SEO Fundamentals on Lenny's Podcast
Key Takeaways
When to begin investing in SEO — and the signals that mean you're ready (or not yet).
How to hire the right SEO team for the stage you're at, not the stage you wish you were at.
Topics are the new keywords. Build your content strategy around topic clusters, not isolated head terms.
The exact heuristics and tools Graphite uses to design and execute SEO strategy at scale.
How to get executive buy-in for SEO and keep projects moving when SEO sits across product, engineering, and content.
Summary
Ethan Smith — Co-Founder & CEO of Graphite — joins Lenny Rachitsky for a foundational walkthrough of SEO: how to think about it, when to start, how to staff it, and how to actually execute. The episode originally aired in December 2022 and remains the clearest single primer on the discipline.
Topics are the new keywords.
Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite
Ethan covers when and how to start investing in SEO, how to hire the right team, and how to build an SEO growth engine from zero to one. He breaks down how topics are the new keywords, provides the exact heuristics and tools to successfully create and execute an SEO strategy, and goes deep on how to get buy-in and ensure that projects move forward without delay.
Built for founders, operators, and PMs who own growth but don't yet have an SEO playbook — and for SEO practitioners who want to see how Graphite frames the same problems they work on every day.
