero, they don't have enough signals that you are. So the way that we assess that is I will go into... The first signal I'll look at is, what's your traffic? What's your current traffic? And your non-SEO traffic is actually an authority signal. So I'll go into Similarweb, I'll put the domain in, I'll look at the total traffic, and I'll wanna see at least, I would say, 1,000 visits a day roughly for, for non-SEO at least. If you have five visits, that, that, that's very little. And then the second thing I'll look at is the number of referring domains. So I'll go into Ahrefs or Semrush and look up the total number of referring domains. I'll try to have at least 1,000 roughly referring domains. You could grow with less than that and less than 1,000 visits, but it's much harder. And the more you have, the easier it is to grow and the faster you can grow and the more you can grow. And then in terms of the addressable market, that's a little bit more complicated, but most markets are pretty large actually, uh, in SEO, but we want it to be large. So WithPower is an, uh, actually a- an interesting example. So they're a clinical trial, uh, lead gen site. They wanna acquire people to take clinical trials.... how many people are typing online, "I wanna take a clinical trial." Not, not very many. But the number of people that could be taking clinical trials is very large. And so if we target the persona, like w- what's the key demographic of who might be, uh, a candidate for, uh, taking a clinical trial? It's very, very large. And so we can then create content that targets that, like gig economy or college students or people like that. (clears throat) And so if you think about targeting the persona, most sites have a very large addressable market. But the way that I would think about the addressable market is that which is, "What's, what product am I offering? What are the use cases for that product? What is the persona? What's the size of that?" (clears throat) And then I would assess that typically by looking at external, uh, benchmarks. So if I'm a shopping site, I can ... And I, I haven't started yet. I can look at other shopping sites, I can see how much traffic they have. So again, I can go into SimilarWeb. If I'm wish.com and I wanna see what, you know, what my traffic potential is, I can put in Walmart and, and Wayfair, put it in SimilarWeb, look at their total traffic. You can get SimilarWebs free for all of this. And then I can get a sense of how, how big I can, uh, get ... The one other thing I'll mention is that (clears throat) there are product competitors and audience competitors. So for something like, uh ... I'm at a WeWork right now. So for WeWork, I could look at the traffic for other, you know, w- rental office companies, or I could look at companies that are ranking for the kinds of things that I would wanna rank for. And they might not be direct product competitors. So like fintech is interesting. So for Robinhood, Robinhood could look at other sites that allow you to sell stocks in crypto, or they l- could look at Investopedia. Investopedia doesn't allow you to buy stocks, but they have a, a bunch of traffic. So it's not a product competitor, but it's an audience competitor. And so these competitors basically can tell you what the size of that market is. So that's how I think about the addressable market. So ideally, it's large. It typically is, and then the more authority I have, the more I can compete. If I'm starting from zero, it's probably too early. But once I have traction, SEO can then multiply that traction.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky14:11

      Okay. Wow, there's so much there. I'm gonna try to summarize because I think that was just like a million nuggets in one answer. So the, the way to think about this, if I'm just kinda reflecting back what you just said, if SEO is worth investing in. You also kind of answered when it makes sense, which is interesting. One is just, do you actually have ... Do you have like 1,000 or more visits a day just organically through search is a sign that maybe it's a good time before that ... Before that ... Is that ... Yeah, sorry.

   4. ESEthan Smith14:37

      1,000 visits not from search. From anything-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky14:39

      Not from-

   6. ESEthan Smith14:39

      ... other than search.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky14:40

      Oh, okay. Got it. And other than search meaning ? Like what example is that when you say that?

   8. ESEthan Smith14:45

      Usually direct and paid but, um-

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky14:47

      Mm-hmm.

   10. ESEthan Smith14:48

       Direct, paid, email, social-

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky14:50

       Got it, got it.

   12. ESEthan Smith14:50

       ... um, anything else.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky14:52

       And why is it that it's not from search?

   14. ESEthan Smith14:54

       So Google wants to see that you're not just an SEO site.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky14:57

       I see.

   16. ESEthan Smith14:58

       And if you're not getting any traffic from anywhere else and it's only from SEO, then you're an SEO farm essentially.

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky15:05

       Got it.

   18. ESEthan Smith15:05

       So the more traffic you have that's not from SEO, that means that you're credible. The more referring domains you have, that means you're more credible, more authority. The more shares you have, more authority. So the more of these signals, the more you're a known brand in Google's eyes and the more authority you have and the better you can rank. So it's the non-SEO traffic piece that I, that I especially, uh, wanna look at.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky15:25

       Got it. And then the other piece is that there's 1,000 domains linking to you is something you look for, right?

   20. ESEthan Smith15:31

       Yeah, ro- ... And, and, you know, it, it depends.

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky15:33

       Roughly, yeah.

   22. ESEthan Smith15:33

       But those are my rough back of the envelope benchmarks.

   23. LRLenny Rachitsky15:36

       And if you're not hitting these benchmarks, is the idea consider investing in this so that you can eventually start doubling down on SEO? Or is it just let it happen and kind of see if it even happens on its own?

   24. ESEthan Smith15:48

       You could do either. Usually people don't specifically focus on links or non-SEO traffic for SEO. They just do it because they want to grow their company. So usually that's what happens and it happens for free.

   25. LRLenny Rachitsky16:00

       Awesome.

   26. ESEthan Smith16:00

       Uh, but you could be intentional about it if you, if you want to.

   27. LRLenny Rachitsky16:03

       Awesome, okay. So that touches on when to start focusing on SEO, and I'm gonna ask you if there's anything else you should think about about the when.

4. 16:09 – 18:36

   Heuristics to determine if SEO is worth it

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky16:09

      But it feels like the other piece is even more important is should you even consider SEO? And the total addressable market is a, is a big part of that. And you've mentioned the site SimilarWeb. Is it just similarweb.com, right? Type in your URL and it shows you how much organic traffic you're getting from search, how much your competitors are getting? Is that roughly a good way to describe that?

   2. ESEthan Smith16:28

      Yeah, it has total traffic and then it has traffic by channel and it has countries and other things. But I'll look at total traffic and then by channel and then total times percent non-SEO equals total, total traffic from non-SEO.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky16:40

      And you may have mentioned this, but again, what are heuristics looking at that data that's like, "Okay, this market is big enough for SEO?"

   4. ESEthan Smith16:47

      Well, it depends on, you know, how much traffic you want, but, um, the heuristic ... I mean, the heuristic is to look at other sites that are your product competitor or your audience competitor and you can get their totals and then you can, you know, say whether or not that, those totals are meaningful. But I would do totals times what I think my conversion rate is equals sales, compare that with other channels. So how much could I get in paid? How much could I get from SEO? How much could I get from social? And then that's how you would decide which channel and whether or not SEO is the channel to focus on.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky17:15

      Got it. So the team is like already it's happening, they're going to your competitors, this is what you can eat away if you invest in SEO?

   6. ESEthan Smith17:21

      Yes.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky17:22

      Awesome. Okay, before I get into other attributes of when it makes sense to invest, is there something about the actual product, the way it works, say, generates content automatically like Lastdoor or z- Zillow or Zapier? Is there something else that tells you this is gonna be really useful, this is gonna be a good product to use for SEO? Or the opposite, when it's like probably not gonna work out for SEO?

   8. ESEthan Smith17:46

      Sort of. So when, when we're looking at all of our different channels, SEO, paid, social, other, we wanna do impact versus scope. And we talked about impact. Scope is another one. So if you have no content at all and no UGC, then the scope is higher to compete, uh, in the addressable market. And if you have a ton of UGC like Glassdoor, the scope is lower. So the more UGC you have, the more, uh, like for Zillow, the more addresses you have for a shopping site, the more SKUs, the more products you have, the scope is lower. It's easier to compete for those.So definitely consider that. But if you have no UGC and no skews, you could still compete through editorial SEO and through other ways. So it's not that that would tell you you cannot if you don't have those things, but those things make it easier, therefore the scope is lower, therefore impact versus scope ratio makes more

5. 18:36 – 23:30

   The three buckets of SEO: programmatic, editorial, and technical

   1. ESEthan Smith18:36

      sense.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky18:36

      This is a good time, I think, to introduce these buckets of types of SEO. You mentioned programmatically, editorial. Can you just talk about what these buckets are and what they, what they mean?

   3. ESEthan Smith18:44

      There's programmatic SEO, there's editorial SEO, and then there's technical SEO. So programmatic SEO are pages that are automatically generated from a database of, of information. So for eBay, product pages are generated automatically from information in their database. Or for Zillow, homepages, address pages are generated based on information in their database. For a site with UGC like Glassdoor, that, that is programmatically generated as well. So that's programmatic SEO. It's usually category pages and item pages. Item page meaning product page, page about a home, page about a video. So it's like an individual item, and then there's category pages which are grids or lists of, uh, items. So those are the two main page types for programmatic SEO. Then there's editorial SEO. So editorial SEO is where a person actually sat down and wrote a piece of content, like a writer wrote something, like an article or a guide or a listicle. And, uh, editorial SEO is more and more actually driving more traffic than programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO used to be almost all SEO when I started, and editorial SEO has overtaken that.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky19:51

      Wow.

   5. ESEthan Smith19:51

      So that's editorial SEO. And then there's technical SEO. So technical SEO is just the infrastructure, so like internal link architecture, tags, redirects, page speed. That- that applies for everything. But those are the three main types.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky20:05

      Got it. Okay, so these are basically three areas you can invest in also as a, as a company that's investing in SEO. Which of these is the best, most lucrative? You may have mentioned editorial, maybe is on the rise. If you could choose, 'cause you can can't really make UGC, and so I guess if you could choose, is there one that's the best route if you could choose?

   7. ESEthan Smith20:27

      It depends, but the short answer is editorial SEO is usually the best. But it depends on your category. Given your addressable market, you wanna see the page type that maps to the queries that you want to target. And sometimes that's an article and sometimes it's not an article. So for Zillow, that would not be an article. It should mostly be programmatically generated pages. Or for an eBay, it's mostly gonna be programmatically generated pages, or for most commerce companies. But, but for most other companies, it's editorial SEO. So editorial SEO is always an opportunity for every single company if there's an addressable market, and programmatic SEO is sometimes an opportunity. The nice thing about programmatic SEO is that you don't have to spend money for each page that you create. So Zillow doesn't spend money for every single home page that they create. eBay doesn't spend money for every product page that exists. Editorial SEO, every page has a cost. So that's kind of how I think about it.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky21:20

      What are some examples of really good editorial SEO-ish companies, sites? Yeah, what comes to mind?

   9. ESEthan Smith21:27

      I'll give you a couple that I work with, and then I'll give a couple that I don't work with. So Masterclass is, is one of the, the, uh, projects that I'm most proud of and, and they do a great job and build a lot of content about their classes and it's stuff that's related to their classes. Another example is BetterUp, which is a coaching platform, so people can get a virtual coach to improve in their career and will build a lot of content around how to give difficult feedback, how to create a five-year plan, things like that. So those are two projects that, that we worked on that, that I'm really proud of. A couple other examples that I did not work on. So NerdWallet is one of the top editorial SEO companies and they have guides around credit cards and financial information and, and their, their stuff is top-notch. HubSpot does a really good job, so they have a lot of content around productivity and have done really well. The other is Dotdash. Dotdash is a conglomerate of many different publishers, like Allrecipes and Investopedia, and they consistently over and over again perform really well. They're probably the most successful editorial SEO company. So those are a few examples.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky22:31

       Awesome. I wanna transition to how to be good at SEO and how these operations run and how to do this well. Before I do that, coming back to a question I wanted to finish asking is when does it make sense to invest in SEO? Is there anything else to think about for a startup that's like, uh, not yet, not yet, that tells you that it's time other than these benchmarks you shared of 1,000 non-search visits a day and 1,000 links?

   11. ESEthan Smith22:53

       Yes. Well, we want to decide of everything that the company could work on, what is the relative priority of SEO versus everything else, paid, social, and things like that. So we wanna compare it with these other things and we wanna look at the cost. So depending on the cost and the opportunity and how that compares with other channels, that's how I would- h- h- how I would make the decision about when and whether to do SEO.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky23:15

       Got it. So yeah, very specific to what other opportunities they have, like if paid is working really well, maybe not worth investing in SEO just yet. That makes sense.

   13. ESEthan Smith23:22

       Yes, or, or Airbnb brand is working really well. Let's, let's, you know, dive into brands.

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky23:29

       Yeah.

6. 23:30 – 27:00

   The process for creating an SEO strategy

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky23:30

      Okay. So shifting a bit to how to do this well. Just broadly, what are the buckets of activities that a startup needs to nail to be good at SEO as a team, as a company? What are kind of like the investment areas that they have to do well at?

   2. ESEthan Smith23:45

      So it depends. And here's the workflow that I would go through. So first, we wanna define the addressable market, and given the addressable market, uh, what are the different topics and keywords that I want to acquire on? And then what is the page type that I need for that? So for Zillow, the addressable market is mostly address pages. For Masterclass, it's mostly articles. And so we look at benchmarks, we see what keywords they're ranking on, then we take those keywords, then we figure out the page type. Then given the page type, we wanna figure out the product requirements, so what needs to be on the address page on Zillow. Then we wanna figure out the content strategy. What are the different subtopics and themes that, uh, content that needs to be on, on each page?... and that's specific to the different page types. And then last is the infrastructure. So how do we help Google find all these different pages, uh, via links? And so that's the workflow that I go through. It depends on your addressable market what, you know, what that strategy looks like. But those are the components for a, for a high impact SEO strategy.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky24:47

      To unpack a couple of these, so there's a page type. You gotta figure out if it's... You said that if it's, um, article or a address for Zillow. How do you do that? How do you figure out what kind of pages that you should create?

   4. ESEthan Smith24:58

      So the short answer is you take a few keywords you want to rank for, you put them in Google, and you look for themes of the page types that appear. So for, for MasterClass, you type in how to poach an egg and you see that all the results are articles with a recipe. That's a very clear correlation that if I want to rank, I need a page like this. So with MasterClass is an interesting example. They have classes and chapters, and each chapter is... Like they have a how to po- poach an egg chapter for, for Gordon Ramsay. And what we could do is we could have a chapter page, and the chapter page is a transcript of what Gordon Ramsay said. And that actually won't rank. The page type is wrong. Google is not ranking chapter pages or transcribed text. They're ranking articles. And so that's the short answer. The longer answer is, if you want to rank for how to poach an egg, you would want to know, well, there's a thousand different keywords that this page is actually going to be targeting. So type in all thousand of those, uh, different keywords and then look for the patterns of the page types for all thousand keywords. Now, that's impossible to do manually, but if you were to be very rigorous, you would, you would essentially do that, but you're basically looking for what are correlations of URLs or page types that are, that are ranking for these terms. Usually there's one or two page types. So sometimes there's two different ones and, and, you know, it's like a, a fractured intent. And so an example would be, uh, best cameras. So you'll have a category page and a listicle page typically. So you could have one or, one or the other, but you will need one of those. If you have a product page, you're not going to rank. So you're basically looking for correlations of which page types are ranking for the terms that you want to rank for, and that's how you come up with your page type. And similarly, if you want to know what should go on the page, you again look for what are the correlations of the components of the pages that are ranking, that are ranking for the terms that I want to rank for. For example, do I need a map or do I need an address or do I need a phone number? A way to answer that is to see what are the patterns of the pages that are ranking for the terms you want to rank for.

7. 27:00 – 28:33

   Why you shouldn’t be too formulaic

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky27:00

      So it sounds like essentially you're this detective trying to understand and reverse engineer what Google wants out of this general topic. Is that the way to think about it?

   2. ESEthan Smith27:08

      Yes, and the only thing that I would say is I wouldn't have the goal be copy everyone else and just do, you know, do what we think the algorithm wants. I would take inspiration and make, make a great page. So if it looks like maps are useful and phone numbers are useful, you should include that. But I wouldn't just optimize purely to, to ge- to get a visit and then stop. I would take it as inspiration. Users in general seem to want to be able to contact the business, and they want to be able to find the business, which is why there's a map. So what are some other ways that I could help users do that? That's how I would, how I would come up with requirements.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky27:45

      Got it. So look at what Google is finding valuable, see what makes sense, what doesn't, think about what else would make it even more valuable. Like, the way to think about it isn't what's Google's secret crawling algorithm. It's like, what is going to be useful to somebody that is looking for this thing? And Google's probably constantly trying to make it do that, even though it's not perfect. And I imagine the more you're connected to what is this, how is it going to be useful to a human, the less likely an algorithm change is going to screw you in the future.

   4. ESEthan Smith28:14

      That, and the better your engagement.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky28:16

      Mm-hmm.

   6. ESEthan Smith28:16

      So if it looks like users really want to be able to find a business and you do that better than anyone else, your engagement will be higher, and your higher engagement will cause you to rank higher, and it'll cause you to rank higher right away. So it's not only a way to be robust against algorithm changes, it's, it's a way to rank higher right now.

8. 28:33 – 29:31

   What is site engagement?

   1. ESEthan Smith28:33

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky28:33

      And engagement is click through on the page that Google sends you or something else?

   3. ESEthan Smith28:38

      It's click through. So it's... If I typed in best camera, what's the rate of clicking on my position versus somebody else? So that's signal one. Related to that is, did you go back? So you clicked on my page, then you went back and you clicked on somebody else. That's a very bad signal. So that's engagement on google.com. The second part of engagement, uh, which is probably even more important, is did you stay on the page, and did you stay on the page for a long period of time? So Google's tracking everyone through Chrome and Android, and they can actually see what happened after they left Google. And ultimately, Google wants you to end your session or find the answer, find what you wanted on that page. So the more you click on, on our URL and then go to the page and then stay there and spend time and get your answer, that's a, a key ranking signal.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky29:28

      Wow, I didn't know any of that. That's awesome.

9. 29:31 – 31:49

   Which pages need to be indexed

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky29:31

      What does the operation look like to generate these pages once you've kind of figured out, I need, say, address pages with a map and a category? What does it look like to actually generate? And do you need like millions of pages, thousands of pages? What's like the order magnitude and then how do you actually go about generating these?

   2. ESEthan Smith29:48

      It depends, but it's usually not millions unless you're eBay or, or a Zillow, but usually it's less than a million. It depends on the page type. So for a product page, typically you would index all of your product pages, and however many product pages is the number of URLs. But you wouldn't want to index things that are thin or empty or we have a product and it's out of stock and there's no description and there's no reviews. You might not want to rank all of those. But usually for product pages or item pages, you would index all of them that are of some threshold of quality. For category pages, you want to find all of the categories that go after keywords where the category page is the right page type. So what are all the queries where category page is ranking?... and then you don't want a page for every single s- keyword. So when I started in SEO, you would have a category page for every single keyword. And so I was at a shopping site. We had 10 million plus pages, so every single way that you could possibly search for a product had its own page. And that worked really well. The pages were of, uh, dubious utility because of that, but, um, but that worked well. That no longer works well, and Google does not want you to do that. So you'll see in their guidance that, um, you should not have many minor variations of every single way that you could search. You should have themes or topics. And so a topic for best cameras, best cameras is gonna rank for the best cameras, 10 best cameras, cameras best, best digital cameras. All these things are gonna map to a single camera category page, and then there's a bunch of other category pages. So you basically take the 20 million commerce keywords, and then you group the keywords at the topic level, and then you launch just those. So that's how you would do a category page, and then on... For an article or a listicle, you would basically build out an article or a listicle page, page type, and then you would have writers write articles and then publish them through Contentful or Webflow or some sort of CMS.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky31:41

      Oh, cool. I want to talk about that, just, like, the actual platform, but this might be a good time to introduce this idea of topics you've mentioned a few times. I was gonna s- to ask you about that towards

10. 31:49 – 36:33

    Topics vs. keywords

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky31:49

       the end, but just this idea of, I think, topics versus keywords is, I think, the way you recommend people think about what to focus on. Can you talk about that?

    2. ESEthan Smith31:57

       When I started in SEO, again, it was keyword based. Every keyword had one page, and now many keywords have one page. So if you're a commerce site and you have 10 million pages, it has to be automatically generated. There's no way for you to afford to write 10 million pages, so you have to automatically generate it, and that led to a bunch of low-quality content. So since 2008 with Google Panda, and there's been a bunch of other algorithm changes, Google wants to, again, find a page that covers many different keywords, and the algorithm is, has improved. So for best cameras, they know that best digital cameras is the same as best cameras is the same as something else, some other variation of that. And so the algorithm has improved, and it can... it- it has a semantic understanding. So the algorithm is targeting topics. Whether that's our intention or not, you are targeting topics. And so there's typically about a... Any given page is typically going to rank or be able to rank for about 200 to 2,000 different keywords, and, um, this is important for a few different reasons. So the first reason is that the search volume for what we're targeting is not the search volume for one keyword. So for best cameras, the s- the search volume is not just the search volume for best cameras. It's the search volume for 2,000 different variations of best cameras, and so if you think the, the, uh, the search volume for best cameras is 1,000, the topic, uh, of best cameras is probably 100,000. It's probably 10X at least the search volume of the keyword. And so when we're making prioritization decisions or, "Should we go after this?" we wanna know the right search volume. If we have the wrong search volume, then, then we're, we're gonna ma- make bad prioritization decisions on a, on a very large quarter magnitude. The second is, um, if our topic is gonna rank for 1,000 keywords, we don't wanna write 1,000 articles, and if we did, we wasted a bunch of money. So if- or, you know, for, for best cameras, if I had best cameras, best digital cameras, best rated digital cameras, we wasted money if we wrote an article or- or made a page for all of those. And the order of magnitude can be substantial of- of- of wasted money. And then the last is that the page that is actually ranking for- for that needs to fulfill the intent of all 1,000 keywords. And if there's a theme that you're not talking about and you didn't know about it, then you're not fulfilling the intent, and you're not gonna rank as well. So for all of these reasons, it's much, much better to think in terms of topics rather than keywords.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky34:26

       What's an example of a topic, maybe from an example of a company you worked at, versus a keyword? What's, like, the... How high-level do these topics get?

    4. ESEthan Smith34:34

       Sure. I'll give two examples. So an example with Masterclass is butter lettuce, and, um-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky34:40

       (laughs) .

    6. ESEthan Smith34:40

       ... the keyword... I think it ranks for about 400 different keywords, and there are themes like health benefits and other kinds of lettuce and recipes. So if we only define what it was, what butter lettuce is, and we did not talk about health benefits, then we have this gap, and- and we're not gonna perform as well. And part of why Masterclass early on was able to outrank Food Network, who has way more... who had way more authority in- in food, is because other companies had these gaps. They were not looking at all 400 keywords, and they didn't talk about health benefits. And therefore, they didn't rank as well, because A, Google's content score said, "You're not comprehensive," and B, users who were searching for butter lettuce health benefits didn't get the answer and then left and went somewhere else. One other example that I'll give is, uh, with BetterUp we have this article Five-Year Plan, and if you look at that article, I think it ranks around 1,000 different keywords. And there are themes like examples and templates, personal versus business five-year plan, and five-year versus ten-year versus one-year plan. And again, because we have all these sub-topic themes, our content is comprehensive, content score is higher, and users, uh, who are searching for five-year plan template get a template. And now we have a better engagement score. So those are two, uh, examples, and one thing that I'll say is the way that we can know how we should cluster keywords, like should we have one page for template versus examples, should we have two separate pages, you can basically put in five-year plan template, five-year plan examples, and you can look to see how much overlap of the results are there. So if the, if the results are completely different for those two keywords, you should probably have two different pages. But if they're all the same, Google is saying, "These keywords are essentially a single concept or- or- or a topic." So that's how you can think about, you know, which click keywords should be clustered under one topic or another.

11. 36:33 – 37:41

    How to mine competitors’ sites for information

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky36:33

       That makes sense. I was gonna ask you with the butter lettuce example, is that how you... How did you figure out that...There was a big opportunity there. What was, like, the, the light bulb?

    2. ESEthan Smith36:42

       So what we do is we'll look for competitors. So we'll look at a Food Network, AllRecipes, other sites. And then we'll basically get all of their pages and all of their keywords, uh, using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush. So if we're starting from zero and we have no information about food, we just go to other sites who have, who have already done this, and get all their information and data and figure out all the different pages that, that they have, all the different keywords that cluster to each page, the search volume or the traffic for, for each of these. And then we can prioritize them based on search volumes. So we have 10,000 food topics sorted by search volume or traffic volume. Then we want to look at how competitive we can be, which is topical authority. Then we wanna look at conversion intent, how does food versus comics versus photography convert, and then we have a prioritized list of topics by expected conversions. So that's ultimately how we think about prioritization.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky37:40

       Awesome.

12. 37:41 – 40:14

    Useful tools for developing your SEO strategy

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky37:41

       Just gonna keep bouncing around based on where this is going. What are tools that you recommend and use most to help you in this? You mentioned a few. Screaming Frog sounds awesome. (laughs) Uh, what else, what else do you recommend?

    2. ESEthan Smith37:54

       There's four tools. So tool one is, uh, Google Search Console. So Google Search Console is free. Anyone with a website can get, uh, an account. There's a bunch of really useful information. You can get real traffic information. You can do SERP tracking, and you can do SERP tracking for free. So every single keyword you rank for, you'll have that in there. Uh, so it's very useful. That's my number one tool. My second tool is Clearscope. So there's a bunch of different ss- tools for content analysis, content scoring. Clearscope's the best one, and Clearscope will tell you what... You know, a lot, I talked about subtopics and, you know, comprehensive content. So that tool helps you understand whether or not you have a gap in your content. That's the second tool. The third tool would be a keyword, uh, research tool. There's many of them. SEMrush and Ahrefs, I use the most. Ahrefs is my favorite, but SEMrush is good. There's a bunch of other ones. They're all pretty similar, so pick one of those. That's, like, 100 to $200 a month, I think. Google Search Console is free. Clearscope is based on volume. And then the last tool or tools is that we have a bunch of internal tools, uh, at Graphite that, that are not accessible but we use to power some of the stuff that I talked about where there's not already a tool. So topics, like I mentioned, we have internal tools for that. We have internal tools for things like what subtopics you need, topical authority. There just aren't tools for that, so we basically built some in-house and we use that for, for when we're building strategies.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky39:22

       What about Screaming Frog? You mentioned that.

    4. ESEthan Smith39:24

       Screaming Frog is good. It's, uh, it's a bit niche. It's not... You don't have to have it. The application of Screaming Frog is, one, crawling. So I wanna get all the URLs from other, some other site. So that's, uh, a good use case. The second is you can audit stuff on your site. So you can crawl your whole site and find error codes and redirect loops and things like that. And then another key use case for Screaming Frog is your internal link coverage, though. Do your pages on your site, do they have links pointing to them within your site, or do they not? So that's what Screaming Frog does. Screaming Frog can be number five. I would just say you can build an SEO strategy without, without Screaming Frog, but, um, but certainly useful.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky40:04

       It's, uh, it's got a place in my heart now, Screaming Frog.

    6. ESEthan Smith40:06

       I use it every day.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky40:07

       (laughs) Okay, okay. So if you're a real pro, Screaming Frog. If you're not using it, you're not, you're not a real pro. That's my conclusion.

13. 40:14 – 45:16

    How long will it take to see results?

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky40:14

    2. ESEthan Smith40:14

       Yeah.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky40:14

       One of the classic issues with SEO that people often worry about is how long it takes to see anything, to see if it's working, to see results. So it's always this like, "Oh, we'll get to it 'cause it's gonna take us six months or a year to even see any effect." Is that true? Does it sometimes sh- show you results sooner? How do you think about timelines on SEO?

    4. ESEthan Smith40:33

       It depends, but usually I'll say six to nine months. But it's a function of how much authority you have and how much existing SEO traction you have. The more authority you have and the more traction, the faster it is. So if a company like Netflix makes a change, you'll see it the next day. And if a brand new company starts from scratch, it'll take probably a year. So you start on SEO today, takes maybe three months to build the page types, do all the analysis, come up with a strategy, build everything, launch it, write 20 articles. So three months to actually launch stuff, and then three to six months to see it start to rank and, and to grow. So what's happening, uh, the, the earlier we are and the less authority we have, Google is testing our pages on keywords that are less popular to see if our engagement is good. And then with better engagement, uh, we will rank more and more and it'll grow exponentially. And so again, back to the previous conversation, Google wants to see, "Well, when we rank for best cameras, what's the click-through rate on Google? And did you stay on our page, or did you go somewhere else?" And the higher that score is, the better our engagement is, the more we can now rank for more competitive, uh, keywords within that topic. Then we're ranking, you know, we have 20 articles and we're ranking for those things. Now we can rank for other stuff that's related to those 20. And so it sort of compounds and grows that way. So the rough timeline is around s- three to six months post of launch. Having said that, the larger the site is and the more authority, uh, it is, it could take days. So for, you know, for, for a large site like a Ticketmaster and eBay, it's probably one to four weeks is the rough timeline once you're really optimized.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky42:11

       So as a founder, you're probably listening to this and be like, "Damn, that's such a long-term investment that's not gonna show impact, and I have all these other things I gotta work on. Should I be doing SEO?" Is there things that along the way, say before six months, that are pointing to, "You're heading in the right direction, keep going," or just like, "Okay, this isn't gonna work. Just stop now"? Is there any kind of early signals, leading indicators?

    6. ESEthan Smith42:32

       Yes. I wouldn't say that there are signals that you should s- Well, there may, there may be signals that you should stop now. But we wanna look for leading indicators, and a leading indicator is, are we ranking at least number 20 for anything? So usually what we'll see is...... well, we'll launch something and maybe in the first week, we're ranking number 15 for, for something and we get one click or, or, or no clicks. But we go from number 15 to number 12 to number eight. Now we're at position eight, we have some impressions for this keyword. We don't have that many clicks because most people don't click on number eight, but we're starting to see signs of progress. Then we go from number eight to number five, now we get more clicks. (clears throat) Now we know if we can rank number five for these interesting head terms, we can rank, so let's say we have 10 articles, we're ranking number five for, for keywords for these 10 articles. We can rank number five for 1,000 articles. (clears throat) And so you can see these leading indicators and signs of opportunity early on, even with a small number of pages. And I would wait until I see that to then scale it. It's common to have, uh, to incorrectly conclude failure. Uh, I, I, I listen to the Yuri Grammarly-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky43:37

       Mm-hmm.

    8. ESEthan Smith43:38

       ... uh, episode and he talked about-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky43:40

       Mm-hmm.

    10. ESEthan Smith43:40

        ... false negatives. Like, we tried this thing, it didn't work, therefore it won't work. It's common for the first try or first several tries in SEO to just not be implemented correctly. And so if you're not ranking for anything at all, either the strategy is wrong or there's no opportunity. It's probably that the strategy is wrong, or, or that you don't have enough authority. But that's how I think about it.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky44:02

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14. 45:16 – 47:33

    Factors to consider when looking to hire an SEO person

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky45:16

       When you're starting to invest in SEO, say a founder is listening to this and they're like, "Yes, SEO, let's do it," how do you recommend they hire for this person/have somebody take it on? Do you recommend finding someone that's, like, an SEO god that has done this a lot and bringing them in-house or finding someone young and hungry that's gonna learn it all, or bringing an agency? As an early stage startup, what do you recommend people do skill-wise and people-wise to start on this?

    2. ESEthan Smith45:43

       It depends on the strategy and it depends on the stage of the company and, and the opportunity and budget. So in terms of the strategy, programmatic SEO is more specialized. It's harder to find people who are great at programmatic SEO. Editorial SEO isn't easy, but it, it's, there, there's a much larger set of people who can do editorial SEO than to do programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO just has many different nuances around indexation logic and, you know, I, I, I talked about the category pages and clustering keywords at the category level. That's a lot of work, it's hard to do, it's specialized. How, how to deal with UGC. So if, if we're a UGC site like Pinterest, it's very complicated and, and you wanna understand, you know, which pages you want to index and, uh, y- you need to build scalable systems. So that's a specialized skill, and there aren't that many people. If you can hire somebody who's great at that, I, you know, it... I'm, I'm biased towards in-house. Even though I ha- run a, a consulting agency, I'm still biased in-house. So if you can get that person, that's great. There just aren't that many of them. But on the S- editorial SEO side, yeah, getting someone young and hungry could, could absolutely work. On the opportunity and budget side, so if, if you're Zillow and you have, you know, SEO is worth a billion dollars to you, just spend the money. (clears throat) I think people under-resource SEO a lot of times and over-resource ads. So if you're Zillow, you're gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads. Or if you're eBay, you're gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads. Why would you not have a really great SEO team? W- like, the amount of traffic you get is probably equal to that. So if you're gonna spend $100 million on ads, why would you spend $50,000 on SEO? That doesn't make sense. So I think it's based on, on the opportunity and, and, you know, how, how complex the, the strategy is that you wanna focus on.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky47:32

       Awesome. That is really

15. 47:33 – 49:19

    The functions of a programmatic SEO person

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky47:33

       interesting. The two routes that you talked about, programmatic versus editorial, what kind of person would you look for for the programmatic? Is it like a growth PM? Is it an engineer? Something else?

    2. ESEthan Smith47:43

       It would be a growth person with technical ability.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky47:47

       Mm-hmm. Okay.

    4. ESEthan Smith47:47

       And I would look for somebody who's done it before. I would not look for someone who has done it before at a well-known brand name company, necessarily. What I would do if I were looking for someone is I would try to find sites that have had really good SEO growth, where the percentage of SEO is really high, almost too high, like 80% of the traffic is SEO, company I haven't really heard of, because that's harder to do. It's easier to do programmatic SEO at a well-known brand name company. It's harder to do at a company, uh, that, that isn't well-known. And the people who are brand name companies, everyone's competing to hire them. And the people at companies that are not brand name, uh, are, are, are, are less competitive. So they've had a harder route to go through, and you know, there, there are fewer people recruiting them. So if I were to look for a programmatic SEO person, I would, uh, basically, you know, scrape the web, find all the sites that have grown through SEO, percentage is really high, they're outperforming, they don't have that much authority, so they've made a ton out of the small opportunity that they had.... that's, that's how I would find a programmatic SEO person.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky48:58

       It reminds me of Gokul gave this great advice that when you're looking for a specific function, instead of trying to just scrape for everyone that does the skill, look for the company that is really good at that specific thing and then just try to hire those people.

    6. ESEthan Smith49:11

       Yes.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky49:11

       So if a company's become really well-known for SEO, that's gonna be a great place to hire SEO people.

    8. ESEthan Smith49:16

       Yes.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky49:17

       What is it that this person does day-to-day?

16. 49:19 – 54:06

    How to do testing

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky49:19

       So with programmatic SEO, it's not like, uh, sitting there and writing. It's basically building code and architecting taxonomies and updating sites, basically working with engineers to just create thousands of pages, millions of pages automatically, right?

    2. ESEthan Smith49:33

       Yes. And they don't need the, the, the SEO person doesn't need to write code necessarily. I'll tell you what I did when I was doing... when I was in-house, doing programmatic SEO. So most of my time was spent, A, looking at other companies that, that I... that are performing well and trying to understand what's working. So that involves finding the other sites, uh, basically auditing what they're doing, going into Ahrefs or Semrush, getting all their URLs and keywords, which pages are performing the best, what are the patterns of the pages that are performing the best. You know, it seems like they tend to have these particular characteristics. So a lot of my time is spent just looking at other people's sites, even more so than my own site, to try to figure out what's working and reverse engineer what's working. Then given that, I'm trying to, uh, recreate that. So for a food network, how do I recreate a recipe page? Like, what are all those different components? I'm coming up with product requirements and then working with engineers to build them. I'm spending probably a lot of time on programmatic on the category page side, going through lots of keywords. And then I'm probably usually manually clustering the keywords and coming up with those browse categories that I mentioned. So a lot of my time is just figuring out which pages are actually being created and coming up with that list or working with engineers to do that. And then, and then we're launching them, and then I'm spending a bunch of time, A, doing data analysis to see what's working and what's not working and why, and then last is tests, so coming up with ideas of what to test. What I'll say is that I spend more time and get more value on assessing other people's sites and assessing our own site than I do on testing. Testing validates a hypothesis, but the hypotheses come from analyzing other people's sites and analyzing my own site. So that's where the valuable qualified hypotheses of what is probably working com- comes from. It's not from brainstorming. The test validates the hypothesis. So that's what I'm spending most of my time on.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky51:34

       Is there an example that comes to mind of what you just described where maybe you tested too much in- instead of just, like, looking at what other sites are doing, or learn something by just scanning sites recently?

    4. ESEthan Smith51:44

       Well, I try not to do that. But sometimes, uh, companies test too quickly. So let's say that you're starting from zero. If you're starting from zero and nothing exists, then you shouldn't be testing things and should be launching things. You should be testing things once things have launched. So, testing is something I would do at like month six or later. The beginning should be around building stuff.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky52:08

       And you... When you say testing, basically running AB tests, right?

    6. ESEthan Smith52:12

       Could be an AB test or it could be a sequential test. And it depends on the tests, but you could make a site-wide change and then see an entire page type, you know, went up or down in a sequential test, meaning change the entire page type at the same time. That's still data. It's not as clean. You're not controlling for every variable, but it's still useful. But yeah, you can do a split test. The one thing that I'll say is some things are hard to test. For example, there are domain-wide things like Google Panda or... Google has a bunch of domain-wide scores, and you can't split test that. You could only split test that if you had 100 sites and you change 50 of them and you don't, you know, you don't change the others, but you can't split test everything. There are also things that are hard to decouple. So internal link architecture, a lot of times, it's a, you know, very interconnected graph, and to truly separate, you know, parts of the site can be hard. So usually split testing is the best route, but you could also do a sequential test. And some things just can't be tested.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky53:12

       Are there any tools that you find useful for testing SEO or is it just the same old AB test?

    8. ESEthan Smith53:17

       We usually build them in-house. You could use tools. What I'll say is the main effort is bucketing. So what's in the con- the control, uh, versus the, the test bucket? Or you have five different buckets. But bucketing actually is not hard, especially if you have thousands of pages. So I don't think that tools do, you know, es- an especially great job at bucketing beyond what a human could do. So for Zillow, just take a random sample of whatever percent you want, and that's a perfectly fine bucket. You don't need a tool for that. You might want to, like, compare the traffic composition of both buckets to make sure that they're roughly equivalent. But that's basically bucketing. And then in terms of the implementation of bucketing, it's actually not, not that hard either to build in-house. There are testing tools. They're perfectly fine. I just typically will, will build it in-house.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky54:04

       Awesome.

    10. ESEthan Smith54:04

        Or rather do it in-house.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky54:05

        Okay.

17. 54:06 – 57:14

    Editorial SEO strategy

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky54:06

       Coming back to the two types of people that you want to look for, we talked about the programmatic person. On the editorial side, what I think of there is I saw this story that Datadog hired an engineer and their job was to write blog posts, and that was really effective for them early on to build their SEO cred. Is that the right approach? How do you think about hiring someone to run your editorial SEO strategy?

    2. ESEthan Smith54:31

       That's a part of the right approach. So that part of the approach is writing really useful content and information, which is probably the most important part. The other parts are, what should I be writing about? What are the topics that I should actually be writing about? A lot of topics maybe nobody's searching for. Maybe they're interesting, but are, are not searched for. So selecting which topics we want to go after is important. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. What are the most searched for topics? So what's the search volume by topic?... what is our topical authority? Where can we actually compete within that set of topics? Where is there conversion intent? All of that multiplied out equals expected conversions, and then we prioritize that way. Then we wanna... So then we have our list of prioritized topics, then we want to make sure that the article is comprehensive and we cover all of the sub-topics. That is not intuitive, typically, to a writer. So the engineer at Datadog that you mentioned probably just had really good intuition about what should be covered, but a lot of people don't. So a lot of times you'll have a gap. And so again, you won't, you won't cover health benefits of butter lettuce on that article and you'll have a gap. So having the outline and the sub-topics is really important, and a, and a writer's not gonna... A writer will guess that and they may be right, but they usually are not. So you start with your prioritized set of topics, then you have your outlines, your, your, your structure of your article, and then you give that to a writer. So that's an SEO person. Then you give it to a writer, who's ideally a domain expert, has expertise, then they write it, then it gets published, and then you analyze it, and then you feed that back into the strategy. So SEO manager does topics and, and outline, writer does writing, SEO manager manages publishing or maybe content manager manages publishing, and then SEO manager looks at results and then that's kind of the workflow.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky56:17

       Amazing. This SEO person, so it's still a dedicated SEO person who's running an editorial SEO strategy, and they have people that are doing the writing. They're not usually doing the writing. And to your point, maybe the most important part is figure out what to write about and what it needs to touch on.

    4. ESEthan Smith56:32

       Yes, and the only thing that I would say is that for editorial SEO, where I've seen multiple examples where the person doing that SEO manager stuff has no experience in SEO prior and we'll show them some of our workflows and they'll pick it up. Uh, like at Masterclass, that's what happened and, and the team didn't have prior SEO knowledge and we shared our workflow, and then they became great and they were actually great at content more so, editorial and editorial strategy, and then they learned SEO and then they're able to do that really well. So it doesn't have to be someone... It doesn't have to be a, a, you know, an SEO expert with deep, uh, expertise. Programmatic is where you'd want a lot of expertise over years in SEO, but on the editorial side, you can actually, uh, pick it up if you have the right workflow and the

18. 57:14 – 59:51

    How to scale based on the size of the site

    1. ESEthan Smith57:14

       right tools.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky57:15

       What does that operation look like initially and at scale? Like how many articles do you have to pump out a day, a week initially, and then later on? Like how do you structure this and what does that look like operationally?

    3. ESEthan Smith57:26

       We'll usually do 10 to 25 articles a month, but it depends. Uh, essentially you have your addressable market. How many topics exist in your addressable market, and how long do you want to take to, to go after them? And how many of them do you want to go after? So if you have 10,000 topics, like MasterClass probably has 20,000 topics, let's say. So if you're doing 10 a month, I don't know how long that'll take. That'll take 200 years or something. Do you wanna wait that long or do you want, not wanna go after all 10,000, you wanna, only wanna go after 5000? You have diminishing return over time. But how many topics do you ultimately want to compete for and how fast do you want to take to get there? What I would usually do is I wouldn't write 1000 articles a month month one. I would start small. I would write 10 to 30, a- assuming that I'm starting from zero. 10 to 30, maybe. We'll usually do 25, but You know, do, do some, some volume around there and try to get those leading indicators that I mentioned before you go really deep on, on SEO. Once you have those leading indicators, then you say, "Okay, so over three months we wrote 50 articles. Here's what the performance looks like." Looks like they're ranking number five. You know, half the articles are performing, they're ranking number five for these different keywords. Okay, now we, we know that we can rank for a bunch of other stuff, and then we just... It's R- it's an ROI question of what's the cost of writing each article? What's the return? And, and how much do we wanna spend? How fast versus ads versus other channels? So that's how I would think about it. What I'll say is that other companies, once they get those leading indicators, will write 100 plus articles a month because again, they don't wanna wait 100 years to, to go after all the different topics.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky59:00

       What does the MVP of that initial team look like? Is it an SEO person and a writer person? Is it just one person can do it all initially? What do you suggest there?

    5. ESEthan Smith59:09

       Probably someone doing strategy and someone writing. You could do both, but usually the SEO person does not wanna write 'cause people who love writing is a, is a, is a special group of people. Uh, an also they're, you know, domain experts as well. The SEO manager's probably not a domain ex- expert in what the article's about. So I would say one SEO person and one writer is the smallest group that you could have that, that would be able to do this effectively. You could obviously have more. When we do projects, we usually have more. We'll usually have three to five people working simultaneously, but that's because we want to go faster and we don't wanna wait too long. So if you wanna be more cautious, minimum would be one SEO person and one writer.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky59:47

       Awesome. Okay. There's a couple things I wanted to come back to that I skipped.

19. 59:51 – 1:01:53

    Page types

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky59:51

       One is the page types. You mentioned there's these very... There's types of pages you can write, category pages, address pages. Are there like a set number of types of pages for people to put into their head?

    2. ESEthan Smith1:00:01

       There's a few pages that cover probably 90% of all use cases. And so on the programmatic side, there's category pages, which is a grid or a list of items, like 20 products. There's an item page, which is a single item, which could be a product, an address, a, a video. So those are the key page types of programmatic. Underneath category, there's brand, subcategory, a bunch of different ways you could slice categories, but it's essentially a grid of items. So that's a category page and a product page. Those are the two main page types. One other one I'll mention is like a question and answer on Quora or a forum, so UGC pages. So those are the primary page types on programmatic and then on the editorial side, it's essentially a page with content and that can be an article, a listicle. A listicle is an, uh, is like a list of items packaged as an article. You could have a guide, you could have a product marketing page, like a landing page for a feature that you have. So those are the... I, I, I would actually break out product marketing pages and homepages as sort of a separate miscellaneous bucket, but like product marketing page, homepage.... support. Those are the, the main page types. There are a few s- Those are the main page types that are, like, 80 to 90%. Then there are special cases. So special case would be tool pages, like a mortgage calculator or a body mass index calculator, or Zapier has integration pages, Google Sheets plus Gmail, so that's a special page type for them. So those are the main page types.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:30

       And coming back to how you decide which of these page types to do, you basically look at what is Google finding most valuable within the space that you're coming after, right?

    4. ESEthan Smith1:01:39

       Yes. What's your whole addressable market? By page type, which ones have the most opportunity, which is essentially impact. What's the scope of all these different page types? And then you prioritize based on impact and scope.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:52

       Awesome.

20. 1:01:53 – 1:03:12

    How to win in a topic category

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:53

       The butter lettuce example, say you wanna win butter lettuce as a topic. Do you have one page that becomes, like, your butter lettuce page that you're driving all your traffic to, or do you try to have like a hundred variations of it to win the broader butter lettuce topic?

    2. ESEthan Smith1:02:09

       The way that I would think about that would be, again, I would take all the different keywords that I wanna rank for, and I would look for the same results seem to be ranking over and over again, or they don't. So is there a significant overlap of the keywords that I have, or is there... is a completely different set of, of results? And if it's completely different, then I would separate them out. The other thing that I would do potentially is if, let, let's say the butter lettuce page is ranking number six for health benefits and we talked about it, but maybe if we... and that's a huge, uh, search line, if we really talked about it, we might be able to compete even better with this spin out sub article. And you can do that by, again, looking at the keywords that you're ranking for, and if there's some theme where you did cover it but, uh, but you're not ranking quite as well as you want to, break out that section of health benefit and then have a separate article for that.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:59

       Awesome. Man, there's so much, uh, meat to this. I'm just... My brain is, is full, but I have many more things I wanna ask. So let me, let me ask a few more things. One is just like a meta question.

21. 1:03:12 – 1:06:13

    How to build solid hypotheses and test them

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:12

       It feels like there's a lot of conflicting advice about SEO. Everyone's always kind of giving you different opinions about the way to win SEO and things are always changing. Do you have any advice for folks that are trying to learn how to get better at this? They'll listen to this. They'll learn a ton. They'll probably hear different advice. Any advice for, like, how to know what to believe, what's real, who to listen to?

    2. ESEthan Smith1:03:32

       Yes. So I think it's based on doing data analysis of your site, of competing sites to generate hypotheses of what you think is working and then testing them and validating those hypotheses, which is different from Google said something and therefore I will believe it completely or somebody told me something. So Google is a source of hypotheses to test a- and analyzing other sites, stumping that someone said something that another SEO person said. These are all hypotheses, but ultimately you wanna test them. Of the hypotheses of, you know, of the sources of where you would generate your hypotheses, I would focus on looking at other sites and looking at your own site. So find what seems to be working on other sites and do that by, again, putting them into Ahrefs, putting them into Semrush, getting their top pages, trying to glean what, what patterns you think are correlating with success. A- and then, then same on your own site. So which pages are performing well? Which ones aren't? Like an article that's 2000 words is doing or bl- the word count seems to be a correlation. Longer is better and shorter is worse. Maybe that's... Maybe that is causal. Then go test it and then validate it. I think also I spend a lot of time... So when I look at other people's sites, uh, one thing that I'll do that I've had a, a lot of success at is to contact the person who runs SEO at that company and then set up a meeting and then ask them a bunch of questions about, I think that this is what's, what happened. Is that correct? Or what have you tested? What's worked and what hasn't worked? I, um, I remember I was trying to come up with an international SEO strategy, and so I did an analysis where I looked at every company and which companies had repeated success outside of the United States. So eBay, TripAdvisor, a bunch of other sites. And there were clear patterns that TripAdvisor consistently outperformed over and over again. So then I analyzed TripAdvisor and tried to come up with what I thought was causing that, and then I tapped my network and tried to find the person who's running an SEO TripAdvisor, which is hard to do. But I eventually found, uh, Luke Levesque, who was running all SEO including that, and I asked him a bunch of questions and he, he answered some of 'em. And, and so now I actually, I actually know the answers, so I don't even need to test some of these things. Like somebody else already built this and tested it so they can just tell me. Um, so finding the SEO manager, the people at these companies and just asking them the questions is actually a great way to, uh, to get the, uh, th- those answers.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:03

       Awesome. Luke's coming on this podcast actually in not too distant future.

    4. ESEthan Smith1:06:07

       Luke's great. I'm, I'm looking forward to it.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:09

       Yeah, he's a big deal now. You mentioned that some

22. 1:06:13 – 1:08:54

    How to deal with roadblocks and advocate for resources

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:13

       companies get a little blocked on thinking about strategy and just like planning and don't actually get anything done. And I think you had some thoughts to share, just like how do you get shit done without being blocked if you can't get all the things done you want to get done?

    2. ESEthan Smith1:06:28

       The, the dirty secret of SEO and SEO consulting is that most of what is recommended never gets launched. So we, um, we interview people from other SEO agencies or who are doing SEO at other companies. And the common thing that will happen is I'll say, "What did you work on? What was your strategy? Describe your strategy." And then they'll describe it in detail, "And I did all these different things." And then I'll ask, "What happened?" And they'll say, "Oh, well, actually, almost none of this got launched because I couldn't get resources." So the common problem is, is resources. And, um, you know, every, every company is resource constrained. I think a key part of why SEO especially gets disproportionately blocked...... is number one, it's not part of the product org and the changes are oftentimes product changes. So Eli Schwartz has this book about product-led SEO, which is how it should be done and it usually is not done that way. It's usually the product org has their stuff, and then there's the SEO team over here and they're saying, "Please do this thing," and the product team says, "Well, I have all this other stuff that I need to do, so I'm, I'm not gonna do that or I'm gonna do that in a year." And so having the org design and having things prioritized through product, I think, is really important. Also having buy-in at, at the executive level is really important. Usually when we get blocked, I'll just try to ask the executive, "There's this really big opportunity. May we please get this thing launched?" I think the other part of why SEO doesn't get resourced as it should is that it's mysterious and it's hard to describe it, and people will say, "Well, how do you know that this is gonna work?" And you actually don't know if it's gonna work. And so the, the fact that there's this mystery around it versus something else where there's not mystery, the non-mysterious thing will get prioritized over the mysterious thing. (clears throat) And then the last is that it's just, just a lot of work. The stuff that I've been describing to you, to your point about there's a lot of meat, there's, there's a ton of work to do at, at, you know, at scale. Like at Zillow, you need a large team in it to do a whole bunch of different things, so you need a lot of resources to actually do all this stuff. And so it's just high-scope a lot of times to do it. And so for all these reasons, the getting things done part is actually more of a factor of success or not than the actual strategy a lot of times.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:38

       There's a bunch of topics I wanna touch on before we wrap up. This is already, I think, gonna be the longest episode we've done, but well worth it, because rarely have I heard this much depth on such a, as you said, mysterious skill and, uh, and growth opportunity. So I'm really excited about all the stuff that we're talking

23. 1:08:54 – 1:16:43

    How topical and domain authority are determined

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:54

       about. There's a few things that you already touched on in my notes, but there's a few that we haven't. One is topical authority, which you've talked a bit about, but I'm curious, is there anything more to share about just the importance of becoming an authority at a topic as the core of your SEO strategy versus a keyword focus and things like that?

    2. ESEthan Smith1:09:14

       This is probably the, the most important, least understood part of SEO. So page rank, uh, was a key thing with Google, where Google would prioritize things based on page rank, and it's based on academic publications, where the public, uh, the journal article that was cited the most is, is better than others. So they applied that to, uh, to their search engine, and that was a key part of why their search engine was better. (clears throat) And so it started with links. So the more links you have from other sites pointing to you, the more important you are, the higher you'll rank. And so people would build links and focus on that. And over time, that's gotten a lot more complex, so there's more inputs. The links is one, and, and I mentioned referring domains. That's part of links. There's other inputs. So non-SEO traffic, like I mentioned, how much traffic are you getting from other channels is a signal, and Google is looking at Chrome for that as well. So Google actually knows your traffic sources and

    3. NANarrator1:10:09

       Hmm.

    4. ESEthan Smith1:10:09

       ... Android. So non-SEO traffic is an authority signal, shares and, and social activity is an authority signal, branded search, so number of times people type in your brand name into Google, how many times people type in masterclass is an authority signal. So authority is, is more complex, so there's more inputs. The second thing is that it's topical. (clears throat) So it's not your total domain authority, it's what you're known for. (clears throat) And you'll see in the most recent Google helpful content update, they talk about domain experts or, or top... uh, they don't use the word topic, but they, they refer to people where there's a specific narrow expertise versus we can rank for anything, like a Wikipedia. (clears throat) And so Google is looking for which sites are disproportionately known, that have disproportionate authority for certain themes versus others. And so those themes come from, what is the anchor text of your backlink? Does it say chicken recipe or does it say digital camera? (clears throat) What is... For shares, what has been shared the most? What is the content of what got shared the most? Branded search, so Masterclass plus Gordon Ramsay is authority for Gordon Ramsay. So these are the inputs, and that's how Google's determining those, uh, keywords. And then they'll give you authority for the things that are semantically related or adjacent to that. So an example that I'll give is, I was working with this, a recipe site, and we had a viral blog post about Jell-O shots, 10 Jell-O shots worth the hangover.

    5. NANarrator1:11:37

       (laughs)

    6. ESEthan Smith1:11:37

       And, um, we got four million likes and millions of pins. It was hugely successful. (clears throat) And so that post did really well. I think it ranked around number six for Jell-O shots.

    7. NANarrator1:11:49

       (laughs)

    8. ESEthan Smith1:11:49

       But the entire domain then started to rank for vodka recipes and whiskey recipes and things that were semantically related to Jell-O shots. And it... And those pages were not even linked to from the blog post. So the blog post did well, but the entire domain benefited from, from Jell-O shot topical authority and from things that are adjacent to Jell-O shots, which are other, other types of alcohol. And so it was stuff adjacent, and it was entire domain rather than single page. So that was a really interesting example, and we see that a lot. Uh, an example with Masterclass is early on they had authority for the names of the instructors like Gordon Ramsay, but not for food in general. And so we knew that if we had authority for Gordon Ramsay, then we'll have authority for things that are adjacent to Gordon Ramsay. So Gordon Ramsay's known for Beef Wellington, salmon, uh, how to poach an egg, steak. And so we focused on things adjacent to Gordon Ramsay. (clears throat) And we knew we could rank there versus something like a butter lettuce, where we did not have authority for that yet. We would not rank for that early on. So we started for stuff that was adjacent to where our topical authority was, and then we branched out from there. And this is actually a great way where earlier companies can actually rank even if their competitors have way more domain rank than they do, because again, Google's saying, for, for a fintech site, maybe you don't have as much authority as, as Investopedia, but you're really known for a p- you know, iron condor crypto. I for- I, I forget what it was called, but, like, you're, you're known for that thing. So what's your authority... Or for Gordon Ramsey, what's your authority for-... just Gordon Ramsay relative to your total authority. And if you're disproportionately known for Gordon Ramsay, then you have very high topical authority for that, and you'll, you'll outrank other sites that have more total domain authority because you're disproportionately known for that thing.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:34

       When people think about the idea of a topic, you mentioned a bunch of examples, butter lettuce, Gordon Ramsay, is, is it usually just like a topic versus a keyword? A topic is like a, a one-word or two-word description of, like, a broad thing, versus, like Caesar le- Caesar salad with sardines and croutons. What's, like, a good mental model for thinking about, "Here's a topic that I can win," versus, like, "Here's just a keyword?"

    10. ESEthan Smith1:13:57

        A topic would be... Again, we wanna find keywords where the results are the same over and over again. So those keywords are now a group. That group of, of keywords, 300 keywords where the same results are showing up ev- every time, that's now a cluster of keywords. Uh, and, and therefore it's a topic. So the label of that topic is essentially, you know, what, what do you think is the primary theme of that? It's usually the, the highest search volume keyword within that keyword cluster. Uh, like a butter lettuce, so that's the name of the topic. And then the way that you think about adjacent topics, so you can kind of think ab- uh, of adjacent topics is, uh, for food, what does an ingredient graph look like? So, so for Jell-O shots, there's drinks, uh, meat, vegetables, produce. Underneath drinks, there's juice and coffee and tea, and then there's alcoholic drinks. Underneath alcoholic drinks, there's whiskey and vodka and this. Eventually, lower down, there's Jell-O shots. So Jell-O shots, what's adjacent to that are other types of alcohol. Then you have other types of alcohol, you rank for that. What's adjacent to that? Other kinds of drinks. What's adjacent to that? Something else. But that's kind of how you can think about how the graph, or sorry, the topic lives in a, i- in an overall graph, is, is, is an ingredient graph or same with, with commerce, you know, uh, home goods versus cameras, there's a whole tree structure. So that's how you can think about adjacent topics.

Episode duration: 1:30:59