- There are over 200 factors in Google's algorithm.
Wouldn't it be great if you could rank higher on Google
without learning each of those factors?
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down a minimalist approach to SEO.
The only three things you should do every week
to get traffic.
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Before we get started,
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If you're overwhelmed and don't have lots of time to invest,
it's important to know where to focus your efforts.
Sure, it would be great to do everything,
but that's not always realistic.
And instead of doing everything that you read online
about SEO, let's see the activities that will produce
the most impact on your business.
So number one, optimizing existing content.
Now optimizing existing content
is all about finding new keywords,
sitting on page two and three and optimizing for them.
What you also want to end up doing is
going to Google Search Console, and then looking to see
which pages are getting the most impressions,
but the least amount of clicks.
And within there, you want to click on those pages
and look to see which keywords
are getting a lot of impressions that are on page two
or bottom of page one that you may not be talking about
too much within your content.
And then what you want to do is update the content
to include those keywords.
You may also want to include those keywords
within your title tag and your meta description.
The next thing when it comes to updating content
is deleting your underperforming content.
See, just because you write content
and you generate a lot of links to it,
it doesn't mean that it's a good piece of content.
It doesn't mean that it's going to rank.
It doesn't mean that it's going to get social shares.
Just some content, even though people link to it,
they just don't care to read about it.
And that's the harsh reality of content marketing.
A lot of times you write content
that you don't think is amazing but other people love it
and they link to it like crazy.
So you want to take your underperforming content
and you'll want to delete those pages.
And if it's related to any other article,
you'll want to do a 301 redirect
from the old URL to the newer article.
The next thing when it comes to updating content
is consolidating content.
If you have three articles on the beginner's guide to SEO,
the ultimate guide to SEO and, you know,
the all-in-one guide to SEO.
I'm making it up as you can see.
So if you take those three articles,
they're pretty much just about SEO and how it works.
It's just different ways of saying
the beginner's guide to SEO or the guide to SEO.
And what you'll want to do is consolidate them
because when you have multiple conflicting articles,
Google won't know which one to rank number one
or on page one or which one to not rank.
And a lot of times you'll see your pages flip flopping,
and you'll see for a certain keyword that different pages
will rank on page one or page two.
And you're just like, wait, what the heck?
And that's because you're sending
conflicting signals to Google.
If you combine those articles into one,
the best piece of all of them,
you take the URL that's performing the best,
that has the most backlinks as well.
You do 301 redirect from the old ones to the new one.
And what you'll want to do is update all internal links
going to any of the older URLs and put them to a new one.
If you do that, what you'll find is
you'll send less conflicting signals to Google
and you'll start ranking higher, not just for that page,
but your whole site.
When we're also talking about updating content,
I also want to discuss refreshing content
that brings traffic to your website.
There's a lot of content that is already doing well
and is generating traffic on your site.
But what you'll find is
when you log to Google Search Console,
some of these articles will drop in traffic over time,
or they'll continually rise.
The ones that drop, you'll want to Google
the terms that you were getting more track from before
and see who's ranking above you.
What are they doing that you're not?
And I want you to fix that by updating the content
on your site to make it better than all the competitors.
Also, if your article's continually doing well,
what are the cures
that are driving you this increase in traffic?
What could you do to even make it more related
to those cures and better
so that way you can get even more traffic?
Now, the next tactic that I want you to focus on
is doing competitive analysis to guide your content efforts.
Here's what I mean by this, right?
So we already discussed updating content.
Now, when we're talking about competitive analysis,
what topics are your competition writing about?
How in depth are they?
What are their top rank pages?
What could, you know, you be doing to be better than them
when it comes to creating content?
And you want to go more in depth than them
and better than them.
So what I want you to do is head over to Ubersuggest,
and I want you to type in your domain.
Now, when you type in your domain,
you'll get a report of your top pages, your traffic,
the keywords you're ranking for,
but you'll also see in the left hand navigation,
an option to look at competing domains.
So you want to end up looking at all the other sites
that are similar to you.
And what this Ubersuggest report does is
it shows you all the similar keywords that you rank for,
that other people also rank for.
And it also shows you the keyword gaps.
Those same websites that rank for similar keywords,
they rank for keywords that you don't rank for.
And Ubersuggest will show you this.
And I want you to use that report
to now come up with a list of new keywords
to create content around.
In addition to that, take those competitor URLs
and look up their top pages in Ubersuggest.
This report breaks down their most popular pages
from top to bottom.
It shows you who's linking to them
and it shows you those keywords
that each of those top pages are ranking for.
This will also give you new content ideas
in case you don't cover any of the topics
that they're generating a lot of traffic for
that you're not generating any traffic for.
And this will give you
ideas of what type of content to create.
The last tactic that I want you to end up spending time on
is creating new content.
So we talked about updating your old content,
doing competitive analysis.
Now let's talk about creating new content.
Content clusters around keywords
that your website has the potential to rank for.
That's what I mean.
So if you go back to Ubersuggest, you type in a keyword,
let's say I go after SEO.
In Ubersuggest in the keyword ideas report,
there's actually an option
where you can actually put in your domain name
and it'll adjust the keywords
that you have the ability to rank for.
Now this is important
because even if you want to rank for a term like credit cards
or online gambling or SEO,
some of those keywords are just so difficult
that it may not be the right term to rank for right now,
or try to go after, but years from now,
or maybe even six months from now,
it could be the right opportunity,
but you want to focus your efforts right now on keywords
that you have the potential to rank for,
or else you're going to be wasting time writing content
that's going to generate very little to no traffic.
So once you put in your domain name,
Ubersuggest will then filter the results.
So you want keywords you can rank for
that are going to be much easier
and those are the ones that you should start
creating content around and create content clusters.
What I mean by this is,
you know, if I was writing content around SEO,
I'll talk about SEO, on page SEO, speeding up your website,
link building, creating content, generating social shares,
broken backlink building.
I would go so in depth around the topic
that Google will be like, wow, this neilpatel.com
is really the authority when it comes to SEO
or digital marketing, so let's rank them higher.
Now, if you need help with any of these three strategies,
plus the other 197 plus other factors,
you can, you know, always leave a comment below,
I'm here to help.
Or if you just want my team to do all this for you,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital,
where we're here to help you grow your traffic.
If you enjoyed the video, like it, share,
tell people about it.
Thank you for watching.