Neil Patel walks through eight steps to rank on Google, starting with technical audits and keyword research using Ubersuggest. He found human-written articles outperformed AI ones, recommends targeting low-difficulty keywords with high CPC, building backlinks through competitor analysis, and refreshing old posts when they start losing traffic.
Chapters
Most people don't know this, but this is how you rank number one on Google. Most people think traffic is just about SEO, but that's only part of the puzzle in 2025. As someone who's been in marketing for over 24 years, I want to share my step by step system for blowing up your website traffic this year. And today I'm going to reveal it for the very first time. First ranking on Google starts with this ubersuggest SEO site audit tool. Identifies broken pages, low word counts, duplicate titles and site speed issues, just to name a few. And it gives you step by step instructions on how to fix it. What I love about the ubersuggest site audit report, not only does it tell you how to fix it, but it tells you what order to do it in based on what should impact your traffic the most. And these hidden errors confuse search engines. And if your site isn't crawlable, your content doesn't matter. Using this auto report gives you a prioritized roadmap so you know what to fix first that'll have the biggest impact. Good SEO isn't just about your site though. It's about beating your competition. When you create a project within ubersuggest, it monitors your competitors as well. Your rankings, your backlinks and your fresh content too. So you can reverse engineer what's working for you and your competition. SEO is a race not against Google, but against the top ranking sites in your space. And tracking your competitors gives you real time insights on what's working so you can move faster and smarter. Your content won't rank unless you do this. Ubersuggest reveals keyword volume, SEO difficulty and cost per click. This is what someone's willing to pay per click if they're bidding on this keyword in a Google Ad. The key is to find low keyword difficulty. That means it's easy to rank for and high cost per click keywords because that signals money making opportunities. If a business is willing to spend a lot of money on a cost per click ad, that usually means that keywords driving conversions. And if it's easy to rank for, that means if you target that keyword and rank at the top, you're much more likely to not only get traffic, but traffic that converts into revenue. And the best part about these keywords is they're easy for even small businesses to start seeing wins with. Most people think AI can do everything SEO for them, but you should avoid using AI for this one thing. We did an experiment with 68 websites. We created 744 articles, half human ran, the other half AI written with human assistants. The human written content got 5x more traffic than the AI content on a monthly basis from Google. Google's algorithm rewards E experience, expertise, authority and trust which AI struggles to replicate. AI just creates regurgitated information that everyone already sees on the web. It doesn't mean AI is useless. AI is still very useful for a lot of tasks such as content ideation or helping you adjust the tonality of your content, or even translating and transcribing your content into multiple languages so that way you can rank on Google overseas. This is one of the easiest ways to boost your SEO. Ubersuggest Backlinks Opportunity Report shows you all the sites linking to your competitors, but not you see, if someone links not one, not two, but three plus of your competitors and they don't link to you, they're pretty much competitor agnostic in which they're willing to link to anyone. And if you can create better content than your competition and you hit that site up, they're much more likely to link to you because they link to other competitors. And if your page is more up to date and fresh and more thorough and detailed and provides a better user experience, why wouldn't they swap out one of those links? Or just add a link to you? And you can even personalize the outreach of by creating a custom email with chatgpt and then shoot that off to each individual site that you're reaching out for a link for. To win an SEO in the long term, you need to do this branded searches. People typing in your name or your company name into Google is a major ranking factor. And your content, when you push it across social media and email, it increases people looking and searching for your brand. See In 2025, the average person interacts with the brand 11.1 time before they buy. So you need to be everywhere they're hanging. And when you go omnichannel with your content, you put it on social media, email, SMS and more channels. It builds brand equity that lifts your SEO and your traffic results because it causes more people to search for your brand on Google. Your old website content isn't dead, it just needs a refresh. I want you to go into Google Search Console and look for declining posts when you look at the top keywords that are driving you traffic. Google Search Console also has a page tab. You can look at the pages that are getting traffic. You can compare the results over the previous year. The pages that are declining in traffic usually need to be updated with new stats better formatting or even information that they may be missing. See, Google favors fresher content. This is why Wikipedia ranks for everything on Google because it's consistently updated. Would you rather read a three year old article or a three week old article? Of course you're going to pick the 3 week old article because it's more fresh, updated, probably more relevant to what you're looking for.
