- People really overthink and over-complicate SEO.
But if I had to break it down to the bare minimum essentials
that you need to master in order to get SEO,
it wouldn't be a lot.
Hi, everyone, I'm Neil Patel.
And today I'm going to break down eight things to master
in SEO.
Do you know them?
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Before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
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The first thing I want you to master is studying
search results and competitors.
Who's ranking? How many back links do they have?
What kind of back links?
Where can you get these back links from?
What kind of pages are ranking?
Is it content pages?
Is it E-commerce pages?
Is it a service page?
Is it a app?
All these things are things that you need to know
if you want to rank.
Now if you're just tryna figure this out,
and you're not sure where to get started.
You can use Uber Suggests,
you can type in any keyword and we'll show you not only
all the other similar keywords,
but I'll also show you who's ranking
in the top hundred positions.
How many social shares they have,
how many back links they have.
How many other phrases that they're ranking for,
heck it even tells you all about their content as well.
So you know, hey, should you be copying what they're doing?
Or should you be using a different strategy?
The second thing that you need to do
is start planning and strategizing.
What are the keywords that you can win at
versus the ones that are going to be a waste of time?
Look, search volume is everything,
you need to look at what people are ranking for,
and see whether or not that you can replicate
those kind of metrics.
For example, if it's a Wikipedia that you're going after,
well, Wikipedia has a high domain score,
the chances are you're not going to rank for everything
that they're ranking for.
You want to go after keywords that are less competitive,
because if you go after less competitive keywords that still
get some traffic and have a high chance of converting,
you can still generate revenue.
And once you get your business going
and you're doing better and better,
then you can start going after the more competitive terms.
And Uber Suggests, if you look at the keyword ideas report,
it tells you how a keyword is.
Go after keywords that have a SEO difficulty score
of less than 40.
Those are easier to rank for.
Uber Suggests will also tell you how many back links
you need to rank for any given keyword.
And that's integrated within the SEO difficulty score.
The next thing I want to cover is writing.
SEO is all about delivering what people need
and doing a better job than anyone else.
Writing content is going to be crucial to anyone running
an SEO campaign, even if you're outsourcing it.
If you're not great at writing, you can use your phone
to record yourself speak and then use services like Rev.com
or Trent.com to transcribe the audio.
You can edit the transcription
and then turn into blog posts.
Or if you're looking for other writers
to write amazing content for you.
You can go to the Problogger job board
and in this job board, you can find a ton of freelance
writers that are good at writing content that's SEO
friendly.
The other thing that you need to know is basic HTML.
You'll need this skill because you need to edit title tags,
meta tags, you need to add schema markup like
the FAQ schema markup,
it's a great way to get higher rankings.
You also need a tracking code on your site
like Google Analytics.
And then hey, is that traffic converting into conversions,
Google Analytics will tell you this.
You need to figure out how you can structure your site.
So that way you have a hierarchy, right?
You have parent topics subtopics.
All these things will help you rank higher,
from optimizing all tags to other basic things that are
really important when it comes to HTML.
If you don't know basic HTML, you're probably going to have to
hire a developer.
You can find people at Upwork for pennies on the dollar.
Or else you could try to learn it yourself.
But it may take a while.
Or if you're using WordPress,
you can just use plugins like the Yoast SEO plugin,
or the Rank Math plugin.
And this allows you to optimize your blog
and adjust a lot of this HTML stuff
without learning a single line of code.
Literally, you can do a lot of these things
with a few clicks of a button.
The next thing you need to learn is analytics.
Your results will only be as good as you'll be able
to measure them.
If you don't know where your users are spending their time,
what kind of content to produce,
what's your best dwell time,
which causes your visitors to bounce,
and which causes your visitors to keep coming back
and buying more, and increasing your lifetime value
with those repeat purchases.
It's important to measure content that's effective,
and why people are coming to your site.
And once they land on site, what they're doing next,
even the devices that they're using,
because hey, converting something on a mobile device
is totally different than converting them
on a web-based desktop site.
Even if you have a responsive design, it's not that simple.
These things will tell you how you should optimize your
site, not only from a content standpoint,
but also from a technical SEO standpoint.
And remember, SEO is all about providing
the best user experience.
So you need to look at things like conversion rates per page
and channel, bounce rates, time on site, traffic by channel
and month over month growth rates.
This will all help you determine on how you can grow
from an SEO standpoint,
but from a user experience standpoint as well.
The next one, self management, SEO is multi-faceted.
You'll be doing several kinds of activities
in any given day,
you can be doing SEO audits, writing content
and keyword research, strategy, on page optimization,
cold email outreach, client meetings,
if you don't have the skills to manage your time,
things are going to get lost.
You need to know on a daily basis, what are the actions
you need to do and which ones should be prioritized
and how to manage your time effectively.
If you're a bit lost, start off with the site audit report
within Uber Suggests, because that site audit report will
end up breaking down what you should focus your time on
first, second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. based on what's
going to have the biggest impact to your ranking.
The next thing you need to do is be willing to constantly
learn.
SEO changes rapidly and every day something different can
happen to alter your industry,
whether it's Google doing an update, like the medic update,
or just a general algorithm change, or hey,
you have new competitors who are copying
all of your schedules
and doing it better than you.
So if we're not going to be staying up to date with industry
trends, reading blogs, learning new techniques that may be
surfacing, you're going to struggle.
You need to read each and every single day and learn from
other people in your industry as well,
even if that takes some time out of your day.
And I like doing things like going to industry events,
like when you go to those in person conferences,
you can network with other members, heck,
even if they are at a SEO Marketing event,
and you can get feedback from other SEOs and markers on what
they're doing that's effective versus
what you should be doing.
Most importantly, you need to write conclusions from
your SEO experiments and understand what are the lessons
that you can learn from each success and each failure that
you have,
because not everything you're doing is going to work out.
And last but not least cold outreach.
I've shared over and over again several studies that show
correlation between back links and rankings.
Atrus has a lot of studies on this,
and so does a Authority Hacker.
And we're even seeing the same thing in Uber Suggests,
in which there's a direct correlation between how many links
you have and your rankings,
and true after a while there is diminishing returns.
But for you when you're starting off,
and you don't have that many back links,
each and every single one really helps move the needle.
It's important to master cold outreach,
whether it's by emailing, social media, or even phone calls.
How do you pique a stranger's interest
and get them to link to you?
How do you craft that introduction, that you're so likable
and approachable that people want to converse with you?
How do you craft amazing subject lines?
How do you persuade other people to take action?
These are all skills that you need to master if you want to
do well with cold outreach.
Now, if you're tryna build links, or figure out hey,
how do I get a ton of PR and get these links in an easy way?
There's a tool called milkshake.
Milkshake has a lot of templates that they've tested
and tried when it comes to link building.
Check it out.
It helps you and they even have a community support center
where you can live chat with people and they help you craft
your outbound emails to generate more links.
If you enjoyed this video,
make sure you like and subscribe to our channel.
And if you need more help with your SEO,
check out my ad agency.
Neil Patel digital.
Thank you for watching.
If you have any questions, leave a comment.
I'll do my best to answer and help you out.