- Can you really rank a website without writing content?
Most people have a hard time creating content.
And even when they write some content,
their websites may not be getting lots of traffic.
So, is there really a way to rank a website
without writing content.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today, I'm going to break down how you can rank a website
without writing content.
(soft music)
Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel,
and if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Here's a quick step for you.
82% of marketers report actively using content
in marketing in 2021.
That's up from 70% from the previous year
according to HubSpot.
Now I don't have the current version numbers or stat
when it comes up
and people are leveraging content marketing,
but that's still a crazy stat.
Content marketing works amazingly well,
but it's going to get more and more competitive every year,
as marketers start giving it more focus in their mix.
Look, the best time for opportunity,
is for you to start leveraging content now.
And I remember when I started content marketing,
years and years ago,
I'm talking about 10 plus years ago,
it wasn't as competitive,
there also wasn't as much search volume in Google,
but it worked like a charm.
I could write any mediocre piece of content and boom,
you can rank on page one of Google.
Build a little bit of links,
rank even in the top three.
Nowadays, you can have the best piece of content,
you can have a lot of links,
it doesn't guarantee the rankings.
Look, the answer is, when you're doing SEO
as your main strategy to gain traffic,
then yes, writing content is king.
You can still rank a website without content.
You know, if you have some content, that's good enough,
but you need some form of it.
Keep this in mind, if your page has no texts at all,
Google won't really know what your page is about.
You still need content in your title, your headings,
your call to actions, maybe a paragraph here or there,
that's all examples of content.
But the point I'm trying to get is,
you don't necessarily need to write hundreds of blog posts
to necessarily get tons of SEO traffic.
It doesn't hurt, it actually helps,
but it doesn't mean that you won't have any traffic
if you don't write tons of content.
And if you hate writing content, you're bad at it,
or you just don't have enough time to do it yourself,
there's always ways to ramp up your content,
without necessarily writing it.
And if you're getting started and you want to learn
how to do content marketing,
to skyrocket your traffic,
I have another video that walks you through that process.
You can just look on my YouTube channel,
I actually have more than another video,
I have tons of videos.
Well, first off, let's dive right in,
on how you can start getting traction,
without really writing content.
So, the first thing you can do is test new titles,
AKA your headlines,
and see if you can improve your click through rate
on Google Search Console.
You can also use tools like Click Flow.
Now here's the example of how that's powerful.
Rand Fishkin, years and years ago
told everyone to Google best grilled steak,
or variation of that,
and click on the second result.
Or actually it was maybe the fourth result,
I don't have the notes in front of me, but I do remember.
And what ended up happening is this,
that site went from being,
let's say, number four to number one,
and it also started ranking higher for other keywords.
That's example of higher clickthrough rates.
And the way he got those clicks is,
he told people on Twitter to go do a search,
click on the first result,
click the back button and then go click
on roughly the fourth result.
And then boom, in less than a few hours,
it popped up to the top.
But here's the thing,
you can't do that because it's not scalable
for your own site.
He more so did it for experiment,
but you can test your title.
Try to make it more appealing,
get that creativity going,
so then that way you can get more clicks.
Another thing that you can do,
and this doesn't involve writing more contents,
is actually removing some content,
is removed cannibalizing content.
In other words,
when you consolidate content on the same topic
or roughly the same topic, you'll start doing better.
For example, I was always wondering,
Neil, why don't I rank so high for this keyword SEO?
Well, I may not rank high for this keyword called SEO
because I may have 20 articles that say,
be good as this guy in SEO,
how to get started in SEO, how SEO works.
You get how they're pretty much all the same thing?
That's when you need to consolidate,
and when you do that,
you're raking start getting better.
I did that, and now I'm on page one for the term SEO.
See, when you're consolidating,
you want to see which one is best.
What's already getting majority of the SEO traffic,
has majority of the back links.
That's the one that you typically want to use,
and then you want to fold the other words into it.
And when you do that,
redirect the other ones that aren't doing that well,
and do it through a 301 redirect.
Another thing you can do is just find
new internal linking opportunities.
Whenever you're touching a subject,
that's related to another page on your website,
and turn to the link to that page.
Don't focus too much on the exact anchor text,
just focus on relevancy and what's best for the user.
Getting more internal link juice flowing to those pages,
will cause them to rank higher.
And use schema and structured markup.
You heard about FAQ page schema.
You can also use tools like Ubersuggest
to find out which SERP features
are present in the search results
for the keyword that you're targeting.
And if you notice that there's a certain type
of search feature, that's ranking for a keyword,
that you should start optimizing
for other similar keywords,
with structured markup that'll help you get there.
Some examples of that are,
review structure markup,
product markup, offer markup,
local business markup.
Now, another thing that I want you to do,
is keep in mind that more people search Google
on mobile devices than their desktop devices.
You want to make sure that your website is responsive,
that way whether someone has a big mobile device,
or a small one, your website shows up clearly.
You also want to use Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP,
so then that way, your pages that are content base,
load faster for mobile load time.
And if you want content, but you don't want to write,
you can either go to the Problogger job board,
and hire writers,
or you can just work with guest contributors.
We did this with Crazy Egg.
Crazy Egg was one of my older companies,
we hired a small writing team.
They did their SEO research,
their keyword research, competitive research.
They even outline content and we had content writers,
and facts searching,
and we used stats to back up all our points.
And guess what happened with Crazy Egg,
we ended up generating over 200,000 visitors a month,
purely because of all those guest contributors.
And another thing that you can do
if you want to do really
when we did the strategy on Crazy Egg,
is find people who can go create compelling images,
like infographics,
or it can find interesting images out there
and create them themselves using tools like Canva.
And this is what we call visual content or infographics.
It's a really simple way to make complex information,
easier to understand.
If you do that, not only will people link to it,
but your audience is going to be really happy,
and you're going to start seeing
all your other content rank higher.
The last piece of feedback I have for you,
is use other platforms beyond SEO,
in your content marketing mix.
Podcasts, great form of content.
You can actually transcribe the podcast and to texts
without doing much work.
Video content, publish it on YouTube,
your social properties, repurpose it.
Heck, just bust out a phone and record yourself.
You can also publish lightweight educational content
on social media platforms,
through things like image care shells, or short videos,
dumbing down complex ideas,
or attention grabbing images,
with long form text descriptions on social media platforms
like Instagram, LinkedIn, or even Facebook.
If you follow all of that,
you'll start getting some traction,
even if you're not writing tons of content.
And if you have the honor and the privilege to do so,
either go hire the writers,
or start writing it yourself,
because more content does help.
Even though it doesn't mean
you have to write content to rank,
if you want more traffic,
like not thousands of this,
I'm talking about millions and millions and millions
of visitors, eventually are going to have to create
tons of content.
But it doesn't mean it's the end of the world if you can't,
there's still some solutions out there
like the ones I described today.
And if you just need help and want my team
to do all this for you,
check out my ad agency NP Digital,
where we just help companies with their content marketing,
SEO, an essence, all forms of their digital marketing.
If you enjoyed the video, like it, share it,
and tell people about it.
If you got any questions,
leave a comment below,
I'm here to help.
Thank you for watching.