In episode #684, Eric and Neil discuss one way you can rank without using SEO or paid ads. Tune in to hear how you can rank without all the work.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: How to Rank at the Top of Google Without SEO or Paid Ads
- [01:05] Neil doesn’t always come up with his own marketing strategies.
- [01:22] When Eric owned the elder care website, it wasn’t ranking.
- [01:50] They clicked on the top-ranking site, which was poorly curated. They bought out the site to use it to climb in the rankings.
- [02:45] Neil used this method to help his sites rank higher.
- [02:52] It’s a more affordable approach to ranking higher.
- [03:45] Everyone has a number at which they would agree to sell.
- [04:30] Buy a site that has diversified traffic, instead of just one stellar keyword ranking.
- [04:50] Buy a site with a good traffic portfolio.
- [04:53] That’s all for today!
- [04:57] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post How to Rank at the Top of Google Without SEO or Paid Ads | Ep. #684 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 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're going to talk about how you can rank at the top of Google without SEO or without paid advertising. Neil.
Neil Patel: Eric did this first. I jacked this strategy and then I went crazy and now I do it a lot.
Eric Siu: As he always does.
Neil Patel: I mean go crazy, not jack stuff.
Eric Siu: Sometimes I jack people's strategies too. I'll be honest. What do they say, "Good marketers create-"
Neil Patel: No, no, great artists, good marketers create, great marketers steal.
Eric Siu: No, no, great artists steal.
Neil Patel: Well they say that with marketers.
Eric Siu: I don't know. The Picasso thing. I don't know about marketers.
Neil Patel: Yeah, some are interchanging it online. Nonetheless, I don't always come up with my own marketing tactics. Some of them I jack from other people and I even cite them too. This one I took from Eric. I took my email opt in method one time from, I forgot what the startup was called but I noted them in a book.
Eric Siu: Groove HQ.
Neil Patel: There you go, Groove HQ. And I even linked to them in a blog post. The strategy Eric once used, he was in the retirement, elderly care community and you weren't ranking. You were a brand new website. You didn't want to spend any money on Pay Per Click.
Eric Siu: True.
Neil Patel: And where were you ranking?
Eric Siu: We were ranking, so for the key word I'll just reveal it, the keyword senior living, we're not ranking at all. And then what we did was we looked at the top two pages or so and we saw a site that was ranking, hovering between number three and number five for the keyword senior living and we clicked on it. Looked like a garbage website. Looked like nobody cared about it so we just reached out to the person.
Neil Patel: And how much did you buy that site for?
Eric Siu: We bought it for I want to say, I think we bought it for $10,000.
Neil Patel: And if you had to do Pay Per Click for that term what would it have cost you?
Eric Siu: That keyword alone I think is 20, I want to say 20 to 25 dollars a click.
Neil Patel: You would probably have spent more than ten grand in a month.
Eric Siu: Exactly.
Neil Patel: The numbers ended up panning out. Now I took his strategy and I took it to the extreme because I was like, wait when I looked at how much I'm spending on content marketing and SEO, because you still have to hire people to help you out from editing to doing manual outreach to getting the manual social shares, because SEO looks at more than just, "Hey, how many backings do you have and how clean is your coat?" What I ended up doing was I took Eric's strategy, find all the blogs in my space that aren't generating any revenue, buy them and then merge them in.
I didn't do it for specific key terms that I wanted to rank for, I just did it because they already had the traffic. Whether it's from social or whether it's from search it's a much cheaper approach than it is to buy a site, than it is to do your SEO or spend money on Pay Per Click. Now we're not saying you shouldn't do SEO, we're not saying you shouldn't do Pay Per Click, but it's a [cheat 00:03:02] code. It's quicker and the ROI on this is extremely high. The problem is not everyone's going to sell or not everyone is asking for a reasonable price. Like I tried buying Search Engine Watch. They ignored me. They make jack shit in revenue. And they probably think their site's worth a bit too much.
Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean look at it as real estate. I think when you're looking at buying property, and sometimes look, you're going to look to buy distressed property where people maybe they need the money, they don't care about the business anymore. Really, you can look at this from a mergers and acquisitions mindset where you're just out there looking to do deals with people. Eventually you stumble across one and people are willing to let it go.
Everybody eventually has a number at the end of the day. I didn't think Neil would be able to get UberSuggest and he got it. Got the deal done. He bought some other blogs recently too. I think we talked about it on a previous podcast but just staying diligent with this I think eventually once you start to see success, once you get to a certain scale you might look at acquiring other businesses and other websites. Just make sure you do the due diligence on the site too just to see. You can use a tool like [Atrust 00:04:04] for example to see how much their monthly traffic is worth and then you can build off of that. Neil, do you have anything else to add?
Neil Patel: Yeah, so if you're going to do this, I don't recommend doing it for one specific keyword. If a site's ranking for one keyword only and that's what you're banking on you can always lose the ranking too over time because you're buying a site. You're redirecting it or you're combining it or you're leaving it alone. What we found is the best approach is just to buy a site that has a well diversified traffic. You know mix from SEO, social media, direct, email, et cetera and you can either merge it in or keep it separate. You want to maintain it, keep growing it, and again, don't purely buy it for its Google rankings, don't buy it for its links. It's a quick way to lose your money if something wrong happens. But just buy it for its overall traffic portfolio and knowing you can monetize it better than what they can.
Eric Siu: Great. That's it for today. Go check out our marketing tool Goodies To Grow Your Business. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway 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 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.
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're going to talk about how you can rank at the top of Google without SEO or without paid advertising. Neil.
Neil Patel: Eric did this first. I jacked this strategy and then I went crazy and now I do it a lot.
Eric Siu: As he always does.
Neil Patel: I mean go crazy, not jack stuff.
Eric Siu: Sometimes I jack people's strategies too. I'll be honest. What do they say, "Good marketers create-"
Neil Patel: No, no, great artists, good marketers create, great marketers steal.
Eric Siu: No, no, great artists steal.
Neil Patel: Well they say that with marketers.
Eric Siu: I don't know. The Picasso thing. I don't know about marketers.
Neil Patel: Yeah, some are interchanging it online. Nonetheless, I don't always come up with my own marketing tactics. Some of them I jack from other people and I even cite them too. This one I took from Eric. I took my email opt in method one time from, I forgot what the startup was called but I noted them in a book.
Eric Siu: Groove HQ.
Neil Patel: There you go, Groove HQ. And I even linked to them in a blog post. The strategy Eric once used, he was in the retirement, elderly care community and you weren't ranking. You were a brand new website. You didn't want to spend any money on Pay Per Click.
Eric Siu: True.
Neil Patel: And where were you ranking?
Eric Siu: We were ranking, so for the key word I'll just reveal it, the keyword senior living, we're not ranking at all. And then what we did was we looked at the top two pages or so and we saw a site that was ranking, hovering between number three and number five for the keyword senior living and we clicked on it. Looked like a garbage website. Looked like nobody cared about it so we just reached out to the person.
Neil Patel: And how much did you buy that site for?
Eric Siu: We bought it for I want to say, I think we bought it for $10,000.
Neil Patel: And if you had to do Pay Per Click for that term what would it have cost you?
Eric Siu: That keyword alone I think is 20, I want to say 20 to 25 dollars a click.
Neil Patel: You would probably have spent more than ten grand in a month.
Eric Siu: Exactly.
Neil Patel: The numbers ended up panning out. Now I took his strategy and I took it to the extreme because I was like, wait when I looked at how much I'm spending on content marketing and SEO, because you still have to hire people to help you out from editing to doing manual outreach to getting the manual social shares, because SEO looks at more than just, "Hey, how many backings do you have and how clean is your coat?" What I ended up doing was I took Eric's strategy, find all the blogs in my space that aren't generating any revenue, buy them and then merge them in.
I didn't do it for specific key terms that I wanted to rank for, I just did it because they already had the traffic. Whether it's from social or whether it's from search it's a much cheaper approach than it is to buy a site, than it is to do your SEO or spend money on Pay Per Click. Now we're not saying you shouldn't do SEO, we're not saying you shouldn't do Pay Per Click, but it's a [cheat 00:03:02] code. It's quicker and the ROI on this is extremely high. The problem is not everyone's going to sell or not everyone is asking for a reasonable price. Like I tried buying Search Engine Watch. They ignored me. They make jack shit in revenue. And they probably think their site's worth a bit too much.
Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean look at it as real estate. I think when you're looking at buying property, and sometimes look, you're going to look to buy distressed property where people maybe they need the money, they don't care about the business anymore. Really, you can look at this from a mergers and acquisitions mindset where you're just out there looking to do deals with people. Eventually you stumble across one and people are willing to let it go.
Everybody eventually has a number at the end of the day. I didn't think Neil would be able to get UberSuggest and he got it. Got the deal done. He bought some other blogs recently too. I think we talked about it on a previous podcast but just staying diligent with this I think eventually once you start to see success, once you get to a certain scale you might look at acquiring other businesses and other websites. Just make sure you do the due diligence on the site too just to see. You can use a tool like [Atrust 00:04:04] for example to see how much their monthly traffic is worth and then you can build off of that. Neil, do you have anything else to add?
Neil Patel: Yeah, so if you're going to do this, I don't recommend doing it for one specific keyword. If a site's ranking for one keyword only and that's what you're banking on you can always lose the ranking too over time because you're buying a site. You're redirecting it or you're combining it or you're leaving it alone. What we found is the best approach is just to buy a site that has a well diversified traffic. You know mix from SEO, social media, direct, email, et cetera and you can either merge it in or keep it separate. You want to maintain it, keep growing it, and again, don't purely buy it for its Google rankings, don't buy it for its links. It's a quick way to lose your money if something wrong happens. But just buy it for its overall traffic portfolio and knowing you can monetize it better than what they can.
Eric Siu: Great. That's it for today. Go check out our marketing tool Goodies To Grow Your Business. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway 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 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.
