Ethan Smith: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wow, I didn't know any of that. That's awesome. What does the operation look like to generate these pages once you've kind of figured out I need say, address pages with a map and a category, what does it look like to actually generate and do you need millions of pages, thousands of pages? What's the order magnitude and then how do you actually go about generating these? It depends, but it's usually not millions, unless you're eBay or a Zillow. But usually it's less than a million. It depends on the page type. So for a product page, typically you would index all of your product pages and however many product pages is the number of URLs. But you wouldn't want to index things that are thin or empty or we have a product that's out of stock and there's no description and there's no reviews. You might not want to rank all of those, but usually for product pages or item pages, you would index all of them that are some threshold of quality. For category pages, you want to find all of the categories that go after keywords where the category page is the right page type. So, what are all the queries where category page is ranking? And then you don't want a page for every single keyword. So when I started in SEO, you would have a category page for every single keyword. And so I was at a shopping site, we had 10 million plus pages. So every single way that you could possibly search for a product had its own page. And that worked really well. The pages were of dubious utility because of that, but that worked well, that no longer works well. And Google does not want you to do that. So you'll see in their guidance that you should not have many minor variations of every single way that you could search. You should have themes or topics. And so a topic for best cameras, best cameras is going to rank for the best cameras, 10 best cameras, cameras, best digital cameras. All these things are going to map to a single camera category page. And then there's a bunch of other category pages. So you basically take the 20 million commerce keywords and then you group the keywords at the topic level, and then you launch just those. So that's how you do a category page. And then on for an article or listicle, you would basically build out an article or listicle page type and then you would have writers write articles and then publish them through Contentful or web flow or some sort of CMS. Oh, cool. I want to talk about that, just the actual platform. But this might be a good time to introduce this idea of topics you mentioned a few times. I was going to ask you about that towards the end. But just this idea of I think topics versus keywords is I think the way you recommend people think about what to focus on. Can you talk about that?…

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