Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about the 95% of you that will ignore this eso strategy, surprise, surprise. What is it Neil?

Neil Patel: Branding. Eric Schmidt one said, "Brand is what separates the good companies from the crap."

Eric Siu: Says, "Internet cesspool needs brands."

Neil Patel: Is that what the exact quote is? I can never get it right.

Eric Siu: Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

Neil Patel: There you go. With the SEO, and both Eric and I have done experimentation on this. But if you look at some of the biggest sites that do well, everyone's like, "Oh I can outrank them, I'm looking at their domain authority, and I'm looking at their back links, and how in depth their content is." I never, or I rarely ever hear people, probably more like never, hear people saying, "Oh, let me go check out the brand authority of this site." And no one's ever going to like Google trans, typing in the brand name, seeing if it's going up to the right, how many searches they're getting, or running that through SEM rush, or HR rush to see how much traffic that brand is getting.
If you don't know how popular a brand is, it's harder to beat them. Huge brands like Nike have such strong loyalty that it's hard to out rank them because people aren't just Goggling for shoes, they are Goggling Nike shoes. And when people Google Nike shoes a lot, it tells Google that people really love them because that's one of the few brands that has brand plus the keyword shoes.

Eric Siu: Yeah, so Neil how did you go about building or what's your branding strategy?

Neil Patel: My branding strategy used to be I would have amazing good content and then just try to grow my brand by providing a ton of value and helping people. It didn't work too well in which, yeah my brand started growing but what really made it take off wasn't just providing value, it was having people who were popular on Instagram and other social sites, holding up a sign that said, "Who is Neil Patel?" It caused everyone to Google for my name, my rankings grew, and what was funny enough is, if your brand dies over time, so does your rankings as well, so you can't just create a temporary brand. So I did this for many months and what I found is people kept Goggling for my name. I started creating a new loyal audience or a much bigger loyal audience, and that helped preserve my rankings.

Eric Siu: Yeah, so a couple things you can do in terms of kind of tracking how your brand is doing. You can use BuzzSumo, they have a really good alerting system where you can look at your brand over time. Neil likes using Google Trends as well. That's free for you to use. And what else can you use Neil, to track how your brand efforts are going?

Neil Patel: That's mainly it, you're using the alerts and you're using the Google Trends. I also like looking at Google Search Console because it shows you what keywords your ranking for and type in variations for your brand. The beautiful part about Search Console now is they track data more than just 90 days. So you can go back like, let's say a year, or whatever the timeframe that they have, it keeps going back, you can use that data to see if your brand is going up and to the right based off your own search traffic. You also want to look at the click through rate so if you're getting a ton of brand queries but a low click through rate that's a bad signal. You don't just need a lot of brand queries, you need a click through rate above 50% ideally.

Eric Siu: Yeah, the old days of doing this, I remember when I first started learning how to do SEO/Content Marketing I tried to mess around with all these affiliate deals and I would make these different micro sites, I remember I had one called, howtogetridofpimples.net, I think I still own the domain. And, basically I would just have a bunch of people from, oh I forgot what, text expander, not text expander, but anyways these content broker websites that would write these articles for like fifty bucks or so, and you would think that these things, these things used to do really well. This was when Google was easy to be, it was easy to manipulate Google. That's not the case anymore.
Nowadays it's the power brands that are out there, like to Neil's point, it's not just domain authority whatever, it's how strong your brand is. And the stronger your brand is, here's the thing, your domain authority actually turns out to be higher in the long run because a lot of people are linking to your brand. So think about not just only your SEO strategy, I know this is related more to SEO, but if you start to build things together and you combine LinkedIn, not LinkedIn, well in LinkedIn too, but YouTube as well, maybe you are doing podcasts, that's all going to tie into your branding and that's going to help you with your SEO. So Neil, anything else to add?

Neil Patel: No, that's pretty much it.

Eric Siu: Alright so go get your brand on. We'll see you tomorrow just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing tools and see you later.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close, be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.