Don’t Build Backlinks This Year - Do This Instead

Key Takeaways

did you know that building backlinks doesn't guarantee that your rankings are going to go up hey everyone i'm neil patel and today i'm going to break down why you should not build backlinks this year and instead you should do this look before we get started make sure you subscribe to this channel and if you're on youtube click the alert notification here's the thing there's nothing wrong with building backlinks and i don't think everyone should stop building backlinks but if you're strapped for cash and time there's something else that you can do that can help you in the short run especially if your budget is trapped and even if you are building links you should never pay for them when it comes to a pay-per-play you can pay people to help you without reaching get them naturally but you shouldn't pay for them depending on the niche and the location of your business you know for smaller newer websites it takes a lot of time to for link building to really make an impact and work you can really do well in the early days without building tons of links or building you know just a few of them and getting them gradual over time especially if you're going after niches that aren't that competitive instead of doing link building i want you to commit to writing one high quality piece of content per week for at least you know a few months if you do that for a few months what you'll find is you can slowly start getting rankings quicker and here's how you do that when you write content you're doing it based off of specific keywords and take those keywords and put them in ubersuggest and then uber says on the left-hand navigation click on keyword ideas and in there you'll have a button that says page one ranking potential if you click on that button put in your url it'll break down all the keywords that you can rank for now what i want you to do is write content on all these keywords that are relevant to your business you take those keywords and you create a blog article on them now some of those keywords don't fit well together but for the ones that don't fit well together you write separate articles around them and ideally they should be around the same topic this is what's considered topic clusters what i mean by that is let's say i'm writing a guide to seo i can go after hey here's the beginner's guide to seo then i can talk about on-page seo which is related but that could be a whole separate article then i can talk about link building which is a whole separate article then i can talk about let's say page speed and how that impacts seo and that could be a separate article when it comes to optimizing your load time then i can talk about google's amp framework which is for accelerated mobile pages for mobile devices and for your content pages they can load faster for mobile users when doing a search on google the point that i'm trying to make is if you focus your time instead of doing link building especially in the early days and you write content you're going to be better off see because when you go out there and you try to build links and you don't have much especially if you have a new site or your site doesn't have much that's of value and i'm not trying to knock it it's what other perceivers value not what you or i perceive right and if they don't perceive value they're not going to want to naturally link to it and if you email all those people trying to convince them to link to you it's a lot of work and the results are going to be slim to none but on the flip side if you spent your time writing content that you could potentially rank for you're going to be better off and using this flow and uber says when you're doing keyword research what you'll find is some keywords like credit cards are super competitive that's really hard to rank for even terms like auto insurance but on the flip side that you know what you can potentially rank on page one for that button what analyze your site your on-page seo your backlinks your history and it takes all that into account and it tells you what you can rank for today what you have the best possibilities to rank for in the short term with the circumstances that you're you know being dealt with when it comes to seo and by focusing writing high quality content you're going to be better off but here's another trick that you need to keep in mind when you're writing these pieces of content that you could rank for take those keywords do a search form on google i want you to look at all the people in the top 10. what are they doing so amazing what are they missing what could they be doing better what are they including that you have to include that'll give you an idea of how to write better content you also need to go to page four or five six of google and look at the pages that are ranking what are they not doing that the ones that are on page one are doing that'll help make it in concrete on what you should be doing and that'll give you better ideas of hey here's what i need a right to beat the other people who are ranking because it's not just about backlinks just think about this when you do a google search are you like hmm this number one result should be there not because their content but because they have a million links you don't really care who has a million links or two million links or a hundred links when you're doing a google search all you care for an end user is hey i did a search did i click did it give me the solution to my search query or my problem as quick as possible in the most efficient way if it did you're happy if not you click the back when you go to the next result you don't really look at on-page code or keyword density or backlinks you look at did it solve your problem that's user experience you want to optimize for that when you're writing your content put the user first and if you do that and then you start building links later on right but you create the content first you're gonna start ranking better and getting more traffic that's why i want you to do this instead of build links because it'll help create a really solid foundation so when you do get more links you can start writing content on more competitive terms and you'll do even better if you need help with your marketing check out my ad agency np digital if you enjoy this video like it share tell appeal about it thank you for watching