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Ethan Smith

one of the most innovative disciplined first principles seo thinkers and i've met is ethan smith from graphite

3 episodes · 3 sourced appearances

Appearances and evidence

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Frameworks in these episodes

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Marketing5 steps

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

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Marketing4 steps

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

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Marketing4 steps

Editorial SEO Operating Model

Split the work: SEO manager picks topics and outlines, a domain-expert writer writes, then analyze.

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Strategy3 steps

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

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Strategy4 steps

Expected-Conversions Prioritization

Rank topics by search volume x topical authority x conversion intent, not by volume alone.

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Marketing5 steps

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

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Marketing3 steps

Head vs Tail in Answer Engines

Why AEO rewards citation frequency and hyper-specific long-tail questions

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Marketing3 steps

Help Center Optimization for the Tail

Turn your support docs into the citation source for obscure use-case questions

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Marketing4 steps

Hypothesis-Driven SEO

Generate hypotheses by analyzing sites (and asking their SEO managers), then test to validate.

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Marketing4 steps

Internal Link Spread Optimization

Most sites starve their own pages of internal links; fixing spread is SEO's biggest quick win.

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Productivity5 steps

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

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Strategy4 steps

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

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Communication4 steps

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

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Leadership4 steps

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

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Strategy4 steps

SEO Readiness Assessment

Two questions decide if SEO is worth investing in: is the market big, and do you have authority?

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Marketing3 steps

SERP Reverse-Engineering

To learn what page to build, read what Google already ranks for your target keywords.

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Marketing7 steps

The 7-Step AEO Execution Plan

A repeatable pipeline to make your product show up in LLM answers

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Marketing3 steps

The Authentic Reddit Citation Strategy

Win Reddit citations by being a real, disclosed user — not a spam farm

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Leadership4 steps

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

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Communication3 steps

The Information-Gain Content Heuristic

Judge content by what new it adds, not how typical it is

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Innovation3 steps

The Three B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

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Marketing3 steps

The Three Types of SEO

Programmatic, editorial and technical SEO are different games; pick the one your queries reward.

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Marketing3 steps

Topical Authority Adjacency

Rank by starting where you're already known, then expand into semantically adjacent topics.

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Marketing3 steps

Topics Over Keywords

Modern Google ranks one page for a cluster of 200-2,000 keywords; target the topic, not the keyword.

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