what is search engine optimization

There are over 200 factors in Google’s algorithm. Wouldn’t it be great if you could rank higher on Google without learning each of those factors? Today I’m going to break down a minimalist approach to SEO. The only three things you should do every week to get traffic.

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Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
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If you’re overwhelmed and don’t have lots of time to invest, it’s important to know where to focus your efforts. Sure, it would be great to do everything, but that’s not always realistic. And instead of doing everything that you read online about SEO, let’s see the activities that will produce the most impact on your business.

So number one, optimizing existing content. Now optimizing existing content is all about finding new keywords, sitting on page two and three and optimizing for them. What you also want to end up doing is going to Google Search Console, and then looking to see which pages are getting the most impressions, but the least amount of clicks. And within there, you want to click on those pages and look to see which keywords are getting a lot of impressions that are on page two or bottom of page one that you may not be talking about too much within your content. And then what you want to do is update the content to include those keywords. You may also want to include those keywords within your title tag and your meta description.

The next thing when it comes to updating content is deleting your underperforming content. See, just because you write content and you generate a lot of links to it, it doesn’t mean that it’s a good piece of content. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to rank. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to get social shares. Just some content, even though people link to it, they just don’t care to read about it. And that’s the harsh reality of content marketing.

The next thing when it comes to updating content is consolidating content.

When we’re also talking about updating content, I also want to discuss refreshing content that brings traffic to your website. There’s a lot of content that is already doing well and is generating traffic on your site. But what you’ll find is when you log to Google Search Console, some of these articles will drop in traffic over time, or they’ll continually rise. Also, if your article’s continually doing well, what are the cures that are driving you this increase in traffic? What could you do to even make it more related to those cures and better so that way you can get even more traffic?

Now, the next tactic that I want you to focus on is doing competitive analysis to guide your content efforts. Here’s what I mean by this, right? So we already discussed updating content. Now, when we’re talking about competitive analysis.

So what I want you to do is head over to Ubersuggest, and I want you to type in your domain. Now, when you type in your domain, you’ll get a report of your top pages, your traffic, the keywords you’re ranking for, but you’ll also see in the left hand navigation, an option to look at competing domains. So you want to end up looking at all the other sites that are similar to you. And what this Ubersuggest report does is it shows you all the similar keywords that you rank for, that other people also rank for. And it also shows you the keyword gaps.

This report breaks down their most popular pages from top to bottom. It shows you who’s linking to them and it shows you those keywords that each of those top pages are ranking for. This will also give you new content ideas in case you don’t cover any of the topics that they’re generating a lot of traffic for that you’re not generating any traffic for. And this will give you ideas of what type of content to create.

Now let’s talk about creating new content. Content clusters around keywords that your website has the potential to rank for. That’s what I mean. So if you go back to Ubersuggest, you type in a keyword, let’s say I go after SEO. In Ubersuggest in the keyword ideas report, there’s actually an option where you can actually put in your domain name and it’ll adjust the keywords that you have the ability to rank for.

So once you put in your domain name, Ubersuggest will then filter the results. So you want keywords you can rank for that are going to be much easier and those are the ones that you should start creating content around and create content clusters.

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This is the second lesson of my free SEO course called SEO Unlocked. Today I’m going to be going over SEO and why it’s important. Did you know that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine? You may think, “All right, there are these search engines out there.” “Yeah, sure we know Google.” But for a minute, just think about how many times you go on Google or search, or YouTube and search, or Kayak and look for hotels or flights, there are search engines all around us and we’re constantly using them. Before we get started into going over SEO, there are a few things I wanted to cover: There’s a lot of people saying false information out there, so I wanted to play a little fun little game called Fact or Fiction.

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Download the course materials: https://neilpatel.com/training

Ubersuggest: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/

Google Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
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The first one: My industry is too hard to get ranked in.
Second one: Only big companies can do well on Google. Then I always hear, the more pages I have, the better.

Now let’s go over all five of them.

The first one: It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, you can always rank on Google.

Now, of course, creating an account on Google Search Console and submitting your sitemap isn’t a bad thing to do. And you don’t need to spend a ton of money to win online, and that’s why I started to get into SEO.

There are three main keys that you really need to understand if you want to win online.

The first is, why is SEO so important? Look, SEO’s a process of optimizing any given search word, or term, for a search engine on your site. So no matter what time of the day or what country people are in, when they’re searching, you can be found, you’re getting that traffic, and some of it will end up converting into sales.

The next key to winning online is choosing your battleground. They dominate search on all landscapes. So when you look at the desktop, they’re an estimated 4.5 billion active internet users, and Google’s search share for desktop is 87%. That’s roughly 8.7 out of 10! That’s an amazing result.

And just being on there isn’t enough. Your position is everything! Over 31.7% of people click on position one, according to Advanced Web Ranking.

The third key, which is unlocking the SEO factors to win online.

One thing that you can do is go to Ubersuggest, click on the Site Audit Report in the left-hand navigation, once you’re there, and look at your website, and it’ll breakdown the factors that Google is looking at.

You’re probably wondering, “Hey Neil, this is all great, “but what’s the Holy Grail of SEO?” “What’s that silver bullet?” Well there’s not really a silver bullet. It’s a lot of little things that add up, and I’m going to go over them.

One of them is Page Speed. For every second delay means roughly 7% reduction in conversions, according to HubSpot. So you want to make sure your site loads fast.

The next thing I want you to look at is Mobile User Experience. Look, the number of people that are using mobile devices is continually going up. So much so that Google has a mobile-first index.

The next factor that I want you to look at is Topical Content. The more detail that you go into on each page around the same topic, the better you’re going to end up ranking. Versus if you go really broad and cover a lot of random topics, but you don’t go in-depth on all of them.

Another factor and this is from Ahrefs, it’s all about URL Length. The longer your URL length, the lower your rankings are. So you want to keep your URL short and to the point.

Another thing to look at is Content Length. Generally speaking, the longer your content, the more social shares you’re going to end up getting, the better you’re going to end up doing.

Backlinks are another big factor. And as you can see from this chart by Ahrefs, backlinks have more of an impact on your rankings than On-page SEO; that’s getting sites to link to you, it’s super important.

And one thing that very few SEO’s looks at is the power of brand and user signals. The ex-CEO of Google once said, “Brands are the solution, not the problem.” “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

These days security is a big issue as well, so you want to make sure you’re using an SSL Certificate, so that way you get that HTTPS. Because when people go to your website and you’re not using SSL, you’re more likely to get a warning.

► If you need help growing your business check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital @ https://neilpateldigital.com/

►Subscribe: https://goo.gl/ScRTwc to learn more secret SEO tips.
►Find me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/neilkpatel/
►On Instagram: https://instagram.com/neilpatel/

#SEO #NeilPatel #DigitalMarketing