My Biggest SEO Mistake (And Why Your Organic Traffic Might Be Garbage)

Over the last 12 months I've driven 58.6 million visitors from Google. You will look at my traffic sets, you look at this graph and you're like, wow, Neil you must be doing really well at SEO. And you know what you're doing, but you know what? That's not really the case. Today I'm going to break down my biggest SEO mistakes.

RESOURCES & LINKS:
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Ubersuggest:
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As you can see here, 58.6 million visitors from SEO. That's a lot of traffic to not have to pay for. And if I scroll down and I look at the traffic stats, coming from terms like Ubersugget which is fine. My name, Ubersuggest, affiliate marketing, my name, variation Ubersuggest.

But if I just keep going further down the list you'll start seeing a lot of keywords that, aren't really relevant to my business. And a lot of the key words of what I was optimizing for as you can see here, it was just pure volume. And I was getting a lot of traffic, but as you can see now my traffic starting to drop, why? Because my team, you know, at my ad agency we track leads and I can't show you our leads in Salesforce because we track it all due to people's personal information like their records or the company URLs.

But when we were tracking our sales through Salesforce of what's driving clients for NP Digital , and typically people will click on let's talk and submit a form or contact.

So we have two options to become a lead. And what we found is, most of these keywords droves, little to no leads. Now, if you go to neilpatel.com, I get my traffic typically from blogging, right? I can see here on the blog. And if you look at my content, I'm going after keywords that are very specific. Customer reviews in video ads.

So if I type in customer reviews video ads. The search volume, isn't high. If you look here zero monthly searches, right? People aren't really searching for a lot of these keywords but you know what?

We found that people who are interested in putting customer reviews in video ads or images, and they're trying to figure this out are interested in conversion rate optimization which is one of the services we offer.

So the content that we're producing on our blog is much more niche. How to create a free Google website for a business. This for us, this post is target local businesses because our SMB division helps localized businesses. How to create unique gift guides for e-commerce content.

And I spent so many years building up my traffic and it wasn't until I got the traffic.

Look, the big lesson from this is, don't optimize for traffic optimize for revenue. If your keywords aren't generating you revenue, move on to new keywords. And when you're doing keyword research, don't make the mistake I did. Don't just optimize for quote-unquote traffic. What I want you to do is type in keywords.

So don't optimize just for traffic, optimize for traffic from the right audience. And before you go after keywords do your keyword research, type them into Ubersuggest, figure out what keywords have high volume and traffic while you're technically they mean the same thing but also high CPC. And of course it's related to your business.

So don't just optimize for quote-unquote keywords and traffic optimize for relevancy. And if you do that, you're going to be better. And if you need help with this check out my ad agency, NP Digital or if you just have questions, leave a comment below.

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28 Responses to My Biggest SEO Mistake (And Why Your Organic Traffic Might Be Garbage)

  1. ave reus June 7, 2021 at 2:01 pm #

    Ayy Neil Patel I need to use Uber suggest for free since I can’t make international payment from my country

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:36 pm #

      There is a free version, friend 🙂

  2. COIN INFORMATION SERRANO June 7, 2021 at 2:06 pm #

    Nice class

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:36 pm #

      Thanks 🙂

  3. Can I Do This June 7, 2021 at 2:21 pm #

    HI sir how to start digital marketing agency?

  4. damini parande June 7, 2021 at 2:22 pm #

    So basically search for the keywords that bring more revenue and create content around those keywords

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:37 pm #

      Correct 🙂

  5. Eden Daraqutni June 7, 2021 at 2:24 pm #

    on an e-commerce site for example, putting keywords on the title and description enough or better adding a blog to the site ?

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:37 pm #

      Both are important!

  6. Ajay Kumar - 47 June 7, 2021 at 2:27 pm #

    Thanks a lot Neil!

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:37 pm #

      My pleasure!

  7. Cbsankar June 7, 2021 at 2:28 pm #

    Thanks, sir for your great advice.

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:37 pm #

      Always welcome

  8. Vitthal Kalamkhede June 7, 2021 at 2:49 pm #

    Neil why I find you as my inspiration, because you share all your secrets. It is best to learn from your mistakes. Thanks Neil for such a great share.

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:38 pm #

      Happy to help 🙂

  9. Blogger teck June 7, 2021 at 3:08 pm #

    Amazing video sir love your knowledge

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:40 pm #

      So nice of you 🙂

  10. Robert Kumi Adu-Gyamfi June 7, 2021 at 3:16 pm #

    Neil is one of the few SEO’s who doesn’t mind showing his dashboard. It’s been an honor to follow your advice. Kudos!

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:44 pm #

      I’m happy to be transparent with you guys 🙂

  11. El Cachafaz June 7, 2021 at 3:18 pm #

    So, how many employees do you actually have?
    (you said: “…probably 400-500…”)

    • Neil Patel June 7, 2021 at 3:41 pm #

      That’s about right 🙂 I have people who work in my agencies, people who work for me personally, and some contractors.

  12. unknown June 7, 2021 at 4:51 pm #

    Can you please give me a guide to study seo

  13. Jules Life June 7, 2021 at 5:18 pm #

    Hey, Neil. This isn’t relevant to this new video but I’m “Optimizing” my comment for the highest likelihood to get a reply hahahaha. What would you say is the best way to go about updating older blog content?

    1) Writing a newer article with all the old information AND the updates in that field and then leaving up your first article on the subject but marking the newer one as canonical?
    2) Writing a newer article with all the old information AND the updates in that field and then deleting the first article on the subject but setting up a 301 from the old URL to the new one?
    3) Writing a newer article with all the old information AND the updates in that field and then leaving them both live and simply linking from the older one to the newer one?

    I’ve kind of done all over the years and never feel confident I’m doing the right thing. I haven’t done the 3rd option in years.

  14. Erling McCracken June 7, 2021 at 6:34 pm #

    You’re the man Neil, thank you for your honesty and insightfullness.

  15. nirjhar acharjee June 7, 2021 at 7:16 pm #

    Great information…

  16. Marketing Harry June 7, 2021 at 7:49 pm #

    It’s great that you pointed out these mistakes. Another useful video!

  17. P June 7, 2021 at 7:50 pm #

    How did you figure that out (cpc is 0 as well with low search volume) @3:40-3:48?

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