The word on the street is that SEO seems like a dark art. Ethan Smith is here to demystify all things SEO—what it is, and how and when to do it. He’s the CEO of Graphite, an SEO and growth agency.
Ethan’s background
- Shopping.com and eBay helped Ethan get into programmatic SEO.
- Consulted for Honey and MasterClass and ended up creating Graphite, focusing on content and SEO strategy.
- Graphite helps both with SEO strategy and execution for their clients.
What are the main components of SEO?
Important: SEO fits into a broader context in product and growth, and can’t function independently.
- Technical SEO
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- Technical SEO is the foundational work you need to do to make sure search engines can crawl, index, and rank your content. Your site needs to have strong internal links, fast page rendering (ideally server-side), and quick loading times (per PageSpeed).
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- Technical audits give you a list of SEO bugs, e.g. there is a $150 report from Screaming Frog.
- Technical SEO is necessary but not sufficient. To drive significant SEO traffic, you have to discover high-demand topics and create top-notch content using editorial and programmatic SEO techniques.
- Editorial SEO: Important: Overtaken today as the most important form of SEO as Google favors it. Involves creating great content, human-guided/made articles like a guide or a listicle. As you build your authority for a certain set of topics, your SEO will improve, although general timelines are 6-9 months.
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- Good SEO examples include MasterClass, BetterUp, NerdWallet, HubSpot, and DotDash.
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- If you google “digital cameras” today, the top 10 are likely editorial SEO pages.
- Creating great content is expensive, i.e. between $500 and $1,000 an article, so you have to do deep research for the kind of keywords you want to rank for and create a strategy for content to match those specific keywords. Keywords are often grouped together into themes or topics that help strategize the kind of content to write about.
- Programmatic SEO: Pages are automatically created based on a database of information that you already have, on the fly. Examples include:
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- User-generated content (UGC), like Glassdoor
- Commerce, like eBay’s product and category pages
- Marketplaces, like Zillow
How can I be good at SEO?
Figure out your workflow:
- Find an addressable market, i.e. keywords that are relevant. Organize the keywords into topics, e.g. “butter lettuce” has both similar keywords like “lettuce nutrients” and come under a topic like “nutrition” and “health benefits”
2. Have an idea of how your competition is doing for the same topics.
3. Nail content strategy: Find a page type that is most relevant for the above topics and the kind of business you are in (i.e. e-commerce vs. user-generated content). Some page types include:
Category (grid or a list of items), or Brand
Items page (Product, Address, or Video)
UGC content like in Quora
Editorial like an article, list, or guide
4. Then work on infrastructure to help Google find these links, i.e. making them indexable and tracking engagement, which is how many people clicked on the page from Google and how much time was spent, including bounce rates.
Tools to get started on if you’re new to SEO
1. Google Search Console: free search tracking for your site
2. Clearscope for content scoring on topics
4. Technical audit like Screaming Frog
Some notes on internal links
- The more internal links you have, the more traffic from Google.
- Move away from the power law where only the top 20% visited pages get relinked internally (happens with related or popular or recent recommendations). These are not header/footer links but content links in the body tag.
How do I hire for SEO?
- Skills to look for: Programmatic SEO is specialized and more engineering-focused. Editorial is more accessible (a growth person with some technical ability). Someone who is a detective, is scientific and creative.
- Day-to-day would look like:
- Finding competitor sites and auditing them. Finding URLs and patterns, reverse engineering them.
- Doing data analyses of launched pages, working with engineering.
3. Based on the stage of the company and budget, most folks spend more on ads and less on SEO.
- Starting off, focusing on editorial strategy, one writes about 20 posts a month. One SEO person and one domain expert/writer is the minimum viable team.
Other notes
- The dirty secret is that SEO strategy never gets executed (or any resources). You’ll need to have executive buy-in!
- Often SEO is not part of the product org.
- SEO is not easy work but definitely useful, and its impact can be quantified.
On AI-generated pages
- Ethan doesn’t like or recommend them. Content should be useful, and he isn’t sure that today’s AI content is useful.
- Wisdom or factuality is key, and today ChatGPT makes false claims. Could be useful for structured data (e.g. events in a basketball game), which are factual in nature.
This is a human edited summary of the podcast episode with Ethan, by Gaurav Chandrashekar (@cggaurav, productscale.xyz). To listen to the full episode, go here.
