Luc Levesque: recommendation

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is the next generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to waste of time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more delivering results quickly, avoiding knowing prolonged analytic cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your north star metrics like activation, retention, subscription and payments. Eppo supports test on the front end, on the backend, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com. That's geteppo.com and 10X your experiment velocity. So I want to segue to a different topic, SEO. You're kind of the... You tell me, but it feels like you're one of the earliest SEO people in tech. You helped grow Tripadvisor many years ago and it was mostly SEO-driven. I think you innovated a lot of SEO tactics and strategies. And then you helped Pinterest, Thumbtack, other companies that are very SEO-driven. You talked about how many companies grow through one channel and these are all very SEO-driven companies. I imagine Shopify has a lot of SEO work that's happening right now with you there. And so I want to chat about SEO. So I guess broadly SEO is like... It's like this amazing growth channel. It's basically free. It continues to work after you stop doing any work on it for a while. Many founders think about, "Should we invest in SEO? How do we approach SEO?" So maybe just as a first question, what are signs that your product and company is a good fit for SEO being potentially a huge channel for growth? 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?…

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