- No matter how good you are at marketing,
you're not gonna get traffic from Google
unless you stop doing this.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm gonna share five SEO mistakes
that are gonna kill your traffic.
(upbeat music)
Before we get started, make sure you subscribe
to this channel.
That way, as I release more videos like this,
you'll get notified.
Quick question for you.
How much traffic are you getting
per month from Google?
Leave a comment below with the number.
Because you know what,
after you stop making these five deadly SEO mistakes,
that number is gonna increase.
The first mistake is putting dates in your URL.
I used to do this with neilpatel.com.
What a huge mistake.
My URL structure used to be
neilpatel.com, slash year,
slash month, slash title of my blog post.
The moment I took off the dates from my URL,
guess what happened to my search traffic?
Well, within 30 days, it went up by 58%.
And I'm not talking about, I took my search higher
from a 1000 visitors to a 1580 visitors.
I'm talking about, I had hundreds and thousands
of visitors from Google already each month
with dates in my URL.
But the moment I removed 'em,
I saw additional 58% increase in my search traffic.
So, whatever URL structure you have,
just make sure it does not have dates.
Reason being is, when you have a date in your URL
Google thinks of your site as being relevant to that date.
So, you write a blog post, they're like oh,
this blog post must be on, related to January 12th, 2025
or whatever the date is today.
So, if you want your content to continually rank,
you know that evergreen content,
you can't be putting dates in your URL.
The second mistake that you're making is you're thinking
of your site as a silo.
It doesn't matter how many different sections you have
or categories, it's still one site.
It's on one domain name.
For example, my blog is about marketing.
So, when I create content, I link
to all the other marketing posts
that are relevant to the post that I just released.
And you should consider thinking of your website
as one big site, versus different silos.
So when you write content, link to other pieces
of content that are relevant.
That way, all of your pages are gonna be interconnected
and they're gonna rank higher.
The third mistake that you're making,
you're thinking of SEO as just SEO.
It's not just about on-page code.
It's not just about building links.
It's not even just about getting social shares.
It's about building a brand.
Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google once said
that brands are the solution.
What he's talking about is, when you're trying to figure out
what sites to rank higher than others,
he decided, as well as a ton of other people in Google,
that if you have a brand, you should rank higher.
Why is that?
Well you've heard of this thing called fake news.
It's a great way to combat that.
It's not just Facebook, who's concerned about fake news.
It's also Google, it's also Linkedin.
It's also Twitter.
It's all of the major platforms out there.
So, building a brand does wonders for you
especially when it comes to SEO.
You can do things like collecting emails
to get people to keep coming back to your site.
You can use tools like Hello Bar to do that for free.
You can use tools like subscribers.com
to do push notifications.
So when people come to your website within one click,
they can subscribe.
Getting all those people to keep coming back,
it'll help reinforce your brand to them.
That'll help you climb in the rankings in the long run.
The fourth mistake is just writing content.
I know you're thinking, oh Neil, content's king.
How's that a mistake?
No, writing content isn't the mistake.
It's writing content and then not updating it,
and that's what most people do.
They just write content, and they write more new content.
Then after that, they write more new content,
and guess what they do after that?
They write more new content.
So, if you update your content,
Google's gonna be like, oh wow, it's fresh.
It's hip, it's new, it's still relevant.
Let's rank it higher.
With over a billion blogs out there,
Google likes picking brand new, updated content
versus old, outdated content.
This doesn't mean you have to rewrite the whole article.
It could just be a paragraph or two, a few lines.
It could just be reviewing the article,
making sure it's still up-to-date,
and you make no modifications,
because it's still good to go.
And the last mistake you're making,
you're not thinking about the user.
Google looks at something called user metrics.
Whether it's the browser, whether it's the toolbar,
Google wants to make sure people have an amazing experience.
They're using all those platforms to track
how when people come to your website,
how they perceive it.
And they can't talk to 'em by surveying 'em
or anything like that, but what they can see is,
hey did someone perform as a Google search,
click on the listing, land on your site,
and within a second, are they clicking the Back button?
'Cause if they are, it tells Google,
your website, that webpage isn't relevant.
So, by putting the user first, instead of putting SEO first,
it'll help you climb to the top.
Now, if you're struggling with your site
and not getting the search traffic that you deserve,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital,
and if you like this video,
please leave a comment below.
Tell other people about it.
Subscribe to the channel,
and of course, like the video itself.
Thank you for watching,
and I look forward to helping you out
later this week.