In this clip,
we're going to talk about how SEO is going to change in 2020 and unfortunately
you're not going to like it, but before we do,
don't forget to subscribe or follow whatever platform you are watching on right
now, especially if you enjoy a clips on marketing, entrepreneurship, growth,
productivity, and more stuff. You're going to enjoy it. Check it out. All right,
so SEO, here's what's happening with SEO right now. If you think about Google,
because Google is the largest,
they take on the lion's share of the traffic in the U S and a lot of countries
around the world. The problem with this is they're a publicly traded company.
Now their incentives are to make more money for their shareholders.
Now it's no longer just don't be evil, which was their model in the past.
They actually took that off of kind of their,
their mission statement or part of their mission and values.
So you think about it now, there's only so much space.
There's only so much real estate and on a search result page.
So it used to be in the past, you know their ads.
I remember in high school when, when they started, um, Google ad words, um, the,
there was only like one snippet and as crystal clear that it was an ad, right?
And now over over the years,
now it's becoming less and less apparent that it's an ad, right?
It used to be highlighted in yellow.
It was like crystal clear as an ad and there's only like one or two of them
right now you might see like four or five ads at the very top and you see more
ads at the bottom because Google is making a less apparent than their ads and
they're putting more ads on the, on the on search engine result pages,
they're making more money, they're incentivized to make money,
which means the organic results, the SEO results,
those are getting pinched down a little bit, right?
So what used to be at the very top above the fold that would get like the lion's
share of the clicks.
Now it's getting pushed down so much that you know these to say like maybe the
number one result in SEO might get 25 to 40 to 50% of, of the clicks.
Now it's like, you know, it might go down to like 10% or so.
There's a clip I'm going to show you in a little bit where, uh,
when I spoke at the marketing school live conference, I'm,
I actually share some data, uh, from, from rand Fishkin, from spark Toro,
the search result pages,
they're getting more and more consolidated as become a tougher and tougher to,
um, to make SEO work.
Here's the thing that's happening with Google right now.
If you produce a blog post,
this is a recent study with collaboration with Rand Fishkin and of spark Turrell
what the job shot, the number of, um,
zero click searches are going up.
Meaning that when you land on a search result page or a Serp,
the problem right now is that most people aren't clicking anymore because Google
is, you know, adding, you know, here's the answer, right? You don't,
you no longer need to click on something. Um,
and this black part over here is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um,
and that, you know, there's this whole thing runs, got a rent,
Rand's got a rant about Google, um, driving more clicks to their,
bless you to their own, to their own properties. And that's a problem in itself.
But let's just talk about what this means for us right now. So zero clicks,
searches are growing and over here,
all you need to know if I did like laser pointer it,
but you can see it's going up and to the right.
So what do you have to do for yourself? You kind of have to CYA,
cover your own acids, right? So, um, Google Click throughs,
you can see the blue part is what we want. That's organic searches. Um,
so organic click percentage, that's,
and you can see actually the red part for the paid clicks, um,
which is where Google makes its money. That is actually growing.
It's growing very slightly, but you can see that. So you kind of have to, like,
if you're just doing blog posts, you have to defend yourself.
If you're going to do a blog post, how do you make the most of it right?
Like if we do a podcast, how do we make the most of it?
And we've talked about this a couple of times, so you know people who,
I don't have the time for this.
So what we do is we do something called cotton sprouting and then we might take
a video.
So our youtube channel I think has two to three new videos per week and we'll
start with the video first because a video automatically becomes an audio file,
right? So video, audio, and then we can convert. Let's say I do like a,
my talk right now, this talk can become maybe three or four podcasts episodes,
right? And so I can go from one, one video piece of content,
automatically have three podcast pieces of content.
And then from there I have like 50 to 60% of our blog posts.
So I could just have a writer on my team take on the blog post,
maybe write a 500 word or a thousand word piece to see if it ranks and an
upgrade it. And then we've got to think about promotion too. So we, we do seed.
Sprout pollinate is a promotion portion and then a very bottom,
it's monetization, right? So harvesting. So we produce a ton of content.
We ranked for a lot of different things.
I think we were ready for podcast advertising, ad networks, things like that.
And I was actually talking to Mr affiliate master Siad about this and he's like,
dude, you should think about like how you can like affiliate ties.
Those are monetizes better. And um, you know,
most people don't think about how they can monetize the traffic that they're
bringing and um, that's good traffic, right? I think,
I think for the podcast advertising wine, um,
I think for this year we'll at least collect 30 to 36 grand on it. It's not bad.
We can probably do more with it, but at least that's some cashflow, um,
that we otherwise wouldn't have gotten.
And now we just take that 36 grand and apply it to her salaries and hire more
people. Um, so this is content sprouting right here. It's,
how do you make the most of what you have? This is what Gary v does too,
cause he has a videographer and I follows him all over around the whole day.
And um, sometimes it might be like a 15 hour session and then you know,
all of that might become like, you know, separate audio clips.
It goes into podcasts. And then, um,
one guy that used to work at single right now is his copywriter. Um,
and so he Q will convert it into long form content. Um,
I think when he used to work for us, uh, Eric, what was he writing?
Like 8,000 words a day, something like that. Yeah.
So he was running like four to 8,000 words a day.
He was just a machine and now he's,
he's with Gary v and he actually gave me his content process, um, just to,
um, and actually I think Gary V's actually shared it on slideshare,
so you can pick it up. Just type in Gary v content process. Um, and it's,
it's very similar to something like this,
but it's literally taking what you have, right?
You don't just buy a car and drive it off the street and just don't drive it
again, you make the most of it. You do content sprouting.
So with these zero click searches like it, okay, it's crystal clear.
Like I mentioned right before you saw the click.
It's getting tougher and tougher.
What I think you need to do with SEO now is you cannot just be a blogger.
You have to think about if we have a blog post,
we're gonna make little video clips to your,
we're going to make a little social clips to,
we're going to make them into audio clips too.
So we're not just relying on one channel because blogging itself is very hard.
I talked about in another view,
there's over 1.6 billion sites in the world right now is becoming tougher and
tougher to compete when it comes to just SEO.
So you have to diversify because if Google is making it tougher and tougher and
you can see over the the, the trends that the,
that what I talked about in the graph is like,
it's already hard enough doing SEO. The zero click searches are rising.
And you have to think about answer SEO too.
You can't just put all your eggs in one basket. Sure.
Get good at one channel first, and then you have to start to diversify.
That's the only way you're gonna Start to protect yourself longterm when it
comes to playing the game of SEO, especially in 2020. In the next clip,
I want to share a video also clip from what Neil was saying at the marketing
school live conference. And he was talking about how, look,
it's not just traffic that matters. It's actually, uh,
conversions that matter and how do you convert more when it comes to SEO,
you don't have to increase rankings to get more search traffic.
Here's the old site that I have. I eventually got rid of it. Nutrition secrets.
It was in nutrition site. I got my traffic up into the right and yeah,
there's writing content and building links and all that kind of stuff.
But the real way we grew nutrition secrets, we did something really manual.
At that time. There was no software that could do this. Now there isn't.
I'll tell you about the software and a bit. I don't have the screenshot. Um,
but you go into Google search console. I still like the old version.
I don't know why. You know, you click click CTR impressions,
you see the pages that are getting the traffic and then from there you look at
which you click into the page that has a low CTR. You look at the keywords,
the ones that are driving a lot of impressions but low clicks and then you're
like, alright, I need to adjust my page with these keywords.
I can get more clicks. Simple concept. You look for keywords.
I have less than a 5% click rate.
Look for pages I have a less than a 4% CTR, right?
And make sure the keywords that you want to rank for and your title tag and
within your content and meta-description. Once you make that change,
you submit to Google and they re crawl it.
And here's some cures that help skyrocket CTR that we've tested,
how to use lists, number results free. You tips, great tricks,
best why blog posts. You guys get the gist.
These have all worked really well from everything we've tested and as you submit
it back to Google and you fettuccine Smith the URL,
click submit to their index and boom, you're in.
You say you're not a robot and you give it 30 days and you see results.
We used to do all this manually. That's how we grew our traffic.
It's one of the best ways because Google is looking for a user signals.
Everyone focuses on links, but not enough of this.
If you don't want to do it manually, like how I used to do it,
there's a tool called click flow, you know,
that's what we do now and we just automate it and it works much easier,
but I kid you not.
This is where we're seeing the biggest search gains right now for SEO.
We're just optimizing going after user signals. It's not sexy.
No one talks about it works and nutrition secrets.
As we started doing all this stuff,
our branding started going up and we started doing better,
getting higher rankings, more pages, and that's how we continually climb.
But traffic and all this kind of stuff is gray, but it's not everything.
Elsie and rush showed one of my past startups, kissmetrics,
I think we raised like 17 million bucks for it. It didn't turn out well.
I bought out the domain name from the investors for 500,000 bucks and then
redirected the traffic and then they recently did an asset sale.
Now I had good traffic.
My competitor mixed panel who copied my product at the beginning,
they even had a tech crunch article showing similar screenshots,
had roughly one third of their traffic.
They raised money at an $865 million valuation.
What do you think we were worth? I'm the traffic guy.
I'm getting all this traffic. I'm beating them. What do you think we were worth?
Anyone want to take your guests more than 15 because we raised 17 ba but we are
worth roughly one 10th that technically not even one 10th that so maybe one 15th
one 20th that's brutal, right? Think about it.
I'm a marketer, I'm on cloud nine getting all this traffic.
Who shows you traffic isn't everything.
And I realized at that point the real formula to success,
especially in the future is traffic plus conversions.
Cubed equals success.
When you think about conversion rate optimization,
that's not just about paid advertising and optimizing the traffic coming in,
but it's also like taking the traffic that you have from an SEO perspective and
optimizing that to,
you can use Google search console or you can use this offer that I have called
click flow. Um,
and then that way you can optimize the titles descriptions you have or different
elements, different blocks on a, on the pages that you have on your site.
If you're struggling with SEO, you've got to go on any channel, right?
And once you start to get it working, once you start to find your voice.
And the second part is if you're already getting traffic,
how do you make the most of their traffic that you have?
You can do on Syrup SEO,
which kind of is like cro on the search result pages or you are basically doing
like, you know,
SEO and cro at the same time you making the most of the traffic that you have.
These are the two big things that are going to happen when it comes to SEO in
2020 Google is going to try to make more money. Always.
You got to think about what their incentives are.
They are at the end of the day in advertising platform.
So how are they going to get there, right?
How are they gonna get to get their money? And then at the same time,
once you understand what they're trying to do,
how are you going to make the most of what you have?
How are you gonna Protect Yourself, protect your butt for the longterm?
So that's about it from this video. But I do have a,
another video for you to check out that's related to this.
So don't forget to check out the next video if you're watching a video right now
and also whatever channel you're on, don't forget to rate, review and subscribe.
And leave a comment, let us know what you think and we'll see you tomorrow.