Ethan Smith: evaluation

Transcript context

…So as a founder, you're probably listening to this and be like, "That's such a long term investment, that's not going to show impact. And I have all these other things I got to work on. Should I be doing SEO?" Is there things that along the way, say before six months, that are pointing to you're heading in the right direction, keep going. Or just like, okay, this isn't going to work, just stop now. Is there any kind of early signals, leading indicators? Yes. I wouldn't say that there are signals that you should, well, there may be signals that you should stop now, but we want to look for leading indicators. And a leading indicator is, are we ranking at least number 20 for anything? So usually what we'll see is we'll launch something and maybe in the first week we're ranking number 15 for something and we get one click or no clicks, but we go from number 15 to number 12 to number eight. Now we're at position eight. We have some impressions for this keyword. We don't have that many clicks because most people don't click on number eight. But we're starting to see signs of progress. Then we go from number eight to number five. Now we get more clicks. Now we know if we can rank number five for these interesting head terms, we can rank. So let's say we have 10 articles, we're ranking number five for keywords for these 10 articles. We can rank number five for a thousand articles. And so you can see these leading indicators and signs of opportunity early on, even with a small number of pages. And I would wait until I see that to then scale it. It's common to incorrectly conclude failure. I listened to the Yuri Grammarly episode and he talked about false negatives. Like we tried this thing, it didn't work, therefore it won't work. It's common for the first try or first several tries in SEO to just not be implemented correctly. And so if you're not ranking for anything at all, either the strategy is wrong or there's no opportunity, it's probably that the strategy is wrong or that you don't have enough authority. But that's how I think about it. 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?…

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