Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile 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: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about how many backlinks do you really need. The thing I'll look at is this. Let's say you're in the industry of, I don't know, interior design, for example, and you have your top two or three competitors. I always like looking at my competitors backlinks profile as part of the strategy just to see how strong is their backlink profile, how strong is their domain rank or their domain authority. Those are both scored on the scale of 1-100, and then I can look at their backlink profile. Is it spammy?
Actually, here's a really good example. Both of us have a friend in the blockchain space, and that space is still very nascent right now. We're talking cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, things like that. This guy does really well for himself. Thing is that industry is not that competitive at the moment, so he is susceptible to somebody, like a really smart marketer deciding to go all in on it, so he needs to fortify his backlink profile because it's just a bunch of spammy stuff right now, and it's still a very nascent industry.
Look at the backlink profile, and then you'll get an idea of what you actually need to do in order to compete.

Neil Patel: If your competitors have a lot more backlinks than you, you don't necessarily need more than them. There's other factors that can help boost your ranking so you don't have to build as many links. I'm going to share two of them that are really important.
One is brand queries. If your brand is bigger and more people are searching for your brand, you're better off and you need far less links. Even if you have half the amount of links, you can still outrank others, assuming you have more brand [inaudible 00:01:55]. It's a really valuable factor that Google uses that most people forget. There's no simple way to spoof this or get your friends to search. They'll look for it on a daily or consistent basis, so you need to building a brand, and that could be through content marketing, podcasting, videos, whatever it is. The more value you provide, the bigger your brand will grow over time.
The second thing I have to share with you is thoroughness. Content thoroughness, after Google's Hummingbird update, has a huge impact on search traffic and rankings. If your content is five times more detailed than your competitors, it has the right keywords, your user metrics are much better and people love the content that you're pushing out, what you'll find is you can outrank people who literally have three, four, or even five times more backlinks than you, and I've done this time and time again. It really comes down to having really super thorough content.

Eric Siu: Two things that Neil likes to talk about a lot, well, here's how you can monitor your brand queries. You can look at Google Trends. That's the first thing. That's free. Second thing is I use BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo, Neil and I talk about it a lot to monitor who's doing well in terms of certain topics, and then who's got the most shared articles for certain niches, but you can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to manage brand mentions. You can look at your competitors. You can look at yourself. I actually get a alert every single day from BuzzSumo showing how I'm doing, and that gives me an idea of what I need to do next from a brand perspective, and I think it's really important. The fact that we're doing this right now is an element of branding.
Neil, anything else?

Neil Patel: Yeah. Last, but not least, from my end, focus on quality. You don't need the most amount of backlinks. If your backlinks are more relevant, they're contextual, they're within the text versus the sidebar, footer, and they're from higher domain authority sites, I'm giving you the best situation, you can outrank people with 1/10 the links. It really comes down to quality. It's not all about quantity.

Eric Siu: Great. That's it for today, but before we go, we have a 90-day free trial of Crazy Egg to give away to every single one of you. Just go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to learn more and you'll learn more about how you can get a one-year annual subscription of Crazy Egg. That's it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.

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