- Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel here,
and today is another Q and A Thursday video
where when you have a question, I answer it.
And I'm here with Adam from viewership.
- Hey guys.
- And this week's question is:
- This is from Arbaaz and says:
Hey Neil, your content is amazing, and he has a question.
What's the benefit of shortening a URL,
and what websites would you recommend to shorten URLS?
- If you wanna shorten your URL, you could use bitly,
but I don't recommend using too many tools like that.
The biggest benefit of a short URL that's keyword rich,
you tend to rank higher in Google.
When you have a long URL with too many subfolders,
you'll notice that your rankings won't be as high
compared to when you have less subfolders,
and you have shorter URLs that are keyword rich.
A good example of this is if your URL's very long,
and I used to have this with neilpatel.com in my older posts
what Google sees is "Hey, your URL is really long
and it has all those keywords,
so your blog posts must be related
to all of those keywords combined together."
They think it's related to a very specific topic.
The moment you end up shortening your URLs,
Google's like "Hey, this content is about ..."
Like, one of my URLs what is SEO,
so neilpatel.com/what-is-seo.
That page ranks on page one of Google for the term SEO.
And it ranks for a lot of other SEO-related terms.
It's short, and because it's short Google's like
"Oh, this URL's about SEO and
all the other topics around SEO".
But if my URL was "link building, the key to SEO",
I would only be ranking for certain
link building-related topics.
Or, if my URL was even worse:
"link building, the key to SEO in 2017",
and I know we're already past 2017,
Google will be like "Oh this article's about 2017,
and link building and SEO for 2017."
So don't pigeon-hole yourself with really long URLS,
the shorter they are, they better.
In addition to that, people do remember the URLs.
For example, I know to log into wordpress
it's my URL dot com slash wp-admin or -login.
Right? People remember short URLS.
- Of course.
- By keeping it short, people remember it more,
they're also more likely to share it.
When a URL is really long and complicated,
you're gonna be much more likely to misspell it,
and share the wrong link, and people mess up
when they link to it from their own site.
When they share it on the social web,
sometimes it creates problems as well,
I know some sites like Twitter, yes they shorten the URLS
but some have a cap and the URL doesn't look nice
and it gets cut off and it gets pushed to the second line.
But you wanna just keep it short so people can remember it.
- What about buying domains? Like super short,
like one-word, two-word domains. Does that matter?
- It does help. One of my competitors
is called keywordtool.io, all right?
It's not a dot com, it's not a dot org,
but it's Keyword Tool dot whatever, io.
What do you think they rank for on Google?
- I don't know, Keyword Tool, maybe?
- That's right! And I'm also trying
to rank for that, Keyword Tool, that term,
because I bought a company called Ubersuggest
and the URL neilpatel.com/ubersuggest also ranks
for Keyword Tool, but not as high.
It ranks on, I think, page one or page two
or page three, somewhere around there.
And eventually it'll climb up over time.
If I had a URL that was keywordtool.com,
when people talk about me, they link to me.
When they link to me, what's the
anchor text that they're gonna use?
- Neil Patel.
- Well yeah, cause my name's Neil Patel,
but if my name was Keyword Tool, what would it be?
- Oh yeah, Keyword Tool, yeah yeah yeah.
- Exactly, so that helps you rank for the term.
Also, in addition to that, when you have a shorter URL
that is the keyword or a shorter
domain name that is the keyword, you get more brand queries.
And we've talked about this in past videos,
brand queries are huge when it comes to rankings.
If Google wants to rank BMW and General Motors,
and they both have a ton of links, what do you think
they're gonna do to decide who to rank first?
Yeah, they'll look at SEO factors,
but they already both optimized,
let's say they both already have millions of links,
they're gonna be like "Oh, well, ten times more people
are typing in BMW than General Motors,
they must be a more popular car manufacturer."
And I don't know if that's true on who's more popular,
but you can see using Google trends, google.com/trends,
you can type in BMW and General Motors or GM,
you can see which one's more popular.
Google is using that to decide
who should also be ranked higher.
The reason I also rank decently well
for SEO, terms like online marketing,
is because a lot of people are googling "Neil Patel".
I built up a brand, I've been doing a podcast,
doing these videos, more people get to know me
and they type in Neil Patel or variations of it,
Neil Patel blog, Neil Patel SEO, Neil Patel videos.
- Keyword Tool, search that a couple times.
- Yes, Neil Patel keyword tool, there you go!
And all that helps with my rankings.
The point I'm trying to make,
and you brought up an amazing question,
is do domains matter? Yes, domains matter,
short domains with keywords are even better,
really long domains with keywords aren't as effective.
It used to be much more effective years and years ago,
like three, four, five years ago,
and people called it exact match domains.
Google's now changed their algorithm
where they don't have as much pull as they used to.
But yet sites like hotels.com still have
a decent amount of pull, because any time you type in,
like, New York City hotels, or hotels,
or anything related to hotels, hotels.com pops up.
And that's why short is effective.
And that's a good hack for you guys.
If you wanna rank really well,
for one specific keyword that's a money keyword,
go buy a domain with that keyword.
It doesn't have to be a dot com or a dot org,
just look at keywordtool.io, it's a dot io
and they still do well. You can too.
- All right, there we have it. Love it
- So, that's it for this week's Q and A Thursday videos,
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