- Five underrated SEO lessons.
I've been doing SEO for a very long time.
I started when I was 15, I'm 37,
that's 22 years to be exact.
And I know there are a lot of stats
and data out there about SEO
and what works and what doesn't,
but in today's video,
I'm not going to bore you with all that.
Instead, I want to share my personal experiences,
and I want to tell you what I've learned over the years
and what you can take from it to do better.
Most of these lessons aren't common
and you probably haven't heard of them before.
Lesson number one,
updating content frequently
is better than building more links.
I know you need links to rank.
So if you have no links,
go out there and build some.
Look, I have friends that have websites
that generate hundreds and thousands of dollars a month
in affiliate incomes.
And we have clients from all around the world,
so we see tons of data on what works.
And yes, you need the links,
but links only take you so far.
We found that if you build less links
but you update your content more frequently,
you do way better when it comes to a SEO perspective.
And when I mean updating,
I'm not talking about word or two
or image or here and there,
I'm talking about adjusting that page
to be the best for your users
and whatever that takes,
better than your competition in other words.
Just think about Wikipedia
and how often they update their content.
It's based on what's best for the users,
not for Google.
But in the long run,
funny enough that helps them with Google
because Google's optimizing for users as well.
So spend more time updating the building links
especially if you're a established website.
If you're a new website,
there won't be much content on your website,
you probably don't have many links,
focus on building more links.
Lesson number two,
shortcuts just aren't worth it.
So there was this site called Battlefield Bypass
which is expired domain
with a lot of authoritative links.
These links were naturally generated and not purchased
because it was a national park
and it was part of a war that happened on that land.
So I bought it,
and I converted it into online casino site
years and years ago when I started my SEO career.
Within months, I was ranking the top three positions
for the term, "Online casino."
That key word
is worth hundreds and thousands of dollars a month
in affiliate revenue,
that's millions of dollars a year.
That's a lot of money,
but within months Google whacked me,
and all of a sudden that site lost all this rankings.
In essence, I was trying to cheat the system
by getting traffic and rankings,
by cheating instead of providing value.
See, the sites that rank at the top in the long run
are the ones that provide the most value,
not the ones that cheat their way up to the top.
Now I've learned a lot from this mistake and others
but I had a shortcut mentality when I was young,
and if I had to go back in time,
I would stop taking shortcuts
and I would've done what's best for users,
which would've been what's best for my career.
Lesson three, it's easier for brands to rank.
When I was younger, I tried to fine tune my SEO skills
by learning every little thing
from on-page SEO to off-page,
I learned as much as possible
and I still do today,
but over the years, I have become wiser,
even though I still need to learn a lot more.
And I found that working with large corporations
at my ad agency NP Digital,
it's taught me a lot.
One of the things that's taught me is
brand queries go a long way in Google's eyes
and in their algo.
The more people searching for your brand,
and assuming a high percentage of them
click on your result,
it tells Google that you have a good, strong brand.
And, if your brand is more popular
than your competition,
it tells Google that people prefer you
over the competition.
And as your brand queries keep going up,
what you'll find is, your rankings also go up.
Once I learned that,
I focused more on building a brand.
It takes well over five years to build a brand,
so you need to be patient,
but it helps a lot with SEO.
Lesson four, the quickest way to grow your SEO traffic
is by going global.
A Google employee once told me
that the majority of searches on Google
aren't in English.
That's obvious, right?
And it was to me at the time, I'm like,
"Yeah, the majority of the world doesn't speak English,
what's new with this."
But what she told me next wasn't as obvious.
She's like, "Yes, Neil, they don't speak English,
the majority of searches aren't in English,
but Google doesn't have enough webpages
and all these other languages for most topics."
Once that clicked, I was like,
"Oh wait, I need to transcribe my content
into multiple languages."
So I started doing that
and I didn't say translating, I said transcribe.
The reason why is you have to adapt it
for the local languages.
Now, the United States only makes up 25%
or less of my traffic due to international expansion.
You should go global if you want more SEO traffic.
Lesson five, don't purely rely on SEO.
I used to believe that SEO
was the best marketing channel.
And because of that,
I focused purely on SEO at the beginning.
Funny enough, I still prefer SEO over other channels
but I don't think it is the best marketing channel,
I don't think any marketing channel is the best.
I now take a different viewpoint.
All marketing channels are great
as long as you can make them work for you
and drive you traffic,
brand awareness, leads, and even sales.
So I don't not focus on SEO,
but I also don't purely focus on SEO.
I focus on all marketing channels
as well as new ones that come up
as long as I can make them work.
And if any of them get crushed
by platforms making an algorithm update,
I don't have to worry because my traffic sources
are diversified.
If you need help with your marketing,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital,
we are the performance marketing agency here
because we provide amazing results for our clients,
and I hope we can do that for you as well,
so hit us up.
If you enjoyed this video,
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If you have any questions, leave a comment,
I'm here to help.