- If you've had a website for a while
you know that SEO takes some time
and I'm not talking 30 minutes a day,
I'm talking dozens and dozens of hours per week
for a really long period of time.
I know it's not what you want to hear
but hey, I've got some good news for you today
and I'm going to save you some time.
Hey everyone,
I'm Neil Patel and today I'm going to write down
the six time wasters of SEO.
In other words, you need to stop doing these activities.
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Time waster number one.
Checking your rankings daily or even multiple times a day.
Do you know how often I check my rankings
or even my Google Analytics stats?
If you're guessing multiple times a day
you're wrong.
I check them once a week and that's it,
you don't need to know your rankings more than once a week.
Now my Google Analytics traffic I do try to check it
roughly once a day, sometimes once every two or three days.
The reason being is I want to be notified
if something happens with the Google algorithm update
or I get a hit or my traffic tanks.
Because let's face it, if you check your rankings
multiple times in a day,
it's not really going to do anything.
If you log into Google Analytics multiple times a day
it's not going to really do anything,
you need to focus on execution and stop wasting your time
continually looking at reports.
Here's a easy thing to do.
Sign up for Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest has free rank tracking.
Go to the dashboard, sign up, add your site,
add your keywords, it will notify you once a week
automatically over email,
your average rankings for all the most important keywords
that you're tracking, if they're moving up or down
or how much your improving and it will even tell you
new site errors that it's finding from a SEO perspective.
That way you don't need to obsess about it
on a daily basis and it will just do the hard work for you.
Best of all, for free.
Time waster number two,
being obsessive about keyword density.
Look, people write content all the time,
I hear them always saying like,
"Oh I need to put this keyword into this H1 tag,
"this keyword into title tag,
"this keyword into this meta description."
When I write content I don't do any of this,
I just write content for the user.
I try to create the most appealing title
that I want people to click through,
read and get hooked.
Just like an author would do when they're writing a book
or just like a journalist would do when they're writing
a news article.
It's not about keywords, it's about quality content.
Sure if I'm writing about dog food
naturally the keyword dog food
and other keywords related to dog food
will show up in there
but it's not like I'm actually manually shoving
these keywords in.
Think about the person, do what's best for them
and naturally you may put these keywords in your title tag,
meta description, H1 tag, your introduction,
and even conclusion paragraphs.
But don't obsesses about it where you have to put them
in each and every single area.
If it doesn't flow and sound right
people aren't going to want to read your content,
they're going to go back,
right when they're searching on Google, hit the back button,
that's going to send bad user metrics to Google
and it's going to hurt your rankings.
The third mistake,
building an excessive amount of back links
to increase domain authority.
You know I have a ad agency called Neil Patel Digital
and we get so many people saying,
"I want more links
"and I want to increase my domain authority."
I've outranked sites that have domain authorities
of 80 and 90 with a site
that only has a domain authority of 40 or 50.
I know Moz has created the word, domain authority,
in Ubersuggest we use the word, domain score,
everyone has their own version of it.
Google doesn't use domain authority, domain score,
or any of these other metrics.
Sure directionally the higher the authority
the better off you are,
but that's not going to guarantee rankings.
If someone has amazing domain authority
and I've seen this time and time again
like with the entrepreneurs, the Forbes,
the Huffington Post, they have all these guest posters
creating shit content,
you think that stuff's ranking everywhere?
No, why?
Because the quality sucks versus a small mom and pop
writing an amazing article that everyone wants to read
and share that's going to do way better.
Don't obsess about domain authority,
focus on the end experience for the user.
The fourth issue,
only focusing on highly competitive keywords.
Yes, you know going after these head terms
can drive a lot of traffic but they don't drive sales
compared to long tail phrases.
Go to the Keyword ideas report within Ubersuggest,
look at the prepositions and comparison words
as well as the suggests,
that will give you keywords that are more likely to convert.
Yeah, they won't drive you as much traffic,
but who cares?
At least you're generating sales.
You know I was talking to one of my buddies, Mike,
at Dr. Axe, and he runs marketing there.
And everyone knows that, at least in the SEO industry,
Dr. Axe has lost some traffic when it comes to SEO
and they've got hit here and there
for some Google algorithms, but you know what?
A lot of that Google traffic
hasn't really crushed their revenue, why?
Because when someone's searching for an article
on nutrition of a banana, it doesn't necessarily mean
that they're going to convert into a paying customer
when it comes to supplements.
So it's not all about quantity,
go after quality based keywords.
The fifth time waster,
you're focusing more on desktop devices
versus mobile devices.
Did you know that over 50% of the searches done
on Google are now from mobile devices?
It's a huge ranking factor.
So much so that they have a mobile-first index
and you can see this with the recent BERT update
that Google's putting a ton of focus on
content and web design, especially for mobile devices.
So make sure your adding structured mark up to your site
and you're using mobile optimized themes
because this will help you do really well in the long run.
The sixth issue,
trying to meeting unreasonable SEO expectations.
Look, if you're just cranking and hammering,
putting so many hours in
because you're trying to hit a specific time frame,
it's just not going to happen.
You don't control
when Google really wants to shift rankings,
that's not up to you, it's up to them.
So by you spending double or triple the time,
it's not always going to help you get higher rankings,
that's why I don't obsess about Google.
But you know what you should obsess about
and I got this from Jeff Bezos
from watching an interview of him online,
he obsesses about his customer.
He doesn't obsess about Google,
he doesn't obsess about his competition,
he obsesses about his client, his customers.
If you do that and you do what's best for them,
in the long run Google should place you where you belong..
So don't try to hit unrealistic expectations
by obsessing about Google, obsess about your customers
because when you do what's best for them,
that's when you grow.
Now if you need help with your rankings, your traffic,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
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