Summary
- Avoid poor keyword targeting by using tools like Rankability to assess keyword difficulty and potential ROI. Focus on less competitive variations with high conversion probabilities.
- Map keywords to stages of the sales cycle, emphasizing bottom-of-the-funnel commercial keywords for higher conversion rates and better ROI.
- Study Google SERPs to understand competition and estimate organic CTR, factoring in SERP features that can affect click-through rates.
- Aim for content uniqueness through Information Gain by providing fresh insights, unique studies, or personal data, rather than relying solely on existing competitor content.
- Prioritize content quality over quantity. High-quality pages with strong backlink support perform better long-term. Aim for fewer pages with strong content than many with weak or no backlinks.
- Regularly update existing content for improvement rather than constantly adding new content. Enhancing relevance and effort can significantly boost performance.
- Build topical authority by ensuring comprehensive topic coverage and support through strategic internal linking across related content clusters.
- Implement basic on-page SEO practices and advanced tools like NLP for content optimization to ensure comprehensive topic coverage and relevance.
- Leverage schema markup to enhance page understanding and improve visibility in SERP features, using tools like ChatGPT to create correct schema.
- Consider good internal linking practices, ensuring pages are easily accessible within three clicks and use diverse, relevant anchor text to improve user experience and relevance.
- Recognize the impact of website design on SEO, focusing on conversion-friendly design elements that encourage goal completions and positive engagement signals.
- Strategize backlink building by focusing on linkable assets rather than building links to direct commercial pages. This strategy supports broader authority and relevance.
- Maintain careful management of anchor text diversity to avoid penalties, prioritizing a natural mix within the backlink profile to remain within safe limits.
- Prioritize high-quality backlinks over a large number of low-quality ones. One authoritative link can outweigh hundreds of low-quality links in terms of impact without risking penalties.
- Use user tracking software to gather data on user interaction and engagement, using the insights to optimize page layouts and maximize efficiency based on real evidence.
- Allocate time and resources to high-impact SEO activities, focusing on the 20% that contribute to 80% of results. Avoid spending time on low-impact tasks that minimally affect outcomes.
- Avoid impulsive changes in response to Google updates. Allow time for initial analysis and let the dust settle before implementing well-thought-out changes.
- Be skeptical of all Google's SEO advice and perform independent testing where possible to validate what's effective in practice versus what's stated by Google.
- Exercise patience with SEO efforts, waiting for content and updates to stabilize before making further changes. Giving pages time to adapt can reveal clearer results.
- Embrace a multi-channel digital marketing approach, leveraging different forms of media and platforms to cultivate diverse traffic sources and market reach beyond just Google.
- Build scalable SEO systems using AI tools for task efficiency, systemize processes for repetitive tasks, and provide comprehensive SOPs for consistent execution.
- Avoid trying to handle entire SEO processes alone. Develop a team or use AI agents for specialized tasks, ensuring scalable and sustainable growth over time.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest implementing some smart SEO strategies to boost your business without spending too much money or time. Here are some simple steps:
Pick the Right Keywords: Use tools like Rankability to find less competitive keywords with high conversion potential. You want to focus on keywords that match different stages of a customer's buying journey, especially those closer to making a purchase.
Unique and Helpful Content: Make your content stand out by adding fresh insights or unique data instead of just copying others. Try creating content that hasn't been covered in the same way elsewhere.
Content Overhaul: Update your existing content regularly instead of always creating new material. Make sure your content remains relevant and adds extra value over time.
Build Internal Authority: Make sure to cover topics comprehensively and link related content internally to improve your site's authority. This helps Google understand your content better.
Basic On-page SEO: Ensure your main keywords appear naturally in the article's title, headings, and throughout the text. Tools like ChatGPT can help generate schema markup, improving how search engines understand your pages.
Backlinking Tactics: Instead of trying to get links to your sales pages, create valuable content or tools that others will want to link to naturally.
Invest in Good Design: Ensure your website design is user-friendly and encourages visitors to take action, like signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.
Use Data for Better Choices: Install user tracking to understand how visitors interact with your site. Use this information to make smart changes to enhance their experience.
Be Patient and Strategic: SEO is a long-term strategy. Wait to see the results of your efforts over time and avoid making sudden changes after Google's updates.
By concentrating on these strategies, you can improve your business SEO in a cost-effective and impactful way.
Quotes by Author
"Even experienced marketers fall victim to Common SEO habits that sabotage their results"
"The goal is not to drive a lot of traffic the goal is to drive ROI for every single dollar that you put into your SEO"
"You have to have backlink support and so it's better to create less pages but support those pages with links"
"Design is one of the most underestimated elements of SEO"
"There are a million different things you can do in an SEO campaign but not everything is as impactful"
Full Transcript
so are your SEO strategies secretly hurting your Google rankings I'm Nathan gotch and I've helped thousands of businesses get better rankings and more organic traffic but here's the truth even experienced marketers fall victim to Common SEO habits that sabotage their results costing them traffic time and money in this video I'll reveal 21 harmful SEO habits that might be holding you back why they're dangerous and exactly how to fix them so you can climb the rankings faster so hit the like button to show me you're excited and let's dive straight into number one which is poor keyword targeting so picking the right topics for SEO is one of the most important skills that you can have because if you pick the wrong topic and you go and try to build a page for it and you don't realize that it's too competitive you're going to waste time money and resources when you shouldn't have even done it in the first place so the first thing you want to do is always run any topic or idea you have through a keyword research tool like rankability and you can quickly see the difficulty level so like in this context the difficulty is based on backlinks so how many links are you going to need to be able to rank for this and as you can tell it's highly competitive but more importantly the the thing that really matters is if it's going to require a lot of back links that means that it's going to be a very big investment and you also have to consider is that investment worth it are you actually going to see an Roi by trying to rank for that keyword and so when we go and look at this keyword in particular you'll see that the the competitors are very very big okay we have you know zapier we have back Linko we have Wix we have HRS we have MS we have all these really powerful highly trusted domains so it's probably not wise to go after this keyword but what you can do is you can look for a variation that has slightly less comp comptition but is a little more specific for example you could go after SEO tools for agencies so the same topic but for a specific ideal client profile or ICP for short and that's going to be much easier to attack and that in fact that's exactly what I did specifically for got SEO I went SEO tools for agencies and you'll see that I'm doing very very well right even though there's some you know big Heavy Hitters in here it's very competitive it's still much easier than trying to rank for this very very body based keyword so really measure competition because what you don't want to do is try to rank for keywords you just have no chance of ranking for because it's just going to be a waste of resources and anyone that says otherwise is not being considerate of budget or being considerate of where that money's actually going because at the end of the day the goal is not to just get a bunch of traffic to our website the goal is to get traffic into our website that has a high probability of converting but more importantly to try to get an Roi for every dollar that we spend for every dollar that you put in an SEO you should be trying to get three four or even $5 out of it and that's on the low end you should be really thinking about a 10 to1 ratio as far as Roi so and that brings me to the next very important point which is once you understand to Target keywords that are within your competition range you need to map your keywords to where they are in the sales cycle or in the customer awareness Journey so what you don't want to do is Target a bunch of keywords that are in this unaware phase because these are all the keywords are going to be eaten up by the AI overviews they're very informational in nature and they don't have a high probability of converting so the only thing you can do for any keywords that fall in this early stage is you can just offer lead magnets or you can try to push them deeper into the funnel with more content but the the the point at which they're going to be ready to convert is going to take much longer so what you want to do is flip this and focus all of your attention your effort right here and then build your whole strategy around these bottom of the funnel commercial keywords because these are the keywords that are actually going to make you money and so this is where the focus should be and don't get persuaded or seduced by search volume because search volume is only giving you an indication of the the demand around a particular idea but it doesn't give any other detail as to whether it's actually going to convert and so the goal is not to drive a lot of traffic the goal is to drive Roi for every single dollar that you put into your SEO so you need to be very deliberate with where your time and your attention and your money goes it's best to focus down here because you have the greatest probability of actually driving real revenue and now habit number two is not studying the serps so studying Google serps or search engine results pages is one of the most important skills you can have for keyword selection but most importantly how you can actually estimate the Organics TR that's going to be possible okay so I'm going to show you three different examples this first example is for an e-commerce focused keyword or a uh a store that sells a physical product okay and you can tell we're dealing with a lot of things here in these serps so right away we can see there are no organic results that are even above the fold at all so we have a sponsored block here we've got two sponsored Google ads here and then we finally get into the popular products here okay so you could AR these are kind of organic but it's not your traditional organic results plus we've got all kinds of filtering mechanisms over here that you know ultimately will distract the user even more meaning less organic CTR to grab in this particular keyword now finally we get to the traditional organic results and so what you want to do is when you're looking at any keyword and you're trying to understand that keyword you need to have a try to at least estimate what that CTR is going to be like so if you're working with a client for example you can't say that they're going to get terrific CTR for this keyword that would be uh you know that that would not be honest when you look at these results what you should say instead is based on normal environments where it's straight organic results the first result typically gets 30% but because of all these other Sur features just to be conservative maybe we should cut that in half so maybe let's say if we get to number one that could drive us you know 15% of the total clicks but even then I'd probably go even more conservative than that in this scenario and this is why it's really important that you don't get hyperfocused on just this one singular keyword phrase of course you need to build your pages around a particular idea but think more about the total amount of traffic going to a page that's what matters way more than where you're position for like one specific variation of that phrase measure Performance Based on how much traffic that page is getting not just based on your individual keyword rankings so but the point is like study the serbs get a good idea of what you're up against and so this one here you know I would I would project my CTR expectations to be much lower because we're just dealing with so many different Sur features and so many different things that could pull clicks away even if you're doing a good job at ranking so that's the first one the e-commerce front the second one is something much more informational in nature which for pretty much every informational keyword at this point we're seeing a lot of similarities the first is these AI overviews they pop up a lot now across many queries notice they didn't pop up here for this e-commerce keyword that's a commonality we don't see a lot of AI overviews for e-commerce focused keywords that could change but for now it's very prevalent for informational queries and you can see you know this is uh changes the game quite a bit cuz now we've only got about three results up here that Google is citing and based on our early evidence of this studying this for the last you know many months here usually these are pulled from the first page but not always okay so I'd say 50 60% of these are typically pulled from the first page so if you want any chance of getting visibility in the AI overviews you have to actually rank well in the traditional search results so there's no way around that you have to you know it greatly increases your odds uh of of showing up here okay and so what we're looking at though is just once again studying the serfs what are we up against what what will happen if we rank number one when we consider all other variables so we got the AI overview and we've got a video pack okay so this isn't just about thinking about like projected CTR it's also thinking about all right if we want to drive as much visibility as possible for this keyword what can we do and so I'll give you a small example of this we look up content optimization tools I'm actually doing this in real time so you can you know you can watch this progress um but you'll see here I rank this is my actual web page that's ranking but then I actually rank here and then if we scroll down I've got three different rankings from YouTube okay this is all by Design I'm I'm intentionally going after these different platforms to try to occupy as much serp real estate as possible the only reason why I even developed such a strategy is because I saw that there were these different SE features so I said okay I'm going to you know create my mother assets so you should always build a mother asset like this this is like your focus this is the chord this is the one that you really want to kind of build around but then you want to study the serps and say okay where else can I rank so I can capture more CTR for this keyword okay and it's the same thing the one I just showed uh SEO tools for agencies you'll see once again uh you know we're sitting right here but if we go down there's also another result for us down here we've got two other YouTube videos okay so the idea here is to try to just grab as much real estate as we can and don't just view this as your only you know don't just view it as your only opportunity is to rank your one web page view it as no we have this keyword that we want to rank for so how do we get here regardless of what property it is regardless of whether it's our website versus another website that kind of thinking has to be removed and yes we want to focus on our website but more importantly we want to focus on where we can rank the fastest and the easiest sometimes YouTube is a better option in many cases so just keep that in mind as you study the serps but most importantly don't just rely on organic either like if I was you know looking at furnace repair Chicago we see we've got we've got the local service ads I mean it's kind of a no-brainer that you should make that investment too because it's way above the fold it's above the local pack so if you're not doing it you're probably missing out on business and leads uh but more importantly looking at this like on the local level if you're not performing in a local pack you're going to be missing on a lot of business so this is this is no longer just like focus on traditional organic you got to really get focused on multiple areas multiple channels to really be able to do this the right way and at the end of the day the focus needs to be on how do we generate as many leads or as sales for whatever industry we're going after stop thinking so much about how do I rank my one web page uh because that's that's not that's kind of going to be a dying strategy that that is the the mother asset but we should be building around it try to capture more real estate which brings us to number three ignoring Information Gain so you probably already know that creating highly relevant content is very important for SEO but one of the other big elements you need to focus on is Information Gain which essentially all that means is that your content is bringing something new and fresh to the table and so when you look at a keyw what you want to do is you want to Target the same topics that the competitors are are targeting you do want to do that but you also want to think about what's something we can do that's very unique for this keyword so the best way to kind of explain this is just in a couple of examples so this one here you're looking at is best CMS for SEO and I've been ranking for this probably for you know I think since maybe 2016 is uh we'll go ahead and look here yeah 2016 was when I started ranking for this okay and the this is not your prototypical long form piece of content the reason why this performs is a few reasons number one is it has really good links so the intent here to build this asset was actually more for linkbait wasn't necessarily to rank really for a lot of keywords is more just to drive links but the end outcome was it actually did end up ranking for best CMS for SEO and so first the first part of this is links and I'm not going to pretend like that didn't play a role here but the other big part is that this content is very unique and I do believe that is built into the algorithm I do believe Google has a way to see content that does have some sort of unique elements to it and so the way that I typically will approach this is try to create my own data so do my own case studies create my own data and that way no one else can copy it right now now they can reference this data uh they could try to recreate this study but at the end of the day this data is all unique it's all based on just my one isolated case study so this is the idea you can create uniqueness by coming up with your own insights another way to do it is this I have a highly controversial post here about Google being biased um and so I looked at you know a bunch of search results and then studied it based you know really from an SEO perspective not a political perspective but you know of course I knew would get political but the point is is like I wanted to examine it like from an SEO perspective and see like is there actual bias and you can read the study if you want but the point is is like as far as it being unique the content itself is very unique no one else has done a study like this but the other thing that makes it really unique and it's something that a lot of people don't really think about is the user generated content so I'll let you have some fun if you want to go and read some of these comments but uh you know I accept every comment everyone that's negative the ones that are positive I accept them all because what I want to do is I want there to be uniqueness here I want this ugc to add stuff to this page that can't be found anywhere else okay so it's not just about the meat of the page it's also you can create that uniqueness with the ugc okay so as you can tell data is my favorite kind of angle but another one is using just like your time as a unique angle so for this one I I wanted to rank for best SEO books but I saw like all the top results were from really strong websites so I knew I had to come up with something very unique so I decided to buy every single book on Amazon and read all the SEO books okay um and I have proof that I did it because I actually show like my Amazon purchase history and then I actually reviewed all the top ones um but the idea here is once again I'm using my time and I'm coming up with an angle that I know most people won't so if you look at Google's eat guidelines you'll see a lot of stuff about effort effort is a big element to content that seems to perform better um and so really thinking about like how can I put more effort into my content probably might pay off okay I can't guarantee it but if you you know in life it does seem to be like a consistent variable is the more effort you put into something typically the better it will do it's not always true but it greatly increases your odds so there's a lot that you can do to make your content unique uh and to kind of tap into this element of Information Gain and this is an area that I really love it's I have so much fun with this because it's actually really easy to beat people these days because almost everyone has gotten so lazy because they just go into chat gbt and they think it's going to solve their content problems but if you just put in a little extra effort a little extra research a little uniqueness you know I I like to mess around with memes and like make the content super unique um this is this is what it's all about right and this is how you make your content unique it's not just about the words it's how that content is structured too what can you do to make it feel like your content how to make it unique compared to all of the garbage that's out there online uh the good news is it's not that difficult so think about that every time you create a page how do we how do we make this page really stand out how do we make it really different than what's already out there next up at number four is a Comon trap which is focusing on quantity over quality so occasionally you may run into some people talking about how they created a bunch of content and they got a huge Spike and organic search traffic from Google but very rarely will you find a case study where someone did that and that traffic actually stuck for a significant amount of time so usually when you focus on quantity over quality you can get a big lift in the short term but long term it doesn't really work and you won't find many examples of it working long term okay and so one thing that I like to do to kind of reemphasize this point and you can do this you can look at really any s you run a screaming frog crawl like I have here and you can uh integrate the HFS API and what I like to do is I like to look at the ratio of backlinks hitting pages on the website and look at what percentage of pages actually have backlinks and so when you look at most websites that are usually underperforming from an SEO perspective one commonality I often find is that like they have tons of pages on their website and many of them do not have backlinks so like in the context of like this one business uh I think it's upwards of 90% or more of their Pages don't have a single backlink so what you're essentially telling Google is that this website is not very popular okay and that's not what you want and so what you would rather have is a much tighter leaner website that doesn't have a massive amount of pages but every page or as many pages as you can has that backlink support okay so just to give you some perspective like this is a small local business here and they have 2600 pages indexed in Google that don't have a single backlink okay so this is an example of quantity over quality they focused heavily on quantity but they didn't build the support they didn't prove to Google that these pages are good and we know that just creating content is not how you do well in Google you can't just create content and get results because if that were the case everyone using chat gbt would have terrific results but that's not the case the way that we actually deliver results in SEO is you have to have backlink support and so it's better to create less pages but support those pages with with back links instead of creating a lot of pages and only have a few pages with links moving on to Habit number five which is constantly creating new content instead of updating your existing Pages if you already have existing organic search traffic the best thing that you can do is focus on your existing Pages first really think about is there an opportunity for us to upgrade and make these Pages better and so what you're looking at here is an example of me executing this in real life for this particular blog post that SEO for dentists okay so this blog post as you can tell right here for a very long time starting in September 2022 did absolutely nothing it did horrible for a very long time and the reason it did horrible is because it was just pure AI garbage content and I did that on purpose because I wanted to see this is you know the early stages of of you know AI that like how how little effort can I put into a piece of content to see if it can perform now funny enough it did not perform well at all so what I did is like okay instead of doing that I'm going to do the opposite and I'm going to put a significant amount of effort into this content and see how it performs so I wanted to go on both edges both extremes to see which one would do best uh to No Surprise and I've tested this now hundreds of times over the last couple of years the low effort content always underperforms the high effort content without fail I have not had a single situation where the low effort content cont has beat my high effort content it just doesn't happen um and so what we can do here is you want to focus on these existing URLs and you want to make them better that is the key so this was already an existing URL I didn't change the url all I did was upgrade it I made this page better I invested a lot of time and effort into it most importantly I made it much more relevant so this page originally was about a a rankability score of 20 and really what the rankability score is just an indication of topic coverage and relevance so the lower the score is an indication that you're not covering a lot of the topics that the competitors are covering it's that that's a signal that you're not covering those topics that's it um and so what you want to do is you want to cover more of these topics because this is just like the barrier to entry to actually ranking if you don't talk about the same stuff that the competitors are talking about you basically have no chance of ranking so you do need to cover the same topics but going back to my previous this point you do want to bring some uniqueness to the equation so what you'll see here is like one thing I tell a lot of you know the rankability members is try to look at your content and yes you want to see green that's all good that means you've covered the topics but you also want to see a lot of white space and this white space is an indication that we're talking about things more than likely than no one else is talking about okay and so you want to have both of those things that's the perfect formula is Extreme high level relevance Plus plus Information Gain okay and if you can combine those two together along with you know increasing the level of effort you put into your content and the level of investment into your content the better you're inevitably going to perform so that's the idea is we really want to focus on these existing assets uh rebuild them make them better make our site better and stop just publishing on the you know the the content hamster wheel you want to make your stuff better it's much you get much more bang for your buck when you do that and that leads nicely into number six which is not building topical Authority the right way so one of my favorite ways to see if we're building enough topic support for a particular page is just to run a site colon search because what you're going to do is you're going to see all the pages that are indexed around that topic so let's say I wanted to build topic support for this content optimization tools post what I do is I run a site callon search and I just go very broad with content okay and what that's going to do is going to help us see what are the what are the pag that are directly related to this very very broad topic and you know overall because we have focused on this we do have good topic coverage for this but you can take it even further and look you know content optimization you could do SEO content whatever you want you can get more specific but the point is like run this search so you can get a kind of a broad overview of how well you're covering this topic and just to give you a little perspective this particular page here you can see I've highlighted it and this page is the the pillar for this cluster okay so it's at the center of this cluster it's the one that matters and the way that we always do things we always build from the bottom of the funnel and then work our way up so what we're doing here is we're building this at the core the center of this cluster and then I'm building supporting assets around it and all of these are within this you know content optimization tools cluster or even further out content optimization and so you can see how this has been clustered out we've got like specific you know different levels of this and this is the way that you need to be thinking about building topics support so for example this this has got 38 supporting assets around this one you know core con piece of content so that's the idea you should be thinking about how do we build more support around this idea um and that's how you really do this and you got to get really granular so like right now I still think there's room to you know probably go up to a 100 assets just in this one cluster there's so much opportunity and people greatly underestimate how much opportunity there is to build real Authority around a particular idea so don't underestimate that and number seven a foundational mistake is neglecting essential onpage SEO so at a bare minimum for onpage SEO you need to have your keyword in the title In The Meta description in the URL you want it in the H1 and ideally you could get it in the first sentence or variation here in the first sentence and then if you want to go to the next level ideally some sort of variant of the core keyword in the first age too if you just do that that's probably going to put you ahead of I don't know 50% of the internet who's try attempting to do SEO just doing that alone will get you ahead of a lot of people but to go to the next level after you've got your kind of really the on page SEO basics down you need to use a tool like rankability for NLP optimization and so NLP really is just the technology that's used to extract what are called entities from all of the competitors so when you're looking at these keywords here these are keywords that are pulled from the top ranking competitors for that keyword and so what this allows you to do is make sure that you're have you have as much topic coverage as the top players okay and you have to do that because the the way I like to think about this if I was you know creating a piece of content around SEO which is obviously the thing that I specialize and it doesn't make sense for me to not talk about link building and digital marketing and keywords and ranking factors and all the things you would expect when it comes to SEO and if you're trying to rank for this and you don't talk about those things well it's just going to look odd because it seems like you wouldn't know what you were talking about if you didn't talk about user experience and keyword research and all these things that you would typically talk about when it comes to SEO so this is like the bare minimum you have to do to build proper relevance now number eight might surprise you but it's ignoring schema marup so I could dedicate a whole video to schema marup but the main reason I want to do is number one it helps build more relevance it helps drive more detail for our pages so that the algorithms understand our Pages better okay it's just a bare minimum that we should be doing but also the Sur features that it gives us so what you're looking at here for rankability review this is product review schema and so because there's schema on this page we are getting those star ratings in there which then hopefully increases organic CTR now the good news is with chap gbt this is a breeze now so you can see here I just went in a chat gbt and had it create this schema for me very simple prompt gave it the URL gave it the title gave it my star ratings and obviously gave it the you know the inputs that it needs within a couple of seconds it built out this nice really really good schema and what we can do is we can just copy this schema go over to the schema Mark of validator we'll go and paste that in run the test and no warnings whatsoever and this will do the job okay so you put this in and then we'll go back to the rankability uh rankability review page and you can see if you use this extension here there's this schema Builder markup or schema Builder extension and you can actually verify that it's working well okay so go here we'll click on the product and you can see it's all working appropriately so just use those tools tools and you can start to implement this across any website next to number nine is a critical mistake many Overlook which is poor internal linking so the first thing to focus on when it comes to internal linking is just overall coverage so there's two things to focus on number one is craw depth this is how many clicks it takes to get to a page on your website ideally want to get it less than three clicks deep okay next one is unique in links this is how many unique pages are internally linking to the page that you're looking at for for me I typically like to see that this is five or above so anything that's below five I'm going to investigate I'm going to see how can we drive more internal links to this page and then from there it's just to focus on internal link anchor Tex so I'll show you this example here we can see that internal link anchor text we want to diversify it just like we would for external you know links and external anchor text we would diversify you should diversify your internal link anchor text for the main reason because Google's technology has changed so much and they use NLP to understand pages so links are actually not the best tool to drive relevance anymore Google can understand what a page is about pretty well now with NLP so what you're looking at here is an example of uh abuse internal linking abuse okay and this is not just you know uh obviously the exact match elements that's just one but the other thing you want to think about here is from a user experience perspective so you see a lot of local businesses do this and it's a massive mistake because what you're doing here is you want to rank for furnace repair St Louis okay that's a good idea but then you have to think about if let's say you did Rank and someone who lives in St Louis let's say downtown St Louis specifically they come in here you know they're looking for for help in the St Louis city area and then they see all this stuff here for all these different cities and these surrounding cities this has no use to them whatsoever and so when you have this stuff here you're adding a bunch of things that are not relevant to the user which then is going to confuse them it's going to cause user experience issues and it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense at all so don't use internal linking in this manner because this isn't actually creating anything that's going to be useful even for results but most importantly it's not going to help you drive conversions which is the whole reason for even creating a page in the first place and number 10 thinking your website's design doesn't impact SEO is another costly error design is one of the most underestimated elements of SEO and what you want to happen is any page that's commercial in nature really any page in general but let's just focus on Commercial Pages we want to have goal completions so if someone lands on this page we want them to actually call a phone number we want them to actually submit a lead form we want them to visit a second page we want them to dive deep into what we do this all stuff that's good but if the site's design is not built for conversions you're going to not you're not going to get those positive signals that we need to have so you know the phone number is not clickable right here there's not a form the phone number is not clickable in the header you know there's some obviously contrast and color related issues but if we look at a page like this or a website like this you can see it's built to convert it's got everything going for it it's got multiple calls to action it's really clean it's just doing the job that it needs to do because they are focused on conversions and the design allows that to become much more likely so do not underestimate the importance of design because at the end of the day the we're not just doing this to get traffic we're doing this to actually get leads and traffic and customers and sales so uh we're looking to drive revenue for this so you should invest a significant amount of time into your design you should really care about it but you should approach it from the perspective of conversions not from the perspective of making it look pretty and now let's shift to backlinks with number 11 building back links to the wrong pages so if you want better link building results you need to understand this concept and so if you want more links what I recommend doing is focusing on creating content assets or what I call linkable assets these are assets engineered to attract back links so those could be free tools or free software that could be data driven pieces of content it could be ego baate there's a variety of mechanisms and different Frameworks you can use and I have a ton of them inside of gacho Academy but but you can also just use chat gbt to help you brainstorm these linkable assets but the reason you want to build these cuz number one they can actually help you attract back links naturally which is the only way to truly scale your link profile but more importantly we can build links and acquire links in a very natural way so instead of driving these backlinks to the homepage or a category page or a product page in the context of e-commerce you're going to drive back links to the content asset which is a a page or some type of app asset that actually deserves to get back links and then from there you're going to use internal links to drive that link Equity to all the commercial pages and the idea is a rising tide lifts All Ships so these this link Equity will flow and these pages will rise I've I've done this more times than I can count and it it really does work and I think some people think you have to just drive back links to these pages but you can build relevance and build Authority through your content assets and then just drive all of those positive signals to those commercial pages and it works incredibly well closely related number 12 is the risky practice of aggressive anchor Tex so your anchor Tex is one of those link building variables that is a Sure Fire way to get penalized and so you got to be really careful Google is extremely good at identifying signals of Link spam but in particular anchor Tex is one of those areas where the algorithms are really good at identifying using that as their trigger for then ultimately assigning that link spam to that particular website okay so just be really really careful and so you're looking at here like a an anchor text profile for one of my pages and you could see the the primary keyword is it has about 14% which is pretty high to be totally honest and it should definitely be lower but you have to also look at the total amount of unique anchor Texs going to this page and there's a lot of variation there's a lot of uniqueness so it's not just one exact match anchor that's constantly slamming this page there is diversity and this is the idea so in a perfect world we could get this down but as you know as a page accumulates links you can't always control the ratios but it's something you do want to keep an eye on and make sure that it's not getting completely unbalanced to the point where like okay this page has a lot of exact match anchor Texs which is an indication that you have some levels of control over those backlinks and you know Google um you know want you to get links naturally even though that's very difficult and natural links don't typically follow a particular pattern so just keep that in mind if you're if you're buying links or whatever you're doing like if you have a certain pattern that you follow you get a certain amount of links every month you use a certain type of anchor Tex all the time uh you use certain types of websites all the time you start to leave a footprint and so be very very careful on that front now number 13 is another backlink killer which is lying on lowquality backlinks so here's an example of a link opportunity on the service that doesn't look too horrible but when you start to investigate it further you can see that this is nothing more than a website that's built just for link building in other words it's link Farm okay and so looking at this we can see you know yeah we've got a link out here doesn't look bad it's an internal link so you doesn't cause any issues right there but as we start to scroll we start to see the reality and you know the way I think about this is like like if if me just one little person with one little mind can easily find signals of Link buying and Link injection then I have no doubt that the phds and absolute Geniuses that work at Google could certainly figure it out as well and so just looking at these different you know these different links that are dropped in here you can see it's just very obvious that they were purchased okay you look at how the way they're placed you look at how natural it looks it's just very very clear okay so this is one type of link that you'll often see that I would classify as lowquality okay another type is the nastiest of all this is like a profile link I'm not going to scroll because there's just a lot of crazy stuff here and I potentially might get a virus for being on here but the point is like this is another example of just a terrible link like don't don't get links like this you will regret it um and the thing is when it comes to Links the the thing that I don't think a lot of people fully grasp is you don't need to get a lot of links you just need to get really good links and it's much better to get one really good link than it is to get hundred or thousands of garbage it really is it is the ratios are really off off balance in that way like in if you're going to make investments in links just only get the best be really really deliberate about what hits your site be really really care careful because when you build nasty backlinks to your website it's really hard to reverse that every other thing that you do in SEO can pretty much be reversed it can be tested you can figure out things uh and the it's not you know a life or death decision but when it comes to Links it's something once you get those spammy links it's hard to to reverse it so and just to give you an example this is I got a link from atfs here to one of my case studies and you can see how much more natural the links are in here and more importantly they're linking to a lot of other entities relevant entities in this industry okay so they're linking out to other SEO websites other SEO blogs there's a lot of relevance in their outbound link profile they're not linking out to some payday loans website okay so that's another big element of this is like normal websites websites that are not uh letting people buy links uh they don't do stuff like like that that you don't see those patterns so that's why it's so obvious for Google to be able to identify it because a normal website just doesn't have those that type of linking practice so with that in mind there's so many ways to get high quality back links but one of the things you can do is you can Outsource this this work and so the one of the websites and one of the businesses I recommend is digital. PR and what they do is they will use digital PR to get you really high quality backlinks and they will focus more on getting you a lot of homepage based backlinks and that's not a bad thing it should be part of your overall link building strategies to get homepage links which then you can drive that link equity and authority to some of those internal Pages or more of your your commercial pages so they do a really really good job and as I mentioned before you know getting high quality backlinks is all that you should be thinking about don't think about anything like you like the thing is I hear some people talk about link diversity like you don't need link diversity when you have high quality backlinks that's not that doesn't that's not necessary because you're just getting the best of the best so link diversity it doesn't matter the only time you need link diversity is when you're you know doing much more gray hat stuff so anyway if you want the best links I highly recommend using them just go to digital. PR to learn more and number 14 a habit keeping you blind to results is not using user tracking software so although I install user tracking software to definitely improve SEO the real reason I do it is because I want to understand what users are doing on every single page on my website I want to know what they like what they don't like but most importantly I want to get evidence so if I've evidence of something I can make some hypotheses and I can actually run real tests and so just to give you a small example this is a page uh and then funny enough this is a a tool that I built with chap gbt when it first came out and it's still to this day users seem to like it a lot it gets a ton of Engagement it's been ranking since you know I you can go back and look at my channel my older videos around that time when chat gbd came out I I showed people that this thing is actually ranking back then it's still ranking now and the reason is because it fulfills the intent of the keyword perfectly if someone is searching for a script timer what do they want they want a freaking script timer they want a tool to use they don't want a dissertation about a script timer and so in this case the reason why I'm bringing this up is because now that I have so much data for this particular page and I see that users are engaging with it the way that they are I can ultimately think about do I need the content that's below the fold okay so there's a bunch of content below the fold here and what I did though is because of this data I removed all that content and so I I don't have the full data now to to to prove the effectiveness of that but my my hypothesis is quite simple because this is fulfilling the intent because users are engaging with it I believe that that content below the fold will make no difference from an SEO perspective so I think having it versus not having it will make no difference at all um and so what I did is I just got rid of it because when I look at this and look at the movement data you can see that almost all the movement data probably 99.9% of the movement data is all in this region on this page okay but when we go down there's virtually nothing at all and in fact we can actually go back and look prior to that date and we'll see what it used to look like and you'll see that when we look at this movement data it does not exist below the fold like barely anything so look at this content here it there's really nothing right basically nothing at all but right here we see where the attention is okay and so I believe that Google uses user signals as part of its ranking algorithm and so this is an example of I could have never run this test accurately without having this data so the data gives you power I cannot stress it enough please if you're going to make any investment in tools you definitely want some sort of user tracking software I don't even care which one you pick just pick one because it gives you just powerful insights that you just would not get otherwise and speaking of wasted efforts number 15 is spending time on low impact SEO activities there are a million different things you can do in an SEO campaign but not everything is as impactful and so what I did a long time ago is I created a very simple kind of categorization process for every action that exists in SEO and so what I use and you can also use this as well is based on the ice formula and this is really used in SAS but I used it in the context of SEO so impact confidence and ease impact is how impactful is this action from an SEO perspective how confident am I that it's actually going to deliver that result and then uh what's the difficulty level of that particular action so and then you get a total and you can actually start to categorize ize these actions but what what people tend to do is focus on the easy things in SEO so like they might go and update meta descriptions or update Title tags or all this little micro stuff that doesn't have a massive impact and that while that stuff is useful and maybe does have some value it is not it has no comparison to something that is much more high impact like you know uh fixing a 404 page with existing backlinks it's very simple action but it can have a very big impact on performance so it's much better to focus on the 8020 of SEO focus on the 20% of actions that deliver 80% of the results uh don't get wrapped up in the you know in the little micro stuff and the little tiny actions or even the low value actions that are really just you know taking your time uh and are really what I would consider time wasters in many cases there's only a few big actions in SEO that make a massive difference and so once you understand those actions I have it here for you you can just C Cy this uh you're going to start getting much better results and and spending less time on stuff that just doesn't move the needle now on to number 17 a strategic misstep which is kneejerk reactions to Google updates so Google releases many updates throughout the year and some are bigger than others but one of the things you don't want to do is when there's an update immediately go to your website if you've been affected and just start changing a bunch of stuff I've been doing SEO since 2011 so I've seen a lot of different Cycles many different algorithm updates and I can tell you the the patterns are very predictable when it comes to people getting their sight hit so I've had many sites hit myself so I know what it's like but I can tell you when most people get their website hit they immediately go and just start changing a bunch of things so that is not the right thing to do the first thing you want to do when there's an update and let's say you were negatively affected the best thing to do is just do nothing just let it let the dust settle let the update finish and just see where things land then once that's over then it's time to do a proper audit so you want to do a proper audit you want to start to analyze and see what's going on and ultimately determine if there's opportunities to improve your performance and if you were hit by an update as you know as much as you see on social media with people claiming that you know their website's great and there's no reason they should have been hit um I've never once seen a website that was unfairly hit that uh you know had no issues whatsoever every website that I've ever seen that's been hit by an update and has lost significant traffic has issues and that just makes sense because pretty much every website on the Internet is going to have some issues some are just bigger than others and so what you want to do is just try to find out what those core issues are and of course you know there's not not always a perfect answer especially with some of the recent updates where it seems to be much more random as far as Google's penalties but at the end of the day just be careful with just shifting things around when there's an update just just sit back let it finish and once the dust is settled then start to diagnose similarily problematic at number 17 is listening only to Google's SEO advice so last year there was a huge Google leak and in this leak a lot of things were uncovered and just to give you very high level overview there were a lot of things that seos like myself have been talking about for many many years that we said were ranking factors and then Google uh you know as part of its propaganda machine said that you know things like organic CTR were not ranking factors or that backlinks weren't that important anymore or that Google Chrome uh doesn't track user user engagement user signals and then translates that over to organic search performance there's a whole laundry list of various things that Google claimed were either a not ranking factors or B weren't that important for performance which makes perfect sense because they don't want people understanding their algorithm because then you can manipulate them so they their their greatest weapon is to push out a lot of misinformation just to muddy the waters uh and that's their most effective tool it's actually not their algorithms their most effective tool is is the propaganda that they can spread with humans uh but the point is be very careful with what Google tells you if Google is saying something just be very careful to believe it go and do your own testing do your own independent in research and get real facts from in the field experience and the only way to do that is to actually do SEO you have to do SEO yourself run your own tests and yes you're going to get some anecdotal evidence you may not have the the largest you know test data but you can start to see commonalities you can start to see certain variables that move the needle on certain variables that don't you have to be willing to test that's the only way to truly learn and don't just listen to what Google says and then treat it like gospel and now number 18 is not being patient enough so there's a pretty old study from atrs where they did an analysis and they found out that the average page in the top 10 was over 2 years old so patience is really critical and this makes sense because pages that are aged and older tend to accumulate more backlinks which then kind of solidifies their position but I would say you know just because this study is a little outdated there's a lot more volatility in the serbs so there's not the days of like ranking at the top and kind of staying there forever doesn't really happen at least for semi competitive keywords but the point remains that patience is still important you need to give time as soon as you publish a new piece of content or you've you've optimized an existing piece of content you need to give it enough breathing room to actually settle the way that I like to do it is when we publish or we do an update or an upgrade on a page is I give it you know up into the the point until I see stagnation so once the rankings have stagnated once the traffic is kind of gone flat for a couple of months typically then I know we got to introduce some new variables to push that page over the edge but until then there's no point of really messing around until you finally hit that set point once you've hit that set point now it's time to to introduce some some additional ranking factors so that might be acquiring more backlinks that might be making the page deeper and more comprehensive and more relevant it might be you know driving some internal links to it there's a lot of different things we can do to move the needle but the point is just wait till things stagnate for number 19 beware of an overly narrow Focus By ignoring other digital marketing channels Beyond Google so I absolutely love SEO and it's the single reason how I've been able to Achieve Financial Freedom and ultimately be able to build a business that I really love it's all because of SEO but I'll tell you this you have to know more than just SEO you have to when you're building a business you have to think about many other facets of digital marketing and so what you're looking at here is a much more comprehensive approach to digital marketing so what you're looking at is what I've talked about before which is the five stages of customer awareness and this is just an example for rankability but you can see I've placed each of these keyw into their appropriate categories okay so you're most aware product aware solution aware problem aware and unaware and you can see that at different stages we are going to be promoting different things so at the unaware phase I'm not going to go straight from this phase up to a rankability free trial instead what I'm going to go to is some sort of lead magnet so I can get someone on an email list which then allows me to do email marketing and then of course drive them to rankability okay and as you go deeper into the funnel you'll see that it becomes much more appropriate to go direct to that offer but the further they are from conversion the better it is to promote some sort of free lead magnet that doesn't require a credit card and maybe just requires an email so that's how you can kind of you know use these different phases to align the the the offer to whatever stage they are in in this cycle okay and then the other thing too is thinking about like what's the core thing that we're going after so you know you have content in this case content optimization so what I want to do is I want to draw I want to create assets on my own assets around this topics it's going to be my website on the website I'm going to create different assets here at each stage I'm also going to create linkbait that's specific to content optimization and then this is really like the foundation of what you do then to layer on top of that you want to start to create content about content or about your core topic on your what I call your rented assets so that's going to be the YouTube LinkedIn Tik Tok Instagram all of these what some people call call owned assets but they're actually not owned assets cuz you don't own these channels at any point it can be taken away from you so it's not technically an owned asset in my opinion it's more of a rented asset but they're still really really important and I've showed the example already in this video but we'll just show you know content optimization tools this is to show you the the power of omnipresence you can see like my YouTube video is outperforming my my URL right now my actual website cont content at this current moment okay and we've got other videos that are doing really really well too so this is the beauty of of going multi- Channel omnipresent because you can actually drive way more awareness way more traffic and honestly way more leads and sales now we're almost there number 20 is not leveraging AI technology to build scalable SEO systems so just to give you some perspective on this this is just my sop for upgrading existing content it's 47 pages long it has tons of videos to support it and so this is the stuff that my team members go through and actually use to implement work in the SEO campaigns it's also what you know over 300 agencies are using with all of their clients uh to to execute SEO campaigns but just to give you a small example of what it takes to really build proper systems here's just the process for just uh upgrading an existing asset and you can see the level of detail that you should go to to create these systems and I've spent an enormous amount of time Building Systems over the years because every time that you do a task you should be thinking about how you can never do it again if it's a task that happens more than once and you know it's going to happen more than once meaning it's reoccurring uh but it's not at any particular Cadence then you should be building out a system for it try to not repeat the same task over and over again instead build a system invest that time yes it does take a lot of time you invest that time though to save you you know hundreds and hundreds of hours over the long term and so now with chat gbt you can build a lot of these systems yourself and then eventually you know we'll be able to have the AI agents go through and do a lot of this work but for now you do need to build out these systems so the way that I personally handle this is I always build the system uh with you know just a straight Google doc build the systems in here also have video documentation of the task and then uh we assign the task in a sauna and then we just link to this sop and and the videos so that way who's ever going through it they always have proper reference points uh and so this is what it takes to build systems and I highly recommend systemizing everything that you're doing an SEO but also everything you're doing in your digital marketing campaign and finally at number 21 a common roadblock which is trying to do everything yourself so I've showed you throughout this video how to use tools how to use AI how to use systems to get better and more consistent SEO results at scale but the next level of this is to build a proper team so right now you need humans to to really do a lot of this heavy lifting but in the future this is what I believe an SEO team is likely going to look like it's going to be you're going to have a human you know at the head of this who's responsible for strategy quality assurance you know process development and managing these various agents and these are all going to be various AI agents that are specific to this one task you'll probably have some general agents that can basically do everything but the way You' really want to do is very similar to how you'd work with a team member which is have them be really good at one thing so like have have an agent that just does keyword research and is an absolute killer at that okay and all of these other departments and then to layer it you're going to have the systems just like I showed you before with the Sops you're going to use large language models as well so that's be chat gbt that might be via apis as I mentioned here but you're going to be using large language models to do a lot of this and then you're going to be using the various types of tools like rankability or any other tools to execute that like very specific SEO work so this is what the future looks like and so I highly recommend uh you know start playing around with these agents because there's a high probability that this is going to be the future of a lot of execution it's very far out by the way we You' got a lot of time I've showed I've showed some previous videos uh about the AI agents and how it's going to be very disruptive but it's still very early uh but the time to start learning how to use them is right now and I can tell you there's no secret here you just need to build out your system build out your processes that are within that system and then within those processes you have S so piece okay and as long as you have that built out you're building that the right way you can just feed that into to these agents and they're going to be able to execute work at a very high level so that's all for today if you enjoyed this video please hit the like button and subscribe for more SEO tips and if you're ready to take your SEO skills to the next level using my proven system for getting predictable rankings I'd love to invite you to apply for got SEO Academy spots are limited so click the link in the description submit your application and let's scale your SEO results together
