Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss buying existing websites to capture Google traffic and rankings instead of building SEO from scratch or paying for ads. They cover pricing, ROI versus PPC, and how to vet sites using Ahrefs, with examples like GrooveHQ and Ubersuggest.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today, we're going to talk about how you can rank at the top of Google without SEO or without paid advertising. Neil?
So Eric did this first. I jacked the strategy and then I went crazy and now I do it a lot.
As he always does. I mean, go crazy, not jack stuff.
Sometimes I jack people's strategies too, I'll be honest. What do they say?
Good marketers No, no, great artists—
No, good marketers create, great marketers steal?
No, no, great artists steal.
No, but they say that with marketers.
Oh, I don't know, it's a Picasso thing. I don't know about marketers.
Yeah, someone ended up changing it online. Nonetheless, I don't always come up with my own marketing tactics. Some of them I jack from other people and I even cite them too, like this one, right? I took it from Eric. I took my email opt-in method one time from, I forgot what the startup was called, but I noted them in a blog post.
GrooveHQ.
There you go, GrooveHQ, and I even linked to them in a blog post. So the strategy Eric once used, he was in the retirement elderly care community and you weren't ranking. You were a brand new website. You didn't want to spend any money on pay-per-click.
True.
And where were you ranking?
We were ranking. So for the keyword, let's just reveal it. The keyword senior living, we're not ranking at all. And then what we did was we looked at the top 2 pages or so and we saw a site that was ranking Hovering between number 3 and number 5 for the keyword senior living. And we clicked on it, looked like a garbage website, looked like nobody cared about it. So we just reached out to the person.
And how much did you buy that site for?
We bought it for, I want to say, I think we bought it for $10,000.
And if you had to do pay-per-click for that term, what would it have cost you?
That keyword alone, I think is $20, I want to say $20 to $25 a click.
So you would have probably spent more than 10 grand in a month.
Exactly.
So the numbers ended up panning out. Now, I took his strategy and I took it to the extreme because I was like, wait, when I looked at how much I'm spending on content marketing and SEO, because you still have to hire people to help you out, you know, from editing to doing manual outreach to getting the manual social shares, because SEO looks at more than just, hey, how many backlinks do you have and how clean is your code? What I ended up doing was I took Eric's strategy, find all the blogs in my space that aren't generating any revenue, buy them, and then merge them in. I didn't do it for specific key terms that I wanted to rank for. I just did it because they already had the traffic, whether it's from social or whether it's from search. It's a much cheaper approach than it is to buy a site, you know, or than it is to do your SEO or spend money on pay-per-click. Now, we're not saying you shouldn't do SEO. We're not saying you shouldn't do pay-per-click, but it's a cheat code. It's quicker, and the ROI on this is extremely high. The problem is not everyone's going to sell or not everyone wants to— is asking for a reasonable price. Like I tried buying Search Engine Watch. They ignored me. They make jack shit in revenue and they probably think their site's worth a bit too much.
Yeah. I mean, look at it as real estate. I think when you're looking at buying property and sometimes, look, you're going to look to buy distressed property where people that maybe they need the money, they don't care about the business anymore. So really, I mean, you can look at this from a mergers and acquisitions mindset where you're just out there looking to do deals with people. Eventually, you stumble across one and people are willing to let it go. Everybody eventually has a number at the end of the day. Like, I didn't think Neil would be able to get Ubersuggest and he got it, got the deal done. He bought some other blogs recently too. I think we talked about it on a previous podcast. But just staying diligent with this, I think eventually once you start to see success, once you get to a certain scale, you might look at acquiring other businesses and other websites. Just make sure you do the due diligence on the site too just to see You can use a tool like Ahrefs, for example, to see how much their monthly traffic is worth. And then you can build off of that. Neil, do you have anything else to add?
Yeah. So if you're going to do this, I don't recommend doing it for one specific keyword. If a site's ranking for one keyword only, and that's what you're banking on, you can always lose the ranking too over time because you're buying a site, you're redirecting it, or you're combining it, or you're leaving it alone. What we found is the best approach is just to buy a site that has well-diversified traffic. You know, mix from SEO, social media, direct email, et cetera. And you can either merge it in or keep it separate. You want to maintain it, keep growing it. And again, don't purely buy it for its Google rankings. Don't buy it for its links. It's a quick way to lose your money if something wrong happens, but just buy it for its overall traffic portfolio and knowing that you can monetize it better than what they can.
Great. So that's it for today. Go check out our marketing tool goodies to grow your business. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.
