The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Dec 1, 2022 1h 30m 36 insights Episode Page ↗
Lenny interviews Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite, an expert in SEO. They discuss when and how companies should invest in SEO, covering strategies like programmatic and editorial SEO, team building, and common myths to help listeners master this powerful growth lever.
Actionable Insights

1. Prioritize Internal Linking

Recognize internal linking as a highly under-optimized lever; ensure all important pages have sufficient internal links (ideally 5-10+) to improve crawlability and traffic, as 90-95% of sites currently face this problem. This can lead to a 25% or even 100% increase in traffic if links are under-optimized.

2. Build Topical Authority

Focus on building deep, disproportionate authority for specific, narrow topics where you can outrank competitors with higher overall domain authority. Google’s topical authority considers not just backlinks but also non-SEO traffic, social shares, and branded search queries.

3. Allocate SEO Resources Wisely

Re-evaluate resource allocation for SEO, ensuring its budget is proportional to its potential traffic impact. For large companies spending heavily on ads, SEO investment should match the traffic potential, not be a minimal afterthought.

4. Integrate SEO with Product

Integrate SEO within the product organization and secure executive buy-in to ensure SEO initiatives are prioritized and resourced effectively. This helps overcome common blocking issues where product teams prioritize other tasks over SEO changes.

5. Assess Addressable Market Size

First, assess your SEO addressable market size by analyzing product and audience competitors’ total traffic and channel distribution using tools like Similarweb. This helps determine the potential scale of traffic you could acquire through SEO.

6. Evaluate Current Site Authority

Second, evaluate your current authority and competitiveness by checking for at least 1,000 daily non-SEO visits (direct, paid, email, social) and roughly 1,000 referring domains (backlinks). Google prioritizes credible domains that already have existing traction.

7. Compare SEO to Alternatives

Finally, compare the potential impact, cost, and scope of SEO against other growth channels (paid, social) to decide if it’s the right investment for your company now. This ensures SEO is prioritized based on its relative value and opportunity.

8. Prioritize Editorial SEO

For most companies, prioritize editorial SEO (manually created articles, guides, listicles) as it’s increasingly driving more traffic than programmatic SEO. However, choose programmatic SEO if your target queries primarily map to automatically generated page types like product listings.

9. Adopt Topic-Based Strategy

Group related keywords into broader topics, creating a single comprehensive page for each topic rather than individual pages for every keyword variation. This improves search volume accuracy for prioritization and makes content creation more efficient.

10. Determine Optimal Page Type

To determine the correct page type for a topic, search your target keywords in Google and observe the patterns of ranking page types (e.g., articles, category pages, product pages). This reverse-engineers user intent and Google’s preference for that query.

11. Optimize for User Engagement

Optimize for user engagement metrics like click-through rate from the search results page, time spent on your page, and avoiding immediate bounces back to Google. Higher engagement is a key and immediate ranking signal that causes pages to rank higher right away.

12. Structured SEO Workflow

Follow a structured SEO workflow: define the addressable market, identify target keywords/topics, determine optimal page types, define product requirements for those pages, develop a comprehensive content strategy, and ensure robust technical infrastructure.

13. Leverage UGC and Data

Utilize existing User-Generated Content (UGC), product SKUs, or data assets to lower the scope and ease of competing in SEO. The more automatically generated content you have, the easier it is to scale programmatic SEO efforts.

14. Avoid Technical Audit Focus

Don’t solely focus on technical audits (bug lists) as the primary SEO strategy; instead, prioritize a broader SEO strategy aimed at growth. Technical SEO is mainly about infrastructure, not the main driver of growth.

15. Start Editorial SEO Small

Begin editorial SEO with a modest volume of 10-30 articles per month to test performance and identify leading indicators before scaling up to 100+ articles monthly. This cautious approach helps validate the strategy before significant investment.

16. Minimum Editorial SEO Team

The minimum effective team for editorial SEO is one dedicated SEO strategist (responsible for topics, outlines, and analysis) and one writer (ideally a domain expert). The strategist focuses on identifying opportunities, and the writer creates the content.

17. Hire Programmatic SEO Expert

For programmatic SEO, seek a growth person with strong technical ability and proven experience, ideally from companies that achieved significant SEO growth without being well-known brands. This role involves analyzing competitor sites, defining product requirements, and working with engineers.

18. Hire Editorial SEO Learner

For editorial SEO, consider hiring a content-focused individual who is ‘young and hungry’ and can learn SEO workflows and tools, rather than requiring deep, long-term SEO expertise. They can become proficient with the right guidance and tools like Clearscope.

19. Analyze Competitors for Topics

Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze competitors’ top-performing pages and keywords to identify high-opportunity topics and content gaps. This allows you to reverse-engineer successful strategies and prioritize your content creation.

20. Use Clearscope for Content

Use Clearscope (or similar content analysis tools) to ensure your content is comprehensive and covers all necessary subtopics for a given keyword cluster. This helps fulfill user intent and improve content scores for better ranking.

21. Utilize Google Search Console

Use Google Search Console (free) for real traffic data, SERP tracking, and identifying keywords you rank for. It provides invaluable insights into your site’s performance directly from Google.

22. Consider Screaming Frog Tool

Consider using Screaming Frog (approx. $150) for advanced crawling, site audits (error codes, redirects), and analyzing internal link coverage, especially for larger sites. It helps identify structural issues and opportunities.

23. Prioritize Analysis Over Testing

Prioritize thorough analysis of competitor and your own site data to generate strong hypotheses before investing heavily in A/B testing, especially in early stages. Testing validates hypotheses, but analysis generates them.

24. Look for Early Ranking Signals

Expect SEO results to typically appear within six to nine months, but look for early leading indicators like pages ranking within the top 20 for target keywords. Even low-click impressions can validate your strategy before scaling.

25. Avoid AI for Core Content

Generally avoid using AI (like GPT-3) for generating core content, especially for sensitive topics, due to potential factual inaccuracies and lack of underlying wisdom. AI-generated text can sound correct but be factually wrong.

26. AI for SEO Workflow Tasks

Leverage AI tools for various SEO workflow tasks like keyword clustering, topic identification, subtopic outlining, and performance analysis. This allows human experts to focus on creating high-quality, factual content.

27. Leverage Adjacent Topics

Leverage existing topical authority by first creating content for semantically related or ‘adjacent’ topics, then gradually branching out to broader themes. This strategy helps build authority incrementally and rank faster.

28. Create Comprehensive Pages

Ensure your content comprehensively addresses the intent of all keywords within a topic to improve ranking and user satisfaction. If there’s a sub-theme you didn’t cover, you’re not fulfilling the intent and won’t rank as well.

29. Break Out Sub-Articles

If a specific sub-theme within a comprehensive topic isn’t ranking well despite being covered, consider creating a dedicated sub-article for it. This can help gain more authority and ranking power for that specific niche.

30. Connect with SEO Peers

Actively seek out and connect with SEO managers at successful companies to learn directly from their experiences and validated strategies. Many are willing to share what has worked and what hasn’t, saving you testing time.

31. Focus on Great Pages

Use competitor analysis as inspiration, but focus on creating genuinely great and useful pages that fulfill user intent, rather than just optimizing purely for the algorithm. This approach leads to better engagement and long-term ranking.

32. Avoid Indexing Thin Pages

For programmatic SEO, avoid indexing thin, empty, or low-quality pages (e.g., out-of-stock products without descriptions or reviews). These pages can negatively impact overall site quality and Google’s perception of your domain.

Aim for a flat internal link graph where important pages are only a few clicks away from high-authority crawl points (homepage, popular pages). Avoid a deep hierarchical tree structure, as Google needs many paths to find and crawl pages.

34. Body Links Over Footer

Implement internal links strategically within the body or at the bottom of content pages (above the footer) for maximum impact. Body links are weighted more heavily than navigational links found in footers or main navigation.

35. AI for Structured Data

Use AI for content generation when it can leverage structured, factual data to create accurate and useful sentences, such as summarizing sports scores or clinical trial information. This ensures the content is based on underlying wisdom and is factually correct.

36. Understand False Negatives

Be aware of false negatives in SEO; initial failures might indicate incorrect implementation or insufficient authority, not a lack of opportunity. It’s common for early attempts not to be implemented correctly, so re-evaluate before stopping.