Before I understand why everything I taught you about SEO was wrong, let me first give you a little background on how I have (and many traders) have become SEOs.
When I started my entrepreneurial venture, I did not have a lot of money.
I was working in a theme park where I cleaned the toilets and collected garbage.
Although most businesses grow through paid commercials, it was just not possible for me because I was earning $ 5.75 at the hour.
I had no other choice than to learn SEO and get there if ever I wanted my site to generate traffic and that was doing it. 39, silver with hope .
And like most SEOs, I've always thought that the keywords on which people spend the most money tend to convert well.
Think about it: if a company spends $ 50 per click for certain keywords, it must earn money.
So, would not these be the keywords you would like to use?
Here's how I taught people to do SEO over the years
Back in the day, I used keyword tools like Ubersuggest, I found all the high traffic keywords in my space that were very expensive per click, and I wrote tons of tickets on them.
And then I went to Ahrefs to see all my competitors, see their most popular pages, look at their traffic value number, and, of course, write longer versions of their post that were better for that I can support their rankings and traffic.
By using these 2 tactics, your traffic would increase over time.
Extremely fast too if you could get out the content fast enough … Just look at my search traffic per month over the years .
(Yes, there is more to SEO than these two tactics, but they work very well.)
Can you guess how much revenue I have generated as my search traffic has grown?
Well, according to SEMrush, the search traffic that I generate in the United States alone is worth $ 1.2 million.
If I had to buy all this traffic, it would cost me $ 1.2 million per month in cost per click.
This is crazy considering that the traffic generated $ 408,000 in revenue last month (no profit … of revenue).
And if you come back a year ago, I received 340,268 visitors a month from Google and this traffic generated $ 362,495 last year.
In other words, I increased my search traffic by 123% while my income only increased by 12.5% … not a good deal .
Fortunately for me, I did not spend $ 1.2 million to generate this traffic, but there are costs involved because SEO takes time and resources.
Now, let's look at my friend's website, Legion Athletics.
He is in the B2C world and sells fitness supplements. Its traffic has only increased by 3% compared to last year.
But his income increased by 44% because he focuses on the traffic that causes sales. In other words, he no longer cares about increasing his total traffic, he just increases traffic generating sales.
Neil, you must have known better!
Why? Yes, I knew that growing my search traffic in double, triple or even 10 times would not increase my business turnover at the same rate.
I have been doing SEO for over 16 years now … it took me a long time to learn this, but not so long ago. ?
See, with my company, my ideal client is a large company that has been doing marketing for many years.
That does not mean that I can not help and that I will not help small businesses … I just prefer the bigger ones because they have much bigger budgets.
For me to continue to increase my traffic at a fast pace I have to go after some novice terms, such as how to get indexed in Google. But traffic from this type of message will not convert visitors into customers.
These beginners terms account for over 81% of my search traffic, but I'm going after them because I believe in branding and the long game (the rule of 7, which I will come back to later in this post). ]
And I have multiple business units / revenue streams, so I'm willing to spend capital to generate brand awareness that could be profitable in 5 or 10 years.
But, I've never learned to think of SEO from a strategic point of view because it's a lot more complex than just ranking for key terms that are very much in demand.
Why does more traffic equalize more sales?
To be featured on Google, you must write informative articles of long duration. That's why Wikipedia ranks for everything.
This does not mean that you can not rank product pages (e-commerce) or lead generation pages up in Google, it's just harder. Much, much more difficult.
Let's now do a quick Google search. Let's search for the term "car insurance".
According to Ubersuggest, the keyword gets 201,000 searches per month in the US and businesses pay $ 63.15 per click when it comes to PPC ads.
Here is a screen shot of the Google search results page I see, looking from Las Vegas, Nevada.
And this is what AAA's first paid advertisement looks like:
And this is what Nationwide's best organic list looks like:
Do you see why the AAA version would generate more sales?
Their landing page is simple and clear. You simply choose the insurance option and you leave for the races.
But obviously, this page would never rank organically because there is little or no text. Seriously, there's nothing on it … they barely give Google information.
The average webpage that ranks on page 1 of Google contains 1,890 words. From what I counted, the AAA landing page has 73 words. This is a bit far from the 1890 number.
And the Nationwide example has so much text on the other side.
So Nationwide will still generate sales, but nowhere near the percentage of this AAA PPC landing page.
Does this mean that you should not do SEO?
I'm not saying that SEO is useless.
I'm just saying that it will never convert as well as paid advertising because you have to please the user and Google with regards to SEO. This means that your pages will be heavy and will not focus on closing the sale.
I know that they say that SEO traffic has more confidence, so it converts better … but you have to keep in mind that an SEO landing page does not can not be optimized for conversions as aggressively as a paid landing page.
Thus, Google generates more than $ 100 billion a year (mostly from paid ads).
Of course, the text of your SEO landing page or your blog post could be persuasive and sell, but if it was only for sale, you would not get a high rank on Google organically.
So, if I had to teach you SEO again from the beginning, I would take a different approach.
I would not tell you to advertise paid or ignore SEO. And I would not teach you any tactics at first.
Instead, I would like to teach you early marketing strategy, which would lead you to a more successful SEO campaign.
I tell you first to set up your conversion tracking in Google Analytics.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceTVejpbYK0?feature=oembed&w=700&h=394]
Once you've set your goals, I'll ask you to sign in to Google Analytics. Click on your site. In the left sidebar, click "Conversions> Goals> Preview". You will be able to see where your conversions arrive from.
Knowing where your sales come from, you can focus on the marketing efforts that work and stop those who are not.
Then I would like to teach you how to go further by discovering the exact pages that lead you from new search visitors to sales. (If you do not know how, follow this tutorial.)
Now that you know which pages are generating your sales, focus on optimizing these pages. I know this will not get the most traffic, but it will bring you the most sales.
And you do not need to implement 100 different SEO tweaks to optimize the pages that generate your sales.
Start by following this SEO hack that I describe in the video below. (It will provide a good boost and is easy to implement.)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmB_TC92I8w?start=300&feature=oembed&w=700&h=394]
And once you've implemented my Google Search Console tactic, I'll ask you to work on more advanced SEO techniques.
Conclusion
Chances are you are like me and you made the mistakes above.
I know it because you are reading this blog, and I spent the majority of my time blogging on tactics instead of teaching you strategy.
SEOs are brainwashed from day one … they are taught that higher rankings and traffic are the most important things.
In reality, more revenue is what is really important … that's why CPP experts have the right mindset. They optimize for turnover, sales, leads and ROI instead of pure traffic .
At my agency, our vice president of marketing services, Todd, does not stop telling the team that we need to focus on the return on investment.
Even though our team averages an increase in search traffic of more than 100% in the first six months, Todd is more concerned about revenue. If you can not provide a long-term return on investment, it does not matter how good you rank a site. Time period!
Now, if your traffic keeps growing, but your earnings are not, all hope is not lost. You will have to be a little more aggressive with your marketing, especially with regards to optimizing the conversion.
Simply follow the steps below:
Step 1: Install Hello Bar
If you look at the NeilPatel.com website, you will notice that I have an exit window.
It's not because I like popups and that I think they provide an amazing user experience. I just know that when people read the articles in your blog, the chances are that they will not convert to clients (at least not right away).
By collecting their e-mail at the exit, you can then convert these visitors over time into customers by providing them with offers and directing them to your product or service pages. (The Hello bar has GDPR compatible settings.)
The key to optimizing conversion is to find a balance. Make sure you provide value so that the conversion techniques you use do not irritate people.
Step # 2: Remarket
Have you heard of the rule of 7? I am religiously.
Someone must see your brand 7 times on average before converting it to a customer. This gives them time to become familiar with your business and earn their trust before opening their wallets.
Using Google and Facebook remarketing, I found that I could generate double the number of leads for my sales team and spend 1 / 26th of money compared to buying traffic using traditional pay per click campaigns. ]
This is a strategy that Digital Marketer uses immensely because it works so well.
They do not have as much organic traffic as me, so they buy Facebook ads on their blog, which helps people get acquainted with the Digital Marketer brand.
They then remarket all these users with the help of ads by redirecting them to sales pages. It works very well.
Step # 3: Be Creative
Look at the number of calls to shares I have on the NeilPatel.com site.
Regardless of the article you are reading, you will see a top bar that looks like this:
I have it because it helps to convert visitors into customers.
And look how many sidebar calls to the actions I have.
Sounds crazy because I have 3 in my sidebar, but it works.
I even called stock and content upgrades in my blog posts … it worked well, but I started to ruin the user experience so I got rid of them to create a healthy balance on the blog.
If I had to start all over again and did not have a lot of organic traffic, I would set Google Analytics correctly as described above. Then I would do some content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads and SEO.
Think of it as a great experience. You test the waters by doing a little bit of everything … do not spend a ton of money. Instead, you try to understand what works and what does not work.
From there, you can see what drives sales to get a better idea of the pages you need to focus on to generate more sales.
Once you see that things work, I would resize just as long as I produced a reasonable return on my investment.
And for those of you who like to follow your rankings, keep in mind that I can not follow my rankings on NeilPatel.com a little bit.
Yes, I am watching the growth of my traffic over time as it gives me a good idea of the changes I'm making that work, but I do not track rankings as I think it's a waste of time. I focus on conversions and incomes.
Out of curiosity, how many of you are focusing on optimizing good pages rather than on the pursuit of search traffic?