A Response: Neil's Response to Critics On His New SEO Strategy | Ep. #714

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about, well, Neil's going to give a response to some of the critics that he's had around his SEO strategy. So, before I even go into that, Neil, maybe we should talk about the SEO strategy first and then I can talk about the story and then you can respond to it.

Okay. So, first off, I don't know what you're talking about.

So, SEO strategy is how you're going to build software and you're going to build mindshare.

I'm just making sure because I'm like running quite a few strategies at the same time and I don't know which one. So speaking of the tool, I had this concept in which there's a lot of marketing tools out there, Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, there's KW Finder, there's BuzzSumo. And I'm like, most of these tools have tons of features that no one uses. I don't even think people use more than 80% or 20% of their features. Yes, there's some power users that use them all, but majority don't. And they cost a ton of money when technology these days, because a lot of these tools were built 6, 7, 10 years ago, much cheaper these days to build them. I'm like, why doesn't someone just build a more usable version and just give it away for free?

Yeah. So I was browsing through SoundCloud trying to look for like another, another, I don't know, another DJ to listen to because I was working. So, well, I actually am subscribed to this one internet marketing podcast. Um, and what happened was one of the, one of the marketing directors, Tim Soulo from Ahrefs, um, who Neil and I actually, I mean, we, we, we talk about Ahrefs all the time. Yeah, nice guy. Nice guy. Um, he actually hopped on the podcast and 2 of the guys were just kind of critiquing, uh, Neil's strategy around, you know, buying all these, uh, or building or buying other software and then kind of giving it away for free. So Tim came on and what his, what he said was, he's like, you know, I don't think Neil's going to be able to come up with, you know, the backlink history that we have, all this other data that we've had over the years. I don't think he realizes how hard it's going to be to actually do it. And the other guys were like, yeah, I'm not sure kind of what Neil is thinking. So maybe you can address that.

Sure. Was that the only question?

That was kind of the main gist of what I got.

Cool. I didn't listen to it, so I don't know, but it's probably amazing podcasts, you know, whatever they're discussing. So there's a few things. One, when it comes to history, most people don't do anything with the history. I'm not saying history is not good. I'm just saying most people don't do anything with the history because I already surveyed hundreds of people within the marketing space. And again, maybe my audience is different than theirs. I don't believe it is, but again, it could be. So I look at a lot of this stuff and it's like nice to have, but it's not needed. And I'm not saying everyone's going to cancel Ahrefs or SEMrush or stop paying them. I'm just saying that if I give away most of the stuff that people are using and give it away for free, then People will probably just use my free solution.

Yeah. So I'm just reading the bullet points here. So it says like, what you will learn, everything about Neil Patel's plan to make all SEO data free, what a seasoned SEO SaaS thinks about the situation, and what this means for authority site owners and how tool companies might react. How do you think tool companies, how have tool companies reacted to your strategy after putting that bold post up there?

I have no idea because I don't talk to any of them.

Oh, okay. Well—

And like my blog post that's coming out tomorrow, I talk about Ahrefs and SEMrush. It's not like I hate them. It's just like, I look at it as like, ah, I can take all this stuff, release it for free. I don't do jack shit with my money. So what else is there to do?

I got some bullet points here for you. So look, so we talked about that, you know, Neil underestimates the server costs and infrastructure needed to grow such a tool. Actually, I don't think we addressed that. No.

I've created so many analytics companies and I've spent so much money on servers, not like thousands. I'm talking about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands per month. I know how to optimize for that.

And then the third bullet point here is Neil probably has a hidden plan to release a paid version of this tool. True or false?

That's a funny version. A lot of people ask me that. I do not want to release Ahrefs, SEMrush, and all their paid features or their features and charge for them. I want to release all their features and make it free. Now, one day I may come up with some really advanced SEO stuff and do some machine learning and some AI. I may one day charge for that kind of stuff. I don't want to charge for information like they're charging for. So they charge for backlink data, traffic data, basic data on like, here's how many errors you have on your site. And they charge for crawling and all this kind of stuff. I don't want to charge for any of that. That should all be for free.

4th and final point here. Actually, there's probably more. I'll look at it while you answer, but the version release will probably be much less ambitious than the paid tool. So how much less ambitious do you think your tool is going to be?

Sure. So the first version will not have any link data. So the first version will have things like domain authority, page authority. It'll have total backlink count. It will not have data like this page has 112 links and you can see each link. So we will not have, we will not have the ability for you to drill down into links. As for you putting in a URL and seeing data on, Hey, here are all the keywords that this page ranks for or the site ranks for in every single country, we will have that. If you want traffic estimation, we will have that based off of organic rankings and paid rankings. If you want to type in a keyword and see, hey, here are all the suggestions from Google as well as Google suggests, we have that. Not only do we show you the suggestions, but we'll also show you when you click on each keyword who ranks for that keyword in the top 10, kind of like KW Finder does. You can see social sharing data, you can see, all right, this, this Or this URL would be hard to beat. This one would be easy to beat. The other thing we want to add in the, or we will have in the first version, is BuzzSumo type of reporting. So you can put in a keyword, it'll show you all the blog posts that rank for that keyword, and it'll show you their social shares as well as estimated traffic that they're getting from Google. And it'll even show you all the keywords that that article ranks for, which I believe BuzzSumo does not show you for, correct?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I haven't used BuzzSumo in like 2 months, but they could have changed some of their features. You'll also have the basic stuff like seeing your competition, who they are, your domain authority versus theirs, your traffic versus theirs. So like all the basic stuff that I think that most people see, top pages, top keywords, the rankings for all these keywords and pages.

Yeah, so final question from over here. I'm going to— there's more, but we're running out of time here. So if no login is required, actually, I think Neil, you're kind of hitting this right now, but if no login is required for your tools, someone will build straight scrapers and destroy Neil's server costs.

Not really. My server costs don't drastically go up for someone to hit my server 1,000 times or 1 million times. The most expensive part is crawling, gathering the data, analyzing it all, caching it so that way people can load it up in seconds. Of course, if someone keeps wanting to scrape all the data, like, yeah, they could. It doesn't really hurt me because my stuff is already free. You would have to enter in every single keyword and URL in there. And of course, if we feel that it's using— ruining the user experience for other people, we would probably put a CAPTCHA on there after like 10 times or whatever the number is. So after a while, they're going to have to start entering CAPTCHAs if they're just trying to scrape.

There you go. So that is it for the questions. But here's the thing, like, You know, if we're going to put stuff out there, some, some claims may be bold. Some people, some claims might not jive with people. Go ahead and do these podcasts. I mean, we love, we love addressing these. It gives us more content to put out anyway, and it also holds us accountable. So we love this. I mean, if you guys have more thoughts around NIO strategy, I mean, we're more than happy to respond to some of these comments. And, you know, I think it's good commentary for everyone and everyone gets to learn. So that is it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out the marketing goodies that will grow your business. And we'll see you tomorrow.