How to Drive Massive Traffic from Google without Ranking on The First Pages

Ranking high on search engines used to be easy.

All you had to do is mention your target keyword more than the competition.

For example, if you want a web page to rank #1 for “baby toys,” mention it more than the current web page that occupies the #1 spot.

That means if your competitor mentioned it 50 times, you mention it 60 times. Maybe 100 times.

Search engines believed that you have the most relevant web page, and it deserves to take the #1 position when you do this.

But that has changed.

Search engines have gotten smarter over the years.

These days, you don’t need to rank #1 for every keyword to get a lot of visits from search engines.

In fact, it’s possible for a web page that ranks #10 for a keyword to be getting more search traffic than a page that ranks #1.

What’s the key to getting a lot of search traffic without ranking on the first page of Google for your target keyword?

Here’s it:

High-quality, in-depth content always perform in search engines

Forget everything you’ve learned about SEO and just do this:

Write high-quality, comprehensive content on a regular basis.

If the competition is currently creating 500–1,000 words article, you should put in extra 1,000–1,500 words.

Note: Simply adding more words to your articles doesn’t give you an edge. Your article should dive deeper into the topic.

“Here at NeilPatel.com, all of my articles are 4000+ words. And, in a year, I’ve already crossed 100,000 visitors/month.” — Neil Patel

Today, Neil Patel’s blog receives hundreds of thousand visits from search engines each month. That happened because of the long-form content he created.

There’s a reason why long-form content performs superbly in search engines:

Long-tail keywords.

In-depth content tends to contain a lot of long-tail keywords.

By writing a comprehensive content, you’ll naturally add a lot of long-tail keywords that are somehow related to your target/main keyword.

Circle Surrogacy is one of the top surrogacy agencies in the world. The agency maintains a blog where they publish content about surrogacy.

Airbnb created an in-depth guide titled “Things to do in New York.”

It’s clear their target keyword is “things to do in New York,” which receives about 75,000 monthly searches on Google.

Inside the guide, you’ll find phrases like “best pizza spots in New York City,” “museums in New York,” “New York City Subway station,” and “Brooklyn waterfront.”

These phrases tell search engines like Google a lot more about the web page. They probably wouldn’t have been on the page if it isn’t in-depth.

Long-tail keywords like these give the page more power to rank for several keywords that are related to the topic.

MedCognition uses long-tail keywords in describing its product on its homepage. They used “affordable, portable and realistic patient simulation for pre-hospital providers” and “holographic, augmented reality medical simulation.” These long phrases help search engines like Google and Bing better understand what the startup does.

Long-form content gets read

One of the excuses bloggers give for not writing long-form content is that web users don’t read long-form content. That’s a lie.

Sites like Buffer and Wait But Why achieved tremendous success publishing long-form content.

Neil Patel has built 4 companies and a remarkable personal brand writing in-depth content.

It’s because people read them.

It took me 3 hours to read “The Lonely Death of George Bell” by the New York Times.

The article gained over 1,300 comments within a day and sat atop the lists of the “Most Viewed” and “Most Emailed” articles.

That’s another sign people love reading long-form content as long as it’s educating, interesting and entertaining.

In 2015, Microsoft conducted a study that found that the average person’s attention span had shrunk to eight seconds. The study was published in Time.

But WordStream, an Internet marketing company switched to long-form content publishing in 2012. The average time spent on their blog tripled from 1 minute, 33 seconds to 4 minutes, 35 seconds.

Long-form content gets shared

Neil Patel did an experiment with his own blog posts.

He compared articles under 1,500 words to articles over 1,500 words.

Neil found that posts that were under 1,500 words received an average 174.6 tweets and 59.3 Facebook likes. Posts that were over 1,500 words received an average 293.5 tweets, and 72.7 Facebook likes.

That means posts that are greater than 1,500 words receive 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes than posts that are less than 1,500 words.

Another study from OkDork shows that the longer the content, the more shares it gets.

That tells you web users are willing to share long-form content.

If web users are sharing your long-form content, it gives your webpage more power to rank on search engines.

Search engines are tracking those shares and visits coming from social sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others.

If your content is getting shared on social channels, it tells them that it deserves a better placement in their search results.

Long-form content naturally includes long-tail keywords that will drive massive traffic to your website.

With long-form content, you don’t have to worry about ranking on the first page of search engines. All you need to do is produce high-quality long-form content that is better than what your competitors have.