The 6 Time Wasters of SEO – STOP Doing These Activities
– If you've had a website for a while you know that SEO takes some time and I'm not talking 30 minutes a day, I'm talking dozens and
dozens of hours per week for a really long period of time. I know it's not what you want to hear but hey, I've got some
good news for you today and I'm going to save you some time. Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today
I'm going to write down the six time wasters of SEO. In other words, you need to
stop doing these activities. (upbeat music) Make sure that you
subscribe to this channel and if you're on YouTube
click the alert notification, that way when I release
more content like this you'll get notified. Time waster number one.
Checking your rankings daily
or even multiple times a day. Do you know how often I check my rankings or even my Google Analytics stats? If you're guessing multiple times a day you're wrong. I check them once a week and that's it, you don't need to know your
rankings more than once a week. Now my Google Analytics
traffic I do try to check it roughly once a day, sometimes
once every two or three days.
The reason being is I want to be notified if something happens with
the Google algorithm update or I get a hit or my traffic tanks. Because let's face it, if
you check your rankings multiple times in a day, it's not really going to do anything. If you log into Google
Analytics multiple times a day it's not going to really do anything, you need to focus on execution
and stop wasting your time continually looking at reports. Here's a easy thing to do. Sign up for Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest has free rank tracking. Go to the dashboard,
sign up, add your site, add your keywords, it will
notify you once a week automatically over email, your average rankings for all
the most important keywords that you're tracking, if
they're moving up or down or how much your improving
and it will even tell you new site errors that it's
finding from a SEO perspective. That way you don't need to obsess about it on a daily basis and it will
just do the hard work for you.
Best of all, for free. Time waster number two, being obsessive about keyword density. Look, people write content all the time, I hear them always saying like, "Oh I need to put this
keyword into this H1 tag, "this keyword into title tag, "this keyword into this meta description." When I write content I
don't do any of this, I just write content for the user. I try to create the most appealing title that I want people to click through, read and get hooked. Just like an author would do
when they're writing a book or just like a journalist
would do when they're writing a news article. It's not about keywords,
it's about quality content. Sure if I'm writing about dog food naturally the keyword dog food and other keywords related to dog food will show up in there but it's not like I'm
actually manually shoving these keywords in. Think about the person,
do what's best for them and naturally you may put these
keywords in your title tag, meta description, H1
tag, your introduction, and even conclusion paragraphs.
But don't obsesses about it
where you have to put them in each and every single area. If it doesn't flow and sound right people aren't going to
want to read your content, they're going to go back, right when they're searching
on Google, hit the back button, that's going to send bad
user metrics to Google and it's going to hurt your rankings. The third mistake, building an excessive amount of back links to increase domain authority. You know I have a ad agency
called Neil Patel Digital and we get so many people saying, "I want more links "and I want to increase
my domain authority." I've outranked sites that
have domain authorities of 80 and 90 with a site that only has a domain
authority of 40 or 50.
I know Moz has created the
word, domain authority, in Ubersuggest we use
the word, domain score, everyone has their own version of it. Google doesn't use domain
authority, domain score, or any of these other metrics. Sure directionally the
higher the authority the better off you are, but that's not going
to guarantee rankings. If someone has amazing domain authority and I've seen this time and time again like with the entrepreneurs, the Forbes, the Huffington Post, they
have all these guest posters creating shit content, you think that stuff's ranking everywhere? No, why? Because the quality sucks
versus a small mom and pop writing an amazing article
that everyone wants to read and share that's going to do way better. Don't obsess about domain authority, focus on the end experience for the user.
The fourth issue, only focusing on highly
competitive keywords. Yes, you know going after these head terms can drive a lot of traffic
but they don't drive sales compared to long tail phrases. Go to the Keyword ideas
report within Ubersuggest, look at the prepositions
and comparison words as well as the suggests, that will give you keywords
that are more likely to convert. Yeah, they won't drive
you as much traffic, but who cares? At least you're generating sales. You know I was talking to
one of my buddies, Mike, at Dr.
Axe, and he runs marketing there. And everyone knows that, at
least in the SEO industry, Dr. Axe has lost some
traffic when it comes to SEO and they've got hit here and there for some Google algorithms,
but you know what? A lot of that Google traffic hasn't really crushed their revenue, why? Because when someone's
searching for an article on nutrition of a banana,
it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to convert
into a paying customer when it comes to supplements.
So it's not all about quantity, go after quality based keywords. The fifth time waster, you're focusing more on desktop devices versus mobile devices. Did you know that over
50% of the searches done on Google are now from mobile devices? It's a huge ranking factor. So much so that they
have a mobile-first index and you can see this with
the recent BERT update that Google's putting a ton of focus on content and web design,
especially for mobile devices.
So make sure your adding
structured mark up to your site and you're using mobile optimized themes because this will help you do
really well in the long run. The sixth issue, trying to meeting
unreasonable SEO expectations. Look, if you're just
cranking and hammering, putting so many hours in because you're trying to
hit a specific time frame, it's just not going to happen. You don't control when Google really
wants to shift rankings, that's not up to you, it's up to them. So by you spending double
or triple the time, it's not always going to
help you get higher rankings, that's why I don't obsess about Google. But you know what you should obsess about and I got this from Jeff Bezos from watching an interview of him online, he obsesses about his customer. He doesn't obsess about Google, he doesn't obsess about his competition, he obsesses about his
client, his customers. If you do that and you
do what's best for them, in the long run Google should
place you where you belong..
So don't try to hit
unrealistic expectations by obsessing about Google,
obsess about your customers because when you do what's best for them, that's when you grow. Now if you need help with
your rankings, your traffic, check out my ad agency,
Neil Patel Digital. If you enjoyed this
video, like it, share it, subscribe to this channel. Thank you for watching..
