- [Neil] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel. And today's another day of Content Marketing Unlocked, and I'm going to be breaking down how you can market your content. Over the weeks, we've talked about how to get started, how to create content, but what I wanted to break down today is how you can promote your content, so it gets more traffic because without that, it doesn't really matter.
Now when you're promoting your content, one of the best ways is going to be through Google and SEO, but keep in mind, position is everything, if you're at the top, that's where you get the majority of the clicks. The number one listing on average, is getting 31. 7% of the clicks, according to Advanced Web Ranking, so you want to try to be at the top.
The better your site structure, the better your chance of ranking at the top on Google. And it really comes down to site structure as being a key important element when it comes to your content. Because a terrible site structure and architecture can mean that your content's not crawled as frequently and it doesn't rank as high.
And when you structure your site in a really effective way, and I'll break down how to do it and we even have a cheat sheet and worksheet that breaks down how to do it. But when you do it, when you end up googling for your site name, you'll tend to see sitelinks, in which you'll see an indentation, more links from your website, like you see on the image on the right, and that way, when people are doing searches, they can find all the popular areas on your site. And that has to do with a, site structure and b, you know, as your site grows in popularity, it naturally shows up as well as you're increasing click-through rate.
And when you are saying, hey, how do I get these sitelinks? Well, yeah, site structure popularity, but you don't have to do anything with Google. If you follow everything I'm going to teach you in this lesson, it'll naturally happen.
Google automatically rewards websites with sitelinks, based on great site architecture, and, of course, popularity and high click-through rates. So what are these sitelinks? What they are is a listing format that Google's showing on their main page along with several other links.
So they'll show your main listing from your website with other internal pages. And if you have a poor site architecture, what'll happen is it'll just show the main link or whatever query they're searching for but it won't have the indentation and more results from your page. Remember, the key is to gobble up as much of the page as possible, so you get more people clicking over to your website, which increases your chance of getting more sales or leads.
And a good architecture, of course, helps with crawling as well. It makes it easier for the Googlebot to crawl your whole site, all your pages, higher chance of them indexing more of the pages. And when you're working on your architecture, you're just like, hey, I don't have to worry about crawling, because I'm going to create a sitemap and just submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.
Sure you can do that, and you should do that. But it doesn't necessarily guarantee that all the pages are going to rank in the ideal position that you want them to. And that's why a good architecture helps because that improves with crawling, which improves with your ranking as well.
As I mentioned, if you really want to optimize your architecture, go to neilpatel. com/training, click on Content Marking Unlocked. Then click on week three, this is the first video.
And I want you to download the workbook on site structure, and just go through it and make sure that you do everything step-by-step because it'll help you set the right structure for your site so you don't have to worry about it. Now, besides structure, there's actually a lot more things that are important as well. With SEO, it comes down to a lot of factors.
One of them is picking the right theme or topic. See, back in the day, Google would rank websites with a ton of authority for everything, and they still technically kind of do. But nowadays, they prefer niche sites that are on a specific topic.
They don't want me, Neil Patel, who talks about SEO and digital marketing to also talk about dentists, and medicine, and all these other random topics, I'm not an expert on. They want me to stick within my wheelhouse. So try to get as specific as possible, pick a theme or topic and stick with it.
And you're probably wondering, hey, how can you stick with the topic? What should I end up making mine on? Is it big enough?
You probably have all those questions because if it's not big enough, you may just end up regurgitating information or duplicating content, and you don't want that. So first off, you can use a tool, Think with Google, that'll help you. You can look at different categories, sectors, they provide a ton of different data points, which will help you analyze any space, any sector.
Same with Google Trends, you can put in any category, website, and it'll tell you popularity over time. There's also cultural trends. And you can check those out at Think with Google as well.
There's also a customer insights. You can also see this at Think with Google. These are all tools that Google is providing to help you as a website owner to figure out, hey, what topics, what trends should I be focusing on to provide the most value to my user base, to my reader base?
So now that we got that away, let's go really break down how you can rank number one on Google. Well, first off, I want you to go to Ubersuggest and type in the keyword that you're thinking about going after. Then from there, in the left hand navigation, I want you to click on Keyword Ideas.
Then from there, I want you to find the keywords that you think are relevant to use, and you want to base this off volume, the bigger the volume, the better. That means more people are searching for it. The higher the CPC, the better as well, because that means more people are spending money for those keywords, or companies are moreso spending the money.
Because if companies are willing to spend more money per each person that Google drives, it means that that keyword is worth a lot more money, because it converts and it drives traffic. And after you do that, and you got those keywords, now you have to do a few steps. The first is, your content that contains those keywords.
If you don't have them, make sure you write new content on them. And we've already covered in Content Marketing Unlocked on how to write content. But once you have content on those subjects, you want to make sure you update those really important pieces of content on a monthly basis.
Sometimes every six months worst case if they're not that important, but the ones that are really important, you want to update on a monthly basis. You want to optimize for those keywords by putting them in your title tag within the first paragraph or first sentence of your text, you want to put them in your headings, use h2, h3 headings, that helps as well. You also want to make sure your content is really thorough in length, the longer the better.
But you don't want to just add words for the sake of it. If you can get everything done in 500 words and it's the most amazing posts out there while your competition is writing 3,000, good for you, don't just shove in words when you don't need them. But in general, typically, if you want to be thorough and cover that topic in every way possible, you're going to have a good amount of words.
You also want to improve the readability, there's an app called Hemingway app. It'll help you with this. It's a really great nifty tool, you should check that out.
You want to also make your URL readable. If you make it readable, like if you look here, neilpatel/com/blog/blogging-principles, it's simple. I don't use random numbers in my URL, or anything like that.
I really try to keep things simple. It helps with the rankings from all the studies that I've seen, that we've tested out as well as read on sites like Backlinko, shorter URLs helps with rankings. You also want to include the keywords within your meta description tag, not just your title, but also your meta description.
So when people search for any keyword, it's there. It makes it easier, Google bolds those keywords, and then boom, you'll find that you get better click-through rates, which increases rankings as well over time. Now, when I create content, I also put images in my content, sometimes video, sometimes audio files, but I definitely use images most the time because a picture says 1,000 words.
So include alt tags, alt tag describes what an image is. And, you know, alt tags, if you hover over an image, it's that little box that says, oh, this is, you know, Toyota Camry 1998 silver. I don't know why I picked that.
Funny enough, I used to drive a Toyota Camry, but it was a 1989 Toyota Camry, drove it forever. But there's some Toyota Camry. So with your alt tag, you want to be descriptive.
Silver four-door 1989 Toyota Camry four-cylinder, that's an example of a good alt tag that's super descriptive. You also want to improve your links, the more people linking to you, the better off you are. So I want you to go to Ubersuggest, and go to the backlinks report, type in your URL, and you'll see all your new links and lost links.
This is great, because you want to see which areas you're losing links, where's your gaining links. And this will help keep things going because the ones you're losing links, you want to hit up those sites and try to convince them. Or you can monitor your competition as well, whatever links they're losing, you want to hit them up and make sure you're going after those links as well.
And to improve them, do a few simple things. Other than that, internally, you can do internal linking. So if I've a post on SEO and link building, I may link those two together.
You also want to fix broken links. If other people on the web have broken links, hit up those sites, convince them to replace their broken links with yours. And of course, when relevant, you want to use keywords within the link text, that's the anchor text, you know that link that you click on?
Those keywords, that's the anchor text. When they contain keywords, it helps with rankings. But if all the anchors say the same keyword over and over again, it's harder to rank, you want it to flow natural.
So you don't want to just force the same keyword every time, you want to make it flow naturally. With your website, if you fix your site structure, you fix, you know, your content, your linking, you're updating your content frequently, having the right keywords. If your layout isn't good, you also rank well.
So first off, for mobile devices, I consider using Accelerated Mobile Pages, that's also known as AMP, A-M-P. That way, when people visit your site from a mobile device, it can load faster. Your layout also, when I talk about layout, people have different-sized devices, so make sure it's responsive in design, so that way anyone can read it.
It's more and more of important ranking factor that you're providing a good user experience because if people keep bouncing away, Google doesn't like that. They're going to rank your site lower and lower. It's also the same reason that you want to improve your load time.
And if you don't know how fast your website load time is, go to Ubersuggest, click the site auto report in the left hand navigation, put in your URL, and scroll down and you'll see your site speed, and it'll tell you what to fix to make it faster as well. Also, make sure you're using correct CSS, HTML. There's a lot of validators, like the W3C, check that out, that'll help make sure that your site's valid.
You can also do diagnostic benchmarks. You can find those tools at Think with Google, of course. And there's different media types too that you can end up leveraging.
Do you want to end up leveraging video, audio, pictures, calculators, tools, whatever it may be? I found that tools and videos work really well, pictures do too. If you're using pictures, try to avoid stock photography images, doesn't work too well.
As for your website and security, make sure you're using HTTPS. If you're not on HTTPS, then people get a notification in the browser that your site isn't secure and it's going to hurt your rankings over time. Now we got the basics covered, let's go over how you can promote your content with $0 budget.
First off, leverage communities. If you look at Airbnb, they grew by leveraging Craigslist, Facebook groups, Quora, and all those sites out there, right? Moreso they leveraged Craigslist, people do talk about some of the other sites, but you yourself could use subreddits, Facebook groups, Quora, Twitter, Instagram, whatever these communities are, because it's an easy way to drive traffic by just promoting your site.
I also encourage sharing, like Spotify, a lot of people were using them and sharing the content on what they were listening to on Facebook, that grew them. And it was a similar story with Drpbox. You can share for more space, and that's what allowed Drpbox to really win, and they bought in that exclusivity, in which, hey, you want more space, you want these features?
Share. Heck, they even did it early on in their product flow, where it was invite only. Gmail did something similar, and that really helped them grow early on as well.
There's also word of mouth as well. You know, yeah, you can try to create viral videos and technology, and all that kind of stuff. But in general, the better product, the better service you have, the better content, the more word of mouth marketing you're going to get.
And to help encourage that word of mouth marketing, I recommend guest posting. You can go out there and guest posts on a lot of sites. Buffer, they ended up growing their social sharing app through tons of guest posting.
If you had a guest posting on 10 sites, it will help drive more traffic in the long run. And you just reach out to other websites that have guest contributors and ask them if you can also contribute content as well. There's also growth hacking.
It's that mindset of trying to grow and not just leveraging marketing, but leveraging anything. For example, you can leverage tools, or you can leverage invite flows or referral programs. Those are all examples of growth hacking.
Now, one thing that you'll notice that I do on neilpatel. com is I do email newsletters, it's a great way to get a ton of traffic from attention grabbing headlines to CTA to click and get people back over your site, to creating compelling reasons for people to click through. These little simple things allows you to get more traffic.
And that's why I recommend that you have your own email newsletters or broadcasts, and you start collecting email lists using tools like Hello Bar, a simple way, get you more traffic in the long run and it'll work well. You could also do sidebar links, you'll notice I do them on neilpatel. com, NerdWallet does them, a lot of popular sites do them, it helps with ranking of your most important pages, super effective.
There's also Instagram content. If you have content, like I have blog post content or video content, I'll share it on Instagram. It drives more engagement to the same topics and traffic in the long run as well.
When you think about all this stuff, you need a strategy, you need to figure out your goals, is it to generate more signups, traffic, brand awareness, sales, whatever it may be, that's what you want to focus on, and we have some templates and worksheets that will help you out that I'll share with you in a little bit. But before I do that, I also want to talk about the content promotion workflow. In summary of what we went through is everything from site architecture to sitelinks, to optimizing your content, to internal linking, external linking, newsletters, sidebar links, leveraging communities, guest posting.
And I know we went through it pretty quickly, and that's because I have two action items for you. One, follow the site structure, and two, I want you to download the content promotion master guide, this will help you through all those steps. And you can find them both at neilpatel.
com/training, click on Content Marketing Unlocked, go to week three, video one, and boom, you'll find all the files underneath that. So that's it, if you enjoyed this video, like it, subscribe, share it, tell your friends about it. If you have questions, you can leave a comment, or you can email us directly.
We're here to help you succeed. Take care.
