search engine optimization

“That's what's going to give you, especially if you're thinking you can, you want to go back to raising you know, less than 12 months later. That forces you to focus on very kind of short term tactics, short payoff tactics. And so things like SEO, there was no …”

“SEO is now becoming more attractive because you know, you're like, once you got your burn under control and you're thinking, okay, we saved all this money by reducing our paid budget. We're cutting it entirely. Like how, how do we put some of those resources b…”

“SEO has a different a different return horizon than say paid acquisition, right? It's longer out. It's maybe six months is the earliest you can see results. And even then it's going to be a small trickle that compounds over time.”

“Getting an outside resource, at least for like an audit, Is really helpful. Now, whether it's a boutique agency or, you know, a solo consultant, I think that's more circumstantial. But I found like, you know, at least with the companies that I've worked with, …”

“Take Canva, for instance, right? Their biggest initial growth loop, and I think this is public knowledge, was their long tail SEO strategy, where, you know, any kind of design project that you could think of, you know, you would search for, you know, designing…”

“When you are onto something and you really need expertise and you don't have that expertise internally. Yes, I think hiring externally is the right thing to do at that point, because those are really specific skills that some people have taken years to learn. …”

“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.”

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

“Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site and they want you to be a credible domain before they rank you. And if you're starting from zero, they don't have enough signals that you are. So the way that we assess that is I will go into the first signal I'll…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“To do SEO well, I think it needs to fit into a broader product context and a lot of what's effective in SEO is actually making core product changes.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“A lot of people think that templates were what drove like Airtable's top of Sunnel. That is not the case. I was having a conversation with someone who works a lot on SEO at Airtable in the much later days. And sort of laughing over the fact that people thought…”

“Actually, SEO was the number one marketing motion that we used.”

“Ideally you hire an amazing SEO person you can bring internal. Second would be somebody amazing who can get things done, surround them with advisors. And then in my stack rank would probably be third would be agencies.”

“And I think the changes will be We'll probably start seeing things shift to paid. You have to pay for that free traffic. And the second one is there may just be a case where those keywords just don't get many clicks anymore. You might drop down to a very small…”

“And if you have an entire SEO team working on one keyword, I don't think that's crazy because one, you know, a small number of keywords can define an entire industry or a business.”

“12 months is probably like max. If you can't see impact in 12 months, is something wrong? If you have existing content, it could happen pretty early. Could happen on day one. Actually, I've seen that happen. It could happen. If you have to build new parts of t…”

“When I think about growth, I don't think about a specific, it's not growth equals SEO and Instagram. For me, growth equals whatever it takes to move the needle. So I get this question all the time. How do you build a growth team? What does a growth team do? An…”

“And then there's other ones with 1010 of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages, which are either user generated content. Like TripAdvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces like Thumb Attack and other types of websites like that. Those are…”

“On the buyer side, we really leveraged the fact that we have a ton of inventory and to some degree it ends up being quite a long tail of inventory where we can meet really niche and specific needs. And so that lends itself really well to thinking about SEO, le…”

“I don't think SaaS in general should do SEO”

“So that's where I think SEO should be is you need to be in the buyer journey with the SEO you're creating. And it doesn't matter what AI overviews does or doesn't do because you're still solving the mid funnel problem with your SEO solution.”

“I don't think restaurants typically should have a website. Not only should they not do SEO, but I don't know that they should have a website because if you think about the buyer journey for a person looking for food, They don't typically go to a website.”

“This is the biggest myth in SEO is that you could just build links and link building is, is the secret source and the secret sauce to like growing your SEO footprint. And that's totally wrong because the way most people build links is they buy these guest post…”

“Link building is brand building. So it's thinking about how you're going to build a brand and have people mentioned to you. And you're, when you're doing link building, you're creating a relationship between the piece of content that has linked to you and the …”

“I think the most important thing to leave people with is that SEO is not dying. There will always be a world where users are requesting their own information.”

“I think of SEO as a product. And I think the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question. Because it's a product question.”

“At a grand scale, Google Cloud should not be doing SEO. At a small scale, a lot of SaaS tools shouldn't be doing SEO because there isn't necessarily an SEO journey.”

“I don't think that's at all correct. And I don't think anyone, whether you're doing SEO as your full-time job, whether you're receiving SEO traffic as a part of one of your primary marketing channels, I don't think anybody has to worry about that.”

“All of Tinder's inbound came from the word Tinder.”

“So this entire idea of SEO get up until 20, 22 was monetized unstructured data. Whoever wrote the longest piece of content on Best beach hotels in Miami and then built the best links to it. They would win. They would win whether it's ads or win whether it's ho…”

“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…”

“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…”

“Everything that works in SEO works in AEO, but there are additional things beyond SEO that also work in AEO.”

“Dot dash Meredith is a large media conglomerate with good housekeeping, all recipes, Investopedia. It's the, it's probably the most successful SEO company of all time. And it's also one of the most cited, probably the most cited in LMs as well.”

“There's these best practices that I think still do largely apply because it's gonna ultimately come down to an AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still vali…”

“Performance drives SEO. SEO is an input into AEO.”

“If you ask me what's your organic marketing strategy right now, to me, it's all about social, which is what is my CEO posting? What is my team posting? What is my LinkedIn? What is my creator economy doing? Influencer marketing. And across all of the social pl…”

“A product that's sold really well direct actually doesn't do well in things like social and SEO and vice versa. If you're getting a lot of traffic through SEO, adding ads often like costs a lot and doesn't really move the needle”