My New SEO Strategy: Blog Less, Spend More on Technology

On February 13, 2018, I acquired a keyword tool called Ubersuggest for $120,000.

It was generating 117,425 unique visitors per month at the time I purchased it and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the tool, the concept is really simple:

You put in a keyword you want to target via SEO or PPC, and it gives you more keyword ideas. That way you can grow your traffic by going after more keywords.

Most people thought I bought the tool to just redirect the traffic to NeilPatel.com so I could get more backlinks and rank higher for all of my search terms.

If you do the math it would come out to roughly 14 dollars a link.

But NeilPatel.com already had 3 times more links than Ubersuggest.

And let’s face it, I already rank for most things marketing related… so the links don’t really help that much.

And others thought I was buying it because I wanted to redirect the traffic and net another 117,425 visitors a month.

But very little of Ubersuggest’s traffic was from countries that I generate revenue from.

For example, out of the 117,425 monthly visitors, Indonesia was the most popular region at 28,491 visitors a month and the United States only made up 13,492, visitors.

Full transparency: I didn’t buy it for either reason.

NeilPatel.com already had enough backlinks, and I already generated well over a million unique visitors every month.

Instead, I bought it as part of a huge experiment.

I wanted to see if I could grow my traffic without content marketing.

Why am I trying to get away from content marketing?

I rank for everything under the sun when it comes to marketing. Seriously…

Here’s my search traffic in the last 30 days (and I bet I will get a 40 plus percent lift in the next 30 days, but that’s for another blog post so stay tuned).

If I want to grow my traffic to the level of Hubspot’s blog and get over 6 million visitors a month I would have to write content on things like “how to edit videos.”

There are two problems with content like that. First, I wouldn’t be able to monetize it.

Second, and most importantly, I am not an expert when it comes to video editing so I shouldn’t blog about it.

I’ve also thought about writing about entrepreneurship, but I don’t really enjoy it as much.

And because of that, my lack of passion will show in the content when I publish it.

In general, if you aren’t passionate about what you are writing about, don’t waste your time. Your content will suck, and people will be able to tell.

So, my team and I made a decision last week that I should only write one blog post per week, share my personal experiences, and get away from writing generic marketing content that I’ve been blogging about for years.

Plus, it’s more fun to share stories than it is to write a blog post showing you how to use Twitter.

But there was one big issue.

I couldn’t move away from writing one blog post a week because the blog is what generates all of the leads for Ghadiya Hardik Digital (my ad agency).

I had to find something that could continually help generate more visits without me requiring to blog 7 days a week.

And although it took me over a year of experimenting… I found it.

So how are you going to grow your traffic now, Hardik?

Remember how I mentioned Ubersuggest at the beginning of this blog post?

Well it was one of 7 experiments that worked out.

I took the old Ubersuggest that looked like this:

And I paid a developer to add a new skin and include CPC data. The product now looks something like this:

But here is what’s interesting: The moment I released the new Ubersuggest, the usage on the tool stayed the same.

But within a few days, people learned that they could get CPC data for free using Ubersuggest and traffic started to spike.

If you look at the graph above from Google Trends, you’ll notice that the usage died shortly after people found out I acquired it because they felt I was going to destroy the free tool…

…or they thought I was going to add a paywall (plus a lot of people in the marketing space hate me)…

…but once I released a version with more free information people starting to love the tool even more.

Literally, that one little change, which was providing cost per click data for free to Ubersuggest caused the usage to double.

At first, I thought this happened because everyone loved the new feature.

But from surveying my users I quickly learned people started using Ubersuggest because they were paying Keywordtool.io $49 a month for this one simple feature.

In other words, my popularity grew because I took something people were used to paying for and made it available for free.

And fast forward to today the tool has maintained its popularity just because I’m giving away a feature most marketers are used to paying for away for free.

But I didn’t stop there…

Once I learned the power of free, I realized that I can probably grow the NeilPatel.com website to 3 or 4 million unique visitors a month by just giving more away for free.

Here’s how I came to that conclusion.

A paid tool called KWfinder has been growing in popularity. You can see that growth from the chart below:

So now I am going to release a new version of Ubersuggest to include their feature set for free, so I can gobble up their traffic.

Here’s what that feature will look like once my developers finish making it…

But why stop there?

SEMrush and Ahrefs are amazing tools that provide tons of traffic estimation data and they are much more popular than Ubersuggest.

The main problem?

They both cost at least $100 a month.

And Buzzsumo is popular as well, as you can see below.

So, I decided that it would be a fun experiment to make Ubersuggest into a much larger tool and just give away everything for free that you are used to paying for 🙂.

Unlimited usage, no login required, for free.

Here are some previews of what the tool will look like:

The best part of all…

By making something for free I won’t have to do much marketing at all to generate the visitors.

It’s easier than writing 7 blog posts a week and all I have to do is take what people love and pay for and give it all away for free.