- SEO gurus are teaching you tactics that work,
but in general, they're still giving you bad advice.
Hey, everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today, I'm going to break down
why some SEO gurus have been lying to you
to your face this whole time.
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In most cases, SEO gurus give you tactical advice
instead of strategical,
long-term execution on what works best.
In isolation, yes, each tactic can help you,
but it only takes you so far.
If you look at the biggest companies who dominate SEO,
they don't dominate it because they purely focus on SEO.
Instead, they dominate because
they've built a good product or service.
Google wants to show you what's best for users, right?
It's not about what's the most backlinked sites.
Just think about yourself right now.
Whenever you do a search on Google, are you like,
"Hmm, I can see why this site should be number one.
"They have a million backlinks."
You don't think about that,
let's just be honest with ourselves.
You do a search on Google, you click on a listing
because you think it's the most relevant
and it can help you out.
If it doesn't, you click the back button,
it doesn't matter if they have the best on-page SEO,
the best backlinks, you know, amazing-looking design.
You only care about, did it solve your problem,
and ideally as quick as possible,
and, did it give you what you want?
Now, you click on the number two result.
Now you click on the number three,
and you keep going down the list, and if everyone does that,
and eventually they figure out that
the fifth result is what solves their problems,
even if it has 1/10, 1/20, 1/50 of the backlinks,
it ranks higher.
So, the tactics that you're learning from SEO,
that people are teaching online, they're not wrong,
they will help with your rankings and traffic.
But if you want to build a big business, do well,
there's a few things you need to know.
One, you need to focus on your product or service.
Is your product or service amazing?
So amazing that people want to keep using it
over and over again?
You know, Larry Page once said,
"You know you could potentially
"be on to a multi-billion dollar business
"if someone has to use your product multiple times a day."
And that's true, if your product's so good
or your service is so good,
people have to use it on a regular basis,
and they keep telling people about it,
you're off to a good start of
creating a multi-billion dollar business.
Number two, you need to build a brand.
If you look at the term "shoes",
did you know a little bit more than
a million people a month are searching for the word "shoes"
each and every single month in the United States?
Nike, on the other hand,
some months gets five, six million searches.
More people are searching for Nike than shoes.
Yes, Nike creates products other than shoes
like jerseys or shorts,
but people really know Nike for their shoes, right?
You ask any kid they're like,
"I want to pair of Nike's because I'm going to run faster."
I don't know how true that is, depending on the shoe,
but you get the point, they built a brand.
And Google's looking at brand queries
because the bigger the brand for terms, you know,
or categories, they know that
that company is less likely to create fake news
so they're more likely to rank them higher
because people have an affinity towards that brand.
Whenever you do a search and you see something from Nike
over NeilsShoes.com,
they're not going to click on Neil Shoes,
although I would love it if you did,
although I don't really have a shoe site.
But you're going to click on Nike,
I would too, because of their brand
So focus on creating amazing product,
amazing service and build a good brand.
And the way you focus on building a good brand is
by going omnichannel, leveraging SEO, content marketing,
good product, good service, paid ads,
radio ads, television ads,
heck, my ad agency, NP Digital, we run television ads.
Not because television is amazing,
it's a great medium for me to reach more people
and it allows people to know more about my brand.
The third thing that I want you to do,
if you want to do well in the long run is
you need to keep experimenting.
Just because a marketer, or a guru, including me,
tells you something doesn't mean
that advice is going to hold true forever.
What works today may not work tomorrow.
For example, with one of my early startups,
we changed our log-in flow for our B2B analytics solution
to login with Google.
And we got a massive double digit increase in conversions.
But then, as we forced people to only use that
as a sign-in option, it still worked, but over time,
people started getting worried about privacy and security,
and even though we didn't do anything malicious,
it just wasn't us, it was the whole market,
consumers were like, "Hmm, login with Google, only option?
"I don't like this."
We actually started getting less conversions.
So then, we also give the option of login with Google
or sign up with your name and email.
And that boosted our conversions.
But when we did that test earlier on years ago,
it actually decreased our conversions.
And the reason being was back then
people didn't have privacy concerns, but now they do.
Even if you don't do anything malicious with people's data,
what works today may not work tomorrow.
So, you need to constantly run experiments.
And even if you find something that wins,
it may not win tomorrow so you got to rerun tests over time.
So, if you follow those three things,
you're going to do better in the long run.
Think about it, you need a holistic approach.
And if you need a holistic approach with your marketing,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital.
If you have any questions on your marketing strategy,
leave a comment below, let me know your marketing strategy.
What are you trying to do with SEO, or content, or paid?
What's working, what's not?
And I gladly will give you feedback for free
and tell you how to adjust things to get better results.
Now, keep in mind, once you adjust things,
right away, you're not going to see results
that you may be looking for.
Sometimes, it takes a week, a month, three months.
If it's a CRO tweak, sure, you'll see results right away.
But, for most marketing changes,
it can take months before you see results
so just make sure you're patient as well.
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