Lenny Rachitsky: observation

Transcript context

…The way that I would think about that would be, again, I would take all the different keywords that I want to rank for, and I would look for the same results seem to be ranking over and over again, or they don't. So is there a significant overlap of the keywords that I have or is there is a completely different set of results? And if it's completely different, then I would separate them out. The other thing that I would do potentially is if let's say the butter lettuce page is ranking number six for health benefits, and we talked about it. But maybe if we ... And that's a huge search volume. If we really talked about it, we might be able to compete even better of this spin out sub article. And you could do that by, again, looking at the keywords that you're ranking for 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. Awesome. Man, there's so much meat to this. My brain is full, but I have many more things I want to ask. So let me ask a few more things: One is just like a meta question. It feels like there's a lot of conflicting advice about SEO. Everyone's always giving you different opinions about the way to win SEO and things are always changing. Do you have any advice for folks that are trying to learn how to get better at this? They'll listen to this, they'll learn a ton. They'll probably hear different advice. Any advice for how to know what to believe, what's real, who to listen to? Yes, so I think it's based on doing data analysis of your site, of competing sites, to generate hypotheses of what you think is working and then testing them and validating those hypotheses, which is different from "Google said something and therefore I will believe it completely, or somebody told me something." So Google is a source of hypotheses to test and analyzing other sites. Something that someone said, something that another SEO person said. These are all hypotheses, but ultimately you want to test them. Of the sources of where you would generate your hypotheses, I would focus on looking at other sites and looking at your own site. So find what seems to be working on other sites and do that by, again, putting them into Ahrefs, putting them into Semrush, getting their top pages, trying to glean with what patterns you think are correlating with success. And then same on your own site, so which pages are performing well? Which ones aren't? An article that's 2000 words, it's doing ... Or the word count seems to be a correlation. Longer is better and shorter is worse. Maybe that is causal, then go test it and then validate it. I think also I spend a lot of time ... So when I look at other people's sites, one thing that I'll do that I've had a lot of success at is to contact the person who runs SEO at that company and then set up a meeting and then ask them a bunch of questions about I think that this is what happened? Is that correct? Or what have you tested? What's worked and what hasn't worked? I remember I was trying to come up with an international SEO strategy. And so I did an analysis where I looked at every company and which companies had repeated success outside of the United States. So eBay, TripAdvisor, a bunch of other sites. And there were clear patterns that TripAdvisor consistently outperformed over and over again. So then I analyzed TripAdvisor and tried to come up with what I thought was causing that. And then I tap my network and tried to find the person who's running an SEO TripAdvisor, which was hard to do, but I eventually found Luc Levesque who was running all SEO including that. And then I asked him a bunch of questions and he answered some of them. And so now, I actually know the answers. So I don't even need to test some of these things. Somebody else already built this and tested it so they can just tell me. So finding the SEO manager, the people at these companies and just asking them the questions is actually a great way to get those answers.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.