The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

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.

(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.