7 SEO Experiments To SKYROCKET Your Traffic

Key Takeaways

hello everybody welcome to the final uh session of this advanced seo summit with neil patel i am live right now with neil um i'm coming to you from san francisco and we're very excited uh to have all of you with us today where we're gonna go through a lot of different data on seo experiments that neil's doing how he took the neil patel traffic from a little bit to a ton per month and uh 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 on facebook live uh so it's gonna it's gonna be awesome if you guys can hear me uh 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 uh and that we're live like we're supposed to be okay cool sounds good and i always love finding out where is everybody from tell me what part of the world you're coming from i'd love to know where people are joining us from uh it's daytime 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 kind of like my session it's great 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 them right like i was talking with um uh yeah i always say yoast because of the plug but i was talking to juice the other day yeah because uh i was using his plugin i used the href blank stuff and i was telling him i'm like dude i gotta say i'm like i love your xml sitemap because the problem with most xml sitemaps are when you have different languages they don't create them properly so whether 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 lifesaver so we're just talking about little things there uh andrew you know i've worked with him for a while tyler was the one who told me to change my urls you'll see that in my presentation as well in one of the experiments that was a big lift that was like a 40 plus percent increasing yeah i've got a question and i want to drill down into it um 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 going to go through uh his deck on demystifying seo which is phenomenal because it is a process and this guy's got it figured out so get your pins ready get another tab up ready with a word document or whatever you need to do to take notes i'm going to let neil take it away and then after that if you've got a question that you want to make sure it gets answered just below this screen there's a q a function type that question in the q 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 um 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 a stuff and i've done this before with you you love to just get into what's working for you right now right so screen sharing and stuff exactly can you see me right now clay yeah we can see now if you want to uh click on the share screen thing and let's get the deck going i think we're all ready all right so reload the chat jefferson says neil already tells us everything in the blog which is it's almost true it 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 uh 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 the windows loading a bit slow for me all right no worries i've got sweden people are still typing where they're from sweden colombia uh 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 uh canada india holland okay wow there's so many people in here man we are blazing on this thing uh if it's still loading maybe just refresh the screen and we'll be here uh if that's the best way to do it um share screen so i'm waiting for the pop-up now once it comes up then i will start sharing okay let's see maybe a question you have for me i wanted to know uh i see a bunch of people that all have their uh dates in the url of their blog so walk us through specifically what you removed and did you remove it from the page and the url and what happened uh i removed it well pages usually don't have dates um i use it i removed it well yeah actually i removed it from the pages and i removed it from the urls and it worked out quite well so um 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 going to refresh the screen really quickly and then you can add me back on yeah go for it we'll be here no problem okay also just to remind everybody while we're uh getting neil's screen loaded for the presentation uh this presentation is going to 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 radio button um right there at the top okay i don't think that you should click off of this one because this is the most exciting one um and then the recordings are going to be available for a couple of hours after that until they get moved to uh the members area so um let's see neil's gonna just say something in the chat and i'll promote him on screen again or dylan maybe you could help um so let's just get him loaded up again there is a transcript uh i'm going to all right i'm back there you are all right so now let's see thanks finder screen 2 a.m in india you guys are awesome coming and uh listening to this live broadcast let's see let's make sure that we can get the screen loaded and there it is uh it looks good i'll just put my window so that way i don't know all this stuff and hopefully that way the computer is more smooth can you see my screen yeah we can that's great go for it all right let's play this bad boy you guys ready yes so today i'm gonna teach you guys seven experiments that i ran that grew my traffic from 9029 search visitors a month to 449 000 that's a huge increase now to clarify i did that increase through uh 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 right as you can see from the screen january 1st 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 if you can see in the top left you'll see that it 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 going to 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 you know how much search traffic you're gonna get because if you have five pages that google's index and then you have a hundred pages obviously you have a higher probability of getting more search traffic but the real question is is there diminishing returns right one is if you go from having a hundred blog close to 200 200 to 500 500 to 1000 etc what really happens so i decided to test a few things i did everything from for periods of times i've blogged once a week only i've 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 a hundred 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 of post it's not going to get search traffic right away but over a period of you know six months it should be doing somewhat well in the search engines and i've even tested translating my blog into three different languages in total i have over a thousand nine hundred posts i tested quite a bit so and you can just see right currently it shows that there's 1919 post published i have english portuguese brazil uh german and spanish those are the uh four main languages that i'm in right now and i have content really on all forms of seo marketing 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 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 topic would go up now again to emphasize when you only have 10 20 posts and you publish another 30 40 50 of course your sure traffic is going to 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 going to be hits or misses which is why i published them in quantity and i did everything from like using ahrefs and semrush and seeing where my competition is getting traffic from and i'm like okay you know like maybe i should publish posts that are just like my competitors i even did stuff like going into my analytics for 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 and search changes 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 they didn't get necessarily more social shares than some of my other posts right i've had posts i got on three four or five thousand social shares and they didn't get as many uh 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 we publish content and you do it in mass scale some of your posts just naturally get good search traffic so as i showed on that number 17 or number 20 listing that post has 4159 and what i started doing is i wouldn't 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 uh 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 because 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 uh 10 000. and keep in mind google webmaster tools data never matches up with analytics but master 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 is off by 1.6 which is quite a bit so once you click on the page so i clicked on the number four listing then you want to 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 the 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 skyscraper technique um brian dean spoke earlier in this event if you're not familiar with the 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 etc 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 him 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 will help you determine which posts are not going to be hits you can start deleting the ones that don't even get 100 searched visitors a month after six months or a year you pick whatever you want and then from there take 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 uh user metrics like good time on site low bounce rates etc and those are the pages that you really want to tweak and bind to so experiment number two here's another way that i really increase my search traffic it's pretty much to 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 want to 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 them that hey the first listing isn't as relevant as the second one so they should switch them 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 this stuff out there um i know moz ran 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 ran did right you tweet out care to help my google theory slash test could you search for imec lab and 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 in 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 have it 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 you'll get a report that looks something like this right it pretty much shows all the keywords that you're getting traffic from uh the amount of clicks the impressions etc 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 i'll look for keywords that have less than a four percent 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 would test using numbers and negative words i would also try using the words what is within the title tag because 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 uh tested things like including the keywords in the front i also looked at pay-per-click ads for ideas i would use sem rush to also type in my competitors to see what ads they've run in the past um to just go see and you know get all the keyword ideas and ad copy ideas because you know google adwords is largely based on click-through rates right just because someone bids more doesn't mean that they're going to be on top if they if someone has a highest click-through rate by far they're usually going to be the highest listing which means that their copy is really appealing i also would test out different word counts within title tag i found six words work really well i tried using powers and adjectives which work as well and of course evoking curiosity so here's examples of adjectives effortless fun incredible essential strain absolute etc 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 ten 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 used to do this with my nutrition site which i don't have anymore but sold it and uh i would get clicks keep adjusting the title tags i would use google search console and over time it would go up it was a pain in the butt it wasn't 100 uh percent success rate sometimes i would fail and then i had to keep retesting the page and it could take me months because 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 list within your title tag how to free the word you tips why tricks great and even putting the year within title tags right these 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 uh 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 few thousand five ten thousand or you're willing to uh 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 ten 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 because if the picture's the same and we're testing stuff out roughly at the same time of day 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 to creating a profitable facebook advertising campaign i may also test out how to create a facebook average uh how to create a profitable facebook advertising campaign right another variation could be how to create a profitable facebook advertising campaign for less than five hundred dollars right i know 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 learned with click-through rate in which when you test something out on quick news 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 going to 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 is a 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 them you see that glass you're like i 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 going to reveal all of that data right 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 um 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 signs so one of my buddies dan and his partner um 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 uh 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 we're like oh we should just do the campaign call 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 fight so as you can see picture of a model i also had a really buff dude this was my favorite he deleted it after a while it was a video the guy was jacked he probably was like 250 300 pounds i don't know a big bulky muscle builder type of guy and on his chest he put neil patel and he was like flexing his chest and then my name would keep going up and down and 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 skyrocketed 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 the month and i realized even if something'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 every tuesdays i just picked a random day i found that your search volume skyrockets because everyone's on social media they 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 skyrockets right 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 one's from shreds they had a lot of bad press because people found out their people doing shred stuff or supplement stuff for taking steroids but nonetheless they grew into a company that was doing 20 million dollars a year purely off of social media you know and they paid men women fitness people uh you know mothers with family whoever it may be to promote shreds uh here's another example gary vaynerchuk this is a cool way to get more people talking about him he started putting out ads within uh new york city with his cell phone number great way to create press as well and you can try anything um 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 prserv.com he's pay-per-play uh there's another one called dan from uh stranger social in which he leverages uh social media like facebook instagram you get people who are really popular who don't make much money to do stuff for hundreds of dollars uh and just get creative with your ads right that's a lot of stuff out 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 and the us and spanish markets and uh it's really helped grow the business so here's some lessons that you're gonna run your campaigns all at once uh which means that you wanna do them let's say all on a tuesday or all on a wednesday or thursday or uh monday pick a day or a friday you to 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 right i have no idea i thought it was the best idea but and i because i've been blogging for so long right quick sprout patel kissmetrics crazy et cetera i'm like well let's really actually see if content is king so i invest so much time and energy into content because 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 of people who put it up into wordpress because i write in microsoft word don't ask me i don't like writing in google docs and i don't like writing in uh wordpress i don't know why but i've been writing in word for so many years so i'm just used to it and i'm like if i look at how much i spent 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 um this tool i don't know what it ended up costing me micas is around like 20 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 talks about your seo score your page speed etc and here's the traffic to the tool over time right 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 home page if you go look at the stats for the tool page itself there's over four page use per visitor and the 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 the example of the tool traffic over a 30-day period just the home page and almost all of it comes from google right as you can see my most popular page my home page 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 home page 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 an email signature generator i was talking with one of their guys ryan in austria 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 uh 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 b2c like all the tips i'm giving you today they work in both b2b and b2c 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 uh tool their website greater 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 um ended up doing i think the slide is wrong right so is this right let's see um 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 the general synopsis i improved my load time by roughly 31 i compressed my images i removed uh the entry pop-up not the exit pop-up i know people are saying like google's penalizing for mobile pop-ups all my buddies who are running mobile pop-ups and even me we haven't seen any difference in our search traffic just as a fyi uh i increased the text size on my blog to make it more readable made my paragraphs shorter improved the design of the i improved the design of the mobile version right the responsive mobile design and i pushed the content above the fold so out of all the changes that i've made uh that reduce the bounce rate the entry pop-up and adjusting the content so it's more above the fold help 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 um 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 create 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 usa 85 000 or 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 72.19 and overall the traffic increase the pages from google almost doubled 22 383 to 40 933 and it's so funny because everyone talks about like oh yeah we know bounce rates and user metrics you know of impact rankings like tell me something new neil well how many of you have actually tested that out i bet you not even one percent right and there's nothing wrong with that even i'm sort of test a lot of this stuff out but tess some of these things that you continually hear about they really do help increase rankings it just takes time you decrease your balance 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 why do they do this they do it because they don't want people spam or 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 the keyword within my url and put the keyword within the first sentence of the content so i would use a seo books keyword density tool the url is there on the screen tools.seobook.com general keyword density if you don't want to write down the url no worries this is recorded or you can just google seo book keyword density and here's an example of a page this is on how to uh 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 uh then neil then patel then neil patel replied because i get a lot of comments right and i tested out the density and tried doing different things like removing comments and 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 uh etc 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 3 to page 2. right and now i'm ranking a middle of page 1 i'm in middle of page 2 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 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 because i'm like wait i'm only covering wordpress ones if someone wants to start a blogger blog or a medium blog or a blog using wix etc i also looked at all my competitors and see what they were covering using the seo uh book keyword density tool and i didn't look just like keyword density i looked at all the words that i'm 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 the page now you'll see that i cover every single blogging platform it's more thorough it doesn't have the best density compared to the competition but it's caused my rankings to increase and it's continually gone up and hopefully one day i 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 forty percent uh tyler from canada who was giving a speech i think yesterday he's the one who told me about this uh 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 this stuff he was gonna do and he's 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 because i was like all right i'll probably get like a two percent lift a five percent 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 because i don't believe anyone should ever do work for free so he's like 20 000 canadians 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 um and a lot of the changes that you weren't going to impact my ranking but i'm like all right let's make this url change so here's my search traffic in december 2016 before the url change right this one thing that he taught me brought more attention to because 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 what my rankings went and my search i've gone 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 slash month slash day to post title to neilpatel.com blog slash post title now this comes down to semantics relevance when google reads this url structural this is my old one this is the post title let's think about the post title it works in a hierarchical 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 a year and that year is related to a blog well my posts aren't related to dates i'm not a news site this hierarchical structure 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 uh today i published one on 27 seo essentials uh for blogging right and that post title is if i did it in this old way it would be like all right well that would 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 a seo post oh and it's from online marketing blog it's still relevant you're not blogging about everything your website's very relevant and my search traffic went up and i learned a few 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 because i've 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 uh internal link from one blog post to another one is using the old url structure you gotta go through each blog post and update the urls you need to uh do a 301 from your old urls 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 every time 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 a and as you guys are asking the questions i'll do my best to answer them 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 uh 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 uh that traffic increase over that period of time amazing stuff there was a ton of people in the chat uh having awesome positive content comments asking lots and lots of questions um so i'm just gonna get started with some of the most upvoted ones um let's take it from the top now we've noticed over the last four days 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 is the and the most upvoted one uh is from diana it's changed from the one that we previously talked about her question is uh 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 uh there following your advice sure so it all comes down to topical relevance and what i found is can you still see my screen claim yep so what i found is it all comes down to topical relevance um google likes ranking small mom and pops just as much as they like ranking the big dogs so i'm going to give you guys an example right neilpatel.com how to start a blog and this is what i mean by topical relevance it's whoever goes more in depth like in other words topical coverage not real oh looks like he got disconnected there just hang on looks like he's reconnecting we'll just have him 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 uh who's in the audience uh oh we need neil to uh to comment again neil comment again hang on guys we're coming let's see neil comment here sorry guys i'm just uh putting neil back on the live stream here neil okay cool thanks so uh here we go so neil's just refreshing um uh 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 um voted uh question out of everybody's questions what would you do if you had to do it again let's see vasil can you um maybe call neil on the phone and make sure that he's refreshing and then we've got a bunch of other ones from craig a couple from craig wow craig you've really got good questions it looks like yours are getting a bunch of upvotes uh there he is let's invite neil again um yep will do okay there's neil again let's see if he's gonna get added all right so we were talking about uh topical relevance we were answering um diana's question what is the fastest and safest way to get brand new website uh to rank on the first page of google and how fast can he get there following neil's advice um let's see he's not there but i think he's 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 going to 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 uh join us that we've got um a couple of there you go how are you all right where do you guys listening i was going to abraham lincoln did you guys see the abraham lincoln stuff no we just saw the uh the the the google home page ah that sucks time to answer the question again all right it is voted one so all right so the best way to increase your ranking is purely through topical uh depth right topical relevance going more end up on my post right so you can still see my screen yep 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 um all the way to choosing a domain name hosting uh blogging platforms like think about uncovering wordpress.org.com blogger tumblr medium ghost who who the heck uses ghosts 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 no all right so wikipedia you have abraham lincoln page there's only like four or five thousand words their rankings keep uh 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 example let's say you have a pizza shop right and you wanna you're in new york city pizza shop in manhattan you're talking about the best pizzas and you want to rank for all pizza terms in new york city if you start talking 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 um the best times of the day to eat pizza what they go with does it go with red wine white wine uh what kind of toppings should it 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 like you're going so 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 skyrockets your rankings eventually to the top what i mean by that is like they start you'll start seeing jumps so you'll go from like page five to page three or page ten to page five five to three and then you'll slowly start climbing and you go from page three to page two you'll be at bottom on page two and jump to the middle of page two etc awesome okay uh 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 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 yep so pick the biggest niche that you can find that doesn't have marketers like when we started that nutrition blog mike and i um and he was a nutritionist or a nutrition person because i didn't know anything about nutrition it's so much more popular than marketing or like uh so let's say go 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 going to 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 uh like weight loss go after stuff that is up and coming new edgy but stuff that isn't breaking down like that all the markers would go for marketers will go after weight loss supplements because 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 quit green tea it's probably decent it's a subset of nutrition tea healthy drinking etc and you don't compete with too many markers i used to rank on page one for this without building any links on a brand new nutrition website just because you had a nice article with pretty images and it wasn't even that thorough i feel like there's gonna be a lot of people starting websites in the tea niche just make sure you guys give me a cut of whatever you make all right craig with 59 up folks 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 yeah there's two so the first tool that i love using is sem rush and i'll show you the main way i use it i just plug in like competitor urls here it starts loading i gotta log in it's all right we would love to see how you set up your sem rush so we're happy to wait it's pretty basic yeah they they have a lot of cool information especially in the projects section i don't even know my username and password let's go back to the home page uh let's see if semrush is watching or if they can give us uh oh no i have a username and password it's just saved on the home page for somebody you click login from that okay when i click log in from here your password should pop up yeah that's the browser right mm-hmm okay log in see you now i want to know what about black tea and the white team niche is being saturated today he's made good money i know someone who makes a few hundred thousand a month in profit selling pizza online really wait i think i heard you talk about that once are they what like a drop shipper or what are they is it like it's a young guy i think he's like in his uh late 20s he didn't want to create his own tea products so he just sells others and he doesn't deal with inventory so he gives someone else a cut to deal with it all like a drop shipping company and sell someone else's product and white labels it but yeah so here's sem rush i put in a domain like moz and what i really care for is top paid keywords because and i look at this every single month in sem rush because i want to 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 some of the same keywords and i don't want to spend the pay-per-click cost um i know that hey these keywords and priority tend to be the best now i know i'm not going to rank for moz at her name but good keywords and i look at the volume seo seo keywords google algorithm update uh keyword tool keyword tool uh let's see these are actually the same i don't know why it shows up twice oh two different pages uh moz seo open site explorer that's their product technical seo that's a good keyword to bid on um 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 to or within my web pages 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 going to drive traffic but convert because if someone's spending a lot of money because they give you estimated cpc like local seo 12 and 43 cents per click must convert really well it doesn't matter if the volume is lower must be amazing keyword so because of that i'll go after those keywords within my blog post do 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 scm rush so after let's say i put in moz.com is this one here bless you 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 oh god yeah i bet you're getting a lot done yeah i'm so productive like even when i have a rice store there's no excuses the best time to work it's not like we're digging dishes here yeah exactly all right so on scrolling this is moz that you're looking at 594 000 backlinks 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 then i'll go from spy food to sem rush to optimize e because they show like the competitor level how uh 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 that keyword must be converting they all can be dumb if sem rush spyfu and moz are bidding on the same 20 keywords as their main ones i know those are the probably the most lucrative ones in the space and that's what i try to go after organically absolutely and one other tool you set 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 right my business andrew hit him up and we couldn't even get to off or i was willing to pay 2 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 right like look at the organic keywords it just keeps going down like they're just the guys who bought it are doing jack [ __ ] 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 dragging 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 when i 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 etc uh search sites internet search engines better search engine than google unfiltered search engine right 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 uh content to create and i make sure i include all these keywords within my content and what i do is i just export them right and then i go into microsoft excel start export all right i'm going to load this for you guys so you can see a load in here do you see it yep that's a trick question how do you see it i don't even see the x csv file oh see the csv file the screen there it is i like you sleeping on me claim that so now i know all the keywords that i need to include in my content i usually just take the top hundred okay so then i take the top hundred there's usually duplicates and i remove the duplicates and i remove the misspellings and i'll take the top hundred after i remove misspellings and duplicates and then i integrate them within my content for the page that i want to rank and i find that it helps me drive amazing search traffic cool awesome okay anybody that uh is wondering about tools in this sort of category that do similar things got sem rush and ahrefs people are asking a bunch about spyfu and serpstat and stuff like that i use servstat i have a really special deal with them i pay for one of their apis um and with serpstat uh the data is just not as good as sem rush um i pay search stat thousands a month i don't know what the number is i think like 2500 500 or whatever it is it's not a bad tool i like it the data is just not as good as semrush okay cool my neutral viewpoint right so you can totally agree these guys are awesome we got a bunch of insight from marina their president a couple of days ago on what the trends are after collecting so much data uh so semrush absolutely for me it's not even the trends or the data like i don't really care what they do on their back end 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 uh for the price it's amazing but i'm limited on regions as well so like if i go to here you can see google united states bulgaria united ukraine south africa pretty much it right and again i'm not trying to talk [ __ ] i pay for the tool so it must be good enough up and coming as well serp stack guys yeah they're up and coming but if i go to sem rush and this is the reason i prefer it the 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 home i'll page this yes all right it's putting me to the dashboard oh well so uh where is it so if i type in keyword analytics it should be here overview you 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 you know 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 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 sure so you get to hear me for a bit and i do apologize because even i hate hearing myself all the time nah it's good we need these long answers this is what we're all here for okay so i tested a lot of things with site structure uh when you're a local page a few things to keep in mind one make sure that your home page has the right keywords right uh so it's like neil patel title is like helping you succeed through online marketing i mentioned online marketing there i'm not trying to rank the home page 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 have some keywords in there visitors dollars ads uh then i talked 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 is a local website but this works for localized well uh and i can show you i actually rank locally so neil patel i cleaned my address look at this we got little cookies there some cup of tea is that what we get if we come over yeah yeah i'll get you that seriously niana come over i'll buy you that and look my hour's operation 24 hours a day there's no holidays why did you name it something amazing why did it name what why didn't you name it something else the fun house or something i don't know i actually don't want people to come i was just experimenting and testing out right of course okay cool link to your main sections okay so once you link to your main sections you have improve your knowledge you know uh my blog my podcast a webinar start a website main pages and really importantly right and then you have each subsection this works at the same 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 page sites too link to your most popular pages on all your blog and uh category restaurant pages could be your most popular menu items your food pages like look i link online marketing here you think it's a fluke that i rank for also online marketing on google probably not no i'm number one or number two at neilpatel.com number one quick sprout but uh close enough either way they're both my sites um but you see right and both of them on quick sprout too clicksprout.com blog what do you notice here too look in the sidebar what's that a link to the guides right that's how i optimize my site structure uh and then on really important on localized pages uh make sure you crossing within your menu or within your content your pages and then uh on your contact page i don't do this because 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 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 uh 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 so i don't really consult so i haven't had to deal with this in a long time but here here's some ideas right i'm sure yeah okay testimonials but let's go even further and let's assume these guys don't even have case studies and testimonials right so go sign up for a free uh 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 going to use this as a broad example because it's easy for everyone to see let's say your competition is give me a sec should i use amazon or i'll see you something smaller all right so let's use who else can we use what's a small site i'm running blanks here claim uh let's do marketing comps okay that's a conference that's too small of a niche uh we can do growth marketing accomplish you actually want but you guys don't really do any seo or marketing or anything on that uh blogging and stuff all right growth marketing.com.com yep all right let's try this out so keyword overview right it's loading no data sorry do a real thread r-e-a-l-t-h-r-e-a-d it's a t-shirt company all right much easier are they decent size they don't have to be yeah in the industry yes all right so what you want to do is you how the heck all right let's go to domain overview realthread.com it's pulling it's pulling 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 um let's pick amazon right this one's easy to do and you guys can see so here's how i explain it to clients we should have asked the audience they probably could have given good examples sorry go ahead uh no worries actually we should have 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 costs 19.3 million dollars 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 right and it would show if you're a real threat for example that these keywords would cost roughly 13 000 a month so you can show your boss you're like look they're getting traffic based on the sem rush 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 thirteen thousand dollars so we should be going after them so then i had to sneeze but it's not coming out all right so and then there you go bless you we get like 300 blessings every time that happens it's funny we still feel lucky when they do that yeah you're very blessed right now i really do feel like i'm so happy everyone's here and like learning and stuff like that right um amazing some of the stuff the corners and points that people of the speakers have uncovered and like broken down have been incredible yeah so like when i go to organic keywords i click the wrong thing but this shows me all the keywords that companies like real thread are ranking for and it shows me on sem rush i'm using tool tools ahrefs and sem rush as i mentioned i love both of them um this tells me what the organic traffic is worth so 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 right so they're doing it why aren't we it's worth at least this much here if not more and sem rush uh and 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 that 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 it's probably worth somewhere in the 40 to 50 000 range conservatively why are you factoring that double and triple in there what are you accounting for uh because what i've seen is everything from sem russian ahrefs shows that the traffic is way higher than what they report so if they report that it's seven point one thousand visitors the number is way higher by far and our 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 yeah this is what better way to prove seo uh value to a boss than a case study because everybody comes with case studies you know yeah no one gives a [ __ ] about case studies i just want to know what your boss like cares about why your competition is 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 or moving fast enough yep absolutely okay great answer uh the next one from scott with 35 votes is about website authority or page authority is asking what are the best practices on a low budget to increase website authority ratings sure i actually have a blog post on this and you guys can just go and read it um it pretty much teaches you how to increase your domain authority on a budget i think i published it last week oh perfect it's got that how to boost your domain to 30 by five points in two weeks and it's pretty much teaching you how 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 and it's step by step and long form i'm guessing right yeah like here's a scroll bar right keeps going and going in 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 oh speaking about cora you see the screen just reminding me you guys want to see some cool stuff with cars that i'm doing yeah who wants to see cora stuff all right so we have issues with the quorum moderators uh they hate us but i don't care um why because so what we do is we go answer all the questions within the marketing space and we go take content from our blog post so like let's say how to market yourself on instagram i'm literally taking it verbatim and two answers right instagram is the most recent yada yada in fact like this is literally straight up on 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 right and i'm linking out and i kid you not like my posts get decent uploads see five upvotes and when i started this on quora it's been only like two months i had no real followers on kara uh 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 copied my blog response like here check out this one how can i create strong backings to my websites 220 upvotes 245 uploads 83 71 356. what are some of the interesting psychological marketing tactics right and b2c um 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 hyping up this one was written february 17th look at that i had my guy grant does this for me he's amazing he heads up latin america so um he put forbes top 10 mark marker etc and then just start 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 let's see wonderful insights neil color me stunned dude you are brilliant i think it is 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 straight up where my guys are taking us straight up from the blog and ikg not is a great traffic source for us we put utm variables on it because cora doesn't let you track the links so we started going back into our core post and changing our links have utm variables in google are within course we can track it within google analytics and it started working we did it for 100 posts and we realized it worked so then we just stopped doing it because we got too lazy um 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 13th and every once in a while quarter monitors will give a [ __ ] for copying and pasting our blog post and then they delete them and then we argue and they put it back and then some of the moderators are really nice like oh yeah no problem our mistake that you can keep doing this right so it's like so effective in driving traffic um we're gonna scale this out and we think we i think i can get to like around four or five hundred thousand views per month if not like a million views a month all right amazing so we did the same thing on linkedin just go add everyone some people are asking why doesn't why don't we get penalized for duplicate content it's a quora thing oh no google doesn't penalize for duplicate content duplicate all day long like have fun with it google's never penalized for duplicate content at least i know once i got in trouble or they said they did it but my blog kissmetrics got hurt and they fixed something on their end and then we're good to go gigaom also got her which no longer exists and a few others so uh where's my home i haven't even logged into linkedin in ages i don't even know how to use my profile i mean yeah they updated the interface double or david does this for me so every time a blog post gets published my guys i think david does it david's amazing so um yeah like i share the content i'm like trying to find linkedin i'm sorry guys yeah okay i think it's under me or i'm not too familiar with it either see all activity see 172 more articles oh on linkedin i think david did this today i published this post today i assume this is post where's the writing you can write oh posts there you go come on load yeah i've heard good strategies about how to do this and then like tease them with some of the content and then put like to read more click here and they can drive them to your blog yeah that's what we do i'm trying to find it i know these guys do that because i see it in my uh referral logs and like linkedin went up drastically once i started doing that i do not know where to go uh interests it's somewhere here should be under articles vasil says 172 more articles geez and then click oh there it is wow you see it i don't even know 200 views hundreds of likes oh this is just the uh oh they're saying home icon neil home icon the home icon i don't know oh right there um [Music] i think that's just the stream though yeah i have no idea where it says write an article now 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 or 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 thanks okay ready for the next question yeah let me find it okay it is from etai which i'm guessing is israeli itai says just launched my e-commerce website one of the first things to do for driving traffic and more sales because he just says here's an example there you go i found it i click you see this yeah publish new website look they're taking the first few paragraphs step one click to continue reading yeah exactly nine comments too like you know i'm getting clicks and engagements from it works really well yep all right so what was etai's question e-commerce how to get more e-commerce sales just generally speaking sure so your checkout pages on e-commerce should always be two-step do not do a one-step checkout page um in which uh like ask for a name an email or email password and then on the second page ask for their credit card details uh doing that is a great way to increase uh conversions there's something cool that uh what is it called uh and then when the people that what is that service called you know what i'm talking about 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 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 one signal let's see i'm assuming a lot of people don't use this it's push notifications are you guys familiar with push notifications i'm sure they are yeah i'm getting yes jack knows it all right so push notification for those who don't know push crew is an example of it i know their interface a bit better one signal works better with ecommerce though and what you end up doing you can end up sending a message right so see it in action so you click yes right you see this click me and i'll take you to a relationship this is a push notification okay stop yeah so let's exit out this stuff and one signal is a free version you don't have to pay for it like literally 100 free right and what you can do with e-commerce is everyone who adds stuff to their shopping cart but doesn't continue you can then do a push notification and get them back to your site that helps with sales the other thing i've done is is it signal feed signal uh what is it feed single feed there you go not signal feed single feed.com this is e-commerce uh feeds and what this does is put your products everywhere so you're selling them more than just on 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 because they're putting on other really popular ecommerce sites use it check it out i love it it works really well okay cool uh craig's asking what tools do you use to research writing an epic blog post or how-to guide buzzsumo.com i may type in things like it's loading i may type in something like uh 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 guys the exact process i'll even show you how i promote the content too 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 and simon was the one who asked the e-commerce question right no he was a different guy but still interesting all right so i'll look at online marketing and here's an example how google analysts were in marketing let's say how i write them had an article called how google analytics save marketing seriously and check this out facebook engagement linkedin twitter etc so then i'll go look at their article and i'll just create a way better version so how google analytics were in 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 yep and like techcrunch has great editors and marketers but they're not marketers themselves so you know yeah it's probably short not a lot of step-by-step in it that's correct okay so i'll write an article called how google analytics saved marketing just go look at theirs make it more in-depth and then from there because 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 uh marshall's marsha's name uh raj's name uh sam hurley and you can find a lot of their websites like when they have a website you click on it because then you can find their email from their website right and then once you have their email like i would 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 uh how google analytics ruined marketing by uh so and so uh 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 uh like to check it out cheers kneel that's it people like sam twenty to thirty percent of time will respond back and then you'll email sam and like he and he'll usually respond back with something like sure then you'll email him back with like here's the article cheers neil p.s let me know if i can do anything for you pps if you share this article not only make my day it'll make my decade right and you'll get a ton of shelter shares on your article 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 a huge fan of yours so much so that i even linked out to you my latest blog post called x y and z um feel free to check it out if you like it let me know your number one fan neil p.s if you share this not only make my day it'll make my decade i love it that's great okay and some other people are saying all top and some other areas where you can get good ideas too next one is uh site speed uh ahmed is asking how do i make my website site and uh how do i sorry how do i make my website fast and i mean very fast practical advice yeah so there's google page speed 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 right attempting to load the page reach limit number of three directs less batch uh dismiss it's not redirecting itself i know the paperwork it ranks in google all right so let's do do crowdcast dots dot io or there you go quick sprout even better so it'll tell me what they're ranking the page as and this is really important because what you'll notice is that it'll give you suggestions you fix these suggestions on mobile desktop try to get as good as you can you're not going to be perfect but what i found is it's not about making your website fast because you don't have to have the fastest website i know amazon wrote uh he's 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 your site loads fast enough and you can do um you can use uh page speed test what is that tool called uh not pingdom there you go so you can do kingdom 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 cool i love it there you go i don't know how to fix it you type it into google page speed that tool tells you how to fix it from google's perspective 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 uh difficult yeah um when you're starting off on target keywords target pages so i would go and you can use ahrefs as i showed before right type in your competitors urls and just go look for the pages that do really well so if you type in neil patel and keep an ahrefs as a sample size it'll never show you real traffic that your competitor is getting your competitor will always have more than whatever ahrefs is showing by a magnitude of whatever two three four x right it's somewhere in their ranges a lot per industry but go to top pages and it'll show you the type of uh 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 right or create a page that's similar but can you see how the volume uh it's really off right so this is twelve thousand five hundred and seven my google webmaster tool shows 39 000 and google webmaster tools is lower than google analytics so that should give you 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 a while but the keyword tool i mean um the blog is another page right but it generally shows what's the most popular page gotcha okay awesome uh next question is 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 i have 150 people through all my companies there you go big nash upender there's the answer to your question is that big mesh asking that a few people ask different versions of the same thing so i just paraphrased i'm like our bigness because bigness also works for us i know uh but it was also asked by people that are just in the audience that have no connection upender was asking how do you get so much of this stuff done um yeah i'm a big team so like uh i'm now doing something called meal knowledge or just neil patel 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 him to make sure i like the topics then 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 uh pasquelly pasquale came over and then i kid you not like we shot 16 videos in three hours like i just crank them 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 them to facebook and youtube once we have like a backlog of 30 to 40 videos and then i'll start publishing them 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 that's awesome yeah we just heard eric sue this morning share with us how you guys hold each other accountable and do you know bulk sessions and and keep up with just the massive demand to produce a podcast every day yeah and think about it right i'll even share the cost so pascal will cost me 4 500. um and that's to shoot uh 31 videos a month already paid david but let's say this takes you know two thousand dollars worth of david's time and then me my time it takes three hours of shooting twice a month so that's six hours uh and then to come up with topics that takes me roughly uh two hours of my time because david already does some of the grunt work so for roughly six thousand five hundred dollars and eight hours of my time a month right six hours of filming broken down into uh two sessions and then two hours of topic generation for six thousand five hundred dollars i'm creating 31 videos my cost per video would be 209 dollars that's really affordable this stuff doesn't isn't as expensive as most people think oh cool thanks for sharing that um okay next question is this is a softball but it's got a bunch of upvotes so i'm going to 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 um they have an amazing uh program called amp neil yeah amp isn't too much seo though um it's so funny i don't like selling [ __ ] and i don't even want to sell a p and it makes good money but like i don't care to make the money um maybe you know what i'll do i should just actually uh take those videos organize them and just shoot like 40 50 videos on seo and just make them step by step and order them for everyone and then release it for free if they like that i can do that i don't care don't care for any money or anything and i'll include screen captures and i'll show people how to use the tools and do everything step by step we've got yes from melissa a yes from alex yes from haney basically yes from everyone there all right sounds good i'll do that it'll take me a while to crank it out but i'll release something for free sure sure well we'll be reading i'm sure the audience will be reading your blog well into the future okay um one question that keeps getting asked here it's pretty cool it's had some good results is um uh what experiment are you running right now and what results are you seeing yeah so it's not a seo experiment that's the right it's a b test uh let's log in continue so i use crazy egg tests um you can sign up for crazy.com you won't get the test feature it is a paid product even the free version or the crazy i guess but if you email support and crazyegg.com and you ccneel crazy.com and you ask for access to the test feature to 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 continue to 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 four percent 212 leads uh this one's 279. so i'm testing stuff where i change the copy and what i'll do is like 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 uh any developers or designers or anything like that so i make all my marketing changes or a lot of them through here and i've been doing this more and more um and you can see let's go to 0.2 view only loading the control see this is why people don't have access to it yet because it's only in beta for people like me but it's a wizzy wig 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 like 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 uh i can pick whatever goal i can have more paid views per visit i can have you know more email capture or whatever and i can track all this within clicks of a button without being technical well said it doesn't work right now but you can always sign up and then the support team will give you access and if it doesn't work for you don't make sure it works or refund with money but that's what i used to uh do a lot of my testing and what i found is simple little words and phrases 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 ah to osha i'm sharing everything on my journey to 100 000 monthly visitors some of you guys will see a variation the url is 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 eggs so i just run a ton of tests by tweaking text changes or simple design changes or removing stuff got it okay michael's asking what do you recommend for e-commerce sites that have a bunch of products that are similar uh but different variations should they be trying to come up with original content for each description or any advice there they should try to create templates that's what we usually do for e-commerce sites and these templates you can just plug and play words or phrases or content areas etc and then you optimize for uh the best template and that's what we find that works really well for e-commerce okay what do you say is the most important seo factor for non-article-based sites uh most important seo factor for non-article based sites is click-through rate and uh 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 e-commerce or video showing the products for e-commerce uh or if it's a lead gen site you know maybe create quizzes or funnels where people go down them 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 um how many people are searching for your keywords and clicking through are they logged into gmail which you can't control but i bet you those are factors that google's using and did you know the user metrics and click-through rates they have to be using awesome okay um let's see tony's asking how important are categories on a blog 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 make them simpler i also added blog categories as you can see the url here blog slash category seo now this category should say at the top i'm kind of lazy but i'll have one like i should say category seo what is seo and it should give a just general description of what seo is cool uh in your presentation in the demystifying seo you talked about going back and deleting some old uh posts that were over six months or over a year why did you do that um and do you think it helps or do you think you can just leave it there and it will also grow it didn't help so what i did is i actually like uh unpublished them in wordpress so then they disappeared and people couldn't see them and then when i realized after a few months i didn't do anything then i put it back okay got it so there's the answer we are out of time um that's all the question time that we have for questions today um 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 the winner of an seo consultation i am i actually would love to help someone out all right cool uh let's do it so listen i'm going to just uh click off of here turn my camera on again and maybe we can uh just get a final word from you thanks so much for being with us today you've been a huge help uh 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 asking 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 chat room on there i have to figure out a software to do it and it'll just be free where people can go and we chat and we just help each other out and i'll be in there on a daily basis so i'm 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 uh wi-fi but i really do appreciate everyone for coming if i can my team or anyone can help you guys out with anything just hit up support me on patel.com and i really do want to 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 the email thank you very much absolutely neil thanks brother see you another time soon and i'll say goodbye to you now um for everybody that's still on the phone call listen we have got a special session coming up right uh when i go off the air here we're going to put everybody inside of the raffle section so what we're going to do is uh we're going to call out the winners for neil's insider club and that's coming up uh in a couple of minutes hang on one second let me just make sure that neil's gone here for so for everybody uh 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 101 you can talk about seo you can talk about growth marketing you can talk about different things um but whatever it is he's going to do it for you i've heard that people go out of these sessions and triple uh 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 um and some uh exciting prizes for you there the seal is gonna join with me um in a couple of minutes just a few short minutes along with joe uh who owns the uh the 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 a virtual hat and we're going to announce those winners so kevin mark simon uh brenemier wes rebecca all of these guys that have been in a lot of the chats thanks so much for staying here let's see if you guys win in uh the raffle contest that's coming 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