Are Blog Posts the Best SEO Strategy Today?

0:00All right. So we're going to talk about if blog posts are the best SEO strategy today. I need to sneeze, but I'm holding it. So let me show you this post from LinkedIn. So this guy, Peter Caputa, CEO of DataBox. So he said this. So the other day, an agency owner told me they were going to wrap up their content production for their own marketing from four to eight articles per month. This is the exact advice I used to give in 2010. Publish more blog posts to get more search traffic. The problem, it doesn't work anymore. You shouldn't give up on SEO, but SEO is increasingly a rich man's game, which is what I said a couple of episodes ago.

0:34So this is especially true in competitive markets like software, professional services, and consumer markets. So unless you have a really big budget or a high domain authority, your content marketing strategy should not just be quote unquote published more. That's especially true if you're simply sitting down and writing content based on your own expertise or what you're reading. It's really, really, really true. If you are just reading what's already online and trying to write a better version of content exists already, That's not good enough anymore. I'm not going to read all this stuff, but what's some actual advice?

1:04Here's a few examples of things you can do if your strategy is still just write more content. Neil, you want to read some of these? So instead of sitting down and writing eight blog posts this month, pick a topic for a survey, get 100 respondents, and then publish a report. Instead of writing eight blog posts this month, pick a topic and start three conversations on social media about that topic. All right. So instead of going down all of these, I would actually tell you what I would do instead of going down all these. So I do think writing more content isn't a bad idea if you have already really good SEO traffic.

1:37If you have no SEO traffic, you're going to have to write blog posts too. But I would actually look at it a very different way. I would actually look at it based on your authority. If you have low domain authority, call it 20, 30, 40, even 50, which isn't that high. I would figure out what free tools you can offer on your website to naturally build links. And you've seen this. You've done the analysis on this, Eric. what are my most popular link pages on my site? Ubersuggest. Yep, Ubersuggest. And all my other tools like Answer the Public, Ubersuggest. When you look at how many links free tools get, it blows out of the water any type of content that most people could ever write.

2:14And it just continually builds links. You're continuing to get that residual effect without much work. With content, you get links early on or later if you're manually building them, but like it slows down for those blog posts. while tools, you just keep getting them and they keep generating more and more traffic over time. The second thing I would do is if you already have domain authority and you already have traffic, I would first focus on, and we had an episode on this a few days ago, so make sure you listen to it, updating your content. And what we found is when you focus on updating your content, because there's already enough content on most topics on Google, we found that you generate way more traffic just keeping your old content updated and fresh.

2:53Because when someone does a search, They don't want to read something that's a year old or five years old. They want to read something that's a week old, two weeks old. And this is why Wikipedia ranks for a lot of terms. It's not that it's a best source of content on animals or presidents or whatnot. There's probably a website that has better content on those subjects than Wikipedia. But what Wikipedia does well is they keep their content fresh and up to date. So what we do is we'll go into Google Search Console, look at that page, its traffic, compared to a year ago and compared to three months ago.

3:24And when we do a comparison to either of those date points, if the traffic has gone down for either of those date points, we update the content and make it fresh. And when I say update it, we look at who's ranking above us, what do they have that we're not including, look at that subject and poke holes and figure out, all right, what can we do to make that content about that topic more fresh, up-to-date, better, more valuable to users? Does it need videos? Does it need more images? how's the conversational tone we look at literally every aspect to try to improve the content and then of course we do mix in new content as well whether you have a low domain authority or a high domain authority because without content you're just not going to do as well and not every topic has already been written about because there's always new things in most industries that you could be writing on you know it's interesting this is something i'm in the middle of debating on right now it's to bring back the piece of our software that shows where you're decaying traffic and just giving it away for free because that's something that's helpful, right?

4:23But like even rewinding back into how I'm thinking about YouTube right now, I'll tie this all together. The way we used to create videos, I'm speaking for Neil as well here, but the way we used to create videos for YouTube probably worked really well five, six years ago. This is why we got a lot more views because the bar, the quality bar was a lot lower, but the quality bar has actually risen quite a bit more, but this also applies to SEO as well. So a lot more people are writing content now. A lot more people are doing what the experts out there are talking about, right? And so what do you need to do?

4:53The moat that people used to have has decayed. So you need to create a new moat, a new content moat. And so what's going to take a lot of work? Actually creating a product. And one, to build the actual product, you have to learn how to work with engineers. You have to understand product. Well, there's product cycles, there's sprints, there's all that type of stuff that you have to figure out, right? Right. So you can certainly go buy something out there, but if you're going to maintain it, you have to learn that stuff as well. Right. But the good news is it's much more of a blue ocean than it is a red ocean.

5:20The red ocean right now where there's blood in the water is where everyone's writing blog posts. Everyone's doing the same stuff from 10 years ago. You got to go to where it's not as competitive. It might be harder, but harder often means that it's not as competitive. That's what I want you all to think about. Right. So sure. You can talk about trending news. Yes, absolutely. That works. We do that with marketing school. Yes. You can share data you can share reports that's cool but it's still not as linkable from like an asset standpoint as a free product right like back in the day by the way maybe 10 years ago everyone's talking about infographics in fact neil would spend like 30 000 on an infographic and it would get a ton of links right but right now if he did it he'd be a dumbass if he did it no one cares for the infographics like they're cool to look at but you're not going to get a ton of links like you used to yeah dude you remember i even did animated infographics that were made up of where they would move with their own graphics.

6:12Yeah, we did everything. How many links do you think those infographics got on average? I don't know. I had a blog post that broke it down, but like some got like 20, 30, 50, some hundred, some more. The problem is when you look at the link tools, you'll start seeing like a lot of junk links in there too. But if you actually look like how many unique good sites link to you, I would say like 20, 30, at least per infographic. I mean, look, I'm looking at neilpatel.com slash ubersuggest right now. So referring domains is about close to 21 ,000 or so. And you can certainly go look at the quality of links.

6:44But at the end of the day, it's something that provides utility. We've got links from Google, Adobe, GitHub, Shopify, Wix, Reddit, PayPal, Trustpilot, everything. So anyway, it is what it is. Take it for what it is. Sure, it's going to cost you more money. It's going to cost you more time. But at the end of the day, it's actually going to cost you less. So think of it that way. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. And we will see you tomorrow.