The 27 Most Important Lessons We've Learned About SEO

Today we're gonna talk about 27 of the most important things that we've learned around SEO. So before we talk about it, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, no matter what platform you're on, it helps us go a long way. Around SEO, some of the key things I've learned are, it takes a long time, it's getting more and more competitive, 'cause there's over 4 million blog posts being produced every single day. Google's changing a lot too, there's voice search, a lot of AI, and just a lot of, there's a lot of flux, right? And then paid ads, they're basically pushing down the results too. So there's a lot to deal with as an SEO. Because people think it's getting tougher and tougher, people are shying away from it. And I think the ones that truly embrace it, take advantage of it, those people are going to go a long way. Because if you combine SEO with the other marketing channels, you are going to be able to decrease your customer acquisition costs, drive more organic traffic. You're going to have an advantage over your competitors because they decided not to invest in SEO and they decided to invest perhaps too much into paid media. So my team has gone out and found the best clips around SEO that are going to help you for the long term. Without further ado, let's go ahead and check it out.

The one thing that you need to do before you start doing SEO is look up your competitors in either Ahrefs or SEMrush. You can pick whatever tool you want. The reason you want to look them up is they'll show you all the most popular pages that they're getting their search traffic from, the terms that those pages rank for, the positions, how much it would cost if they had to buy those keywords from a cost-per-click standpoint, and the total traffic value that those pages are getting. This will all help you determine what you should be targeting first. Because if you're going after random keyword ideas and pages that your competitors aren't necessarily getting traffic for, but you know your competitors are making a lot of money because they may be on things like the Growth Everywhere podcast revealing their numbers, Yeah. you won't know if you're going to be doing well. Just because you get traffic doesn't mean it's going to help you generate revenue. So looking to see what pages your competitors are generating the most of their search traffic for and the value of that traffic, that'll help you get a kickstart in which when you start creating content, you start focusing on your SEO efforts. You know what to focus on first because you know your competition's making money.

It's free. It's cool. If you're an SEO, it's Google Search Console. So let's take a look at my screen right here. So with Google Search Console, there's a lot of different options. It can show me issues I have with my index or crawl issues perhaps, and also looking at the search analytics section, which shows me how certain pages are doing, how I'm ranking for certain keywords. And it can also show me the sitemap that I have. Are there any issues with my sitemap? It's just easy, right? It's very complementary to Google Analytics if you have Google Analytics, and I'm assuming most of you do. That way you're able to look across the board how you're doing on the analytics front and also from a search perspective too. And the cool thing is you can actually sync those 2 together and you can get more benefit when you have GA and Google Search Console connected together. Neil, I'm so curious, what are you going to expect from SEO in the first 30 days?

Yeah, so with SEO in the first 30 days, it depends. If you're doing it yourself and you're making a change every single day, even if it's a small change like changing a title tag or cross-linking or whatnot, in your Google Search Console, you should see an uptick in impressions. This is if you're doing SEO on a brand new site and you've never done it before. You shouldn't see a ton of rankings increases. You shouldn't see a ton of traffic from Google, but you should start seeing your impressions go up within the first 30 days, assuming on day 1 you're making on-page changes yourself. If you're using an agency, I bet you in the first 30 days, they're going to do a lot of planning and brainstorming and laying out the framework and the foundation. You won't see much. In the second 30, or technically within 60 or 90 days, you'll start seeing some stuff. But in general, if you hire an agency, you won't see anything in the first 30 days. If you're doing it yourself, which I bet most of you are, you'll start seeing your impression counts go up.

How do you analyze a client's website to see what they are doing wrong? There are a couple of tools that you can use out there to see what's going on with your website. The first one I like is Ahrefs. You can also use SEMrush as well. Those are going to show you kind of what's going on from a linking perspective on your website, what kind of keywords that you're ranking for. You can also look at your competitors as well. Look at what they're ranking for too. You can also use a tool called SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb is going to show you the different types of referral traffic going to that website. It's going to show you also, it's going to show you the type of ads that they're running as well, the type of keywords that they're bidding on as well, the type of apps that they have, that website has, and you can see all the competitors around that. You can also use BuiltWith. BuiltWith is going to show you what kind of technology a website has and at the same time, if you're looking at a client's website, Take a look at their Google Analytics, look at the traffic trends over time. And I usually like to cross-reference that. If this is around SEO, I wanna look at all the algorithm updates. And there are a ton of kind of algorithm calendars over time that show you what happened. And I like to kind of annotate what's going on. So you're kind of triaging what's going on. And also, just staying on the topic of SEO, if you're gonna use a crawling tool, you can use Screaming Frog SEO Spider. That's gonna crawl your entire website, show you what the site structure looks like, where the broken links are, even your internal linking structure as well. That's gonna be helpful. And you can also use Google Search Console. Google Search Console is free. It's a helpful tool. It's going to show you pages that you need to optimize. Also groups of pages you can optimize to help you grow your business. When I first started doing SEO, um, I was so intrigued by it, right? It's just like this puzzle and I wanted to do everything. I wanted to do the white hat stuff. I wanted to do the black hat stuff. I wanted to try everything. And at the time I was really, and you know, I guess I still am into electronic music. And, um, so I made this site, uh, cause I really like, you know, when you go to these festivals, you get to see like these light shows, right? So, I made a site called lightshowvideos.com and I was like, okay, this is going to be great, whatever. I was like stealing, like, you know, I was— I wasn't stealing. I was embedding all these light show videos from YouTube everywhere. And I would write like an article about it. And lo and behold, within a month or so, I was ranking number 1 for light show videos. Okay. Now here's the lesson. Here's what I learned. I spent 2 months on it, right? My first foray into SEO. Got the number 1 ranking. But you know what? It doesn't matter if you rank number 1 if it doesn't get any volume, right? So the first thing that you need to understand is the concept of the skyscraper content, which is developed from our friend Brian Dean, who's well known in the world of SEO. We're looking at one of his blog posts right here, and it talks about how he increased his search traffic by 110% in 14 days. And you can see the skyscraper content. What he means by that is basically looking at the number 1 or number 2 piece of content out there and then figuring out how you can outdo it by 10x or 20x, right? So, this entire case study right here, he basically pioneered this term. And here's another tactic you can use. When you come up with the term skyscraper content and people start looking for it, that almost becomes its own brand in itself. So, that's what Brian Dean did a good job with.

So, if you're doing major changes constantly, like a redesign, optimizing for mobile speed or site speed, whatever it may be, what you'll find is when people are continually changing your site, whether it's design or speed or releasing new features or pages, In many cases, it'll mess up your SEO. And if you're continually running new changes every month, then you should double-check your on-page SEO every month. Doesn't mean you need to adjust it. You just need to double-check it to make sure people didn't undo stuff.

There's 2 things that matter most when it comes to Google. It's content and it's links. Don't forget about links. If you've really created a good piece of content, the idea is if you make a skyscraper piece of content, you— it's really easy for you to request to other people. And say, hey, what do you think about this? So obviously you're not just going to go request them all the time. Hey, come link to my stuff. Come link to my stuff. Ideally, if you can build a relationship, even better. 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, uh, 6 months of free cable or whatever. It 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 up to 5,400. Did the same thing again. Now it's at 10,000 visits a month. So Grammarly helps you check mistakes and avoid plagiarism. I actually had the Grammarly, one of the co-founders on the Growth Everywhere podcast recently, and they are doing really well. I mean, they've raised over $100 million and this is a couple of years deep into the business. So they're doing really, really well. So check out Grammarly. It's going to help you write more SEO-friendly content. It's going to make people happier. And if people are happier, then they're— well, they're going to— they're going to convert and then they're going to buy stuff from you and then you're going to make a lot of money and then you're going to be happy yourself. Everybody's happy. To this day, this is a formula that we continue to follow. Again, this is the content reusage framework from Aleyda Solis. And I love it because it's so— it's so foolproof. What you do is you create a piece of content and, you know, if it can be expanded, you go out and expand it. If it's outdated, go ahead and update it. If you can reformat it, from a blog post to a video to a webinar, for example, you can go ahead and do that, right? It's just so like when you have a process like that, every single person can follow it. I mean, if someone gets sick, God forbid, well, somebody else can just step up and do it. And that's— it's a process that scales really well. And it's something that, you know, I think ever since the beginning of this podcast, it's been 2 years, I've been talking about it. And I still don't think a lot of people are into that because people all the time, right now, when we talk about SEO, for example, it's like, Oh, more links, more links, more links, or content, more content, more content, more content. But what about making the most of what you have already? Because look, the example that you can use here is that it's 6 to 7 times more expensive to try to acquire a new customer all the time. But what about retaining your customer? A lot of people forget about that. And you can apply that same concept to what you do around not even just SEO or content, but around marketing in general. People think content marketing is a really short-term thing. They think it's maybe they do it for 6 months and they stop doing it. The reality is when you, when it comes to content marketing, We're talking it's a 12 to 18 month journey to even start to see results. So consistency is really important. Whether you're publishing once a week, once every day, whatever it is exactly, you have to make sure you're consistent. The consistent ones are the ones that succeed in the long term. It's not even just around content marketing, it's around business as well.

International expansion. Eric knows I've been doing this for many years. It's probably one of the largest sources of my traffic. I'm not relying on US traffic anymore. I get so many visitors from India, Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Japan. It's just adding up really fast because I'm just going really heavy into being global. And it's the reason it's my favorite SEO strategy is because there's no competition outside of English. Seriously, you can rank for auto insurance in Germany really easily or in France or any other country out there. It only is really competitive in the English market.

Have influencers in your content. And even if you're doing on your site as well, when you interview like 25 people, you know, 25 experts reveal tips on hiring, for example, you have influencers in there, they're going to help you share your content. And these influencers, they have, let's say, 10,000, 20,000, 100,000, 1 million followers or so. It's going to help you exponentially get more traffic and more awareness to kind of what you're doing around your content.

So with SEOs, most people believe that if their resume is good, and they have a college degree and they've done SEO for other companies, they're good. That's the worst way to hire an SEO. Just because someone's been put on a project or a big brand or any website and they say they got these sites rankings, it doesn't really mean that they did. A lot of times it naturally happens or they worked with other people who may have done the majority of the work. The real way to hire SEO is to show someone your website, ask them what changes to make, and ask them, hey, can you implement the changes? If they can implement the changes, they can do everything and not just tell you like, oh, your content's off, it doesn't do X, Y, and Z. I'm like, no, be specific. Your title tag's off. Well, how would you change it? Oh, add in more keywords. No, what would the new title tag be exactly? Letter for letter or number for number, because you can put numbers in your title tag. Once they start giving you specifics and you believe that, hey, this makes sense, logical and it, you know, it goes along with everything else that you're reading online with best practices, then by all means, give them a chance. What I like doing is why not test them out and try them out for a week or a month before you hire them full-time. And that way, you know that they're proven versus those SEOs out there because most of them, whoever you talk to, I guarantee you on the first page or you're going to be at the top spot, I'm really amazing at this. Not really. Where's your own website? Have you ever ranked anything? Show me your own Google Analytics.

We're looking at my screen right now and you can see Neil's face in the favicon right here. This is Neil Patel's Ubersuggest. It used to be Ubersuggest, but he decided that he just wanted to buy it, so he bought it. And if we look at Ubersuggest, what we can do is we can just type in— let's say I want to rank for online marketing, for example. Let's type in online marketing. Let's take a look at it. And here it is, online marketing. 995 keyword ideas found for online marketing. Ad agencies, ad agency, ads, internet marketing, advertising campaign. Da da da da da da da. It's all here. Okay. It's free to use. He bought it. Thank him for buying it. Thank him for making it free. So you can actually export it to CSV as well. God bless.

Conversion rate optimization. Everyone is saying that SEO is becoming harder. Everyone's saying that paid ads is becoming more expensive. So what does everyone do? Most people are saying, hey, it's not even worth going after these channels. But what the smart people are doing is focusing on CRO. See, if 100 people came to your website and one of them converted into a customer, you now have your numbers on, hey, this is how much you can spend on marketing based on your profit margins. But if you focus on CRO and you can get that number to be 2 or 3 out of every 100 visitors turns into a customer, now you can spend more on paid ads, you can spend more on SEO, you can spend more on link building. You don't want to buy links, but nonetheless, you can do manual outreach, content marketing, stuff like that. It's the one thing in marketing that isn't popular, but it's one of the most effective strategies that people are too lazy to use or leverage.

If we look at the hub and spoke content strategy, here's how it works. You have a main piece of content, so you have a landing page, for example, people land on it. Let's say it's the beginner's guide to online marketing, and then you have a bunch of other chapters that are tied to it and they're interlinking to each other. So you can see that right here. Basically, we have the main page and then everything's kind of linking to other pages and those pages are internally linking to each other. That way it's— everything's building on itself. It's good for SEO. When you internal link to each other, you're giving signals to the search engines and it's also a good user experience as well. So if we come back to the post right here on the beginner's guide to online marketing, this is also a hub and spoke piece because he links to different chapters. So you see he's linking to chapter 5, Chapter 6, chapter 7 as well. And then those are all linking to each other and they're linking to the main page. So that's a hub and spoke model. It's good for when you look at Googling things like conversion rate optimization as well, other, other types of content. The hub and spoke model really helps.

7 SEO hacks that'll improve your local rankings. 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 articles 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 You're changed to the new URLs as well.

A lot of the web has a ton of graphics out there. Go find infographic designers, pay them a couple hundred bucks, and then what you do is you add an embed code for your infographic and then you reach out to people and then have them link to it. That's the easiest way of going about it. In fact, that's how Kissmetrics, which is one of Neil's companies that he co-founded, that's how they built a ton of links, made millions of dollars in sales, and they actually have their infographic section that's Most of you guys, when you want to find keywords, you'll use tools like SEMrush, Ubersuggest, type in a keyword and then it gives you more suggestions.

What Google Correlate does is you can put a keyword like beard oils and it'll show you, like if you put -2, it'll show you what people typed in 2 weeks before they typed in beard oil. So you can figure out, hey, here are all the keywords people are typing in before they're becoming customers. Go after them. You can build some brand affinity with that audience and then generate more sales that way. Or you can do— use the word to, like 2 weeks. So there's numbers in there. Whatever keyword you type in, like beard oils, you would adjust it by either a negative number or positive number. So if you just put the number like 2, it'll show what do people type in after 2 weeks after they type in beard oil. And it may be terms like beard balm. And if they type in that, you're like, oh cool, I should rank for this keyword, create this product and offer it as an upsell. So it's a simple SEO strategy that gives you more keyword ideas using a free tool.

I really like BuzzSumo because you have the ability to see, let's say I'm writing a post on content marketing. If I just type in content marketing right here, I can find the best content marketing posts and I can decide if I want to emulate them, if I want to reach out to people that have shared similar content, people that have tweeted it. You can see all of it here. You can see right here total shares for certain pieces of content. It's all here.

In our days, when we have questions, we would have just Googled it. But now people are just asking things like Alexa what the answers are. And because of that, SEO is going to change into more and more voice search. And when it changes into voice search, what you'll see is like you have rich snippets and Google taking your data. It's going to get even worse in which they're going to just take your data and show it through a microphone or a speaker. And you're not going to get anyone coming to your website because of that.

Amazon Polly is basically something that Amazon came out with that allows them to transcribe the text that you have already on your blog or any kind of text that you have. And you can use an API and then basically you will have a little play button at the top of your blog post and people can just hit play. So after we installed this, literally the only thing that we did was we installed it. We found, you know, we Googled Amazon Polly WordPress plugin. And then after that, basically our dwell time on our site, so the amount of time that people stayed on our site increased by 20% on average. So by doing that, when you can do that across the board, and we have hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, when you're able to do that across the board and get that lift, well, you have people that are staying much longer on your website, but it's also helpful for your SEO because dwell time is a factor. So, okay, I learned a lesson from light show videos. Okay, so you gotta have some volume. And then I was like, okay, you know what? Problem for people? Pimples. How do you get rid of pimples? So I made a website, exact match domain, something around like similar to that phrase. So something around getting rid of pimples, right? And I hired a bunch of writers from TextBrokers. Okay, so I was paying like $50 an article because, you know, I was still learning this stuff. I didn't have a lot of money and they would write like these 500, 300 to 500 word articles, right? And then I said, okay, let's get like, you know, like, like 10 or 20 of these articles up. And then I even had someone design it too. I went to like, like some version of Fiverr where I paid for the designs. It just looked like a site that was from the 1990s. And, you know, the traffic was slowly going up. And then what I found was the traffic slowly went up, but then it, it, it just stayed there. It stayed stagnant. And it's like, why? What I learned from that was you get what you pay for. Okay. So, you know, this is why, like, we talk about high quality, not just long form for the sake of long form, but long form, high quality content that really stands When you're able to do that, you're able to create like a linkable asset. And then that is a reason for people to link to you. That's a reason for people to look at— look up to you as an authority. But when you're paying $50 for one article and it's basic, it's written by someone from like, you know, out of the country, why should you rank for anything? And Google is smart enough to know that you don't deserve to. So that site didn't do well at all. So what I learned from that was that you got to have— you get what you pay for. That's the lesson I learned. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once said that the internet is a cesspool, right? It's really the brands that are gonna rise to the top. If you think about it, if you're a brand like Amazon, if you're a brand like IKEA, if you're a brand like Coca-Cola, a lot of people are already gonna know who you are, they're gonna be searching for your brand all the time, so Google has that data already, and also these brands, they're already getting a lot of links going to their site already, so the 2 things that matter the most when it comes to Google, right, content and links. So if you can take care of the brand portion, you're going to get the links, right? You just got to take care of the content portion. A lot, a lot of things become much easier once you become a brand in the eyes of Google.

SEO still works, but not as well as it used to in 2010. Yes, there's more traffic now, but it's much harder. For that reason, you need an omnichannel approach because most of these channels are saturated and it's the only way to build up a brand because one channel is not going to drive enough Demand and presence for you.

All right, I hope you enjoyed that epic video. Let us know what you think in the comments no matter what platform you're on, and don't forget to check out the next clip, and we will see you tomorrow.