Ethan Smith
25 statements across 3 episodes · 5 bullish · 3 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Dec 1, 2022 by Ethan Smith · said 6 times in 2 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Ethan Smith's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
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brought up most by Yuriy Timen (5), Jonathan Becker (1)
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2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 5 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Ethan Smith, oldest first
Dec 1, 2022
Smith: SERP overlap determines whether keywords should share a page
“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, …”
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022
Ethan Smith: Creating individual pages for every keyword variation no longer works
“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 …”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
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…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Ethan Smith: AI should assist SEO research workflows, not autonomously generate articles
“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…”
Dec 1, 2022 positive
Dec 1, 2022 positive
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.”
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Smith: SEO results take six to nine months, faster for authoritative sites
“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…”
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022
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…”
Dec 1, 2022
Smith: New SEO initiatives should launch before testing in month six
“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…”
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022
Dec 1, 2022 neutral
Dec 29, 2022
Dec 29, 2022
Ethan Smith: SEO addressable market must include audience competitors, not just product rivals
“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…”
Sep 14, 2025 negative
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Ethan Smith: AI is only the second-biggest shift in SEO history
“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…”
Sep 14, 2025 positive
Smith: Community-generated help content captures long-tail LLM citations
“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…”
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Sep 14, 2025 negative
Smith: Majority of SEO and AEO best practices are incorrect
“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…”
Sep 14, 2025 negative
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Sep 14, 2025 neutral
Smith: Buy the cheapest answer or keyword tracking tool available
“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…”