Zillow

Lenny's Podcast · Sep 19

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

It merges government and comparison data, realtor photos, and neighborhood and school data into programmatic pages. Hand-writing 500 million property pages at $1,000 each would be cost prohibitive, and technical SEO matters at its scale.

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.
• Spend on technical SEO only if your site is huge▶ 1:34:35Agencies like to sell audits and page speed work because they are easy deliverables.

Lenny's Podcast · Aug 4

Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)

Zillow has huge reach among people browsing and starting a home search. It once launched a similar offering to Opendoor's, then became a partner, bringing the audience while Opendoor brings the transaction.

Tips

• Stay competition aware but customer focused▶ 50:50Opendoor now partners with Zillow, which brings audience while Opendoor provides transaction services.

Lenny's Podcast · Mar 30

Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Reddit, Grubhub)

Real-time home values turned a dull listing site into a sticky product, giving buyers and sellers the same reason to return. Casey calls it a genuine innovation that others rarely pulled off.

Lenny's Podcast · Dec 1

The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

Its market is mostly programmatic address pages, and SEO is worth about a billion dollars to it, so it should simply spend the money. At its scale SEO needs a large team.

Tips

• Pick editorial SEO unless your queries need programmatic pages▶ 20:50