Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I've been doing SEO for a really long time. It's a lot of fun and certainly being a supervisor was a great learning ground for that, that we were able to really innovate and try new things there. In terms of the playbook that we built out. That was a lot of fun, those years. Couple thoughts. The first one would be I do think there's an SEO play in any company. Maybe at a different extent, but Google is such a large funnel of existing demand for your product or your product area that there's usually an angle to get some SEO traffic there. So I do think it applies to most companies. I would say if you're an early product that the world's never seen, it's a brand new thing, there might be some creation, some demand creation you need to do, but most of the time there's existing demand in Google where you can harvest demand or there's queries that are related to your topic that you can start ranking for to start building brand awareness. So there's always some angle. And then I kind of divide websites or online products into two categories. There's the ones which are smaller sites, small number of pages, very targeted at your product and don't have this kind of loop of creating new pages automatically. Most eCommerce sites actually have would a number of pages around the products and about us, those types of pages. That's one type of sites. Let's say they have dozen pages. And then there's other ones with thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of pages which are either user generated content like Tripadvisor and Pinterest and others, or marketplaces like Thumbtack and other types of websites like that. Those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact very quickly because there's such a large optimization surface and ideally it's growing and generating traffic automatically. I've always thought of LinkedIn as just such a great example of this where you have this viral loop where if you recall when it was just starting, everybody was getting these invites from LinkedIn. Those come and go. You get an invite, you register, you don't. That happens. But the byproduct is when people join, they create this beautiful lightning page, which is your profile that gets indexed. It's kind of like a viral loop feeding an SEO loop that continues to grow. So that's a good example of use generated content which kind of feeds on itself and grows. So there's those two categories. Going back to the first category, if you only have a small handful of pages, the way to think about that is you certainly want to optimize those pages, then you want to start creating content that speaks to your audience beyond that. So you need a content strategy, whether it's a blog or creating new parts of your site that address questions that your audience might have. But generally speaking, I think there's an SEO play in any company and there's just different tactics, strategies, and approaches to get there. Awesome. I never thought of it that way, that there's kind of these two buckets. So the first bucket is like you don't have a ton of pages that naturally are generated as a part of your experience. And the second is you do. I guess in the second bucket I think of Reddit and Glassdoor and Quora, Tripadvisor, a great example, Pinterest. In the first bucket is the way to generate pages. Basically, it's editorially write content and have people write things for you. Is that generally the strategy? There's different ways of doing it, but a good content strategy is a kind of tried and true approach. Definitely.…

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