We all know that the best things in life don't come easy, but what we also know and believe in is the fact that the best things in life don't always come with a price. This mantra rings true especially when it comes to downloading royalty free stock images we desperately need to bring that extra flavor to our website, blog or social media profile.
As an active inbound marketing agency, we have tried a million times to search and download the images that we end up seeing as available for purchase on premium stock photography websites at an unbelievably high price. This often makes our image search futile since we cannot get that stock photo for free or even if we do spend a minimum of £5 (or more likely $5) we only get to download the image in a simple non-HD jpeg version.
Well, you are probably going to say 477,000 because I used that number in the title of this post. 😉
And it’s true, just look at the screenshot from Ahrefs. It shows the number of keywords I rank for.
But what’s crazy is that I am in a super competitive niche… digital marketing.
So, are you wondering how I did it?
Well, it starts with proper keyword research.
See most marketers start their keyword research with tools like SEMrush or Ubersuggest and they type in a keyword like “SEO”. You then get a list back with hundreds of keyword suggestions with cost per click and competition data.
And once you have a list of keywords you like, you probably do what most marketers do, which is to start inserting them into your website or creating content around the keywords.
Does this process sound familiar?
Well, of course, it does because that’s what everyone has been teaching you to do.
But what’s wrong with this?
This process is like gambling… there’s no guarantee that you’ll rank for these new keywords. And even worse, those keywords may not generate you any leads, sales, or revenue.
But thankfully, I have a process for you that will not only help you rank for thousands of keywords, but it will also ensure that this new-found traffic converts into leads, sales, and more revenue.
Here’s the 5-step process that helped me rank for 477,000 keywords.
Step #1: Focus on the pages that drive revenue
Going after the right keywords won’t guarantee you success.
If you rank a page that isn’t converting well, you’ll get more traffic, but your revenue won’t go up.
If you haven’t setup goal tracking, watch the video below as it will teach you how.
Assuming you set it correctly, let’s look for the pages that are driving your revenue.
You can see from the image above, I sorted the results by conversions.
You now have a list of pages to focus on. But it isn’t as easy as just picking the top page and going from there.
For example, your top page could be a “check out” page, which, of course, won’t do any good if you rank it higher.
Instead, you should focus on:
Product pages
Service pages
Content pages
Once you have a final list of pages, you’ll want to take those URLs and look them up in your Google Search Console.
Step #2: Log into Google Search Console
Once you’re in Google Search Console, you’ll want to click on, “Search Traffic > Search Analysis”.
This will lead you to a report that looks something like this.
You’ll then want to click on the “Pages” option as it will sort the results by top pages.
At this point, you’ll have to go through your list of pages and find them within Google Search Console.
Once you find one of the pages, click on the URL and then select “Queries” at the top.
This will give you an overview of the specific terms that generate traffic to your high converting pages.
Now let’s download the data in CSV format and open it with Excel.
Once you load it up, it should look something like this.
I want you to first sort the data by impressions. Look for the keywords that are generating the highest impression count as those keywords have the potential to drive the most traffic.
If you feel those keywords are relevant to your product or service that you are offering, make sure you include them within the title tag of your website.
You won’t be able to add all of the keywords to your title tag because it is limited to roughly 60 characters, but adding a few of the most popular terms will ensure that you are going to get higher click-through rates, which will boost your overall search rankings.
Once you’ve adjusted your title tag, let’s do the same with your meta description.
Meta descriptions can be longer these days. Google is ok with roughly 300 characters. So, feel free to sprinkle in a few more keywords, but make sure your meta description still flows in a readable sentence.
And before we get back to the Excel sheet, let’s expand your content by adding in some of the keywords you don’t rank high up on page 1 but should.
You can do this by adding more content to your page, or if you can insert the keywords without “stuffing” them in (just make sure your content flows and provides value).
Now let’s head back over to Excel. You should see a filter icon that looks something like this:
Select column E, as this will select all of the keywords based on their rankings. Then click on the “sort & filter button” and then select “filter”.
You’ll see a table that pops up. Unselect any numbers that are 1, 2, or 3.
You’ll also want to unselect any number that is 11 or greater. This will show you all of the keywords ranking on page 1 that are NOT in position 1, 2 or 3.
By, having a list of keywords that are in position 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10… you can now focus on moving them up.
You’ve already done the hardest part which is getting on page 1. It’s not that much more work to get into the top 3 spots (at least for most keywords).
You’ll want to take all of the keywords that are relevant to your page and see if you can blend them into your content or headings without ruining the user experience.
This may mean that you’ll have to re-write your content and make it double the length.
Or if you have a product or service page that you are trying to rank higher, it may mean that you can’t include all of the keywords as it will ruin the user experience and hurt your conversion rate (but you can probably include a few more).
Over time you’ll find that your rankings will slowly climb for keywords that will bring in more revenue.
Step #3: Add in related keywords
You know what’s one thing I love about Google? They are really generous when it comes to giving marketers data. From Google Analytics to Google Search Console… Google has some amazing tools!
Another product I love (technically it’s more of a feature) is that Google shows you all of the related keywords to the ones you are already ranking for.
This is going to be a manual grind, but it’s worth it.
Log into Google Search Console and look at the top 10 keywords that you rank for. You can get this data by clicking on “Search Traffic > Search Analytics”.
Make sure you exclude any branded terms and compile a list of your top 10 terms.
Now go to Google, type in each of these keywords manually and scroll to the bottom where it says, “related keywords”.
Google gives you a list of other popular terms that people are typing. What is beautiful about this list, is that these keywords are already related to the one you are ranking for and they are typically much easier to rank for.
So, for neilpatel.com, I already rank for the term “SEO.”
So Google is telling me that in addition to the word “SEO,” people are also searching for:
You should do the same. It’s an easy way to rank for more relevant keywords, boost your traffic, and, eventually, your revenue.
If you do this for your top 10 keywords, you’ll have an additional list of 80 keywords (8 keywords per term).
And by integrating these terms into your site (only when it makes sense, don’t spam) you’ll quickly rank on page 1 for dozens of other terms.
If you want to go crazy like me, you can do this for 1,000 terms, which will then give you suggestions for an additional 80,000 keywords!
But again, don’t force it and ruin your user experience. This will hurt your conversion rate. You should only add keywords when it is natural and makes sense for the user.
And hopefully, you selected keywords from pages that are driving your revenue (remember Step 1!). The last thing you want is to spend time increasing your rankings and find that your revenue isn’t going up.
Step #4: Go after the low-hanging fruit
Have you noticed that there is a huge difference in traffic between the pages on your site that rank on page 2 compared to the content ranking on page 1?
Like most marketers, you probably don’t notice it because your pages that rank on page 2 of Google don’t get much traffic… which causes you to forget about them.
It’s sad but true.
So, let’s fix this!
Log into SEMrush, type in your domain name, and click on “Organic Research > Positions”.
You’ll want to look for all of the terms that you rank number 11 or 12 for.
You can do this by using the filter setting (just copy the settings in the screenshot below).
You’ll have a list of keywords that are almost on page one.
Now just make sure those keywords are pointing to pages that are responsible for driving your sales, leads, and revenue (go back to step 1 if you don’t know how to do this).
For the keywords that aren’t driving sales or leads, you can ignore them for now.
For one the ones pointing to pages that are driving sales or leads, perform a Google search for each of those keywords.
Now compile a list of web pages that are ranking above you.
Take those URLs and plug them into Ahrefs. Once you plug in each URL, click on “Backlinks” in the left navigation bar.
This will show you a list of sites linking to your competition.
I want you to get in touch with each of those sites and beg for a link. Here’s an email template you can use (you’ll have to modify it to fit your site).
Hey [Insert website owners name],
I noticed that you are linking to [insert competing web page] from [insert the URL of on their website linking to the competition]. Did you know that the page you are linking to isn’t the best resource for your website readers?
It’s missing [insert multiple points on what that competing page lacks].
If you want to provide an even better experience for your website readers, you should consider linking to [insert your URL that you want to rank higher] as it has [insert why your web page better than the competition].
Cheers,
[Insert your name]
You’ll find that after emailing hundreds of sites that only 3% to 5% will link back to you assuming your page is comparable to the competition.
If you can’t get at least 3% to link back it means that you either didn’t do a good job modifying the email template or your page sucks compared to your competition. 🙁
I know this is tedious work, but it’s a great way to boost your traffic.
Just think about this stat when doing the link outreach… 91% of searches never go to page 2. Or as my sales team says, page 2 is the perfect place to bury a dead body.
Step #5: Attract buyers before they are ready to buy
Another reason I love Google is that they have this neat tool called Google Correlate.
What Google Correlate does is shows you search patterns. In other words, they show you what your customers are typing in weeks or even months before they become customers.
And if you want to upsell your users, you can use Google Correlate to see what your customers type in weeks or months after they become a customer.
This will help you determine what products or services to offer assuming you want that upsell revenue.
Here’s how it works… let’s say you are selling beard oil. You type in “beard oil” into Google Correlate and you can see what people are typing in before they become customers.
As you can see some of the keywords people are typing in are…
beard oil
beard oils
flannel outfits
trek farley
sweater crop
beard products
best beard oil
sweater crop top
acne studios
what is beard
To get those results I got, I selected “-3” weeks.
I am looking at what people typed in 3 weeks before they searched in beard oil. That’s why I put a “-” sign before the number 3 to see what they typed in before they searched for my main keyword.
If you want to attract more customers and build brand loyalty with people who may be interested in beard oil products, I would create content around the best beard oil or flannel outfits that go well with beards.
That’s what I got from the Google Correlate data.
And if I wanted to figure out what products to create in order to upsell my beard oil customers, I would perform the same search on Google Correlate but use a positive number such as “2 weeks.”
Based on the data above, I would consider offering beard balm as an upsell as there seems to be a strong correlation.
The cool part about Google Correlate is that you can do this for any keyword and sort the results by the country you are targeting.
Conclusion
I know my method of keyword search is a pain in the butt, but it works.
Just think of it this way…
Creating content on new topics is hard because there is no guarantee a new page on your website will rank for competitive terms.
But if you take web pages that already have traction and you improve them using the techniques I described above, it’s a guaranteed way to generate more search traffic.
Now if you want to create content that focuses on new keywords, by all means, you should do so!
I am not saying that creating new content is a bad idea… heck, I do it all the time.
But consider creating new content after you modify your existing pages that are already driving your traffic and sales.
And when you do go after new terms, don’t forget to use Google Correlate as it will help you gain the right type of traffic (plus your competition isn’t doing it).
So, what do you think of my keyword research and SEO process that I used to rank for thousands of keywords?
You know what’s interesting about having an ad agency?
It’s that you get to talk to companies of all sizes and learn what causes them to grow.
And I know what you are thinking… “Neil, shouldn’t you be the one telling companies how to grow”?
Technically, yes. And I do.
But at the same time, I need to analyze what a company has done so far to come up with the best marketing strategy for them.
And the sad reality is, most marketers and companies are focusing on the wrong things. (I’ll go over how to fix it later in this post.)
Over the last 7 months, I talked to 208 companies to find out where they are spending their marketing efforts and what’s working. And best of all, I got the approval to share their data with you. 🙂
I talked to companies generating anywhere from one million dollars in yearly revenue to $291 million.
I avoided talking to companies less than a million in revenue because most of them weren’t doing much marketing. And I avoided talking to companies generating over a billion in revenue because you wouldn’t be able to replicate what they are doing.
As for the industry, I talked to companies in the B2B space as well as the B2C space. From ecommerce to lead generation to software as a service and everything in-between.
The first question I asked each of these companies was:
Where do you spend your marketing dollars?
In essence, I got a breakdown of marketing spend by channel.
It was obvious that most companies spend their money on Google and Facebook ads.
Even if they didn’t share that data with me, you can tell by just looking at Google and Facebook’s market cap. They are worth $790 billion and $554 billion respectively because of paid ads.
Now let’s break down the data by company size.
Does marketing spend by channel change by company size?
When talking to these companies, I broke them down into three groups.
The first being under 5 million in yearly revenue (with a minimum of $1 million per year). The second group was $5 million to $100 million, and the third was over $100 million.
Do you see a trend? No matter what size a company is, the majority of their marketing budget is going towards paid ads.
When I asked why the most common responses were: it’s easy to scale and you can see a direct ROI.
Now let’s look at the conversion rate per channel…
Conversion rate by channel
Before I share with you conversion data, out of the 208 companies I interviewed, only 73 of them had the correct tracking set in place for me to get accurate numbers.
You don’t have to pay for an analytics solution, you can just use Google Analytics and set up goal and conversion tracking. It’s better than nothing.
Here is the average conversion rate per channel:
When looking at the conversion data per channel, you’ll notice that I combined SEO and content marketing because they go hand in hand.
The more content marketing you do, in general, the better you’ll do when it comes to SEO.
The graph clearly shows paid ads convert better. And they usually do because you can control the landing page the traffic goes to. That’s why I love paid advertising!
Just look at these 2 pages below. They are both on page 1 of Google for the term “auto insurance”.
This one takes the top spot through paid ads:
And this one takes the top organic listing:
It’s obvious why the paid one converts better. The design focuses on converting a user into an auto insurance client. The organic listing (the second one) has tons of text because, without the content, it wouldn’t rank high on Google.
But looking at pure conversion rates doesn’t tell the whole story because some marketing channels are more expensive than others.
To get an idea of how effective a marketing channel is, you have to look at return on marketing spend.
Return on marketing spend doesn’t necessarily mean how profitable a channel is.
All it’s doing is showing the return based on marketing spend.
For example, although Facebook Ads don’t convert as well as Google Ads, they are much cheaper. Out of all the companies we interviewed, on average, they generated $3.04 in revenue for every dollar they spent on Facebook ads.
Again, this doesn’t mean profit. But typically, companies won’t keep spending money unless it is profitable.
What’s interesting about this data is that it shows 2 things:
Facebook Ads produce a better return on ad spend over Google Ads – this makes sense because it’s much cheaper to advertise on Facebook and it hasn’t been around as long as Google. Facebook Ads are quickly increasing in cost and over time the return on ad spend will probably even out with Google AdWords.
SEO produces the best returns – assuming you have set up your conversion tracking correctly, SEO is very effective because you can focus on increasing traffic from the right keywords that are causing sales. The only problem with SEO is that it is a long-term play and you won’t see results instantly.
So what’s wrong Neil?
Well, nothing yet, because you don’t have all of the data yet. 🙂
Let’s look at a few more trends and data point points…
The first is that paid ads are just increasing in price, which means you can expect to pay more for them each year.
Now, I am not saying the remaining searches cause clicks on organic listings.
34% of searches get no clicks because Google is solving a lot of search queries through their knowledge graph, which means a user won’t have to click. Plus, people are clicking on images, new stories, map listings, and whatever else Google decides to show.
But still, the majority of the remaining clicks are going towards the organic listings.
So why are you focusing all of your efforts on paid ads?
Just think about it. You know ad costs are going to keep going up because they have over time. And users prefer to click on the organic listings, yet you still spend the majority of your budget on paid ads.
And no, I am not saying that you shouldn’t leverage paid ads. Heck, I still think you should spend the largest portion of your marketing budget on paid ads because they are easier to scale, they convert better, and you’ll see an instant return assuming you know what you are doing.
But what you should be doing is maxing out your SEO spend because it produces the best return.
Here are 3 lessons for you when it comes to your marketing efforts and where you should be investing your time and money.
Lesson #1: Get good at SEO
You have no choice!
You’re going to struggle to keep your business profitable as your cost to acquire a customer is going to continually rise.
If you don’t believe me, just look at Google’s revenue graph that I shared above.
But here’s the beauty: If you get it right, your cost for SEO will continually go down over time compared to how much traffic and sales it’s driving.
Let’s look at NeilPatel.com.
I’ve been doing SEO on my own site for many years now. And when I mean SEO, I’m encompassing social media marketing, content marketing (including podcasts and videos), and crazy experiments.
Here’s my overall traffic excluding any cost per click type of ads for 2015.
A whopping 868,821 unique visitors. During that year I spent $320,301 on SEO related efforts, excluding CPC ads.
And in 2016 I generated 3,448,929 unique visitors and I spent $1,430,133 on SEO related efforts, excluding CPC ads.
Last but not least, I generated 7,442,647 unique visitors in 2017 for a total spend of $581,495 on SEO related efforts, excluding CPC ads.
2018 isn’t over yet, but my costs are even going to be lower than 2017 and my traffic is higher.
Technically if you include how much money I’m spending on building out the Ubersuggest tool it will be higher… but that’s not really considered SEO.
Here’s a recap…
In 2015, SEO was really expensive for me when you look at it from a cost per visitor standpoint.
It got worse in 2016 because I really wanted to grow faster, and then in 2017, I started to run out of places to spend my money and naturally, my growth rate slowed down.
If you fast forward to today, my cost per visitor is drastically lower than 2017. But still… I’m able to generate a B2B visitor for less than 8 cents.
That’s ridiculously cheap considering some of the terms I rank for would cost me $11 a click.
In other words, SEO is very expensive in the beginning, but it generates one of the highest ROI because you don’t have to keep spending money at the same pace to generate the greater results.
With paid advertising, if you stop spending money, your traffic and sales will stop. And if you want to scale fast, it tends to cost more per visitor instead of less per visitor like SEO.
But here’s what’s interesting… less than 1.7% of marketing spend was allocated towards CRO when you look at all companies as a whole.
I do understand why companies generating under $5 million a year in revenue don’t spend much on CRO because they don’t have as much traffic.
But if your company generates over $5 million a year you should consider allocating more of your budget towards CRO.
Yes, it’s not as sexy as SEO or social media marketing, but it works.
Lesson #3: Don’t forget lesson number 2
Most marketers and companies want to be hip and cool. In other words, they want to spend more time and money on cool marketing channels.
When I asked each company, “which marketing channel do you feel has the most potential”, here are the responses I got back:
What’s shocking about the chart above is that both B2B and B2C companies almost equally agreed Instagram and YouTube have the most potential.
Although Instagram is cool, ads are really expensive and it’s hard to generate a positive ROI on Instagram.
As for building up your Instagram reach organically, it’s definitely doable, but it’s hard to drive traffic from Instagram to your site unless you are having people swipe up.
As for YouTube, there is huge potential in it as long as marketers are willing to create videos. YouTube SEO isn’t competitive and ads are still affordable.
But here is the thing, you can see from the data above that most of these large companies have been built off of traditional channels like paid ads and SEO.
Yes, these newer channels are sexy, but the old ones still work extremely well.
And here is the kicker… you haven’t even seen the maximum potential of both paid ads and SEO because most you haven’t fine-tuned them.
So why would you want to go after unknown channels that aren’t as proven when you haven’t made the most out of the channels that work for your competition?
If you want to grow your traffic, leads, and sales, here’s how you should prioritize your marketing budget:
Spend more on SEO – whether you are a small company or a large one, SEO will produce a better return on your investment than paid ads in the long term. With all of the companies I talked to, less than 3% dominated the organic listings. But before you go all in on SEO, you need to setup tracking correctly so you so aren’t wasting your time driving traffic that doesn’t convert.
Keep your SEO budget reasonable – I’m kind of crazy, but most companies should never spend more than a million on SEO. Yes, really big companies will… but when you are maxing out your SEO budget it’s nowhere near as expensive as paid ads. As for what the amount will be, it ranges a lot depending on the industry, how competitive it is, and how fast you want to grow. So sadly I can’t give you an answer on how much, but it should decrease over time.
Invest more in CRO – if your company is generating at least 5 million dollars, you should consider spending more money on CRO. I know many of you don’t care for it based on the data above (plus my CRO blog posts aren’t as popular as my SEO ones), but it will help tremendously. It will allow you to spend more on paid ads as costs rise and it will increase your overall profit margin.
Avoid the sexy marketing channels – you shouldn’t consider copying me or others when it comes to Facebook, YouTube, etc. if you haven’t figured out the basics yet. Spend more time and energy on what’s proven.
When you’re small, test – many of you have businesses that generate less than a million dollars a year in revenue. If this is you, don’t follow the formula above. When you are starting off, it is best to test 4 or 5 marketing strategies out at the same time. Spend very little money on each of them… whichever one produces the best return, that’s what you should focus on in the short-run.
And if you are one of the rare marketers in which you’ve mastered all of the above strategies and already implemented them, the next step for you is to think outside the box and be a bit more creative.
