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 are going to talk about something Google doesn't want you to know. Neil, what is it?

Neil Patel: The best way to rate isn't link building, isn't content marketing. Google emphasizes brands more than anything else that we're seeing right now. The big brands rank well. You see that when you do searches all the time. The most popular brands within that niche dominate the listings. Wikipedia, Microsoft, About.coms, New York Times, Huffington Post, TechCrunch. Brands do extremely well. It's funny. It's not just Google who doesn't want you to know this. A lot of consulting shops, a lot of agencies, also don't want you to know this because they're pitching you all these services, which are great, but what they're a lot of them are not helping you do is building a brand, and if you focus on building a brand, in the long run, you will do better off than your competitors.
Eric Schmidt once released a quote, he's the ex-CEO of Google, and it was something around, "Brands are a great way to separate the crap from all the listings." I don't know the exact-

Eric Siu: From the cesspool.

Neil Patel: There you go. From that point, I started doing a lot of experiments with brands, which I'll talk about a bit later in this episode, and I notice, by leveraging branding, my ranking skyrocketed.

Eric Siu: Well, Neil, what experiment did you do that actually ended up getting you a lot of attention, not just through Google, but let's say Instagram, as well?

Neil Patel: I took a lot of the popular models, both male and female, and I had them hold up signs that said, "Who is Neil Patel?" When people hold up a sign that says, "Who is Neil Patel," and most people don't know who I am, it causes them to search for my name, and in Google's eyes, they're like, "Oh, wow, this brand, this domain name, is getting a lot of brand queries, and that caused my rankings to skyrocket. I started ranking number one for online marketing, number two for online marketing, ton of other terms, but here's the thing that makes it really hard to just do this trick and get everyone to search for your name. If it's not consistent and people don't keep searching your name and you don't build up "long-term brand", you'll find that your rankings will dip. They're not looking for just a quick hit and someone who gets a ton of news or searches. They're looking for someone who continually builds their brand over time.

Eric Siu: That's the thing that's the most defensible. There's nothing that can be taken away. I actually remember watching a session earlier this week at SaaStr, and we talk about Warren Buffett talks about the concept of building a moat, something that where you can protect your business. In the past, maybe it's something around technology. Well, now, a lot of technological stuff is becoming more table states. Let's say scaling servers and things like that. Yes, technology's going to keep evolving. Nothing's being taken away there, but a lot of the things that were difficult to do are now, well, relatively easy to do, assuming you can pay for it.
The new moats, and there's a slide on this, is, basically, building a brand. Nothing could ever be stripped away, and this is not even just in the context of Google. Sure, it's important to rank for Google, but also diversifying, which is why you see content coming on different platforms from both Neil and myself. It's important to build a brand because, at the end of the day, people trust a brand, people go to a brand, and it's just easier to do business. Yes, it takes time. It takes money, but is it worth the effort? Well, if you're spending the time on it, you better be willing to put in the effort, and, yeah, it's going to pay off.

Neil Patel: The way I look at it is Coca-Cola, when you want a drink, like a carbonated drink, you'll just think of them naturally or think of Pepsi, or if you think about fast food, you'll think about Burger King, Pizza Hut, McDonald's, whatever it is. These guys build brand. You want to have a running shoe. Who would you go to? Probably Nike, Reebok, Adidas. There's not tons of options out there. Yes, there's a lot of "options" that companies are creating shoes, but there's not a lot of options of big brands in this space. By dominating the brand within your niche, you'll do well.
If you look at Eric and I, we're doing this. This is Marketing School. We both do content marketing. We both create videos for YouTube and Facebook. What else do we do, Eric? We both create tools and we give a lot of them away for free. We both go to conferences and speak. In other words, we're building up our brand. Yes, we get traffic to our sites through SEO, through social media marketing, but if it wasn't for us spending time and energy building up our brand, it would be a lot harder for us to see results. It's like everything works together these days in marketing. We've talked about this in previous podcasts when it comes to omnichannel. By building up our brand and leveraging a lot of the marketing channels out there and you combine it all, that's when you start seeing things explode, and it takes a while.
Eric, how long have you been focusing on building up your brand?

Eric Siu: Four years.

Neil Patel: When did you first start seeing results, when people started saying, "Hey, I see you everywhere. We wanna work with you because of it," your search traffic started going up?

Eric Siu: Dude, at least two to two and a half years.

Neil Patel: All right. Nowadays, you were in the elevator the other day at your complex. What did someone say to you when you were in your elevator?

Eric Siu: Oh, it's like, "Hey, it's Eric. Aren't you the guy from that marketing podcast?" The same thing at SaaStr, too. I walk by and people just point at me, being like, "I like your podcast."

Neil Patel: He's building up a brand, and I'm doing the same thing. Don't expect results right away. You can do them both for your personal brand or corporate brand. If I had to do things over again, I have a decent size personal brand, not as big of a corporate brand, I would have built a corporate brand first because you can sell a corporate brand with ease. You can't sell a personal brand.
You look at Tony Robbins. He can monetize. You look at Gary Vaynerchuk. He can monetize. You look at me. We can monetize, but if we focus our energy on building a Pepsi, a Coca-Cola, a Microsoft, whatever it may be, those companies are worth so much more. Warren Buffett has a brand, but Berkshire Hathaway is worth much more money.

Eric Siu: The final thing I'll add around this is that when you have a brand, you have a lot more options available. The funny thing, I think Neil probably notices this, too, but the agencies that we have, that's just one side of the business. We actually are open to a lot of other options. Why I'm saying this is that I notice a lot of agency owners, they actually tend to try to drag each other down. It's really competitive. They're trying to cut at each other's throats, talk behind each other's back, things like that. Neil and I really don't care for any of that because, well, because we have so much other stuff that we're working on, too, that it's not just related to ... We're not relegated to just one thing. The brand opens up many doors, many opportunities for other areas that you, otherwise, would not expect to see.
We have episodes on how you can build a personal brand and, also, we've talked about why it's good to have a company brand. It's all there. You can just search Marketing School. You can look through our previous podcasts, and you'll get more insight on that.
Neil, anything else?

Neil Patel: That's it. Thank you, guys, for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. For our daily marketing giveaway, make sure you check out SingleGrain.com/giveaway.

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