The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 พ.ค. 2024
- Ethan Smith is the CEO of Graphite, a boutique growth agency that’s helped companies like MasterClass, Thumbtack, Robinhood, Medium, and Honey develop and execute their SEO strategies. SEO is one of the least-understood levers for growth, while also one with the biggest payoff. This episode is a true master class on all things SEO. Ethan shares a wealth of information, including when you should begin investing in SEO, how to build an SEO team, and the three main buckets of SEO. He explains the difference between topics and keywords, gives the exact heuristics and tools to help you be successful in developing and implementing your own SEO strategy, and also goes deep on how to deal with roadblocks and advocate for resources.
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Find the full transcript here: www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ult...
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Where to find Ethan Smith:
• Twitter: / ethan_l_s
• LinkedIn: / ethanls
• Graphite: www.graphitehq.com/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: / lennysan
• LinkedIn: / lennyrachitsky
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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:
• Coda: coda.io/lenny
• Mixpanel: mixpanel.com/startups
• Lemon.io: lemon.io/lenny
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Referenced:
• Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy a.co/d/2wkN4dx
• Topical Authority Analysis: bit.ly/topical-authority-tool
• SEO Link Analysis: bit.ly/diagnostic-internal-links
• SEO Links API: bit.ly/graphite-internal-link...
• Screaming Frog: www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-s...
• Brandon Lee of Power: / brandonhli
• Similarweb traffic analysis: www.similarweb.com/
• MasterClass: www.masterclass.com/
• BetterUp: www.betterup.com/
• NerdWallet: www.nerdwallet.com/
• HubSpot: www.hubspot.com/
• Ahrefs: ahrefs.com/
• Semrush: www.semrush.com/
• Google Search Console: search.google.com/search-cons...
• Clearscope: www.clearscope.io/
• Yuriy Timen on Lenny’s Podcast: www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-...
• Gokul Rajaram on Lenny’s Podcast: www.lennyspodcast.com/gokul-r...
• Luc Levesque on Twitter: / luclevesque
• Search Off the Record: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
• GPT-3: gpt3demo.com/apps/openai-gpt-...
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Ethan’s background
(07:53) Why technical audits are the biggest myth in SEO
(10:05) When to invest in SEO
(16:09) Heuristics to determine if SEO is worth it
(18:36) The three buckets of SEO: programmatic, editorial, and technical
(23:30) The process for creating an SEO strategy
(27:00) Why you shouldn’t be too formulaic
(28:33) What is site engagement?
(29:31) Which pages need to be indexed
(31:49) Topics vs. keywords
(36:33) How to mine competitors’ sites for information
(37:41) Useful tools for developing your SEO strategy
(40:14) How long will it take to see results?
(45:16) Factors to consider when looking to hire an SEO person
(47:33) The functions of a programmatic SEO person
(49:19) How to do testing
(54:06) Editorial SEO strategy
(57:14) How to scale based on the size of the site
(59:51) Page types
(1:01:53) How to win in a topic category
(1:03:12) How to build solid hypotheses and test them
(1:06:13) How to deal with roadblocks and advocate for resources
(1:08:54) How topical and domain authority are determined
(1:16:43) The power of internal links
(1:24:32) Why AI is not usually useful for content creation
(1:28:31) Final tips for getting started with SEO
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Production and marketing by penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
Hey everyone - Graphite Co-founder here. We are very excited to be in this pod and talk SEO, the Graphite team will be answering questions from Lenny’s Pod audience in the comments!
QUALITY. I always appreciate founders or SMEs dropping knowledge and pulling the curtain back.
The secret sauce isn’t all the ingredients, it’s how you pull it all together and the many details in between that make these folks unicorns at what they do.
This guy is a beast.
Interesting episode, though I completely disagree about the "SEO traffic" vs other traffic- if you get more organic traffic than direct, or social, etc, it simply means you have a well optimized site. It doesn't mean at all that Google doesn't want to see that, I've seen over many years where I've helped clients build organic traffic - i.e. people organically searching and seeing relevant content appear, and where they used to have majority direct or paid, but now organic is the most traffic they get - their authority has actually grown - would love to understand your methodology around that. About links... 1000+ links could all be from a link farm, so the quantity of links is not important but the quality of those links are.
Thank you for sharing this! TH-cam should allow us to like a button more than once.
Thanks J!
Great episode! Etan's advice on SEO and Growth is top-notch. 👌
Thanks Gabrial!
This episode was very insightful, I learned a lot!
I've never heard SEO concepts articulated so well before. Ridiculous amount of value crammed in here. Best SEO-related content I've ever consumed (and I've spent thousands on courses). Thanks both.
Thanks for the kind words MrOrange2015!
EXCELLENT interview! Tons of useful information!!! THANK YOU!!!
You're welcome, thank you!
Spoken like a true SEO, answered many questions with "it depends". In all seriousness though, an insane amount of knowledge bombs dropped here. Thanks for this!
"It depends....and here's specifically what it depends on, and given that and incomplete information here's my best guess answer to your question" :)
Age old question... when should I use a subdomain vs a subdirectory? For a relatively new side I'd like all my SEO efforts to contribute for the entire domain.
Hey Ernie! We've seen multiple times that when content is migrated from subdomains to subdirectories it immediately starts performing better. That's generally our recommendation.
Also, super important that if you have sections of the site (like the ones that you're considering putting on subdomains) that they are tightly integrated with the rest of the site via internal links, not just the directory structure. I recommend listening to the insights around 1:16:43
@@marcos_graphite Thanks!
I think sub domain or sub folder, they're both fine. Use whatever works best for you. Google has said this multiple times. If you take one look at sub domain vs sub folder, you can tell it's the same website. Then I'm sure that Google, the world biggest search engine can tell too. John Mueller at Google has answered this question as well in their TH-cam channel
Lots of interesting work going on regarding topical authority.
Thank you!
I loved this episode! I can’t wait to test some of the learnings!
Thanks
Really interesting, informative and insightful session.❤😊
Superb pod cast. Ethan's SEO knowledge is on another level. Great advice and insights as I'm working on building a CMS SaaS app with built-in SEO tools for local service businesses
Thanks James!
Brilliant
Totally insightful 💯🚀
You have some very interesting guests on your pod, who give away amazing insights compared to some others I’ve listen to. 👌🏽
Thanks Joseph!
@@ethan_l_s No probs, I had to pop your name in to TH-cam and listen to a few more things from yourself yesterday I’m building a marketplace which will connect parties and event with suppliers so it was interesting to hear everything your shared 👍🏽
Thank you for this episode!
Regarding programmatic SEO, when generating a big number of pages and updating the sitemap, the new pages are being discovered but not indexed. Is there a way to deal with that?
Hey Marc - great question.
Assuming your content is good and have enough authority to rank for the queries that you want to rank for, I would focus on Internal Links architecture. You want to point links from the pages that get most SEO traffic to new pages that you're publishing so that you show that they are important on your site.
If that doesn't do it, it's probably an issue with content quality or topical authority.
Also, final note, I would be cautious publishing too many pages at once. You can solve this by publishing in batches, waiting for those to rank, and only then publish more. }
Happy to dive deeper if you send some examples.
@@marcos_graphite thanks for the tips! Highly appreciated 🙏
Great content again. One question regarding editorial SEO I have recognized in our category the trend goes more from text editorial like a blog or magazine to TH-cam videos and podcast. So the trend shows me SEO grows more and more into a content production using different content formats. How do you asses this into your audit for new clients?
In general, it's good to look for the patterns that correlate with ranking, then try to infer the patterns that cause that. So, to your point, if videos and podcasts are ranking now, then that may be a more effective strategy than a purely text article. Do you have an example search query I can reference?
@@ethan_l_s thanks for the reply. One example for us on our business category using queries such as "guided meditation" there are a couple in that field where we recognized: organic wise we got more and more TH-cam videos or ebooks and also pdcasts suggested. I have tried to see some historical stats in semrush about the share of content formats but was not able to find something. Now with TikTok it will be just a question that new content formats might be requested mainly from a SEO perspective.
@@Blubbha Yes, in this case in particular you could try to dissect further the user intent when someone searches for "guided meditation" and fit the content format to that. For example, are they trying to understand "what is guided meditation" or are they trying to "practice meditation"; in this query it's obvious that it's the latter so more interactive formats (eg video) or guides will do better.
It's hard to see SERPs evolution by content type, but one general pattern is a trend towards more visual results (either with images or videos) as consumers want it more and serving and indexing that content get cheaper over time.
Side note on Content Strategy/ROI: videos/guides will be more expensive to produce, so you have to make sure you are targeting topics with higher volume to break even. One approach here is to create a main content piece that's very rich (with videos/images/etc) and support it with other informational content around it.
Super interesting episode. Really liked it. Had a question for how to gain initial traction and authority, often have that issue when starting out with a new idea, and is SEO strategy of building content useless then, or is it more that it's not worth pouring money into SEO before you have that, but still can have use of SEO even as a smaller player before growing?
If you have almost no referring domains (
Loved this episode! So insightful!
What's the best way to increase the number of referring domains?
There are a few options. The most common options are 1) Do traditional brand PR either internally or with a firm 2) pay a link building agency to help build links 3) buy paid advertising (the ads will have a secondary effect of some of the users who saw the ads linking to you).
Very helpful in highlighting the importance and effect of proper seo. Highly recommended.
Thanks!
Any advice on programmatically generated SEO pages
Is this a good approach early in a company to determine organic demand for a particular category
Or should one only do this as a scale mechanic
And how would you execute this kind of strategy?
This can work for sites like ecommerce, marketplaces, UGC sites, etc. So, it depends on the type of site. For other sites like enterprise/b2b, there's typically less opportunity for programmatic and more so for Editorial SEO. If there's a specific site you have in mind I'm happy to react to it.
+1 on Ethan's comment.
If you have unique differentiated supply or a value add, programmatic can work very well in early stages. This applies to UGC content platforms, marketplaces, etc. If the content doesn't have much of a value add it won't work.
Re organic demand - To determine the demand you can derisk it by using a keyword research tool and checking the search volume of these keywords. An alternative is using Google Keyword Planner to estimate search volume before creating the content.
Re execution - I would separate in two tracks: 1) page and content design: make sure the pages are giving users added value over other results 2) rollout plan and publishing strategy: publish pages for queries with some search demand, avoid publishing too many pages at once (
Guys I'm also interested in this topic - for a marketplace site. Can you point me in the direction of any good sources of info about programmatically generated pages for a marketplace? Thanks.
FIRE, This was pure FIRE. Thank you.
Thank you for providing clear action items and direction for those that are actively working to learn more about SEO!
Thanks!
awesome
❤❤❤❤❤❤
Hey Lenny, we're wondering why you choose coda over notion? 🚀
I use both! Coda mostly for newsletter planning, and for podcast scripts. And Notion for podcast planning. Both rock.
damn this was incredibly insightful, thanks! 🔥🔥
Thanks Paolo!
Is there a away to figure out what Google classifies your page type as?
There's not a way that I'm aware of unfortunately
Would be cool to have some timestamps
They are there, check the full description
@@LennysPodcast ah sorry, thanks for pointing!
@@LennysPodcast Do you have a tool you use to make timestamps, or do you painstakingly do it yourself by re-listening to the whole podcast.
@@joinmodulo all manual
@@LennysPodcast Cool. Thanks Lenny!
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