- SEO isn't something that you learn once
and it's good to go forever.
Google makes over 3,000 algorithm changes per year.
That's a lot of changes.
So if you're not continually testing,
you're not going to do well and outrank your competitors.
Hey, everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today, I'm going to share with you seven SEO experiments
to test in 2020.
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The first test that I want you to try
is to A/B test your headlines.
You want to come up with a handful of different headlines
and test them against each other.
You can use tools like clickflow.com to do this.
The reason this is important is,
Google is all about user metrics.
If someone does a search for something,
heck, if 1,000 people do a search for the same term
and everyone clicks on the second result
instead of the first result,
what does that tell Google?
The second result is more relevant.
It doesn't matter if the first result has better SEO
or more backlinks.
They do not care.
It shows them that the second result is more relevant
and that the second result should be ranking number one.
And some quick things that you can do
to ensure that your headlines, your title tags,
get more clicks.
One, you can add the years to the end of the title,
such as updated in 2020, updated in 2019.
Those things help with a lot more clicks.
You can also do something in which you ask questions
in your title tag.
What is SEO?
What is digital marketing?
Questions tend to increase click-throughs by over 10%,
according to ClickFlow.
Another simple thing that you can do is evoking curiosity.
Example, the seven benefits of green tea.
Number six will shock you.
That's a good example of like,
oh what's number six?
Well, if you want to find out, you got to click through
and find out more.
So continually test your title tags,
and ClickFlow will give you ideas on what you can do
to improve your title tags,
and they have a free version of their product
or a free trial, so that way you can get started
without spending any money.
The second experiment I have for you to run
is create separate headlines for social media and SEO.
Now in the first tip,
I talked about adjusting your headlines, your title tags,
so you can increase your click-through rate
on Google and boost your rankings,
but here's the thing.
From everything that we found,
what's loved by social media is the total opposite
of what's loved by Google.
Using things like shocking, using things like,
words like amazing, all those type of terms,
those words like effortlessly,
in a lot of cases, they do extremely well
to gain social shares, but we're seeing a new trend
in which people don't necessarily want to click
on those keywords for Google because they think
it's quote unquote clickbait.
So you want to create separate titles for your SEO,
and you want to create separate titles just for social media.
And you can use Open Graph,
and that'll allow you to create different tags
just for social media.
And then you can have title tags just for SEO.
Heck, the headline on your page,
the title of your blog post,
could be totally different than what you use
on social media or even SEO.
But that's something that's worth testing,
because that way you can get the best of both worlds.
You can create a headline that does really well
for social media, you can create one that gets
a lot of clicks for SEO,
and you can create one that does well for your readers.
The third experiment I want you to run
is to produce a lot less new content.
So on neilpatel.com, I only blog once a week.
Most people don't know that,
like, "You have so much content."
I'm only blogging once a week.
Sure, in the past, I have a lot of content, but now,
one a week.
But can you guess how many pieces of content
that I update on a monthly basis?
90.
Now I'm not updating all the content myself.
I may be writing the content myself every week,
but I have a team of three people
that just update my old content.
And they update 90 posts a week.
And what we found is, when you update your old content,
make it fresh, not just a few words here and there,
but update it, really make it thorough, better,
make sure the links aren't dead,
everything that improves the user experience,
we find that our traffic and our rankings
have continually gone up.
Before we started doing that, we were getting
four million visits a month.
Now we're at roughly 5.3 million visits a month,
all from updating old content.
That's a huge increase.
The fourth experiment that you should consider running
is improving your time on site.
Google's all about user metrics, bounce rates,
time on site, click-through rates.
All these things can impact rankings.
because they're not just about, hmm,
the page that has the most links should rank at the top.
They're like, huh, the page that users love the most
should rank at the top.
Some of those metrics are things like time on site.
So how do you do that?
Well, adding videos to your content is a simple way.
When you see YouTube videos or videos
that you've created, embedding them within your content
is a great way to keep people there longer.
Embedding audio files like your podcast episodes
on your page is a great way to keep them there longer.
Slideshows, you can use SlideShare
to do PowerPoint presentations
that you want to embed on there.
Continually updating your content and making it longer,
that should improve your time on site.
Internal linking, getting people to go throughout
your whole site, that helps.
Quizzes, people love that as well.
Asking people to comment, engage,
and then responding back to them brings them back
to your site again.
That should help as well.
All those things should improve your time on site.
The fifth test I have for you to run
is load your HTML files from a CDN.
Everyone already knows that page speed
is important to Google's rankings now.
The faster your page loads, the higher you're going to rank.
You optimize your mobile load speed, that's fine.
You do that for desktop as well, that's great.
But even if you get a better server,
that's not necessarily going to guarantee
that your site's going to load as fast as it can.
What a CDN is is a content delivery network.
Companies like Akamai have servers all around the world.
That way, when someone in India views your site,
it's getting delivered from a server in India.
When someone in New York views your site,
they're seeing a server from New York or New Jersey
or somewhere close.
And the same goes for most of the rest of the world.
So with the CDN, you can use things like Cloudflare
to have them host your HTML files,
so that way wherever people are visiting your site
around the world, you can distribute to them faster,
which should improve your rankings.
The sixth experiment I have for you
is LSI and search intent.
Don't just focus on main keywords
with the highest search volume.
While this may drive a lot of top line traffic
and you want to rank from them, and even if you can,
takes a lot more time, a lot more effort,
and a lot of those keywords don't convert into revenue.
Go for the most qualified traffic that's possible.
So instead of just going for sheer traffic,
optimize for conversions, for revenue.
Go further down the funnel.
Move into keywords and terms that your target audience,
your qualified buyers, really look for.
I'd rather have 1,000 amazing, ready-to-buy visitors
than 100,000 visitors who are likely to bounce away
and don't convert.
You can use Ubersuggest for this,
and a quick win is, go take the keywords
that you already rank for and it'll give you a long list
of long-tail phrases.
And it sorts them by volume and CPC data.
Typically if a keyword has a higher CPC,
that means there's more buyer intent there.
And if you take the page that's already ranking
for these head terms or popular terms,
you integrate all these long-tail phrases
that are much more likely to bring in buyers,
you'll notice within 30 days,
you should be able to easily rank.
All you have to do is adjust your content,
include those keywords, expand upon them,
make sure it's relevant, and then resubmit that URL
into Google Webmaster Tools.
When you submit it, you can request for new indexing,
and then within 30 days,
you should see your rankings go up.
The seventh experiment I have for you
is double down on video content.
Most people aren't into video.
They're just like, "Ah, it's more work,
"I don't look good on camera."
They're all picky.
Don't worry about it.
You're going to be your harshest critic.
Google is trying to rank videos more and more,
same with podcasts.
They rank podcasts as well now.
And they're pulling out the audio, transcribing it,
and using it to figure out what it should rank for.
The reason I want you to double down on video
is one, YouTube SEO is different than Google SEO,
in which when you rank,
you tend to rank within the first 24 or 48 hours
you upload the video.
You don't even have to wait months.
That's the beautiful part about it.
Two, the audience in general,
we want to consume content through video
rather than text now.
Video's becoming much more popular.
I get way more people coming up to me that say,
"Hey, Neil, I see your video content
"over your text-based content,"
even though my text-based content gets roughly
three times more traffic than the video-based content.
That's the power of videos.
You need to keep pushing it out there.
You need to keep creating it.
And I recommend you create more video content
than text-based content.
I create roughly three videos a week.
Remember, I only write one blog post a week,
but I'm doing more than three X the video content.
So start mixing that into your overall SEO strategy,
especially in 2020, and that should help you
get more traffic.
Now if you need any help getting more traffic
to your business, check out my ad agency,
Neil Patel Digital.
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