Who is Neil Patel?

For those of you who are new to online marketing or just getting into entrepreneurship, you may not be familiar with Neil Patel. So before I share with you how Neil Patel has managed to rank multiple websites for highly competitive keywords, let me give you a little background on Mr. Patel.

Born in London, England and moved to Orange County, Southern California when he was two years old, Neil Patel is now a highly successful entrepreneur and expert digital marketer. His main business right now is selling online marketing courses.

He was named top entrepreneur in the U.S. by Entrepreneur Magazine, and top influencer on the web by The Wall Street Journal.

He has a blog at Quick Sprout where he covers a range of guides, tips, and tools for improving your marketing strategies.

Neil is the co-founder of Crazy Egg where you can track how your visitors are engaging with your website. He also developed the analytical tool Kissmetrics which is designed to track your customer’s behaviors on the web, such as their purchasing activities.

You would be hard press to Google any Internet marketing related keywords and not see one of Neil Patel’s blog posts. If I google “direct response copywriting,” guess who shows up #1? That’s right Crazyegg.com one of Neils websites. Mr. Patel doesn’t just show up for semi-competitive terms he also dominates extremely competitive keywords. Take “Online Marketing,” as an example Neil has managed to rank not 1, but 2 of his sites in the top 2 spots.

Impressed yet?

The Beginnings: Content Content Content

To rank well in Google you need to produce unique content that is well researched.  We’re not talking, high school final type research, we’re talking College thesis research.  Back in 2008 you could write a 500 to 1000 word quality article and this would likely be considered authoritative and have a good chance of ranking highly in Google.

In 2013 Google announced to the web community that they understood users are looking for “In-depth articles” and results were now being ranked based on signals looking for high quality, in-depth content.

A 2017 study by Direct Response Copywriting showed a significant correlation between word count and search engine rankings.

Every business looking to increase traffic needs to start a blog. Your goal is to make your blog the authority in your market. Mr. Patel isn’t trying to game the search engines with the newest marketing gimmick, he understands that Google wants to give it’s users the best experience possible.

When you sit down to start writing copy, ask yourself what does the searcher want that is not already covered on the first page of Google. Step back and think like your customer.  If you are selling online marketing services, are you looking for people typing in online marketing?  Maybe, but to get better more qualified leads you should be targeting  “Online Marketing Expert In Denver.”

The person searching “online marketing expert in Denver” is looking to find information on a very specific topic. A searcher gets an idea or need. Then, they google that need it’s your job to give the searcher EXACTLY what they are looking for.

How Do You Write Unique Blog Content?

Blogging has become extremely popular and the number of bloggers you’re competing with is going up every year. You can find an established blog on anything you want, in any category you want. The only way your blog can become successful and not get lost amongst all the other blogs is to write unique content that differs from anything else on the web.

Google wants to give users a unique experience each time they conduct a search. Each search is designed to have ten

Each search is designed to have ten DIFFERENT results to chose from. Before writing a blog post you should determine what you want to rank for and what keywords people are using. If you’re going to write a blog about Internet marketing and compete with the best online marketers in the world, you better take a look at the first page results and determine how you can add value to this page.

You can use Google’s keyword tool to source keyword data and Google Insights to find out what is trending.

If you’re going to write a blog about Internet marketing and compete with the best online marketers in the world, you better take a look at the first page results and determine how you can add value to this page.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for “Internet Marketing” look at the first page and review each result carefully, what information would a person searching for Internet Marketing not see? Identify this information and you have your post.

I’m writing this blog post after asking myself “How does Neil Patel rank for every single search term I type in.”

Guides Attract Traffic

Mr. Patel has found that writing carefully researched guides is the best way to attract visitors and rank well in Google. Neil asked a simple question, what are people searching for? People are using Google to find specific information, Neil crafts his content to give people this information.

If you take a look at most blogs out there, copywriters are not investing much time in their articles. They are writing posts with between 1k-2k words. It used to be that quality out-weighed quantity. It is changing now. Now you need quality and quantity; Google wants to give users the absolute best information possible. This is typically long researched articles, with various unique images.

Neil Patel understands this concept and uses it to his advantage. He pays expensive copywriters to write exceptional long articles, blog posts and guides. This technique allows Mr. Patel to dominate search results and get a 20x return on what he paid for content.

Often you will see posts of Neil’s that are 45k words! He does this by adding to the content over time. This works extremely well for SEO.

How To Write Interesting Guides

A guide has to be as informative as possible. The more information you have the better.

Write everything you can about the topic you’re covering. You should spend several days researching your topic, putting together a comprehensive outline and compiling sources. Once you have enough information to write a thoroughly detailed guide lay out the structure for your post. What will your title be, where will you insert page breaks, sub headers, and images?

The readability of your post is just as important as the content itself. I recommend using a tool like Yoast SEO to help determine your readability.

Google algorithms are so advanced that they can detect when your blog content is poorly written. Make sure the information you’re providing is original and relevant to your topic. Writing researched guides and blog posts not only gets your readers attention it gets authority websites to use you as a reference. This can result in amazing backlinks, which is what any good online marketer is after. Point and case, Neil’s blog post on “100 ways to be a power twitter user” ended up on the Colorado.gov social media resources page. This .gov backlink is priceless

Keep in mind:

You are writing for your readers. You want to be their primary source of information, provide people with solutions and answers to their questions.

Maintenance: Improve On-page SEO

Neil Patel has mentioned on many occasions that if you are going to rank and maintain your rankings, it is imperative that you update your content frequently.

Think about it; Google doesn’t want un-touched articles from 1999 about search engine optimization showing up on page 1 for the search term SEO. Google wants fresh relevant content that keeps up with the rapidly changing world we live in.

Refresh Your Content

Go back to old blog posts and update them with new relevant content. This provides fresh content for the page and increases the relevance score of your content.

You may have seen blogs that are time sensitive usually these posts have a year in the header. In 2018 all you will have to do is change the year, add in any relevant changes to your topic and you will see a spike in rankings. Make sure you change all titles, tags, snippets and subheaders.

The Secret Recipe To Effective Link Building

While content might be king, link building is the emperor. Backlinko analyzed 1 million websites and found that the number 1 ranking factor was how many backlinks the site had.

Writing great content is the first piece of the puzzle. You’re going to struggle to rank like Mr. Patel if you do not have quality inbound links.  We can see that Neils blog QuickSprout has over 367k backlinks, coming from 22.8k different domains. Now don’t run out and buy 100k backlinks thinking you’re going to outrank QuickSprout, these are legitimate backlinks acquired over time.

Diving deeper into Quicksprout and Neils link building techniques we can see that he has a very diverse portfolio of backlinks. It’s important to understand that more backlinks are NOT BETTER. Of the 366,835 backlinks Quicksprout has, 74% are Dofollow, and 26% are Nofollow this is not a coincidence.

The next thing to note is the number of links Neil has received from Images, .gov and .edu sites. The percentages may seem low, the fact is 315 .edu, and ten .gov backlinks add a lot of authority to your website. Getting .edu and .gov links are no easy task it all boils down to having quality content.

Neil has a method that he follows every time he releases a new blog post.  He calls it the 200 Outreach Program.

The 200 Outreach Program

The way the program works:

• Find 200 websites highly relevant to your own website.
• Identify 200 blogs that would likely mention your website.
• Find 200 Facebook fan pages that are related to your content.
• Connect with 200 twitter profiles that regularly tweet similar content.

Website Overhaul

Make sure you’re on-page SEO is up to par.  Frequently go through all your pages, fix any content and or technical errors on your site. Look out for duplicate titles, descriptions, and tags which could affect your rankings.

Run a check to find out which pages are indexed and which ones are not. You want to quickly fix any non-indexed pages.

Important: Your Site Must Be Mobile Compatible

It is no longer good enough to just have a responsive site. Google is now cracking down on websites that are not mobile-friendly. It would benefit your site tremendously if you used Google’s amp framework.

Are You Ready To Rank Like Neil Patel?

Search engine marketing is by no means an easy game like anything with hard work and dedication you can rank for anything, it just takes quality content, networking (link building) and time!