(plucky electronic music) - Hello everybody. Welcome to the final session
of this advanced SEO summit with Neil Patel. I am live right now with Neil. I'm coming to you from San Francisco, and we're very excited to have all of you with us today where we're gonna go through a lot of different data on SEO experiments that Neil is doing, how
he took the Neil Patel traffic from a little
bit to a ton per month, and it's just gonna be
an overall great time. So I'll give everybody
a minute to make sure that they're in the chat. We've got this thing
broadcasting of Facebook Live. So it's gonna be awesome. If you guys can hear me,
just give me a thumbs up or a mushroom or a cucumber or anything that's a positive signal
that you can hear me, and that we're live like
we're supposed to be. Okay, cool, sounds good. And I always like finding
out where's everybody from. Tell me what part of the
world you're coming from. I'd love to know where
people are joining us from. It's day time here, but I
know through the whole summit people have been joining
from all over the place. I've got Germany,
Portland, India, Australia. Wow, the Australia folks are up early to listen to you, Neil. How are you, man? - I'm good. - Great. - I would say thanks for having me like I do with most sessions, but this is kinda like my session. - Well it's great for you to be here. We're happy to have you. The whole audience has been ramping up for it all week. We've heard a bunch of great people. You've got some really
smart friends in SEO, man. - Yeah, they do. You know it's funny. I've worked with so many of 'em right. I was talking with, I always say Yoast 'cause of the plugin, but I was talking with Joost the other day
because I was using his plugin. I use the hreflang stuff. And I was telling him. I'm like dude, I gotta say
I love your XML site map. 'Cause the problem with most XML site maps are when you have different languages, they don't create 'em properly. So when you have separate
domains or separate sites, it does everything automatically for you, and you don't really have to do much. And I was like yeah it's a life saver. So we were just talking
about little things. Andrew, you know I've
worked with him for awhile. Tyler was the one who
told be to change my URLs. You'll see that in my presentation as well on one of the experiments. That one was a big lift. That was like a 40 plus
percent increase in. - Yeah, I've got a
question I want to drill down into it if you don't get
to it in your presentation. But just so everybody's sort of aware of what we're doing here in this session, Neil's gonna go through his deck on Demystifying SEO which is phenomenal because it is a process, and this guy's got it figured out. So get your pens ready, get another tab up ready with a Word document
or whatever you need to do to take notes. I'm gonna let Neil take it away. And then after that, if
you've got a question that you wanna make sure gets answered, just below this screen
there's a Q and A function. Type that question in Q and
A, and then do as best you can to get a bunch of up votes. The chat is slammed with
people, so if you ask it in the chat, I may not see it. So the best way to get it answered is to write it below,
and it's the opportunity to ask Neil anything that you want, proposals, questions about SEO. Let's see if we've got time to answer it. Neil's promised us that he's gonna give us a great, long session
after for Q and A stuff. And I've done this before with you, you love to just get into what's working for your right now right,
so screen sharing n'stuff. - Exactly, can you see
me right now, Clayton? - Yeah, we can see you now. If you wanna click on
the share screen thing, and let's get the deck going. I think we're all ready. - All right, so I'm gonna reload the chat. - Jefferson says Neil already tells us everything in the blog. Which it's almost true. He does tell a lot of stuff in the blog, but I've had a couple
of sessions with Neil that were not official, and I've learned something every time,
so that's the good news. Let's see, you see that? Is it coming up? I don't see it coming up? The screen share there
under the live stream. - Windows loading a bit slow for me. - All right, no worries. I've got Sweden. People are still typing
where they're from, Sweden, Columbia, let's see
a bunch of other places. London, a bunch of people in London, Cuba, Mexico, Vegas, Ukraine in the house. Harold is from Mars. He gets the long distance award. Canada, India, Holland, okay, wow there's so many people in here, man. We are blazing on this thing. If it's still loading, maybe just refresh the screen, and we'll be
here if that's the best way to do it. - I'm gonna click share
screen, so I'm waiting for the popup now. Once it comes up, then
I will start sharing. - Okay, let's see. - What was that burning
question you had for me? - I wanted to know, I
see a bunch of people that all have their dates
in the URL of their blogs. So walk us through
specifically what you removed, and did you remove it
from the page and the URL, and what happened? - I removed it, well pages
usually don't have dates. Well yeah, actually I
removed it from the pages, and I removed it from the URLs, and it worked out quite well. And I will explain that in the last one within my presentation. I believe that is experiment number seven. So just to speed this up I think I'm gonna refresh this screen really quickly, and then you can add me
back on, sounds good? - Yeah, go for it. We'll be here, no problem. Okay also, just to remind
everybody while we're getting Neil's screen
loaded for the presentation, this presentation is gonna
go for probably an hour, hour and a half, something like that. And then, all of the other presentations if you missed any, you can
view those right at the top by that horizontal radial button. Right there at the top, okay? I don't think you should
click off of this one 'cause this is the most exciting one. And then the recordings are gonna be available for a couple of hours after that until they get moved to the members area. So let's see. Neil's gonna just say
something in the chat, and I'll promote him onto screen again. Or Dylan maybe you could help? So let's just get him loaded up again. There is a transcript. I'm going to... - All right, I'm back. - There you are. All right, so now let's see. Thanks Inder. - Now I can share my screen. - Two a.m. in India. You guys are awesome coming and listening to this live broadcast. Let's see. Let's make sure that we an get the screen loaded, and there it is. Looks good. - Minimize my window. So that way I don't have all this stuff. And hopefully that way the
computer's more smooth. Can you see my screen? - [Clayton] Yeah, we can. That's great. Go for it. - [Neil] All right,
let's play this bad boy. You guys, ready? - [Clayton] Yeah. - [Neil] So today, I'm
gonna teach you guys seven experiments that I ran that grew my traffic from 9,029 search
visitors a month to 449,000. That's a huge increase. Now to clarify, I did that increase through a period of two
years from January 2015 all the way to January 2017. And then after summit's
over, if you guys still have questions that I don't
answer during the summit, you can always tweet at me. So here's my traffic. As you can see from the
screen, January first, 2015, I had a bit more than 9,000
search visitors a month. Now if you fast forward to
January 2017, as you can see, this is 449,000 visitors
a month from search. As you can see at the top left, you'll see that is says organic search traffic. This is not paid search traffic. This is pure organic. So experiment one, and I ran quite a few, but I'm gonna talk about the
seven most interesting ones. Experiment number one, does post frequency affect search traffic? Now you guys already know that
when you're first starting off with a blog or a website, and you add a ton of content, of course,
frequency and the amount of content as well as
quality affect how much traffic you're gonna get. Because if you have five
pages that Google's indexed, and then you have 100
pages, obviously you have a higher probability of
getting more search traffic. But the real question is is
there diminishing returns? What happens if you go
from having 100 blog posts to 200, 200 to 500, 500
to 1,000, et cetera? What really happens? So I decided to test a few things. I did everything from
for periods of times, I blogged once a week only. I blogged three times a week. I've gone all the way
up to seven times a week and even 14 times a week. That's two posts a day. I deleted the content that doesn't get 100 search visitors a
month, right after it's been live for six months. Because you have to keep
in mind that just because you know you publish a piece
or post, it's not gonna get search traffic right away. But over a period of you know six months, it should be doing somewhat
well in search engines. And I've even tested translating my blog into three different languages. In total I have over 1,900 posts. I've tested quite a bit. So and you can just see, right? Currently it shows that
there's 1,919 posts published. I have English, Portuguese,
Brazil, German, and Spanish. Those are the four main
languages that I'm in right now. And I have content really on
all forms of SEO marketing. (sneezing) Bless you, sorry about that. And what I found is the
more content that I produce, I was like all right, this should help increase my search traffic, right? Well after you reach a
few hundred blog posts, this is what happens
to your search traffic, and you can see this. In other words, it's pretty flat. Like yeah, you may see certain days a bit higher than others,
but if you look at it over a period of a month or two,
it's pretty flat, right? In other words, the test
didn't go the way I wanted. The more posts I publish,
when I deleted content, and I tried all these
different types of things, I was hoping that my
search traffic would go up. Now again, to emphasize when you only have 10, 20 posts and you
publish another 30, 40, 50, of course your search traffic's
gonna go up over time. But I'm talking about after you have enough content on your
site, 100 plus posts. And what ended up happening
was I didn't really get more search traffic just
by publishing tons more pieces of content. But I learned something
that was really interesting. I couldn't predict which
posts were gonna be hits or misses which is why
I published them I quantity. And I did everything from like using Ahrefs and SEMrush and
seeing where my competition's getting traffic from. And I'm like okay you know maybe I should publish posts that are
just like my competitors. I even did stuff like
going into my analytics from my own company such as Kissmetrics, seeing what posts were
popular, and try to replicate better versions on neilpatel.com to see if that also helped, right? Tested a lot of things,
and what I found is it was really hard to replicate success by just publishing a
lot of content and using intelligence from competitors
and data like that. But I learned that when you publish posts, and there's no real logic behind this, but when you publish posts
just randomly some do well in search engines and some don't. And when you look at your
analytics, you'll see like me, like number 20 on this page right in that chart is
13 Secrets That'll Boost Your Facebook Organic Reach. That was a post that I published in 2015 that naturally just
started getting traction. I didn't do anything. I didn't build any links to that page. It didn't get necessarily
more social shares than some of my other posts. Right, I've had posts that I've gotten 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 social shares, and they didn't get as
many search visitors as opposed to I got 500 social shares. There wasn't really one specific pattern. And I couldn't predict when I write a page even if I like put the
right keywords in there and everything like that that
I'm gonna get high rankings. But what I found is that
when you publish content and you do it in mass
scale, some of you posts just naturally get good search traffic. So as I showed on that number
17 or number 20 listing, that post has 4,159. And what I started doing
is I go into Google Webmaster Tools. I clicked on search traffic. Then I clicked on search analysis, right. When I did that, I would get a listing, and here's what the tick boxes look like when I'm in Google Webmaster Tools. So once you log in and you click on that, you'll get this report. Make sure you click on clicks and pages 'cause that filters based on pages, and it shows you which
ones have the most clicks. And you'll start seeing a list. Now here's the Facebook one. This is a more recent screenshot, so there's way more traffic. It's number four on this, 10,000. And keep in mind Google
Webmaster Tools data never matches up with Analytics. Webmaster Tools always reports less than Google Analytics from
everything that I've seen. For neilpatel.com, it ranges quite a bit. Some months it's off by 1.3. Some months it's off by
1.6 which is quite a bit. So once you click on a page, so I clicked on the number four listing,
then you wanna make sure you tick these boxes, clicks,
impressions, queries, right. And then you'll get a list
like this that'll show all the keywords that what's
their impression count and what's your rankings. That'll tell you what you should try to get more rankings for. In other words, what you should try, what keywords you should be
trying to rank higher for. And then from there, I would use Brian Dean's skyscraper technique. Brian Dean spoke earlier in this event. If you're not familiar with
his skyscraper technique, just Google it. And it's all about creating a page that's more in-depth and more thorough than every other one in the space and has more content and
more details et cetera. So I made my Facebook page more thorough. That didn't really increase rankings, but I did outreach to everyone
in the social media space and asking 'em for backlinks, right? And when I did that, over time that page increased in search traffic. It went up from 4,000 to 17,000 visitors. So the big thing that I learned from this experiment was
publish a lot of content. Don't expect to get more search traffic just because you publish
a lot of search content. I mean just because you
publish a lot of content, but that'll help you determine which posts are naturally gonna be hits. You can start deleting the
ones that don't even get 100 search visitors a month
after six months or a year, you pick whatever you want. And then from there, pick
the most popular posts using the method I described
within Google Webmaster Tools, find the keywords, go build links using Brian Dean's skyscraper
technique, and you wait like four, five, six
months, your search traffic on those pages will drastically increase. And Google likes something
about those pages. It could be click-through rate. It could be user metrics
like good time on site, low bounce rates, et cetera. And those are the pages
that you really want to tweak and fine tune. So experiment number
two, here's another way that I really increased my search traffic. It's pretty much just
figure out if you can use social media data to figure out how to increase your click-through rate. We all know that click-through rate increases rankings, right? So if you're number one versus number two versus number three,
there's a huge difference in how much search traffic you get. You of course wanna be number one. And when you're number
two and you're getting more clicks on your listing
than the number one listing, what happens? Well Google will naturally move you up. Why? Because if all the users
click on the second listing, it tells 'em that hey the first listing isn't as relevant as the second one, so they should switch 'em around. And that's what Google does. So the key is how can you create really attractive title tags? And you guys have seen some
of the stuff out there. I know Moz, Rand Fishkin
did an experiment. He tweeted out saying hey
you know I currently rank number seven for IMEC Lab. Can everyone go and click on that listing? Within three hours, he
shot up to number one. And still to this day,
he ranks number one. And this is what Rand did, right? He tweeted out. Care to help with my
Google theory slash test? Could you search for IMEC Lab in Google and click the link on my blog. I have a hunch. Right, and that was in
April 2014, worked well. So let's go over how most people increase their click-through rate. And you guys may have heard me talk about this is the past. And this is what I used to do. It works, but it's a pain in the butt. So sign into Google Search or sign up for Google Search Console
if you already haven't. Let it sit for 30 days so you can collect a lot of search data. Then log in, select your
site, click on search traffic, and then click on search analysis. And then you'll get a report that looks something like this, right? It pretty much just shows all the keywords that you're getting traffic from, the amount of clicks, the
impressions, et cetera. And then you know you can
click on the following boxes, clicks, impressions, CTR, and make sure you're still on queries. What they'll do is show you
the total number of clicks, impressions and average CTR. Then it'll look for keywords that have less than a 4% CTR,
right, such as key terms like online marketing. And then what I would do is I would take the pages that have those keywords and the page that's ranking, and I would do a few things with my title tag to increase my click-through rate such as I'll test using
numbers and negative words. I would also try using the words what is within the title tag
'cause I found that like if you put let's say
what is online marketing, what are protein bars,
do protein bars work, things like that, do protein
bars make you stronger, right? I found that those get a lot of clicks. I also tested things like including the keywords in the front. I also looked at pay
per click ads for ideas. I would use SEMrush to also type in my competitors to see what ads they've run in the past to just go see and you know get all the keyword ideas and ad copy ideas. 'Cause you know Google
AdWords is largely based on click-through rates, right? Just because someone
bids more doesn't mean that they're gonna be on top. If someone has the highest
click-through rate by far, they're usually gonna
be the highest listing which means that their
copy if really appealing. I also would test out
different word counts within the title tag. I found six words worked really well. I tried using power words and adjectives which work as well. And of course, evoking curiosity. So here's examples of adjectives, effortless, fun, incredible,
essential, strange, absolute, et cetera, right,
these are all keywords that I've tried within title tags and variations of these. So here's an example of
a really good title tag. And this one evokes curiosity. This one's by Authority Nutrition, 10 Proven Benefits of
Green Tea Number Three Is Very Impressive. What's number three? Like I wanna know what number three is. You click, and then it
goes from there, right? So once you start
adjusting your title tags, you'll notice something like this. And I usually do this
with my nutrition site which I don't have anymore, but sold it. And I would get clicks, keep
adjusting the title tags. I would use Google Search
Console, and overtime, it would go up. It was a pain in the butt. It wasn't 100% success rate. Sometimes I would fail, and then I would have to keep retesting the page. And it could take me
months 'cause it takes Google a long time to show data, right? It would take literally a
month for me to figure out if the new title tag I'm using is working. So you know the other
thing that I've learned throughout this whole
process when I was using Google Search Console, I learned phrases like what is, best, amazing,
lists within your title tag, how to, free, the word you,
tips, why, tricks, great, and even putting the
year within title tags, these are all phrases and words that work extremely well to increase
your click-through rate. But again, this process would take me at least 30 days to figure
out if it was working or not. So there must be a better way to optimize click-through rate, right? And that's what my whole experiment was, can I get results quicker? So what I started doing is using Twitter. Now I have a lot of followers. If you don't, you can also
try using Google AdWords. You can also buy Twitter ads. You can use tools like adding
a lot of Twitter followers and then unfollow the people
that don't follow you back. It works. Once you get enough followers
like a few thousand, 5,000, 10,000, or you're willing to pay for a bit of ads, you'll quickly be able to tweet out a lot of stuff and figure out what's working and what's not. So if you notice with me
and my Twitter account, my guys tweet out, I kid you
not, 10 plus times a day. People think we're crazy, and
we're just after the traffic. And that's one portion,
but what they don't realize is we're using Twitter to try different title tags for the same
links to figure out which ones are getting the
most retweets and likes and click-throughs
because that's telling us what's the most appealing titles that we could be using. 'Cause if the picture's
the same, and we're testing stuff out roughly
at the same time of day, and we have data on what
time of day our users are the most engaged,
then we know that hey the title affects everything. So we would test out doing things like changing up the title tag. So as you can see, the one at the top says Five Steps of Creating
a Profitable Facebook Advertising Campaign. I may also test out How to Create a Profitable Facebook
Advertising Campaign. Right, another variation
could be How to Create a Profitable Facebook Advertising Campaign for Less than $500, right? And I would test out all these methods, figure out the click-through,
and then if I had to adjust the copy to match
the headline later on, I would. But by doing that, over time
my search traffic went up. And it didn't go up
right away, but over time it slowly kept going up. And that's what you'll learn
with click-through rate. In which when you test
something out on click-throughs, it takes Google some time to figure out where they should place you. So if your click-through
rate continually increases, they're not just gonna
move you from number 10 or page three to number one on page one. They slowly move you up,
and that's why you start seeing a gradual increase
in search traffic. And that's what I was seeing
when I continually tested my click-through rate, and I realized that Google Search Console's
the slow way of doing it. Just do it through social media. So experiment number
three, who is Neil Patel? Some of you guys have seen
this, some of you haven't. And my big hypothesis with this test was does Google rank brands higher? And I wanted to really
figure that out, right? Just like Pepsi, Coke,
everyone knows about 'em. You see that glass, and
you're like oh I really want a Pepsi, I want a Coke. They have a really strong brand. So do these brands get
preferential treatment when it comes to Google? And well first of all, before you can actually do that, you
need to first figure out how does Google track
if a brand is popular? You would assume based off
of search volume, right? Well for you because
they're not gonna reveal all of that data, in the
same format that they get, the closest and the easiest
thing is Google Trends. So you can type into
Google Trends, any name, any company, and it'll show you a chart. If there is no data,
that means your brand's pretty much non existent
in the eyes of Google. And over time as that
increases, it'll go up. And you see spikes in my
name, and that's fine. That happens when you get PR or big press. And I wanted to see if I can manufacture the quote, unquote spikes, and I did. These spikes aren't natural. It's all caused by me. So here's my search
traffic before I started doing brand campaigns and after. And as you can see, that's
a huge increase, 24.10% increase in search traffic, all from increasing brand queries. And I've done it multiple times over you know last few years, and it's worked extremely well. So I did a few things. One, I had some friends
who are really popular on social media. They tend to be models. I don't know why they're
the most popular people on social media on like Instagram, but they just are, and
they don't make a ton. So they're also willing
to do things like science. So one of my buddies,
Dan, and his partner, I don't know why I'm blanking on his name, what's Dan's partner's name? Brandon. So Dan and Brandon run a social media marketing company, and Dan and Brandon, there was like oh we can get a ton of people to search for you. So I was talking to Brandon, and we were talking on Skype. His son was like who's
that guy you're talking to? Who is this Neil Patel? And it came to us like
oh we should just do the campaign and call it Who is Neil Patel to see if we can get a
ton of people searching. So we had models both females and males and even makeup artists
and a lot of random people do crazy stuff with my name, Neil Patel or who is Neil Patel to see if we can get way more search volume. So as you can see, picture of a model. I also had a really buff dude. This was my favorite. He deleted if after awhile. It was a video. The guy was jacked. He probably was like 250, 300 pounds. I don't know, big bulking
muscle builder type of guy. And on this chest, he put Neil Patel, and he was like flexing his chest. And then my name would
keep going up and down, and he'd create like a video on Instagram. And it worked out extremely well, right? So much so that as you can see, my search traffic just sky rocketed. And I did a few things. I had them do it always on the same day. So at first, I tried
doing this in which I had everyone do it throughout a month, and I realized even if
someone's really popular on social media like let's say Instagram, and people post something,
no one really searches. It doesn't really help. But if everyone is talking
about you or your company on the same day, and I
would do it every Tuesdays. I just picked a random day. I found that your search
volume sky rockets 'cause everyone's on social media that day is continually seeing you. And they're like what the heck? Why is everyone talking about this person? There must be something big there. And then, boom, your search
traffic just sky rockets. And it takes usually a
few months to kick in, but you'll start seeing
your brand queries go up. And it works for almost any industry. Here's ones from Shredz. They had a lot of bad press 'cause people found out their people doing Shredz stuff or supplement stuff were taking steroids. But nonetheless, they grew into a company that was doing $20 million a year purely off of social media. You know and they paid
men, women, fitness people, you know mothers with
family, whoever it may be to promote Shredz. Here's another example, Gary Vaynerchuk. This is a cool way to get
more people talking about him. He started putting out
ads within New York City with his cell phone number. Great way to create press as well. And you can try anything. You can manufacture it like
I did through social media. Focus on crazy marketing tactics. You can also use performance
based press companies like Chris from PRserve.com. He's pay for play. Here's another one called
Dan from Stranger Social in which he leverages social media like Facebook, Instagram,
and you can get people who are really popular who don't make much money to do stuff
for hundreds of dollars. And just get creative
with your ads, right? There's a lot of stuff out there. Stuff works, I've done it. I've tried it. And I've done it so many times, and I've done it in Brazil, in the US, in Spanish markets, and it's really helped grow the business. So here's some lessons. You wanna run your campaigns all at once which means that you
wanna do 'em let's say all on a Tuesday or all on a Wednesday or a Thursday or Monday,
pick a day, or a Friday. You wanna consistently do this
over a period of two months. After you stop, you'll notice
that your search traffic is still way higher than it was before. Rotate up your campaigns. Don't just use the same influencers. Keep rotating them up and don't expect to get results right away. It literally takes a
few months to kick in. So experiment number four,
is content really king? And it's funny, right,
everyone talks about like oh you should do a ton
of stuff with content. Blogging's the best stuff, and
is it really the best stuff? I have no idea. I thought it was the best
idea 'cause I've been blogging for so long, Quick
Sprout, Neil Patel, Kissmetrics, Crazy Egg, et cetera
where I'm like well let's really actually see if content is king. So I invest so much time and energy into content 'cause I
have a team that helps me. Like I'll do a lot of the writing. I have people who edit. I have people who are correcting it. I have people who put it up into WordPress 'cause I write in Microsoft Word. Don't ask me. I don't like writing in Google Docs, and I don' like writing in WordPress. I don't know why, but I've been writing in Word for so many years. I'm just used to it. And I'm like if I look at how much I spend on content a year, it's
hundreds and thousands of dollars like with designers helping make things look good
from customized images. I'm like this is actually
really expensive, and of course, it could be done cheaper, but I'm strapped for time, right? So I decided to create a
tool, the SEO Analyzer. And I created this landing page. I spent money on a tool. This tool, I don't know
what it ended up costing me. My guess is around like 20 to 30 grand. I could be wrong. I went above and beyond. You don't have to go that crazy. And you know here's a screenshot of what the tool looks like. It talks about your SEO score,
your page speed et cetera. And here's the traffic
to the tool over time. As you can see, it's climbing. And best of all, I didn't
build any links to this tool. I didn't really do
anything, and this isn't the only tool that I've done this with. It's worked really well. People love tools. The time on site is really high. You can see the average time on site is only one minute, 11
seconds, but this is just for the tool homepage. If you go look at the stats
for the tool page itself, there's over four page views per visitor, and the time on site is
well over two minutes. Exit rate is low. Bounce rate's not too bad,
overall pretty healthy. And as you can see, it
continually goes up. It's so effective. Here's an example of the tool traffic over a 30 day period just the homepage and almost all of it
comes from Google, right. As you can see the most
popular page, my homepage, then my blog page, and then my tool page. That's how effective tools are. You should definitely create tools. One of the most popular
pages, and one of my best investments by far. And for additional proof, keep in mind Google Search Console
data is always different than Google Analytics. But Google Search
Console shows more people find my site from the tool page than any other page. It even beats out my homepage. This is pure Google traffic. That's how effective a tool is. Spend your time, money,
effort, creating tools. It's the best ROI, and
it's not just me, right? HubSpot, they have email
signature generator. I was talking with one of their guys, Ryan in Australia, and he was like yeah our email signature
generator generates as high quality leads for our sales team as the content itself,
and it's way cheaper. And I'm like seriously? He's just like yeah, he's
like just from that tool alone we can get over
10,000 leads a month. He's like it's amazing,
and it's way cheaper than doing content. So it's not just me who's doing this. This kind of stuff works
even better in B to C. Like all the tips I'm giving you today, they work in both B to B and B to C. They work for personal
brands and corporate brands. And if you look at HubSpot,
they're continually building more and more tools, right? Their email signature
tool, their website grader. They're continually adding more and more to their suite so that way they can capture leads at a much cheaper cost or even capture sales
at a much cheaper cost than creating content. So experiment five, does bounce rate impact search traffic? We've all heard about
it, and you know there's a few things that I ended up doing. I think this slide is wrong, right? Is this right? Let's see. I'm just fast forwarding, all right, a bit misplaced, but I can go through it. All right, so in general,
you've heard about it. And I started testing things out. And here's a general synopsis. I improved my load time by roughly 31%. I compressed my images. I removed the entry
popup, not the exit popup. I know people are saying
like Google's penalizing for mobile popups. All my buddies who are
running mobile popups and even me, we haven't
seen any difference in our search traffic just as an FYI. I increased the text size on my blog to make it more readable,
made my paragraphs shorter. I improved the design
of the mobile version, the responsive mobile design, and I pushed the content above the fold. So out of all the changes that I made that reduced the bounce
rate, the entry popup and adjusting the content
so it's more above the fold helped more than anything else. And I would test this out per region. You don't have to do it per region. I have a lot of devs that work for me. But when you landed on a blog post page, this was the part above the fold, right. And now when you go to a blog post page, you actually see the title first, and then you see a
screenshot that's related to the title, so this is a screenshot of Google AdWords, and then
you see text underneath. And that took my bounce
rate from June 2015, this is just for Google USA
traffic, I created a filter. This is just search traffic
in United States of America. And as you can see, my
bounce rate was 85.70%. So 13,000 visits from Google just the USA, 85% bounce rate. And then November 2015,
I got up to 23,000 visits a month from Google, USA
right, United States, bounce rate decreased to 72.9. So in essence, the bounce rate went from 85.70% to 72.19%. And overall, the traffic
increase of page views from Google almost
doubled, 22,383 to 40,933. And it's so funny 'cause everyone talks about like oh yeah we know bounce rates and user metrics you know impact rankings. Like tell me something new, you know. Well how many of you have
actually tested that out? I bet you not even 1%, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. Even I'm slow to test a lot
of this stuff out but test. Some of these things that
you continually hear about, they really do help increase rankings. It just takes time. You decrease your bounce rate right away, you don't get a huge
lift in search traffic. But over time as your user
metrics continually improve, Google places you a bit
higher, and they still see if your better user metrics still stick. And if they do, they
place you a bit higher. And if they still stick,
again, your rankings keep going up. So whey do they do this? They do it because they don't want people, spammers just creating sites, popping up to the top of Google, and then spamming the crap out of it, and then making a ton of money off of shady stuff. That's why it takes a lot
longer to get rankings. Plus it also encourages more people to just spend money on AdWords. So experiment number
six, does keyword density or thoroughness matter more? So I'm assuming you guys have all tried shoving keywords onto a page. I know I have. I used to do things like aim
for a higher keyword density than my competitors, use keywords within my h1 tag, use a
keyword within my URL, and put the keyword
within the first sentence of the content. So I would use SEObook's
keyword density tool, the URL's there on the screen, Tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density. If you don't wanna write
down the URL, no worries. This is recorded, or you can just Google SEObook keyword density. And here's an example of a page. This is on how to start a blog. And as you can see, I don't care about keyword density, right? It went all the way from 873 which is my most popular key term which is reply, then Neil, then Patel,
then Neil Patel reply to 'cause I get a lot of comments, right? And I tested out the density and tried doing different things like
removing comments n'stuff. And I improved the density overall. So that way more keywords
that were on the page like bloggers, domain,
WordPress, blogging, blog, blogging platform, et
cetera, types of bloggers, whatever it may be. And what ended up happening was my rankings, can you guess what happened when I adjusted the density? They didn't do much. They didn't really change at all. And I even gave it time like
30 days, 45 days, right? But when they made the content
more thorough, it moved from page three to page two, right? And now I'm ranking on
the middle of page one, I mean middle of page two, and I expect to be ranking on page one. It's just a question of time. So here's what I mean by thoroughness. That page that I tested this on is called How to Start a Blog. You can see here in the URL neilpatel.com/how-to-start-a-blog. So neilpatel.com slash
How to Start a Blog. And that post just pretty much breaks down how you can build a blog using WordPress. And I started making
the page more thorough by doing things like covering
all aspects of blogging, like how to start a blog, how to write your first blog post, how
to promote a blog post. I even started poking
holes and doing things like talking about every
single blogging platform 'cause I'm like wait I'm
only covering WordPress. What if someone wants
to start a Blogger blog or a Medium blog or a
blog using Wix et cetera? I also looked at all
my competitors and see what they were covering using
the SEObook keyword density tool, and I didn't look
just at keyword density. I looked at all the
words they're mentioning, and then I look at all my competitors who are also on the first page. So the first 10 listings,
and I also looked at all the keywords they were mentioning to see if there was any commonalities. I did a lot of this in spreadsheets. It was a pain in the
butt, but it worked well. And that helped me rank
higher, and if you go to that page now, you'll see that I cover every single blogging platform. It's more thorough. It doesn't have the best keyword density compared to the
competition, but it's caused my rankings to increase, and
it's continually gone up. And hopefully, one day
get high up on page one. So experiment number seven,
do URLs really matter? So I changed my URL, and in
one month my search traffic grew by over 40%. Tyler from Canada who was giving a speech I think yesterday, he's the
one who told me about this. We got introduced by a mutual
friend, Tony from Expedia. And Tyler's like oh dude, I can improve the on page SEO and improve semantics. And I already knew
about a lot of the stuff he was gonna do. And he was like dude, URL can
really change your rankings. And I've heard that so many
times, but I didn't want to go and have my devs
do a 301 'cause I was like all right, I'll probably
get a 2% lift, a 5% lift which I didn't care for. But he was like, "No,
you'll get a huge lift. "I've tested this a lot." So I'm like what do you want? 'Cause I don't believe anyone
should ever do work for free. So he's like 20,000 Canadian. So literally that night,
went back to the hotel room after doing the networking event. Without a contract, I just PayPaled him 20,000 Canadian dollars. And he tried to give me a lot of changes. I was like all right, whatever right? And a lot of the changes
I knew weren't gonna impact my ranking. But I'm like all right,
let's make this URL change. So here's my search
traffic in December of 2016 before the URL change, right? This one thing that he taught me, brought more attention
to 'cause I was like all right, yes, everyone says URLs matter, but how much could they really matter? There's over 200 factors
in Google's algorithm. Well my search rank went from 283 to 449 literally in one month all because of removing the dates in the URL. So what was the URL change? I went from neilpatel.com/year/month/day
to post title to neilpatel.com/blog/post title. Now this comes down to
semantics and relevance. When Google reads this URL structure, this is my old one,
this is the post title. Let's think about the post title. It works in a hierarchal fashion, right? So what is this telling Google? This is telling Google that the post title is related to a specific day. And that day is related
to a specific month, and that month is related to year, and that year is related to a blog. Well my posts aren't related to dates. I'm not a news site. This hierarchal URL structure shows Google that hey this post title is relevant to an online marketing blog. Do you see how it's more
semantically relevant? The old way, a post on,
today I published one on 27 SEO Essentials for Blogging, right? And that post title if I
did it in this old way, it'd be like all right,
well that'd be relevant to April 20th, 2017. That post has nothing to
do with April 20th, 2017. Has everything to do with
an online marketing blog. Oh so Google's now like oh cool this is an SEO post, oh and it's from an online marketing blog. It's still relevant. You're not blogging about everything. Your websites very relevant. And my search traffic went up. And I learned a few more things, right? As I mentioned, it's all
about topical relevancy. The less folders you use, the better. And that, again, helps keep it towards the root domain. And when you're doing this, you also need to make sure you add breadcrumbs. A lot of people don't do breadcrumbs cause I tested this out a few other times to make sure it wasn't a fluke. And I've learned a few things. So you need to add breadcrumbs. You need to make sure
they're schema markup. You need to change all the internal links from the old URLs to the new one. So you can't just 301 your URLs, but if internal link from one blog close to another one is using
the old URL structure, you gotta go through each blog post and update the URLs. You need to do 301s from your
old URLs to your new ones as I mentioned. And most importantly, you need to change all of these things at once. I've done this around
six times now since then. Every time I make these
changes one by one, the search traffic never goes up. Or technically it goes up,
and then the next week, it goes down. But every time, I make
all the changes at once, the search traffic goes up, and it sticks. I don't know why, but for some reason in Google's algorithm, they want to see you making a lot of changes at once. So that's it. And now, let's get into some fun Q and A. And as you guys are asking the questions, I'll do my best in order to answer 'em, but show you stuff that I'm doing as well. So you can see more and more. - Okay, amazing man, thanks so much. Let's just put us both back
on screen here I guess. If that's okay with you. And let's look at the questions. Wow, so what a great
journey through that traffic increase over that period of time. Amazing stuff, there was a
ton of people in the chat having awesome positive comments, asking lots and lots of questions. So I'm just gonna get
started with some of the most up voted ones. Let's take it from the top. Now we've noticed over the last four days that the audience is sort of spread out, beginner, intermediate, advanced. While I'm asking this question, I'd love to know what you consider yourself. Type it in the chat,
beginning, intermediate, or advanced SEO. But the first question,
Neil, from the audience, and the most up voted one is from Diana. It's changed from the one
that we previous talked about. Her question is what's
the fastest and safest way to get a brand new website or blog to rank on the first page of Google, and how fast can I get
there following your advice? - Sure, so it all comes
down to topical relevance. And what I found is, can you
still see my screen, Clayton? - Yep. - So what I found is it all
comes down to topical relevance. Google likes ranking small mom and pops just as much as they like
ranking the big dogs. So I'm gonna give you
guys an example, right? Neilpatel.com/howtostartablog. And this is what I mean
by topical relevance. It's whoever goes more in-depth. In other words, topical
coverage not relevance. - Oh, looks like he
got disconnected there. Just hang on. Looks like he's reconnecting. What just happened there? The Seal if you're
watching, maybe you could create a poll, beginner,
intermediate, or advanced. That would be a cool
way to sort of calculate who's in the audience. Uh oh, we need Neil to comment again. Neil, comment again. Hang on guys, we're comin'. Let's see. Neil, comment here. Sorry guys, I'm just putting Neil back on the live stream here. Neil. Okay cool, thanks. So here we go. So Neil's just refreshing his browser. But until we get there, looks like there are a bunch of intermediates, a bunch of beginners,
and a bunch of advanced which is pretty cool. It's interesting to see
the top voted question out of everybody's questions. What would you do if
you had to do it again? Let's see, The Seal,
can you maybe call Neil on the phone and make
sure that he's refreshing? And then we've got a bunch
of others ones from Craig, a couple from Craig. Wow, Craig, you've really
got good questions. It looks like yours are
getting a bunch of up votes. There he is. Let's invite Neil again. Yep, will do. (laughing) Okay, there's Neil again. Let's see if he's gonna get added. All right, so we were talking
about topical relevance. We were answering Diana's question what is the fastest and safest way to get brand new website to rank on the first page of Google, and how fast can you get there following Neil's advice? Let's see. He's not there, but I think he's trying to connect now, so just hang on. Hold on one minute. We've got the Crowdcast
guy working on it now. Didn't accept, okay invite. Here we go. All right, now I think
he's gonna be joining us. I was able to successfully
send the invite out. Thanks everybody for bearing with us. Sometimes, technical issues happen as I'm sure you know. And we've got a ton of people that have been joining us on there. Just wanted to remind
everybody while we're waiting for Neil to join us that
we've got a couple-- - I'm back. - There you go. How are you? - Hey where'd you guys lose me? I was going to Abraham Lincoln. Did you guys see the
Abraham Lincoln stuff? - No, we just saw the Google homepage. - Oh, that sucks. All right, time to answer
the question again. (laughing) All right-- - [Clayton] It is the loaded one. - [Neil] All right, so
the best way to increase your ranking is purely
through topical depth, topical relevance going
more in-depth on those. So you can still see my screen? - [Clayton] Yep. - [Neil] All right, so
here's what I mean by this. On my How to Start a Blog page, I cover how to start a blog, picking blog topics, all the way to choosing a domain name, hosting, blogging platforms. Like think about, I'm covering
wordpress.org, dot com, Blogger, Tumblr, Medium, Ghost. Who the heck uses Ghost,
you know what I mean? Like that's how in-depth that I went to increase my rankings
from page three to page two. And it works on everything. Like have you heard of the
Abraham Lincoln example? - [Clayton] No. - [Neil] All right, so Wikipedia used to have the Abraham Lincoln page that was only like 4,000 or 5,000 words. Their rankings keep shooting
up because that page just kept getting more and more detailed. Like they cover everything, right? They probably even talk about his beard. Like this page, as you can see, I'm like continually scrolling. It's never ending. I'm like now halfway through the page. That's how in-depth that they go. And because of that, Google's like all right, we should
rank this page higher. Now to give you an example, let's say you have a pizza shop, and
you're in New York City, pizza shop in Manhattan. You're talking about the best pizzas, and you wanna rank for all
pizza terms in New York City. If you start taking about
how you make a pizza, the difference between New York water and Chicago water and how that makes the dough taste different,
how you preheat the oven, the best times of the day to eat pizza, what they go with. Does it go with red wine, white wine, what kind of toppings,
should they be market fresh, how you make the best
tomato sauce or pizza sauce or whatever you want to call it, how much chili flakes should you ideally place without ruining the flavor. You're going to in-depth
that everyone's like wow this is amazing content. And I found that when you're a new site, and you don't have as many backlinks, but you go way more in-depth, Google sky rockets your rankings
eventually to the top. What I mean by that is like
you'll start seeing jumps. So you'll go from like page five to page three or page 10 to page five, five to three, and then
you'll slowly start climbing. And you'll go from page three to page two. You'll at the bottom of page two and jump to the middle
of page two et cetera. - [Clayton] That's awesome. Okay, I've got Craig asking so speaking of niches and starting out, any advice for somebody that wants to put a new site in any random niche? Do you have some favorites
or any advice there? - [Neil] All right, so
I'm loading Google Trends. Here's how I pick a niche these days. It's purely through Google Trends. So it's loading. You still see my screen? - [Clayton] Yep. - [Neil] So pick the biggest niche that you can find that
doesn't have marketers. Like when we started that
nutrition blog, Mike and I, and he was a nutritionist
or a nutrition person 'cause I didn't know
anything about nutrition. It's so much more popular than marketing. So let's say I go to nutrition as a topic. It appeals to everyone, and
I'm competing with blogs that don't know very much
about marketing compared to let's say I go in a
niche like marketing. Marketing. Right like, look at the comparison. Nutrition versus marketing,
it's more popular by quite a bit, and
there's no competition. So what I mean by that
is there's no competition compared to marketing, right? You're not competing with other marketers. So pick niches that are big
like a subset of nutrition, and don't go after like weight loss. Go after stuff that is
up and coming, new, edgy but stuff that isn't breaking down like that all the marketers would go for. Marketers will go after
weight loss supplements 'cause they know they can make quick bucks and be affiliate marketers. Marketers won't go after
something like green tea. Yet green tea is really popular. Like let's go look at green tea. Green tea. Right, so if I click green
tea, it's probably decent. It's a subset of nutrition,
tea, healthy drinking, et cetera, and you don't compete with too many marketers. I used to rank on page one for this without building any links on
a brand new nutrition website just because we had a nice
article with pretty images, and it wasn't even that thorough. - [Clayton] I feel like there's gonna be a lot of people starting websites in the tea niche now. (Clayton and Neil laughing) - [Neil] Just make sure
you guys give me a cut of whatever you make. (Clayton laughing) - [Clayton] All right,
Craig with 59 up votes is asking what's the number one tool that you can't live without,
and if it's not one, maybe give us a couple. - [Neil] Yeah, there's two. So the first tool that
I love using is SEMrush. And I'll show you the main way I use it. I just plug in like competitor URLs here. So it's loading. I gotta log in. - [Clayton] That's all right. We would love to see how you would set up your SEMrush, so we're happy to wait. - [Neil] It's pretty basic. - [Clayton] Yeah, they have a lot of cool information especially
in the project section. - [Neil] I don't even know
my username and password. Let's go back to the homepage. - [Clayton] Let's see
if SEMrush is watching, or if they can give us-- - [Neil] Oh no, I have
a username and password, it's just saved on the homepage. For some reason, you
click login from that. It doesn't work when I
click login from here. My username and password should pop up. - [Clayton] Yeah, that's
the browser, right. - [Neil] Login, see. - [Clayton] Now people want
to know what about black tea and white tea? (Clayton and Neil laughing) The whole tea niche is
being saturated today. - [Neil] Teas make good money. I know someone who makes a
few hundred thousand a month in profits on tea online. - [Clayton] Really? Wait I think I heard you
talk about that once. Are they like a dropshipper? Is it like special? - [Neil] Yeah, it's a young guy. I think he's like in his late 20s. He didn't want to create
his own tea product, so he just sells others. And he doesn't want to
deal with inventory, so he gives someone else
a cut to deal with it all like a dropshipping company
and sells someone else's product and white labels it, but yeah. So here's SEMrush. I put in a domain like Moz. And what I really care
for is top paid keywords. And I look at this every single month in SEMrush because I
wanna see if it changes. See companies in general don't spend an arm and a leg on pay per click unless they know it's
converting really well. And let's go to full keyword report, and it'll show literally every single one of the keywords that
companies like let's say Moz are paying for. Which is amazing because if I'm trying to rank for the same keywords, and I don't wanna spend
the pay per click cost, I know that hey these
keywords and priority tend to do the best. Now I know I'm not gonna
rank for Moz, the domain, but good keywords, and
I look at the volume, SEO, SEO keywords,
Google algorithm update, keyword tool, keyword tool. Let's see, these are actually the same. I don't know why it shows up twice, oh it's two different pages. Moz SEO, open site explorer. That's their product. Technical SEO, that's a
good keyword to bid on. And I look at continual
variations, Google SEO, free SEO tools. So I'm looking at all
this stuff to determine what I should end up putting
and what I shouldn't put on the page, or within my webpages, within my keywords, within my copy to figure out you know should I be going after these keywords. In essence I'm using the paid data to figure out which organic keywords aren't just gonna drive
traffic but convert. Because if someone's
spending a lot of money 'cause they give you the estimated CPC, like local SEO $12.43 per click. It must convert really well. It doesn't matter if the volume's lower. It must be an amazing keyword. So because of that, I'll
go after those keywords within my blog post due
to the fact that I know that hey eventually those
visitors are more likely to convert into customers. Then the other report
that I use on SEMrush. So after, let's say, I put in moz.com, is this one here. (sneezing) - [Clayton] Bless you. - [Neil] Thank you. I'm getting sick too. I'm like all bundled up
inside with a blanket and my heating turned on to 80 degrees. - [Clayton] Oh God. I bet you're getting a lot done. - [Neil] Yeah, I'm still productive. Even when I have a fever, I still work. There's no excuses. - [Clayton] It's the best time to work. It's not like we're digging ditches here. - [Neil] Yeah, exactly. All right, so I'm scrolling. - [Clayton] This is Moz
that you're looking at? 594,000 backlinks? - [Neil] Yeah, this is on SEMrush again. I ignore all of this. I don't care about that. I care about the most important part is top paid keywords by far. That'll tell you what keywords
you should be targeting. And then I do the same thing
for all the main competitors. So they'll I go from SpyFu
to SEMrush to Optimizely 'cause they show like
the competitive level how close they are relevant to Moz. And I look at all of their keywords. And I start copying
them as well, and I look for similarities because
if all my competitors are bidding on the same keywords, that tells me that keyword
must be converting. They all can't be dumb. If SEMrush, SpyFu, and Moz are bidding on the same 20 keywords
as their main ones, I know those are probably
the most lucrative ones in the space. And that's what I try
to go after organically. - [Clayton] Absolutely, and
one other tool you said. - [Neil] Yeah, the second
tool that I use a lot, and I use these tools
probably on a daily basis. So it's Ahrefs, and I
tried buying the other day Search Engine Watch. My biz dev Andrew hit
'em up, and we couldn't even get to an offer. I was willing to pay two
million bucks for it. But this website, and
here's why, I can see over time that their traffic just tanks. They suck. Because it was founded by Dan Sullivan, or he was part of the team. I don't know how it worked. He was doing an amazing job, and over time their search traffic has just tanked. Like look at the organic keywords. It just keeps going down. The guys who bought it are doing jack shit with it, and
they've owned it for years. So I'll go into Ahrefs. I'll type in a URL like
all my competitors. And I go into top pages. That's the main feature I use. It's not the backlinks. It's the top pages in the left sidebar. That tells me what pages are driving all their traffic, and then I go create similar content on my site. And then if I go and click on this URL. I don't mean to do that. There you go. I wanna click on the keywords not the URL. It shows me all the keywords that drive the traffic in order. Search engine, search
engine, best search engine, alternative search engines, et cetera, search sites, internet search engines, better search engine than
Google, unfiltered search engine. This all helps me determine what pages are driving my competition
the most traffic and the keywords so that way I know what type of content to create. And I make sure I include
all these keywords within my content. And what I do is I just export 'em, right? And then I go into Microsoft
Excel, start export. All right, I'm gonna
load this for you guys so you can see. So load it in here, do you see it? - [Clayton] Yep. - [Neil] That's a trick question. How do you see it? I don't even see the CSV file. - [Clayton] Oh see the CSV file. Nope, see the screen. There it is. - [Neil] I'm like are you
sleeping on me, Clayton? - [Clayton] Nah. - [Neil] So now I know all the keywords that I need to include in my content. I usually just take the top 100. - [Clayton] Okay. - [Neil] So then I take the top 100. There's usually duplicates,
and I remove the duplicates, and I remove the
misspellings, and I'll take the top 100 after I remove
misspellings and duplicates. And then I integrate
them within my content for the page that I wanna rank. And I find that it helps me
drive amazing search traffic. - [Clayton] Cool, awesome, okay. Anybody that is wondering about tools in this sort of category
that do similar things. Got SEMrush and Ahrefs. People are asking a bunch
about SpyFu and Serpstat and stuff like that. - [Neil] I've used Serpstat. I have a really special deal with them. I pay for one of their APIs. And with Serpstat, the data's
just not as good as SEMrush. I pay Serpstat thousands a month. I don't know what the number is. I think like 2,500, five
grand or whatever it is. It's not a bad tool. I like it. The data's just not as good as SEMrush. - [Clayton] Okay, cool. - [Neil] That's my
neutral viewpoint, right? - [Clayton] Yeah, I totally agree. These guys are awesome. We've got a bunch of insight from Marina their president a couple of days ago on what the trends are after
collecting so much data. So SEMrush absolutely. - [Neil] For me, it's not even the trends or the data, like I don't really care what they do on their backend. What I like about SEMrush
is they're a big company and they've been around
longer, so they invest more into like data crawling. So like when I go to
Serpstat, again good tool. For the price, it's amazing. But I'm limited on read ins as well. So like if I go to here, you can see Google United States, Bulgaria, Ukraine, South African, pretty much it. And again, I'm not trying to talk shit. I paid for the tool, so
it must be good enough. - [Clayton] Up and coming
as well, Serpstat guys. - [Neil] Yeah, they're up and coming. But if I go to SEMrush,
and this is the reason I prefer it. They keyword data is
way more, and they have data on pretty much every
single region out there. So let's say I type in a keyword like, let's go to their homepage. Forget this. All right, it's porting
me to dashboard, oh well. Where is it? So if I type in (tongue
clicking) keyword analytics, it should be here, overview. You can see this 114 more countries. I can get data on everything
from UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Afghanistan, Albania,
Algeria, Australia, right? Like they have data on
pretty much everything. Now for Moz, they may not have data on all these regions, but
I can type in a keyword, and I can get data literally
on all these regions. That's why I use SEMrush. - [Clayton] Yeah well, absolutely. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit. Wes is asking about site structure. What's the best site
structure and strategy for a local service based business targeting multiple cities, any advice? - [Neil] Sure, so you
get to hear me for a bit, and I do apologize 'cause
even I hate hearing myself all the time. - [Clayton] Nah, it's good. We need these long answers. This is what we're all here for. - [Neil] Okay so, I've
tested a lot of things with site structure. When you're a local page, a
few things to keep in mind, one, make sure that your homepage has the right keywords, right? So it's like Neil Patel title is like Helping You Succeed
through Online Marketing. I mention online marketing there. I'm not trying to rank the homepage. It lets Google know that this website is about online marketing and marketing and everything around that. Have a video, keeps the
user metrics really good. I have some keywords in
there, visitors, dollars, ads. Then I talk about growing
business, talk about who I am which is related to the
domain name Neil Patel, right? And then I go into the main
pages and sections of the site. I know this isn't a local
website, but this works for local as well. And I can show you. I actually rank locally. So Neil Patel, I claim my address. Look at this, we got little cookies there, some cup of tea. (laughing) - [Clayton] Is that what
we get if we come over? (laughing) - [Neil] Yeah, I'll get you that. Seriously, if you wanna come
over, I'll buy you that. And look, my hours of
operation, 24 hours a day. There's no holidays. - [Clayton] Why didn't you
name it something amazing? - [Neil] Why did I name what? - [Clayton] Why didn't you
name it something else, the fun house or something, I don't know? - [Neil] I actually don't
want people to come. I was just experimenting
and testing out, right. - [Clayton] Of course. (laughing) Okay, cool, Wes, I nope you got-- - [Neil] Link to your main sections, okay? So once you link to your main sections, you have improve your
knowledge, my blog, my podcast, webinar, start a website, main pages. And really importantly, right, and then you have each subsection. This works the same if
it's a local site or not. Here's a blog page linking
to all the blog posts. Let's go into blog post page. You have the breadcrumbs, right. As you can see, I'm
linking to the categories. That's ideal structure. Sidebar, this is very, very important. Most people don't think about this. This works really well
for localized sites too. Link to your most popular
pages on all your blog and category restaurant pages could be your most popular menus
items, your food pages. Like look, I link all my marketing here. You think it's a fluke that I rank for also online marketing on Google? - [Clayton] Probably not, no. - [Neil] I'm number one or number two with neilpatel.com. I'm number one with Quick Sprout, but eh, close enough, either
way, they're both my sites. But you see, right? And both of 'em, on Quick Sprout too. Quicksprout.com/blog, what
do you notice here too? Look in the sidebar, what's that? - [Clayton] A link. - [Neil] To the guides, right? That's how I optimize my site structure. And then really important,
on localized pages, make sure you cross link within your menu or your content, your pages,
and then on your content page, I don't do this 'cause I'm
not really that localized, but have all your locations
and addresses there. So that way you can claim
up multiple listings within the maps. And then go submit to Moz local. - [Clayton] Got it, okay. All right Wes, I hope
you heard all of that. If you didn't, you can
replay this session. And for everybody else that
asked a similar question about local rankings or site structure for local businesses, I hope that site architecture helped out a lot. Let's move on. Adrian's got 23 up votes
with this next question. He says the benefits of
SEO are sometimes hard to explain to clients or bosses because SEO is so
complex and often doesn't have instant results. How do you address
misconceptions about SEO when you consult? - [Neil] So I don't really consult, so I haven't had to deal
with this in a long time. But here's some ideas, right? - [Clayton] Case studies, I'm sure. - [Neil] Yeah, case studies, testimonials, but let's go even further and let's assume these guys don't even have case studies and testimonials, right? Go sign up for a free
trial of SEMrush, okay? And then go type in your competition. Let's say your competition,
and I'm gonna use this as a broad example 'cause it's easy for everyone to see. Let's say your competition
is, give me a site. Should I use Amazon, or
let's use something smaller? All right, so let's use,
who else can we use? What's a small site? I'm running blanks here, Clayton? - [Clayton] Let's do
Growth Marketing Conf. - [Neil] Okay, that's a conference. That's too small of a niche. We can do growth marketing
conf which you actually want, but you guys don't do any SEO or marketing or anything on that. - [Clayton] Blogging n'stuff. - [Neil] All right,
growthmarketingconf.com. - [Clayton] C, O, N, F.com, yep. - [Neil] All right, let's try this out. So keyword overview, right? It's loading. No data, sorry. (laughing) - [Clayton] Okay, let's do Real Thread. R, E, A, L, T, H, R, E, A, D. It's a t-shirt company. - [Neil] All right, much easier. Are they decent sized? - [Clayton] Yeah, in the industry, yes. - [Neil] All right, so
what you want to do is. How the heck? - [Clayton] Seriously. - [Neil] All right, let's
go to domain overview. Realthread.com. It's pullin', it's pullin. All right, you can see this, right? Organic search 7.1. They don't really do much paid search. They're not a good example. Let's pick Amazon, right? This one's easy to do. You guys can see. So here's how I explain it to clients. - [Clayton] We should've
asked the audience. They probably could've
given good examples. Sorry, go ahead. - [Neil] All right, no worries. Actually we should've, but all right, let's use Amazon for example, right? So as I'm pulling it up, they probably get a ton of organic search
traffic, and they probably spend an arm and a leg on paid advertising. All right, so traffic
cost $19.3 million, right? Organic search traffic, it
also shows you estimates of these sites, the keywords they rank for and traffic costs. SEM is estimating with all the sites what the traffic's actually worth. But like even if you
go back to Real Thread, it'll show you what they
think these keywords are actually worth and how
much you would have to pay if you wanted to buy that traffic. And it would show if you're
Real Thread for example that these keywords would
cost roughly $13,000 a month. So you can show your boss being like look they're getting traffic
based on the SEMrush data, a lot of people are
bidding on these terms. That's how they know
they're, A, good terms. They're profitable, and
they're worth $13,000. So we should be going after 'em. So then oh, I have to sneeze,
but it's not coming out. So and then (sneezing) oh there you go. - [Clayton] Bless you. We get like 300 bless yous
every time that happens. It's funny. (laughing) - [Neil] That's good. I feel lucky when they do that. - [Clayton] Yeah, you're
very blessed right now. - [Neil] Actually I really do feel like I'm so happy everyone's
here and like learning n'stuff like that, right? - [Clayton] Amazing, some of the stuff, the corners and points
that people, the speakers have uncovered and like broken
down have been incredible. - [Neil] Yeah, so like when
I go to organic keywords, I clicked on the wrong
thing, but this shows me all the keywords that
companies like Real Thread are ranking for, and
it shows me on SEMrush. I'm using two tools Ahrefs and SEMrush. As I mentioned, I love both of 'em. This tells me what the
organic traffic is worth. So if I tell my boss if I had to work, I'm like look here's how much it's worth, and look at our competition. They're ranking for all these key terms. You know they're a
bigger business than us, so they're doing it. Why aren't we? It's worth at least this
much here if not more. And SEMrush, and this is actually a bad and a good thing, but their
number, in my opinion, is lower than what it's really worth. So like, you can actually tell their boss or your boss that hey
you know if it's 13,000, I actually usually feel it's worth like three to four X that. So that's probably worth
somewhere in the $40,000 to $50,000 range conservatively. - [Clayton] Why are you
factoring that double and triple in there? What are you accounting for? - [Neil] 'Cause what
I've seen in everything from SEMrush and Ahrefs
shows that the traffic is way higher than what they report. So if they report that it's 7.1 visitors, the number is way higher by far. And organic traffic tends to convert better than paid traffic
from what I've seen assuming it's targeted keywords. So you can easily say it's
three to four X that number. - [Clayton] Yeah, this is
gonna (muttering) proof SEO value to a boss, then a case study because everybody comes
with case studies, you know? - [Neil] Yeah, no one gives
a shit about case studies. I just wanna know what
your boss really cares about why your competition's beating you. So show why he's beating you,
what that traffic's worth and the keywords that they're ranking for. And be like, look I wish I can tell you we're gonna rank tomorrow, I can't. There's no way. Google tries to make it
hard for people to rank so that way you spend
more money on AdWords. But I can tell you one simple thing, every quarter your search
traffic should go up assuming there's no seasonality. If it doesn't, that means we're not doing a good job with SEO and making changes that are moving fast enough. - [Clayton] Yep, absolutely. Okay, great answer. The next one from Scott with 35 votes is about website authority or page authority. He's asking what are the best practices on a low budget to increase
website authority ratings? - [Neil] Sure, I actually
have a blog post on this, and you guys can just go and read it. It pretty much teaches you how to increase your domain authority on a budget. I think I published it last week. - [Clayton] Oh perfect, Scott. - [Neil] How to Boost
Your Domain Authority by Five Points in Two
Weeks, and it's pretty much teaching you to do it on a budget assuming you don't have any money. All my blog posts are written based on if you don't have any money. So it's called How to Boost Your Domain Authority by Five Points in Two Weeks, and it pretty much teaches you what to do to grow your domain authority. Follow it, it works, I use it. - [Clayton] And it's step by step in long form I guessing, right? - [Neil] Yeah, like here's a scroll bar. It' keeps going and going and going. - [Clayton] That's a really long one. I love it. Scott, check out neilpatel.com. That blog is gonna be your guide for the next couple of weeks, man. - [Neil] Oh speaking about
Quora, you see this screen. You just reminded me. You guys want to see some cool stuff with Quora that I'm doing? - [Clayton] Yeah, who
want to see Quora stuff? - [Neil] All right, so we have issues with the Quora moderators. They hate us, but I don't care. - [Clayton] Why? - [Neil] Because, so what we do is we go answer all the questions
within the marketing space, and we go take content
from our blog posts. So like let's say how to
market yourself on Instagram. I'm literally taking it verbatim. And two answers right. Instagram has the most recent, yada, yada. In fact, this is literally
straight up from my blog. Okay, and then a lot
of the internal links, some of them go back to my blog. This one's Quick Sprout
which is one of my blogs, and I'm linking out. And I kid you not, like my
posts get decent up votes. See, five up votes. When I started this on Quora, it's been only like two months, I had
no real followers on Quora. I wasn't an influencer on Quora. And my answers get tons of views, and it's an easy way to
get more brand awareness traffic to my blog. And I just copy my blog response. Like here check out this one. How can I create strong
backlinks to my website? 228 up votes, 245 up votes, 83, 71, 356. What are some of the
interesting psychological marketing tactics, right? - [Clayton] That's a good question? - [Neil] B to B and B to
C, and like I kid you not, I just straight up copy and paste. Where's my post? 100 answers, why isn't mine at the top? Oh here you go, I'm high up enough. This one was written February 17th. Look at that. My guy Grant does this for me. He's amazing. He heads up Latin America. So he put Forbes top
10 marketer et cetera, and then just started taking stuff from the blog and boom
copying and pasting. Same, old routine. This works so well. Like nine comments. What are the comments
that people are saying? View other comments. - [Clayton] Let's see. - [Neil] Wonderful insights, Neil. Color me stunned, dude, you're brilliant. I think (muttering) James Altucher. This guy's very genius. No wonder when I post images I'm smiling on Facebook when I get more likes, right? Like I'm just taking it, or my guys are taking it straight up from the blog. And I kid you not, it's a
great traffic source of us. We put UTM variables on it 'cause Quora doesn't let you track the links. So we started going back
into our Quora posts and changing our links to
have UTM variables in Google within Quora so we can track
it within Google Analytics. And it started working. We did it for 100 posts, and
then we realized it works, so then we just stopped doing
it 'cause we got too lazy. But if you look, like last 30 days, 219,000 views on my
answers, and check this out, most recent, as you
can see, I haven't done anything since April 13. And every once in awhile, Quora moderators will give us shit for copying and pasting our blog post, and then they delete 'em. And then we argue, and
then they put it back. And some of the moderators
are really nice. They're like oh yeah,
no problem, our mistake. But you can keep doing
this, right, so it's like so effective in driving traffic. We're gonna scale this out, and I think I can get to around 400,000
or 500,000 views per month if not like a million views a month. - [Clayton] All right, amazing. - [Neil] We did the
same thing on LinkedIn. Just go add everyone. - [Clayton] Some people are
asking why don't you get penalized for duplicate content? It's a Quora thing. - [Neil] Oh no, Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content. Duplicate all day long. Have fun with it. Google's never penalized
for duplicate content. At least, I know once I got in trouble. They said they didn't,
but my blog Kissmetrics got hurt, and then they fixed something on their end, and then we were good to go. GigaOM also got hurt
which no longer exists and a few others. So where's my home? I haven't even logged
into LinkedIn in ages. I don't even know how to use my profile. - [Clayton] Yeah, they
updated the interface. - [Neil] Double or David does this for me. Every time a blog post
gets published, my guys, I think David does it. David's amazing. So yeah, like I share the content. I'm like trying to find LinkedIn. I'm sorry guys. - [Clayton] Yeah, I think it's under Me, or I'm not too familiar with it either. - [Neil] See all activity. See 172 more articles, oh on LinkedIn. I think David did this today. I published this post today I assume. Where's the writing? You can write, oh posts. - [Clayton] There you go. - [Neil] Come on load. - [Clayton] Yeah, I've
heard good strategies about how to do this
and then like tease 'em with some of the content and then put like to read more click here, and then you can drive 'em to your blog. - [Neil] Yeah, that's what we do. I'm trying to find it. I know these guys do that 'cause I see it in my referral logs. And like LinkedIn went up drastically once I started doing that. I do not know where to go. Interests, it's somewhere here. - [Clayton] It should be
under articles The Seal says. - [Neil] 172 more articles. - [Clayton] Geez, and then click. There it is, wow. - [Neil] You see it? I don't even know. 200 views, hundreds of likes. - [Clayton] This is just, they're saying home icon Neil, home icon. - [Neil] The home icon? - [Clayton] I don't know. Oh, right there. - [Neil] Home. - [Clayton] I think that's
just the stream though. - [Neil] Yeah, I have no idea. - [Clayton] Jorge says
write an article now. - [Neil] Okay, so when
you write an article, what my guys do is they take the article. They click write an article, they take the first two, three,
four paragraphs, you pick, and then at the end it says
click to continue reading, and that goes over to my blog post. That's how I get my LinkedIn traffic. - [Clayton] Nice, okay
ready for the next question? - [Neil] Yeah. - [Clayton] Let me find it. Okay, it is from Itai which
I'm guessing is Israeli. Itai says just launched
my eCommerce website. What are the first
things to do for driving traffic and more sales? - [Neil] Here's an example. Oh there you go, I found it. I clicked. You see this? - [Clayton] Yeah. - [Neil] Publish, new website. Look they're taking the first
few paragraphs step one. Click to continue reading. - [Clayton] Yeah, exactly. - [Neil] Nine comments too. Like you know I'm getting
clicks and engagements from it. It works really well. - [Clayton] Yep. - [Neil] All right, so
what was Itai's question? - [Clayton] eCommerce, how
to get more eCommerce sales just generally speaking. - [Neil] Sure, so your checkout pages on eCommerce should always be two step. Do not do a one step checkout page in which like ask for a name, an email, or an email, password, and
then on the second page ask for their credit card details. Doing that is a great way
to increase conversions. There's something cool, what is it called? And then when the people that, what is that service called? You know what I'm talking about? - [Clayton] No. - [Neil] It like recaptures. I'm trying to think. I should know the name. I've used it before. Oh well, you can do it manually. Okay so, you capture a name and email for all the people who don't purchase. You then send them back to that page to then buy. You can also do something
really interesting with onesignal.com. Have you guys heard of OneSignal? - [Clayton] Let's see. - [Neil] I'm assuming a lot
of people don't use this. It's push notifications. Are you guys familiar
with push notifications? - [Clayton] I'm sure they are, yeah. I'm getting yes. Jack knows it. - [Neil] All right, so push notifications for those who don't know. PushCrew is an example of it. I know their interface a bit better. OneSignal works better
with eCommerce still. And what you end up doing you can end up sending a message. So see it in action. So you click yes. Right, you see this? Click me, and I'll take
you to (muttering). This is a push notification, okay? - [Clayton] Oh, it's at the top, yeah. - [Neil] So let's exit out this stuff. And OneSignal is a free version. You don't have to pay for it. Like literally 100% free, right? And what you can do with eCommerce is everyone who adds stuff
to their shopping cart but doesn't continue, you can then do a push notification and
get 'em back to your site. That helps with sales. The other thing I've
done is it signal feed? Signal, what is it? Feed, SingleFeed, there
you go not signal feed. Singlefeed.com, this is eCommerce feeds. And what this does is put
your products everywhere. So you're selling 'em on
more than just your website, singlefeed.com. This helps get your
products out everywhere. They're one of the four
Google Shopping partners. It's a great way to get more sales 'cause they're putting it
on other really popular eCommerce sites. Use it, check it out, I love it. It works really well. - [Clayton] Okay cool. Craig's asking what tools do you use to research writing an epic blog post or how-to guide? - [Neil] Buzzsumo.com. I may type in things like, it's loading. I may type in something
like online marketing. Let me log in first so that
way you can see more data. Sign in. All right, it's loading. I'll show you the exact process. I'll even show you how I
promote the content too. - [Clayton] That'd be great. By the way, Simon's
saying he's got One Signal implemented on his site. So some people do know about it, yeah. - [Neil] And Simon was the one who asked the eCommerce question, right? - [Clayton] No, he was a different guy, but still interesting. - [Neil] All right, so I'll
look at online marketing. And here's an example How Google
Analytics Ruined Marketing. Let's say I then write an article called How Google Analytics Saved Marketing. Seriously, and check this
out Facebook engagement, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera. So then I'll go look at their article, and I'll just create a way better version. So How Google Analytics Ruined Marketing. And there's this content. It's like all right, it won't be too hard to write a way
better post than this, right? And like TechCrunch has great editors and marketers, but they're
not marketers themselves, so you know? - [Clayton] Yeah, it's probably short. Not a lot of step by step in it. - [Neil] That's correct. Okay, so I would write an article called How Google Analytics Saved Marketing. Just go look at theirs,
make it more in-depth. And then from there 'cause
that one did really well. I click on view shares. And it shows me every single Twitter user that shared this article. And it tells me how many
followers they have. So now I'm then gonna
write a better article, and then I'm gonna Google Marsha's name, Raj's name, Sam Hurley, and you can find a lot of their websites. Like when they have a
website, you click on it 'cause then you can find their email from their website, right? And then once you have their email, like I would Google, or I would
email let's say Sam, right? And my email would be
like hey Sam, I noticed you shared an article called How Google Analytics Ruined Marketing
by so and so author from techcrunch.com. I actually have a similar
article coming out called How Google
Analytics Saved Marketing, and it breaks down A, B, and C that the original article didn't. And it actually goes in-depth
on if you're a company or even a marketer how you can use Google Analytics step by
step to save you money and improve your marketing so
your business can grow faster. Let me know if you would like
to check it out, cheers Neil. That's it. People like Sam, 20% to 30% of the time will respond back. And then you'll email Sam being like, and he'll usually respond back
with something like, sure. Then you'll email him back
with like here's the article, cheers Neil, PS let me know
if I can do anything for you. PPS if you share this
article, not only will you make my day, it'll
make my decade, right? And you'll get a ton of
social shares on your article. - [Clayton] Nice. - [Neil] And then I also do this. Every time I link out to
people in my blog post, I do the same thing. I'm like hey Sam, I gotta
say, huge fan of yours. So much so that I even linked out to you in my latest blog post called X, Y, and Z. Feel free to check it out. If you like it, let me know. You're number one fan, Neil. PS if you share this,
it'll not only make my day, it'll make my decade. (Clayton laughing) - [Clayton] I love it. That's great, okay. And some other people are saying, AllTop and some other areas where
you can get good ideas too. Next one is site speed. Ahmed is asking how do I
make my website site, sorry. How do I make my website
fast, and I mean very fast? Practical advice. - [Neil] Yeah, so
there's Google PageSpeed. You don't have to be perfect. Everyone thinks you have to be perfect. I don't think Google actually uses speed to improve rankings as people think. I know they mentioned it as a factor. Here's where I think they use speed. I think speed indirectly affects rankings. I don't think speed
directly affects rankings. Attempting to load the
page reach, limit number of three directs less fetch, dismiss. It's not redirecting itself. I know the paperwork. It ranks in Google. All right, so let's do. - [Clayton] Do Crowdcast.io,
or there you go, Quick Sprout even better. - [Neil] So it'll tell
me what they're ranking the page as. And this is really important
because what you'll notice is they give you suggestions. You fix these suggestions
on mobile and desktop. Try to get it as good as you can. You're not gonna be perfect. But what I found is it's not about making your website fast 'cause you don't have to have the fastest website. I know Amazon wrote a piece talking about how the slower their site loads, the more you lose. But it's not about being the most fast. It's about being fast enough
where people don't bounce. If your site loads too slow, what I found is user metrics show
that people bounce more. And when they come from
your site from Google and they bounce, and they go back. Eventually Google tanks your rankings. So if you site loads fast enough, and you can use page speed test. What is that tool called? Not, Pingdom, there you go. So you can do Pingdom, type
in your website here, right? And type in all your
competitors who rank on page one and just make sure your website loads in roughly the same
amount of time as theirs, and you're good enough. That's the trick. - [Clayton] Cool, I love it. There you go, Ahmed. - [Neil] If you wanna know how to fix it, you type it into Google PageSpeed, that tool tells you how to fix it from Google's perspective. - [Clayton] Cool, sounds good. Okay, next question, let's keep rolling. We've got a little bit more if you've still got some time. Jeanette is asking about keyword research or keywords specifically. How difficult should my keywords be? Having a hard time
determining what's too broad and what's too difficult. - [Neil] Yeah, when you're starting off don't target keywords, target pages. So I would go, and you can use Ahrefs as I showed before, right? Type in your competitor's
URLs and just go look for the pages that just do really well. So if you type in Neil
Patel, and keep in Ahrefs is a sample size. It'll never show you real traffic that your competitor's getting. Your competitor will always have more than whatever Ahrefs is showing by a magnitude of whatever,
two, three, four X, right? It somewhere in there
ranges a lot per industry. But go to top pages, and it'll show you the type of pages that you should be writing similar content on your end. And then when you go to top pages, you can use that export
that I showed earlier with the CSV. Export the keywords into
CSV, and you now have keywords for that page that you should be going after assuming you're willing to write a similar page or
create a page that's similar. But can you see how the
volume, it's really off, right? So this is 12,507. My Google Webmaster Tool shows 39,000. And Google Webmaster Tools is
lower than Google Analytics. So that should give you an idea of how off it is, but
it's a good indicator of if a page is popular. And that is still correct. That page is still the most popular page. The second most popular page is this one. This page was really popular for awhile. But the keyword tool, I mean the blog is another page, right? But it generally shows what's
the most popular pages. - [Clayton] Gotcha, okay awesome. Next question, it's actually a variation of a few different questions
that people have asked. You're going over a bunch of stuff that seems kind of time consuming. How do you get so much marketing done on neilpatel.com? - [Neil] I have 150 people
through all my companies. - [Clayton] There you
go, Vignesh, Upinder. There's the answer to your question. - [Neil] Is that Vignesh asking that? - [Clayton] A few people
asked different versions of the same thing. So I just paraphrased. - [Neil] I'm like our
Vignesh 'cause Vignesh also works for us. - [Clayton] I know. But it was also asked by people that are just in the audience
that have no connection. Upinder was asking how do you get so much of this stuff done? - [Neil] Yeah, I have a big team. So like I'm now doing
something called Neil Knowledge or just Neil Patel where
we're gonna create videos where I do a video a day of
me giving a marketing tip. And the video could be like three minutes to like 10 minutes long, and it has screen captures and all that. So David will come up with the topics. I go through 'em to make
sure I like the topics. The I redo whatever ones I don't like. Then him and I go over the titles, and we'll do that in two to three hours. The next day, we had a film guy come over, Pasquale, Pasquale came
over, and then I kid you not, like we shot 16 videos in three hours. Like I just crank 'em out. And then Pasquale and
David will do the editing. David will make sure the right
screen captures are there. And then we'll start
uploading 'em to Facebook and YouTube once we have like a backlog of 30 to 40 videos, and then I'll start publishing 'em once every single day. And I'll launch it by sometime in May. But my goal is to do
literally one video a day for the whole year even if it's a holiday. - [Clayton] That's awesome. Yeah, we just heard Eric Siu this morning share with us how you guys
hold each other accountable and do you know bulk sessions and keep up with just the massive demand to produce a podcast everyday. - [Neil] Yeah, and think about it, right? I'll even share the cost. So Pasquale will cost me
4,500, and that's to shoot 31 videos a month. I already paid David, but let's say this takes you know $2,000
worth of David's time. And then me, my time, it takes three hours of shooting twice a month. So that's six hours. And then to come up with topics that takes me roughly two hours of my time 'cause David already does
some of the grunt work. So for roughly $6,500 and
eight hours of my time a month. Right, six hours of filming broken down into two sessions, and then two hours of topic generation. For $6,500, I'm creating 31 videos. My cost per video would be $209. That's really affordable. This stuff isn't as expensive
as most people think. - [Clayton] Wow, cool. Thanks for sharing that. Okay, next question
is, this is a softball, but it's got a bunch of up
votes, so I'm gonna ask it. SEO instructors often
share good information on how to rank but fail to provide step by step blueprint to success. Do you offer a step by
step instructional manual at an affordable price? They have an amazing
program called AMP, Neil? - [Neil] Yeah, AMP isn't
too much SEO though. It's so funny. I don't like selling shit, and
I don't even wanna sell AMP. And it makes good money,
but like I don't care to make the money. Maybe you know what I'll
do, I'll just actually take those videos, organize 'em and just shoot like 40, 50 videos on SEO and
just make 'em step by step and order 'em for everyone,
and then release it for free. If they like that, I can do that. I don't care. I don't care for any money or anything. And I'll include screen
captures, and I'll show people how to use the tools to do everything step by step. - [Clayton] We've got yes from Melissa. Yes from Alex. Yes from Heaney. Basically yes from everyone there. - [Neil] All right, sounds good. I'll do that. It'll take me awhile to crank it out, but I'll release something for free. - [Clayton] Sure, sure,
I'm sure the audience will be reading your blog
well into the future. Okay, one question that
keeps getting asked here, it's pretty cool. It has some good results
is what experiment are you running right now and what results are you seeing? - [Neil] Yeah, so it's
not an SEO experiment. - [Clayton] That's all right. - [Neil] It's an A, B test. Let's log in. Continue. So I use Crazy Egg tests. You can sign up for crazyegg.com. You won't get the test feature. It is a paid product or Crazy Egg is. But if you email
support@crazyegg.com and you CC Neil@crazyegg.com
and you ask for access to the test feature, just say Neil said I can have access. They'll enable it. And it's a WYSIWYG test feature, but it's called something
like bandit testing where you can continually
just make changes to your website without being a marketer, I mean without being a
developer or designer. So I'm testing stuff. So as you can see, here's
my control, 4%, 212 leads. This one's 279. So I'm testing stuff
where I change the copy. And what I'll do is I'll
just click add variant. Let's see. It's loading. Come on Crazy Egg. It's gonna load the whole
site, and then I can make edits to the whole
site without any developers or designers or anything like that. So I make all of my marketing changes or a lot of them through here. And I've been doing this more and more. And you can see, let's go
to variant two, view only. Loading the control. See this is why people
don't have access to it yet 'cause it's only in
beta for people like me. But it's a WYSIWYG here that'll pop up. And once the WYSIWYG
pops up, I'm then able to make changes to my site
in whatever way, right? I can click add variant,
and then from add variant, I can literally just go click
on the text, make changes and then adjust my
marketing in whatever way that I want. And then I can see the
stats within Crazy Egg on if something causes,
I can pick whatever goal. I can have more page views per visit. I can have you know more
email capture or whatever. And I can track all this
in clicks of a button without being technical. Sad is doesn't work right now, but you can always sign up and then the support team will give you access. And then if it doesn't work for you, they'll make sure it works
or refund you the money. But that's what I'll use
to do a lot of my testing. And what I found is simple little words and phrases like on my blog page. If you guys all load this up right now, many of you will see
a different variation. Here's the variation that I see. The variation is from aha to oh shit, I'm sharing everything on my journey to 100,000 monthly visitors. Some of you guys will see a variation. The URL's still the
same, neilpatel.com/blog. I bet some of you in the chat will start seeing variations that
talk about online marketing and how I rank number one on Google for online marketing. And the goal is just
more email collections, and I track that through Crazy Egg. So I just run a ton of tests by tweaking text changes or simple design changes or removing stuff. - [Clayton] Got it, okay. Michael's asking what do you recommend for eCommerce sites that have a bunch of products that are similar
but different variations. Should they be trying to come up with original content
for each description, or any advice there? - [Neil] They should
try to create templates. That's what we usually
do for eCommerce sites. And these templates, you
can just plug'n play words or phrases or content areas et cetera, and then you optimize
for the best template. And that's what we find
that works really well for eCommerce. - [Clayton] Okay, what do
you say is the most important SEO factor for non article based sites? - [Neil] Most important SEO factor for non article based
sites is click-through rate and time on site and user metrics like are they bouncing right off. So like I would look at video,
really high quality images let's say for eCommerce or video showing the products for eCommerce. Or if it's a lead gen site, you know maybe create quizzes or funnels where people go down 'em and take a quiz and interact. And then at the end
you collect their lead. But user engagement metrics like that like time on site, people bouncing back or staying on your page,
how long they're staying, how many people are searching
through your keywords, clicking through, are
they logged into Gmail which you can't control,
but I bet you those are factors that Google's using. And I do know the user metrics
and click-through rates, they have to be using. - [Clayton] Awesome, okay. Let's see. Tony's askin' how important
are categories on a blog? - [Neil] Categories are very important because it helps Google
with semantics relevance. If you look at my 40 plus percent increase in search traffic, not only did I switch up the URLs and make 'em simpler, I also added blog categories. As you can see the URL
here, blog/categories/seo. Now these categories
should say at the top, I'm kinda lazy, but I'll have one my guys I should say category SEO. What is SEO? And it should give just
a general description of what SEO is. - [Clayton] Cool, in your presentation in the Demystifying SEO, you talked about going back and
deleting some old posts that were over six months or over a year. Why did you do that? And do you think it helped? Or do you think you can
just leave it there, and it will also grow? - [Neil] It didn't help. So what I did is I actually
like unpublished them in WordPress, so then they disappeared and people couldn't see 'em. And then when I realized
after a few months it didn't do anything,
then I put 'em back. - [Clayton] Okay, got it. So there's the answer. We are out of time. That's all the time that we
have for questions today. We are going into a new
session right after this to wrap everything up and
to announce the winners. Neil are you ready to
do a one on one session with the winner of an SEO consultation? - [Neil] I am. I actually would love to help someone out. - All right cool, let's do it. So listen I'm going just
to click off of here, turn my camera on again, and maybe we can just get a final word from you. Thanks so much for being with us today. You've been a huge help. We had I believe our
record number of people in the session. And for getting all of
this stuff together, I've got some people askin'
are we gonna do it again? What's your plans next for
where can they catch you? What's the story? Where should people find you? - Yeah, we plan on doing another summit. You can just find me
on the Neil Patel blog. I'm even thinking about
doing like a live chatroom on there if I can figure
out a software to do it. And it'll just be free
where people can go on, and we chat, and we just
help each other out. And I'll be in there on a daily basis. So I'm just trying to
figure out a web based version that works for me
like while I'm traveling so I don't have to have an
app in case I'm on the plane. And a lot of these planes
restrict apps for wifi. But I really do appreciate
everyone for coming. If my team or anyone can help you guys out with anything, just hit up
support at neilpatel.com. And I really do wanna
see you guys succeed. Thank you guys for being here. If you guys have issues or just need help, we don't need money. Just shoot us an email. Thank you very much. - Absolutely, Neil thanks, brother. See you another time soon, and I'll say goodbye to you now. For everybody that's
still on the phone call, listen we have got a special session comin' up right when
I go off the air here. We're going to put everybody inside of the raffle section. So what we're gonna do is we're going to call out the winners
for Neil's Insider Club. And that's comin' up
in a couple of minutes. Hang on one second. Let me just make sure
that Neil's gone here. So for everybody that's inside
of this Crowdcast system right here, you've signed
up and have been added to what we call Neil's Insider Club. Neil's Insider Club
offers you the opportunity to win some pretty cool prizes. The first place prize is a private, free consultation with Neil one on one. You can talk about SEO, you can
talk about growth marketing. You can talk about different things. But whatever it is,
it's gonna do it for ya. I've heard that people
go out of these sessions and double and triple their business. Second place prize is a group of people that were in the second
place and also third place is a group of people. We've got amazing discounts
and some exciting prizes for you there. The Seal is gonna join with
me in a couple of minutes, just a few short minutes along with Joe who owns this platform that we're doing all of this social contest stuff on. And he's going to draw
the name out of a hat, virtual hat, and we're going
to announce those winners. So Kevin, Mark, Simon,
Brenimere, Wes, Rebecca, all of these guys that have
been in a lot of the chats, thanks so much for stayin' here. Let's see if you guys
win in the raffle contest that's comin' up right now. I'm gonna stop this
broadcast and join us there because we've got some bonus sessions and some additional exciting information that we're only going to give out to the people that join
us in this last section. So hang on, and we'll be right with you. - So if you like this
video, like, comment, share. I do appreciate it. And if I can ever do
anything to help you out genuinely even if it's you
know giving you some advice, I don't care for the money, just leave a comment below, and I will do my best to try to help you out and
answer all your questions. Thank you for watching.
