Ethan Smith: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, he's a big deal now. You mentioned that some companies get a little blocked on thinking about strategy and just planning and don't actually get anything done. And I think you had some thoughts to share, just how do you get shit done without being blocked if you can't get all the things done you want to get done? The dirty secret of SEO and SEO consulting is that most of what is recommended never gets launched. So we interview people from other SEO agencies or recruiting SEO at other companies. And the common thing that'll happen is I'll say, "What did you work on? What was your strategy? Describe your strategy." And then they'll describe it in detail, and I did all these different things. And then I'll ask, "What happened?" And they'll say, "Oh, well, actually, almost none of this got launched because I couldn't get resources." So the common problem is resources, and every company is resource constrained. I think a key part of why SEO especially gets disproportionately blocked is number one, it's not part of the product org, and the changes are oftentimes product changes. So Eli Schwartz has this book about product led SEO, which is how it should be done, and it usually is not done that way. It's usually the product org has their stuff, and then there's the SEO team over here and they're saying, "Please do this thing." And the product team says, "Well, I have all this other stuff that I need to do, so I'm not going to do that, or I'm going to do that in a year." And so having the org design and having things prioritized through product I think is really important. Also, having buy-in at the executive level is really important. Usually when we get locked, I'll just try to ask the executive, "There's this really big opportunity. May we please get this thing launched?" I think the other part of why SEO doesn't get resource as it should is that it's mysterious and it's hard to describe it. And people will say, "Well, how do you know that this is going to work?" And you actually don't know if it's going to work. And so the fact that there's this mystery around it versus something else where there's not mystery, the non-mysterious thing will get prioritized over the mysterious thing. And then the last is that it's just a lot of work. The stuff that I've been describing to you, to your point about there's a lot of meat, there's just a ton of work to do at scale. At Zillow, you need a large team and to do a whole bunch of different things, so you need a lot of resources to actually do all this stuff. And so it's just high scope a lot of times to do it. So for all these reasons, the getting things done part is actually more of a factor of success or not than the actual strategy a lot of times. There's a bunch of topics I want to touch on before we wrap up. This is already I think it'll be the longest episode we've done, but well worth it, because rarely have I heard this much depth on such as you said, mysterious skill and growth opportunity. So I'm really excited about all the stuff that we're talking about. There's a few things that you already touched on in my notes, but there's a few that we haven't. One is topical authority, which you talked a bit about, but I'm- One is topical authority, which you talked a bit about, but I'm curious, is there anything more to share about just the importance of becoming an authority at a topic as the core of your SEO strategy versus say, keyword focus and things like that?…

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