In this Marketing School episode, Eric Siu and Neil Patel explain how to grow organic traffic by adding long‑tail keywords to existing content. They illustrate why a single page can rank for hundreds or thousands of queries, using examples like Wikipedia articles and their own high‑ranking pages on singlegrain.com and neilpatel.com. The hosts walk through a step‑by‑step process: (1) review current rankings and impressions in Google Search Console, (2) discover related queries and question‑based keywords using tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic, and the “related queries” box in Google, (3) assess competitor pages to find keyword gaps, (4) naturally incorporate relevant long‑tail terms into the content, expanding sections or adding new pages when needed, and (5) monitor traffic improvements, which they claim can happen within 30 days. They stress that adding keywords to already‑ranking pages is far cheaper than acquiring new customers or creating brand‑new content, citing a case where a post grew from 700 to over 10,000 monthly visits after keyword expansion. The episode concludes with a call‑to‑action for listeners to complete a short survey.
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Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we are going to talk about how to add long-tail keywords to your content. So what does that mean exactly? So if you actually type in singlegrain.com or you type in neilpatel.com, and if you go to top pages, this is in Ahrefs or you can use SEMrush and you can see we have some pages that actually rank for hundreds or thousands of keywords. Okay. And how does that actually happen? How can one page rank for so many keywords? It's because there's so many long-tail keywords in that piece of content. Obviously there's a lot of people linking to it too, but the example I like to use is always Wikipedia. If you look at the Abraham Lincoln post from Wikipedia in 2007, 13,000 words, and then in 2011, you know, 21,000 words. I don't know what the numbers are, but it just kept going up, up, up, right? More, more and more long-tail traffic coming in. That means it's going to be, you know, when we talk about upgrading content all the time, you're going to start to rank for that. Yeah.
The other thing you can do too is Look at all your content that's ranking, go log into Google Search Console. You can see the impression count, you can see the keywords that you're getting somewhat traffic for, but very few clicks. Just go back to your posts or your page, see if you're including those keywords within there. And if they're relevant to that page, by all means, add them in. Don't just stuff the keywords in there, but expand your content to cover them as well. Keep in mind, when people are doing searches, they're not searching for a keyword. They're trying to solve a problem. Whatever they're searching for is because they're looking for a solution to that. So when you're adjusting your content, you need to put in the solution. It's the same reason when you do a Google search and you scroll down, it'll show like similar queries. Those are usually other problems people are trying to solve when they're also looking for content related to whatever they just typed in. Again, you can take those, add them into your article, which will help assuming it's relevant and you're just not stuffing them in, has to flow naturally And on top of that, you have to adjust your content, sometimes add more words or whatever it may be, but it's not just about word count and stuffing, it's about being in-depth. If you can cover and give them the answer within 1 or 2 sentences, that's fine. If you can't and you need to expand by 2 paragraphs, that's okay as well.
Yeah, I mean, going on Neil's point, I mean, the related queries when you're searching for something. So let's just say red shoes. If you search for red shoes, sometimes in the Google box, you might see a question box. 4 or 5 different questions in there. That's an opportunity for you to answer those questions on that page. If not on that page, go make a new page that actually solves those questions. And we also, we also talk about Ubersuggest. We talk about AnswerThePublic. There's all these different tools out there that are going to give you new permutations of what people are searching for or asking. And you can also use Ahrefs or SEMrush. They actually have tools in there that can help you group these different keywords and then Pull out all these different questions that people are asking.
Yeah, so for example, if you have a competitor that ranks above you for a certain keyword and his content or her content is similar to yours, you can take that URL, put it into Ahrefs, they'll show you all the keywords that they're getting traffic for and impressions for. You can also compare it to your URL as well, see where the difference is because they show gaps where all the keywords that your competitors rank for that you don't. And you can start seeing if you can adjust your content to include these keywords. And ideally, you don't want to create new content, you just want to add them in because it's a lot less work than it is to create new pages. But worst case, if you want to create a new page, as Eric mentioned, go for it.
Yeah, I mean, I always talk about how, well, no, I don't always talk about this, but everybody knows this, that it costs you 6 to 7 times more to try to acquire a new customer than to build on what you already have. So, how is it that you don't spend that effort into your own marketing and make the most of what you already have? And this is, this is part of that, right? You make the most of what you have and then all of a sudden you have this one post that gets 700 visits a month and then jumps to 2,800, then jumps to 5,400, and then it jumps to 10,000 visits a month. Literally, that's a real-life example of one of our posts just because we were adding more content, more long-tail keywords to it. Anything else, Neil?
No, that's it. This is a good strategy. It's worth doing. It's easier than creating new content, right? Like brand new posts or blog posts or new pages. It's simple, easy, effective way to grow your traffic, especially if you're doing this to pages that already have traffic. If you use the strategies Eric and I just discussed on pages that have little to no traffic from Google, this is tough and it won't work as well. But if you do it with all your top pages that are already generating a lot of traffic, It's super easy to do and you'll see the results within 30 days.
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