Ethan Smith: recommendation

Transcript context

…Okay, awesome. Oh man. Okay, great. Go Power. So to start, I want to help people understand when to focus on SEO, want to make sense as a growth channel and timing around when to invest in SEO. So question for you, what are just attributes of a product or a company that tell you that SEO could be a growth driver and/or a massive growth driver? Because I imagine SEO isn't useful for everybody. How do you think about that? There's two big things. The first thing is the addressable market large? So the addressable market for SEO large, and for most categories it is. The second is do you have authority? Do you have existing traction? If you start from zero and you have no traction. So we talk with seed stage companies and series A companies, typically they don't have a lot of authority and it's too soon. And Google doesn't want you to just be an SEO site and they want you to be a credible domain before they rank you. And if you're starting from zero, they don't have enough signals that you are. So the way that we assess that is I will go into ... the first signal I'll look at is what's your traffic, what's your current traffic? And your non-SEO traffic is actually an authority signal. So I'll go into Similarweb, I'll put the domain in, I'll look at the total traffic, and I'll want to see at least, I would say, 1000 visits a day roughly for non-SEO, at least. If you have five visits, that's very little. And then the second thing I'll look at is the number of referring domains. So I'll go into Ahrefs or Semrush and look at the total number of referring domains. I'll try to have at least 1000 roughly referring domains. You could grow with less than that and less than 1000 visits but it's much harder. And the more you have, the easier it is to grow. And the faster you can grow and the more you can grow. And then in terms of the addressable market, that's a little bit more complicated, but most markets are pretty large actually in SEO, but we want it to be large. So with Power is actually an interesting example. So they're a clinical trial lead gen site. They want to acquire people to take clinical trials. How many people are typing online, "I want to take a clinical trial"? Not very many, but the number of people that could be taking clinical trials is very large. And so if we target the persona, what's the key demographic of who might be a candidate for taking clinical trial? It's very, very large. And so we can then create content that targets that, like gig economy or college students or people like that. And so if you think about targeting the persona, most sites have a very large addressable market. But the way that I would think about the addressable market is that which is what product am I offering? What are the use cases for that product? What is the persona, what's the size of that? And then I would assess that typically by looking at external benchmarks. So if I'm a shopping site, and I haven't started yet, I can look at other shopping sites, I can see how much traffic they have. So again, I can go into Similarweb. If I'm wish.com and I want to see what my traffic potential is, I can put in Walmart and Wayfair, put it in Similarweb, look at their total traffic. Similarweb's free for all of this. And then I can get a sense of how big I can get. The one other thing I'll mention is that there are product competitors and audience competitors. heir total traffic. Similarweb's free for all of this. And then I can get a sense of how big I can get. The one other thing I'll mention is that there are product competitors and audience competitors. So for something like, I'm at a WeWork right now. So for WeWork, I could look at the traffic for other rental office companies or I could look at companies that are ranking for the kinds of things that I would want to rank for. And they may not be direct product competitors. Or FinTech is interesting. So for Robin Hood, Robin Hood could look at other sites that allow you to sell stocks and crypto, or they could look at Investopedia. Investopedia doesn't allow you to buy stocks, but they have a bunch of traffic. It's not a product competitor, but it's an audience competitor. And so these competitors basically can tell you what the size of that market is. So that's how I think about the addressable market. So ideally it's large, it typically is, and then the more authority I have, the more I can compete. If I'm starting from zero, it's probably too early, but once I have traction, SEO can then multiply that traction.…

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