What is SEO? An Introduction to SEO
– Hi, everyone. I'm Neil Patel, and today I'm going to be going over SEO and why it's important. Did you know that 93%
of online experiences start with a search engine? You may think, "All right, there's these
search engines out there." "Yeah, sure we know Google." But for a minute, just think about how many times
you go on Google or search, or YouTube and search, or Kayak and look for a hotels or flights, there's search engines all around us and we're constantly using them. So this week in the program, as I mentioned, it's all about the introduction
and keyword research. Today I'm going to be
going over the introduction and then after that we'll end up diving into keyword research. As I mentioned, it's a seven week journey, as long as you follow along, you should see results.
Before we get started into going over SEO, there's a few things I wanted to cover: There's a lot of people saying
false information out there, so I wanted to play a little
fun little game called, Fact or Fiction. The first one: My industry is too hard to get ranked in. Second one: Only big companies can do well on Google. Then I always hear, the more pages I have, the better. Then people always say, I need to submit my site to Google, or, I need to spend money to win online.
Now let's go over all five of them. The first one: It doesn't matter what industry you're in, you can always rank on Google. Some industries take longer than others, but you can still rank on Google. And if it was only big companies that ranked well on Google, you wouldn't see all
these small Mom and Pops, popping up and doing well
and changing their lives. Also, the more pages you have the better, that's totally false. If you look at About.com they cut more than half their content, they turned it into a lot of minisites and they started getting more traffic. And Google, it detects
your site automatically, you don't need a "manually submit it." Now of course, creating a
account on Google Search Console and submitting your sitemap
isn't a bad thing to do. And you don't need to spend
a ton of money to win online, and that's why I started to get into SEO.
Now by the end of this presentation, you'll understand the factors that are really important to Google if you want to really rank high. And you'll also learn how SEO
will help you drive traffic, and more importantly sales. There are three main keys that you really need to understand
if you want to win online. The first is, why is SEO so important? Look, SEO's a process of
optimizing any given search word, or term, for a search engine on your site. In other words, it's your 24-hour salesman. So no matter what time of the day or what country people are in, when they're searching, you can be found, you're getting that traffic, and some of it will end
up converting into sales.
That's why I love SEO. If you stop paying money to
Google or Whatnot for paid ads, you know what, your traffic dies down. But with SEO, if you don't do anything
for a whole week straight, you don't even open up your wallet, you can still continually get traffic. During this presentation I
may end up using some terms that you may not be familiar with, so I want you to go to: neilpatel.com/training and download the Marketing
Acronym Glossary. This will help you keep up with everything and understand what we're talking about. My five top reason of why
I love SEO so much is: It's simple, it increases your traffic, it generates a positive
return on investment. It gives you amazing brand awareness. Over the years, so many people have found
me from Google first.
It builds a ton of trust. What's funny is people are like, "All right, it ranks in Google, "I read it, it must be true." Now that doesn't mean you should put out deceiving information, but it's for you to understand
that it builds trust. And your competition is doing it. So if you don't do it, you're going to get left out. The next key to winning online is choosing your battleground. As Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia says, "If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist." Your new best friend is Google! You know when you're going out to the park and you're playing baseball, your new friend Google's
going to be there. When you're on your couch
watching TV with a friend, well that friend is going to be Google. Now I know they're not really
going to be sitting next to you and Google can't really
catch the ball for you, but that's how much in love
you need to be with Google, because they can change your life.
They dominate search on all landscapes. So when you look at desktop, they're estimated 4.5 billion
active internet users, and Google's search
share for desktop is 87%. That's roughly 8.7 out of 10! That's an amazing result. Hey, if I was in school and I kept getting grades
of 8.7 out of 10 or 87%, my mom would be happy. And on mobile, it's even more crazy. They're 9.5 out of 10. They dominate even a greater share because so many people
are using android devices. So if you're not on Google, you're not going to do well. And just being on there isn't enough. Your position is everything! Over 31.7% of people
click on position one, according to Advanced Web Ranking. If you're not in the top 10, then you're not going to be seen at all.
Being in the top is literally everything. At this point what I
want you to do is go to: neilpatel.com/training and download the pdf on Search Engines. It'll help you understand
how Google works, their layout from the SERP features, to advertising, to paid results, to knowledge graph. It literally will breakdown all aspects of a search listing page. If you already know that, you don't really need to download it, but if you don't, it's a great place to start before we jump into the third key, which is unlocking the
SEO factors to win online.
One question that you may have in mind is, "Hey Neil, what information
does Google offer "in relation to SEO and ranking online?" Well they give some
information, not a ton, but they do give some
and we do appreciate it. They have guidelines, like they tell you to make sure that your website stands out from others, or make sure that your pages
are optimized for users and not search engines. But these little checklists
and these little factors don't really tell you much. And yes, they tell you what not to do, but again, it's really generic
and it doesn't tell you much. One thing that you can
do is go to Ubersuggest, click on the Site Audit Report
in the left-hand navigation, once you're there, and look at your website, and it'll breakdown the factors that Google is looking at.
From what's healthy, what's having issues on your sites, to redirects, to warnings, to recommendations. You're going to want to
go through all of them, and make sure you fix them. And you want to do it for
all the pages on your site. Not just half your pages, or a few of your pages. Google wants to rank sites
that are fully optimized, not just one or two
pages that are optimized. The other thing that's cool that they do is they have a Twitter account
called, Search Liaison, and they Tweet about updates, what's happening, so I make sure if I were
you I would follow it. Danny Sullivan also works at Google, I recommend following him as well. Those are two accounts that you can get a lot of information on what's happening with their algorithms. You can also look at, Think with Google. It's a website that
they ended up releasing. It gives you information and a lot of data points out there. You're probably wondering, "Hey Neil, this is all great, "but what's the Holy Grail of SEO?" "What's that silver bullet?" Well there's not really a silver bullet.
It's a lot of little things that add up, and I'm going to go over them. One of them is Page Speed. For every second delay means roughly 7% reduction in conversions, according to HubSpot. So you want to make sure
your site loads fast. And on that same Site Audit
Report in Ubersuggest, it breaks down site speed
and it tells you what's wrong and what needs to be fixed.
The next thing I want you to look at is Mobile User Experience. Look, the number of people
that are using mobile devices is continually going up. So much so that Google
has a mobile-first index. That's the power of mobile. The next factor that I want you to look at is Topical Content. They know that, hey, if you have pages on cats, then you may cover topics like kittens, what happens if your cat
leaves you for a day or two? What kind of food does a cat eat? What's a healthy weight for a cat? The more detail that
you go into on each page around the same topic, the better you're going to end up ranking. Versus if you go really broad and cover a lot of random topics, but you don't go in-depth on all of them. Another factor, and this is from Ahrefs, it's all about URL Length. The longer your URL length, the lower your rankings are. So you want to keep your
URL short and to the point.
Another thing to look
at is Content Length. Generally speaking, the longer your content, the more social shares you're
going to end up getting, the better you're going to end up doing. But that doesn't mean that
you should just go out there and release a ton of long
articles that contain fluff. If you have fluff in your articles, you won't do well. Backlinks is another big factor. And as you can see from
this chart by Ahrefs, backlinks have more of an
impact on your rankings than On-page SEO; that's getting sites to link to you, it's super important. And one thing that very few SEO's look at is the power of brand and user signals. The ex-CEO of Google once said, "Brands are the solution,
not the problem." "Brands are how you
sort out the cesspool." Now Matt Cutts, who also
worked at Google in the past, he was a Former Head of Web Spam. He stated a quote saying, "We actually came up
with a classifier to say, "okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times "is over on this side, "and low-quality sites are
over on the other side." In these days security
is a big issue as well, so you want to make sure
you're using a SSL Certificate, so that way you get that HTTPS.
Because when people go to your website and you're not using SSL, you're more likely to get a warning. Now before I dive into the next
lesson of keyword research, I want to go over some cool things that you should do to get started. The first is to go to Ubersuggest and head to the Dashboard
and create your project. This will help you track
your rankings over time and your progress, so you can see if you're
doing better or worse. And of course, you should be doing better. I already went over the Fact and Fiction, now you know what is real and what isn't. Now it's time for you to go to: neilpatel.com/training and download these three things, they're super important: Google Search Packs, Local Landing Page, Local Directory Checklist. This is all important because it'll help set-up the right foundation before we dive into keyword research. Thank you, and I look forward to helping you get loved by Google..
