- But in general, when I look at my comment count right now,
we clean out all the spam.
We're at 106,000 comments.
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- Neil, what's the biggest impact on SEO?
- From all the data we've seen and tested,
we believe it's brands.
Now, here's what I mean by that.
So to go back, Eric Schmidt the ex-CEO of Google once said,
brands are the solution, they're not the problem, right?
It's how you sort out the good companies from the cesspool.
And I'm paraphrasing his quote,
but you guys get the point.
It's pretty much saying brands are important
and brands are a key factor in Google's rankings.
So, I once, over time I noticed a trend,
more and more people were typing in my domain name
into Google.
So my domain name is neilpatel.com
for one of my sites where people are typing in my name,
Neil Patel SEO, Neil Patel tools, Neil Patel Ubersuggest,
Neil Patel content marketing, et cetera
variations of my name.
And what we found is
if we didn't build links or anything, well
our brand spiked from PR or whatnot, and it spiked
for a month or two, all of our ranking skyrocketed.
And even when the PR went down
and the brand queries went down, our rankings maintained
or close to maintained to their peaks.
So we found that Google loves brands. Like, we've seen
and tested sites in different regions globally.
And even if you build links, you write the right content,
you're super thorough, we found that if you don't have
brand queries, you don't rank as high.
But if you have a ton of brand queries
and you barely have links or anything like that,
your ranking skyrockets.
- Absolutely. There's an algorithm change back in 2009,
that was a big brand update, I believe.
And since then, bigger brands have been getting a benefit.
Now, "bigger brands".
It doesn't necessarily mean you have to
be a bigger company, right?
- Yeah. You don't have to be a Nike or Wikipedia.
You just have to be a big brand
for the keywords you're trying to rank for.
And you don't have to be the biggest brand.
You just have to be somewhat of a brand.
Like, my brand queries suck compared to Nike
I get roughly a hundred thousand visitors a month
from people googling Neil Patel
even though my domain name's neilpatel.com.
But yeah, I still rank well, and so does Nike
but Nike probably gets a hundred thousand queries
every single minute.
- So brand queries, big impact on SEO.
You, I mean, you've told me this for, for years.
This is not a new thing.
So, what's surprising is why haven't more people done this,
right?
- Yeah. And you're doing a good job of it.
You do YouTube, you're on social media, you blog,
you speak at conferences, you build a brand.
And you do that whether it's personal or whether
it's corporate.
and just look at how much business you got
because of brand, not a lead, you have rankings
and get traffic to your site, but it also helps
generate business as well.
And you can do that for a corporate brand, and again
a personal brand, but very few people spend
time and energy into it.
- Yeah. I think it's one of the things I've seen you
over the last probably 15 years or so
continue to invest in, and now you have an ROI from it
but I remember the first seven, eight years
there was zero ROI.
And you spent tens of thousand dollars a month
on building a brand, and where others didn't.
But you spent a lot of money on brand
for those of folks who don't maybe don't spend money
or like maybe need a little bit of convincing,
I guess, what are some ways you can build
your brand up online?
- Yeah. So I stick with the rule of seven.
When someone sees your brand or hears
about it seven times and interacts with it seven times
they're much more likely to become a loyal follower.
Again, whether it's personal or corporate.
So, simple things that you can do
is, one, collect emails.
If you collect emails, anytime you update your content,
or have something new, like a YouTube video
you can always blast it out.
Two, you can do push notifications.
So, anytime someone comes to your site, have them subscribe.
Anytime you have new content or want to push out a message,
let them know. Three, leverage social media
all of the channels out there, because they believe that
you're not going to find someone on one channel
or another, but you know, if you leverage all of them
you'll get something. It's better than nothing.
Four, engage with people.
So like, like you mentioned, if someone leaves a comment
on your videos, you'll take the time to respond to them.
I think that's huge.
A lot of companies and people don't do that.
That does help build a lot of brand loyalty.
I would say the next one is interact with people in-person.
You do a great job with that as well.
And most people are like, yeah
I'm going to try to build a brand.
Let me stay away from people as far as possible.
But there needs to be some sort of touch component,
human component, where it's one-on-one
or one-to-many, but live, in-person.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I think the couple of things, the comments,
I think it helps you build connections with your readers.
I think, you've probably, QuickSprout Neil Patel
has more comments than probably
any other digital marketing site,
every other digital marketing site combined, right?
Like, somehow you've engaged
- [Neil] They're a lot.
- [Sujan] You have a lot of comments.
I've tried to repeat that
on my site and I can tell you, it doesn't
it doesn't happen overnight, and you have to be consistent.
It happens very slowly.
And the later you start
like, when you started back in, like, I would say like,
05-06, people were more engaging at that point.
And they continued to engage with your site.
You start later, they don't engage as much.
- Yeah. They don't engage as much. It's harder.
Even now I noticed we get less comments than we used to.
But in general, when I look at my comment count right now,
we clean out all the spam. We're at 106,000 comments.
- Holy crap. That's a lot of comments, right?
What's the average per blog post? Like 10-20?
- I think it's in the, well, I'll tell you right now.
So, 106 and I have,
let's see, 106,447 divided by a 5,420
19.06 comments per blog posts.
- Wow. Nice. That's awesome.
I have an average of one comment per blog post.
- You got to start somewhere, right?
- That's right.
Yeah. I just know this because I have 419 comments
and 419 posts.
So anyways, cool. So commenting is great.
I think the next thing is relationships, networking
builds that relationship and a relationship is
like a deeper impact on a brand, right?
Like it's one of the things I remember you telling me
a long time ago. I was like, I want people to talk
about me when I'm not in the room and you optimize for that.
I don't know what it is you do
- They could say good or bad thing.
- [Sujan] Right.
- You just want to be top of mind.
Cause then when someone wants to pay you,
hopefully they'll think about you over anyone else.
- Yeah. I love the fact that you're building brand
multiple ways.
You do a lot of YouTube. You do Instagram, you do.
You've been blogging for years in multiple places.
What's your favorite way to build a brand
or building brand query, specifically?
- Release free tools. I found that that beats everything.
- Hell yeah. That is a great thing.
Like, look at Ubersuggest, dude
that thing just crushes it from a search volume.
- Yeah. We have 340,000 monthly visitors
or technically 340,000 visits.
Every 28 days from people googling Ubersuggest.
- Wow.
We have this company called Voila Norbert.
It's an email finding tool.
Voila Norbert is not a common brand, right?
It's like, it's a French word.
- No.
- Like you wouldn't think that like people would search
for that. We get more searches for our brand name
than our top keywords have.
- Yeah, your logo's cool, too.
- Little Norbert, the little Butler guy?
But anyways, but it shows free product or freemium
that you can freely use, how far that goes.
And one of the reasons why we acquired it,
it was just like, hey, we could do nothing with this.
And the brand value alone will continue to grow as long as
you make the product better.
So it was like no marketing just
by improving the product, is marketing.
I know you guys have done a lot of work on that Ubersuggest
side of things. Is that why you put it
under the Neil Patel umbrella to get around?
- [Neil] Yeah.
- Awesome. You have to invest in it, right?
I'll tell you this.
I just started investing in my brand 2013
like, seriously investing in my personal brand.
So six solid years of effort, a solid decade after you.
And there's a zero in terms of how many people,
or two zeros probably versus the volume and the traffic
and everything regarding yours or my personal brand.
And I'm sure there's a lot of other stuff in between,
but yeah
- You just skyrocket though.
As you wait, you know, you do another 3, 4, 5 years.
It starts growing at a much faster pace, right?
- Yeah. It's a snowball effect, right? Over time.
Yeah. So don't start later start now because channels
will change. Like the stuff that would work today
won't work in five years. So start now.
- [Neil] Exactly.
- Awesome. Thanks, Neil. Where can people find you?
Where do you want people to go?
- Neilpatel.com
- [Sujan] Awesome. Super simple.
If you don't know how to get to it,
google his name so you can help him with his brand query.