Video Transcript: Keyword Tips

In this video, you're going to learn nine powerful techniques to help get your site  to the top of Google fast. In fact, one of my followers recently used these same  techniques to rank number one for his target keyword. The best part, you don't  need to hire an agency to execute any of these DIY SEO techniques. I'm Brian  Dean, the founder of Backlinko, and today, I'm going to reveal nine of my all time favorite white hat SEO techniques. Stay tuned. I'll be honest with you. When I  launched my first website, I had no idea what I was doing, so I hired a random  SEO agency to SEO my site. Oh, hey, yeah. Can you SEO my site? Thanks.  Needless to say, that agency did absolutely nothing. That's when I decided to  fire the agency and learn SEO myself through trial and error. It took three long  years, but I eventually learned how to do SEO the right way. Thanks to my  proven strategies, I now rank in the top five for some super competitive  keywords and inc.com recently called me one of the world's most sought after  SEO experts. With that, let's get into the actionable techniques, starting with use these words in your title tag get more traffic. Last year, SEO pro Ross Hudgins  decided to run an interesting SEO experiment. Ross analyzed 7999 pages that  ranked on the first page of Google. So what did he find? Ross discovered that  top ranking pages tended to use these words in their title tags. What's going on  here? Google upranks websites that get a high organic click through rate.  According to Ross, certain terms tend to attract lots of clicks from Google  searchers, and because pages that use these terms in their title tag get more  clicks, they also get higher rankings. Now, besides the terms that Ross found,  here are some others that I personally use to maximize my organic click through rate. I'll have another strategy that you can use to boost your organic click  through rate later in this video. But for now, let's jump right into DIY SEO tip  number two, find long tail keywords with searches related to here's exactly how  to execute this technique. First, type a keyword into Google, Next, scroll to the  bottom of the search results until you hit the searches related to Section. This  section is where Google shows you keywords that are similar to the one you just searched for. And because these terms come straight from Google, they can  make great long tail keywords for you to target. Now it's time for technique  number three, which is to use these little known sources of awesome keyword  ideas. You've probably already used Google Suggest to find longtail keywords.  This is where you type a phrase into Google and see which keywords Google  suggests. Now this tactic is pretty useful, but there's one problem with this  approach. Everyone and their mom knows about it. That's why I recommend  using untapped sources of suggested keywords. I'm talking about places like  YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon and Bing, for example, let's say they were going to write an article about the Paleo diet, but you didn't have a keyword for that  article. Instead of typing the phrase Paleo Diet into Google, you try YouTube,  and you get a whole new set of suggestions, you can get even more awesome  keyword ideas by doing the same thing in Bing. That's all there is to it. Okay, 

let's rock and roll with technique number four, which is to reduce your bounce  rate. Last year, I analyzed 1 million Google search results to figure out why  certain pages ranked higher than others. One of our findings was that pages  with a low bounce rate tended to outrank pages with a high bounce rate. In case you're wondering, your bounce rate is the percentage of people that click on  your site in Google search results and then click their back button. Now it's not  clear if Google uses bounce rate as a direct ranking signal. Our finest could be  the case of correlation not always equaling causation. For example, pages with  a low bounce rate might just have straight up better content, and that's why  Google ranks them so highly. Or it could be that Google uses bounce rate as a  direct ranking signal. Either way, I recommend improving pages on your site that have a high bounce rate, it'll boost your conversions and will probably also help  with your SEO. Okay, let's move on to our fifth tip, which is to optimize your click through rate using AdWords ads. Look I already showed you how a higher CTR  can help you get higher rankings, and now it's time for me to reveal one of my all time favorite ways to boost CTR Google AdWords. In case you're not familiar  with how Google AdWords works, it's basically a big auction. But unlike most  auctions, AdWords also takes into account an ad's click through rate. If an ad  has a really high CTR, it gets a steep discount on every click. Now needless to  say. Almost every ad that you see in Google is optimized to maximize clicks, and when I realized that I could use these ads to write my title and description tags,  a light bulb went off with that. Let me walk you through the step by step process. First Search for your keyword in Google. Keep an eye out for AdWords ads that  appear at the top and bottom of the first page. If you notice any terms that the  ads tend to use a lot, sprinkle them into your title and description tag, and you'll  probably notice an increase in your CTR and traffic. It's that easy. Now it's time  for our first link building technique. Link roundups. I can't believe we haven't  talked about backlinks yet. After all, a Google employee recently said that  backlinks are still one of Google's top three ranking signals, and now I'm going  to show you one of my all time favorite link building strategies, Link roundups.  Link roundups are weekly or monthly blog posts that link out to the best content  that recently came out. So if you publish high quality content on your site, you  have a good chance of getting your content included in a roundup. Here's an  example of a backlink that I got from a link roundup using the process that I'm  about to share with you. Okay, let's get into the steps. First, you need to find link  roundups in your industry. All you need to do is search in Google using these  search strings, and you should find at least a handful of roundups that are a  good fit for your site. The last step is to reach out to the person that runs the link  Roundup, let them know that they run a great roundup and that your content  might be a good fit. Here's a real life example of an email that I recently sent,  and if your content is a good fit, they'll usually have no problem adding a link to  your site in that week's roundup. The best part, not only do you get a link, but 

your links, anchor text is usually the title of your article. That way, your anchor  text includes your target keyword, but it's not spammy. Exact match anchor text,  which Google doesn't like and while we're talking about links, let's cover another white hat, link building technique, resource page link building this strategy is  similar to link roundups, with one major difference, like Link roundups, resource  pages link out to awesome content on a given topic. But unlike link roundups,  resource pages include the all time best content on that topic. Here's an  example of a resource page, and now it's time for me to show you how to build  links from resource pages. First use these search strings to find resource pages  in your niche. When you find a page where your link would make sense, send  the site owner this script. Obviously, this is a bit of a numbers game, but if your  content is amazing, most people will have no problem adding your link to their  resource page. Speaking of amazing content, it's time for do it yourself. SEO  technique number eight, publish in depth content. Last year, one of my readers,  Emil Shore, reached out to me. He emailed to tell me about a piece of content  that he published that quickly hit the number one spot for his target keyword.  How did he do it? He published an incredibly in depth piece of content, and my  big search engine ranking factor study found data to back this up. We found that long in depth content tended to rank best in Google. So in practical terms, what  does this mean? It means that articles like five tips for x or four ways to do Y  simply don't work anymore. To rank today, your content needs to cover  everything there is to know about your topic. For example, last year, I wanted to  write a post about SEO tools. Now my original idea was to list my 12 favorite  tools. Now this post would have been okay, but it wouldn't have been the type of in depth content that ranks on Google's first page. That's when I decided to  review every single SEO tool on the market. It took over 70 hours, but in the  end, I had a piece of very in depth content, that now ranks in the top five for my  target keyword. So the hard work paid off. Now it's time for our last DIY SEO  technique. Pay attention to SERP features. You probably noticed that Google is  adding more stuff to the search results instead of just 10 blue links, Google's  results now have knowledge graphs, Rich Snippets, video results and yes, more ads than ever before. Why is this important? Well, most people choose a  keyword based on two things, search volume and competition on the first page,  but they don't consider that Google's new SERP features can steal clicks away  from the organic results, for example, let's take the keyword weight loss, as you  can see, Google displays ads at the top of the page, news results and a people  also ask box, and because of these new SERP features, according to Ahrefs,  only 44% of people searching for that term click on an organic result. Bottom  line, do? Do your best to target keywords that don't have a lot of SERP features. That way you won't rank for a keyword that ends up getting very few organic  clicks. I know that I said I'd only cover nine tips in this video, but I want to throw  in a bonus SEO tip for you, and that's to tap into multimedia. So should you use 

videos, images and charts in your content, let's look at the data skyward.  Research discovered that articles that contained at least one image got an  average of 94% more traffic than articles without an image. And our ranking  factor study discovered that image rich content tends to rank best in Google.  Bottom line, make sure that your content contains at least one piece of  multimedia like an image or video. Industry Studies show that this can help you  rank higher in Google. If you like this video, make sure to subscribe to my  YouTube channel right now. That way you won't miss out on actionable SEO  videos like this one, just click on the subscribe button. Also, if you want  exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with subscribers. Head over  backlinko.com and sign up for the newsletter. It's free. Now I want to turn it over  to you which technique from today's video are you going to use first? Are you  going to try publishing in depth content or build backlinks from link roundups?  Let me know by leaving a comment below right now. Yeah, when he sees you  come around, he's gonna be like, That bastard, causation, correlation, oh, I'm  still wearing the hat this guy. Actionable, so it's gonna be like ding, you know?