In episode #609, Eric and Neil discuss whether you really need more backlinks to outrank your competition. Tune in to hear what you can do to improve your ranking.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: Do You Really Need More Backlinks to Outrank Your Competition?
- [00:34] Eric doesn’t think you need more backlinks.
- [00:54] Sometimes, a wikipedia post will rank higher than others because they have domain authority.
- [01:15] However, Eric and Neil don’t even check their domain authority anymore.
- [01:21] When you’re starting off, this is something you need to check, but once you are more established, it doesn’t matter.
- [01:41] Neither Eric or Neil even knows how many backlinks they have.
- [02:15] To win business, Eric’s company will show companies how many backlinks they have as compared to their competitors.
- [02:30] Once you’ve been working with a customer for a year or two, you produce good content, build natural links, create videos, create podcasts, and you no longer check on backlinks.
- [03:00] The simplest way to outrank your competitors: go to Google Search Console, check your URL’s with a lot of impressions, but low clicks, then re-write it by fleshing it out and adding in pertinent keywords. You will find that your ranking for those keywords will increase and you will outrank your competitors without having to build more links.
- [03:30] Sometimes, checking backlinks is based merely on ego, as nothing annoys people more than their competitors having more backlinks and higher domain authority.
- [03:55] Clickflow is a great tool that shows you when your impression count is too low. This means you should improve the title or meta-description.
- [04:16] Sometimes, adding popular keywords to your title will help boost your ranking.
- [04:42] That’s it for today!
- [04:46] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post Do You Really Need More Backlinks to Outrank Your Competition? | Ep. #609 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
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 Sue.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about if you really need more Backlinks to outrank your competition. I'm gonna say emphatically, no, because if you look at ... If you use a tool like HREFs and you type in a key word and you look at the top results, sometimes you have results that are ranking higher than the others and they don't have as many links for that specific page. Now the question is, why is that? Well, the first thing I could say to kick this conversation of is that sometimes a Wikipedia post is gonna rank a lot better than the other ones out there. It could be a variety of factors. We're talking over 200 variables when we're talking SEO, but one thing could be the domain authority. Wikipedia's domain authority is extremely strong so whenever something is written about it, it tends to rank well especially if it's about a biography, like Abraham Lincoln for example.
Neil Patel: Dude, do you even check your domain ranking, or domain authority anymore?
Eric Siu: I don't even care about it.
Neil Patel: No. Do you even check on your Backlinks you have anymore?
Eric Siu: No.
Neil Patel: I don't either. When your starting off, yes you should check your domain authority or domain ratings and you need to make sure you're building Backlinks, but after a certain point in time, it doesn't matter. Once you start having numbers like thousands of links, it doesn't make a fact on like, "oh this is gonna help build our rankings more than anything else." Do you know how many Backlinks you have right now Eric?
Eric Siu: No.
Neil Patel: I don't either. As you can see from us, if we're both marketers, we both have all these tools like Atrush, SEMrush. Some of them we pay for some of they're given for free. I think most of 'em, we get 'em for free. If we don't check 'em, yet we're using these tools on a weekly basis. That means these metrics, once you're up and running, aren't too important. Sure if you have a brand new website or you haven't been doing much SEO, you should be checking out these metrics. I know you do a lot of consulting, we do too. When you take on a new client, do you check how many links they have, their domain rating?
Eric Siu: Nope
Neil Patel: You don't check that?
Eric Siu: Well actually here's what we do do. To win the business what we do is we stack 'em up against their competitors and show how many links they have versus their competitors.
Neil Patel: Yeah so in other words, you are checking and you are looking at that to figure out if you can really help em?
Eric Siu: Yes.
Neil Patel: Or figure out how competitive it is.
Eric Siu: Yes.
Neil Patel: In general, once you're up and running with a customer for over a year or two, do you continually check the Backlincks?
Eric Siu: Nope.
Neil Patel: Yeah. We both know that you produce good content. You naturally build links. You do videos. You do Podcasts. You do a mixture of everything. You can do well, but what we found is, if you really wanna outrank your competitors and you've already been up in ranking and the caveat is, you've already been up and running and you've been ranking. You've been doing this stuff for a while and you wanna just rank higher, like higher on page one. The simplest way to outrank your competitors is to go into Google search console. Look at your URLs that have a lot of impressions but don't have enough clicks. Go take 'em, Google will show you all the keywords, 999 that that page is getting. Rewrite the article. Make it three times longer. Then add in the keywords whenever they make sense and you'll notice that your rankings for those terms will pop and you'll start outranking your competitors without building more links.
Eric Siu: Yeah, you don't necessarily need new content or new Backlinks all the time. Often times it's just ego. Actually to my point earlier, when we're trying to win business sometimes we're stacking them up against their competitors and it's just an ego thing, 'cause nothing pisses people off anymore than like, "oh my god, they have more Backlinks. Oh my god their domain authority is higher," but at the end of the day it's not the biggest thing that matters. To Neil's point, yes you can go into Google search console, absolutely. You should be adding more content. You should be upgrading your content. You should be expanding it. Also, at the same time, you can use the tool that we have, ClickFlow and what that does is it basically shows you well here are you should be writing a better title or meta description because your impression count is too low. So you can even go to that distance. So you don't necessarily need to do this new Backlink or content stuff all the time, just to reiterate.
Neil Patel: What's funny is, sometimes just adding in a few keywords into your title tags, when your page is already somewhat ranking, boosts your rankings. Maybe not the next day, but if you look at it over a period of 60 to 90 days, it really helps boost your rankings. It's these little things that help, and everyone's like, "I need more links. I need more links. We need to build thousands more." You don't really need to build ton more than your competitors. You just need good enough links and you to be consistent and have an overall well encompassed SEO strategy versus just purely focusing on links. I think well, I guess ... No I'm not gonna add this part. Anyway, before we go, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway for our marketing goodies and we'll see you tomorrow.
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. 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.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about if you really need more Backlinks to outrank your competition. I'm gonna say emphatically, no, because if you look at ... If you use a tool like HREFs and you type in a key word and you look at the top results, sometimes you have results that are ranking higher than the others and they don't have as many links for that specific page. Now the question is, why is that? Well, the first thing I could say to kick this conversation of is that sometimes a Wikipedia post is gonna rank a lot better than the other ones out there. It could be a variety of factors. We're talking over 200 variables when we're talking SEO, but one thing could be the domain authority. Wikipedia's domain authority is extremely strong so whenever something is written about it, it tends to rank well especially if it's about a biography, like Abraham Lincoln for example.
Neil Patel: Dude, do you even check your domain ranking, or domain authority anymore?
Eric Siu: I don't even care about it.
Neil Patel: No. Do you even check on your Backlinks you have anymore?
Eric Siu: No.
Neil Patel: I don't either. When your starting off, yes you should check your domain authority or domain ratings and you need to make sure you're building Backlinks, but after a certain point in time, it doesn't matter. Once you start having numbers like thousands of links, it doesn't make a fact on like, "oh this is gonna help build our rankings more than anything else." Do you know how many Backlinks you have right now Eric?
Eric Siu: No.
Neil Patel: I don't either. As you can see from us, if we're both marketers, we both have all these tools like Atrush, SEMrush. Some of them we pay for some of they're given for free. I think most of 'em, we get 'em for free. If we don't check 'em, yet we're using these tools on a weekly basis. That means these metrics, once you're up and running, aren't too important. Sure if you have a brand new website or you haven't been doing much SEO, you should be checking out these metrics. I know you do a lot of consulting, we do too. When you take on a new client, do you check how many links they have, their domain rating?
Eric Siu: Nope
Neil Patel: You don't check that?
Eric Siu: Well actually here's what we do do. To win the business what we do is we stack 'em up against their competitors and show how many links they have versus their competitors.
Neil Patel: Yeah so in other words, you are checking and you are looking at that to figure out if you can really help em?
Eric Siu: Yes.
Neil Patel: Or figure out how competitive it is.
Eric Siu: Yes.
Neil Patel: In general, once you're up and running with a customer for over a year or two, do you continually check the Backlincks?
Eric Siu: Nope.
Neil Patel: Yeah. We both know that you produce good content. You naturally build links. You do videos. You do Podcasts. You do a mixture of everything. You can do well, but what we found is, if you really wanna outrank your competitors and you've already been up in ranking and the caveat is, you've already been up and running and you've been ranking. You've been doing this stuff for a while and you wanna just rank higher, like higher on page one. The simplest way to outrank your competitors is to go into Google search console. Look at your URLs that have a lot of impressions but don't have enough clicks. Go take 'em, Google will show you all the keywords, 999 that that page is getting. Rewrite the article. Make it three times longer. Then add in the keywords whenever they make sense and you'll notice that your rankings for those terms will pop and you'll start outranking your competitors without building more links.
Eric Siu: Yeah, you don't necessarily need new content or new Backlinks all the time. Often times it's just ego. Actually to my point earlier, when we're trying to win business sometimes we're stacking them up against their competitors and it's just an ego thing, 'cause nothing pisses people off anymore than like, "oh my god, they have more Backlinks. Oh my god their domain authority is higher," but at the end of the day it's not the biggest thing that matters. To Neil's point, yes you can go into Google search console, absolutely. You should be adding more content. You should be upgrading your content. You should be expanding it. Also, at the same time, you can use the tool that we have, ClickFlow and what that does is it basically shows you well here are you should be writing a better title or meta description because your impression count is too low. So you can even go to that distance. So you don't necessarily need to do this new Backlink or content stuff all the time, just to reiterate.
Neil Patel: What's funny is, sometimes just adding in a few keywords into your title tags, when your page is already somewhat ranking, boosts your rankings. Maybe not the next day, but if you look at it over a period of 60 to 90 days, it really helps boost your rankings. It's these little things that help, and everyone's like, "I need more links. I need more links. We need to build thousands more." You don't really need to build ton more than your competitors. You just need good enough links and you to be consistent and have an overall well encompassed SEO strategy versus just purely focusing on links. I think well, I guess ... No I'm not gonna add this part. Anyway, before we go, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway for our marketing goodies and we'll see you tomorrow.
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. 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.
