This question has taken on incredible proportions in recent months in Brazil.
Neil Patel, not long ago, was known by those already involved in the world of Digital Marketing, but remained unknown to the general public.
However, in recent weeks, that name has been on everyone’s lips, from the most experienced marketing professional to the most common fan of the carousel (Brazilian soap opera). I will explain later.
ATTENTION: If you want to know who Neil Patel is , the content you are reading now is not for that. Read our full article explaining who he is .
I am here today to tell another story.
That’s right. I’m going to tell you how the “Who is Neil Patel” campaign brought incredible results to our blog, even though it wasn’t the intention of Instagram’s most famous marketer.
In addition to a big history lesson, I’m going to break it down into several lessons with you. Lessons on content production , SEO , marketing, etc.
I guarantee that in addition to having fun with everything that happened in this story, you will learn a lot from this article!
So without further ado, let’s get to understanding how it happened:
How it all began
Once upon a time there was a keyword: Digital Marketing.
Digital Marketing was not very popular in Brazil about 3 years ago. However, it has become the most sought-after keyword for companies and professionals in the field.
Obviously if you have a Digital Marketing blog, you have wanted to be the first on Google when someone types that keyword into the search engine, right?
However, that position can only be occupied by one blog or site.
Fortunately, that first organic position is currently being occupied by rockcontent.com/blog in the Portuguese search results, thanks to the magical powers of quality content production and link building .
And… it was going to be a long and peaceful reign, until a great challenger emerged.
I don’t know if anyone has told you this, but Google’s search results pages are a real battlefield.
If you’re ranking first for a hot keyword, you can be sure that everyone is chasing you, thinking of how to take your place.
That’s how it works.
Let us return to the challenger. As is well known, every war begins when one party declares war on another.
The crow came in the form of WhatsApp when Patel sent a friendly message to the Rock team saying he would steal our top spot.
I confess that it was a little scary to have one of the biggest names in Digital Marketing in the world and a major agency for us threatening our positions.
Even more so when he was rapidly climbing the rankings and came in second place (in a very short time) leaving behind incredible blogs like Resultados Digitais.
In addition to that, it used the same domain it uses in the United States, meaning it entered the Brazilian market with an absurd amount of domain authority.
Our Marketing Manager, Renato Mesquita , even made a gif expressing our feelings at the time:
- Will Neil Patel Overtake Them In Digital Marketing?
- No
- Oh really?
- :'(
But we remain firmly in first position and we do not intend to leave there
And that’s how the biggest confrontation in the history of Digital Marketing began:
Who is Neil Patel?
Shortly after, the controversial campaign with the hashtag #QuemENeilPatel emerged.
We were taken by surprise when we saw several female profiles posting photos considered sensual in which they showed on a badge or a cell phone: Who is Neil Patel?
The campaign generated a lot of media buzz in the week it was launched, as we can see in this Google Trends graph.
Neil Patel’s idea was to get people to search for his name on Google and the first result in the search engines was his blog:
You might be thinking, “But that won’t generate qualified traffic!”, “That will only bring people who don’t care about digital marketing.”
Well, I’m going to use the explanation that Patel himself used in his conference at the RD Summit – the largest Digital Marketing event in Latin America.
He asked: “If you were to Google Luxury Car, who would come up first? Mercedes or BMW?… dramatic pause… “The one with the most searches!”
So, the idea would be similar with Digital Marketing. If the domain has many searches and receives a huge number of visitors, it will bring more opportunities to stand out in competitive keywords.
Counterattack
From this moment on you will learn very valuable lessons:
You don’t win a war just by defending yourself.
A week or two after the campaign, Patel was in Brazil for Fire – another big Digital Marketing event – where he gave a talk. And he paid a visit to Rock and that was the day he took the photo challenging Peçanha (our co-founder).
That day Renato (Hank, as we call him) and I were talking, when I made a suggestion:
“Why don’t we create an article for Who is Neil Patel? And then we rank second and take some of Patel’s traffic. And if he keeps bothering us, we’ll take the first spot for his name!”
The last sentence was followed by laughter, in the end we would not be able to take the first place for his name. Do you agree?
From Hank’s reaction, we knew this was an optimal response to the attacks we were receiving on our keyword.
And we produced a post that was, honestly, far superior to any other publication that wanted to explain who Neil Patel is.
The article was richer in information than even Patel’s own website, which featured only a video explaining who he was.
Our blog told his story, we explained the campaign, we explained the 4 SEO tools that he created and we also posted an interview that Peçanha had with him.
So much so that many videos emerged explaining who Neil Patel was and the most popular ones used our blog post as a reference.
They relied on our content to provide answers on YouTube and even used links to our post!
First steps
I confess that despite being a good idea, we wasted a bit of time in the first campaign.
Had we released the post a week earlier, or during the time when the campaign was in full swing, our results would have been much more significant.
We did a lot of promotion of the content on Facebook, we gave a basic push to paid media ( because in fact paid media is not the enemy of organic media ) and we asked our team to share the content.
Encouraging your team to share posts can really make a big difference.
Here at Rock we are currently 200 people. If half of the team shares a post, can you imagine the reach it can have?
Use your team size to your advantage!
This was very important for us. In a short time, the publication was gaining positions until it reached third place. This guaranteed a large organic traffic in addition to high social traffic.
But the campaign had already lost steam.
The story does not end here, obviously. The campaign had a second, much bigger and longer-lasting moment.
And that’s how the content became a phenomenon for the blog.
A small post for a man, but a huge traffic for the blog
We knew Neil Patel’s campaign would be back on the air. And we needed to prepare for that.
From that moment on, we returned to paying attention to the publication, 5 months after its launch.
A little link building here and some tweaking of the content, trying to secure the second position for “Quem é Neil Patel”/Who is Neil Patel, until the day arrived…
Suddenly the post had over 100 people online at the same time. Our traffic was incredible. And it only kept increasing.
We activated our team, just as we had done 5 months earlier, and (almost) everyone shared the content.
We soon moved up to second for “Who Is” and third for “Neil Patel”, just behind two pages of his domain.
That week we broke the blog’s weekly traffic records and every day was a new record. The campaign was very strong.
To give you an idea, look at Google Trends to see the difference between the first moment at the end of August and the second moment, at the end of January and beginning of February.
The following week, Patel came back even stronger. The campaign changed its face a bit. Whereas at the beginning it was photos of women in sensual poses, these became only of women with many followers.
Perhaps the displeasure that the campaign generated with that previous approach caused the change.
Patel even started investing in young celebrities, like Larissa Manoela!
Ok, you may not know who she is. I didn’t know until the day she posted the quote. I was just freaked out by the number of her followers. But my 11-year-old brother-in-law knew. And probably any teenage children, nephews or cousins in Brazil know.
She is one of the actresses who starred in Carrusel, the soap opera. The most popular one (I think).
Anyway, the most important thing is that you know that she has 8 million followers (never before have so many teenagers entered our blog).
This is a real-time screenshot of the blog, the day the young woman posted the photo:
Let’s put some other numbers on the table:
The campaign took off again on January 25th. From then until the end of February , there were more than 75 thousand page views!
That’s right. You can check:
64 thousand came organically. And on the day with the most access, we had more than 9 thousand page views.
Of course, his result was even more surprising. But we didn’t spend millions of dollars on that.
Mission impossible
Well, I want to get to the best part of this story quickly.
We ended up fighting for second place with another blog. Our content was superior, but we often fell behind.
Renato then had a brilliant insight: our post needed a better SEO title that talked about Instagram.
We went to Google Search Console and looked at the queries that generated the most traffic. Among them were:
- Who is Neil Patel campaign
- Who is Neil Patel Instagram
- Who is Neil Patel controversy
That’s where the title came from:
* Who is Neil Patel? The man behind the controversial Instagram campaign
At the end of the following week, we had the best surprise of the last few months.
Remember when I said it was impossible to take the first position on Google for Patel’s name? Well yes!
I made a mistake!
We started ranking first for the keyword “Neil Patel”. Above one of the strongest Digital Marketing domains in the world and which have the name of the author himself.
To give you an idea of how important that is, look at the difference in CTR (click-through rate) for the keyword we rank second for and the one we rank first for:
(Now you have no reason not to believe in this type of information)
The situation is as if you had googled “Mercedes” and the first result was the BMW website!
How was that possible?
I’ll explain it to you:
1. Quality content/Time spent on page
It may seem like we’re repeating this like an old parrot, but you need to keep that in mind: make the best content you can!
Our post was way better than anyone else’s. And you probably didn’t notice this in the screenshot above, but:
In over 50K views, the time spent on the italy mobile database page was over 6 minutes. And that’s a good average. The content was different and it stopped people in their tracks!
Understand the importance of page dwell time here !
2. Title for SEO
In the interview Peçanha had with Neil Patel, the Briton said that one of the most important things to be successful was to have good titles.
Well, the title of his page wasn’t exactly the best.
and after Renato’s (Hank) advice, our post increased CTR and gained rankings.
And no wonder, two days after he lost the position, Neil Patel’s team changed the title of the post. It looked pretty nice with another one there, didn’t it?
3. Link Building
No surprises here.
Internal linking done right. We managed to get some links from several partners who recognized that the publication explained very well who the man behind the controversial campaign was.
And you already know how important it is to receive good backlinks, right?
4. Disclosure of content
We shared our post quite a bit, which increased its visibility, generated traffic, and strengthened the page’s authority.
Using our team for outreach was, as I say, essential to having such a wide reach.
5.
We were keeping an eye on the market and discover the main sales development tools on the market identified something that would be a big trend. Since it was relevant to our audience, we made the content.
That can happen in any market, so keep your eyes peeled. Soon there may be a “Who is Neil Patel” in your market, and you could be the one to answer everyone’s question.
We always push the buttons here on the blog. 5 basic things, which we always tell you and you need to take seriously.
#ThanksNeilPatel
Finally, there are only 3 things left to say.
The first is that you should only invest in such content if it is truly relevant to your audience. Patel is one of the biggest names in Digital Marketing, so it is absolutely natural to have content about him on our blog.
Second, it’s critical for you to understand Google. It’s now more important to focus on user intent than just keywords. The intent of someone searching for “Neil Patel” is not to reach his site.
That’s why Google put us on top! Because we are the answer that people searching for “Neil Patel” want to read.
Even though it has a higher domain authorityasb directory , Google is more concerned with the reader’s intent in order to present him with the answer he is looking for.
The third and most important is: we had the best month in the history of the blog in the middle of February, with Carnival and a few days less.
