best seo tips for first ranking in google

 Starting with someone whohas no SEO strategy currently, let's start there. Do you think there's asite-wide level of optimization that has to happen? Like, straight up title tag, meta tag, optimization of differentqueries on the site, an internal linking structure, and then a content marketing strategy on top of that to add value to the site, as a base level SEO strategy?

 

 Or what would you suggest to someone who, first level is they don'tcurrently have an SEO strategy, and then we'll ask aboutsomeone who already does, and what they can optimize, but just base level,if you don't have one, what do you do in today's world? Because I really don't know. - Yeah, so I'm going to sharemy screen, if you don't mind. - Please.- Let's make this fun. All right. So in the last month, I got roughly 2.3 million unique visitors, (indistinct) visits, andthen 20 million pages.

 

 This is without ads. - [Host] That is wild! So yeah, so how do I do that? (laughs) - [Neil] All right. So the easiest thing, and I'll actually show yousome stats on this, right? (keyboard clacking) In a bit. So the easiest thing is I have a app, you can type in the URL. (keyboard clacking) It's called Ubersuggest. It's free. You can type in the URL, and it'll give you theestimated traffic of any site, or whatever, out there. You know, you can look atkeywords, top pages, et cetera. But what I wanted to show you is this is the easiest thing. So you just click on Site Audit. Again, this is free. I don't even capture an email straight up, this is just free. So you don't have to putin an email to use it, and it'll tell youeverything that's wrong. Pages, your score, your load time. And you can be like, "All right, "let's look at my Issues,or Critical Errors." And you can just go to all of them, and be like 31 pageshave a low word count. And it'll break them all down, and it'll tell you- - 

[Host] You need morecontent on those pages. - [Neil] Exactly. And it'll tell you What isThis, and How to Fix It. And then you can to Warnings, and you can do the same thing. Two pages have duplicatemeta descriptions. So what is it, right? So what is that, and how do I fix it? - [Host] Nice. - [Neil] It just breaks down everything you need to fix, in priority, from how hard is it to implement, to how much traffic willyou get by fixing them? So that's the first part of SEO, right? It's just like the lowest hanging fruit. The second part is all about keywords. So if I'm trying to targetthe keyword, marketing, and this is super effective, or digital marketing, right? And I use these tactics on my own site. To give you an idea, if Itype in digital marketing, I think I'm like numberone or two or something. Here's all the paid listing, and I am the first organic listing. I do that for a lot ofterms like online marketing. I'm up there somewhere. I'm number two. Funny enough, numberone's also my website. Although I sold it.- [Host] Quicksprout. Technically, I didn't sell it, I gave it away to focus on Neil Patel, but I was also number one and two, and I even rank for SEO somewhere, I think on page one. Number one is Moz, twoMoz, (indistinct) land, Google, Google, Wikipedia, then me. But here's a simple thing I do. It's all about finding theright type of keywords, right? The way I find the righttype of keywords is, one, you can just type inkeywords like digital marketing, or whatever you want to target. 

Here's my process. I go and I look for keywords, and I just click View All Keywords, and it'll show me everyone who's ranking, how many links they have, their domain scores, socials, et cetera. So I'll go find keywords, andit gives me solid metrics. When I mean solid, as innon-opinionated metrics. Like the average webpagethat ranks in the top 10 has 435 backlinks anda domain score of 49. So I know, is it going tobe easy for me to get 435? Is it going to be hard? because I can have a roughidea of how many links I have. So I'll just go throughhere, and I'll find keywords. As you can see, there'slike 500 suggestions here. Here are some other related keywords I'll post from our database. This has 30,000 recommendations. And then I'll look forquestions that people are asking in the digital marketing arena, right? Like is digital marketing important? Why digital marketing is important. Is digital marketing the future? Right? I'll also look forcomparison-based keywords, digital marketing versus traditional. This works moreso for product-based stuff. So if you're E-commerce, like Nike shoes versus Reebok shoes, or MailChimp versus ConvertKit, right? - [Host] Right, right. - [Neil] And then the last step when I'm trying to create content, after I find some keywordsthat are typically... I look for keywords that arehigh in volume, high in CPC, and I want to go after keywords that have a low SEO Difficulty. So that's abbreviation of SD. It's like digital marketingcompany has a high CPC, volume's not bad, low SEO Difficulty, which means people are typing that in, me being an agency, probablya good keyword to go after, because it probably converts well if people are paying $17 a click. - [Host] Right. - [Neil] And the way you dothis is you just create content. So there is a ContentIdeas section of the tool, and it'll show you allthe content per country, so you can break it downby whatever country, or language, or region you want. And, technically, you can break all the reports down by that. And you want to look for articlesthat are somewhat popular, because it's breakingdown the social shares, as well as articles thathave decent search traffic, as well as a lot of backlinks. 

So here, I like this onebecause the estimated business is 1000 a month, they have 41 backlinks. This is "The 10 EssentialTips for B2B Marketing Success in a Digital Economy", right? So I'd be like, "Huh, this isn't bad." I can potentially writeon something like this. I can see that it's alreadyranking for a lot of terms. And now I have terms to target for that's related to that main keyword, as well as I can start targetingsome of these keywords, and if I can rank higher thanthem, I'll get more traffic. I can also go after all thesites that are linking to them, and try to hit them up, saying I got a better article than them, and try to convince them to link to me. This is how I do SEO in a nutshell. - [Host] Still to this day,long-form, value-rich content, and, essentially, backlinks, and on-site interlinking pagerank sculpting structure, or some version of that. I'm talking to you from2012 SEO, by the way. You know what I mean? My world was SEO for sevenyears, and it was deep SEO, and then I've not thought about it since. So everything that I'msaying is what I remember. So correct me if I'm not- - [Neil] No, no, you prettymuch got the concepts right, and, you know, but now there's these tools that automate all of it. So I can put in a domain link, like a competitor, ormy own site, Neil Patel, and I can see everyonewho links to them, right? And this is just outreach that I can do. And what I love doing isI'll go find a competitor, and this works in E-commerce all day long. And in E-commerce, funnyenough,

 it works even better, because there's just not asmuch competitors for SEO. Everyone wants to do thepaid stuff right now, especially with (audio cuts out) ads. Like, I can go take mycompetitor, like Moz, I would do this for an E-commercesite, whatever it may be. I can see who's links tothem, and outreach them. But even better, I canjust click on Top Pages, and you can do this forany E-commerce site, you can see yourcompetitors, their top pages, their backlinks, how manyvisits these pages are getting, how many social shares they have, and be like, "Oh, Moz'sBeginners Guide to SEO, "here are all the keywordsthat are ranking for it." I just click View All, and I'll be like... Sadly, it's free, but sometimesit takes a second to load because it's pulling so manykeywords from our database. Other info like SEO, whatis SEO, marketing SEO, what is that websiteSEO, optimize for SEO, SEO optimizing, like, theyjust have all the keywords that they just keep getting traffic for, and you can keep going next,next, next, or export them. And again-- [Host] Let me ask you- - [Neil] Go ahead. - [Host] Let me ask you this, though. So, you're super, superhigh level at this, so I'm going to break it down for someone who may notbe as sophisticated. What we've talked about is, step one, optimize your website itselfwith onsite SEO factors, which Ubersuggest willtell you what is broken, and tell you how to fix it from the Site Audit version. - [Neil] Yeah. - 

[Host] Step two is go through, and look at keywords thatyou're already ranking for, and keywords thatcompetitors are ranking for in the keyword traffic analyzers, see which ones have highvalue and low competition, and create long-form, value-rich articles. You can find ideas for these long-form, value-rich articles in theContent Ideas suggestion of your tool, Ubersuggest. And then, and now I'm going a level which you have not said this, but I want to just makesure I've got this right, is the factors that will gointo that ranking or not, have to do with both social suggestions, i.e. shares and activity on social, backlinks to that particular article, and your actual website itself,because if your main site has a bunch of people linking to it, then that power is distributedto the pages on that site. And if you're interlinkingon your own site properly, you're going to filter some of that power into these pages that you're creating. And then, let me ask you this, where does paidamplification fit into this? Does paid amplification fitinto it in the sense of, you write a long-formarticle that you want to rank for a given query that you'veused Ubersuggest to find, and then you do somepage post amplification, or page post engagement ads, to amplify that particulararticle to your target audience, which then gets it social signals, which then support it inranking, or how does paid fit in? - [Neil] And you don'thave to do paid at all. So, easiest way to dopaid, if you want to help, you just boost a post on Facebook, and that'll give it alittle bit more legs, and it'll run faster.