- [Neil] You look at all these SEO tools out there,
whether it's Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz,
and you type in a keyword,
like I typed in marketing tools here,
and you'll see a SEO difficulty number
which tells you how hard it is
to rank for that keyword on Google.
Now, this data is pulled through backlinks,
but how can you figure out
if a keyword is really easy or not to rank for
without going through all the effort
of promoting the content?
Hey, everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down
how you can increase your traffic through sleeper content.
(bright music)
Now, before we get started, make sure you like this video.
And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
As I mentioned earlier,
if you use a SEO tool and you type in any keyword,
whether it's marketing tools
or even just something like marketing,
you'll see how difficult it is to rank for a keyword.
And some of these keywords are really easy to rank for.
Some of them are much harder to rank for.
But does that mean that you can't rank for these keywords
if you don't have a ton of backlinks?
No, that's not the case,
and the reason being is Google uses many factors.
Links are just one aspect of it.
And what I'm going to teach you today is
how you can get more search traffic
without putting tons of effort through sleeper content.
So let's head on over to the neilpatel.com website.
As you can see here, here's my homepage.
Scroll down, a little bit about me.
And then now let's go to the blog
where you can find all my content.
Now I'm going to show you my content.
I want you to see what's off, okay.
Here's one post,
"How to Use Customer Reviews in Images and Video Ads,"
one comment.
Another one, "How to Use YouTube Ads to Grow Your Business,"
97 comments, much better.
"How to Create a Free Google Website For Your Business,"
zero comments.
"How to Create Unique Gift Guides for E-Commerce Content,"
zero comments.
"How to Get Backlinks to a New Website with No Money,"
306 comments.
So as you go and you scroll down,
you'll see a lot of have zero comments,
some have some comments, and some have a lot.
Some have little to no comments, like 12 or 8.
But why is that?
Why are some posts doing extremely well and others aren't?
Well, I'm going to share a little secret with you.
The posts that tend to have a lot of comments I promote.
I push on social media, like Facebook, Instagram,
videos, and my live sessions.
I'll cross-link to them more.
I even do email blasts, push notification blasts.
I do a ton to promote them
so that way people get to know that content,
they want to share that content,
and hopefully it ranks higher.
But you can only send so many email blasts in a day.
You can only send so many push notification blasts.
You can only promote so many posts on Facebook
on your fan page before your audience gets irritated
that you're sharing five pieces of content a day.
So let me tell you a little secret on what I do.
I create a ton of sleeper content.
This is an example of one,
"How to Use Customer Reviews in Images and Video Ads."
Here's another one,
"How to Create a Free Google Website for Your Business."
Let's actually check out this post.
It's pretty detailed. It's thorough.
Thousands of words.
Keep scrolling.
Has a comment section but no comments.
And let's say I want to go after free Google website
as a keyword.
People always look at Google for a Google website.
Lot of results.
Let's see, page one.
Nope, not here.
All Google results there or mainly Google domains.
Let's go to page two.
Nope, not there, Wix, website.com.
Nope, I'm not there.
Page three, nope.
Ah, there you go, I'm at the bottom of page three.
All right, so this post is recently published,
has zero comments.
If this post starts getting to page two, right,
it's at the bottom of page three, then I'll rework it.
I'll cross-link. I'll promote it more.
I'll try to build links by manually outreaching to sites.
I'll push it on social media.
I may even do a email blast.
But what I'm doing is I'm creating tons of content
and publishing it.
But most of my content that I publish like that,
this is what I call sleeper content,
which if you're publishing it,
you're not really telling too many people about it,
you're not marketing it, it doesn't all rank.
A lot of these pages that I'm writing content on
aren't ranking in the top 10 results
or top 10 pages on Google.
But a good portion of them are,
and all I'm doing is just publishing content.
The moment it gets to page two,
I'll start doing more marketing
to try to get it to page one.
And really what I'm looking at is not if it hits page two.
I'm looking to see if it hits the top of page two
or bottom of page one.
Now, there's some posts that I've published.
Let's see, I'm going to scroll down.
And let's see, subscriber count, right?
Let's see where I work for subscriber count.
Subscriber count.
Okay, so we can go to subscriber count.
Not in page one.
All right, I'm on top of page two, decent position,
or more so middle to top, third spot on page two.
The moment that gets higher on page one,
I'll start pushing it, because as you can see here,
based on the Ubersuggest Chrome extension,
it gets 22,200 monthly searches in the United States.
Not bad.
So I'm doing this for a lot of keywords,
and some of them are easier to work for, some of them aren't.
So let's Google subscriber count.
And if I Google subscriber count,
all right, it's getting some searches.
57 is SEO difficulty, so it's medium difficulty, not bad.
But that's my model.
And sometimes I don't rank, sometimes I do.
But when I start ranking, I push harder.
And what I want to recommend to you is
every article you write,
even if you're targeting new keywords,
whether it's difficult or not,
don't worry about the SEO difficulty number.
Just publish content.
See what happens.
And if you do this,
you'll find tons of new keyword opportunities
that you can potentially rank for.
With a little bit of effort, you can get them to page one
and ideally to the top of page one over time.
You just have to be patient with this.
And when you publish this content,
typically you should see some results
within three to four weeks.
And the ones that do really well and have high volume
based on the Ubersuggest data,
those are the ones that after getting some traction,
send the email blast out.
Do a push notification blast.
Share it on the social web.
All those little things can really help you.
But don't waste your time promoting all your content
that you're creating when it may not get any traction.
Wait for some traction first, and then go and push after.
That's what I would do if I wanted to get more SEO traffic,
and that's what you should do.
I've been doing this strategy for years.
It works really well.
And you probably haven't seen a lot of this content
because I don't push it out in email blasts
or social media mentions, but it works really well,
and that's how I've grown my traffic
to millions of visitors a month.
So let me know your thoughts.
Curious if you like this strategy.
If you have questions, leave a comment below.
If you need help with this strategy
and you just want my team doing it for you,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital.
Thank you very much.