Eric Siu and Neil Patel explain their core SEO tactic: upgrading existing ranking content instead of constantly creating new pieces. They identify top pages in Google Search Console, add sections targeting uncovered keywords, and expand articles to drive 4x to 10x traffic growth.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today, we're going to talk about the one SEO tactic we use that you don't. Let's asterisk that you probably aren't doing this right now. So what could that tactic be?
I wouldn't even asterisk it. I bet you less than 1% of the people are doing it.
Boom. Hey, tweet at us if you think you do it well. What is it?
It's upgrading your content. You have a ton of content on your site. You're already getting search traffic. If you don't know what pages are getting the most search traffic, just log into Google Search Console, sort by pages, you'll see the most popular ones. Why isn't it that you're not, instead of creating more and more content, which is what a lot of people like doing, and when you create more content, doesn't mean it's going to do well, it's really a hit or miss. But if you already know that certain pages on your website are getting a ton of search traffic, why wouldn't you take those pages, make them not 1 or 2 times better, But 10x better. If you make them 10x better, yes, that page is probably not going to get 10 times more search traffic, but it can get 50% more search traffic, 70%, sometimes even double or triple the amount of search traffic. It's the simplest tactic that doesn't require anyone to be a technical SEO and it just works really well.
Yeah. You know, I think for most, most of you listening to this, there's always been a point in your life or in business where you feel like you're spinning your wheels or you're, You're on the hamster wheel and you're just running, running, running, and you're really getting nowhere. You're kind of almost running in place. And this is one of the things, like Neil just mentioned, people produce content for content's sake and then they complain about content not working, maybe because they don't make the most of what they have. So, I talk about this a lot when I'm speaking at conferences. And, you know, the example I like to use is one post that we had was getting about 700 visits a month and then we upgraded it, meaning we just added like a paragraph to it and then it jumped up to 2,800 visits a month. So, 4 times increase, right? And then we did the same thing a year later and it jumped up to 5,400 visits a month. Okay. Uh, did the same thing again, just literally adding paragraphs, right? I'm not saying this is the formula, but that's what worked for us. And then we kicked it up to about, uh, 10,000, uh, visits per month. And then I just checked the analytics again recently and it's now up to 15,000 a month. Okay. So when you're able to do something like that, think about this. When you upgrade it, it's getting more and more traffic. Maybe it's ranking number 1 for a ton of different keywords. Um, what happens is if it's ranking number 1 or number 2 or number 3, Those types of keywords, when people are searching for it, people like to link to the number 1 rankings, right? So you're going to start to collect more, more links to that page too, and you start to build this flywheel. So make the most of the best stuff that you have, and it's going to take you a long way.
If you're trying to figure out how you should upgrade these pages so that way they're 5 or 6 or 10 times longer, and we're not saying it has to be 10 times longer, just make it as long as you can where it's thorough and you're not rambling on. What you need to do is you log into Google Search Console, you go to that page, you see all the keywords that you're getting some search traffic from. It could be 10 impressions, 100 impressions, it could be 20,000 impressions or even clicks. You then want to look at the article and see which of those keywords you cover in your article. Take those pieces or more so those keywords, the ones that you're getting impressions for but that aren't covered in your article, assuming they're related, integrate those keywords into your article, not just by adding the keyword, but also adding paragraphs of text related to that keyword that also blends in with your content. So for example, if you're ranking on page 1 for digital marketing and you notice that you're also getting some search traffic related to digital marketing jobs, but your article doesn't really cover much about digital marketing jobs, if you think it's relevant and you can adjust your article to also discuss that, Sure, by all means do it. But if you don't want your article to be about digital marketing jobs, then don't talk about that phrase. On the flip side, you may also see another term like digital marketing consultant. If that's a term you want to go for, but you don't really cover in the article, then sure, expand the article to not only include that keyword, but also paragraphs to blend that keyword in and make the story still flow. And that's the easiest way because if you add random keywords, you may do well, you may not. But if you already are adding keywords that you're getting impressions for, but you're not ranking well for, Those keywords typically will shoot up to page 1 pretty fast.
Yeah. The final thing I'll add is if you're— Neil and I talk about using Ahrefs a lot. You can use other SEO tools too, but when you look at it, you can look at an individual page and you can see over time how many keywords it actually ranks for. So you can see one page, maybe it ranks for 100 keywords when you're looking at it. And then as you upgrade it over time, you're going to see it's starting to rank for more and more keywords. You can use the same thing. You can use Google Search Console as well to kind of cross-reference to see how much stronger that page is getting. How many more impressions, how many more clicks that page is getting. That's just to prove that the work that you're doing is actually, is actually A, working, and you can prove to stakeholders, let's say if you have partners or you have someone that you're reporting to, that all the hard work you're putting into this upgrading stuff actually provides some kind of tangible value.
Yep. That's it from my end. As many of you guys know, we have a free event that we're going to be throwing once we hit a million downloads. or a million listens in a month. You can go to marketingschool.io/stats to see where we're at and also to help us out. The more you help us out, quicker we'll get there. We'll have fun together. In-person event, fully free, free food, whole day event. Let's have a blast.
Goodbye.
