The Two-Bucket SEO Fit Test
Does your product mint pages by itself? The answer decides your entire SEO strategy
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Levesque splits every website into two buckets: small sites with a fixed handful of pages, and sites that automatically generate thousands to millions of pages through user-generated content or a marketplace. The bucket you are in determines whether SEO is an optimisation-surface game or a content-creation game, how fast impact can arrive, and how big the ceiling is. He pairs this with the counterintuitive claim that a single keyword can carry an entire company — so a whole team on one keyword is not crazy.
Origin
Built by Luc Levesque over years of SEO work at TripAdvisor — one of the most SEO-driven companies ever built — and applied since at Pinterest, Thumbtack and Shopify. The insight was seeded by an acquisition conversation where a product he judged terrible turned out to be ten times bigger than his own.
Core principles
- 01There is an SEO play in almost every company — Google is a vast funnel of existing demand for your product area.
- 02Optimisation surface is the ceiling: more indexable pages, more upside, faster.
- 03The best SEO loops are byproducts of another loop (viral → profile pages → indexed pages).
- 04Growth is exponential, not linear — SEO is not 'a bit more traffic', it is company-defining.
- 05Modern Google ranks content by user feedback on quality, not by keyword ratios and link tricks.
How to run it
- 1
Classify your site into a bucket
Bucket A: a small number of hand-built pages — product pages, about us, typical of most commerce sites. Bucket B: thousands to millions of pages generated automatically through user-generated content (TripAdvisor, Pinterest, LinkedIn profiles) or a marketplace. Determine which you are in before doing anything else.
- 2
If Bucket B, work the optimisation surface first
You have an enormous, self-growing optimisation surface. This is where huge lifts arrive fastest — small systematic changes multiply across a very large number of pages that are already being generated and indexed for free.
Pro tip Look for an existing viral or engagement loop whose byproduct is an indexable page — LinkedIn's invite loop mints a beautiful landing page (the profile) for every new user, and that SEO loop then compounds on its own.
- 3
If Bucket A, optimise the handful, then manufacture pages
Optimise the pages you have, then build a real content strategy — a blog or new sections of the site that give high-quality answers to the questions your audience is actually asking Google. You must go create the content; your users won't.
Watch out Bucket A is still capable of being a primary channel — it is not automatically a minority channel.
- 4
Find the keyword the industry is built on
Identify the small set of queries that define your category. The number one organic result captures a disproportionate share of the world searching for that term — entire industries and businesses have been bought and sold on a single keyword rank. Putting an entire SEO team on one keyword is a rational allocation.
Pro tip When studying any successful company, reverse-engineer its one dominant loop or channel — Priceline on SEM, Facebook on the photo-tag viral loop, TripAdvisor on SEO. Most companies got where they are on exactly one.
- 5
Reverse the demand test for brand-new categories
If your product is genuinely something the world has never seen, there may be no existing demand to harvest. In that case, find the related queries adjacent to your topic and rank for those to build brand awareness while you create the demand.
In the wild
Levesque founded TravelPod, the first travel-blogging site — 'WordPress but for travel' — and sold it to TripAdvisor without ever having learned SEO or growth. Later, evaluating an acquisition target whose product he thought was terrible, he asked why they'd buy it and was told the site was ten times bigger than his own. In that space, the number one keyword was 'travel blog'. TravelPod ranked roughly number two for a very long time and never owned it.
→ The moment flipped Levesque's entire career toward growth levers, and became his canonical example that one keyword rank can define an entire business.
LinkedIn's early growth ran on invite emails — a classic viral loop that comes and goes. But the byproduct of every registration was a public profile page: a beautiful, unique landing page that Google indexes.
→ A viral loop feeding an SEO loop that continues to grow on its own — Levesque's model example of Bucket B compounding without further input.
Common mistakes
Treating SEO as 'just another channel'
People model growth as linear — one more channel adding one more slice of traffic. Growth done right is exponential; a single dominant keyword can be the entire business, so under-resourcing SEO because it looks incremental is a category error.
Still optimising for tricks
Links, keyword ratios and on-page tricks still matter, but the days of purely winning on them are over. Google now shows content to users, collects feedback, and ranks by which piece is genuinely best.
Assuming a small site can't win on SEO
Founders in Bucket A often conclude SEO can only ever be a minority channel for them. It can absolutely be a big channel — it just requires creating high-quality answers rather than harvesting user-generated pages.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and growth leads deciding whether SEO deserves to be their primary channel, and which SEO motion their site's structure actually supports.
Not ideal for
Products with no search demand and no adjacent queries, or teams that have not yet reached product-market fit.
From the transcript
“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…”
“websites like that those are generally easier to see a huge amount of impact very quickly because it's such a large optimization surface”
“I think one thing to keep in mind with SEO is entire Industries are based off of single keywords”
“it's not just about little you know tricks and links and keyword ratios that those days are over those do matter but it's”
“and if you have an entire SEO team working on one keyword I don't”
From the episode
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft
Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor)