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Ethan Smith

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90

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2022-12-01

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2022-12-01

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1

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1. “Absolutely. So, our website is graphitehq.com, and my email is ethan at graphitehq.com. So that's where you can find me. And one thing I'll add is I talked about how I learned a lot from asking other people at companies. Worked and what didn't work, and what you're doing with your podcast is essentially getting those people on a podcast and sharing it with everyone. So when I was starting in growth, I had no information or no guidance other than that consultant that I mentioned to point me in the right direction. So it was really painful. So the fact that there's an operator who's talking to other operators and practitioners and getting that information, giving access to everyone is really meaningful. So I just wanted to thank you for that.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Thing that they should do is assess the size of the addressable market. So is it large? Do that by finding, again, product competitors and audience competitors, how much traffic do they have? Is that meaningful? Second thing that they should do is they, can I compete? Do I have enough authority? So how much traffic do I have that's not from SEO? How many referring domains do I have? What is my total authority? How much traction do I have? Then they would want to ask of all the things I could be working on, how does SEO compare with all of my alternative things that I could focus on? And then what's the scope of that? So do I want to spend my money on that or do I want to spend it on something else? What's that amount of money? Does that make sense? So that's what I would do.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Workflow of creating content, you start with what should I be writing about? What are the subtopics, so like 300 different keywords? What are the sub themes? What's that outline? How is it performing? All of these things can be done really well with AI. So AI can extract structure. They can help me decide which topic to write by going through these thousands of keywords and clustering them and looking for overlaps and things like that. It could tell me what my topical authority is. It could sort them. It could go through the keywords and find these subtopic themes. It could do that all that really well. And then a human can write a piece of content, given all that information. Human can write a piece of content. They're a domain expert. They have wisdom. And they can write an article based on that structure. That's a great application of AI. What's not a great application of AI is writing an article to just in cancer treatments based on no underlying wisdom.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Examples, so they're extracting structure from clinical trial information and generating sentence based on that structured data. So in that sense, it's useful, but most AI generated content is just sentences that are similar to other sentences that have been written. And so in general, I recommend against AI. An example would be how should I save for my retirement? If I have an article about that and it's just not truthful and I'm making decisions about my retirement based on this article that GPT throw, that's really bad. Or if I'm, you know, if I have cancer and I'm researching cancer options and this AI content suggests some treatment that is not a good treatment, that's a big problem. And so I think we want to be really careful about how we use AI for content generation where AI is really useful is actually all the other stuff that I talked about. So if you think about the”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “And GPT 3 said the soap was oxide free, but it was not oxide free. But GPT-3 doesn't know that. And some other thing was oxide free on the web. And so just said it was oxide free. So it made this false claim. But if you're a user, you would never know that. It was written well. It was spelled correctly. It was grammatically correct. And it was just factually inaccurate. And so to have content be useful and to use AI in a useful way, there needs to be underlying wisdom that the AI is communicating. So if you have structured data, then it can be useful. So let's say that you're writing an article about a basketball game. You have structured data about each thing that happened in the basketball game. Somebody scored this point at this particular time. And then this happened, something else. You can generate sentences that are factual. They're based on actual information or knowledge. And the sentences are therefore useful. With power is actually an interesting.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Mostly don't like it and don't recommend it, but there are exceptions. So a couple of things on this. The first thing is the content should be good and it should be useful. And we've played around with GPT-3. So GPT-3 is basically generating sentences that are similar to other sentences that have been written by somebody else. So GPT-3 takes common crawl and very large data sets, a large snapshot of the whole web. So tons of sentences and then it trains a model to generate new sentences that are similar to other sentences that have been written. So they're grammatically correct. They're spelled correctly. Sometimes they sound like they are written by a person. Sometimes they're not, but a lot of times they are. A lot of times it's indistinguishable from a human. The problem is that you want the sentence to be factual. You want there to be underlying wisdom in the sentence. So I'll give you an example. We were playing around GPT-3 to generate a description of a product, of a soap.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Fulfilling now, but it wasn't when I started. I tested a bunch of things that didn't work. And it's very demotivating to do a bunch of work and none of it works. I think that's part of why people either don't go into SEO or when they do, they go out of SEO is that they try a bunch of stuff and it doesn't work. But if you can persevere through that and start getting things that do work and start getting wins and 80% of your company's traffic comes from the work that you did, that's very, very fulfilling. I think the other fulfilling thing is there's a certain profile of a growth person or an SEO person who really likes to do things they're not supposed to do and to break things and to do things that are unconventional. And I'm that way. And so for those reasons, it's very flulfying.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yes and no. So footer links are not equal to body links. So links in the nav and in the footer are navigational links and they count, but they don't count as much. Google will look at your page and separate out navigation. But body links count a lot. And I think that the way Google is doing that is they're basically looking at the same pieces of information over and over again or is it different? And so we'll usually put it at the bottom of an article or a bottom of a category page. You can put them anywhere really. Make them be in the body. It could be at the top. It could be at the bottom. But I wouldn't put it in the footer. I would put it above the footer.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “So we actually built our own at Thumbtech, I worked on their internal link algorithm. And then at the shopping site that I mentioned 2007, we did the same thing that we've rebuilt that a few different times, but regularly the scope was too high. So we basically built that in the house. So we have an API that can power this on any site. We have it live on a bunch of sites. We have it live on Upwork. And the other side's seen really good lift from that, but consistently we'll see if you don't have good link spread fixing it has significant opportunity. Typically 25% plus opportunity, even like 100% opportunity sometimes if your links are really under optimized. So this is probably of anything that I can recommend to companies as the quick win, the thing to do at the start. It's this.”

   2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And so then when you fix it and you spread links everywhere, then traffic goes up. And essentially what you want is you want a shortest path from crawl point. So what I mean by that is a crawl point is where Google enters your site. Google's enters your site at your homepage, but it also enters your site on any popular page. So if your mobile app page gets lots of links or you have a press release that gets lots of links, all of these are places where Google is entering your site frequently and it has a lot of authority. And what you don't want is you don't want every page to be very far away in your link graph. You don't want it to be very far away from these crawl points. You ideally want as few cups or as few levels of your site from those crawl points. You don't want a hierarchical tree structure. You actually want a very flat graph. So how do you actually build this? This is a lot of work. So back to getting things done. This takes a lot of effort.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Ideally 10 to say that this page has enough and frequently they won't. And none of these algorithms that I just described are going to solve it. So facet-based, related, popular, recent, none of those are going to spread enough links everywhere.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Are based typically on people who view this, viewed this other thing. And if you have a post that didn't get viewed a lot, you don't have data for that. And then it doesn't show up in the related algorithms. So related algorithms tend to skew towards a subset of pages. And so typically what you'll see is if you crawl, so you can look at this by getting screaming frog. So this is a good use case for screaming frog. Scrape the whole site. You'll get an internal link count. It's called unique in links and screaming frog. And you'll see a power curve where 5% of pages are getting 95% of links. It's very extreme usually. Then you can see that a bunch of pages on your site get zero links or one link. We'll usually look for at least five links.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “And 90% plus sites don't have this. The reason why is because internal link algorithms are typically either facet-based, recommendation-based, or popular-based. So for facet-based, what I mean by that is for thumbtech, plumbers in San Francisco, they'll link to other cities and other service types or related will be, and basically you'll have silos. So you'll have pages, you know, you'll have cities that maybe they're not popular enough. They didn't get linked to. You'll have other services they didn't get linked to. And so you'll have these gaps in the site where you didn't have enough links to some of the pages. Popular, you're always going to have the same 10 most popular posts on every single page and the other posts that are not the most popular don't get linked to. Most recent, same thing. You'll only link to the most recent ones and not to the ones that are not the most recent. Related similar. So related algorithms.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Within the site. So within the site, we're linking to these products more. And then we saw a huge increase, I think it was 300% increase in tropic to these product pages. And so then we were able to draw clear causal relationship. And that was in 2007. That still works. And that's still a thing. So I would say probably 90 to 95% of sites have this problem right now. And the reason why this is a thing is Google is crawling the web and your site through links. And if you don't have links, then Google doesn't have paths to find all of your pages. And it's not enough to put it in the site map. You need it. That's one link. You need many paths for Google to find pages. And the more paths, the better up to a certain point, usually at least 10 links Google needs to find a page and crawl it regularly enough to give it enough credit.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “So I mentioned I worked at this e-commerce company in 2007 And in 2007, Google Search Console had a report of all of your pages and the number of internal links. And they have that now, but the data are not all available. So it's not clean data. But then it was actually real data that was comprehensive and complete. So we could literally download. And we had millions of pages and millions of products. And I could download the entire set of every URL and the number of internal links that Google found. And we had a bunch of product pages that were not getting traffic. So I wanted to understand why. So I got that, all the URLs. all the internal link counts. Then I got traffic and then I basically did a correlation. And I found that pages with more links got more traffic and pages fewer links got less traffic. So again, to the earlier question of how do we generate our hypotheses, we analyzed data. We look for patterns. We generate a hypothesis. I think that links cause traffic, test that hypothesis. So we made a change where we added more links to these products that had no links. And by links, I mean links from”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Algorithmic dynamics, definitions of a graph that are generated constantly. And again, they change. So that's typically how it works. So how Google would actually find these adjacencies? I think it's by doing large crawls of the web and looking for co-occurrences and then structuring and graph that way, looking at search refinements, looking at co-occurring results with so for butter lettuce, here are all the results. What words co-occur on the results there? So Google's basically, I think creating a graph out of that. Part of why I say that is because we have some data suggests that. And then also there's a good SEO, the best SEO podcast, I think it's called Search Engine on the record or something like that, but it's with Gary Alles and John Mueller. And actually give quite a bit of the information. There's one episode where Gary Isles basically does what I just said, where Google crawls the whole web, looks for co-occurrences and search refinements and all of this sort of feeding into how relationships.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “So there is and there isn't. There is, there are expert defined taxonomies, and Google has them, but they typically don't use them. And they typically will generate graphs somewhat on the fly because things will change. And so I think people overestimate the amount of expert curated taxonomies that Google uses. And it's actually a lot of”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “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 an overall graph is an ingredient graph. Or same with commerce, home goods versus cameras. There's a whole tree structure. So that's how you can think about adjacent topics.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Topic would be again, we want to find keywords where the results are the same over and over again. So those keywords are now a group. That group of keywords, 300 keywords where the same results are showing up every time, that's now a cluster of keywords and therefore it's a topic. The label of that topic is essentially, you know, what do you think is the primary theme of that? It's usually the highest search volume keyword within that keyword cluster, like a butter lettuce. So that's the name of the topic. And then the way that you think about adjacent topics, you can kind of think of adjacent topics is for food. What does an ingredient graph look like? So for Jello Shots, there's drinks, 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 jello shots. So jello shots, what's adjacent to that are other types of alcohol.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “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 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 is saying for a fintech site, maybe you don't have as much authority as Investipedia, but you're really known for Iron Condor crypto. I forget what it was called, but like you're known for that thing. So what's your authority or for Gordon Ramsey? What's your authority for just Gordon Ramsey relative to your total authority? And if you're disproportionately known for Gordon Ramsey, then you have very high topical authority for that. You'll outrank other sites that have more total domain authority because you're disproportionately known for that thing.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “But the entire domain then started to rank for vodka recipes and whiskey recipes and things that were semantically related to jello shots. And those pages were not even linked to from the blog post. So the blog post did well, but the entire domain benefited from Jelloshot topical authority and from things that are adjacent to Jelloshots, which are 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. An example with masterclass is early on they had authority for the names of the instructors like Gordon Ramsey, but not for food in general. And so we knew that if we had authority for Gordon Ramsey, then we'll have authority for things that are adjacent to Gordon Ramsey. So Gordon Ramsey is known for beef Wellington, Salmon, had a poach an egg, steak. And so we focus on things adjacent to Gordon Ramsey.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “What is for shares? What has been shared the most? What is the content of what God shared the most? Branded search. So masterclass plus Gordon Ramsey is authority for Gordon Ramsey. So these are the inputs and that's how Google's determining those 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 recipe site and we had a viral blog post about Jell Oshots. 10 Jello Shots worth the hangover. And we got 4 million likes and millions of pins. It was hugely successful. And so that post did really well. I think it ranked around number six for Jello Shots.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Andrew. So now acseotropic is an authority signal shares 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 more complex. So there's more inputs. The second thing is that it's topical. So it's not your total domain authority. It's what you're known for. And you'll see in the most recent Google Healthful Content Update, they talk about domain experts or top. They don't use the word topic, but they refer to people where there's a specific narrow expertise versus we can rank for anything like a Wikipedia. And so Google's 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?”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “This is probably the most important, least understood part of SEO. So page rank was a key thing with Google where Google would prioritize things based on page rank. It's based on academic publications where the public, the journal article that was cited the most is better than others. So they applied that to their search engine and that was a key part of why their search engine was better. 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 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 UR traffic sources.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “The mysterious thing will get prioritized over the mysterious thing. And then the last is that it's 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 a ton of work to do. At scale, like at Zillow. You need a large team 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. 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.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “People will say, well, how do you know that this is going to work? And you actually don't know if it's going to work. And so the fact that there's this mystery around it versus something else where there's not mystery.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “There's a few pages that cover probably 90% of all use cases. So in 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 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 it's a category page.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “The return and how much do we want to 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 want to wait 100 years to go after all the different topics.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Do you want to wait that long, or do you not want to go after all 10,000? You want to only want to go after 5,000. 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 a thousand articles a month, month one. I would start small. I would write 10 to 30. Assuming that I'm starting from zero, 10 to 30 maybe, we'll usually do 25, but do some volume around there and try to get those leading indicators that I mentioned before on SEO. Once you have those leading indicators, then you say, okay, over three months, we wrote 50 articles. Here's what the performance looks like. Looks like they rank number five. Half the articles are performing. They're ranking number five for these different keywords. Okay, now we know that we can rank for a bunch of other stuff. And then we just, it's an ROI question of what's the cost of writing each article.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “We'll usually do 10 to 25 articles a month, but it depends. Essentially, you have your addressal market. How many topics exist in your addressable market? And how long do you want to take 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 months, I don't know how long that'll take. It'll take 200 years or something.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Yes, and the only thing that I would say is that for editorial SEO, I've seen multiple examples where the person doing that SEO manager stuff has no experience in SEO prior and will show them some of our workflows and they'll pick it up like a masterclass. That's what happened 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 were able to do that really well. So it doesn't have to be someone doesn't have to be an SEO expert with deep expertise. Programmatic is where you'd want a lot of expertise over years in SEO. But on the editorial side, you can actually pick it up if you have the right workflow and the right tools.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Or not. So you start with your prioritized set of topics, then you have your outlines, 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 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.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “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 search 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 their conversion intent? All of that multiplied out equals expected conversions. And then we prioritize that way. Then we want to, 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 subtopics. That is not intuitive typically to a writer. So the engineer data dog 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 cover health benefits of butter lettuce on that article and you have a gap. So having the outline and the subtopics is really important. And a writer is not going to, a writer will guess that and they may be right, but then usually.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “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 not searched for.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “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 control versus 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 the tools do an especially great job at bucketing beyond what a human could do. So Brazillo, 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 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 that hard either to build in-house. There are testing tools. They're perfectly fine. I just typically will build it in-house or rather do it in-house.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “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.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “The VNA B tester could be a sequential test. And it depends on the tests, but you could make a site-wide change and then see the entire page type 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. 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 changed 50 of them and 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 very interconnected graph.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “I try not to do that, but sometimes 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. You should be launching things. You should be testing things once things have launched. So testing is something I would do like month six or later. The beginning should be around building stuff”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “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 an 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 comes from. It's not from brainstorming. The test validates the hypothesis. So that's what I'm spending most of my time on.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “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 we're launching them. And then I'm spending a bunch of time doing data analysis to see what's working and what's not working and why. And then last is tests of coming up with ideas of what to test. What I'll say is that”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “And they don't need the SEO person doesn't need to write code necessarily. I'll tell you what I did when I was in housing program at SEO. So most of my time was spent, A, looking at other companies that are performing well and trying to understand what's working. So that involves finding the other sites, basically auditing what they're doing, going into HRFs 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 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?”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “And the people who are a brand name companies, everyone's competing to hire them. And the people at companies that are not brand name are less competitive. So they've had a harder route to go through. And, you know, there are fewer people recruiting them. So if I were to look for a program like SEO person, I would basically 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. made a ton out of the small opportunity that they had. That's how I would find a programmatic SE”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “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 that isn't well-known.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “The Opportunity and Budget side. So if you're Zillow and you have SEOs worth a billion dollars to you, just spend the money. I think people under-resource SEO a lot of times and over-resource ads. So if you're Zillow, you're going to spend tens of millions of dollars on ads. Or if you're eBay, you're going to spend tens of millions of dollars on ads. Why would you not have a really great SEO team? The amount of traffic you get is probably equal to that. So if you're going to spend $100 billion on ads, why would you spend $50,000 on SEO? That doesn't make sense. So I think it's based on the opportunity and how complex the strategy is that you want to focus on.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Even though I run a consulting agency, I'm still biased and now if you can get that person, that's great. There aren't that many of them. But on that editorial SEO side, yeah, getting someone young and hungry could absolutely work.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Depends on the strategy and it depends on the stage of the company 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 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 I talked about the category pages and clustering keywords at the category level. That's a lot of work. It's hard to do with specialized how to deal with UGC. So if we're a UGC site like Pinterest, it's very complicated and you want to understand which pages you want to index and 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'm biased towards in-house.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Can rank, so let's say we have 10 articles. We're ranking number five for keywords for these 10 articles. We can rank number five for 1,000 articles. 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 incorrectly conclude failure. I listened to the Yuri Grammarly. Episode and he talked about false negatives. Like, we tried this thing, it didn't work, therefore, it won't work. It's common for the first tryer for 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 that you don't have enough authority. But that's how I would think about it.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “Yes, I wouldn't say that there are signals that you should, well, there may be signals that you should stop now, but we want to 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 we'll launch something and maybe in the first week, we're ranking number 15 for something and we get one click 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. Now we know if we can rank number five for these interesting head terms”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “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? The higher that score is, the better engagement is. The more we can now rank for more competitive 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 three to six months post of launch. Having said that, the larger the site is and the more authority it is, it could take days. So for a large site, like it take a master and eBay, it's probably one to four weeks is the rough timeline once you're really optimized.”

    2022-12-01 · Lenny's Podcast · The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source