Ethan Smith
CEO and Founder, Graphite. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveacademic@ethan_l_s ↗LinkedIn ↗graphite.io ↗
Ethan Smith is the founder and CEO of Graphite, an SEO and growth agency. He advises companies like MasterClass, Robinhood, and Notion on search and answer engine optimization strategies.
2shows
4appearances
90statements
15resolved
11supported
1contradicted
73%fully supported
6said about them ↓ Everything Ethan Smith said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Smith: Programmatic SEO is easier at brand names than lesser-known companies
“It's easier to do programmatic SEO at a well-known brand name company. It's harder to do at a company that, that isn't well-known.”
Smith: SEO hypotheses come from competitor analysis, not brainstorming
“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…”
Smith: Editorial SEO Requires Far Less Prior Experience Than Programmatic SEO
“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.”
Smith: Minimum Viable Editorial SEO Team Is One Strategist and One Writer
“One SEO person and one writer is the smallest groups that you could have that, that would be able to do this effectively.”
Smith: Spin underperforming subtopics out into dedicated standalone articles
“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.”
Smith: Treat Google Statements and SEO Advice Only as Testable Hypotheses
“So Google is a source of hypotheses to test. Analyzing other sites, something that someone said, something that another SEO person said, these are all hypotheses, but ultimately you want to test them.”
Smith: In-body links carry far more SEO weight than footer and navigation links
“Footer links are not equal to body links. So links in the nav and in the footer are navigational links and they count, but they don't count as much. So Google will look at your page and separate out navigation, but body links count a lot.”
Smith: Chat prompts average 25 words versus 3 to 6 for search
“The average, I think the stat roughly was average of 25 words per prompt and average of three to six for search, something along those lines. So chat is significantly more specific.”
Smith: Chat prompts average 25 words versus six words on Google
“So the average number of words, I think perplexity said this, or somebody else said it was around 25 words versus Google words, around six words.”
Smith: Influencing LLM core pre-trained models takes a year
“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.”
Smith: Answering unaddressed subtopic questions drives LLM search retrieval
“The more you answer all the questions, the better. If you don't answer a question, then you're probably not going to show up, and if you answer a question, this follow-up question and subtopic that somebody else is not answering, you're gonna be more likely to…”
Smith: 1 in 20 landing pages drives roughly 85% of traffic
“One out of 20 landing pages drive roughly 85% of all your traffic. So 19 out of 20 landing pages drive little to no traffic”
Ethan Smith: Built-in UGC and product data drastically reduce SEO competition scope
“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…”
Ethan Smith: Clearscope is the best content analysis and scoring tool
“So there's a bunch of different tools for content analysis, content scoring. ClearScope is the best one and ClearScope will tell you what I talked about subtopics and, you know, comprehensive content.”
Ethan Smith: No commercial SEO tools exist for topical authority
“We have internal tools for things like what subtopics You need topical authority. There just aren't tools for that. So we basically built some in-house and we use that for when we're building strategies.”
Smith: A few page archetypes cover 90% of all SEO use cases
“There's a few pages that cover probably 90% of all use cases.”
Smith: TripAdvisor Consistently Outperformed Other Sites in International SEO
“And so I did an analysis where I looked at every company and which companies had repeated success outside of the United States. So eBay, TripAdvisor, a bunch of other sites. And there were clear patterns that TripAdvisor consistently outperformed over and over…”
Ethan Smith helped popularize '10 Best' title tags and app download interstitials
“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.…”
The other half of the tape: Ethan Smith's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Yuriy Timen 5Jonathan Becker 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 6
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 5 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ethan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | CEO and Founder, Graphite | 3 | 68 | 43% 3/7 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 MIXERGYLEDGER | CEO and Founder, Graphite | 1 | 22 | 100% 8/8 | full record on Mixergy → |