The Most Vital SEO Strategy I Learned Came From a Google Employee

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 share the results of this one SEO tactic. The reason I’m doing this is that if I just share the tactic with you, most of you are going to ignore it like I did.

But if I share the stats with you first, hopefully, you’ll be more open to implementing what I am about to teach you.

So here are my traffic stats from August 2015 for NeilPatel.com:

And here are my traffic stats for the trailing few months after I had learned this new strategy:

As you can see from the image above my traffic was growing. I went from roughly 100,493 unique visitors a month to 144,196. Not too bad.

But here is the thing… my traffic was naturally growing from all of my other marketing efforts. And I didn’t even start implementing what I learned from Google until November 28, 2015.

And the results didn’t kick in right away. It took over a year before I really started seeing growth. But once I hit the 21-month mark, things really started to skyrocket.

So, what was the big lesson?

Well, maybe you’ll be able to figure it out by looking at the screenshots below. What’s the big difference in the screenshots below?

Here’s the first one from NeilPatel.com:

And here’s one from the KISSmetrics blog (which I now own – I’ll blog about this another day):

And here’s one from my older blog, Quick Sprout:

What’s the big difference between them?

All three of the blogs are about marketing. The content is similar… so what’s the difference?

KISSmetrics and Quick Sprout generate their traffic from roughly the same regions. But NeilPatel.com, on the other hand, generates traffic from regions like Brazil, Spain, and Germany at a much higher percentage.

So why is this?

Google told me to go multi-lingual

It’s hard to rank on Google.

No matter how many blog posts I write about SEO, most of you won’t rank well because it takes a lot of time and countless hours of work (or money).

But as my friend at Google once told me…

There is already a lot of content in English but not enough in other languages even though the majority of the people in this world don’t speak English.

In other words, you need to translate your content.

On November 28, 2015, I published my first article in Portuguese (if you click the link there is a good chance it keeps you on the English site, so you may have to click the flag next to the Neil Patel logo and select Brazil after you click on the link).

Fast forward to today and I have 4,806 blog posts published on NeilPatel.com of which 1,265 are in Portuguese, 650 are in German, and 721 are in Spanish.

I slowly starting to go after more languages because the strategy is working. Here are my traffic stats in the last 31 days in Brazil:

And here are the stats for German:

And Neil Patel Spanish:

It takes time to do well within each region when you localize the content, but it’s worth it because there is literally no competition.

Seriously, no competition!!!

And I know what you are thinking… people in many of these countries don’t have as much money, so the traffic is useless and won’t convert.

If that’s what you are thinking then let me be the first to tell you that you are way off!

You need to look beyond English!

Let’s look at the most popular languages in the world:

Now let’s look at the countries with the largest populations:

And lastly, let’s look at GDP per country:

The data shows the majority of the world doesn’t live in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia.

There are so many other countries to focus on.

Not only is there a lot of people in regions like Brazil, but their GDP isn’t too bad. And yes, there isn’t as much money to be made in Brazil as there is to be made in the United States… but in the U.S. you have a lot of competitors.

While in Brazil, it’s much easier to dominate, which means you can probably make as much money in Brazil as you do in the U.S.

To give you an idea, when my ad agency expanded to Brazil, we generated over a million dollars in revenue in less than 12 months when I can’t even speak one word of Portuguese.

Well, technically that’s a lie. I know enough Portuguese to order a water and tell the waiter that I don’t want salt on my food

Just think of it this way, we were able to grow when only 3% of Brazilians speak English. That means I had little to no involvement, yet we still do decently well.

And my efforts look minuscule when you compare them to companies like Amazon. They keep investing in regions like India even though it keeps losing them money. They even announced how they are going to pour in an additional 2 billion dollars.

If you want to grow fast like Amazon, you have to start thinking big.

And international expansion should be one of those big thoughts.

Even if you aren’t able to service some these regions, what’s the harm in spending money to first build up your company’s brand and traffic in those regions? You can then worry about monetization later on.

But you better hurry… time is running out.

It’s like the wild west

During one of my trips to Brazil, I had a meeting with Andre Esteves. The meeting was only supposed to be an hour, but it lasted almost 3, which is a very long time considering he’s worth $2 billion.

In that time, we talked shop, we shared stories from our personal life, he convinced me to stop investing in hedge funds, and to put all of my money back into the web… and best of all — he explained how regions like Brazil are the wild west.

But he didn’t mean that in a negative way. The opposite really.

Instead, he was just explaining how regions like Brazil have little to no competition and are growing fast. Those who are patient will make a lot of money in the long run.

He was spot on!

It’s why Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft focus heavily on internationalization. They all know you can’t build a gigantic business if you only focus on the English-speaking market.

To give you an idea on how much energy these companies spend on globalization, one of my Microsoft friends (who’s an executive), broke down why Microsoft is trying to stop piracy in China.

If everyone in China stopped pirating Microsoft products and paid for them instead, it would add roughly 138 billion dollars to their market cap (according to him).

That’s insane!

Now, of course, if they stopped privacy, not all of those people will pay for their products. But still, it just shows how much more money is to be made by Microsoft in China.

There is even a ton of money to be made overseas for you. You just have to be willing to make the bet.

You’ve already seen my traffic stats and you know I’m growing fast overseas. I’m not monetizing in enough of those regions and that will change as time goes on.

But I made the internationalization bet years ago, and I keep increasing the amount I spend each year.

Here’s how you expand internationally

I’ve done better in Brazil than Germany and all of the Spanish markets. It’s not because I started to go after Brazil first, it’s because I had people on the ground in Brazil from day one.

It took me too long before I started to add people from those regions to the team and expand.

If you don’t speak the language and you don’t understand the culture you won’t do well no matter how good you are at marketing.

This was my biggest lesson I learned, you need people on the ground!

The second lesson I learned is translating your content isn’t enough.

Even if you adapt the content to the region by adjusting everything, you still won’t be successful because people within each region maybe looking for something else.

For example, in the United States, companies are looking for me to write more advanced marketing content. In parts of Latin America, on the other hand, people are looking to learn the fundamentals of online marketing.

For that reason, my team had to start creating new content just for regions like Brazil. This helped tremendously.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the most popular piece of content written for Brazil wasn’t a translation (it’s number 2 on the list, number 1 is a tool).

I rank #2 (behind Wikipedia) and before the YouTube results for the popular search term portfolio: 

And that image above also gets me to my last point. You need to really build a brand in each region or else you won’t do well.

I speak at more conferences in Brazil than I do in Germany or any Spanish country.

Although people believe there isn’t much money to be made from Brazil, I get paid $25,000 to $50,000 for an hour speaking spot every time I fly out there.

Eventually, I learned better ways to grow my brand internationally than speaking (as that isn’t scalable).

I acquired the tool Ubersuggest for $120,000 as it has a lot of traffic from different parts of the world. Now I am improving the tool and expanding its functionality betting that in the long term it will bring me even more traffic and awareness.

Conclusion

I know the advice my Google friend gave me wasn’t rocket science, but hey, it worked really well.

We tend to forget and even ignore the things that are staring directly at us.

We all know the majority of the world doesn’t speak English, yet we all focus our marketing efforts on the English market.

If I were starting all over again, I wouldn’t create a website in English. Instead, I would pick a region in Europe, like France or Germany, where it isn’t as competitive and where their currency is worth more than the dollar.

Not only would I see results faster, but I would make more money because there wouldn’t be as much competition.

And yes, it did take me a while to see results, but since then I have run many more experiments and if I had to start over again I would:

• Create separate sites per region – it’s easier to rank a localized site that is hosted within that country than it is to rank a global site. If you already have strong domain authority like me, don’t use subfolders, you are better off using sub-domains (I did this wrong). To give you an idea, when we create brand new sites with their own domain, focused on one region, we typically are able to climb to the top of page 1 within 3 to 4 months.
• Use hreflang correctly – there are many ways to use hreflang tags. If you aren’t familiar with what they are, in essence, it tells Google which pages focus on which regions. What’s tricky about hreflang tags is that you can either focus on a specific region or language (or both). You have to make sure you pick the right one.
• Buy instead of creating – if you really want to grow fast, just buy sites within that region that aren’t making much money and then fix them. This is the quickest way to grow.

And I will leave you with one final thought…

Google doesn’t penalize you for duplicate content. Translating your content and using hreflang won’t get you penalized.

Now, if you use an automatic translation software and your translations are done poorly, your user metrics will probably suffer and there is a higher chance you’ll suffer from a Google penalty. So translate your content manually.

Are you going to go global? Or are you going to stand on the sidelines and watch others pass you by?

The post The Most Vital SEO Strategy I Learned Came From a Google Employee appeared first on Neil Patel.

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How to Run a Successful Design Critique

The quality of critique sessions is a clear indicator of how well the creative process is being managed. When a design critique goes well, it can create more ideas on how to solve the problem at hand or help designers pick between a multitude of great solutions. But when a design critique goes wrong, it becomes a huge source of frustration for designers; designers who have been burned by insulting or unfocused critiques stop going to the sessions.

If you want to run design critique sessions in your organization, you should do it right.

What is a Design Critique?

Critique sessions are a meeting during which designers share their unfinished work with colleagues. The purpose of a critique is to make the design better. While critique session might sound like a brainstorm session, there’s a massive difference between two. The primary goal of a brainstorming session is to come up with new ideas, while the primary goal of a critique meeting is to evaluate the existing design approach and identify future changes.

What’s Required to Conduct a Session?

A design critique involves a small group of people (usually three to five) to discuss a design. The ideal design critique session is an informal meeting where each participant forgets about job titles or hierarchy, and instead, focuses on making the design better.

What is Considered to be a Good Outcome?

Properly conducted design critique sessions bring two major benefits:

• Useful feedback which helps improve the design;
• Motivation for designers to improve the design—designers should feel positive and excited after the session, even when they know that they’ll have a lot more work to do.

Things to do Before the Session

Establish a Clear Criteria of Design Evaluation

By establishing a clear criteria, you set a bar. While each criteria is a subjective measure by nature, having a well-defined criteria helps define a level of the quality of work. When designers come to the session, they will know that they’re going to be evaluated against clear criteria. And this knowledge will help them more easily anticipate the critique, and prepare for it.

Assign Roles to Session Participant’s

Each design critique session requires three roles:

• Presenter – the designer(s) who created the work;
• Facilitator – a person who controls discussion flow and enables the presenter to have a successful critique;
• Critiquers – other designers, developers, product managers, or stakeholders that provide feedback on the design.

The Presenter’s Role

1. Provide Context

One of the worst things presenters can do during the session is to assume that the people critiquing her work will know as much as a presenter about the design. Creating a context around your work should be the first thing you do. By setting context, you make it easier for critiques to understand the design.

To set the context a presenter might need to:

• Identify the end user—describe user personas and demonstrate the way a persona interacts with a product, sell critiques on the way the average user would look, and how the product would integrate into their daily routine;
• Share user journeys—when you present your work, don’t just show a few screens of a product that are supposed to represent some operations, share a whole user journey instead. Designers have a powerful tool in their toolkit that helps achieve this goal—storyboards, a storyboard can tie a user persona together with a design.

2. Share Your Goals for the Critique Session

Before going to the meeting, the presenter should have a definite answer to the question “What I want to learn from this session?” It’s important to share your goals with session participants. By letting people know what you want from them you create a sharp focus—critiques will provide the right type of feedback (based on your goal). Without goals, everyone will share their general ideas, and the meeting will be more of a brainstorm session than a critique session.

3. Use Dynamic Design for your Presentation

The quality of feedback you’ll receive is directly relevant to the level of fidelity and interactivity of the work you present. When presenters offer up something static, it narrows the field of possible feedback—people will have a hard time imagining everything you’re showing them. But the more your work represents the final product, the higher quality the feedback you’ll receive. When a critique has the opportunity to interact with a design, they’ll give more specific recommendations on how to improve it. A chance to play with a hi-fi prototype will put your team directly in the shoes of your user, and this gives you more relevant feedback.

4. Ask Specific Questions to Collect Specific Feedback

General questions such as “Do you think this design is good?” won’t bring valuable insights. Be specific. Define 3-5 specific questions you want to be answered, and ask them during the session. Ask those questions even if you’re pretty sure what team will tell you. By asking questions, you can spark new discussion and eventually find valuable insights.

5. Take Notes While Receiving Feedback

It’s essential to write down the most important opinions as well as your own thoughts.

The Facilitator’s Role

1. The Facilitator and the Presenter Shouldn’t be the Same Person

Combining the roles of presenter and facilitator might be tempting. But it’s better to avoid this temptation. If a person who created the design is leading the meeting and controlling the discussion, there is a high probability that she will use this power for evil—the presenter can become the victim of their own ego. Ego can make the presenter focus on feedback that makes their ideas shine, and exclude everything else. Of course, not all designers will have such problems, but it’s always better to prevent something from happening in a first place rather solving problems afterward.

2. Clearly Define the Rules

Without a basic set of rules, discussions can go in any direction and become counter-productive. It’s essential to:

• Describe roles – make it clear for everyone in the room what’s expected from them, defining the critics’ role is crucial, set the right tone for critique, preferably by example;
• Describe the criteria for design evaluation – while the criteria should be established before the session, it’s vital to remind participators about the criteria.

3. Promote Equal Participation

Critique sessions are a collaborative activity, that’s why it should be based on dialogue not monologues. Facilitator should support the idea of conversation by asking people to speak up.

4. Keep an Eye on Time

By reminding people of how much time they have to discuss something, the facilitator motivates them to work more efficiently.

5. Block Irrelevant Discussions

It’s essential to block all feedback that doesn’t help presenters reach their goals. Try to steer the conversation back to the goals the presenter set in the beginning.

The Critiquers’ Role

1. Empathize with the Presenter

It sounds pretty obvious, but all too often people give criticism without taking the time to put themselves in a presenter’s shoes. No matter how well a presenter sets the context and presents their work, a critique has unlimited opportunity to make the conversation uncomfortable.

Here are a few things that should be taken into account:

• Be positive – nobody likes toxic people, never say you hate a design;
• Identify presenters needs – when you’re giving feedback, you need to know what the presenter wants to reach, get a sense of what the objective is;
• Listen before speaking – if you take a moment to listen and understand before voicing an opinion, there’s a better chance that your feedback will be valuable;
• Offer direction, not prescription – don’t tell the designer how to fix the design, keep in mind that it’s up to the presenter to come up with a solution, you just help steer them in the right direction.

2. Be Specific When Giving Your Opinion

The feedback that sounds like “I don’t like this design” without any additional details doesn’t bring too much value. Be concrete. Say exactly what you don’t like and why. If you describe better solutions, provide visual examples of what you mean.

The same rule applies when you say something like “This won’t work in the real world.” If you’re going say something like this, be sure to back up your opinion with facts. Facts might be anything from UX best practices, studies, researches, etc.

3. Don’t Bring Personal Taste into it

The words you choose in critiques do matter. Opinions that sounds like “I don’t like this dark UI” are nothing more than a criticism based on personal preference. Often such feedback is considered as too subjective and skipped during discussions.

It’s okay to have a personal opinion, or express your own preferences, but it’s wrong to insert it as an argument in a discussion. Each argument should be given in the context of user’s needs and wants. Thus, instead of saying “I don’t like this dark UI” it’s better say “I think our users won’t appreciate a dark UI.”

4. Ask Clarifying Questions

Misconceptions and misunderstandings are something that happen all the time during discussions. It’s possible to reveal potential miscommunications by asking clarifying questions. Ask “Why?” each time you don’t understand a design decision.

5. Provide More Feedback After the Session

Quite often critiques have thoughts and ideas beyond the scope of the feedback requested. Avoid giving such feedback during the meeting. Write it down and reach presenter with this feedback after the session.

Conclusion

When a design critique session is appropriately conducted, it can be a great combination of vision, strategy, and technology. That’s because people who take part in this activity will be happy to share their experience and knowledge. Such critique sessions feel like informal conversations between people with the same goal—they’re all trying to find the best solution to the problem.

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Popular Design News of the Week: June 25, 2018 – July 1, 2018

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. 

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.

Stream UI Kit – A Beautiful Open Source Bootstrap 4 UI Kit

 

I Built a Bot and Now I Know Why Bots are so Dumb

 

Why Altruism is the Ace to Get your Dream Design Job

 

UX Design: What Augmented Reality Can do for the User Experience

 

How to Write a UX Proposal

 

7 Effective Tips to Improve Mobile Interactions

 

GoDaddy’s New Logo Proves It: Weird Tech Branding is Dead

 

5 Design & Development Skills to Learn this Summer

 

Early Impressions with Artboard Studio

 

Pusha – Send Push Notifications from your Desktop or Web Application

 

Site Design: The Power Project

 

Current State of Webdesign

 

A Collection of Digital Design Tools

 

How to Clean your Filthy, Disgusting Laptop

 

UX Designers, Stop the Jargon and Keep it Simple

 

Swatches and Color Palettes Based on Photos of India

 

Best UI Design Tools, 2018

 

Atomic Design is Messy, Here’s What I Prefer

 

A Beginners Guide to To A/B and Multivariate Testing

 

Brush Ninja – Online Animated Gif Creator

 

UK Government User Research: Service Manual

 

Why Design Thinking is Failing and What We Should Be Doing Differently

 

Welcome Onboard(ing)!

 

Founders Belt – Highly Curated Resources for Every Stage of your Startup

 

Are You Respecting Users’ Time? A Calm Technology Checklist

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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