Bowensthinks

(If you are wondering, the image of me above was taken when I used to work at KISSmetrics with Hiten Shah … I used to have hair) In early January 2017, I purchased the KISSmetrics website for $500,000. If you go to the site, you’ll notice that it forwards here to NeilPatel.com (which I will get into later in the post). The $500,000 didn’t get me the company, KISSmetrics, or any of the revenue streams. The parent company, Space Pencil , is continually improving and developing the product. And on top of that, there are restrictions. I can’t just freely use the KISSmetrics name or pop up a competing company on the KISSmetrics site. So why did they sell me the domain? And why would I pay $500,000 for it? I can’t fully answer why they sold it, but I do know a lot of their customers came from word of mouth, conferences, paid ads, and other forms of marketing that didn’t include SEO or content marketing. For that reason, the domain probably wasn’t as valuable to them as it was to me....

You’ve heard people telling you that you need to write in-depth content because that’s what Google wants. And it’s true… the average page that ranks on page 1 of Google contains 1,890 words . But you already know that. The question is, should you be writing 2,000-word articles? 5,000? Or maybe even go crazy and create ultimate guides that are 30,000 words? What’s funny is, I have done it all. I’ve even tested out adding custom images and illustrations to these in-depth articles to see if that helps. And of course, I tested if having one super long page with tens of thousands of words or having multiple pages with 4,000 or 5,000 words is better. So, what do you think? How in-depth should your content be? Well, let’s first look at my first marketing blog, Quick Sprout. Short articles don’t rank well With Quick Sprout, it started off just like any normal blog. I would write 500 to 1,000-word blog posts and Google loved me. Just look at my traffic during January 2011. As yo...

I don’t think I am the best SEO out there. And I am not the most well-known SEO. But when you have been doing SEO as long as I have, eventually you meet most of the players in the space. And over the years, I’ve met a lot of Google employees. Some of them were in high positions, while others were not. Out of all of the Google employees I met, none of them told me anything that shouldn’t be made public. And I also never put anyone in a position that would compromise their job. But what was crazy is that the SEO advice I got on August 4, 2015, from a Google employee changed my life. And what’s even crazier is that the advice I got on that particular day, is probably known by almost every SEO out there, but I bet less than .1% of SEOs use this strategy. In other words, a Google employee shared knowledge that was readily available on any major search blog, yet I was too lazy to implement what I already knew. So what did I learn? Well, before I go into what I learned, lets first sh...

Can you guess how many keywords I rank for? Well, you are probably going to say 477,000 because I used that number in the title of this post. 😉 And it’s true, just look at the screenshot from Ahrefs. It shows the number of keywords I rank for. But what’s crazy is that I am in a super competitive niche… digital marketing . So, are you wondering how I did it? Well, it starts with proper keyword research. See most marketers start their keyword research with tools like SEMrush or Ubersuggest and they type in a keyword like “SEO”. You then get a list back with hundreds of keyword suggestions with cost per click and competition data. And once you have a list of keywords you like, you probably do what most marketers do, which is to start inserting them into your website or creating content around the keywords. Does this process sound familiar? Well, of course, it does because that’s what everyone has been teaching you to do. But what’s wrong with this? This process is like ga...