Why Your Organic Traffic Might Be Garbage | Biggest SEO Mistake

Over the last 12 months, I’ve driven 58.6 million visitors from Google. You get to look at my movement, kits, take a look at this chart and think, “Oh, Neil, you have to be really good at SEO”. And you know what you’re doing, but you know what? That’s not really the case.

Hey everyone, today I’m going to break down my biggest SEO mistakes.

As you can see here, 58.6 million visitors are from SEO. That’s a lot of traffic to not have to pay for. And if I scroll down and I look at the traffic stats, coming from terms like Ubersuggestwhich is fine. My name, Ubersuggest, affiliate marketing, my name, variation Ubersuggest.

But then when you start getting down you start seeing terms like, you know, how to make money from the internet that’s in Portuguese, how to get followers from Instagram, more Instagram keywords, you know, and then free Instagram followers. This is just Ubersuggest in Japanese. Instagram, digital marketing in Brazil.

But if I just keep going further down the list, you’ll start seeing a lot of keywords that, aren’t really relevant to my business. Like how to increase Instagram followers. Because my business, which I’ll show you here is an ad agency, NP Digital.

And we have been helping people with Instagram. What do we do to help them, yes, things like SEO and paper we want a lot of words like here’s the best B2B pay-per-click award or here’s one for the best B2B SEO campaign and best SEO campaign, we do both B2B and B2C.

Here’s one for corporate responsibility, you know, and the list keeps going on and on. But in essence, we’re a digital marketing firm. Sure, we’ll do social media ads and SEO, but we’re not here to just boost your Instagram followers. We’re here to drive traffic and more importantly, the traffic needs to generate your ROI.

In other words, you need to be generating more money than what you’re spending. If you spend a dollar, ideally need to be making two or three or $4, right?

And a lot of the keywords that I was optimizing for as you can see here, were just pure volume. I was getting a lot of traffic, but as you can see now my traffic starting to drop, Why?

Because of the way my team, you know, at my agency, we are following the lead of, and I can’t help you with leads in Salesforce, as we do, it’s all because of people’s personal information, in the office or a business-URLs. There’s nothing really too sensitive or really any sensitive at all. But we don’t want to share people’s URLs and emails without their permission just would feel a little sleazy and unethical with that one so I don’t want to do that.

But when we were tracking our sales through Salesforce of what’s driving clients for NP Digital, typically people will click on let’s talk and submit a form or contact. So, we have two options to become a lead. And what we found is, that most of these keywords drove, little to no leads. Now, if you go to neilpatel.com, I get my traffic typically from blogging, right?

I can see it here on the blog. And if you look at my content, I’m going after keywords that are very specific. Customer reviews in video ads. So, as I type, customer reviews, and video ads. The search volume isn’t high. If you look here zero monthly searches, right? People aren’t really searching for a lot of these keywords but you know what?

It turned out that the people who are interested in customer reviews, videos, and pictures and try to understand them, are interested in the optimization of the conversion rate, which is a part of the services that we offer. Again, it’s not a lot of people but it’s a good revenue channel for us. How do you use YouTube ads to grow your business?

So, another one is YouTube ads. And people who are looking for YouTube ads are people who are willing to spend money. only has 20,000 monthly searches in the United States. Not a ton compared to some of the other keywords like Instagram followers, I’ll actually show you here by typing in Instagram followers. And keywords like Instagram followers will get way more searches, but they’re not the right type of audience. So, the content that we’re producing on our blog is much more niche.

How to create a free Google website for a business. For us, this post is targeting local businesses because our SMB division helps localized businesses. How to create unique gift guides for e-commerce content. Again, very specific because we have a lot of e-commerce customers, roughly 28-29% of our customers are e-commerce is somewhere in that range.

So, my content is very specific about what’s going to get me, customers. And even though I’m an SEO at first, I’m like, I want to get millions of visitors, and the more traffic, the better. I quickly learn, technically not quickly. I learned over time sadly. And it took a long time to really learn. I have many years of making of my own accord, and it was only until I moved. And we really started optimizing for, what’s not just generating a lead for our ad agency, right?

This would be a lead of someone clicking, letting’s talk, or contact filling out. However, we have started to optimize it, which leads us to really approach the customer and be the first of all to take care of ourselves. And, if you do not know about them until you have a lot of traffic, as you might have guessed, you don’t really give you start getting the traffic but you have assumptions. And I would always tell my team to optimize for traffic and brand awareness, but you know what?

A lot of my competitors, iProspect, yes, you may have heard of them, you may have not. They do probably 500 to 700 million a year. They don’t even get 1/10 of the traffic to their website. If I go into Ubersuggestright now, app.neilpatel.com, and I type in iProspect into here. Let’s load up their site and make sure I spell it right.

All right, so if I load up iProspect into Ubersuggest. And again, it’s just another ad agency website. Yeah, there you go traffic over review. If you look here, it’s just an ad agency. They’re a competitor of mine. And when I look at this, monthly traffic is estimated. Now, let me go back to the traffic overview, sorry about that, iprospect.com. They’re getting roughly 17,000 visitors a month. And if you want apples to apples, let’s go to neilpatel.com. Let’s look at what I got in the last 30-ish days, 5.8, right?

So, it’s like, cool, I don’t make 500 or 700 million a year. I wish I did. And look, 17,000 visitors,5 million, which would you take? I’d rather take 17,000 and generate all that revenue. Look, the biggest lesson from this is, don’t prepare to improve traffic for profit. If your keywords aren’t generating you revenue, move on to new keywords. And when you’re doing keyword research, don’t make the mistake I did. Don’t just optimize for quote-unquote traffic. What I want you to do is type in keywords.

Like I’m typing in digital marketing here. Look for ideally good volume because the more volume, of course, the better. But you want the right volume that can transform the customer. So, when you look at it, even if the keyword has a high volume you’d be like, all right, do I offer digital marketing services?

Yes, we do, so, okay. So, then that traffic is relevant. If a CPC cost per click people would pay for ads high, $18 a click is high. That means the keyword can actually probably drive revenue. On the flip side, this keyword got 60,000 searches. If I type in Instagram followers. This keyword here is 60,000 searches similar but only a dollar 98 cost per click, what does that tell you?

Yes, you can get tons of traffic for this but people are probably, aren’t going to convert as high. If someone’s willing to pay $18 for an ad click versus a dollar 98 or $2, that’s roughly nine times the difference, right? 18 versus $2, that’s a ninefold difference.

That means, that this keyword probably won’t drive as many customers. So don’t optimize just for traffic, optimize for traffic from the right audience. And before you go after keywords do your keyword research, type them into Ubersuggest, and figure out what keywords have high volume and traffic while you technically mean the same thing but also high CPC.

And of course, it’s related to your business. Like type in digital marketing, the digital marketing agency has a $24 cost per click, less volume, but people are willing to pay more. I’m a digital marketing agency. Someone could type in digital marketing and look for a degree or certification. And I don’t offer certifications.

You know, technically you can get a job through my ad agency, but we’re really, more so an agency that’s looking for customers. So, you want to look for high CPCs, and the more related the better, even if less volume. So even though this one, gets, let’s say three X less search volume, right? It’s roughly 20,000, this one 60, but this is a digital marketing agency, which is what I am. So, it’s better for me to go after a keyword that is what I am because the CPC is higher, right? Instead, $18 is 24 and it’s more related to my business which means I’m going to generate more customers from it.

So don’t just optimize for quote-unquote keywords and traffic optimize for relevancy. And if you do that, you’re going to be better. And if you need help with this check out my advertising company, NP Digital, or if you have any questions, just leave a comment below. I’m here to help for free, of course. And if you enjoy the video, like it, and share it. But in essence, that’s my biggest SEO mistake and lesson that I ended up learning. Don’t make it, it was a silly one.

I wish I hadn’t optimized for brand awareness. And I knew a lot of those keywords that wouldn’t convert but I’m like, oh yeah, I want the brand awareness. But there are a lot of competitors like iProspect, and another one that’s massive is Performics. Let’s see performics.com, I believe that’s their URL. performics.com.

And if you look at Performics, another ad agency and these guys are massive, I think they have 3000 employees I don’t know the revenue, but they don’t have that many keywords or traffic, 3,700 visitors.

And most people haven’t heard of them, but look they got 3000 plus employees. I don’t have 3000 employees. They have 3000 employees, you know, they’re making way more money than me. I’m probably somewhere between 400 and 500 employees.

And that your shows you 5 million visitors or 3000 I’d rather have more qualified traffic and more revenue. So yes, brand awareness and traffic are good. As long as it brings in revenue in the long run, that’s very, very important. And I hope that helps you out, best of luck with your strategies.

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