How to Outrank Big Companies When You Have No SEO Budget

There’s a formula to SEO and as long as you follow it, you’ll get rankings.

So, what’s this formula?

Well, you write amazing content, optimize your code, create a great user experience, and you mix in some backlinks.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, the formula isn’t too complicated, but it does require hard work and patience.

Now what makes SEO challenging isn’t the formula, or the time, or the patience. It has more to do with how you beat people who have more money than you because, in theory, they can do more of everything, which should cause them to outrank you.

But you know what? I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I love SEO because it’s the one channel where you can beat big companies even if you can’t outspend them.

How? Well, let’s go over that.

Let’s first start with the two mental shifts you’ll have to make.

Mental shift #1: Speed is everything

What most people won’t tell you is big companies need to spend more to get the same results that you can for pennies on the dollar. They have way too many employees and layers in their organization to move fast and nimble.

In other words, everything moves slowly.

So, what do they do? They spend money in hopes that it makes them move faster. But the reality is, spending more doesn’t necessarily get them faster results.

If you want to beat them, the first thing you’ll have to do is focus on execution. If you can’t move fast, you won’t win.

This is your biggest advantage.

The reason I have gotten to where I am today is due to my execution speed. And now that we keep growing in size, things are moving slower.

For example, because my business has continually been growing, we now prioritize based on what makes us the most revenue and I bet you SEO isn’t as high on that priority list as it used to be. Not just for me, but for all companies my size and bigger.

You have to remember, we have multiple offices, hundreds of employees… we have to focus on what pays the bills.

So how do we compensate? We spend more money in hopes that it fixes it. Just like how I write less content these days, and I spend money on things like Ubersuggest and Backlinks in hopes that it helps.

But that won’t fix everything.

The point is, if you can move fast, it will give you a huge advantage.

Mental shift #2: Scrappiness beats money

Alright, let’s recap the formula to SEO…

Content + SEO friendly code + user experience + backlinks = rankings.

I know Google has over 200 ranking factors, but the formula above encompasses the majority of it.

Now you are probably thinking that if you want to write content or build links you have to spend money, but that isn’t necessarily the case.

With my previous marketing blog, Quick Sprout, I grew it by partnering with other writers.

I wasn’t as well known in the marketing world back then, but I hit up people like Brian Dean and co-authored guides like this one on link building with him.

That guide is over 20,000 words. And Brian did the majority of the work and for free.

I also did something similar with Ritika Puri and we created a guide on marketing psychology.

And every time I partnered with other writers and marketers to create these in-depth guides my traffic skyrocketed.

The first time I published one, my traffic went up by 117% in 2 months.

Now, that’s something that you can still do to this day to see great results.

Another way you can boost your SEO traffic is to get people to contribute content to your site for free.

I did this with the KISSmetrics blog before I acquired it. During its peak, it generated 1,260,681 unique visitors a month.

We grew the KISSmetrics traffic through one simple approach… we hit up tons of writers in our space and asked them to contribute articles.

At first, we had to pay a few because the blog wasn’t known and we barely had any visitors. But once we paid a handful of well-known writers who were guest contributors on competing sites, we now had a great foundation.

We still didn’t have much traffic, but having those writers publish content was enough to convince other writers to submit content for free.

It’s a simple approach that still works to this day.

There are many ways you can be scrappy, you just have to think outside the box. Don’t think you need tons of money to solve your marketing problems. Being scrappy in most cases is more effective.

Now that we’ve covered the two mental shifts you need to make, let’s focus on the 4 quick wins that will yield the biggest results in the least amount of time.

Yes, many of these “quick wins” are well known, but less than 1% of SEOs focus on them. I know this because I have an ad agency that works with large Fortune 100 companies… and it doesn’t stop there, most companies no matter what size they are, don’t focus on these quick wins.

Quick win #1: Land and expand

They say the more content you create the more traffic you will get.

Do you want to know what the big issue with this strategy is?

Writing more content doesn’t guarantee more traffic.

Content marketing has changed. Writing no longer guarantees you more traffic because there are over 1 billion blogs.

With people cranking out so much content on a daily basis, Google now has the choice of what content to rank and what not to rank.

Similar to me, your top 10 pages are going to make up a lot of your traffic… and probably more than me.

The top 10 pages on my site make up 29.23% of my traffic. That’s crazy considering I have 5,171 blog posts.

With your site, your top 10 pages will probably make up over 40% of your traffic as you probably don’t have as much content as me.

So instead of spending the majority of your time writing new content, why not get more traffic out of the content you have.

I call this the land and expand method. In other words, you already have pages that are getting search traffic and rank on Google, might as well adjust them so you can 2 or 3 times more search traffic to those pages.

Best of all, this method gets results within 1 month for most sites and within 2 months if your site doesn’t have as much authority.

If you want to leverage this technique, follow “step 2” in this article where I break down how to land and expand step by step.

Quick win #2: Optimize for revenue, not traffic

Your goal is to increase your search traffic, right?

Well, if you are reading this blog it is. 😉

But as you get more search traffic, what’s happened to your revenue?

Actually, let’s rephrase the question… as my traffic climbed, can you guess what happened to my revenue?

That traffic according to SEMrush is worth $1.2 million.

But here is the thing: as my search traffic grew by 123%, my revenue only grew by 12.5%… not a good deal.

Yes, you want to optimize your site for Google so you can rank higher. But what’s the point if it doesn’t increase your revenue?

You need to look at the pages on your site that are responsible for revenue generation activities and first optimize those so they rank higher on Google. You can do this by setting up goal tracking within Google Analytics.

Once you set up goal tracking, you’ll now know what pages to focus your attention on so that those extra visitors you in bring will turn into revenue. You can then take that extra revenue and reinvest it in your marketing initiatives.

Quick win #3: Optimize for clicks, not rankings

Question for you…

If everyone did a Google search and clicked on the second results instead of the first result, what do you think will happen?

Well, it would tell Google that people prefer the second listing and it would move that ranking to the number 1 spot.

To prove this theory, Rand Fishkin told all of his Twitter followers to search for the phrase “best grilled steak” and click on the 4th listing instead of the 1st.

And within 70 minutes the 4th listing jumped up to the top spot.

It was so effective that the listing Rand Fishkin told everyone to clicked on skyrocketed to the top of Google for the phrase “grilled steak”.

If you want to boost your rankings, it isn’t just about the content you are creating or the links you are building. If people don’t want to click on your listing, you’ll find that your rankings will continually tank.

And if people click on yours more than the competitors, than your rankings will skyrocket even if you don’t build as many links.

So how do you increase your click-through-rate?

Well you don’t want to tell your friends to click on your listing as that is a temporary effect and your rankings will only climb for a short period of time. You want to optimize your title tag and meta description to encourage people to click on your listings over the competition.

This will cause your rankings to climb slower, but they will stick once you reach the top.

I won’t bore you with the details in this article on optimizing click-through-rates as I have already blogged on it… just head over to this post and follow hack number 1. 😉

Quick win #4: Update your old content

Have you noticed over time that your rankings fluctuate? No matter how good you are at SEO and no matter how much money you have, there is no guarantee you’ll be at the top spot.

Do you want to know why your rankings drop?

Most people assume that it’s a penalty. But Google is very friendly (believe it or not), and their goal isn’t to penalize sites. Their goal is to rank the best sites at the top.

You know… the sites that users love the most.

Just think of it this way, if Google hypothetically penalized BMW for building backlinks and removed them from the index, what do you think would happen when people search for “BMW”?

People would be pissed that BMW isn’t showing up.

And they wouldn’t be pissed at BMW, they would be pissed at Google and they may not use Google again.

Google’s goal isn’t to penalize your site or be mean to you or tank your rankings. Their goal is simple… always put the site that is best for the end user at the top.

When your rankings tank, it’s typically because someone else created a page that provides a better experience for the term you were ranking for.

The way you fix this, maintain your rankings, and even climb higher is to continually update your old content.

If you have content that is old, outdated, or if your rankings drop, read this. It breaks down what to do step by step, and it will help you outrank your competition because I bet they aren’t updating their old content.

This is so effective I currently have 3 full-time people updating my old content.

You don’t have to get as crazy as me, but you should update your old content.

Conclusion

Money isn’t stopping you from beating your competition. The only thing standing in your way is you.

That’s ok though. We can fix that.

With a few mindset shifts and some quick wins, things are about to change.

I’ve never let my competition get in my way. I don’t care if they have more money than me or that they have been at this longer.

If I started my journey cleaning restrooms and picking up trash and eventually got here… you can too.

There is nothing really stopping you from winning.

So what do you think, are you ready to beat your competition?

The post How to Outrank Big Companies When You Have No SEO Budget appeared first on Neil Patel.

One Simple Hack That’ll Boost Your Ecommerce Sales

There’s a little growth hack that every ecommerce site should be using.

It’s the easiest hack… it doesn’t require money, you don’t need a following, and it works instantly.

But you know what? No one is using it.

Can you guess what it is?

Well, I’ll give you hint… just look at the image above.

It’s not related to SEO, paid ads, or anything else you are used to reading about here on the blog.

The beautiful part about it is no one is leveraging it, which means it works roughly 100% of the time. 🙂

A simple way to get more ecommerce sales

Alright, do you want to know what it is? Well, I’ll give you one more hint before spilling the beans.

If you watched a video like this on YouTube about the best makeup products, what do you think would happen?

There’s a good chance you’ll buy one of the products recommended. And if you don’t, someone else will.

The issue is, it only works if you generate enough video views.

And I have a lot of articles breaking down how to get more YouTube traffic like:

• YouTube for E-Commerce: The Art of Selling Without Selling
• Is YouTube Worth It? 7.6 Million Views Later, Here’s What I Learned
• How to Hack YouTube SEO – 26 Tactics for Gaining Top Results
• How to Get More YouTube Views

There is one big problem… there is no guarantee that your video will rank on YouTube or get enough views.

But what if I told you that there is a channel that is highly relevant to ecommerce and you can easily get 20,000 plus views per video?

Best of all, there is no competition and you can do it every single time, without even having a following!

How to get 29,090 video views on Amazon

You already know about YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Instagram Live… and you may even know about LinkedIn Live.

But did you know about Amazon Live?

Just like all of the other live platforms, it works similarly, but the whole purpose is to show off and promote your products so you can drive more brand awareness and sales.

The video above is by Skincare by Alana. Alana presented tips in the video about how to reduce puffiness around your eyes and how to make them brighter.

Can you guess how many views that video received in the first week it aired?

Well, based on the headline above you are probably going to guess 29,090. That is correct. 😉

And all Alana spent was $200 to boost the video.

It’s not just Alana who is seeing massive success… I know 2 other people that are getting similar results, but they won’t let me share their stats as they are white labeling other people’s products and don’t want more competition. 🙁

So how do you get thousands of views from Amazon Live?

Well, there is a simple process… let’s break down how you can do it step by step.

Now before we get into that, I need to be transparent: You are going to find it a bit awkward at first. But after you do it a few times, you’ll find that it is easy and fast.

Step #1: Download the Amazon Live app

You probably have an iPhone or an Andriod device. Log into your app store and download the Amazon Live app.

Although you can view Amazon Live on your desktop computer, you can’t post a video unless you do it from your phone.

When you install the app, make sure you allow Amazon to access everything on your phone. This will come in handy later when you try to upload your slate image. I will get into what a slate image is later on…

Step #2: Open the app

Now open up the app. Once it’s opened it will look something like this other than the fact that you won’t have any videos.

On the bottom left you will see a “Streams” navigational option and that will show you all of the videos you have aired.

On the bottom right you will see a “More” navigational option that shows you all the preferences and options you have.

And to get started, you would click the “+” button at the bottom.

Step #3: Getting started

When you click the “+” button at the bottom, you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Amazon Live has a cool practice mode feature. I highly recommend you start off with a practice run or two.

Once you get the hang of it, create a real live video. But before you do you’ll want to add products that you want to promote. You can select one or multiple.

As for video source, your phone camera will be the easiest. There are other options as well such as an encoder and other things for video ninjas, but I would just use your phone camera (also known as phone cam) as it’s simple and works well.

You’ll also have to name your live stream. This is where you enter the title of the video.

This is very important because if your title sucks, you won’t get as many views. If you don’t know how to write amazing headlines, check out these posts:

• The Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Powerful Headlines
• How to Write Headlines People Can’t Help but Click [Formulas Inside]
• The Definitive Guide to Writing a Headline that Doesn’t Suck (Tips, Tactics & Tools Included)
• How to Boost Your Social Shares Through These 10 Headline Formulas
• How to Fail-Proof Your Ad Campaigns with These 7 Headline Formulas

Step #4: Boost your video

It doesn’t take much money to get thousands of views. Technically, you will get thousands of views without spending a dollar. But if you want to spend a few hundred dollars it will go a very long way.

Again, this tactic works without spending any money, but a few dollars can help you get a lot more traction.

Step #5: Schedule or post your video

You’ll have 2 options when it comes to posting your video. You can go live and post right away, or you can schedule your video to go out.

If you haven’t filmed your video during peak hours, I recommend that you schedule it. The last thing you want to do is publish a video in the middle of the night or too early in the morning.

Step #6: Add a slate image

A slate image is a cover image. This is what people see when browsing Amazon Live. Here’s an example of a slate image:

Remember how I said you’ll want to allow the app access to files on your phone? You’ll want to do that so you can upload a slate image.

Step #7: Show a banner

You need to show a banner. It will change the number of sales you generate.

You have 2 options when it comes to showing a banner. The first is to share a promotion with the views, and the second is to share a custom message.

When you select the “share a promotion” option, your promotion will be displayed as a banner at the bottom of your video. Customers can click on the banner to apply the promotion to their account.

And when you select the “share a custom message” option, your custom message will be displayed as a banner at the bottom of your video. People can hide the message at any point.

You can test both options, but I recommend that you at least “share a promotion” so it makes it easier for people to get a discount with just a click.

Step #8: Watch the sales roll in

Alana only generated one sale on her first video, but that’s because she didn’t push too hard. She already knows how to drastically improve that number and, in a bit, I will go over how to generate hundreds of sales through Amazon Live.

The other accounts I have access to have generated hundreds of sales through Live. One has generated 391 sales so far from 2 videos and the other has generated 328 sales from 3 videos. And I will share below why they were able to generate sales and why Alana wasn’t.

How to maximize your sales from Amazon Live

Here’s how to get more sales:

• Buy equipment – if using your phone, get an awesome ring light and a vertical phone holder. It will NOT record horizontally. This will help improve the quality of your video.
• Sell, sell, sell – Amazon wants this feature to sell, sell, and then sell some more. This is the big mistake Alana made and she knows it and will fix this during her next live video. If you don’t sell, don’t expect sales.
• Offer a discount – Pick an awesome product, and a deep discount. If you don’t offer a discount you won’t generate over 100 dollars in sales from your live video. If you generate more sales, you’ll typically get more video views because when you sell Amazon makes more money. I know I have talked in the past about how giving discounts is a bad long-term strategy for your brand. I still stand by that. However, live videos are a much different way to sell in the short term and offering discounts will drive many sales and more awareness quickly. Because the offer is only accessible during the Live and nowhere else, this is one of the situations where not only do I think discounts are acceptable but necessary.
• Be careful – if you are sending tons of traffic to a product and you don’t generate any sales, you will hurt your Amazon organic rankings. For that reason, you really have to sell. If you aren’t willing to sell hard, Amazon Live may not be for you. If you perform well, it can help with your organic rankings.
• Create a sign – hold a sign at the beginning of the video that says “UNMUTE ME” or something like that. Amazon appears to track how many people actually listen to your video, and how long they listen. This should help you get more views and sales.
• Hook viewers – making bold statements that are true or telling people what you are going to cover later in the video is a great way to keep people engaged longer. Poor engagement will lead to very little video views.
• Build authority – although I told you to sell hard, you need to provide amazing information and tips at the same time. This will help you become an authority and it should boost your sales in the long run. Selling without providing value will make you look bad.

It really isn’t that complicated. As long as you follow the tips above, it shouldn’t be hard for you to generate dozens of sales from each Amazon Live video.

Conclusion

Just like every other video platform, the reach will eventually be limited, and it will be harder to get results. And sadly, there is nothing you can do about it.

For the time being, though, you need to jump on the Amazon Live bandwagon and create as many videos as you can. Once you get the process down right and you are seeing sales, I would create 1 video each and every day.

I can’t create videos on Amazon Live as I don’t sell ecommerce products myself, but you can. That’s a requirement that I can’t get around.

So, what do you think about Amazon Live? If you aren’t jumping to create a video after reading this, you are missing out.

The post One Simple Hack That’ll Boost Your Ecommerce Sales appeared first on Neil Patel.

Backlinks: Your Free Link Analysis Tool

Please note that you may have to clear your browser cache to see the latest version of Ubersuggest.

Do you want to know how many people are linking to you? Do you want to find more link opportunities?

Well, I created a free backlink tool that will allow you to do that (and much more).

I decided to call it Backlinks.

And, as you may have guessed, I integrated it within Ubersuggest so that way you can do more within one simple tool.

Here’s how Backlinks works…

How Backlinks works

The first step is to head over to the Backlinks landing page and type in a URL or a domain.

You’ll then want to select the type of backlink report you want to pull up.

As you can see, there are 3 main options:

1. URL – this report will pull backlink information ONLY for that specific URL.
2. Domain/* – this report will pull backlink information for that domain EXCLUDING subdomains.
3. *Domain/* – this report will pull all backlink information for that domain, including any subdomains. This option will typically give you the biggest backlink count number.

Once you figure out what type of query you want to run, select that option and hit the “Search” button.

The Backlinks report

At this point, you’ll see a report that looks something like this:

This report will show you the domain score (the authority or a domain), the total number of backlinks, how many of them are follow versus nofollow, number of referring domains, .edu and .gov backlink count, and the estimated organic traffic a domain and URL receive.

In essence, you can get a quick overview of how you are doing versus your competition in seconds.

Link analysis

When you pull up a Backlinks report, you will also see a full list of URLs linking to a website.

By default, it shows one link per domain to make the report more useful. That way if someone links to you 100 times, you’ll see the best link from that site.

If you want to see all 100 links coming from the same site, unclick the “one link per domain” button.

In general, assuming the URL or domain you just pulled up has a lot of backlinks, you’ll see thousands and thousands of links.

In each row, you’re provided with:

1. Source title – what is the title of the page linking to URL/Domain you looked up.
2. Target page – where the link is pointing to. If you are looking up a URL, then it will be pointing to that specific URL. If you looked up a domain, you can see where their link is pointing to on that domain.
3. Domain score – how authoritative is the linking site? The higher the number the better.
4. Page score – how authoritative is the linking page? The higher the number the better.
5. Link type – is an incoming link through an image or a text link?
6. Anchor text – does the link contain any keywords? You can easily see this through the anchor text column.
7. First seen – when did we first find this link?
8. Last seen – when did we last crawl and find this link?

Advanced filtering

When you are looking for specific link opportunities, especially if you are looking up a competitor’s domain, you may want to use the advanced filters to find the best link opportunities.

Here’s how the advanced filters work.

• Search box – in the box, you can type in any keyword or phrase and it will pull any URLs, titles, or anchor text that contain any of those words. That way you can find what you are looking for faster.
• Zone – if you want to only include or exclude links with certain domain extensions, such as .net, .com, .com.br, .co.uk, etc., you can do so with zone filtering.
• Referring domain – if you want to include or exclude links coming from a specific domain, this is the filtering option you can use.
• Anchor – if you want to find links by a specific anchor text or exclude links with a specific anchor text you can do so with this filtering option.

And if you want to slice and dice the data in more advanced ways, you can always click the “export to CSV” button and play around with the data.

Links are everywhere

As you may know in Ubersuggest you can enter in a URL. Because of this update, we have integrated link data throughout multiple reports.

As you can see in the Overview report under the “Traffic Analyzer” heading, you not only get traffic estimations, but you also get link data.

From referring domains to .gov and .edu links to domain score.

The best part about this update is you now get detailed link information on the Top Pages report.

If you aren’t familiar with the Top Pages report, it shows the most popular pages for any domain.

You’ll notice that you can see how many visitors go to each URL and if you click on “view all” under Est. Visits, you’ll see a list of keywords that are driving traffic to that URL.

And if you click “view all” under backlinks, you will see all of the URLs that are linking to that page.

Conclusion

I hope you like Backlinks. I put a lot of time, energy, and money into building it.

You can look up as many domains and URLs as you want… both from your site or your competition’s. Best of all, there are no restrictions. 🙂

So, head over to Backlinks and start typing in domains and URLs.

What do you think of the tool? Please leave a comment letting me know your thoughts or if you find any bugs.

PS: You can also access the Backlinks report through Ubersuggest.

PPS: I would really appreciate if you told people about Backlinks and shared it. 🙂

The post Backlinks: Your Free Link Analysis Tool appeared first on Neil Patel.

Why You Shouldn’t Try to Rank #1 on Google

Do you know what the number one email request I get is?

Come on, take a guess. What do you think it is?

Ok, its people asking me for money.

But, do you know what the second most common email request I get is?

Companies asking me to rank them number 1 on Google for a specific term.

And I have to say, it’s a big waste of time for you to focus all of your energy on ranking number 1 on Google for a specific term or even a handful of terms.

Just take a look at my site… here’s my Google traffic over the last 31 days:

As you can see from the graph, I’m generating 2,375,455 organic visits from search engines each month.

And can you guess how many keywords I’m tracking when it comes to my rankings?

A big fat ZERO!

I’m not saying I don’t do SEO, I’m saying I don’t focus on rankings.

Can you increase your search traffic without tracking rankings?

The short answer is yes.

As you saw from the graph above, I’m getting over 2 million visits from organic search each month. If you look back a year, I was getting 970,459 visitors a month from search.

In other words, I was able to grow my organic search traffic by 144% in roughly 12 months. That’s not too shabby considering I don’t focus on any one particular keyword.

So why don’t I focus on specific keywords or track my rankings?

Number 1 doesn’t guarantee the most clicks

Ahrefs recently did a study where they showed how being number 1 doesn’t guarantee the greatest number of clicks.

The number 1 listing gets the majority of the traffic only 49% of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I would rather be number 1 than number 2, but getting there doesn’t guarantee the most amount of traffic.

And over time it’s just going to get worse.

Just look at how SERP listing pages looked in 2014.

Now let’s look at how SERP listings look today.

What are the big differences that you see?

1. Paid listings blend in – paid listings aren’t as clearly defined as they used to be. In other words, they blend in, which helps ads generate a higher percentage of the clicks.
2. Localized listings can be ads – the first listing in the localized listing is also paid.
3. The right side no longer has ads – most of the elements on the right side, when you click on them, drive you to perform another Google search.
4. Less organic listings – the homepage only has 9 organic listings if you exclude the localized listings.
5. Organic results are pushed down – not only do the paid and local listings show first, but news results are also in-between the organic results. This causes the 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th… organic result to get fewer clicks.

The common trend is people are focusing on the paid ads more than the organic listings. And organic listings are no longer guaranteed to be as high up as they once were.

Just look at this eye tracking study of a Google SERPs result.

It clearly shows how the paid ads have the majority of the attention.

So, does this mean you should give up?

No, I am not trying to paint a picture of how you shouldn’t try to rank high on Google or that SEO is useless. Because although Google keeps adjusting the layout of their SERPs page, it’s still the most popular site in the world.

Commanding 57.34 billion visits a month means… you have no choice but to do SEO!

But you shouldn’t waste your time thinking about each and every change Google is making because it’s out of your control.

Just look at how many algorithm changes they made in the last 12 months. It’s too hard to keep up with each change or predict Google’s next move. That’s why I take a different approach to get ahead of Google’s upcoming algorithm changes.

I focus on user experience.

What should you do?

You aren’t going to be able to control your rankings for every single one of your keywords… especially if you are doing SEO the right way.

The majority of your traffic should be coming from long tail phrases. Just look at my blog, I rank for 477,000 keywords.

That’s far too many keywords to track on a regular basis.

I focus on 3 things:

1. Create an amazing user experience – Google doesn’t want to rank sites at the top that are the “best optimized.” They want to rank the site that users love the most at the top. So, focus on providing that and, in the long run, you should rank higher.
2. Overall organic traffic growth – keywords have trends and they change in popularity over time. Instead of focusing on a handful of keywords or even a few hundred, I just focus on increasing my overall organic traffic. As long as it keeps climbing quarter over quarter, I’m happy.
3. Conversion rate – more traffic doesn’t guarantee more sales. I continually optimize my conversion rates so that each additional organic visitor I get has a higher chance to convert into a customer.

And I know I said I focus on 3 things, which is true… but every once in a while I focus on one more thing. It’s updating my old content.

If I had to add in a 4th, it would be updating my old content. Even though I know SEO fairly well, there is no guarantee the even my traffic keeps going up and to the right.

Just like you, my traffic drops every once in a while.

It sucks when your traffic just drops 6.94% in a week and it is scary when that trend continues. But when it does happen, follow this and you can reverse the trend of your declining traffic.

Which strategy should you follow?

There are a few SEO strategies I use to get more traffic that still work well today. If you follow them, you should get more traffic over time:

1. Globalization – search isn’t too competitive outside of English. That is changing fast though, so I would follow these globalization tips as soon as possible.
2. Off-page SEO – it still impacts rankings significantly and you can’t ignore it. Here are 6 off-page strategies you should follow.
3. Link building – here’s one of my favorite strategies for link building… it works really well. Even if you have a new site and no one knows who you are, you will be able to build links using it.
4. Land and expand – you already rank for terms on Google. This strategy will allow you to turn one ranking into hundreds.
5. Brand building – Google wants to rank brands higher than non-brands. Follow this as it will help you build a brand.

There are tons of other tactics and strategies that people are using, but the 5 main ones I mentioned above still work well in today’s competitive search landscape.

Conclusion

Yes, you want to continually improve your search traffic over time, but obsessing over whether or not a keyword is ranking number 1 doesn’t mean much.

SEO has moved to a long-tail strategy. The goal isn’t to rank for one keyword, or even a hundred or a thousand… the goal is to rank for hundreds of thousands if not millions of keywords over time.

And as long as that trend is continually going up and to the right, you’re fine.

One way to see if things are going directionally right is to use Ubersuggest. When you put in your domain, you’ll see a chart that looks something like this:

You want the total number of keywords to increase over time and you want the small green bar to continually go up over time as that means a higher portion of your listings are moving up in Google.

So, are you going to continue focusing on rankings?

The post Why You Shouldn’t Try to Rank #1 on Google appeared first on Neil Patel.

17 Charts That Show Where Social Media is Heading

You already know it’s harder to get traffic from the social web unless you spend money ads.

There’s nothing new with that fact… just look at the graph above: It breaks down how the average number of social shares per blog post has been dying year over year.

But the reality is you can’t ignore platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube or any other new contender that comes out and gains traction.

These social sites command so much traffic, that we have no choice but to be on them.

Just look at the Similar Web numbers for Facebook… they get an estimated 19.2 billion visits a month.

That’s ridiculous! And it’s not just Facebook either… according to Similar Web, all of the big platforms get tons of traffic:

• LinkedIn – 917 million visitors a month
• Twitter – 3.62 billion visitors a month
• YouTube – 22.77 billion visitors a month
• Instagram – 2.86 billion visitors a month

In other words, whether you like their algorithm tweaks or not, you have no choice but to be on these platforms as they attract so many eyeballs.

So, what should you do with your organic social reach? How should you combat their algorithms so you can generate a positive ROI as their ad prices keep going up?

Well, I surveyed 183 companies that generate at least 5 million dollars in revenue a year all the way up to $1.7 billion to show you where social media is headed and what you should do to succeed in the landscape.

Let’s dive into the data…

Expect less traffic from the social web, even if you pay for it

Look at the graph below. What do you see?

Since 2015, the amount of shares a blog post receives from the social web has been declining. One of the large reasons for social sites to clamp down on organic reach is that that makes it so you need to spend money to get the reach that you were once used to and relied upon to generate traffic.

Now let’s look at the percentage of digital ad spend going towards social media sites.

Over time it has increased, and you’ll notice that things really started to ramp up in 2016.

An interesting fact is that in the United States during mid-2017, Facebook had more advertisers than inventory. In other words, the demand was higher than the supply which caused CPM and CPC rates to increase.

But similar to the game of cat and mouse SEOs play with Google, marketers also play that game with social networks. In recent years, marketers have figured out how to reverse the trend of their dying organic reach.

2017 was a low point, but since then marketers have figured out a way to boost organic social traffic.

It won’t last forever… but can you guess how?

Don’t expect your employees to help

Well, it’s not by asking your employees to share your content.

Roughly 74% of the companies we surveyed asked their employees to share their content. Might as well get those extra likes and comments, right?

I know I used to do it.

But then I stopped because the majority of my employees didn’t want to share the content. And it’s not just my companies, other companies experienced the same thing.

In other words, the first few times you ask your team members to share, they’ll do it. After a while, they’ll ignore you.

So how are marketers boosting their organic reach?

You have to use chatbots

Here’s how much time companies are spending on each form of social media content.

As you can see, everyone loves posting images and text-based updates because they are easy to post.

But they don’t produce the best engagement. It’s actually live video and other forms of video.

Social platforms are trying to compete with television networks and they are even competing with platforms like Netflix.

So, if you want the most engagement you have to feed into their goals. If you start producing live video or even recorded video, you’ll find that you can boost your engagement. What this will do is get more of your followers engaged so when you post other forms of content they’ll be a higher probability that the content will be seen.

The other reason videos work so well is because they keep people on these social platforms versus driving people back to your site.

But of course, you want your followers to go back to your site… and you can do that through chatbots.

As you can see, 41% of the companies reported that chatbots (also knowns as messenger bots for social sites) provided their biggest traffic gains.

In other words, if you want to drive people from social sites like Facebook, you’ll have to start using messenger bots like Mobile Monkey.

The chances are you aren’t using messenger bots yet, but they are super effective. Just follow this guide and it will walk you through setting them up.

Now, not every social network has messenger bots, but over time you’ll see this change.

You’ll have to start expanding globally

I’ve been blogging a lot about global expansion from an SEO perspective, but the same goes from a social media perspective as well.

The chart above clearly shows how people are now getting traffic from regions where English wasn’t the native language.

And as companies noticed that trend, they also started posting their social content in multiple languages.

You’ll see a trend of this continuing over the next few years in which companies will be leveraging globalization as social marketing campaigns in non-English speaking countries in most cases is more profitable.

If you want the most out of your organic social traffic and paid ads you should consider posting content in multiple languages.

Some social networks like Facebook give great targeting options where you can pick which regions you want to show your content in.

For other platforms like Twitter and Instagram, this doesn’t exist yet.

When you also look at it from an advertising perspective, ads are expensive in regions like the United States, Japan, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany… but they aren’t as costly in most parts of Latin America and Asia.

Now let’s look at social media from a sales perspective.

Here’s how to maximize your social media revenue

Similar to content marketing, don’t expect social media visitors to convert right when they land on your site.

On average, a social media visitor will convert after 3 visits.

That means you are going to have to focus on getting people to continue to come back to your site if you want more sales.

In other words, you’ll have to play the long game.

The simplest way to do this is to remarket your social visitors. But there are other solutions as well that you aren’t currently using.

You can use a combination of the methods above. You’ll find that one won’t be enough and you’ll have to combine a handful of methods, including SMS.

You’re probably not using SMS marketing yet, but did you know that when I send SMS messages my response rates are 68%?!

That’s crazy high!

I’m not talking about opens, I am talking about responses!

For email, you can use tools like Hello Bar and for push notifications, you can use tools like Subscribers.

But there are multiple ways to boost your sales from social media, including focusing on specific content types.

Did you know that if you leverage chatbots (messenger bots) and post video-based content you’ll generate more sales on average than if you just posted status updates?

I know that sounds counterintuitive as it is easier to drive people to your site using status updates than to create a video, but you have to consider that social algorithms favor video.

You can also optimize your sales by picking specific social networks

Sales is a complicated formula. There’s more to growing your revenue than just focusing on specific types of content social media sites love and optimizing your landing pages.

To get a full picture, you also have to look at the first touch and last touch sales.

First touch sales are the traffic source that people first found you from. They don’t necessarily convert right then and there, but it’s the way they first found you.

It’s no shocker, but Facebook is the leader when it comes to first touch sales.

Now let’s look at last touch sales, which is where a visitor comes from right before they convert. Remember, someone may have found your site from Facebook, but they may not convert right away.

Sure, Facebook is still the winner, but YouTube is a close second and, shockingly, WhatsApp is in 3rd place.

It makes sense as texting has an extremely high open and click rate. I know you aren’t using WhatsApp for your business yet because that’s what the data shows, but you should check out their business API.

Conclusion

Over the upcoming years, you can assume social algorithms are going to get tougher from both an organic and paid perspective.

Social media companies are facing heavy governmental pressure due to fake news, privacy concerns, and issues related to political campaigns.

But that doesn’t mean you can ignore the social web or stop using it. It’s not dying and it is here to stay.

The data shows social media is on the rise. Sure, these sites aren’t growing at a rapid pace anymore but that’s due to the majority of the world already being on one of these platforms if not a few of them.

They are effective because people trust what they see on these sites and that should continually increase as they fix issues like fake news.

As long as you follow the tips above, you’ll be able to maximize your social media traffic and revenue even when the algorithms change in ways that don’t favor you.

So how are you maximizing your social media traffic?

PS: If you want to know where content marketing is heading, check this out.

The post 17 Charts That Show Where Social Media is Heading appeared first on Neil Patel.