How to Perform a Thorough SEO Audit in Less Than 3 Minutes

They say there are over 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm.

But are you going to take the time to optimize your site for each and every single one of them?

Well, you should… but you probably won’t.

See, SEO has changed… it used to be that you could do a handful of things and rank well. Sadly, those days are gone.

Now you have to do every little thing and do it well to dominate Google.

So, I decided to make your job easier and release yet another new feature in Ubersuggest that audits your website for you in less than 3 minutes.

It’s called SEO Analyzer.

Introducing SEO Analyzer

If you want to find out what’s wrong with your website, you won’t have to do it manually anymore.

All you have to do is head over to the SEO Analyzer and put in your URL.

How SEO Analyzer works

Once you put in your URL, you’ll be taken to a report that looks something like this:

Once the report loads (it typically takes 3 minutes or less), you’ll see an overview like the image above.

The overview is broken down into 3 main sections.

Overview

The first section shows you your on-page SEO score (the higher the better), your estimated search traffic, the number of keywords the domain ranks for, and how many backlinks the site has.

You’ll also see a message from me that breaks down how many pages were crawled and any SEO errors that were found.

When you click on any of those 4 boxes, it will take you to a more in-depth report.

Clicking on the on-page score takes you to a page that lists out your SEO errors. It looks something like this:

Clicking on the organic traffic takes you to a report that shows you how well your site is performing.

Clicking on the keywords box shows you all of the keywords your website ranks for organically.

And clicking on the backlinks box shows you all of the sites linking to that domain.

Site health

This is my favorite section of the site audit report. This is where you can really dig around and boost your rankings

You can click on any of the four site health boxes and drill down into more reports.

This is important because you’ll want to first focus on clearing up any critical errors. From there, you’ll want to fix any warnings and then, finally, consider doing any of the given recommendations.

The health check box gives you an overview of the healthy pages and the ones that have issues or are broken or blocked or even redirected. By clicking on this box you’ll get taken to a report that lists all your SEO issues in detail.

From there you can click on any of those issues and you’ll be taken to the exact pages that contain any SEO errors and what they are exactly. An example of this is pages with too long of a title tag.

If you aren’t sure on how to fix any of the issues, just click on “what is this and how do I fix it?” and a box like this will appear:

And if you click on the critical errors, warnings or recommendations boxes, you’ll see reports just like the ones above. They will be broken down by how important they are.

That way you’ll know which fixes have the greatest SEO impact and how hard they are to implement.

You should first focus on the ones that have the highest SEO impact and are the easiest to implement. And I took the liberty to prioritize the table for you, so all you have to do is start at the top and work your way down to the bottom.

Site speed

Speed is important. Not only do faster load times help boost conversion rates, but they also help boost your search rankings.

There are two sections to the site speed. The section on the left breaks down your desktop load time and the section on the right breaks down your mobile load time.

Site speed varies drastically by a person’s connection and computer, but the charts give you a rough range of how fast or slow your site loads.

Your goal should be to have your site load in 3 seconds or less for both mobile and desktop.

The report even breaks down which areas are slowing down your site speed.

For example, you could have an issue with “First CPU Idle”… and if you aren’t sure what that means, just hover over the question mark and the tool will tell you.

Top SEO Issues

I know I said the report has 3 main sections, but the 4th section is just repeating the site health section.

You’ll see the 3 most important fixes that you should make to your site if you want higher rankings.

If you don’t have the time to fix everything, start off by fixing the 3 issues listed here. Those will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

Conclusion

So, what do you think about the SEO Analyzer report? Do you think it was a good addition to Ubersuggest?

I know I haven’t talked about the SEO Analyzer report much, but we’ve been working on it for 4 months now.

For now, the tool crawls the first 100 pages on your website, and eventually, our goal is to increase the limit to 500 or even 1,000. Technically we can do that fairly easily, but for the launch, I’ve capped it at 100 due to the sheer number of users I have and server load.

Give the SEO Analyzer a try and let me know what you think.

The post How to Perform a Thorough SEO Audit in Less Than 3 Minutes appeared first on Neil Patel.

* This article was originally published here

The Case For Pin-point Local Tracking

* This article was originally published here

Analyzing Google's Desktop "People Also Search For" Box

Posted by TheMozTeam

This blog post was originally published on the STAT blog.

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The “People also search for” result isn’t new to desktop SERPs, but the rejigging it received in February last year turned it into an entirely different box worth investigating.

And since we know you’re wondering what’s inside, we played the Somerset to your Mills and took a look for you.

What we found was an amped up, URL-centric version of the original PASF box, the “People also ask” box, and the “Searches related to” you see at the bottom of the SERP — it’s a keyword goldmine and chock-full of content ideas, straight from the horse’s mouth (Google).

We’ll take you through how the PASF has changed over the years and how you can take advantage of everything it has to offer — even the odd things.

A brief history and the many faces of "People also search for" 

We first saw the words “People also search for” in 2012 with the introduction of knowledge graphs. Bringing up the rear of this right-side SERP feature, the PASF portion (which is still with us today) contains a handful of image thumbnails atop topically-related terms.

As part of the introduction, Google’s Amit Singhal had this to say about the PASF: “We can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him.”

After that, we saw the “People also search for” act as an independent agent for a brief time, particularly for music-related queries. Divorced from the knowledge graph, the related topics (and images) were contained in their own box and placed at the bottom of the SERP.

When right above the list of “Searches related to,” it’s easier for us to see the kind of distinction Google is trying to make between these similar SERP features. One can take you down several topically-connected rabbit holes (the PASF); the other can help you refine or expand on your current query (the “Searches related to”).

In the example above for the query [can’t hold us], the PASF box thinks that given our taste in music, we may be interested in songs by the same artist or others that sound similar. The “Searches related to” section, on the other hand, is showing us different iterations of our same query.

But that was back in early 2016. On the current [can’t hold us] SERP, that independent “People also search for” box has popped back into the knowledge graph, leaving behind two boxes of related searches that both look and function the same but don’t bear the PASF name.

This brings us to today and what you’re really here for — in the middle of February, Google started returning desktop “People also search for” results that look like this:

Here, the thumbnail images have been abandoned, and the related topics now attach to an organic result. The topics also now seem to be a mix of the original PASF and “Searches related to.”

In our example above for the query [munchkin cat], “napoleon cat,” “skookum cat,” and “dwarf calico cat,” are definitely more like the OG PASF suggestions, while the other three are similar to what you’d find at the bottom of the SERP. This is likely because the PASF box, stuck to an organic results, returns topics that relate to the URL and not the query.

In order to surface this new version of the “People also search for,” you need to do a little pogo-sticking. The only way you’ll see it materialize is by clicking the organic search result and then navigating back to the SERP. It seems to be saying, “Didn’t find what you’re looking for? Try these instead.”

If it feels like you might be experiencing a touch of déjà vu, it’s because you are. We’ve seen this kind of PASF treatment on mobile devices since at least 2015.

Now, onto the research!

There are a lot of PASFs appearing on a lot of SERPs 

Digging into the data to see just how widespread this desktop rollout was, we found that the new “People also search for” result type appeared on 58.74 percent of the roughly 15,000 desktop SERPs we analyzed each day for a week.

This high of an amount, together with their established history on mobile SERPs (which they appear on 87.05 percent of), makes us fairly confident they’re more than just an experiment — they’re here to stay and likely going to increase in scope.

When looking at the number of PASFs that appear for a single keyword, we saw an average of 8.77 boxes per SERP, but SERPs with 10 PASFs occurred most frequently. We also found that the vast, vast majority of organic results with a PASF rank in positions 1–10.

Parsing the 100-result SERP means that it’s not always easy for us to know where one page ends and another begins, but because of the rank clustering we see, we’re fairly positive the “People also search for” box is in an exclusive relationship with the first page.

Also, since this result is currently married to organic results, our SERPs without a few PASFs are more likely due to the presence of SERP features than organic results that simply don’t produce them — though we have seen of few instances of that.

You get six related topics per "people also search for" 

For reasons that remain somewhat unclear but we’ll take a stab at anyway, desktop “People also search for” boxes contain two fewer related topics than PASFs chillin’ on mobile SERPs.

95.47 percent of our mobile PASFs had eight, while 96.81 percent of desktop PASFs had six. And the rest of the desktop boxes were equally likely to contain anywhere from 2–5 topics (Google seems to understand that one is the loneliest number and has refrained from leaving a single topic all on its own).

Perhaps Google wanted to avoid creating a lengthy desktop SERP? Mobile PASFs employ carousel-like behavior, which means they can fit eight terms without creating an impossibly long SERP.

We could also chalk the difference up to these being relatively early days of a rollout, so we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on whether this changes, and we’re gladly taking alternate explanations in the meantime.

Duplicate PASF topics make research doable 

Much like the “also asked” questions in a PAA, there is a lot of duplication in the topics that live in a PASF. Depending on your strategy, you can slice related topics by URL or query to help focus your research and keep it from scaling out of control.

Taking the URL approach helps you see how many topics (and what kind) relate to those specific pages. For example, URLs that appeared more than once in our data set saw an average of 3.02 distinct topics per SERP.

From a query perspective, we found that with an average of 54.46 related topics per SERP, 31.58 percent appeared more than once. If we’re rounding to the nearest whole topic, this means that one query can give us 37 unique related topics to explore.

At first blush, this would create an impossibly large number of new topics to tackle the more keywords you track. But worry not! When we take our entire query space into consideration, our data set returned only 47 unique topics over the course of seven days — a much more manageable number.

After looking at the mobile side of things, it seems Google is intentionally keeping the scope of related topics narrow. Nearly half — 46.35 percent — of all terms in mobile “People also search for” boxes are duplicates, which is even more duplication than our desktop PASFs. With up to 20 extra spots available per SERP, it’s unlikely that Google simply couldn’t think up new topics to slot in. Instead, it appears they’ve determined that the best, most relevant topics are already in play.

To sum this up: the duplication is weird but good. It means that you don’t need a lot of SERPs to get a fairly complete picture of topics associated with you, your competitors, or your queries.

Sidestep tricky competitors by targeting the SERPs of PASF topics 

When clicked, topics in the “People also search for” box becomes the search queries of whole new SERPs. Naturally, we wanted to see what stories those SERPs could tell.

To do this, we gathered a day’s worth of PASF topics, stuffed them into STAT to track, and then did some comparing. And what we found was a somewhat puzzling relationship between domains on the subsequent SERP and those on the original.

For starters, when you click a PASF topic that appears under a domain, 78.87 percent of the time that domain doesn’t rank anywhere in the top 20 of the new SERP. We take this to mean that either: Google knows better than to show you the same site you just left; or even though the site is topically-related, it’s not relevant enough for the new SERP.

In the 21.13 percent of the time that the domain does appear in the top 20 of the subsequent SERP, the lower it ranked on the initial SERP, the higher it’s likely to be ranked on the new one. Huh.

And, of those domains that did appear on the subsequent SERP and ranked in first place, 49.54 percent did so as a featured snippet (though we feel compelled to let you know that our sample size had been whittled down by quite a bit at this point).

So, how’s an SEO to take advantage of all this oddity? Well, if you’re struggling to rank higher, or rank at all, against your current query’s competitors, it may be worth investigating the SERPs of PASF topics as alternate avenues.

Combine PASF with PAA and start to conquer the SERP 

Once you’ve got your paws on all the “People also search for” topics, collect everything in the “People also ask” boxes and then round up each of the “Searches related to.”

Use these gifts from Google to map your query space, grow your keyword lists, and build out content that can hit multiple topics.

Want to see how you can do this all in STAT? Book your personalized walkthrough, below!

Book a demo!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

* This article was originally published here

Uncover How You Stack Up in The Local Search Landscape

Posted by TheMozTeam

This blog post was originally published on the STAT blog.

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With local search as competitive as it is, it’s no longer a question of whether or not you should optimize for local — it’s how soon. And when your goal is to get your online customers to visit your location IRL, your strategy needs to be the real deal.

That’s exactly why we asked Christina Miazgowicz, the Senior SEO Account Manager at Seer Interactive, to give us her tried and true guide to local optimization. Christina is a local search wizard who spoke at City Crawl Austin and blew us all away with her insight.

Get the competitive edge with a local strategy 

It goes without saying (but we’re saying it anyway) that search engines deliver relevant, location-based results for a business’ products or services. It’s how the searcher finds results that are, well, local.

We already know that Google leverages factors such as name, address, and phone number to surface local businesses. But it’s also a good idea if a website is crawlable, has a decent collection of citations, and has a steady stream of backlinks. Does your site have proper categorization? It should. Bonus points if there are ads in place.

If that sounds like a lot, fear not — you have an expert on your side. Thanks to Christina’s buffet of takeaways, you’ll learn how to collect local search data, how to analyze your insights to uncover where you stand in the search landscape, and how to carve out a local search strategy that works for you and your data.

1. Know before you go 

While it might be a no-brainer, you’d be surprised by how many people skip uncovering where they sit in all the noise before executing a strategy.

As Christina says, “Knowing where you stand in the local search landscape isn’t just a good step — it’s crucial to a concrete local search strategy.”

For instance, do you know if you’re showing up in a local pack? Who’s competing with you in it? Is your Google My Business (GMB) listing complete (and accurate)?

Christina and her team conduct a local content audit to help answer these questions. They take a look at the GMB listing, website and landing pages, citations, and ads — the whole nine yards — to help reveal all kinds of goodies, like:

• Organic search competitors.
• Google ranking factors.
• What your searchers are looking for.
• Where you’re showing up on the SERP.

Once an audit is complete, they are one step closer to implementing a comprehensive strategy.

But first: it’s data time. And when they need to get the full local picture, Christina and her team turn to STAT.

How Seer uses STAT for local SEO

Let’s say Christina has a client who’s in the business of designing luxury dog collars (someone is clearly living their best life). They own a storefront boutique that gets a decent amount of web traffic that they’d like to convert into foot traffic.

How does Christina make sure their searchers can find them on the SERPs — and then, get them through the door to buy designer dog collars?

With a slew of well-researched keywords tracking in STAT, Christina gets fresh, daily insights that she can combine with the knowledge she’s acquired from her local audit. With that in hand, she can tell exactly what trees her clients’ searchers are barking up.

Christina notes: “With STAT we get a really drilled down look. We can see how our clients’ URLs are performing rank-wise and if keywords are surfacing SERP features — what type, if they own any of those, and what the competition owns. We can use that data to help surface keywords that matter most in specific zip codes or cities for each client.”

In one of our handiest reports, you get all the details hiding in a local pack. Having business names, URLs, ranking positions, Google ratings, counts of ratings, and ads at your fingertips make measuring your local SEO efforts infinitely easier.

Christina recommends organizing your top 20 results to keep things neat and tidy — it’s much easier to visualize the landscape. Her tip: “Sort by location, regional monthly search volume, result type (organic, shopping box, local pack), and ranking URL to see all that data at a quick glance.”

2. Visualize and analyze all that data 

For one of her clients in the banking industry, Christina looked at keywords in 582 zip codes in 49 locations in STAT. And free to export that mountain of data out of STAT, Christina was able to get creative with her analysis and uncover major insights.

For instance, she found that 94 percent of listings in the local pack contained the tracked keyword “bank” in the business name. She also determined that for organic page one results, a business’ homepage isn’t as important as the business’ location page, which dominated first page results by 91 percent.

Other golden nuggets she discovered in the data:

• 37 percent of local packs were owned by two competitors.
• 85 percent of listings were verified.
• 99 percent of listings had a website.
• 97 percent of categories were the same as the keyword.

Having this detailed level of analysis helps Christina’s clients get a clear understanding of where, realistically, they’re showing up, how they’re performing, who their competition is, and why they may be outranking them.

Christina can even provide insight into what searchers are looking for. And when she knows what their intent is, she can help guide optimization efforts to get eyes on her clients — whether they’re in the banking industry or the designer dog collar business.

3. Put together a strategy

Now that Christina knows where her client is showing up and what opportunities are up for grabs, it’s finally time to throw down a strategy. Here are the steps she takes to get her clients showing up at the right moment for searchers.

Optimize GMB like there’s no tomorrow

First things first, says Christina, take a look at your current GMB listing and fill in the gaps to up your organic ranking game:

“Make sure your GMB listing matches what’s showing up on your site, with information that’s specific to your business — so your business name, address, and phone number, as well as different content around what’s being searched. Don’t forget photos, reviews, a business category, and any special features.”

If it’s a local pack you’re after, the addition of your business address and phone number will up your chances of snagging one. That’s because Google gives ranking strength in local packs to proximity, often more so than to website links, citations, and reviews.

Turn up the dial on content

Next, Christina suggests optimizing local content to improve your businesses recognition, reviews, and potential reach. Again, think location, hours, and your business name, but also consider creating new content that gives your searchers the inside scoop of your storefront’s community.

Seer has an incredibly handy survey tool to help generate new content. You can also apply this to any landing page optimization efforts.

Make sure you are present in industry sites that appear in organic results, such as Yelp, which contain a heckin’ ton of backlinks. This is also where you can build up your citation game to gain even more traffic.

Pay attention to paid

Once your organic strategy is in a good place, shift your focus to paid. Local ads enhance your businesses visibility and showcase what you do and where you are to give you the best chance of appearing in front of potential customers at the right moment.

Ready? Go! 

When you have the full picture of the local landscape, you not only have a realistic understanding of where you’re sitting (and where you can show up), you have the power and precision to make informed decisions — before diving into a strategy.

Curious how STAT can help you with your local search endeavors? Say hello and request a demo!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

* This article was originally published here

How I Gain 1,260 Instagram Followers Per Week

Do you want to be instafamous?

Well, who doesn’t?

Over the last few months, I’ve been running numerous Instagram experiments and I’ve finally figured out how to grow my Instagram following.

My Neil Patel account has been growing by 1,260 followers per week.

And I know what you are thinking… Neil, you are already well known, this can’t be replicated by anyone else.

Right?

Well, not only did we test this strategy out on my profile, but we also did it on 2 other profiles.

It works no matter what industry you are in. Heck, it works even better if you aren’t in B2B like me.

Just look at Dhavalilama. His likes per image have been growing by just using the heart trick, which I will explain in a bit, and he isn’t using my whole strategy. :/

So, how do you gain more Instagram followers each week without spending money?

Tip #1: Instagram wants long videos

You’ve heard everyone say that you need to upload videos. Social networks like Instagram aren’t just competing with other social networks, they are competing with traditional media and even companies like Netflix for your attention.

If you upload videos, you’ll find that you’ll get more engagement than if you just upload images.

But the key isn’t to just upload any video… it ideally needs to be engaging and long.

By long I am not talking about a 60-second video, I’m talking minutes. You’ll have to leverage IGTV for this, but that’s what they want as not enough people are using that feature.

Hence, if you use IGTV, they’ll push your video more.

That way when someone is watching a 5-minute video you just posted, they’ll be able to watch the first 60 seconds on their feed and then they’ll be pushed over to IGTV.

All you have to do is upload the video to IGTV and select the “post a preview” option.

What this does is, it uploads the video to IGTV and then also promotes the video through your feed.

Just look at this video that I only posted on IGTV.

It had 236 views before writing this blog post.

When I posted that video, I had 9,078 followers, which means I had an engagement rate of 2.59%.

Now if you look at this video that I posted…

It had 2,971 views before writing this blog post.

When I posted that video I had 21,047 followers, which means I had an engagement rate of 14.11%.

What’s crazy is, that one simple change increased my video engagement by 444%.

Tip #2: Ask and you will receive

Instagram’s algorithm is simple… the more views and likes your videos and images receive, the more people will see them, which increases engagement and your follower count over time.

There’s not too much more to the algorithm.

Of course, they are looking at things like what percentage of your followers actually engage… but still, the algorithm from a conceptual standpoint is simple.

So, have you thought about asking for people to “like” your image?

Now with Instagram, people are using it via their cell phone so it’s more of a “double tap” than a like… but you get the point.

On average, when I post an image on Instagram I can generate 945.6 likes.

Here’s an example of one of those images:

And as you can see from the engagement, that one did better than most of my images as it has over 1,000 likes.

Plus, the messaging resonates with a lot of people.

But here is one that is simple…

I just asked people to “double tap” if they need to improve their video skills.

It didn’t take much creativity to come up with that image and it received 1,441 likes. In other words, it produced 51.96% more engagement.

You should give it a try… I tend to use this tactic a few times a month and it works really well.

Just be careful though, if you use it every day or every week, people will get sick of it and it will stop working. Hence, I only use it a few times a month max.

Tip #3: Go live

Did I already mention that Instagram is competing with television networks and Netflix?

Because of that, what kind of content do you think they want more of?

Well, yes they want more video content, but we already talked about that.

They want more live content.

Think… reality TV.

Now the live content you produce doesn’t have to be like Keeping up with the Kardashians… they just want live content that people are looking forward to viewing.

You know how you will tune into shows like American Idol or the latest soccer or football match because it’s live and you want to see what’s happening in real time? That’s the effect Instagram is hoping for with live content.

Now, when you go live, Instagram is promoting it heavily so you’ll get more viewers. It doesn’t matter what you talk about… they just want to see more people go live.

Every time I go live, I am able to get at least 1,000 views. Just look at the live I just did…

In the first 6 hours, it’s already received 718 views and I did this live session on a Sunday during non-peak hours. Within the first 24 hours, it will easily surpass 1000 views.

In other words, go live! It’s a simple and quick way to grow your following count. Ideally, you should be going live on a weekly basis.

Heck, you can’t go live too much… feel free to go live daily.

Tip #4: Respond to comments

This one is simple, but no one really does it.

Social networks are supposed to be social. That means you should participate.

And no, I am not talking about just liking other images and viewing videos. I’m talking about engaging with people and talking to them.

So, when you like something that someone else posts, leave a comment.

And when someone leaves a comment on one of your posts… what do you think you should do?

You should respond to them with a comment.

Now, let’s look at some of my posts for a minute. You’ll see decent engagement, but more so, you’ll see me being very active.

Just look at all of my responses.

By engaging with people, you’re more likely to build a relationship with these individuals, which makes it more likely that they will back and continually engage with your posts.

Tip #5: The heart trick

Alright, are you ready for the heart trick? You know, the one Dhavalilama has been using to boost his like count by 300%.

The concept is simple, but it will take a bit of finesse to implement.

A part of Instagram’s algorithm is how much engagement you get from other Instagram users within the first hour of you posting anything.

Now, I’ve done a lot of tests with this… if you can get Instagram users who have more followers than you to like your image or video when it first goes live you’ll find that your content is much more likely to show up on the discovery page.

From a lot of testing, here’s what seems to be the most effective:

• Get people with larger following accounts to like your image or video within the first hour it comes out.
• Ask them to not like anything else within that hour. We’ve found that if they like too many images or videos it doesn’t work.
• And if they are feeling extra generous, have them leave a comment.

The heart trick isn’t that complex, but it is hard to implement because you have to convince users who are more popular than you to like your content right when you publish.

And ideally, you need 6 people who have large accounts (the bigger the better), for this to work extremely well.

Tip #6: Create multiple stories each day

What do Tai Lopez, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Grant Cardone have in common?

Well, other than the fact that they all have over a million Instagram followers…

They all post a ton of stories per day.

And when I mean a ton, sometimes they are posting over 20 stories a day… literally.

The more stories you post, the more engagement you’ll create, which will lead to more followers.

Just look at the stats from the stories I just posted:

I can generate over 1,000 views within 8 hours of posting a story and generally in the range of 1,600 to 2,000 views within 24 hours.

The same story 23 hours later received 1870 views.

Here are some things to keep in mind if you want to maximize stories:

1. Don’t post all of your stories at once, spread them out throughout the day. This will cause people to keep coming back and engaging with your profile.
2. Use a combination of both images and videos within your stories. Overall, you’ll find that videos create more engagement.
3. The more stories you publish, the better off you are.
4. Add polls to your stories, this also helps boost engagement.

Tip #7: Quality matters

Have you noticed that some images get more likes than others? Or certain videos get more engagement?

Instagram is a visual social network. So the visual part is important… you want your images and videos to look great no matter what.

Now, they don’t have to be perfect, but you do want to make sure you are posting images that people enjoy.

Here’s what I mean…

When you look at my profile, you’ll see a ton of images of me that contain quotes.

Some of those images perform really well, while others don’t. For example, every time I post a quote using this image template…

It gets 21.4% less engagement then when I use this template…

Keep track of what your followers like and don’t like. Post more of what they like and stop posting the stuff that has low engagement.

Tip #8: Test, test, test

Speaking of posting more of what your followers like and less of what they don’t, you need to constantly test.

Even though quality matters, when you are testing you shouldn’t aim for perfection. Just aim for speed.

Once you find something that people like, do more of it.

For example, I ask people to double tap as I talked about in tip number 2 because I learned it through testing.

Here are some other things I’ve learned through testing:

• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication – people prefer clean images that are simple.
• Use bright colors – images that are darker, such as night photography don’t perform as well.
• Switch things up – if you do the same thing every week you’ll find your engagement starting to drop.
• People want to get to know you – they don’t want to get to know the Photoshop version of you. Be realistic and personal. Connect with your followers.
• Filters don’t matter – don’t waste too much time modifying or adjusting your images. Little things like filters don’t make the biggest difference.
• Hashtags aren’t game changing – I know everyone says you have to use hashtags and you should here and there… but they aren’t game-changing. So don’t spam and use 20 hashtags per image you post. And when you do use them, pick relevant and popular ones. You can use Ubersuggest to figure out what keywords are popular.
• Use Instagram analytics – it tells you when your followers are online so you know when to post. If you post when they are online you’ll get much more engagement.

A good example of a test I’ve run is when I post on my feed. As you can see from my stats…

My followers are most likely to be on Instagram at 9am. So I try to post around that time, which has helped me get 8.41% more likes per image.

Every little bit adds up!

Conclusion

You don’t have to spend money on ads to grow your Instagram following. If you follow the tips above, you’ll do well and find that you can grow your weekly following count by over 1,000 net new followers each week.

Now, I know you may not want to use Instagram because it doesn’t have your “ideal” audience, but you can drive conversions from Instagram.

For example, when I went live on Instagram and I told the audience to check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital, I was able to generate 2 leads.

Neither of the leads were ideal customers, but it is a numbers game. If I continually do it I will be able to generate clients.

In the past, I have closed 3 deals from Instagram… one paid $120,000, the other paid $1,000,000, and the last paid $300,000.

They were all consulting arrangements, so I had substantial costs associated with the revenue, but it shows that Instagram does work.

Heck, if it didn’t, I wouldn’t be back on Instagram again (this is my 3rd profile, I no longer use the other 2).

You can also use the swipe up feature to drive people to your site and this will help you generate leads and sales.

So, what do you think about Instagram? Are you using it on a daily basis?

The post How I Gain 1,260 Instagram Followers Per Week appeared first on Neil Patel.

* This article was originally published here