TripAdvisor

Lenny's Podcast · Sep 19

Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)

It merged hotels, cities and user reviews into one page per property, with no blog post per hotel. It is the example of programmatic SEO with a real use case.

Tips

• Use programmatic SEO only when there is scale and a real use case▶ 1:17:27SurveyMonkey had a fat head of about 100 templates but not a long tail of 10,000.

Lenny's Podcast · Nov 5

Mastering product strategy and growing as a PM | Maggie Crowley (Toast, Drift, TripAdvisor)

Crowley's rotation program put her on four teams in two years, and she left thinking she was good.

Lenny's Podcast · Jun 15

Leveraging growth advisors, mastering SEO, and honing your craft | Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta)

Luc was VP of growth and GM here after selling his company to it, and it was his learning ground for building an SEO playbook. Its user-generated pages are an example of the large-page SEO bucket.

Tips

• Treat SEO as two buckets and match the tactic to each▶ 45:29TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Thumbtack and LinkedIn fit the large-page bucket.

Lenny's Podcast · Jan 19

How to build your product strategy stack | Ravi Mehta (Tinder, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Outpace)

Its strategy was to make trip planning happen on its own site, since usage was interleaved with Google searches. Optimizing for bookings in the moment pushed people past planning and undermined the strategy; the strategy doc also needed wireframes, and a rotational PM program was built here.

Tips

• Make the strategy doc incomplete without wireframes▶ 24:43Used for Tripadvisor trip planning, a problem several startups and Google had not nailed.
• Let strategy, not metrics alone, decide what goes on the roadmap▶ 46:00Usage was interleaved with Google visits, and short-term booking optimizations leapfrogged users past planning.

Lenny's Podcast · Dec 1

The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Analysis showed it repeatedly outperformed eBay and others abroad. Luke Levesque ran its SEO and answered Ethan's questions, saving him from running tests.

Tips

• Ask the SEO lead at a company that succeeded what worked▶ 1:05:05Ethan reached TripAdvisor's SEO lead for an international SEO strategy and got answers that saved him testing.