- Did you know that building backlinks doesn't guarantee
that your rankings are going to go up?
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel.
And today I'm going to break down why you should not build
backlinks this year and instead you should do this.
(gentle music)
Look, before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel
and if you're on YouTube click the alert notification.
Here's the thing.
There's nothing wrong with building backlinks.
And I don't think everyone should stop building backlinks,
but if you're strapped for cash and time,
there's something else that you can do that can help you in
the short run, especially if you're budget strapped.
And even if you are building links,
you should never pay for them.
When it comes to a pay for play,
you can pay people to help you with outreach
and get them naturally,
but you shouldn't pay for them.
Depending on the niche and the location of your business,
you know, for smaller newer websites,
it takes a lot of time for link building to really make
an impact and work.
You can really do well in the early days
without building tons of links or building, you know,
just a few of them and getting them gradually over time.
Especially if you're going after niches
that aren't that competitive.
Instead of doing link building,
I want you to commit to writing one high quality piece
of content per week for at least, you know, a few months.
If you do that for a few months,
what you'll find is you can slowly start
getting rankings quicker.
And here's how you do that.
When you write content you're doing it
based off of specific keywords and take those keywords
and put them in Ubersuggest.
And in Ubersuggest on the left hand navigation click on
keyword ideas and there you'll have a button that says
page one ranking potential.
If you click on that button, put it in your URL,
it'll break down all the keywords that you can rank for.
Now what I want you to do is write content
on all these keywords that are relevant to your business.
You take those keywords
and you create a blog article on them.
Now some of those keywords don't fit well together.
What, for the ones that don't want to fit well together,
you write separate articles around them
and ideally they should be around the same topic.
This is what's considered topic clusters.
What I mean by that is let's say I'm writing a guide to SEO.
I can go after, hey, here's the beginner's guide to SEO.
Then I can talk about on page SEO,
which is related but that could be a whole separate article.
Then I can talk about link building,
which is a whole separate article.
Then I can talk about,
let's say page speed and how that impacts SEO.
And that could be a separate article
when it comes to optimizing your load time.
Then I can talk about Google's AMP framework,
which is for accelerated mobile pages for mobile devices
and for your content pages,
they can load faster for mobile users
when doing a search on Google.
The point that I'm trying to make is if you focus your time,
instead of doing link building,
especially in the early days and you write content,
you're going to be better off.
See, because when you go out there
and you try to build links and you don't have much,
especially if you have a new site or your site doesn't have
much that's of value and I'm not trying to knock it.
It's what others perceive as value,
not what you or I perceive, right?
And if they don't perceive value,
they're not going to want to naturally link to it.
And if you email all those people
trying to convince them to link to you,
it's a lot of work and the results are going to be
slim to none.
But on the flip side,
if you spent your time writing content
that you could potentially rank for,
you're going to be better off.
And using this flow on Ubersuggest
when you're doing keyword research,
what you will find is some keywords like credit cards
are super competitive.
It's really hard to rank for,
even terms like auto insurance.
But on the flip side that,
you know what you can potentially rank on page one for,
that button, analyze your site,
your on page SEO, your backlinks, your history,
and it takes all that into account.
And it tells you what you can rank for today.
What you have the best possibilities to rank for
in the short term,
with the circumstances that you're being dealt with
when it comes to SEO.
And by focusing running high quality content
you're going to be better off,
but here's another trick that you need to keep in mind
when you're writing these pieces of content
that you could rank for.
Take those keywords, do a search for them on Google.
I want you to look at all the people in the top 10,
what are they doing so amazing?
What are they missing?
What could they be doing better?
What are they including that you have to include?
That'll give you idea of how to write better content.
You also need to go to page four, five,
six of Google and look at the pages that are ranking.
What are they not doing
that the ones that are on page one are doing?
That'll help make it in concrete
on what you should be doing.
And that'll give you better ideas of hey,
here's what I need to write to beat the other people
who are ranking.
Because it's not just about backlinks.
Just think about this.
When you do a Google search,
are you like hmm, this number one result should be there.
Not because of their content,
but because they have a million links.
You don't really care who has a million links
or two million links or a hundred links when you're doing
a Google search.
All you care for an end user is, hey, I did a search.
did a click, did it give me the solution to my search query
or my problem as quick as possible
in the most efficient way?
If it did, you're happy.
If not, you click the back button,
you go to the next result.
You don't really look at on page code or keyword density,
or backlinks, you look at did it solve your problem?
That's user experience.
You want to optimize for that when you're
writing your content.
Put the user first.
And if you do that,
and then you start building links later on, right?
But you create the content first.
You're going to start ranking better
and getting more traffic.
That's why I want you to do this instead of build links,
because it'll help create a really solid foundation.
So when you do get more links,
you can start writing content on more competitive terms,
and you'll do even better.
If you need help with your marketing
check out my ad agency, NP Digital.
If you enjoyed this video, like it,
share it, tell other people about it.
Thank you for watching.