Topics over Keywords

SEO work can take 3 directions:

• Technical: links, site speed, link structure meta etc....
• Programatic: category pages, product pages, user generated content.
• Editorial: content written by humans on a topic that may get ...

SEO is not for every company. And even for those for which SEO may be a good acquisition channel, timing is key. 2 things to consider:

• Authority of the domain. Google avoids SEO sites so before you should invest in SEO get to 1,000 non-SEO uniques: organic, paid, socia...

Basic advice is that any SEO strategy will take from 6m to 1yr to see some results. But it all depends on domain authority (Netflix will see changes in days, a Masterclass in weeks)

• However good SEO is not a set-it -and-forget-it task. Constant monitoring and tweaking is requi...

The more links a page gets the better. A good page should have between 5 to 10 pages linking to it. Usually pages are linked using artefacts as:

• Popular pages
• Recent pages
• Related algorithms.

However most of these will not ensure a good spread. Google is als...

Work on a few articles or topic pages per month. 25 is a good high number. In 3 months you should see some early indicators of performance and scale if it's working. 

Don't go from 0 to 1000 pages per month as you will do it wrong and not learn anything. 

• Split test are only useful when you have a base of pages and enough domain authority. Early on, the focus should be on building and rapid iteration, not A/B. 
• Testing becomes useful for chasing local maximums. The big changes relate to site & link structure and those can't be tested ...

• Programatic SEO needs a growth engineer, because there is a lot of skill required in tinkering. Hard to find & expensive. Hire hungry young people and avoid SEO experts who worked at big brands, because big brands have it easier. Headhunt from smaller websites that found suc...

What does a dedicated SEO specialist do?

• Reverse-engineering: Auditing websites that are working. Looking for content opportunities, checking which pages are performing the best, checking their links with ahrefs.
• Look for keyword bundles and cluster opportunities.
• Const...

... it's because of a few reason:

• Most SEO strategies don't get implemented because lack of resources.
• Lack of resources is due to the fact that SEO is usually not part of the core product team.
• Execs will always prioritise short term projects over mysterious long term ...

Ethan relies on a few tools:

• Google Search Console. Free for analysis of search traffic.
• Clearscope. Will help you understand gaps in content....

Ethan is mostly against tools like GPT-3 being used to generate content. While the text may be grammatically correct, there might be lost of slips. 

AI is good to generate content on top of a structured content. This means the AI serves more like an assistant to a page designed based on fac...

The Google algorithm is super complex these days. Links are only a small part. One can think of Google moving from link ranking to topic ranking, aka "What are known for?"

So Google is looking for website who are disproportionately well-known for some themes: Does your site say...