- [Instructor] Over the last 12 months
I've driven 58.6 million visitors from Google.
You will look at my traffic sets,
you look at this graph and you're like, wow, Neil
you must be doing really well at SEO.
And you know what you're doing, but you know what?
That's not really the case.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down my biggest SEO mistakes.
(gentle music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel
or if free on YouTube, click the alert notification.
As you can see here, 58.6 million visitors from SEO.
That's a lot of traffic to not have to pay for.
And if I scroll down and I look at the traffic stats,
coming from terms like Ubersugget which is fine.
My name, Ubersuggest, affiliate marketing,
my name, variation Ubersuggest.
But then when you start getting down
you start seeing terms like,
you know, how to make money from the internet
that's in Portuguese, how to get followers from Instagram,
more Instagram keywords,
you know, and then free Instagram followers.
This just Ubersuggest in Japanese.
Instagram, digital marketing in Brazil.
But if I just keep going further down the list
you'll start seeing a lot of keywords that,
aren't really relevant to my business.
Like how to increase Instagram followers.
Because my business,
which I'll show you here is an ad agency, NP Digital .
And we don't really help people
with their Instagram followers.
What we really help them with
is things like SEO and paper click.
And we want a lot of words
like here's the best B2B pay-per-click award
or here's one for the best B2B SEO campaign
and best SEO campaign, we do both B2B and B2C.
Here's one for corporate responsibility,
you know, and the list keeps going on and on.
But in essence, we're a digital marketing firm.
Sure, we'll do social media ads and SEO,
but we're not here to just boost your Instagram followers.
We're here to drive traffic and more importantly,
the traffic needs to generate your ROI.
In other words, you need to be generating more money
than what you're spending.
If you spend a dollar, ideally need to be making two
or three or $4, right?
And a lot of the key words of what I was optimizing for
as you can see here, it was just pure volume.
And I was getting a lot of traffic,
but as you can see now my traffic starting to drop, why?
Because my team, you know, at my ad agency we track leads
and I can't show you our leads in Salesforce
because we track it all due to people's personal information
like their records or the company URLs.
There's nothing really too sensitive
or really any sensitive at all.
But we I don't want to share people's URLs
and emails without their permission
just would feel a little sleazy and unethical with that one
so I don't want to do that.
But when we were tracking our sales through Salesforce
of what's driving clients for NP Digital ,
and typically people will click on let's talk
and submit a form or contact.
So we have two options to become a lead.
And what we found is,
most of these keywords droves, little to no leads.
Now, if you go to neilpatel.com,
I get my traffic typically from blogging, right?
I can see here on the blog.
And if you look at my content,
I'm going after keywords that are very specific.
Customer reviews in video ads.
So if I type in customer reviews video ads.
The search volume, isn't high.
If you look here zero monthly searches, right?
People aren't really searching for a lot of these keywords
but you know what?
We found that people who are interested in putting
customer reviews in video ads or images,
and they're trying to figure this out
are interested in conversion rate optimization
which is one of the services we offer.
Again, not a lot of people look for it
but it's a good revenue channel for us.
How do you use YouTube ads to grow your business?
So another one is YouTube ads.
And people who are looking for YouTube ads
are people who are willing to spend money.
only has 20,000 monthly searches in the United States.
Not a ton compared to some of the other keywords like,
Instagram followers, I'll actually show you here
by typing in Instagram followers.
And keywords like Instagram followers
will get way more searches,
but they're not the right type of audience.
So the content that we're producing on our blog
is much more niche.
How to create a free Google website for a business.
This for us, this post is target local businesses
because our SMB division helps localized businesses.
How to create unique gift guides for e-commerce content.
Again, very specific
because we have a lot of e-commerce customers,
roughly 28 or 29% of our customers
are e-commerce is somewhere in that range.
So my content is very specific around
what's going to get me customers.
And even though being a SEO at first I'm like,
I want to get millions of visitors
and more traffic, the better.
I quickly learn, technically not quickly.
I learned over time sadly.
And it took a long time to really learn.
And I spent so many years building up my traffic
and it wasn't until I got the traffic.
And we really started optimizing for,
what's not just generating a lead for our ad agency, right?
This would be a lead of someone clicking, let's talk
or contact filling out.
But we started optimizing for which leads
are actually closing into customers
and where they first find us.
And you don't end up knowing a lot of this
until you get a lot of that traffic,
because you can have assumptions, but you don't really know
until you start getting the traffic
but you have assumptions.
And I would always tell my team optimize for traffic,
brand awareness, but you know what?
A lot of my competitors, IProspect,
yes, you may have heard of them, you may have not.
They do probably 500 to 700 million a year.
They don't even get 1/10 of the traffic to their website.
If I go into Ubersuggest right now,
app.neilpatel.com and I type in iProspect into here.
Let's load up their site and make sure I spell it right.
All right, so if I load up iProspect into Ubersuggest.
And again, it's just another ad agency website.
Yeah, there you go traffic over review.
If you look here, it's just an ad agency.
They're a competitor of mine.
And when I look at this, monthly traffic estimated.
Now, let me go back to traffic overview, sorry about that,
iprospect.com.
They're getting roughly 17,000 visitors a month.
And if you want to apples to apples,
let's go neilpatel.com.
Let's look what I got in the last 30-ish days, 5.8, right?
So it's like, cool, I don't make 500 or 700 million a year.
I wish I did.
And look, 17,000 visitors, 5 million, which would you take?
I'd rather take 17,000 and generate all that revenue.
Look, the big lesson from this is,
don't optimize for traffic optimize for revenue.
If your keywords aren't generating you revenue,
move on to new keywords.
And when you're doing keyword research,
don't make the mistake I did.
Don't just optimize for quote-unquote traffic.
What I want you to do is type in keywords.
Like I'm typing in digital marketing here.
Look for ideally good volume
because the more volume of course, the better.
But you want relevant volume
that can convert into a customer.
So when you look at it, even if the keyword has high volume
you'd be like, all right,
do I offer digital marketing services?
Yes, we do, so, okay.
So then that traffic is relevant.
Is a CPC cost per click people would pay for ads high.
$18 a click is high.
That means the keyword can actually probably drive revenue.
On the flip side, this keyword got 60,000 searches.
If I type in Instagram followers.
This keyword here is 60,000 searches similar
but only a dollar 98 cost per click,
what does that tell you?
Yes, you can get tons of traffic for this
but people are probably, aren't going to convert as high.
If someone's willing to pay $18 for ad click
versus a dollar 98 or $2,
that's roughly nine times difference, right?
18 versus $2, that's nine X difference.
That means,
that this keyword probably won't drive as many customers.
So don't optimize just for traffic,
optimize for traffic from the right audience.
And before you go after keywords
do your keyword research, type them into Ubersuggest,
figure out what keywords have high volume and traffic
while you're technically they mean the same thing
but also high CPC.
And of course it's related to your business.
Like type in digital marketing,
digital marketing agency as a $24 cost per click,
less volume, but people are willing to pay more.
I'm a digital marketing agency.
Someone could type in digital marketing
and look for a degree or a certification.
And I don't offer certifications.
You know, technically you can get a job
through my ad agency, but we're really,
more so an agency that's looking for customers.
So you want to look for high CPCs
and the more related the better, even if less volume.
So even though this one,
gets, let's say three X less search volume, right?
It's roughly 20,000, this one 60,
but this is a digital marketing agency, which is what I am.
So it's better for me to go after a keyword
that is what I am because the CPC is higher, right?
Instead, at $18 is 24 and it's more related to my business
which means I'm going to generate more customers from it.
So don't just optimize for quote-unquote
keywords and traffic optimize for relevancy.
And if you do that, you're going to be better.
And if you need help with this
check out my ad agency, NP Digital
or if you just have questions, leave a comment below.
I'm here to help for free, of course.
And if you enjoy the video, like it, share it.
But in essence, that's my biggest SEO mistake
and lesson that I ended up learning.
Don't make it, it was a silly one.
I wish I didn't optimize for brand awareness.
And I knew a lot of those keywords that wouldn't convert
but I'm like, oh yeah, I want the brand awareness.
But there's a lot of competitors like Iprospect,
another one that's massive is Performics.
Let's see performics.com, I believe that's their URL.
performics.com.
And if you look at Performics, another ad agency
and these guys are massive,
I think they have 3000 employees I don't know the revenue,
but they don't have that many keywords
or traffic, 3,700 visitors.
And most people haven't heard of them,
but look they got 3000 plus employees.
I don't have 3000 employees.
They have 3000 employees,
you know, they're making way more money than me.
I'm probably somewhere between 400 and 500 employees.
And that your shows you 5 million visitors or 3000
I'd rather have more qualified traffic and more revenue.
So yes, brand awareness and traffic's good.
As long as it brings in revenue in the long run,
that's very, very important.
And I hope that helps you out,
best of luck with your strategies.
And again, if you need help with your marketing
check out ads CNP Digital .
If you enjoy the video, like it, share it
tell the people about it.
Thank you for your time.