[Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] my name is Neil Patel and I help companies generate more Revenue through digital marketing Entrepreneur magazine said I was the number one marketer in the world and they also said I created one of the 100 most brilliant companies I started my first website at the age of 16 I took all the money that I earned from working at amusement park and I paid a marketing firm the marketing firm provided no results and I quickly learned that I wasn't alone out of my frustration and from being broke I had no choice but to learn marketing my first client was a power supply manufacturer I helped him generate another $25 million in sales and from that point I realized the power of marketing I helped everyone that I could and I built my reputation by being honest and overd delivering I've helped companies like Google NBC Viacom General Motors eBay but nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed I found a four multi-million dollar companies and I've learned all the mistakes that you should avoid I've written about them on Forbes entrepreneur Inc Fast Company and even on my own blogs it's so awesome to know that colleges from all around the world are teaching my material in their classroom over the years I've received awards from the president of United States States the House of Representatives and the United Nations people believe marketing is expensive and difficult fortunately that's not true there is a Formula even if you don't have a technical bone in your body you can get results and my mission is to share this formula with you [Music] [Music] hello everyone thank you guys for coming today um really appreciate you guys taking the time I know people are from all over the world so let's dive in and get started uh hopefully you guys can see the presentation I'm on an iPad so my camera's a little bit funny but today we're going to be discussing SEO strategies that always work so I'm Neil Patel I'm the co-founder of NP digital um we also have Matt with us who's also from NP digital we also have Joe with us who's from digital marketing Institute who this webinar is with so it's a combination of digital marketing uh Institute and us um Matt do you want to give a quick introduction on yourself and then Joe you can do the same after yeah for sure it's always a pleasure getting a chance to educate alongside of unil and also with DMI I know we've done quite a bit of uh collaborations in the past but yeah I'm I'm Matthew SOS I'm the senior vice president of products and strategy at one of our divisions of NP digital called Neil Patel Excel we specialize in the small to medium business sector um been in the space for over 11 years now been with the Neil Patel group for over five and a half and very excited to be here today chatting about uh Evergreen your strategies go for it Joe feel free to do an introduction on yourself okay um yeah hi everyone um I'm Joe Williams I'm a I'm a subject matter expert over at the digital sorry guys it's it's just repeating a bit here one second [Music] no problem sorry about that everyone that that's perfect um so yeah my name is Joe Williams I'm a subject matter expert at the digital marketing Institute um it it is repeating um we're not doing the repeat on our end I think it's just your end yeah okay so I'll just try again um so yeah my name is Joe Williams I'm a subject matter expert over at the digital marketing Institute um I also run an SEO website um at Joe worlds.com and I've been involved in SEO since 2006 so not quite as long as Neil um but um I'm really passionate about SEO and I'm looking forward to share some SEO strategies today awesome so NP digital um we're a global Ad Agency we have thousand plus employees won a lot of awards I know I talk about this in every single webinar but the only reason I bring it up is just keep in mind when today we're talking about strategies that always work it's coming from a place of data and expertise versus just a gut feeling so there's a New Era of search and it's here and you're probably wondering what does this mean for SEO well the big thing is is the serps are continually getting more complex and they're changing for example when you do a search these days at least in the United States you're going to see AA overviews at the top you know and they've changed on how many queries they've been showing up for at one point it was a good chunk of them now it's somewhere around 15% um that was a last report that came out from uh I believe it was conductor I think it was one of the SEO tools no bright Edge it was bright Edge the one based out of uh San Francisco but according to Bright Edge they were seeing somewhere around 15% and you're seeing the serps constantly change right whether it's that they're also integrating a lot of other types of content like you're seeing much more short form content within the search results like you would see on Instagram YouTube shorts Tik Tok than you ever would be see before you're also seeing a lot of results from forums Community sites like quora Reddit Etc but the serps are not only contining changing they're also getting more complex which of course affects SEO and what does the future look like you know they say 50 plus% of the searches on Google are resulting in no clicks and that was in 2022 spark T put a report it was either today or yesterday maybe it was a few days before that but I saw uh today and they're showing a little bit more than 30% of the searches are resulting in clicks and that data was from sem Rush um Europe is looking very similar to the US but in essence zero clicks you know has been here for a long time this is nothing new according to Danny Sullivan from Google who's the search liaison Google has continually driven more traffic each and every single year to websites than the previous year in other words even though there's more zero click searches keep in mind there's more and more people who are using Google each year especially because they're improving the experience generally speaking which has caused more traffic to be driven to websites than the previous years and we're getting a lot of changes with AI right when we look at the sge Box the AI overviews also known you know they rebranded and changed the name it ends up resulting roughly to 1,200 pixels on average that's quite a bit which is pushing down a lot of other stuff below the fold um you know when we're looking at the data that we're seeing at our SNB division NPA that Matt's uh at and running when we look at that division we've actually seen a decrease in Impressions to our clients but an increase in overall clicks from search so in other words Impressions may be going down slightly but they're actually getting more traffic to their websites and it's not only AI That's changing the way the serps are if you look at this data here you're seeing more images and more videos those two things are really you know showing up way more in the search engine results than they were previously in Prior years and the reason Google is showcasing more results from images and videos is people tend to click on them you know when we're looking at data on when a video is above the fold typically the video is clicked on before anything else from what we're seeing and Google isn't the only Authority right now when it comes to search you guys have already heard that jenz is using Tik Tok and Instagram but what a lot of people don't know is when people are searching for questions they're starting to use you know places like chat GPT they're also starting to use places like social media and when you look at the graph you'll notice that the orange charts or the bars add up to more than 100% and you may be wondering why it's because people aren't just using one channel anymore they're using multiple channels some people are using Google and Chad gbt and social media to perform searches and you're going to see this trend continue going forward so increase in the other platforms doesn't necessarily mean a decrease in Google's traffic just like you may use Tik Tok Instagram YouTube and Facebook because you use Tik Tok now and you didn't use Tik Tok six years ago it doesn't mean that's the death of Instagram or Facebook you know when you look at meta as a company from the last report that they put out they're still generating more revenue from Facebook than they are from Instagram um although Instagram is growing at a much rapid uh faster pace and you can also optimize for these social platforms and AI platforms right but specifically speaking about the AI platforms like chat GPT we did an analysis of the factors that are causing them to recommend a product a service a brand um and here are some of the factors that we've seen increase the probability that they'll recommend your product your service or your brand so optimize it for them right things like relevancy brand mentions reviews they really matter example of reviews is you know when you go on Amazon you're probably not going to buy a product that has a two star out of five or two out of five star review you want something that has like 4.5 stars out of five so if a lot of reviews online are showing that you're a one out of five stars why would they recommend you so what does all this mean for you well yes there's things that are changing and you got to adapt but there's also strategies and tactics that have been proven and have worked for a long time and they continually work moving forward what Google really wants is helpful content so when someone does a search at the end of the day they want to make sure that the information that they're showing them the web page that they're presenting in front of this user is helpful if it's not helpful they don't care too much that's the biggest thing if the content isn't helpful why would they want to show it and that's something that you really need to keep in mind when you're creating content and information out there if you also want to try to rig the game and take shortcuts that's not going to work well either uh if you look at the March 2024 core update right they reduce unhelpful uh content irrelevant unoriginal content and they're pretty much optimizing for giving users what they really want if they feel your content is really outdated just think of it this way would you rather read a three-year-old article or something that's three weeks old right would you rather read AI content that's filled with fluff and maybe spam or something that's written for you that's more useful and helps you solve your problem just think about that when you're creating content and try to rank think longterm not shortterm and you know before I pass it over you got to make sure that you include e experience expertise Authority and trust this right here separates your content from AI you know when we are surveying people on the Neil patel.com website majority of marketers are using AI to create content you know more than 60 70% the big thing that you can include in your content that AI struggles to is e dou e a t make sure you include this within your content all right so yeah let's jump in So today we're going to be covering seven essential SEO strategies that are going to help boost your organic visibility I think the best part about this is you're going to notice that a lot of these strategies are are fairly Evergreen these are strategies that we've been employing ourselves over several several years to the Neil Patel blog and to thousands of campaigns that we manage across all of our agencies and we're excited to bring these strategies to you today so the first one we're going to cover is pruning and cropping and this is something that I don't believe is is spoken about enough in in the content marketing world because with the Advent of helpful content updates and so much more content hitting the internet than ever before due to AI I think we're going to start hearing a lot more about pruning and cropping of your content so when it comes to Google I think the biggest thing we're starting to notice is less can be more and pages that have poor content can affect the performance of your entire website and and Neil kind of mentioned this just a few moments ago about outdated content if you're running a blog or a news media Outlet or anything along those lines and you have old events still up that are no longer relevant those types of pages could be hurting the overall performance of your website and here's a snippet from Google last year about the helpful content up update any content not just unhelpful content on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in search assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that's better to display for this reason removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content so what this means for you is the longer that you continue to leave poor or outdated or lowquality content on your website the more you may be hurting your rankings in the long term and the biggest thing you need to start thinking about is leveraging the right tools to audit your website and find some of those underperforming pages and one of the best ways you can do that is by leveraging tools like uber suggest and the way you can go about it is by popping in your domain sifting through all the different pages on your website and trying to locate pages that have pretty much zero visits and zero backlinks because those should be some quick identifiers for you to let you know that this content really isn't indexing well nobody's linking to it because they're just not finding authoritative enough and there's no traffic visiting those pages and there can be a lot of reasons why traffic isn't visiting it but those can be some quick wins in identifying pages that Google may just find irrelevant or that your audience may find low quality okay so um yeah moving on to merging so merging content well what is merging content essentially if you have multiple related Pages um then you can combine them to a single and often more comprehensive piece now why would you want to do this well um reading through some of Neil's um archives of tweets um I came across um one kind of quite interesting fact that what Neil did earlier in the year is he merged or deleted 12% of the content on one of his blogs and this actually had an up uptake of an increase in 19 19% of SEO traffic so what can we learn from that well we often hear Google talking about high quality content well sometimes less is often more so let's have a look at when we should be merging content will we tend to one of the main reasons we'll merge content is to avoid keyword cannibalization so if you have multiple Pages targeting the same keyword you might think that this will increase your odds of ranking for that keyword but really the opposite is true this is an example of keyword cannibalization um it's also confusing to search engines they won't know which page to rank or at least not not be confident which page to rank and it also has some consequences as well so you know one of Google's subalgorithms is Page rank um and Pages need page rank to rank um and also if you so what tends to happen with keyword cannibalization is some of the pages which are kind kind of considered redundant will receive page rank because they're being linked to internally they'll also have some craw budget allocated to them so this means that the more important pages will receive less attention so what does this mean for you well let's kind of have a look at when cannibalization happens so if you think of multiple URLs where they target the same keywords but also the same intent this is um keyword cannibalization so for example if you wanted to rank let's say for the keyword weight sensors um and you had two informational Pages for that keyword um then you'd kind of run into some problems and that that's an example so the key task or one of the key tasks as an SEO that you'll want to look out for essentially is this overlap so where you can see that there are multiple URLs um that do Target the same keywords with the same intent so what we're going to do now is we're just going to look at two ways that you can identify such Pages the first is using a pay tool and then we'll also look at a freeway as well so most premium pay tools will allow you to do this and we're just going to look at an example using semrush um so essentially the first thing you do is pop in your website's URL you then export your organic keywords let's say into a spreadsheet then in the keywords column so in this table that's the left column you'll sort it alphabetically um and then we'll be looking looking for the ranked URL which we can see in the fourth column and we can see there are two keyword a um and these are ra and there are pages that are different URL one and URL 2 so this this is an example potentially of keyword cannibalization so what we would want to do is we would want to review each of those rank Pages check whether the search intent is the same and if it is we'd want to ask ourselves do we want to consolidate these pages and merge them into one page or perhaps we just want to cut and delete one of the pages okay so if you are looking for a I guess a quick and easy way and a freeway what we can do is we can just hop on to Google we'll use the Google site command in um your website address so in this case we'll use uh one of Neils so we'll say site colon NPD digital.com and then we'll put the keyword in that we want to check to see if there's any um cannibalization issues so I'll put content order in quotes now what Google does is it suggests pages that it thinks are relevant uh for that keywords and it's our job then to check to see if the search intent is the same for that keyword if if it is potentially that that's that could be a candidate for cont merging now just one little bonus um for you guys here you may have noticed um if you've used this command before that Google has taken away um the number of results um count that it shows in Google but you can get that back you click on tools you will get the count of how many results there are okay so how do we um fit keyword cannibalization issues well the the answer is pretty simple it's content merging so let's imagine you have three pages that all target the same keyword and serve the same int intent well what you can do is you can review each page check to see whether there actually is some valuable content on each page and then if there is you can consolidate them all to the one single page so this will typically be the page that ranks the highest um if if possible you'll use that URL and then you'll read redirect the other URLs to that single page which has merged the content to make it a more comprehensive piece awesome so the next strategy we want to chat about is metatag AB testing and this is something that has been around for several years I know back in the day it was a little bit more difficult to do this effectively because there weren't as many tools out there to to create the same experience as you would in like a cro AB test where you can kind of uh diversify your traffic and show traffic a this headline traffic be that headline but there's a lot more stuff out there nowadays but let's first start off with what are meta tags just in case some individuals aren't familiar with all three versions of the meta tags so first you have your title tag this is one of the important ranking factors still to this day this helps search engines understand your content and it also helps capture user attention and interest when a user ends up on a Ser now your meta description is the piece of text that falls underneath that title tag now arguably over the last few years metad descriptions have lost their value as an actual ranking Factor so they don't directly affect rankings per se but they definitely help search engines and users understand what that page is about before they click and go to it so therefore it can impact your rankings through clickthrough rate the third factor of meta tags are meta keywords now these are these are objects that have been pretty much obsolete for at least a decade now they're still a part of a website's HTML structure so they still exist but they're not really ranking Factor they're not really a an area where you need to focus on optimizing that much I would definitely focus more on your title tags metad descriptions and even your header tags so what this means for you when it comes to AB testing so what we're talking about here is putting time and energy into creating effective meta titles and meta descriptions that will impact your rankings directly and indirectly so as you can see with the example at the Top This is a sort of bad badly optimized meta description and title tag as you can see here the title tag is truncated so you see American Heart Association recommendations for and then you see the dot dot dot so that shows you that it hasn't been optimized they're not paying attention to the pixel width they're not paying attention to uh certain keyword optimizations within that title tag and then you'll also notice that the meta description is also truncated and this is most likely because they didn't set a meta description so Google probably just indexed a few sentences on their own to try and at least put something there for the users so it's not just a blank space but below that what you can see is a well optimized title tag and meta description where you have keywords they've paid attention to the pixel width so nothing's being truncated and as you can see here the title tag reads workout routines database a thousand plus free workout plans and then within the meta description to determine if this is a page I would like to go to or not based on the context largest range of free workout routines available muscle building fat loss strength ABS women's fitness and more so as you can see these are two different examples of title tags and meta descriptions what you can do with this type of information is start figuring out ways to test different titles and descriptions for some of your key pages to see if you could start boosting not only your impressions but more your clicks so tools like search pilot can help you create these AB tests in a matter of minutes you want to focus on appealing to human readers not just search engines because at the end of the day what you're optimizing for is a human who's going to go to Google type in a query come upon the organic Blue Links and determine between you and somebody else around you so you want to make sure you're using compelling content you're using items that would make somebody want to come to your page and the most important part with this is sticking to your character limits like I said on the previous slide your title tags are anywhere between 50 to 65 characters and your meta descriptions are anywhere between 155 to 160 characters there are Surs that will kind of extend this a tiny bit but if you can stick to these two parameters more often than not your title tags and meta descriptions will not be truncated on the Ser okay so um yeah moving on to updating old content so as the name suggests this is really just modifying existing content now if we use an analogy of let's say a garden um you need to take regular care of it for it to stay vibrant and this is sort of similar with content you need to take care of it for your content to stay relevant um and you know for some keywords freshness is you know is particularly important as well so let's look at some statistics now and sadly for some reason when it comes to SEO we often take a set and forget approach um so if we look at this we've got 7.5 million blog posts are published each day yet only 38% of bloggers are updating old articles so there's definitely a mismatch there and I'd say there's a missed opportunity so if you think about the hours that it takes to create uh a blog post now it may only take you know half an hour to or maybe an hour to update that post but essentially you're nurturing your content to be more Evergreen and it's going to stand a better a better test of of time okay so I guess it's it's definitely a costly mistake if you're not updating your content um and you can get a massive organic um traffic boost as much as 106% by updating your content but here's a really surprising statistics I I was really surprised when um I came across this this is by um NP digital so when you look at the top organic ranking sites they spend over twice as much time updating content as opposed to creating new content so 31.1% creating new content and 68.9% updating content so my question to you guys is you know what proportion of your time do you spend creating new content and updating content okay so what should you do well you definitely want to be updating your content so at least once a year ideally every quarter um there's lots of cool tools out there like like uber suggest where essentially you can see what pages are ranking well on Google maybe Pages ranking on pages one on two on Google and then you can kind of review the search intent of those pages see how they align with the top rank pages and kind of look for any update that you can make that way some additional things you can do you might want to remove time references from blog posts for example you might want to make your content more visual Maybe videos images or or even uh infographics if you're doing keyword research then it's a good opportunity to work in new keywords maybe uh you know search demand has changed you might want to restructure content to make it easier to skim okay so yeah this is a a really interesting test that HR put together so I think the YouTube video came out about two months ago on the hr's uh YouTube channel and they went through um basically viral SEO video tips um on Tik Tok and actually the the only one that got proven to be a Success Through H's tips was actually from Neil and it was about updating content ENT so essentially um what they did is they jumped into Google search console they followed Neil's advice they compared the traffic in the last 28 days to the 28 days the previous year and then they did a filter by um click difference so essentially they were looking for the biggest losers in terms of clicks from the last month compared to the previous month so once they found um an article I think it was down about 20,000 clicks something like that um and what they found was within two weeks the the well they updated the content and within two weeks the the organic traffic had actually doubled and they'd moved from the second page in Google to the first page in Google so that's really is a quick win like if you're looking for one opportunity to really sort of try you know tomorrow review content that isn't performing as well now as it was say 12 months ago amazing so yeah let's chat about link building because this is still uh one of one of the top factors for Google I know there was the the big data breach that occurred a few weeks ago that had everybody in a buzz and it it was very surprising for a lot of us to see that although there have been so many algorithm updates over the past year about helpful content updates adding the extra e to the eat there there have been so many Focus points on content link building is still a really big ranking factor for Google because it still shows Google who's authoritative online but there's specific ways you have to go about it because they know people are gaming the system and they want to see different tactics within link building so here here here's the question everybody still has are links an SEO ranking factor and from Gary ises who is the search analyst from Google he mentioned I think they are important but I think people overestimate the importance of links I don't agree it is in the top three it hasn't been for some time but links still do matter and here's what Google says about links in relation to AI powered search so sge or the AI overview section of the C now places even more emphasis on producing informative responses that are cooperated by reliable sources and what that basically points to is you have a higher chance of showing up in the AI overview section not only if you were doing one of the best jobs of answering that query but also if that piece of content or that page or that blog or that video whatever it is that's answering the AI overview query if it has a good number of authoritative or corroborate or corroborated links pointing to it it's going to increase the chances of showing up in that AI overview section in 2024 sem Rush reported um all of their ranking signals they they tend to do this every year and what they discovered was pretty baffling like over eight of the top 20 ranking signals were related to backlinks in some way shape or form and what that shows us is that based out of all the other ranking factors that they tend to test over 40% are still related to Something in regards to backlinks so Authority is still a massive signal for Google so here's a quick example of some work that we did for one of our clients at MP digital this is for UTI Universal Technical Institute and the goal when they came to us was they wanted to reclaim a lot of their lost organic search visibility with the help of digital PR and content optimization so we partnered with you content team we iated we developed and launched over 200 new Local Pages with optimized schema markup that were rich with relevant imagery video embeds and other features that matched user intent for each query we also put a heavy emphasis on building them more local links and also doubling down on their citations because we knew that there was going to be a large aspect of local to this type of a campaign so the solution we put together is our digital PR team developed authority to the new pages with placements on Chamber of Commerce websites in local markets we've reached out to newspaper outlets and other local authoritative domains and we GED a total of over 400 citations or placements that went live all averaging 60 plus in domain authorities so as you could tell these were hyper local hyper authoritative websites that all had above a 60da Authority and based on those efforts over several months of work we helped them increase over 41% in year-over-year organic search sessions for new program expansion efforts we increased over 18% year-over-year after the previous year they saw a double- digigit loss and we also helped increase rankings in Google uh by over 982 additional rankings so that was uh up 20% year-over-year from the amount of new keywords they saw ranking within Google from the previous year so as you can tell based on this strategy we put together for you UTI it was not only a combination of helpful content great videos a lot of dynamic content but we help bolster it with that local Authority and those citations to help give it enough signals from Google that UTI was kind of turning the ship around so what you should do based on this information is continue to try your best to prioritize quality over quantity so a lot of people they may look at their competition through a tool like uber suggest or HRS or sem rush and they may realize wow my competitors have 20,000 backlinks how am I going to catch up to them let me just go buy 20,000 backlinks to match them and as you can see based on this scale if you start building a lot of irrelevant links non-authoritative links lowquality links it's not going to do you much good if anything it could hurt your rankings more than help them what you need to focus on is just double down on a few highly authoritative websites that are talking highly about your brand or your product or your service that are linking to you with purpose so their anchor text really does drive you to the right Pages or it leads people to the best possible experience that they can have on your website as opposed to just always going to your homepage so a pro tip that we have for you today is content helps build links but free tools actually help build links even faster and if you've been listening to Neil he's talked about this for years one of the best things he ever did was acquire Uber suggest and turn that into an asset that can help a lot of different brands start linking back to us because they're referencing or referring people to use this great tool so one of the best ways you can put this in to action today is you can go to code Canyon there's a lot of other types of websites that are uh competitors or similar to code Canyon but you can buy tools off of code Canyon that are fairly inexpensive and only need a little bit of tweaking or rebranding to turn them into an asset for your brand or you can even use chat GPT to help you create your own custom gpts that's another way to be found and to be linked to in today's day and age okay so um yeah let's let's move on to creating a great ux so a great user experience now um if you've been following SEO you you probably he about the Google algorithm leak that happened earlier in the year so it's the first time that we really got our hands on um how Google's algorithm worked now it's not completely been proven as definitive um that it that it is a leak from Google but many believe it is and the one thing that kind of jumped out at me which many seos believed was happening for years is that user interactions within search results really do matter so if we think about good ux um essentially what Google is looking at is looking for signals that when someone visits your page they are getting closer or hopefully you are satisfying that search and intent so they're going to be sticking around on your page for a while they might click on to other Pages they might not even return back to Google search results or they return back a little bit later so we that length of time we we we call it dwell time now bad ux is kind of the opposite like they've actually just Pogo Pogo um Pogo sticked from your page back to the search results um and again Google is using these signals to kind of work out whether the content that you're delivering is actually helping satisfy what the user is actually after Okay so let's look at some factors that affect ux so page speed is an obvious one the faster a page loads particularly on mobile that's going to have a good uh user experience so you can hop on to um pay speed insights check out what your core web vital metrics are and hopefully um optimize those to improve your page speed um one thing I found works really well um particularly for cor web vitals is is delaying or defer in JavaScript if you can do that um site architecture and navigation now I'm sure you've um been on a website where you know maybe the content was quite interesting but the navigation was just really poor and you couldn't find related content so that's a an example of bad us um when it comes to layout and design um you know if you like Simplicity and and beautiful sites then you probably would like the experience on an an apple site or a Rel or a similar site so think about you know think about your target audience whether it should be professional and getting a really good design when it comes to content structure and quality um well Google has a you know it search quality RoR guidelines document over 150 Pages where they educate you essentially what they're looking for when it comes to Quality um you know a little bit of a dry read to get to go through that all but there are lots of tips in there you know Neil mentioned um eat earlier you know expertise uh experience authoritativeness and trustworthiness um also there's needs met are you satisfying the needs of your users Google's been mobile first for quite a while now um I think that roll out has finished um relatively recently although it started several years ago but again you'd be surprised how often people don't look at their own websites on a mobile phone maybe they'll look at the homepage but perhaps the contact page doesn't render very well or perhaps you know blog posts are slightly um off sync now when it comes to accessibility now there are standards some standards are very strict but there are some basic standards that we should all be following you know adding alt text to images like it does add a little bit of relevancy to the page for SEO but there are people who are visually impaired and they rely on this alt text when they are you know following screen readers so what else can you do well I would say the number one thing that you can do for user experience is to fulfill the search intent and when we think of ux we tend to think of the ux of what's happening on your content on your pages but really when we're fulfilling the search intent we have to think of the complete ux from Google search results and these are Google's users to your web pages and rather than thinking of how can we convert them into leads and sales the first step is should be how can we fulfill the search intent um and then secondary you know how can we actually convert them into conversions and sales now there are lots of tools out there as well that can help you improve the user experience um you know with with with the help of tools like crazy crazy egg so you know you may be looking at heat maps and you know that's something that you can kind of set a goal what is the conversion what is the thing that you want people to do and then look at heat maps and various features to see if it's driving you towards that goal all right keyword research this is one that has obviously stood the test of time it's the foundation of search engines it's how people search so let's figure out what we could do from a keyword perspective so keywords Remain the missing link between inquiry and content and you need to start leveraging Tools in in different banners because there's so many different tools out there nowadays obviously we've talked about the SEO tools like uber suest SC Rush uh HRS but you also have tools like answer the public and others that can help you really understand um the connection between different keywords different queries different objects and what you want to start focusing on is just begin with indicating what the user's intent may be so when you think about your brand your product your service really dive into your customer personas and understand what are the pain points that they're facing what are the questions that they may have most frequently and that can start helping you understand what what what background are they coming from what is going to be their intent when they come to Google you want to make sure you're reaching the Right audience based on that type of information and once you understand that you can start targeting the right keywords that will help you drive the right traffic so search volume isn't everything and what that basically means is that you're going to find that a lot of keywords that are less competitive they have less traffic but they are easier to rank for and what we've also noticed after running campaigns for over a decade over thousands and thousands of campaigns is that when you start to Target longtail low competitive but also low search volume keywords is that your conversion rates may start to increase over time because if somebody's spending the time to type in this long query they're really feeling some sort of a paino and they're pretty close to probably converting they're probably at that bottom area of the funnel so what you want to focus on here is question based searches you also want to blend in some newer searches and over time what you're going to notice is that your your impressions are going to start to increase your clicks are going to start to increase and your conversion rates are going to start increase and I think for a lot of us we're focused on that Roi we're focused on that conversion and by bringing more of the right type of traffic to our websites it's going to hit your bottom dollar a whole lot better so as I said here what you should be focusing on in years past and still to this day are longtail keywords it's what's going to help separate you from some of the biggest competitors that are in your space I mean if you're in the Ecom space it's almost unavoidable to go up against Amazon or even Walmart nowadays now that Walmart also has a Marketplace but what you can do to circumvent some of that is go after longer tail keywords and as you can see on the chart here to the right it's breaking down SEO traffic by keyword length and what you'll notice is that there is kind of a bell curve here where three to six words in a query seems to generate by far the most amount of traffic coming in at around 57% so the pro tip that we want to give I was mentioning before answer the public you can scan this QR code right here it'll take you straight to the answer the public website you can get started within a matter of minutes on better understanding the strings and the relationships between different questions different queries different ways that people may be searching for topics within your space so use answer to the public to find these longtail queries and questions that your audience is interested in and start building content around it or going back to some of our first tips go back and refresh or prune content that may be either targeting or not targeting some of these phrases that you may find on answer the public okay so um let's move on to making SEO work for you so let's start with growing a Blog with SEO now it's kind of like a a Time proven Evergreen strategy um and it's it's a great way to improve your SEO so a Blog increases your chances of ranking higher in search by 434 per according to opin monster yet 15.72% of online marketers describe content creation as their most effective SEO Tac te so the one thing that I would say that follows on from what Matt was discussing with long tail keywords is that a Blog lends itself very well to longtail keywords if we think of longtail keywords they maybe account for I don't know 70% of all keywords but yet most businesses tend to start by targeting transactional content so they're missing out on a a real big group of keywords um now another thing that's really really quite cool with blogs as well is they tend to be um they tend to be a little bit less biased a little less salesy so they earn backlinks um and they earn trust from search engines and customers okay but we do know that you know blogs are hyperco competitive there are 600 million of them um you know this is a stat from Master blogging in 2023 but what we can say is that informational keywords and longtail keywords which blogs are very good at targeting they tend to be less competitive when compared to transactional keywords so there are opportunities there as well okay so how can you stand how can you get your blog to stand out well focus on quality over quantity if we look if we remember when we at the start of the this presentation one of the uh things I mentioned was Neil cut back um 12% of his his content on his blog and in doing so he was focusing more on quality over Quant quantity you know Google has a search quality rers guidelines which is over 150 Pages where they run through how you can do that how you can focus on quality over quantity um 34% of bloggers say that updating content produces strong results um so update old blog articles now it's it's easy to get in the habit of what are we going to be doing that's new this month or what are we going to be doing that's new that we haven't done before but you know as we as we looked at earlier from you know from a HR perspective they spent I don't know maybe they spent an hour or two updating an old blog post and you know they double their traffic okay so what else can you do well you'll obviously want to start with a really strong um headline um but after you know you have an engaging headline or or even even just talking a little bit more about the headline like you'll want to study people who are very good at blogging like Neil's had a lot of success in this field so what type of headlines are working for Neil or maybe there's someone in your industry that's very good at blogging there are there might be formulas or structures that they're using are those formulas or structures that you could use but when it actually comes to the the the body of the content now that introduction you know it's it's it is your chance to hook the reader in it needs to Peak their interests maybe you ask a question maybe you come up with something that's controversial um but in terms of the heading usually there is some kind of Promise in that heading and your your use of subheadings can help deliver on that promise so think about how you use your subheadings great if you can include keywords but how can you deliver on the promise and when it comes to the end of blog posts um you know you might want to wrap up with a conclusion maybe there's a question you want to ask your audience or maybe there's a specific call to action CTA maybe it's as simple as asking to leave a comment or maybe there's an exercise that you could lead the reader to now if you have comments turned on it's a great way to you know to respond to them as quickly as possible you'll be building your community um it will increase people coming back and checking out your blog and you know maybe you could piggy back on trending topics so if you're in the SEO world and you know maybe there's been another algorithm leak about Google in the future if you piggyback on that um you know when when it comes out and you add a really interesting New Angle to it then it's probably going to do well on social media is probably going to do well on SEO so it's a good thing to do for your blog and of course when you when you finish your blog post your your job isn't done there you'll want to think about how you can promote your post you know whether it's an email newsletter on social media or if it's a particularly really good post you might want to see who you know on social media maybe there's influencers who can you can kind of pre-tell them about the content that you're that you've created yeah so let's pick up the Baton on social media and figure out how social media to this day impacts SEO so as we all can tell based on some of the stats that Neil was showing at the beginning and also just understanding our own behaviors as they've changed over the years as Tik Tok Instagram more of these social media platforms have started to include uh more search behavioral type of features and also the Advent of Chachi BT and AI Bots it's really just changed the landscape of how we search and what we perceive a search engine to be so based on Neiman lab they did a study and they determined that almost 40% of gen Z is using Tik Tok and Instagram for search instead of Google and now a lot of that could be skewed could not be skewed I think a lot of those searches may be related to local but there's a lot of other ways that gen Z is finding their information and what we can see here is based on the year 2000 versus this year in 2024 you'll see how search engines have kind of lost some of that market share when it comes to finding the answer you're looking for you'll see back in the year 2000 over 98% were using search engines as opposed to this year only about 61% but then you'll see the the adverse when it comes to social media and AI chat bots so back in the year 2000 I mean the only social media platform we had back then was maybe my space um and that definitely wasn't a search engine so you had around 1% of people using social media as a search engine tool where now about 177% of the population is using it and then AI chat Bots with the explosion of GPT about a year and a half to two years ago that's now taken about 30% of the market share so the search Trends are definitely changing but organic social media reach is still a challenge for people because there's a level of authenticity there's a level of consistency there's just a lot that needs to go into social media to really make it work as a channel for your brand organic social media traffic on average is declining by almost 2% per quarter 73% of social media views and engagements happen within the first 24 hours so you really have to be on top of your game and consistently publishing content because as you can see here 73% of the traffic you're going to receive is going to come in that first 24 hours and after that it's really going to tail off 98% of posts saw only a few or no more views and reach after 48 hours so there's one big difference with the 2% of the posts that continuously got traffic and Views some even 30 days after the content was published so as we can see based on the previous slide most of the content that's produced on social media on YouTube after 28 24 to 48 hours you're not really going to see much more traction on it but there is something that you can work on that'll help start to bring that traffic to your content so the first thing is trying to Target topics and create content around Evergreen Information the second thing is the content that was produced that was on popular topics at that moment so if you know SEO you have a huge advantage on social media marketing because these are the same typ types of tactics we've been using on blog posts on creating content on your website your web copy your product descriptions you always want to focus on Evergreen topics within your industry and you always want to have these periodic drop-ins of popular topics based on things that may be going on in the real world so applying some of those same tactics to not only your SEO campaigns but also your social media campaigns can really prove to be beneficial and you also want to make sure that you're taking advantage of platform tools so over the years you've seen Google YouTube Tik Tok meta Instagram invest a lot of money into creating like insights or analytic platforms within their business side of their social media platform so make sure you're spending time just digging around in there you can get ideas on popular topics that are trending right now that you could start creating content around you can get ideas of different types of C categories or groups that you could be joining you can see analytic Trends you can even see exact videos or use templates that other people may be using so make sure you're taking advantage of these and one of the biggest things we want to emphasize here is the focus that we've seen on low Fidelity or lowii content and what lowii basically means is rather than going high-fi which is like high resolution high production lots of money invested into that type of video or content lowii seems to generate over 34% more likes and 18.5% more comments on average and I think that goes back to just the authenticity that people are looking for in social media nowadays so more of your DIY videos more of those types of homegrown homemade types of content seem to perform a lot better on Google or on social media so leverage social media across all stages of the funnel So within the top of the funnel you want to make sure you're focusing on posting short form videos that are educating people on industry products and services within the middle of the funnel you want to make sure that you're creating educational content that also mentions your products and services or different aspects of your brand create dedicated content pieces around specific issues that may be occurring in a timely manner and promote your webinars and ebooks or any other forms of content marketing that you may be producing and then at the bottom of the funnel you want to make sure you're going live and pitching your product ideally in an educational way and you're creating content that sells without being pushing so Matt let's skip the key takeaway slide because I know we're running out of time and let's get into questions we do have another webinar coming up you can register for that by just scanning the QR code it's called search engine rewind 2024 where we pretty much break down everything that's happening what's the future is looking like let's go next slide and if you want help with your SEO just in General you can scan the QR code or just go to NPD digital.com where we can help you with your SEO whether it's on Google getting chat GPT to recommend your products services or even Tik Tok or any other platform out there so let's dive into some questions all right hello everyone Colin here from Neil's marketing team good stuff everyone um we're running low on time and there's lots of questions I'm going to pick some of the ones that um multiple people were asking and Matt maybe Neil all um a lot of questions around blog refreshing um I need some clarity on the old blog posts are you saying that we simply update the existing blog post by editing and adding to it or do you mean that we publish a new blog post with the same content reworked so can just and then there were questions about um the date and time stamp like do we leave the original date stamp and then say below that you know edited on certain date Etc um so Matt maybe you can elaborate on on some of those questions because I think you spoke to that no for sure so it it it all depends on the type of content you're targeting right so if we're talking about an Evergreen Post then I would recommend leaving the live URL the same do not create a new page and then redirect the old URL to the new URL like you still want to keep as much Authority from that original URL active and that URL is already indexed so don't mess around with that aspect but definitely go through and update that content based on several factors are there any piece of information that are just completely outdated nowadays even though it's Evergreen content are there maybe tactics or comments or price points or products that have just changed over time maybe Technology's improved so you want to kind of update some of that or maybe a new area of focus has come about or new statistics come about so go ahead and maybe trim some of those sentences down and start adding fresh new information based on what may be occurring in your industry now when it comes to uh timestamps and things like that I mean I've seen a lot of different iterations I've seen blogs that have done it really well by just uh kind of removing the old time stamp and putting the new one there I've seen them do the opposite where they leave the old one and show the new edited timestamp to show their audience and also really show Google that they're taking the time and periodically coming back to this content and updating it so I think that one's more of a preference there I don't know Neil do do you have a differing view on the time stamp yeah I've done quite a bit of test on the time samp stuff I don't know if you have Joe either but uh I haven't really seen any increase or decrease by you know in in most cases when you update the content you're updating the time samp as well but whether it's updating the time stamp or leaving the own old time stamp but then putting on the content updated at this day we haven't seen too much of a change Google's pretty sophisticated they know when a page is being updated or not the funny thing is when it comes to updating content some people try to play games where they just update it too frequently and they're just updating a sentence or here that doesn't really do anything you actually need to make the content better if you're going to update it if you can make the content better just don't waste your time updating it and don't obsess too much about worrying about about things like the time stamp awesome thank you so much and I think it's also important to know you know we're not just talking about refreshing words I I think you really need to understand you know who's ranking for the terms that you're really going after and sometimes it's maybe reformatting as well so less words and more imagery based on the query so there's a lot that goes into that for sure um another big one that we kept getting um and maybe this is everybody how does Google determine if content is helpful I don't know if we can just elaborate a little bit more on eat because I think at the end of the day that's that's what we're talking about but multiple folks um ask that same question um could maybe start with Neil and then go to Matt sure so the the the biggest thing to know is Google testified this in some legal case or Court they said we don't truly understand documents or I'm paraphrasing here we don't understand documents we fake it um they're looking at a lot of user signals time onite balance R keep people clicking the back button it's a lot of factors like that versus them actually being able to comprehend the page um you know things like are people linking to it are they sharing are they leaving comments like all these things give them signals on if people find find a page helpful or not yeah I would also add that obviously Google is indexing if you just give one specific industry right like let's just say HVAC and if Google is indexing thousands of different websites in the HVAC space and they're noticing Trends between all of them that they're all mentioning something very similar when it comes to like your furnace system and if you are a website that's saying something that's opposite or different it it's going to see that either you're not knowledgeable or you're trying to gain the system so kind of identifying strings between multiple Brands and them over time understanding and kind of Google gaining its own expertise on a topic that's another way that they can help understand like okay in the industry this is common practice this is common knowledge uh by indexing all those websites over time the other thing I would add to that too is just like the expertise Factor right so if you have any sort of accreditation master's degree um PhD in certain spaces if you have certifications or anything like that um that can also help Point Google towards the fact that you are an expert you did receive some higher level of education on this topic and if you find creative ways to weave that into your your actual content that'll help I know I know author pages and bio Pages have kind of been devalued over the years but they can still prove to be helpful in some capacity but obviously it's it's the words you're bringing into that content that helps build the expertise awesome thank you Matt and Joe maybe these ones are for you there were um or matter or anybody there were a couple questions when we got into the meta tag section uh should my title tag and my blog page title be the same or different thoughts there and then there was a followup what's your view on using a call to action within the meta description given the limited character space that we have and any thoughts there before we wrap um yeah so I think um in terms of the main heading of the page so I guess the main title of the blog post should it be the same as the actual title tag well you you typically want them to be different particularly if you have done keyword research so your your meta title tag it tends to be a little bit more keyword driven whereas your main heading for the Post tends to be a bit more engaging M driven so the two can be the same and and often are if you haven't really done keyword research but I would say you know if you have done the researched and it it usually does pay to make them different um in terms of a call to action in the The Meta description you certainly you certainly can do that but I'd be careful not to make it too strong the call to action because it might just look like a Google ads um where they tend to have stronger call to actions good good point everyone appreciate the time I know we're running late on it appreciate you guys staying uh if you ever need any help check us out at NPD digital.com um DMI also has some amazing courses on marketing in general and great education check them out as well it's a great resource we appreciate you guys staying uh I know we ran 11 minutes late um but thank you for being here take care everyone have a good one bye all thanks so much happy fourth my name is Neil Patel and I help companies generate more Revenue through digital marketing Entrepreneur magazine said I was the number one marketer in the world and they also said I created one of the 100 most brilliant companies I started my first website at the age of 16 I took all the money that I earned from working at amusement park and I paid a marketing firm the marketing firm provided no results and I quickly learned that I wasn't alone out of my frustration and from being broke I had no choice but to learn marketing my first client was a power supply manufacturer I helped him generate another $25 million in sales and from that point I realized the power of marketing I helped everyone that I could and I built my reputation by being honest and overd delivering I've helped companies like Google NBC biocom General Motors eBay but nothing's more satisfying than helping small business owners succeed I found a four multimillion doll companies and I've learned all the mistakes that you should avoid I've written about them on Forbes entrepreneur Inc Fast Company and even on my own blogs it's so awesome to know that colleges from all around the world are teaching my material in their classroom over the years I've received awards from the president of the United States the House of Representatives and the United Nations people believe marketing is expensive and difficult fortunately that's not true there is a Formula even if you don't have a technical bone in your body you can get results and my mission is to share this formula with you [Music]