Eli Schwartz

AI should be used to enhance the efficiency of creating useful content rather than generating 'slop' or fluff content for the sake of volume.

"AI as a tool is a tool creating something that's not necessarily useful for the end journey of the company... However, if the content you were creating was pretty useful, and now you're using AI to cr..."

Transitioning to a growth advisor role requires developing sales and client management skills while still employed, rather than just relying on operational expertise.

"Build that growth advising muscle by staying on your day job. Don't quit your day job, and moonlighting and practice selling, closing, working, retaining, and that's where if you're successful there,..."

For large-scale platforms, an HTML sitemap and clear internal linking are critical for search engine discoverability.

"If you create a categorized sitemap where you can say, 'These are all the questions on health and from the sitemap... then a search engine can navigate through the entire site, and all of the question..."

Top-down TAM (Total Addressable Market) forecasting is often more accurate for planning than bottoms-up keyword tool estimates, which are frequently unreliable.

"When you do this top-down, it's a TAM forecast essentially. When you do a top-down, you're closer to the truth. Now, you probably aren't going to get to the truth... but it will help you make a better..."

SEO investment should be evaluated against other growth channels based on total cost (including headcount and engineering) and speed of ROI.

"It should really be this thoughtful strategic decision-making process of how much will this cost me all in and is this the right use of funds... if you took that exact same million dollars and put it..."

For some B2B products, physical events or direct sales may offer a better trade-off than SEO if the buyer journey isn't primarily online.

"Instead of spending $15,000 on SEO, you can get... you can go to all these shows for the exact same budget, and you get users who are interested, they're in market, they try your tool out at the booth..."

SEO should be viewed as a product positioning challenge for users on a self-discovery journey rather than just a marketing tactic.

"Product people need to think about how do we position this to the user that is not going to find out about this from a social channel, that's not going to be attracted by an ad? This is a user that's..."

Effective SEO positioning involves identifying the underlying emotional or functional problem the product solves (e.g., loneliness) rather than just the category (e.g., dating).

"We discovered that Tinder is a loneliness-solving problem, loneliness-solving solution... we built out is if you look for online dating in many cities around the world... you're going to find a Tinder..."

SEO success should be measured by business-relevant conversions (like MQLs or sales) rather than vanity metrics like total traffic.

"Whatever it is, there has to be a conversion metric that matters for the business... driving traffic to something that doesn't convert for you wouldn't be a good idea."

SEO requires the same analytical rigor as paid marketing, focusing on efficiency and business impact rather than just 'ranking number one.'

"Really understanding who it is that they're trying to attract with SEO that's the metric we're going to use. And again, I don't know why SEO... this happens with SEO but not any other channel. No one..."

SEO initiatives should follow standard product development cycles, including the creation of PRDs for engineering teams.

"In the second month, we're going to build out a PRD for engineers to start working on. In the third month, they're going to start working, and they're going to ship this."

The foundation of a successful product or SEO strategy is deep customer empathy gained by actually using the product as a customer would.

"Step one is the step that almost everyone misses on SEO, which is be the user. Try to understand who your user is... they had zero customer empathy for why people use the tool."

SEO is only a viable channel if you can clearly define the specific problems or questions users are searching for that your product solves.

"If you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO because SEO is about appealing to that user."

SEO projects should be managed with product milestones to ensure accountability and track progress before final results are visible.

"When you're building out an SEO effort, and I'm going to keep going back to this, it's a product. So you're building out a product and you're creating milestones... Now, if you start missing all those..."