- There are SEO tactics that work really well in 2010,
that people are still doing today.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patil, and today
I'm going to share with you eight things
that you need to unlearn when it comes to SEO
and what you should be doing in 2019 instead.
(bright music)
Before we get started, make sure you subscribe
to this channel, that way when I release more marketing
advice like this, you'll get notified.
Question for you, has your website been hurt
by some old school SEO techniques?
Or have you found out that when you use these old school
SEO techniques, for some reason your traffic isn't going up?
If that's you, leave a comment below with yes.
If it isn't, you leave a comment below with no.
I'm curious because if it is, I want to find out
what these old school tactics you're leveraging,
because I'll show you what to do instead.
The first thing I want you to unlearn
is only focusing on external links.
Everyone's like oh my god, back links
is the number one factor in Google.
No, there's a ton of factors in Google, and just building
links from external sites isn't going to do you justice.
You need to also build internal links.
If you don't build internal links,
your rankings aren't going to climb.
If you look at my site, you'll notice
that I rank for things like online marketing,
and I rank for things like SEO,
it's because I'm internal linking my pages together.
If you don't internal link, you're not going to do as well.
And I interlink throughout my content,
throughout my sidebar, wherever it makes sense.
Those internal links don't just have to be rich
in key words, they need to be more so relevant.
So when you find a good opportunity to internal link,
even if it doesn't have the right anchor text, that's okay.
You need to do what's best for the user.
By doing what's best for them, you'll be able
to drive them to other relevant sections of your site,
so that way they can continue to get education,
find out more about your products, find out more
about your services, and buy from you.
The second thing I want you to unlearn is,
you can't just write content for SEO.
Everyone's doing key word research these days.
Heck, I even had a tool called Uber Suggest
that I've released for free that
helps you do a key word research.
And you should be doing key word research,
but when everyone does key word research,
like you go to Uber Suggest, you type in a key word
like digital marketing, or Google analytics,
or whatever the phrase is, dog food it could be,
you'll see a list of results of all the other similar terms.
But there's an issue.
When you see a list of all the other related terms,
you may end up taking them and
just putting them into your website.
Yep, putting them into your website
is writing content for search engines.
You got to reformat your content.
You got to rewrite it.
You got to extend the length.
You got to make sure that you're powering the best
experience for people because you don't want them
reading your dog food article and just be like
wait, this just has key words in there.
It doesn't teach me anything about the right dog food
for my puppy, if it's going to help him lose weight,
gain weight, be stronger, fitter, leaner.
All that it's doing is just inserting
500 key words related to dog food and
this article doesn't provide any value.
So you can't just write content based off of search engines,
you need to write content based off of people
because Google is now using user metrics,
in which if someone reads your content
and they bounce away because they don't like it,
they hit the back button, go to Google search,
it tells Google that your content sucks
no matter how many back links you have
and no matter how many key words you inserted.
The third mistake that you need to unlearn
is targeting high traffic key words that have no intent.
For example, I rank for terms like SEO.
Do you think that terms drive me any business?
You would think so, but no, it doesn't, why?
Because most people who research that term
are just looking to understand what SEO is, how it works.
They're not necessary looking to pay an ad agency.
A better term would be SEO agency.
Yes, SEO agency gets a lot less traffic,
but the people who come from that key word
and more likely to convert into revenue.
The fourth thing I want you to unlearn
is building a lot of back links.
Everyone believes that you need quantity.
No you don't need quantity.
A good example of this is my friend Todd Malicoat.
Years and years ago had a forex site,
and he ranked on page two of Google
in less than six months of creating it.
Can you guess how many back links he built?
Less than 20.
All he did was went to the sites that already rank
in the top 500 for the term forex,
and he went to those sites and convinced
the owners to link to his site.
And he got those exact pages already ranked in the first 500
to also link to some of his articles
and that drastically shot up his rankings.
It's not about quantity, it's about quality.
The fifth one is SEO is about tactics, tricks and gimmicks.
No it's not, SEO is about putting the user first.
If you look at Google, their mission is to make sure
that when someone does a search,
they're getting the best most valuable information for them.
They don't want them to have to go to five,
10 different pages, they focus on the user.
So if you also focus on the user in the long run,
not the short run, but in the long run, you'll rank higher.
The sixth mistake that you need
to unlearn is focusing on rankings.
Ahrefs did a study, and do you know what they found out?
That the number one listing only gets the majority
of the clicks 49% of the times.
Rankings aren't everything.
For example, I get more traffic than some of the people
that rank higher for me for terms like
SEO tips because of Rich Snippets.
Even though I don't rank at the top,
I still get more traffic due to Rich Snippets.
When you get included in that, that's what's called
ranking zero, you can actually get more traffic.
If you also have more appealing title tags
and better descriptions, even when you rank lower,
you can also get more clicks than your competitors.
It's not always about ranking number one,
it's about ranking for the right terms,
providing the best user experience,
and eventually slowly climbing up to the top.
The seventh mistake that you need to unlearn
is focusing on key words in the bad ways.
What I mean by this is a lot of people
still go after exact match domains.
What worked for hotels.com is not going to work for you.
People still stuck key words in their title tags,
their meta descriptions, their content.
We already went over why you shouldn't do it
in your content, but again, if you stuck key words
in your title tags, meta descriptions, you'll find that hey,
everyone is just clicking on other people's results, why?
Because their title tag and their meta description
is appealing, they're using copywriting to appeal
to people and get them to click versus just having
five keywords in a row that don't make any sense.
So what worked for some of these people in the past
when it comes to key word stuffing won't work for you.
And last but not least, content marketing replaces SEO.
That's a huge myth, that's not true.
Everyone's like yeah if you want ranking,
you just need to create a ton of content.
Not necessarily.
If you don't have a good click through rate,
if you don't have good on page code,
if your URL structure is incorrect, for example,
when I removed my dates in my URLs, my traffic shot up,
I got over 100,000 extra search visitors per month.
If you don't have the fundamentals right,
content marketing isn't going to do wonders for you.
Now if you need help growing your traffic,
growing your rankings, getting more traffic,
check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital.
Of course if you enjoyed this video,
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Thank you for watching.