refoundai SEO Growth Strategy
Turn organic search into a scalable acquisition engine using programmatic data and systematic experimentation.
Help the user with seo growth strategy using insights from 9 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.
How to Help
- Audit and Validation - Identify whether your target audience uses search for discovery and if you have the unique data required to compete.
- Programmatic Design - Help structure 'Mad Libs' style templates that use internal data to generate thousands of high-value landing pages.
- Experiment Setup - Guide the creation of a page-level bucketing framework to test title tags, content, and internal linking changes.
- AI Adaptation - Reorient content toward mid-funnel queries and multiple authoritative mentions to capture traffic from LLMs and AI Overviews.
Core Principles
Shift to Mid-Funnel Queries
Eli Schwartz: "And now you're in the mid-funnel and that's where SEO begins to matter. So the reason why I think this disruption is so big is because the journey changes, the discovery changes. So whereas before if you were a travel site and you were able to rank on best beach vacation within two hours of the United States, that's your ranking result."
As AI summaries satisfy high-level discovery, businesses must focus on deeper research queries where users need detailed comparisons and specific data.
SEO as a Product Feature
Eli Schwartz: "Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question. Product people need to think about how do we position this to the user that is not going to find out about this from a social channel, that's not going to be attracted by an ad?"
Search visibility should be led by product managers and integrated into the core product positioning rather than treated as a separate content exercise.
Validate Search Intent First
Eli Schwartz: "Product people need to think about how do we position this to the user that is not going to find out about this from a social channel, that's not going to be attracted by an ad? This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. If you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO."
Before investing, verify that your specific target audience actually uses search for discovery and that you can identify their exact intent.
Frequency Over Single Ranking
Ethan Smith: "In order to win something like what's the best website builder? At Google, they would win if their blue link showed up first. But that's not the case in the LLM, because the LLM is summarizing many citations, and so you need to get mentioned as many times as possible."
Success in the age of AI search depends on being mentioned across multiple authoritative sources like Reddit and YouTube to influence LLM summaries.
Track LLM Conversion Rates
Ethan Smith: "Significantly more valuable. Webflow saw a 6X conversion rate difference between LLM traffic and Google Search traffic."
Traffic from AI engines often converts at a higher rate because users arrive deeper into their research journey compared to traditional search.
Identify Content Gaps
From "Content-driven growth": "Research topics where searchers are underserved, and create content that delivers compelling, valuable, and differentiated value to those searchers."
Building a successful editorial program requires finding specific niches where existing search results fail to provide high-quality or differentiated value.
Bucket by Page Level
From "How to run SEO experiments": "When you’re running an SEO experiment you’re testing on the page level. Thus, you need to have an experimentation system that can do your bucketing on the page level."
SEO experiments must group by URL rather than user to ensure search engine crawlers receive a consistent experience for every crawl.
Leverage Unique Data Advantages
From "Winning at SEO": "Instead, you want to create pages that capture a specific and valuable user intent. SEO isn’t about capturing the top keywords — it’s about capturing the long-tail of keywords. Sure, you won’t catch the white whale of “flowers”, but if you can capture all of the keywords that follow a common formula such as “{flower type} for sale in {location}”, you’re going to be capturing valuable, high converting traffic and see a much higher ROI."
Target long-tail keyword formulas where your proprietary business data provides a distinct advantage that incumbents cannot easily replicate.
Templates & Frameworks
- Four Types of SEO-Driven Product-Led Marketing (Product-led marketing) - A taxonomy of four organic search strategies specifically designed for PLG products
- SEO Experimentation Framework (Page-Level A/B Testing) (How to run SEO experiments) - A framework for running SEO experiments by bucketing at the page level instead of the user level, measuring organic traffic as the single success metric, and us
- Programmatic SEO Strategy Framework (Winning at SEO) - A three-question framework for building a scalable SEO strategy from scratch, designed to help early-stage companies compete with incumbents.
- Ethan's 4-Step Internal Linking Strategy Guide (Ethan Smith: The power of internal linking for SEO) - A step-by-step process for building an internal linking strategy from scratch, applicable to any website looking to improve SEO
- Programmatic SEO Page Wireframe (Petal to the Metal Example) (Winning at SEO) - A sketch/wireframe template for designing a programmatic SEO page that captures long-tail keywords using templatized data.
- Long-Tail Keyword Formula Approach (Winning at SEO) - Method for identifying and targeting long-tail keyword formulas instead of head terms.
- AI Content Creation Usage Guide (Ethan Smith: The power of internal linking for SEO) - Guidelines for where AI tools like ChatGPT should and should not be used in the content creation workflow
- On-Page SEO Fundamentals Checklist (Winning at SEO) - Five essential on-page SEO features every page needs to rank well in Google.
See references/artifacts.md for the full list with details.
Questions to Help Users
- "Does your target audience use search engines for self-discovery journeys rather than social media or ads?"
- "What unique data points does your business possess that could be turned into thousands of useful web pages?"
- "Is your SEO strategy led by a product manager who treats search visibility as a core requirement?"
- "Are you able to bucket your SEO experiments by canonical URL rather than by individual user?"
- "How frequently is your product mentioned across authoritative community platforms like Reddit or YouTube?"
- "Do your current title tags contain high-intent keywords or are they being truncated by search engines?"
Common Mistakes to Flag
- User-Level Experimentation - Search engine crawlers need a consistent experience across the site and cannot be bucketed like standard users in A/B tests.
- Relying on Vanity Traffic - Raw volume is becoming less relevant than how the search channel drives actual business outcomes and deep-funnel conversions.
- Mass AI-Generated Landing Pages - Scaling with 100 percent AI content without unique human perspective leads to being flagged as spam by modern search and answer engines.
- Ignoring Internal Link Pathways - Without a robust internal linking structure, crawlers cannot efficiently discover, index, or distribute authority to your deeper pages.
Deep Dive
For all 35 sourced insights from 9 guests, see references/guest-insights.md
Related Skills
- Growth Model
- Acquisition Channels
- User Onboarding Activation
- Retention Engagement