- I have 9 million visitors
and now I'm trying to get less traffic.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel
and today, I want to break down how sometimes
the best SEO strategy is to abandon some keywords.
(lighthearted music)
Now, before we get started,
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Look, neilpatel.com gets roughly
eight to 9 million visitors a month.
And it ranges, some months are better than others,
some months I even had 10 million visitors,
some months, there's seven.
Really depends on the season as well.
Now, when I look at neilpatel.com,
when I first started off, I wasn't targeting buyers,
I was targeting any keyword that would get high traffic,
and I just wanted as much traffic as possible.
People were searching on how to make money on Instagram.
You know what?
Boom, I create a article on that.
People want to know how to get more Instagram followers.
Boom, I create a article on that.
People want to know something about TikTok,
even though my customers
don't care to pay me for TikTok marketing,
boom, I create a article on that.
Why was I doing that?
Well, the main thing is,
is I thought the more traffic, the better
because a lot of people wanted this traffic
and people would pay money to rank for these keywords
or more so pay money
to get at the top of Google in the paid ads.
And what I learned from that strategy is,
if the intent of those keywords doesn't exactly match
what your ideal customer is looking for,
you're getting the traffic, but you won't make any money.
So you're probably wondering, what am I doing now, right?
Well, I'm doing a few different things.
First off, I don't care for traffic anymore.
Yes, I want more traffic, but I want the right traffic.
I don't really care if I have 9 million visitors
or 1,000,000 visitors.
I really care about conversions
and what's driving those conversions.
And I've been doing this for a while now.
So I want you to go into Google Analytics,
set up some goals and conversion tracking,
and look to see what's driving conversions.
Focus more on getting those traffic sources.
That's the first step.
The second thing I want you to do is go and look for
what your competitors are paying money on paid ads for.
So you can use tools like Ubersuggest
and put in your competitor's URLs.
See what keywords are ranking for,
see what keywords are targeting for
on a paid ad perspective.
And that'll give you a big idea of,
hey, these are the keywords we should be going after
and these are the keywords that we shouldn't be going after.
So if you know that your competition
is continually paying for keyword,
it means that that keyword is typically
driving up more revenue.
No one just keeps spending money and money over time
for no reason.
Now, granted, if you're a big company,
you may end up doing that,
but most people don't really do that.
And even the big companies,
they do got budgets and they had to produce specific ROI.
The third thing that I'm doing is
focusing on other channels
that aren't necessarily related to keywords.
If you look at the big companies out there,
Microsoft, IBM, Airbnb, Nike, whatever it may be,
they grow their revenue in many different ways.
Nike doesn't just generate revenue through their website.
They generate much of their sales
by sending their shoes to other companies
like Footlocker, right?
You see Nike shoes in Nordstrom
and all these other stores that carry 'em
that generates some more sales, that's called partnerships.
It's a form of affiliate marketing.
Now, if you do things like that,
you can also generate more sales.
And we found that doing things like that
is a massive channel for companies like ours.
The next thing that I'm doing
is going after keywords that I know I can easily rank for.
So if you go to Ubersuggest
and you put in a keyword that you know is good,
like, I'm in the marketing industry,
so I may put in digital marketing,
and you'll see a report that loads
and it shows your overall traffic,
like, for the term digital marketing
and how many people click on it.
But then what's cool about this is on the left side
you see keyword ideas report.
If you click on it, it'll show you all the keywords
that are related to digital marketing,
and there's different tabs, some are questions-related,
some are related,
some are just suggestions from Google Suggest.
And what I want you to do is,
if you're not logged in, you won't see it,
but if you're logged in,
it'll actually have a option where there's a button
that says, show me keywords that I can rank for.
And you put your URL in there
and it'll end up breaking out once you put your URL,
all the related keywords that are good
and that you can easily rank for.
And I want you to look at each of those keywords,
do some searches, do some research,
and make sure that you're seeing direct competitors,
not somewhat competitors, but direct competitors.
Like I wouldn't look at HubSpot
because HubSpot is not a direct competitor.
I may look at iProspect, which would be a direct competitor
and see, all right,
are they bidding for some of these same terms?
And if they are, and they have a high CPC and good traffic,
that means I know that that's a good keyword for me
to target in SEO because it will drive sales,
which is very important.
And that's a strategy that I would recommend,
and remember, traffic isn't everything,
conversions and sales is.
It all starts with tracking your conversions
in things like Google Analytics,
which they can do for free.
So if you have any questions, leave a comment below.
If you need help getting the right traffic that converts,
check on my ad agency, NP Digital.
If you enjoy this video, like it, share it,
tell other people about it.
Thank you for watching.