- If you do this, you'll set yourself up for SEO failure.
Hey, everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm going to break down how you'll never rank
for specific types of keywords
and how to stop setting yourself up for failure.
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Look, it's tempting to go after high volume keywords.
Those are the keywords that everyone wants rank for,
credit cards, auto insurance, you know, SEO,
online marketing, dog food,
but those keywords, more often than not,
have really high search difficulty.
Look, the basic requirements to rank for these keywords
is you need a lot of high quality backlinks
and a high domain authority.
This won't be achieved by a small website, or a new website,
or even if you've just been doing SEO
for a short period of time,
even if your website is really, really old.
You need a few years to reach that level
to go after some of these big keywords.
And even for some of them,
it takes way more than a few years.
By the time you've accomplished that,
you've already grown even more
and your competitors have even grown even more than that,
so then it just becomes harder and harder,
because as you're ready to target some
of those high authority keywords,
your competitors will likely grow,
so it's a really bad approach.
So you're pretty much wondering,
"Hey, Neil,
if I can't go up to those keywords at anytime
in the near future, what should I do?
Well, instead,
you need to build your website authority gradually
by dominating long-tail variations of the head terms.
And you'll gradually be able to climb up
and go after more competitive keywords,
and the more relevant your website becomes
for those niche terms,
the greater chances you have of going after
those head terms.
Here's what I mean.
If you go after the term SEO, right?
It's really hard,
but if you go after how to get started in SEO?
What is SEO?
Then you have to go off to the long-tail variations
of the term,
and then Google knows your website's not just on SEO,
but only, you know, digital marketing, SEO,
online marketing, email marketing,
SEO, paid ads, et cetera,
then Google knows that your website is around this niche.
So then when you try to eventually go after the term SEO,
or online marketing,
even if you don't have the highest authority,
you're more likely to rank because you've done really,
really well in that niche, not just from the eyes of Google,
but from the eyes of consumers out there.
So what I want you to do to find
the right long-tail variations,
and this is going to be a really short tutorial video,
because I just want you to go and do this tactic.
If you do it,
you'll do really well.
Type in the keywords that you want to go after.
You already know the head terms, SEO,
or dog food, or credit cards, whatever it may be.
Type it into Ubersuggest.
Go to the Keyword Ideas list.
When you go to the Keyword Ideas list,
or keyword ideas report,
it'll show you all the keywords that are related
to that phrase.
It'll show you based on questions, comparisons,
related keywords, ideas,
and all this will then end up saying,
"Hey, now you got a list of maybe 500 keywords,
1,000 keywords, sometimes, in many cases, Ubersuggest,
"We'll show you literally up to a million keywords,"
but you don't have the time to filter all of those keywords.
Look to see for that button
that shows you which keywords you can actually rank
on page one for.
Click on that keyword ideas report and then put in your URL.
It'll then filter all the keywords
that you have a possibility to rank for today,
not next month, not six months from now,
not in a year from now, but literally today.
Those are the keywords that you want to go after first,
and I want you to go
and create content around those keywords.
Now that you have a list, I want you to group them.
So let's say I'm creating an article on SEO.
I may see some keywords on on-page SEO,
some about backlinks, some about site speed,
and you want to group them together.
So group all the keywords related to one specific topic,
like in my case, on on-page SEO, group them together,
group the other keywords related to backlinks together,
group the third category related to site speed together.
I may even group another keyword related to,
let's say content creation,
and you can find different groups.
And once you have that group,
go and create an article around that topic,
and create article that's better than your competitor's.
I'm not saying that you need more words on a page,
or you need more visual images, or include videos.
What you want to do to figure out how to create
a better article than your competitors
is take those keywords within that group and Google them.
Who's on page one? What did they include in the article?
Write that down.
Not their words, but write down what they included.
Did they include videos, animated GIFs?
did they include step-by-step instructions
that teaches people how to get something done?
Once you have your list,
do it for all the terms related within that category, right?
Because you have these group of keywords.
Literally Google each and every single one of them,
create your list,
now you'll know what you need to include in your article
to help people solve their problems right away.
Remember, when someone searches for a term,
they're looking for a solution to their problem.
The quicker that you solve it,
and the better that you solve it versus the competitors,
the more likely you are to outrank them.
And then go and create your article on it.
Once you've done that,
I want you to take all the people
that already have articles relate to those keywords,
take their URLs and put it into the backlinks report
in Ubersuggest.
That'll show you all the people linking to your competitors.
Hit up each and every single one
of those websites linking to your competitors
and ask them to link to you.
And do a customized email.
Tell them how your article's better, more in depth,
what you offer that the competitors didn't,
why it benefits their audience linking
to you over the competitors.
And when you do that,
a portion of those people will link back to you.
And the key is to hit up
the people linked to your competitors,
because you already know that they're linked to others
in your space.
When you do this, you're more likely to rank and do better,
and then eventually you'll build up the authority,
and then you can go after the head terms.
You just have to be patient and follow the steps,
and that's how you're going to rank really well today,
and not wait six months to a year.
If you need my team to just do this for you,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital.
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and leave a comment below if you need any help.