The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

**Ethan Smith** (0:00)
I think people are under-resourced SEO a lot of times and over-resourced ads. So if you're Zillow, you're gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads, or if you're eBay, you're gonna spend tens of millions of dollars on ads.
Why would you not have a really great SEO team? Like, the amount of traffic you get is probably equal to that. So if you're gonna spend $100 million on ads, why would you spend $50,000 on SEO? That doesn't make sense.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:25)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Ethan Smith. Ethan is possibly the smartest person on SEO you will find. Ethan has worked with companies like MasterClass, Thumbtack, Robinhood, Medium and Honey to develop and execute their SEO strategies. One of my goals with this podcast is to give you tactical and actionable advice for how to build and grow your own product. And SEO is one of the most powerful and least understood growth levers.
This episode contains more advice, tools, tactics and guidance on how to win at SEO than anything I have ever come across and I suspect it will blow your mind. We talk about when to focus on SEO, whether you ever should, talk about all the things you need to get right to win at SEO, when to hire, who to hire, the most useful tools and so much more. I will now stop talking and get right into it. And with that, I bring you Ethan Smith.
This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers. And it's also how I manage the workflow for this very podcast.
Over the years, I've seen Coda evolve from being a tool that makes teams more productive to one that also helps bring the best practices across the tech industry to life with an incredibly rich collection of templates and guides in the Coda doc gallery, including resources for many guests on this podcast, including Shreyas, Gokul and Shashir, the CEO of Coda. Some of the best teams out there like Pinterest, Spotify, Square and Uber use Coda to run effectively and have published their templates for anyone to use. If you're ping ponging between lots of documents and spreadsheets, make your life better and start using Coda. You can take advantage of a special limited time offer just for startups. Head over to coda.io/lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollar credit on your first statement.
That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to sign up and get a thousand dollars in credit on your account.
This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel, offering powerful self-serve product analytics. If you listen to this podcast, you know that it's really hard to build great product without making compromises. And when it comes to using data, a lot of teams think that they only have two choices, make quick decisions based on gut feelings or make data-driven decisions at a snail's pace. But that's a choice. You shouldn't have to compromise on speed to get product answers that you can trust. With Mixpanel, there are no trade-offs. Get deep insights at the speed of thought at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel builds powerful and intuitive product analytics that everyone can trust, use and afford.
Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com. And while you're at it, they're hiring. Check out mixpanel.com to learn more.
Ethan, welcome to the podcast.

**Ethan Smith** (3:55)
Thank you for having me.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:56)
It's my pleasure. So you're the CEO of Graphite, which is one of the top growth agencies in the world. And you guys are especially good at SEO, which to a lot of people feels like this huge dark art. And so I'm really excited to dig into a lot of the nitty gritty of SEO and the tactics and the strategies around winning at SEO.
And I suspect this episode is going to end up being very rich and very tactical. But before we get into that, could you spend just like a minute talking about how you got into growth, how you got into SEO, and then just a bit about Graphite and what you all do over there?