SEO for CEOs

Ira Ko -

What you need to know in one email.

What is SEO

Google wants to answer people's questions. If your website content does that well, Google ranks you higher. Google calls this Topical Authority and has a secret recipe to calculate this.

Some people focus heavily on reverse engineering this recipe; it's a waste of time.

Instead, find out what your customers in your niche or industry are likely to search for. Write content that matches the need, and repeat the cycle. Capture niches that you can win, and compound topical authority over time.

Here is the original
LinkedIn post re:
getting to the first result of Google.

Tactics

I've since broken these out into separate articles:

  1. Keyword Research to First Draft
  2. Content Outlining

Compounded growth over time

Figure out what your target customer/audience is looking for. Write articles in the language Google understands to surface pain + solution. Acquire users.

Rinse and repeat this process. There are tools that you can buy to automate each step. My SEO stack is: Ahrefs, Header Scraper, Clearscope, Upwork, Google Search Console.

  • Keyword research: Ahrefs, SEMRush
  • Header research: my tool, SEO Minion, ContentHarmony
  • Outlining: Clearscope
  • Writing: Upwork
  • CMS: Contentful, WordPress, whatever your client uses
  • Measurement: Google Search Console
  • Pipeline: Sheets, Asana, Trello

tl;dr

For CEOs, CMOs, agencies:

  • The point of SEO is to help customers with high pain (which means high intent) find your company on their own accord. It's the IKEA way of doing sales.
  • SEO takes time, so it must be done with a long term approach. It's hard to "test" SEO or squeeze ROI out of it in the short run.
  • Start small and specific. Get quick wins. And then blog post / cross post with partners, VCs and systematize using the above tech stack to scale.