Does Adding More Text to a Page Always Result in Increased Long-tail Traffic? | Ep. #446

In Episode #446, Eric and Neil discuss whether adding more text to a page will always result in increased long-tail traffic. Tune in to learn how to effectively add more text to your content and why you should NOT do it if you’re at rank zero.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

  • [00:27] – Today’s topic: Does Adding More Text to a Page Always Result in Increased Long-tail Traffic?
  • [00:40] – In most cases, adding more text to a page increases long-tail traffic
    • [00:47] – A great example is Abraham Lincoln’s Wikipedia page that continuously grows
  • [01:26] – Neil has done tests around adding more text and he saw that the long-tail traffic does, in fact, increase
    • [01:33] – The words or phrases should correspond to the content
    • [01:51] – If you’re ranking zero and update with more text, you could lose your ranking
    • [02:21] – Go to the Google Search Console and check all the words and phrases for which you have impressions and/or low click-through rates and expand on those topics
    • [02:41] – After doing a rewrite and republishing, submit your page to the Google Search Console
  • 02:55 – Marketing School is giving away 90-day FREE trial to Crazy Egg, which is a visual analytics tool
  • [03:08] – That’s it for today’s episode!

3 Key Points:

  1. Adding text that is irrelevant will negatively affect your traffic.
  2. If you’re already ranking zero and you add more text to your existing page, you might lose this ranking.
  3. Expand upon the words or phrases you barely mention to improve your SEO.

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The post Does Adding More Text to a Page Always Result in Increased Long-tail Traffic? | Ep. #446 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.

Full Transcript of The Episode

Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose or marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu ...

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: ... and we are going to talk about if adding more text to a page always results in increased long tail traffic. I'm going to go ahead and say well, not always, but from almost all cases I've seen, yes. I'll give you an example. I always give the Wikipedia example of Abraham Lincoln. First it started off with maybe 2,000–3,000 words or so, then it went up to 5,000 then 8,000 then it's maybe like 18,000 or something like that nowadays. I take that result, and I look at the content that we've been upgrading on the Single Grain blog, for example. Almost every single time that we've upgraded ... actually I'm going to say every single time that we've added more text it, to something that's generating traffic, we've gotten a bump in traffic.
At least on my end that I'm seeing, probably at least a 5% bump in traffic, and in some cases we're getting 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 100% increase in traffic or even more than that. I think that's a good way to go about it, but Neil, I'm not sure what you're seeing on your side.

Neil Patel: I've done a lot of tests around this, when you added more words, in a lot of cases you won't get more long tail traffic, and the reason being is if those words and phrases aren't [inaudible 00:01:34] related to the original piece of content, then your content's just going to be really broad. I've done in many cases when you do that, your traffic will go down, whether it's head traffic or long tail traffic, it doesn't matter, it'll go down. If you also are updating content that has ... not rich snippets. I forget what it's called, you know when Google takes it, puts the information in the search result at the top ...

Eric Siu: Rank zero?

Neil Patel: Yeah, rank zero, there you go. When you're ranked zero, a lot of times when you update your content with more words, you'll lose it, and when you lose it you'll get more ... or you'll get technically less traffic in general because it's hard to get it back.
The point I'm trying to make is if you're going to do this and you want more long tail traffic, make sure you're at rank zero because you can lose it. Two, go to your Google search console, check off all the words and phrases that you have impressions for but a low click through rate, go adjust your title tag, your meta description, and go take all the words and phrases that you barely mentioned. Consider expanding on it, make the article way more thorough, kind of like the Abraham Lincoln example Eric gave, and then from there in general, yes your long tail traffic should go up.
Once you do the rewrite and you publish it, then you go into Google search console, then you go submit that page again, they'll crawl, index it, within a few weeks you should notice a difference in traffic.

Eric Siu: Great, so there's not much more to add around this. But before we go, we have a 90-day free trial of Crazy Egg to give to every single one of you. You do not need to put in your credit card here, and it's worth up to $3,000. To learn more, just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. We will see you tomorrow.

Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. Don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.

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