The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Key Takeaways

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 gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads why would you not have a really great SEO team like the amount of traffic you get is probably equal to that so you're going to spend 100 million dollars on ads why would you spend fifty thousand dollars on SEO that doesn't make sense 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 levels 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 is 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 right 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 Koda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to lightly with an incredibly Rich collection of templates and guides in the coded doc gallery including resources from many guests on this podcast including shreyas Gokul and shashir 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 dot IO slash Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement that's c-o-d-a dot IO slash Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account this episode is brought to you by mixpanel offering powerful self-serve product Analytics do 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 the 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 thank you for having me 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'm 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 is going to 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 you all do over there yeah for sure so 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 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're 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 heriano from 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 the strategy and then since then I went into growth and product broadly and SEO was part of what I did and then four years ago Whirlpool bought the company 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 is just a part of that which I think is interesting because 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 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 in the agency that you run now sure so when I left uh my last company I was doing consulting as a as a solo practitioner 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 in agencies as sort of distasteful and you know not something that I wanted to get into and it was somewhat by accident where uh Master Class reached out to me honey reached out to me Ticketmaster reach 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 was planning to sort of explore and maybe build a product those projects went really well and then I got more inbound from inbound interest from companies when masterclass did well and honey did well so it decided to start an agency and we build out SEO and content strategies so I thought broadly about all the different things that I could do and where the biggest need was were 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 ethyl 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 found that getting things done is actually more important sometimes in 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 distinguishing characteristic is that we can get things done and that we can build stuff so that's a bit about graphite awesome just off the bat what are some of the biggest myths about SEO they've been number one biggest myth are technical audits so we we have people reaching out saying we want to 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 earbugs which is not that useful what the company actually wants is they want to grow them and so we'll try to reframe that in Number One technical SEO I think is misunderstood you want a strategy around your technical components and you want to General SEO strategy to help you grow but 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 Second bossio 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 content manually written content is underappreciated so I think those are the two biggest Knits okay I have a billion questions I want to ask and you're touching on a bunch of these things already before we get into that I just want to kind of frame our conversation and start at the top a little bit and come back to some of these things because this is really important foundational stuff there's kind of three things I want to 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 want to be really good at SEO does that sound good as a as a kind of a base that sounds great cool and 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 them what to ask you and he gave me a bunch of great questions so those are going to be interspliced into our chat awesome plus one for for power I'm also an investor okay awesome oh man okay great go power okay so to start I want to 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 there's two big things the first thing is is the addressable market large so 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 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 I 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 similar web I'll put the domain in I'll look at the total traffic and I'll want to see at least I would say 1 000 visits a day roughly for for non-seo at least 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 at 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 a thousand visits but it's much harder and the more you have the easier it is to grow and the faster you can grow 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 in SEO but we want it to be large so with powers and actually an interesting example so they're a clinical trial uh lead gen site they want to acquire people to take clinical trials how many people are typing online I want to 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 what's the key demographic of who might be a candidate for uh taking 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 and so if you think about targeting the Persona most sites have a very large address of 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 and then I would assess that typically by looking at external uh benchmarks so if I'm a shopping site I can and 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 similar web if I'm wish.com and I want to see what you know what my traffic potential is I can put in Walmart and Wayfair put it in similar web look at their total traffic you can get similar webs free for all of this and then I can get a sense of how big I can uh get the one other thing I'll mention is that there are products 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 rental office companies or I could look at companies that are ranking for the kinds of things that I would want to rank for and they may not be direct front of competitors so like fintech is interesting so for Robin Hood Robin Hood could look at other sites that allow you to sell stocks in crypto or they could look at Investopedia Investopedia doesn't allow you to buy stocks but they have a bunch of traffic 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 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 kind of reflecting back what you just said if SEO is worth investing in he also kind of answered when it makes sense which is interesting one is just do you actually have you have like a thousand or more visits a day just organically through search is a sign that maybe it's a good time before that is that yes if I was in visits not from search from anything other than search um okay got it and other than search meeting like what are examples that when you say that usually direct and paid but um direct paid email social uh anything else and why is it that it's not from search so Google wants to see that you're not just an SEO site and if you're not getting any traffic from anywhere else and it's only from SEO then you're an SEO Barn essentially got it so the more traffic you have that's not from SEO that means that you're credible the more referring domains you 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 want to look at got it and then the other piece is that there's a thousand domains linking to you and some of you look for right yeah right and you know it it depends but yeah those are my rough back of the envelope benchmarks and if you're not hitting these benchmarks is the idea consider investing in this so that you can eventually start doubling down an SEO or is it just let it happen and kind of see if it even happens on its own 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 but you could be intentional about it if you if you want to awesome okay so that touches on when to start focusing on SEO and I'm going to ask you if there's anything else you should think about about the win but it feels like the other piece is even more important is should you even consider SEO and the total adjustable Market is a is a big part of that and you've mentioned the site similar web is it it's 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 yeah it has total traffic and then it has traffic by Channel all 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-seal 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 well it depends on you know how much traffic you want but um the heroes I mean the heuristic is to look at other sites that are your product competitor 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 paid how much could I get Messier 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 got it so the Tam is like already is happening they're going to your competitors this is what you can eat away if you invest in SEO yes 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 Glassdoor or Zillow or zapier is there something else that tells you this is going to be really useful this is going to be a good product to use for SEO or the opposite ones like probably not going to work out for SEO sort of so when when we're looking at all of our different channels SEO paid social other we want to 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 address of Market if you have a ton of ugc like Glassdoor the scope is lower so the more ugc you have the more uh like prezillo the more addresses you have for a shopping site the more skus 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 skus 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 sense 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 there's programmatic SEO there's editorial SEO and then there's technical SEO so programmatic SEO our pages that are automatically generated from a database of information so for eBay product pages are generated automatically from information in their database or for Zillow home pages 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 items so those are the two main page types of programmatic SEO then there's editorial SEO so editorial seos 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 wow so that's editorial SEO and then there's Titan glacio so technically is just the infrastructure it's like internal link architecture tags redirects page speed that that applies for everything but those are the three main types 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 he's on the rise if you could choose because you 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 it depends but the short answer is editorial SEO is usually the best but it depends on your category given your address will mark it you want to 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 also going to be programmatical generating 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 a 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 what are some examples of really good editorial seo-ish companies sites yeah what comes to mind I'll give you a couple that I work with and then I'll give a couple that I don't work with so master classes is one of the 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 better up which is a coaching platform so people can get a virtual coach to improve in their career and 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 I'm really proud of a couple other examples that I did not work on so nerd wallet is one of the top editorial SEO companies and they have guides around credit cards and financial information and their their stuff is top-notch HubSpot does a really good job so they have a lot of content around productivity and I've done really well the other is dot dash dot dash is a conglomerate of many different Publishers like all recipes 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 awesome I want to 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 not yet not yet that tells you that it's time other than these benchmarks you shared of a thousand non-search visits a day and a thousand links 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 want to compare it with these other things and we want to look at the cost so depending on the cost and the opportunity and how that compares with other channels that's how I would how I would make the decision about when and whether to do SEO 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 yes or Airbnb brand is working really well let's let's you know dive into Brands yeah 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 so it depends and here's the workflow that I would go through so first we want to define the addressable market and given the addressable market and 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 master class it's mostly articles and so we look at benchmarks we see what keywords they're ranking on then we take those keywords and then we figure out the page type then given the page type we want to figure out the product requirements so what needs to be on the address page on Zillow then we want to figure out the content strategy what are the different subtopics and themes of 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 to unpack a couple of these so there's a page type you got to figure out if it's you said that if it's a article or a address for Zillow how do you do that how do you figure out what kind of pages that you should create 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 Master Class you type in how to poach an a 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 had a poach in a 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 the 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 I'll type in all thousand of those 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 and 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 fractured intent and so uh 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 or 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 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 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 get to get a visit and then stop I would take his 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 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 that and the better your engagement 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 and engagement is Click through on the page that Google sends you or something else gets 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 and 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 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 key ranking signal wow I didn't know any of that that's awesome 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 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 that's out of stock and there's no description 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 pages are right page site so what are all the queries where category page is ranking and then you don't want a page for every singles 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 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 going to rank for the best cameras 10 best cameras cameras best best digital cameras all these things are going to 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 do a category page and then on for an article or listicle you would basically build out an articular 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 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 mentioned a few times I was going to ask you about that towards 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 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 pen 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 in that and so the algorithm has improved and it can 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 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 search volume is not just in search volume for best cameras the search volume for 2000 different variations of best cameras and so it's effective the the search volume for best cameras is a thousand the topic uh of best camera is probably a hundred thousand there'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 want another right search volume we have the wrong search volume then where we're going to make bad prioritization decisions on a on a very large order magnitude the second is um if our topic is going to rank for a thousand keywords we don't want to write a thousand articles and if we did we wasted a bunch of money so if you know for best cameras if I had best cameras best digital cameras best rated digital cameras we wasted money if we wrote an article or made a page for all of those and the order of magnitude can be substantial 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 thousand keywords and that there's a theme that you're not talking about and didn't know about it then you're not fulfilling the intent and you're not going to rank as well so for all these reasons it's much much better to think in terms of topics rather than keywords 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 sure I'll give two examples so an example with master classes butter lettuce and um 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 had this Gap and and we're not going to perform as well and part of why master class 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 went somewhere else one other example that I'll give is uh with better up we have this article five year plan and if you look at that article I think it ranks for about a thousand different keywords and there are themes like examples and templates personal versus business Five-Year Plan and five-year versus tenure 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 or 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 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's saying these keywords are essentially a single concept or or a topic so that's how you can think about you know which the keywords should be clustered under one topic or another that makes sense I was going to ask you what the butter lettuce example is that how you how did you figure out that there was a big opportunity there it was like the the light bulb so what we do is we'll look for competitors so we'll look at a Food Network all recipes 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've 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 clustered 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 one or traffic volume then we want to look at how competitive we can be which is topical Authority then we want to look at conversion intent how does fluid 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 awesome I'm just going to 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 uh what else what else do you recommend four tools so tool one is a Google search console so Google search console is free anyone with a website can get 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 so it's very useful that's my number one tool my second tool is clear scope so there's a bunch of different tools for Content analysis content scoring clearscope's the best one a clear scope will tell you what you know why 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 sem rush and antrops I use the most ahrefs is my favorite but smrush 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 clear scope is based on volume and then the last tool or tools is that we have a bunch of internal tools a graphite that that are not accessible but we used 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's aren't tools for that so we basically built some in-house and we use that for for when we're building strategies what about screaming frog you mentioned that Spring Park is good it's uh it's a bit Niche so it's not you don't have to have it the application is screaming frog is one crawling so I want to get all the URLs from other some other site so that's 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 length coverage so do your pages on your site that I have links pointing to them within your site or do they not so that's what screaming prog does screening frog will be number five I would just say you can build an SEO strategy without without screaming frog but um but certainly useful so it's got a place in my heart now screaming frog I use it every day okay okay so if you're a real Pro screaming frog if you're not using it you're not you're not real Pro that's my conclusion 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 just like oh we'll get to it because it's going to take us six months or a year to even see any impact is that true does it sometimes show you results sooner how do you think about timelines on SEO 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 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 earlier we are in 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 it 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 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 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 I could take a master and eBay it's probably one to four weeks was the rough timeline once you're really optimized so as a Founder you're probably listening to this and be like damn that's such a long-term investment that's not going to show impact and I have all these other things I got to 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 the right direction keep going or just like okay this isn't going to work just stop now is there any kind of early signals leading indicators 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 or are we ranking at least number 20 for anything so usually what we'll see is we'll we'll launch something and maybe in the first week we're ranking number 15 for something and we get one click or or no clicks but we go from number 15 to number 12 to number 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 we can rank so let's say we have 10 articles we're ranking number five for for keywords for these ten articles we're gonna write number five for a thousand 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 have uh to incorrectly conclude failure uh I I listen 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 try or 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 or that you don't have enough Authority but that's how I think about it this episode is brought to you by lemon.io you've achieved product Market fit you're able to activate engage and retain your customers but you don't have the engineers that you need to move as fast as you want to because it's hard to find great Engineers quickly especially if you're trying to 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SEO let's do it how do you recommend they hire for this person slash 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 going to learn at 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 it 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 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 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 to deal with ugc so if we're a ugc site like Pinterest it's very complicated and and you want to understand you know which Pages you want to index and uh 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 biased towards in-house even though I run 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 that editorial SEO side yeah getting someone Young and Hungry could could absolutely work on the opportunion budget side so if if you're Zillow and you have you know seo's 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 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 like the amount of traffic you get is probably equal to that so you're going to spend 100 million dollars on ads why would you spend fifty thou