Low Hanging Fruit - SEO Tactics That Easy And Effective | Ep. #759

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

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about low-hanging fruit, SEO tactics that are effective. So, here's one that I've been talking about time and time again, especially in the last 12 months or so. It is making the most of what you have already. So, what do I mean by that? Think about it this way. When it comes to customer acquisition, you look at credit card companies and you look at cable companies, they're always focused on giving new deals. 50,000 free points here or, you know, 6 months of free cable or whatever. Sounds like good deals, right? And I've been with these cable companies or whatever, credit card companies for years and years and years. And then you call them and it's like, they aren't willing to give the deal to you because it's only for new customers, right? So, it costs 6 to 7 times more to try to aim for a brand new customer versus just trying to retain someone. But yet, everybody goes for trying to acquire new customers all the time. But instead of thinking in that way, Why don't you think about how you can apply that to marketing as well? And you do that for the posts that you have and you upgrade a lot of the stuff that you have. What you find is that one post that we had, for example, we updated it, added like another paragraph of content to it. It went from 700 visits a month to 2,800 visits a month. Did the same thing again, jumped to 5,400. Did the same thing again. Now it's at 10,000 visits a month.

Another easy tactic is to just adjust your URL string. So we used to have really long URL strings with dates. Once we removed the dates in there, even though our content wasn't related to a specific date, it was evergreen content, Google associated our content with the date in our URL. So by removing the dates and making our URLs more generic versus specific, like when you have a very long URL such as 7-seo-hacks-that'll-improve-your-local-rankings. So 7 SEO hacks that'll improve your local rankings. So let's say that's all in your URL string plus your domain name. When you have a long URL like that, Google thinks the article's around that very specific topic, not just SEO hacks, but SEO hacks that'll improve your local rankings. That's such a long phrase that less people are going to type it in. That doesn't mean you won't rank for head terms, it's just harder. So when you take your URLs, contract them, make them shorter, and you remove the dates, what you find is your traffic goes through the roof. So when I did that, I got a 40+% increase in search traffic in 30 days. And it's not just about changing URLs. You got to 301 redirect the old ones to the new ones, and you got to make sure all the internal links are changed to the new URLs as well.

Wonderful. Neil, have you— you've deleted your content before, right?

I've deleted my content. Had bad experience with it. I've done it many times. Everyone says when you cut and prune your content, you're going to get more traffic. The websites that I've seen that have gotten a huge increase from that have really shit content. So if you have mediocre content and you cut and prune, what I've found is your search traffic typically goes down versus going up.

Interesting. And just for everyone to have context, I mean, the type of content Neil has on both Quick Sprout and neilpatel.com, it's long form. It's all high quality stuff. And it's, sometimes you have to pay a good buck to writers for that stuff. So seems to make sense. And then I think we, so we have done it in the past. I think we did it for, we did it for a client and then traffic jumped up about 20% or so. So it's not like a 3x jump that you might see from like, The Pat Flints of the world.

Yeah. And a lot of these people have like 200-300 word blog posts that just suck. And when you start removing them and they're getting no traffic, it works really well. But if that's not the case, then you're going to lose traffic. Typically the way I like to look at things when I cut and prune, I look for every single URL a website has, how many keywords are on that URL, what are the main keywords it's trying to rank for, and how many visits that post is getting, as well as how many backlinks it also has. When a page has very little traffic, no backlinks, very little text, you know, and it's irrelevant, that's when you can either update it and expand it or you can delete it. I found that the best time to delete is when you have multiple pages competing for the same exact term and the content's very similar. By combining those and pruning those, that helps increase traffic because then Google's not confused on which page to rank. But when you have similar content, but it's not exactly the same and the keywords are kind of different, just removing them just because you want to make your blog even cleaner, usually going to decrease your traffic.

Right. And so the other thing I have, this is the final thing from my side, is speeding up your site. So we talk about page speed a lot on this podcast. So going to a site like GTmetrix, so that's the letter G, the letter T, metrics with an X instead of a CS. So gtmetrix.com, you can see how fast your site is. And then you can see a bunch of elements that are taking up a lot of Loading, taking up a lot of bandwidth. Right. And so what happens is what we found, we did this recently, is that we had a lot of stuff bloated and loaded up in Google Tag Manager. And we found that we weren't using a lot of the tags in there. So we just ended up pausing a bunch and our speed jumped up from like, I think it was like a C- to like a, I think it's like a B+ now, or maybe a B- now. But page speed does matter, does a body good. It's good for your user experience as well.

Yeah, and the last thing I'll mention on my end is the best SEO hack, and this is going to be the future of SEO, is building a brand. And it's not really a hack, that's probably a bad way to say it, but it's the most long-term tactic. So whatever you're doing with your SEO, put the user first. Don't just think about Google because that's what's going to build you a brand. You don't buy shoes by just Googling. Yes, I know a lot of you do, but when you're thinking about shoes, most of you think about Nikes because Nike has a well-known brand. When you think about cars, you may have a specific one in mind like Mercedes or Tesla or whatever it may be. because you see their messaging and branding everywhere. Same with credit cards, you think about Visa, American Express, MasterCard. So building a brand is really important because not everyone Googles for everything. And when you build a brand through your SEO by putting the users first, people will keep coming back, they'll recognize your brand, it'll build trust, and it'll increase your sales and conversions.

All right, so that is it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to get marketing goodies to grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow.