Ethan Smith

“If I'm making viral YouTube videos and you know, a TikTok video and an Instagram story and a Reddit thread, I can be the best product tomorrow. So the time to impact is fast and I can grow on these other channels without really having a substantial brand.”

“I believe by the time this podcast gets published, ClearScope will show the first optimization tool.”

“Who's unique and special? And the answer is no one. If, because it's impossible to be unique and special, And the reason it's impossible to be unique and special is because these are not hard to build. These are commodity. These are easy to build relatively co…”

“We just posted an original piece of original research showing that half of the content published on the internet is generated by AI.”

“I would say I also played a significant role in the 10 best, the 10 best X for Y title tags Like, 15 years ago. And I also played a substantial role in the download interstitials that said, sorry, you can't use the mobile website, you have to download the app.…”

“That was probably the biggest shift, which is Google introduced a bunch of algorithms, Panda and similar things to prevent you from doing spam. So essentially you went from SEO being spam to not spam. That was probably the biggest change. And then this is prob…”

“Most of what I'm describing is about the RAG piece, not the core model piece to influence the core model is probably extremely hard. And maybe you will see the impact a year later.”

“SEO and AEO are both interesting in that the majority of the information and best practices are not correct. And the reason why is because people don't do analysis. Somebody will say something and then it will get repeated and everyone, and then it becomes bes…”

“My general suggestion is pick the one that, pick the cheapest one that does what you need. Just like keyword tracking, you can only, you know, there's not a premium version of keyword tracking. You rank number three or you don't. So pick the keyword tracker th…”

“We are seeing a fair amount of variance in answers just without doing anything at all. So you definitely want a control group.”

“If you feed in derivatives of derivatives into the model, you will basically take the wisdom of the crowd and that will shrink and you'll have a single opinion on everything, which is really bad.”

“It's frequently on a subdomain for whatever reason, subdomains don't work well to subdirectories. So move it to a subdirectory.”

“I might even open up to the community. Anyone can ask anything because the community will then fill in the tail and then answer those. And again, in many cases, there might be nobody talking about this at all. So you could be the only citation for this and the…”

“Your non SEO traffic is actually an authority signal.”

“There are product competitors and audience competitors. So for something like 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 thi…”

“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.”

“So if you have no content at all and no UGC, then scope is higher to compete in the address for market. If you have a ton of UGC like Glassdoor, then scope is lower. So the more UGC you have, the more like for Zillow, the more addresses you have for a shopping…”

“You don't want a page for every single 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 ten million plus pages. So every single way that you could possibly search for a product …”

“And so there's typically about any given page is typically going to rank or be able to rank for about 200 to 2000 different keywords.”

“And so if you think the, if the search volume for best cameras is a thousand, the topic of best camera is probably a 100,000. So it's probably 10 X at least the search volume of the keyword.”

“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, …”

“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 and the more traction, the faster it is. So if a company like Netflix makes a chang…”

“For a large site, like a Ticketmaster and eBay, it's probably one to four weeks is the rough timeline once you're really optimized.”

“Testing validates a hypothesis, but the hypotheses come from analyzing other people's sites and analyzing my own site. So that's where the valuable qualified hypotheses of what is probably working comes, comes from. It's not from brainstorming. The test valida…”

“If you're starting from zero and nothing exists, then you shouldn't be testing things. It should be launching things. Should be testing things once things have launched. So testing is something I would do at like month six or later. The beginning should be aro…”

“It doesn't have to be a, you know, an SEO expert with deep expertise. Programmatic is where you'd want a lot of expertise over years. An SEO, but on the editorial side, you can actually pick it up if you have the right workflow and the right tools.”

“One SEO person and one writer is the smallest groups that you could have that, that would be able to do this effectively.”

“There's a few pages that cover probably 90% of all use cases.”

“And if there's some theme where you did cover it, but you're not ranking quite as well as you want to. Break out that section of health benefit and then have a separate article for that.”

“Where AI is really useful is actually all the other stuff that I talked about. So if you think about the workflow of creating content and start with, what should I be writing about? What are the subtopics? So like, 300 different keywords. What are the sub them…”