This article is indebted to the growth strategies devised and implemented by Graphite – where I recently wrapped up a stint as a Growth Lead. This is my attempt to collect my learnings about SEO from my time there so they don’t atrophe in my brain.
Traditional SEO
Traditional SEO is a lazy term – because what the heck does that even mean? – but I’m going to use it anyway as a useful counterpoint to the growth/product-led SEO approach the rest of the blog post will lay out.
Traditional SEO is focused on “fixes”. The output of a typical “SEO audit” will feature a shopping list of things on a website that need fixing in order to improve its SEO. Typically, not much guidance is given as to how the fixes will impact the site’s SEO, just that they will. The implication – though, again, not often explicitly stated – is that by working through these fixes the site might see traffic improvements but will generally be better positioned to take advantage of users’ searches and not have any unforced errors.
In other words, these audits are less a strategy roadmap outlining how the site can increase traffic and by how much but rather a defensive checklist of items so the organization can feel better about the SEO-ness of their site.
Working in-house, I was often taken aback at how much of a box-checking exercise SEO seemed to be painted as by internal stakeholders. Instead of seeing SEO as a lever for growth, it was something to check off – to gain the approval of. Conversations often centered around questions like, “we’re going to do X initiative on our site, are there any issues with this from an SEO standpoint? No? OK, great, thanks bye!”
This is bad and ignores the repeatable, measurable strategies and tactics that consistently work in SEO and instead replaces it with a hands-off, “it depends” mindset.
Growth/Product-led SEO
Conversely, traditional/growth/product-led SEO rejects an “it depends” mindset. Instead, it focuses on ruthlessly prioritizing SEO initiatives that practioners know (or are at least as confident as they can be) are going to have impact. Usually this confidence arises from similar initiatives having impact on other sites in the past.
Generally, if you aren’t confident an initiative is going to have discernible, measurable impact then you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
SEO tactics that are impactful
There are a lot of things you can do and call it SEO. But there is a much smaller set of things you should be doing.
Improve internal linking
The vast majority of websites have poor internal linking. As a general rule, if you want a page to rank, you should aim to have at least 8-10 internal links pointing to that page. Having more won’t be impactful but having less is likely leaving traffic on the table. Getting these links can be achieved through a combination of contextual, in-copy links (hard to scale) and internal linking modules (easier to scale).
Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO probably warrants its own blog post. Generally, the idea is to create a significant set of indexable pages at scale to satisfy a specific user intent. For example, an eCommerce website may programmatically build out category pages to rank for granular queries they have the product set to support – i.e. a page for “scarves” and another page for “red scarves”.
This can have many applications – from eCommerce to editorial content – but practitioners should be aware that programmatic pages they create successfully meet users’ search intent and do not veer into being spammy or a set of gateway pages.
Editorial SEO
This is traditional blog post creation. The key here is selecting the right topics – finding topics that satisfy the sweet spot of:
- Your site has existing topical authority
- Users are searching at a decent volume
- Competition for the ranking for the topics is at an achievable level
This approach probably warrants its own blog post but however many blog posts you are writing, you should probably be writing more. This enables you to learn from what’s working
Some schema
Most schema markup is low impact. The notable exceptions to this are product schema and FAQ schema (though Google’s recent announcement that they’ll be showing less FAQ snippets in search results will likely lessen the impact of implementing that schema type).
Some technical SEO
Most technical SEO activities fall under the bucket of being low impact. If you work in SEO, you’ve no doubt seen various 100 page technical audits full of granular recommendations – things like “38 meta descriptions on your site are too long”.
The vast majority of these fixes have no discernible impact on the traffic of a site. Instead of clogging up engineering teams with these laundry lists, SEOs should prioritize fixes that enable search engines to better crawl and render content.
Activities that are commonly done by SEO people which are low impact
A handful of things that are low-impact for SEO:
- Core Web Vitals
- Schema that isn’t FAQ or product markup
- E-E-A-T
- A lot of technical SEO updates
Resources
Some additional resources that are helpful:
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