- Starting with someone who has no SEO strategy currently,
let's start there.
Do you think there's a site-wide level of optimization
that has to happen?
Like, straight up title tag, meta tag,
optimization of different queries on the site,
an internal linking structure,
and then a content marketing strategy
on top of that to add value to the site,
as a base level SEO strategy?
Or what would you suggest to someone who,
first level is they don't currently have an SEO strategy,
and then we'll ask about someone who already does,
and what they can optimize,
but just base level, if you don't have one,
what do you do in today's world?
Because I really don't know.
- Yeah, so I'm going to share my screen, if you don't mind.
- Please. - Let's make this fun.
All right.
So in the last month,
I got roughly 2.3 million unique visitors,
(indistinct) visits, and then 20 million pages.
This is without ads.
- [Host] That is wild!
So yeah, so how do I do that? (laughs)
- [Neil] All right.
So the easiest thing,
and I'll actually show you some stats on this, right?
(keyboard clacking)
In a bit.
So the easiest thing is I have a app,
you can type in the URL.
(keyboard clacking)
It's called Ubersuggest.
It's free.
You can type in the URL,
and it'll give you the estimated traffic of any site,
or whatever, out there.
You know, you can look at keywords, top pages, et cetera.
But what I wanted to show you is
this is the easiest thing.
So you just click on Site Audit.
Again, this is free.
I don't even capture an email straight up,
this is just free.
So you don't have to put in an email to use it,
and it'll tell you everything that's wrong.
Pages, your score, your load time.
And you can be like, "All right,
"let's look at my Issues, or Critical Errors."
And you can just go to all of them,
and be like 31 pages have a low word count.
And it'll break them all down,
and it'll tell you-
- [Host] You need more content on those pages.
- [Neil] Exactly.
And it'll tell you What is This, and How to Fix It.
And then you can to Warnings,
and you can do the same thing.
Two pages have duplicate meta descriptions.
So what is it, right?
So what is that, and how do I fix it?
- [Host] Nice.
- [Neil] It just breaks down everything
you need to fix, in priority,
from how hard is it to implement,
to how much traffic will you get by fixing them?
So that's the first part of SEO, right?
It's just like the lowest hanging fruit.
The second part is all about keywords.
So if I'm trying to target the keyword, marketing,
and this is super effective,
or digital marketing, right?
And I use these tactics on my own site.
To give you an idea, if I type in digital marketing,
I think I'm like number one or two or something.
Here's all the paid listing,
and I am the first organic listing.
I do that for a lot of terms like online marketing.
I'm up there somewhere.
I'm number two.
Funny enough, number one's also my website.
Although I sold it. - [Host] Quicksprout.
Technically, I didn't sell it,
I gave it away to focus on Neil Patel,
but I was also number one and two,
and I even rank for SEO somewhere,
I think on page one.
Number one is Moz, two Moz, (indistinct) land,
Google, Google,
Wikipedia, then me.
But here's a simple thing I do.
It's all about finding the right type of keywords, right?
The way I find the right type of keywords is,
one, you can just type in keywords like digital marketing,
or whatever you want to target.
Here's my process.
I go and I look for keywords,
and I just click View All Keywords,
and it'll show me everyone who's ranking,
how many links they have,
their domain scores, socials, et cetera.
So I'll go find keywords, and it gives me solid metrics.
When I mean solid, as in non-opinionated metrics.
Like the average webpage that ranks in the top 10
has 435 backlinks and a domain score of 49.
So I know, is it going to be easy for me to get 435?
Is it going to be hard?
because I can have a rough idea of how many links I have.
So I'll just go through here, and I'll find keywords.
As you can see, there's like 500 suggestions here.
Here are some other related keywords
I'll post from our database.
This has 30,000 recommendations.
And then I'll look for questions that people are asking
in the digital marketing arena, right?
Like is digital marketing important?
Why digital marketing is important.
Is digital marketing the future?
Right?
I'll also look for comparison-based keywords,
digital marketing versus traditional.
This works moreso for product-based stuff.
So if you're E-commerce,
like Nike shoes versus Reebok shoes,
or MailChimp versus ConvertKit, right?
- [Host] Right, right.
- [Neil] And then the last step
when I'm trying to create content,
after I find some keywords that are typically...
I look for keywords that are high in volume, high in CPC,
and I want to go after keywords
that have a low SEO Difficulty.
So that's abbreviation of SD.
It's like digital marketing company has a high CPC,
volume's not bad, low SEO Difficulty,
which means people are typing that in,
me being an agency, probably a good keyword to go after,
because it probably converts well
if people are paying $17 a click.
- [Host] Right.
- [Neil] And the way you do this is you just create content.
So there is a Content Ideas section of the tool,
and it'll show you all the content per country,
so you can break it down by whatever country,
or language, or region you want.
And, technically, you can break
all the reports down by that.
And you want to look for articles that are somewhat popular,
because it's breaking down the social shares,
as well as articles that have decent search traffic,
as well as a lot of backlinks.
So here, I like this one because the estimated business
is 1000 a month, they have 41 backlinks.
This is "The 10 Essential Tips for B2B Marketing Success
in a Digital Economy", right?
So I'd be like, "Huh, this isn't bad."
I can potentially write on something like this.
I can see that it's already ranking for a lot of terms.
And now I have terms to target for
that's related to that main keyword,
as well as I can start targeting some of these keywords,
and if I can rank higher than them, I'll get more traffic.
I can also go after all the sites that are linking to them,
and try to hit them up,
saying I got a better article than them,
and try to convince them to link to me.
This is how I do SEO in a nutshell.
- [Host] Still to this day, long-form, value-rich content,
and, essentially, backlinks,
and on-site interlinking page rank sculpting structure,
or some version of that.
I'm talking to you from 2012 SEO, by the way.
You know what I mean?
My world was SEO for seven years, and it was deep SEO,
and then I've not thought about it since.
So everything that I'm saying is what I remember.
So correct me if I'm not-
- [Neil] No, no, you pretty much got the concepts right,
and, you know, but now there's these tools
that automate all of it.
So I can put in a domain link,
like a competitor, or my own site, Neil Patel,
and I can see everyone who links to them, right?
And this is just outreach that I can do.
And what I love doing is I'll go find a competitor,
and this works in E-commerce all day long.
And in E-commerce, funny enough, it works even better,
because there's just not as much competitors for SEO.
Everyone wants to do the paid stuff right now,
especially with (audio cuts out) ads.
Like, I can go take my competitor, like Moz,
I would do this for an E-commerce site, whatever it may be.
I can see who's links to them, and outreach them.
But even better, I can just click on Top Pages,
and you can do this for any E-commerce site,
you can see your competitors, their top pages,
their backlinks, how many visits these pages are getting,
how many social shares they have,
and be like, "Oh, Moz's Beginners Guide to SEO,
"here are all the keywords that are ranking for it."
I just click View All, and I'll be like...
Sadly, it's free, but sometimes it takes a second to load
because it's pulling so many keywords from our database.
Other info like SEO, what is SEO, marketing SEO,
what is that website SEO, optimize for SEO,
SEO optimizing, like, they just have all the keywords
that they just keep getting traffic for,
and you can keep going next, next, next, or export them.
And again- - [Host] Let me ask you-
- [Neil] Go ahead.
- [Host] Let me ask you this, though.
So, you're super, super high level at this,
so I'm going to break it down
for someone who may not be as sophisticated.
What we've talked about is, step one,
optimize your website itself with onsite SEO factors,
which Ubersuggest will tell you what is broken,
and tell you how to fix it
from the Site Audit version.
- [Neil] Yeah.
- [Host] Step two is go through,
and look at keywords that you're already ranking for,
and keywords that competitors are ranking for
in the keyword traffic analyzers,
see which ones have high value and low competition,
and create long-form, value-rich articles.
You can find ideas for these long-form,
value-rich articles in the Content Ideas suggestion
of your tool, Ubersuggest.
And then, and now I'm going a level
which you have not said this,
but I want to just make sure I've got this right,
is the factors that will go into that ranking or not,
have to do with both social suggestions,
i.e. shares and activity on social,
backlinks to that particular article,
and your actual website itself, because if your main site
has a bunch of people linking to it,
then that power is distributed to the pages on that site.
And if you're interlinking on your own site properly,
you're going to filter some of that power
into these pages that you're creating.
And then, let me ask you this,
where does paid amplification fit into this?
Does paid amplification fit into it in the sense of,
you write a long-form article that you want to rank
for a given query that you've used Ubersuggest to find,
and then you do some page post amplification,
or page post engagement ads,
to amplify that particular article to your target audience,
which then gets it social signals,
which then support it in ranking, or how does paid fit in?
- [Neil] And you don't have to do paid at all.
So, easiest way to do paid, if you want to help,
you just boost a post on Facebook,
and that'll give it a little bit more legs,
and it'll run faster.