The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
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Published 2022-12-01
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Find the full transcript here: www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-seo-et…
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Where to find Ethan Smith:
• Twitter: twitter.com/ethan_l_s
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ethanls/
• Graphite: www.graphitehq.com/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: www.lennysnewsletter.com/
• Twitter: twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/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-links-api
• Screaming Frog: www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
• Brandon Lee of Power: www.linkedin.com/in/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-console/about
• Clearscope: www.clearscope.io/
• Yuriy Timen on Lenny’s Podcast: www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-grow-a-subscription-b…
• Gokul Rajaram on Lenny’s Podcast: www.lennyspodcast.com/gokul-rajaram-on-designing-y…
• Luc Levesque on Twitter: twitter.com/luclevesque
• Search Off the Record: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/search-off-the-recor…
• GPT-3: gpt3demo.com/apps/openai-gpt-3-playground
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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 [email protected].
All Comments (21)
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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!
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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.
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Great episode! Etan's advice on SEO and Growth is top-notch. 👌
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Thank you for sharing this! Youtube should allow us to like a button more than once.
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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.
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This episode was very insightful, I learned a lot!
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I loved this episode! I can’t wait to test some of the learnings!
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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
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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!
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EXCELLENT interview! Tons of useful information!!! THANK YOU!!!
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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.
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This guy is a beast.
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Lots of interesting work going on regarding topical authority.
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Very helpful in highlighting the importance and effect of proper seo. Highly recommended.
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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?
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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.
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You have some very interesting guests on your pod, who give away amazing insights compared to some others I’ve listen to. 👌🏽
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Really interesting, informative and insightful session.❤😊
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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?
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Loved this episode! So insightful! What's the best way to increase the number of referring domains?