Neil Patel, a leading voice for more than a decade on how to use digital marketing to help grow your business, says the secret is there is no secret. COVID has pushed companies to accelerate and improve their online marketing efforts, so it’s more competitive than ever to stand out from competitors. While there is no Holy Grail, Patel offers insights in a recorded presentation that companies can take in 2021 to make sure they are doing all they can to enhance their online visibility.
Improve page load time. According to Patel, improving page loading speed is proven not only to increase visits and SEO rankings, but also increases conversion up to 7%. Many companies already use content delivery networks (CDNs) to load static content to increase page load speed. Patel recommends also loading non-static files with CDNs.
Content length doesn’t matter as much. Conventional wisdom has held that more is better when it comes to content to rank near the top of Google searches. Patel says that’s no longer the case. Your focus should be on quality, in part because Google is using more user signals to rank websites. However, he does advise companies to make longer audio and video content — 10 minutes or more. Anything shorter than 10 minutes may hurt your reach.
How high you rank matters more than ever. Over 35% of clicks go to the No. 1 position in search. If you’re not in the top 10, you’re going to have a difficult time being seen, Patel says. On his Marketing School audio blog, Patel recommends building less links. If you build too many links too fast, your rankings don’t move up as fast and they usually don’t go up as high compared to people who are building more quality links slower.
Repurposing and updating content will be the norm. Many marketers focus on creating new content, but with 1 billion blogs online, there is a glut of information out there. Take the existing content you’ve created and repurpose it. Turn text content into audio and video. Patel says companies should update content more often than they release new content.
Backlinks don’t matter as much. Building backlinks may not be worth the time that is invested into it. It’s about user experience and value. Search engines are optimizing for relevancy.
Shoot for marginal gains. Accept the fact that there is no silver bullet and focus instead on making small improvements in a number of areas.
Author
Get our newsletter and digital focus reports
Stay current on learning and development trends, best practices, research, new products and technologies, case studies and much more.
