My #1 SEO Trick (It’s Not What You Think)
– I know some of you
guys have been wondering what's the biggest SEO
trick that I'm using today, and I have to tell you, it's funny because most people think, hey
Neil, you're super tactical. Like, what link building
tactic are you using? How are you running your content? What are you using specifically to rank at the top of Google? 'Cause you rank for terms like,
or if you Google terms like "SEO online marketing,
internet marketing," I'm ranking on page one
for a lot of these terms. Some of them at the top,
some of them even number one. Here's the trick, my biggest
SEO hack or trick isn't SEO. It's building a brand. If you're looking at these
videos that I'm doing from the content that I'm
creating from in my blog post, from the podcasting I'm
doing marketing School. Everything I do is about brand building. What I found out is, the one
who has the biggest brand tends to win in the long run.
I was talking about this
earlier with a friend. I asked him, I'm like, "If
you were to get a credit card, "what would you get?" He was like, " American Express." I was like, "Okay, if
you had to get a car, "what would you get?" He's like, "Tesla." "If you had to get workout
clothes, what would you buy?" He said, "Nike." And then I asked him, "Would you Google "for any of these products?" He'd like, "No, I would
just go and buy them." Why, because they built a brand.
You're not gonna build a big company unless you build a brand. Now, you're not gonna be
able to do TV advertising and billboards or any of that
kind of stuff that these large corporations are doing,
but what you can do is you can start off by just
giving people value by busting out your phone,
recording your video, uploading it to Facebook,
to YouTube, to LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, whatever it may be. You can create a podcast,
bust out your phone again, record yourself, upload it to iTunes. You could write a blog
post, write an article, release it on WordPress. Share it on the Social Web,
it'll get you some traction. The point I'm trying to
make is, if you help people with your content and your
information and you just give it to them and you
really just genuinely care, I do this, yes because
it helps with my brand, but I really do genuinely care.
It's the reason why I respond to comments. I don't have to respond to comments. If you look at almost all
the comments that are getting on the blog and that I'm
responding to, there for people that can't afford my products or services. I don't care, I genuinely
enjoy helping out people. But, if you care for
others, you wanna help 'em, the indirect benefit from
that is that you're gonna build a brand, and I learned
this not because I'm trying to build a brand, I learned this because I genuinely wanted to help out people.
My mom's a teacher, I got it from her. I genuinely wanted to help out
people, and then I found out that it was building my
brand at the same time, and then when people started
offering me paid speaking gigs and all this kind of
stuff, I was like oh wow, there's value in building a brand. But, it didn't click,
because at first I thought the Nikes of the world, the
American ExpressEs of the world, Coca-Cola's were always
be money on branding 'cause I was like, "No
Google, ads are better, "it's a direct ROI." And I'm not saying branding is
better or worse, but there is value in it as well, and
that's the biggest SEO hack because if you build a brand,
a lot more people will Google for your name, like Nike or
whatever your company name is, and you'll find that your
website will rank higher, and Eric Schmidt gave a hint
on this in which he once said, "Brands are the way to separate the crap," and I'm butchering his
quote, and he's true because what I found is as my
brand queries have gone up, so has my search topic, and
I believe that's the future of SEO, and I have a lot of data on this, and I released a blog
post on NeilPatel.com a while back called The Future of SEO, and I talked about how brand
queries are the future.
