Did you know that I've failed at SEO before? No, I'm not talking about when I first started my career. This was when I knew SEO like the back of my hand. I'm talking about when I was good enough to get sites ranked on page 1… that's when I really failed at SEO. And boy was it was heartbreaking! Let's just say this: I was able to rank a site on page 1 of Google for the term “online poker” and then my rankings tank. Not because of a Google penalty but from something I never expected. But before I go into what I learned, let's first go over how it all started… Online Poker LowdownBack in 2010, I bought an old poker site that was never really updated. It was called Online Poker Lowdown. Funny enough, the site is still up today even though I don't own it. The reason I bought it was because it ranked in the top 1,000 for the term “online poker.” The site just needed some updating. If you are wondering how I found it, I was Googling for the term “online poker,” and I hit up a dozen or so sites who were ranking between page 30 and 100 for the term and bought the cheapest one. And the reason I went after the poker industry was that back then a lot of us thought it was going to be legalized in the United States. So, if I could rank at the top, I would have a site that would eventually be worth a lot of money… assuming I was patient. My first blog postI published my first blog back in November 2010. It was called, the top 5 poker mistakes you'll make. The blog post wasn't the standard 2,000 plus words that I write these days, but it was long enough for 2010. Keep in mind, there weren't as many blogs back then so it wasn't as competitive. But this blog post did well, there were 31 comments: And over time, the blog continually grew as I published more content. My path to growing Online Poker LowdownI wish I had the analytics for the site still, but I don't. If my memory serves me correctly (and usually it does), the site capped out at roughly 41,000 unique visitors a month all from 104 blog posts. And at one point I even ranked number 7 on page 1 for the term “online poker.” The best part of all, it didn't even take me a year to achieve those results. Keep in mind that back then you could get rankings much faster than you can now. But still, it was pretty fast even for 2010/2011. So how did I get my rankings and traffic so high in such a competitive space? It wasn't the content, it was the backlinks. Google's algorithm was much easier to predict back then and links impacted rankings more than anything else. Now you are wondering how I got all of these people to link to me. Like today, no one wanted to link to poker sites… even back in 2011. It was from writing posts like this. By creating list-based posts of the top blogs within the poker industry, it was easy for me to get them to link back to me. If you want to do something similar, it's not as simple as writing a blog that includes the top 30 or even 100 blogs within your industry.
Once you publish your list-based post you'll need to drive a ton of traffic to it within 7 days of it being published. Back in the day, I drove traffic to the Online Poker Lowdown top 30 poker blogs post by paying for StumbleUpon ads. But that is no longer an option as StumbleUpon doesn't exist anymore. You can still drive traffic through Reddit ads, Quora ads, Twitter ads, and Facebook Ads though. These options are technically better than StumbleUpon as they have better targeting options. Even if your blog is popular, I would still recommend that you pay for ads… even if it is just 50 dollars. By paying for ads, it ensures your blog post gets read by hopefully a few thousand new people if not more. You don't need the highest quality traffic either, you just need visitors who are somewhat interested in your content. The more people that read your post, the more will click through to one of the top blogs you mentioned. And the more people that click through to their site, the more of them will notice your blog when they analyze their referral traffic. In other words, when they see a spike in their Google Analytics account, they'll notice that the extra traffic came from your blog. This will put your blog on their radar! Now, on the 7th day of your blog post being live, you'll want to email each website that you included. The email should go something like this…
You're going to have to customize the email and then, of course, make a badge that looks much nicer and is smaller. But you get the point. This one strategy really boosted my backlink count and skyrocketed me to the top. It still works today, but if you are going to leverage it there are a few things you should know:
By combing those two emails with the promotions steps I break down in this blog post, you'll notice that you'll generate backlinks and social shares. That's how I was able to rank on page 1 for one of the most competitive terms. So why was Online Poker Lowdown a failure?I broke down how I climbed to the page 1 of Google for “online poker” and as you can see from some of the posts people were engaging with the content. So why did Online Poker Lowdown fail from an SEO standpoint? It's because I didn't know what I was talking about. See, I know very little about poker, and I hired mediocre writers to help me out. Although I got the content to rank, my user signals were terrible. When people landed on the site, many of them would hit the back button, so they could go back to Google and find a better site. Just think of it this way: If your site has a terrible bounce rate, this tells Google that people don't care for your site. Although you may have “optimized” your site for search engines, it doesn't really matter because people don't care for your content, and this tells Google that your site isn't as good as the competition. Once my rankings started to drop I panicked, and I immediately reached out to a few poker players and I got their feedback. They all told me the same thing… the content wasn't great and if they were looking to learn poker all over again, the blog posts aren't actionable enough to make someone a decent poker player. They even broke down how I needed to teach scenarios within my content and tell people what they should do when they are dealt with specific hands like what to do you do if you were starting off with a pair of 2s. For someone not knowing much about poker and because I wasn't passionate about the topic, I threw in the towel and I sold the blog for a few thousand dollars. The big lesson I learned was that knowing SEO isn't enough. Even if you can build links, write content, and climb to the top of Google fast, you won't stay if people hate your content (or product/service). Google cares what people think first and foremost. So, if you can't create something people will love, your bounce rate is going to be high and you'll find that it will be hard to get steady organic traffic. ConclusionThis was my worst SEO failure. When I started Online Poker Lowdown, I was good at SEO and I was a bit too arrogant. I never expected that not being a subject matter expert would really hurt me. I know there were other solutions that I could have taken, such as partnering up with someone who knew poker (which I tried), but I quickly learned that if people aren't passionate about the topic it won't work. People can tell by your content. You never want to put out stuff that people think is crap. It will just make you look bad. Plus, when you are passionate about a topic, the writing is different. From the way you'll tell stories to how you break down actionable steps or how you mix in life experiences… it's hard to do these things when you aren't an expert. Don't do what I did by popping up sites to make a quick buck. Build something real that you can be proud of. So, what do you think of my SEO failure? Did you expect it to end this way? The post My Failed Attempt at SEO (And What I've Learned) appeared first on Neil Patel.
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