Eric Siu and Neil Patel argue SEOs waste time on backlinks and technical fixes when users only care if a page solves their problem. They shifted from obsessing over link juice to focusing on content and design that match what searchers actually need, a customer-first approach they say drives both rankings and growth.
Today, we're going to talk about the biggest SEO opportunity you are missing. So what is that opportunity, Neil?
The biggest opportunity that we see SEO is missing today is usability or user experience. We're not talking about design, like interaction design on wireframes and stuff like that. We're talking about when a user lands on your website, and they have this problem, whatever problem they have, Typically it's related to the keyword that they're searching for. Did you solve it? Now, some of that could be your design usability, but it's more so the content, the videos, whatever you're doing to convey the solution to their problem. And it's funny when someone does a Google search and Eric, we're both SEOs. Have you ever done a Google search and been like, wow, this site should be ranked at the top. It has a million backlinks. Like when you do Google searches for products or stuff like that, or to solve your problem, do you really care about who has the most backlinks that's ranked at the top?
Never.
Exactly. All he cares about is, did the webpage solve my problem? And SEOs are all thinking about keywords and backlinks and on-page errors instead of being like, what are the queries people are searching for? What is the real root meanings behind these queries? What are people trying to solve? And can I solve it for them? And that's truly the key to rank— ranking at the top in the long run. But for some reason, SEOs are thinking codes and backlinks and, oh, let me just create content with tons of keywords instead of focusing on the root problem, which is someone has an issue, you need to solve it for that searcher. That's how you rank the highest at the top in the long run and keep your rankings.
Yeah. Practically, if I were to go back in time, I don't know about you, Neil, but when I first started learning SEO, it was— I was focused on links. I was focused on Content. I was, I got too obsessed with that where you started looking at, at least for me, you start looking at different ways you can do things, right? You start going, you go to the white hat forums, you go to the black hat forums, you start running article spinning software. This is like 10+ years ago. Your site gets torched. And I think if I were to go back in time, what I would tell myself is, hey, think about what's most important from like a business perspective or a customer perspective. It's what's in it for me, right? It's not, hey, it's not about the links. It's not about the content or All these little things. At the end of the day, are you solving a problem for them? And I wish, I think I've wished I approached SEO with more of like a kind of customer-centric mindset. And I think that's more applicable to business, right? Because when you're starting a business, you're thinking about the customer. How can I continue to solve? How can I continue to do customer development? And what I see, there's nothing wrong with this, but a lot of SEOs are definitely smarter than Neil and myself. They have the potential to make the most of themselves where they can become Super high level that maybe they even start their own businesses. They get stuck in this echo chamber of SEOs arguing with each other all the time about this ranking factor, that ranking factor, this and that. And you start playing this game that doesn't really help yourself long-term. And but if you were to think about, hey, how can I just continue to serve the customer? Very similar to Amazon. They just keep thinking about how can I make it better for the customer? How can I serve the customer? Things just keep expanding because you have a mindset of abundance versus kind of a mindset of, to me, I used to have a mindset of scarcity when it came to doing SEO. I used to try to hog everything. And worry about all the domain authority, not sharing the link juice. And even to the point where I was doing internal link sculpting. So too much of that stuff is not good for you. You might as well spend that, that, that energy on other stuff, thinking about things that are higher leverage. Neil?
It's so funny. I used to sit back and they'll be like, oh, let's do some PR sculpting and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, I'm like, all right. That's a waste of time versus focusing on the user experience.
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