Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedEthan Smith: preference
1 Dec 2022 Lenny's Podcast The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
“If you can hire somebody whose great at that, I'm biased towards in-house, even though I run a consulting agency.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ethan Smith
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 1 Dec 2022
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…This episode is brought to you by lemon.io. You've achieved product market fit. You're able to activate, engage, and retain your customers, but you don't have the engineers that you need to move as fast as you want to because it's hard to find great engineers quickly. Especially if you're trying to protect your burn rate. Meet lemon.io, lemon.io will quickly match you with skilled senior developers who are all vetted, results oriented and ready to help you grow. And all that at competitive rates, startups choose lemon.io because they offer only handpicked developers with three or more years of experience and strong proven portfolios. Only 1% in Canada to apply get in so you can be sure that they offer you only high quality talent. And if something ever goes wrong, lemon.io offers you a swift replacement so that you're kind of hiring with a warranty. To learn more, just go to lemon.io/lenny and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And if you start the process now, you can claim a special discount exclusively for Lenny's podcast listeners. 15% off your first four weeks of working with your new software developer. Grow faster with an extra pair of hands. Visit lemon.io/lenny. When you're starting to invest in SEO, say a founder's listening to this and they're like, "Yes, SEO, let's do it." How do you recommend they hire for this person slash have somebody take it on? Do you recommend finding someone that's like an SEO god that has done this a lot and bringing them in house? Or finding someone young and hungry that's going to learn it all? Or bringing in an agency? As an early stage startup, what do you recommend people do skill wise and people wise to start on this? It depends on the strategy and it depends on the stage of the company and the opportunity and budget. So in terms of the strategy, programmatic SEO is more specialized. It's harder to find people who are great at programmatic SEO. Editorial SEO isn't easy, but it's there. There's a much larger set of people who can do editorial SEO than- There's a much larger set of people who can do editorial SEO than to do programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO just has many different nuances around indexation logic. And I talked about the category pages and clustering keywords at the category level, that's a lot of work. It's hard to do with specialized, how to deal with UGC. So if we're a UGC site like Pinterest, it's very complicated and you want to understand which pages you want to index and you need to build scalable systems, so that's a specialized skill and there aren't that many people. If you can hire somebody whose great at that, I'm biased towards in-house, even though I run a consulting agency. I'm still biased in-house. So if you can get that person, that's great. There just aren't that many of them. But on that editorial SEO side getting someone young and hungry could absolutely work. On the opportunity and budget side, so if you're Zillow and you have SEO's worth a billion dollars to you, just spend the money. I think people under resource SEO a lot of times and over resource ads. So if you're Zillow, you're going to spend tens of millions of dollars on ads or if you're eBay, you're going to spend tens of millions of dollars on ads. Why would you not have a really great SEO team? The amount of traffic you get is probably equal to that. So you're going to spend a hundred million dollars on ads, why would you spend $50,000 on SEO? That doesn't make sense. So I think it's based on the opportunity and how complex the strategy is that you want to focus on. Awesome. That is really interesting. The two routes that you talked about, programmatic versus editorial, what kind of person would you look for the programmatic? Is it like a growth PM, is it an engineer? Something else?…
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