Free SEO Training Course (7 Tips for Ranking #1 in Google)
So before I show you
Easy SEO win number one, I actually need to show you
Easy SEO Win number zero. And this is what I call optimizing the bare bones essentials. And what that means is you need to optimize your website loading speed and your mobile experience, and you need to make sure that you have an SSL
certificate installed. These three things are foundational for your SEO performance. So the easiest way to optimize
your site loading speed is just to go to page speed insights, go to Pingdom and go to GT metrics, and you can benchmark your
current site loading speed and then use these tools and the recommendations that they give to improve your site loading speed. Now the good news is any actions you take to improve your site loading speed will also usually improve your
mobile experience as well. But if you're on WordPress, you can really streamline
this whole process just by using a lightweight
theme, like GeneratePress. And then you combine
that with the AMP plugin and then you make your
website 100% AMP friendly.
You will get extremely high scores on Google's page speed and
insights and the Lighthouse tool. And once again, if you're on WordPress, if you want to make sure that your SSL certificate
is working correctly I recommend using Simple SSL. And the key here is just to make sure that all of your non-secure
URLs are redirecting to the secured versions. So once again here's how you optimize for
the barebones essentials. Number one, optimize your
website loading speed. Try to get that below three seconds. Number two, optimize
your mobile experience, and then number three, make sure you have an
SSL certificate installed and make sure that it's 301 redirecting
all the non-secure URLs to the secured URLs. So now let's move on to
Easy SEO Win number one which is to optimize for E-A-T, which stands for expertise,
authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
So any industry that falls under YMYL which stands for your money or your life, these are the industries that Google has put under the microscope. So if you're in one of these industries which is going to be in the
health industry or the finance or any industry where the
content could negatively impact a person's life,
you need to make sure that that content is reliable, accurate and created by subject matter expert or at least reviewed by
subject matter expert. So let me show you an example. So this example is for the keto diet which I just ran through ahrefs and I wanted to do one that
was really competitive. And one that was actually in your money or your life industry. So we're going to go and look at a few of these results here. So the first result is
health line, which is- this is the website that I recommend everyone tries to model because they're really
doing it the right way.
So when we look at it, you'll
see right away, we know that this content was created
by a subject matter expert because they put it above the fold, they make it apparent. But when we click on this it's going to take us
to the nutrition team, and then we'll see all the
people who write their content, all people who are qualified
experts, you know, PhD, they have all these
different qualifications. Some of them link out to
their social profiles. So this is the type of thing that I recommend
you do in your vertical. And also the other part that's really cool not only is it written
by subject matter expert but it's actually reviewed by
another subject matter expert just to make sure that this
information is accurate.
So if you just get those things right, get a nice author bio that's
above the fold, you can of course be at the bottom, get
some individual author pages and make sure that your
content is being written or at least fact-checked
by a subject matter expert. So then after that, just
make sure you link out to really high quality sources and make sure you always
cite any website where you've actually gathered information from. Okay, so now let's move on
to Easy SEO Win number two which is the optimize
for low hanging fruits. So it's going to Atreus and
enter your target domain. And then what you're going
to do is you're actually going to go to organic key words. And then from here, you're
going to need to make decisions based on how strong your website is. So in this case, Healthline
is incredibly powerful. So I'm not really going to
set a KT metric because I know that they can probably
improve their performance for these individual keywords.
But if I was working
with a brand new website or a website that had lower authority, then we probably want to set
this to something like 10. And What this is going
to do is going to show us all the keywords that are
actually much lower competition which then means if
they're lower competition, they'll be easier to push up with just some base level optimization and maybe some link acquisition. So ultimately let's say we wanted to improve our search position
for this keyword here, loofa. And in most cases you don't really want to be targeting head keywords like this because they're very
difficult to rank for, and also the search intent
behind head keywords is much more ambiguous and
difficult to understand but in this case,
Healthline is so powerful that they could probably
push their position up to number, you know, in
the top three, at least.
So we'll go and look at the
page itself and we'll go ahead and just see how often
they mentioned loofa. And it looks like they
mentioned it pretty well. And they actually
mentioned it really well. It's all over the place. And in fact, maybe it's a little over optimized given how
long the actual piece of content is. So one thing I would
probably try to see is, the overall density seems a little high so maybe I could mess around
either decreasing the density by increasing the word count,
or just decreasing the density without even touching the word
count, just changing these to some sort of synonyms or
something that's relevant. So one thing you can do is
actually we'll just go and look inside ahrefs and we'll
look for some synonyms that could probably maybe
improve this a little bit more, but ultimately one thing you can do to actually drive more traffic to the page itself, isn't just to- obviously you can mess
around with density, but one thing you can do is you can look at this question section here and use this as the basis for adding
more sections to the content which then could allow you to
decrease the overall density.
So usually in most cases, if a page isn't ranking
where it needs to be, it's sitting around number
six, I'm going to mess around with the density or I'm going
to increase the word count and see if that's what pushes it up. I'm going to add new sections to it. So if we look at how to grow, well, maybe not how to grow up,
let's look at how to use, we'll see if they have that in here. And they don't. So that would be a subsection
that we would want to use because it looks like it doesn't look like they have actually
talked about that at all.
So this would be a really
good section to add. They talk about everything else but they don't talk about
how to actually use a loofa which might be a weird topic overall, but it would be a good section to add. So ultimately, what I'm looking
for are new sections to add to push this page up
further, by making it deeper and more comprehensive
than the competitors. And you know one thing some people
might tell you to do is to take this keyword
and put it into surfer. But the problem is when you're ranking on the first page already, you don't want to just emulate the results that are already ranking around you, you want to beat the results
that are ranking around you. So you need to figure out a way to differentiate your content and make your content either deeper or better so that you can
actually outperform them.
So once you've hit the first page, surfer isn't really going to
be super effective for you. That's when the real creativity comes out you need to really think about how you're going to beat them, and the best way is to
just look at the data, look at what already exists. Ahrefs is telling you this is what people are searching, so make sure you have all
these sections in your content, if you don't make sure you do it. And it looks like there's
a million examples here that we could go after, some
of these have different intense but still we would be looking about how to make this content
much deeper than it is.
And then if you've done
everything you can, basically this content has been maxed out as far as the level of depth and as far as the overall
optimization, a few things I would consider is maybe adding
some other types of media. So we could add video content here to improve this content even further, to upgrade it even more. Or I would think about how I'm going to acquire more links to this content. That's the second thing. And then lastly, the third thing and I'm going to be talking about soon but is we would want to look at these terms that
say, having same terms, which these are just
terms that are relevant to the primary topic and
see, are there any new pieces of content that we can create that can support this piece of content? So this content is generally
about Loofah Sponges, it's a general piece of
content about this topic but maybe it might be
worth creating a piece of content around loofah plants because that isn't competing
with this piece of content, it's actually supporting the general topic of loofah and we're
building topical relevance.
And the more topical
relevance we can build around that primary topic the better it will
perform across the board. So now let's move on to
Easy SEO Win number three which is to use the
authority transfer technique. So then just go into
ahrefs and all you need to do is actually just go into
the best buy links section. And then from all you need to do is export this list of URLs, and these are now going to be
your internal linking targets. And the reason is because all of these URLs are the most
powerful URLs on the website.
So if you're trying to
improve the performance of any individual page, you'd want to put internal
links on these pages because these are the pages
that would drive a lot of authority and a lot of link
equity to that target page. So of course the pages need to be relevant to whatever you're trying
to internally link to, but these should always be the
targets that you prioritize over other internal link targets. Now, if you are building topical relevance then it's okay to be linking between different pages that
don't have a ton of authority. There's nothing wrong with that, but when you're thinking
about how you're going to start building better
internal links and trying to get more internal link coverage, you should always always prioritize pages that have existing backlinks because these will give you
the greatest boost overall.
And I can't express this enough, just by adding internal links to some of these super high authority pages, you can see instant improvements in your rankings without
even needing links. And this makes sense because
these pages have links, so you're really just
distributing a portion of that link equity to
the page on your website. Now you may not be
getting all the strength because of the links that are
directly hitting this URL, but you're at least
getting a high percentage of it to those other pages.
So, highly highly recommend you use the authority transfer technique. Look for high authority pages and add internal links to other pages. And now let's move on to
Easy SEO Win number four which is to leverage
featured snippet jacking. So to give you an example, let's go ahead and look at this keyword which is how to get 4,000
watch hours on YouTube. And this is going to be kind of cool, cause I'm going to show you an example of when search volume is
not very accurate at all. So we look at this, this
only gets about 20 searches per month, apparently according to ahrefs. Now, whether that is
true or not, the only way we actually know if this is
true or not is to actually rank for it and see the
performance of that page. And I can tell you more often than not, sometimes you have to follow
your gut about keywords.
And in this case, I definitely
followed my gut about it, and I knew that there were definitely
more people searching this than what we're showing here. So we went ahead and tried
to target this keyword. And at the time it had
a featured snippet here, and it's saying that has a
featured snippet showing YouTube. But normally what will happen is when we see a featured snippet we take the exact word
count that's showing for the featured snippet, and then we create the same
exact word count on our website, and we put it at the top
of the content typically.
Now in this case you'll see that when we go and
look at the performance. So when you look up how to get
4,000 watch hours on YouTube you'll find Gotch SEO, at
least where I'm searching from maybe where you're
searching from it's not the same, but right now, typically we are here. There are some other ones
where we're also ranking, but in this example if I was trying to steal this
feature snippet from myself, I would just look at exactly
the way this is structured here in this featured snippet, and I would create it exactly
the same way on my content. Obviously make it different. It would need to have a different angle, but overall, the general structure of this particular
featured snippet is what I would try to emulate on my website.
So that would come down to the code, the type of heading tags that we're using and even the amount of
the line items here. So what's really cool is we see this only as 20 search volume and
it's super easy to rank for. Well it was easy to rank for,
but the volume is way off. So when we look at this
in the past three months you'll see that this has been
a really, really great page for driving clicks in
Google Search Console. So according to ahrefs, this
only gets 20 searches a month but according to Google Search
Console in the last 28 days we've gotten 132,000
impressions on our page. And this is just insanity. And over three, nearly 4,000
clicks in only 28 days. So you see there's a
huge discrepancy here. So that's why you can't
always trust search volume because there is so much untapped
potential in any industry, even a competitive industry like the SEO industry or
the YouTube SEO industry.
There's so much untapped potential, and also, you need to get out of the mindset of just ranking
for one exact keyword phrase because you look at
this, I am ranking well for that one exact keyword
phrase, and it is driving a lot of traffic and clicks,
but it's actually all of the other variations of
that keyword that's driving the majority of the clicks for this page. So the main takeaway here is that we need to try to
steal these featured snippets because it works really, really well. And people say, "Oh well, you don't want to rank
in featured snippets." Well, that's kind of true because of the CTR is much
lower, only around 3%. And you compare that to any
other result, it'd be higher but still 3% is still pretty high, and you can tell, it still drives a lot of traffic.
So what you want to do, let's say you wanted to steal this
featured snippet from me, which I hope you don't do, but, if we go and look at it
and actually we'll go back, open this up and I just hurt
my engagement there probably. But we'll go ahead and
look and we'll see that, and we'll see what Google is polling. So right here, it looks like Google is polling
this particular line here. And this isn't even a heading tag at all, this is actually just a
straight paragraph tag. So you never know sometimes
the way Google shows these featured snippets
is always different and they're always picking
them in different ways.
So the best thing to do is just model what Google is showing. So in this case, it looks
like just a paragraph, so I would create a paragraph myself, and then let's look at what type of heading
were you using here. So we are using a h3 tag,
which is fascinating. So we'll go ahead and see what the h2 tag is
in this particular scenario. It looks like the only h2 tag we have here is what happens when you get
4,000 watch hours on YouTube which is in the form of a question. So, the difficult thing about featured snippets is
you can model this perfectly, and model this to the exact extent, but you also need to model the
stuff that's around it too. So it's probably the overall structure of this page that has led to me getting the featured snippet. So you do want to try to
model the overall structure. But like I said, the goal
isn't to copy the content, the goal is just to model the
structure on a code level, and a heading level and a paragraph level.
So that's all you need to do. You just need to model what's here, do it down to the T, the exact
words, the exact structure. And typically you can steal it
if you have enough authority. And the other thing you can do if you don't have enough authority is you can build more topical relevance. So you'll see that if we
look at this, this page here, we've built a lot of topical
relevance from other pages too.
So how long does it take
to get 4,000 watch hours on YouTube is another interesting
keyword that we have here. So this page actually
supports this primary page. And once again I believe we stole the featured
snippet for this one too. So if we go and look, we are
the featured snippet here. So actually for this one,
what it used to be used to be, I believe vidIQ used to
be ranking for this one. But what we did is we took
the same exact word count that they had here.
So you can just go maybe into Hemingway editor here, throw it in, and then we see that it has 52 words. So if I was trying to rank for this I would just write my own featured snippet that was 52 words, and then I would put it
right here at the top because I want Google
to give me this result and I want to give them the
information as fast as possible. One thing I noticed originally with the competitor that was ranking for this featured snippet, they had the snippet all
the way down and, you know, at the bottom of their page and instead we wanted to
put it right at the top. So we could obviously
prioritize that information for Google, so you could take it and put it into the search results. So the main takeaway here is to just model what Google is showing. It's showing you exactly what it wants, so just model it and try to
steal that featured snippet, and if your website doesn't
have a ton of authority then you can eventually steal it once you get more authority
by building more links and by building more topical relevance.
Okay. So now let's move on
to Easy SEO Win number five which is to hack freshness. Believe it or not, this tip is very, very simple. All they need to do is go
to any page on your website, and if it is a time
dependent piece of content, you should always add the
year or even the month if you want to get more granular.
And that will actually give
you so much more traffic for people that are searching stuff that's in the current year. So just in the last 12
months alone keywords where I've added the year to it. So 2020 or pages where I've added 2020 you can see that it's
actually driven through over 3000 clicks and over
86,000 impressions just from having 2020 in the title
or somewhere on the page. So you look at this, it's pretty
insane to think about that. All of this content. It's pretty insane to think about that all of these keywords, I probably wouldn't be ranking for if I just didn't have 2020. So you wouldn't believe
how much traffic people are missing out on by not making their
content time dependent. So the one thing that's important is, when you do decide to make
your content time dependent and you want to add 2020
or 2021 or whatever, you need to first make the content better, and then once you've
made the content better you update a little bit,
just update the publish date and make sure you put the year in the title and
somewhere in the copy too.
So we'll go and look at
this key word and you'll see that I actually don't even
have the featured snippet for this key word, but because I have 2020 in it, I'm doing substantially better. So if we remove 2020 you'll see that the results
changed dramatically. Now, of course I'm still ranking pretty well
here for SEO audit checklist but still it's a different set of results when you have 2020 in there,
it changes the whole dynamic. So you should always use
years if you can, or some sort of time dependent metric to
get more traffic to your pages. And the thing is I wouldn't
probably be ranking, I wouldn't be getting as much traffic to this page if I didn't have 2020 in it. So all you need to really do
is add it to your title tag and then add it probably to
the h1 tag on the page two.
That's my recommendation. You don't have to get that extreme, you can of course test
it, but this is literally the easiest way to drive
more traffic to any page. Okay, so now let's move on
to Easy SEO Win number six which is to build more topical relevance. So now this chart that you're looking at is everything that contains
YouTube on my website. And I decided a few months ago, or at least in the middle
of this year that I wanted to go after more YouTube
related search terms. So I decided I was going to
create more YouTube clusters and I wasn't just going to
create one super strong piece of YouTube content, I wanted to create many pieces of content that will support each other and build a ton of topical relevance. And to say that it has worked
would be an understatement it's worked really, really well, and what I've done just
to show you is we'll look at these pages, and I've just targeted keywords
that are hyper relevant to each other, without
competing against each other.
That's the most important part, you do not want the pages to
be competing against each other for the same keywords, you want every page to
have its own intent, targeting its own different keywords. So when we look at this you know how to get 4,000
watch hours on YouTube. This one is how to get 1000
subscribers on YouTube. So these are totally different intents, very similar topic, but different intent.
Then we look at this
one, which is how long does it take to get 4,000
watch hours on YouTube? You can see that these pages
are all radically different. And then this one is best
video format for YouTube, YouTube end screen templates. And then these down here,
actually iMovie vidIQ, these are actually about
tools that are used for video creation or YouTube. So you can see that they're
still topically relevant to these primary topics.
So my next part of my
process would probably to create a long form piece
of content about YouTube SEO but it will be much easier for me to rank for YouTube SEO now because
I have all of these pieces of content that would
support that primary topic. So this is the power
of content clustering. So whenever you want to
go after a general topic you should look for all of the opportunities that
support that primary topic.
And you can either create that mother asset right
away targeting, you know, let's say YouTube SEO,
you create that right away and then create the supporting assets. Or you can go in reverse, like I have, I created
all the supporting pieces of content first because
they're lower competition, and I wanted to dominate for those and show Google that I'm an
expert on this particular topic. And there'll be able to measure that based on how users are interacting
with the content. So if they're going to these pages and they're
consuming the content, they're staying long dwell times, they're sharing it, they're
bookmarking it, you know, all those good user
metrics, it's telling Google that my website is an
authority on this topic. And therefore when I go to target the more competitive phrases I have a higher probability
of performing better for them.
So as I mentioned before, all you need to do is
you just need to go right in to ahref and put whatever
your primary topic is in here. And I went a little more
specific YouTube SEO but oftentimes I'll usually
just do YouTube like this and then I'll go to phrase match, and then I'll go to make
sure that it includes, and actually phrase match
does include YouTube, so what I would do is I'd actually just go to a max of 10 and then I'd start to scan through these results to
see anything that's relevant to what I'm doing. Obviously
there's going to be a lot of stuff that just isn't relevant here. But ultimately I'm looking for the stuff that's going to be relevant to someone who is trying
to build a YouTube channel. So that's really the
process that I go through. It is certainly a manual process but it works really well when you start- when you start to identify
these really good keywords that will support your primary topic.
And now the final Easy SEO Win which is Easy SEO Win number seven is to use the Warren Buffet technique. So in short, the Warren
Buffet technique means that you're going to find
websites that are relevant in your industry, and then you're going to try
to acquire those websites and merge them with your website. So typically the best situation would be that you'd identify a tool
that's in your industry and then you could take that tool, you could buy it from the owner and then put that tool on your website, and then you can redirect their website to the tool that's now
hosted on your website. And the reason for doing this is because it can massively
massively build your link profile and make your website a
hundred times stronger at a literal rapid rate. Pretty much the fastest
way you can acquire a ton of great backlinks is just to
use the Warren Buffet method by consolidating other
websites with yours. And of course you don't
want to go overboard but you want to find websites
that are hyper relevant in your industry and consolidate
them to your website.
So that the example I wanted
to show you is neilpatel.com because he's done it exceptionally well. So if you look at his
linked profile over time it was growing quite well, 2014 to 2015 it's growing pretty fast. Like he has definitely great growth, but then you'll see he's
got these big spikes. He went from 8,000, 9,000
to 22,000 referring domains. So he doubles referring domains in just a short amount of time. And then he had similar growth here. It's still pretty good, and then he had another
explosive growth here and he went from 32,000 referring domains to almost a hundred
thousand referring domains in only two years.
So you're just not going
to be able to compete with someone like this
when they're building links at this rate and this level. So you can see it just has made his website
so incredibly powerful, and as a result, his traffic
corresponds in the same way. So there is a direct correlation between link growth and
traffic growth here. So you'll see, and
especially when you plot it on where this link acquisitions happened. It's almost identical to
where the traffic spiked up. So, anyone saying that links don't work is just being silly at this point. So what I did is I went
to his link profile and use the redirect dropdown
option here on ahrefs, and what you can see is he's had some really,
really great acquisitions. The first is Kissmetrics, which he actually used to own and operate but he basically took this
company that I'm not sure if it failed or they just
decided to shut it down, I'm not sure what happened with it, but if you look at how
strong Kissmetrics was, it had a DR of 89, so he redirected a DR 89
website to his website.
So you can imagine. That can help you quite a bit when you get 6,000 new referring domains. And then he actually went
out and acquired Ubersuggest which was a great SEO tool. And I have no idea how
much he paid for it, but for the link profile
that he got for it, he probably got it for a pretty good deal because he got not only a DR75, but he also got a DR74
website linking to his website or redirecting to his website. And then once again he also acquired marketing Pilgrim, which I don't know the
relationship with that website but he got another DR73
website redirecting to his. So as you can tell, this is a very, very effective strategy, especially when you can acquire websites that are hyper relevant. If we go and look at Kissmetrics
profile, link profile, you'll see that their links
are the absolute best links that he could get for neilpatel.com.
They're extremely relevant, and if we go and look, you know, it would take a very long time to get all these links that Kissmetrics acquired. And if we were to do the math on this, this link profile alone
that Kissmetrics has would be worth several hundreds
of thousands of dollars if you were to try to acquire
these links on your own. So, it absolutely streamlines
your website authority at a rapid rate. And no one really ever talks about this, and I've been talking about it since 2014, about I used to call
it the merger technique now I'm calling it the
Warren Buffet technique cause I've kind of changed my methodology, but regardless, acquiring
really good websites with really great link profiles
that are relevant to yours and then finding a way
to 301 redirect those to your site in a natural way
is the best that you can do.
And in my opinion, the
best thing you can do is try to find tools in your industry, because this redirect here
from Ubersuggest to Neil Patel which now actually has a tool. This is a natural, natural redirect. This will not get you penalized because he's literally just taken a tool that already existed and
put it on his website, and now he's hosting the tool. So there's nothing wrong
with this redirect, there's nothing questionable about it. But when you start to have redirects that are just going to like a blog section that can get a little sketchy if you start to do it at a high scale. But on a lower scale like this you're doing a few
acquisitions here and there, it's not going to be problematic. And finally, the bonus tip
that I wanted to share with you which is by far the most
important thing you can do in 2021 to protect your
website from Google penalties, and not only that, to
improve your SEO performance is you need to focus
on building your brand.
So this chart I'm showing
you is from Gotch SEO, and what I did is I just
put Gotch in the query. So you can see, I've
had over 15,000 clicks and 62,000 impressions just for queries that are directly related to my brand. So, and you look at this you look at the CTR for
these queries, 24% CTR it's 10 times 30 times higher
than a traditional keyword because these are people
that are actually interested in my brand. These are people who either know what I do or people that are going to
probably end up being customers. So this is really the absolute best type of traffic that you can get. When you look at this, look at all of these different keywords
that are related to my brand, we have Gotch SEO, Gotcha SEO Variation, Nathan Gotch, you get the point. All of these are because
I've built a brand and I've built trust in my industry.
So by posting videos on YouTube
or posting on social media, no matter what I'm hoping with my my intention of posting
on YouTube or posting on social media is to drive
branded search to Google. And that's one thing a lot
of people don't talk about. One of the most important reasons for even being on social
media or for creating content outside of just content that
you're trying to rank on Google is you can actually drive
more branded searches which then makes your
website more trustworthy, which as a result makes
it easier for you to rank for your keywords that
you're actually going after.
So, if I was competing against someone who was just only doing SEO, they're only targeting keywords and they weren't trying
to build a brand outside of just building SEO
content on their website, it'd be very difficult for them to beat me because I have so much
trust going to my website, so much branded searches
going to my website. And Google does consider
that, that's 100% a fact. So in 2021 you should
absolutely make it a priority to build your brand, do what you can, because it will absolutely not only help you grow your business, building your brand is a good thing.
Outside of SEO, you should be diversifying outside of SEO, that's the obvious point. Most importantly, it actually helps your
SEO to build your brand. All right, so I hope you got value from this free SEO training. And if you want to get even
better SEO results in 2021 then please book a call below to see how my team can help you. It's 100% free, and I promise there won't be some sort of annoying sales pitch.
Just want to see how we can help you get even
better SEO results this year. Thank you so much for watching, and click the button below to secure your free SEO strategy session. And spots a very limited,.
