Best of Growth Memo

It’s easy to get lost in wild speculations with SEO, but good strategies and tactics are always the results of reasoning from first principles.

SEO doesn’t work the same way it used to work 5 years ago. These days, we have to test everything. Let me explain why.

Google only confirmed 10 SEO ranking factors publicly in its history. In this article, I narrow in on what’s true and what’s speculation, how important each SEO ranking factor is, and the evidence we have for it.

Knowing the fundamental problems in an industry helps you truly understand it. In this article, I outline the 5 fundamental problems in SEO.

In this article, I explain 12 different types ways to solve traffic plateaus.

Predicting SEO revenue is one of the biggest problems in SEO - and one of the most crucial to solve! In this article, I show you how to project SEO traffic and revenue.

In this article, I challenge the classic approach to keyword research and propose a new approach.

In this article, I explain how to build custom click curves for better traffic predictions and outlier detection.

Over my 10 year career, I was lucky to observe the skills and strategies that distinguish successful in-house SEOs from the unsuccessful ones. You read that right, in-house SEO is a skill. Those who master it drive rapid growth. Those who don’t are left behind.

There is a method to (re)structuring an SEO team. In this article, I explain the 5 guiding principles to keep in mind.

User Intent has become one of the most important concepts in modern SEO. In this guide, I explain what it is, how to identify it, and how to optimize for it.

Fragmented User Intent describes keywords that serve several intents. This post explains how to create a model to track and understand that.

SERP Volatility follows distinct patterns that can change overnight. Learn how in this post!

Topical Authority is still a mystical concept, partly because we don’t have a good way to measure it. In this post, I want to offer a method to quantify Topic Authority.

Be careful with the concept of Topical Authority when arguing for SEO recommendations. The concept doesn’t stand on a robust logic.

This guide to internal linking shows what really works and busts the myths. It comes with lots of best practices, strategies, and examples

In this post, I’m presenting an updated lite version of my TIPR model for internal linking optimization.

Internal link optimization is incomplete without factoring in backlinks. In this article, I introduce a model called TIPR that helps you to optimize the internal link graph of your site.

Opposite to common belief, internal linking best practices are not commonly applicable but vary by site type and business model. This article shows what model to apply in which case.

This article is a case study that shows how Google ranks new content for different keywords to test its quality.

Google Search Volume is inherently flawed. In this article, I show some tools you can use as a replcaement

User intent is one of the most important parts of Search today. In this article, I explain how to identify it at scale.

Search volume is a double-edged sword. On one side, it guides our strategy. On the other side, it’s so fundamentally flawed that we should handle it with extreme care. In this article, I explain why and how.

Glossaries as a traffic-driver were forgotten like the Jedi in The Force Awakens. But now, they’re making a comeback.

Bayesian a/b testing for SEO can help you discover factors that move the needle, but you first need to learn how to set a good test up.

Organic traffic fluctuations can be frustrating and induce a lot of stress. They can occur naturally due to algorithm updates or be the result of changes on a website.

Product solution pages are the unsung heroes of SaaS SEO. They are easy to forget but, as I will show you in a moment, they can drive substantial traffic. I dug out some of the best examples and will explain what they do extraordinarily well so you can learn from it.

This article seeks to answer the question of how we can use entities to optimize content today and how we, as SEOs, should look at them.

In this article, I explain how videos can help organic visibility and dispel common myths.

Everybody knows great content is important but what makes “great content” great? That’s the question I answer (from an SEO perspective) in this article.

Content exists on a commodity spectrum. When it’s easy to replicate, you have a problem. When it’s differentiated, it’s a business moat.

Undifferentiated content is a commodity. In this post, I explain how to make your content stand out and irreplicable.

Content-Market Fit is the point at which your content meets and exceeds your audience’s expectations. Here is how you get there.

Recent advances in machine learning put search engines and the web in front of new challenges.

With the release of the Helpful Content Update emphasizes the importance of human-created content. But why shouldn’t some content be created by AI?

At the hand of Bankrate, Cnet and Creditcards.com, we can now better understand the impact of AI content on SEO.

Early adopters play a crucial role in achieving PMF and growth at scale. In this post, I’ll show you why they are so important, how to get them, and what to do with them.

Certain types of companies can build self-reinforcing growth loops on organic search. In this post, I explain the mechanics and constraints of SEO Growth Loops.

Slack follows the classic Land & Expand handbook. In this article, I explain how and what sets Slack apart from Atlassian.

This article deals with the problem of finding the growth lever after the initial growth phase.

In this post, I explain the land and expand model at the hand of Asana.

Affiliate is a hard business, but there is a company that figured it out at scale and is on track to drive $1.6b in revenue from it next year. The big question of this article is “how do they grow sites so successfully?”

In this article, I explore 9 Growth ideas that could turn Twitter around after Elon Musk’s acquisition.

Airbnb crushed the third quarter of 2022. Bookings reached almost 100M and increased +25% year-over-year with a +42% improvement in net income margin. On the call, CFO David E. Stephenson called out a strategic pivot (bolding mine): In terms of the active bookers, taking a step back and look at

There are really only four customer acquisition channels: SEO, online ads, sales, and virality.

Wordle’s virality is no accident, it’s engineered. In this post, I explain the growth mechanics of the game that was just acquired for a 7-figure sum.

Innovation and best practices are at odds, but only when we obsess over the outcome. When we focus on the process, they are complementary.

There are two types of sites: content and inventory-driven sites. For the latter, you basically need to develop great product features.

SEO is full of Red Herrings, misleading assumptions due to cognitive biases. In this case study, I show what this can look like.

Aggregators and Integrators have fundamentally different approaches to Growth. Learn what they are and how to leverage them in this post!

Integrators scale SEO very differently than aggregators. In this post, I explain the basic SEO strategies.

Some integrators have the potential to grow with aggregator strategies. In this article, I explain how to find out whether that’s true for your site.

Every business grows with one of several SEO strategy archetypes. In this article, you learn what they are and how to leverage them.

Creating an SEO strategy is not easy and hardly ever talked about. This article provides a detailed step-by-step manual to put an effective SEO strategy together.

In this post, I highlight 5 examples of product-led growth and how they are different from each other.

Wish you could get more traffic from Google? Half the battle is understanding WHAT you need to fix on your site. This is the power of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools! A cost-friendlier alternative to expensive audits. AWT shows which keywords your pages rank for, how Google sees your content, and what

Organic Search traffic is a great gift to many businesses, but it can also be a drug that’s hard to get off of.

A good SEO strategy has both: offense and defense. In this post, I explain how to balance and prioritize the two.

Platform Confluence is the strategy of bringing several apps and sites in an ecosystem together to improve user experience and monetiation.

Healthline passed WebMD in SEO performance. In this article, I dissect what drove this tectonic shift.

This case study highlights Instacart’s strategic SEO choices and how it could unlock new growth.

Substack is a platform that has an opportunity to tap into an aggregator play by adapting its SEO strategy.

Google’s HCU update punished low-quality AI content after all. In this case study, I show why and how to detect it.

In this Growth Memo, I explain how Adobe unlocked new organic Growth after a period of flat traffic.

Tik Tok is not a social network but competes with Instagram, Snap, Facebook, & Co for attention. Besides their speedy growth, their SEO strategy fails. In this post, I explain why.

Some products are highly trust-sensitive and therefore a bit trickier to grow. In this article, I want to show you how to do that based on DocuSign, a digital signature SaaS company that went public in April 2018 at a $6b valuation.

Airbnb’s new categories present an opportunity to grow non-branded traffic, but unfortunately, the company misses an important step.

Uber Eats is a smart product expansion but also a smart SEO aggregator play. In this article, I explain how it works and why it might have saved Uber.

BNPL providers like Klarna, Affirm, or Afterpay follow specific organic growth strategies that slightly differ and might decide between winner and loser in this winner-takes-it-all game.

Nike is a great example of retail brands that use SEO to accelerate their business. In this case, I explain how Nike uses SEO to accelerate its online growth.

Pinterest processes more searches than DuckDuckGo and is the #1 destination for inspirational searches. Compared to Google, Pinterest has significant competitive advantages in the way it serves search results.

Every announcement at Google I/O 2022 had AI at its heart. No surprise for an “AI-first” company but what used to be a vision in 2021 finally becomes reality.

In this post, I look at thousands of keywords to understand the differences between shorthead and longtail keywords.

Even though Google is still growing at a rapid pace, it needs to think about where future growth will come from and where to find competitive advantages against Amazon.

The growth and diversity of the consumer landscape has been stunted by the chokehold of a few nation-state tech players. As a result, the B2B space is booming but user acquisition comes at a price.

Tik Tok recently surpassed Youtube in engagement. As a result, ad monetization on Youtube has slowed down. What does this mean for SEO?

Google’s market share is not black and white. For a more nuanced view, I analyzed the market share of 30 Google products in different markets.

Google is the most successful startup in history, at least based on revenue growth.

Google’s most recent Q3 earnings call shows that advertising is no longer a sustainable business model on the internet.

Google’s index size is not as straightforward as it might seem and that’s important to understand for SEOs.

In this Growth Memo, I write about the Freemium business model, and how Google uses it to drive revenue.

Idea: Power Laws, Pareto Principle Other names: Pareto Law, Pareto Distribution, Scale-free distribution, MatthewEffect Summary of the idea: Many things in life have a disproportionate relationshipbetween cause and effect. Examples of the idea: 20% of the people own 80% of the land, Just 1.4 pe…

Bayesian Thinking is the constant updating of our beliefs based on prior data and the best way to reason toward the truth.

Mental models help you make better decisions and solve problems. In this post, I explain why and what my top 5 mental models are.

Systems thinking can help us see the bigger picture, make better decisions, and identify patterns.