5 Secrets That Have Helped Neil Patel Rank for Every Keyword He Targets

If you’ve been in the online marketing world for some time, you’ve definitely heard of Neil Patel. Neil Patel is one of the most prolific names in the digital marketing industry.
He is the co-founder of Hello Bar and Crazy Egg and works closely with globally renowned brands such as Microsoft, Amazon, NBC, Tech Crunch, HP, GM, Viacom, and many more. He has helped numerous companies get on the first page of Google.
His blog, which he started in 2012, is considered as the number 1 resource in the SEO industry. Neil Patel has consistently achieved first page rankings for most of the keywords he targets.
But how does he do it?
Here are the 5 secrets that have helped him to rank high on Google for every keyword he targets:

1. In-Depth Topics:

The first secret to Neil Patel’s ranking success is his commitment to finding and publishing in-depth content. He always focuses on filling his articles with detailed content on the topic under discussion.
The easiest way to achieve this is by measuring the amount of details in your overall content using SEO tools such as SimilarContent (SC). With SimilarContent, you can measure your content through its Content Score. This score shows you how closely you have covered all the topics and subtopics required to sufficiently cover the topic.
In a recent article titled “How to Rank for Multiple Keywords with One Piece of Content”, Neil Patel talks about creating keyword clusters and in-depth content. He says that your content should always be informative and accurate.
To rank multiple pages using the same content, you should also focus on making keyword clusters. You can do this by seeding multiple but related keywords, which helps you to rank in all related keywords.
There are several tools that can help you to achieve your desired results. This is done by clustering keywords such as the LSI Graph, seed keywords, and Google Suggestion.
However, for in-depth content, your best option is SimilarContent which shows you how much you have covered the topic through a Content Score measure. Keep in mind that Google does not necessarily read the whole keyword which means that you can use related keywords in different sentences.

Aim for a lot of keywords in every piece of content. The more keywords you have and the more detailed your in-depth content is, the better your ranking gets.

2. Readability

According to Neil Patel, another important factor to consider is the readability of your content. You should always aim at improving the readability of your content. You can do this by making sure that your articles are easy to understand. Focus on getting a high readability grade in your content because Google is now using readability as a ranking factor.
Readability score is one of Neil Patel’s secret for his top rankings. SimilarContent grades the readability of your content with scores starting from A grade. If you checked Neil Patel’s articles on SC, you’ll notice that some of his best-performing articles have a score of A, the highest possible score on SC. This is because Neil’s articles are written in a way that’s easy for the reader to understand and comprehend, which gives the content a high score.

Another important factor to consider in terms of readability is the average word count in each sentence. In one of Neil Patel’s articles, the average word count is just 13. This means readers can easily follow along through short sentences than in an article with long and often confusing sentences.

With a high readability score, you not only have a better chance of ranking high on Google and other search engines but you will also encourage your readers to stay on the page and significantly reduce bounce rate. SimilarContent is a useful and accurate tool for measuring the readability score of your content.
To achieve the kind of success Neil Patel gets in ranking his articles on Google, it is important to maintain your readability score above 60. You have to ensure that the number of words in every sentence is as low as possible. This will help to keep the reader on your page for a longer time and reduce bounce rates.

3. Keyword Coverage

SimilarContent has another useful tool called Keyword Coverage. This one helps you to measure the percentage of keywords that you have used in your article. When you have a score of more than 50 you have better chances of ranking highly on Google and other search engines. You will also find that Neil Patel maintains a score of above 50 and sometimes as high as 90 in his content.
Keyword coverage basically means the actual keywords that you need to cover in your content. It also includes other considerations such as frequency percentage and TF/IDF score, which have to do with the effectiveness of the keywords you have used. The higher the number of your keyword score the more effective that keyword is in your overall content.

Neil Patel uses another SEO tool called MarketMuse to get effective keywords. MarketMuse is a perfect tool but unfortunately, it is too expensive for most content marketers and small to medium-sized businesses. The good news is that SimilarContent can also efficiently play the same role as MarketMuse without digging a deeper hole in your marketing budget.
MarketMuse and SimilarContent are similar in many ways. They both use Artificial Intelligence to analyze the top 10 results in Google and provide more suggestions for keywords associated with your targeted keyword. SimilarContent supports almost all languages, 81 languages at the moment, while MarketMuse supports English only. If you are using SimilarContent version 3, you can even fetch and analyze content from the top 10 Google results in under 30 seconds. It is such a powerful tool.
Let’s take a quick look at a practical example of how Neil Patel uses keyword coverage to rank high in Google by analyzing some of the keywords he uses. One of his articles actually ranks on Google for the extremely difficult to rank for the keyword: “Affiliate Marketing.”
If you search on Google for the keyword “Affiliate Marketing”, you’ll notice that Neil Patel has the first spot in Google’s organic results for the keyword. You’ll also see that he gets organic traffic of around 40,000 per month from the keyword “Affiliate Marketing” and other related keywords.
So, what is the secret behind this phenomenal success? Let’s find out.
When we enter Affiliate Marketing as the main keyword and choose our preferred location as US, the first thing we see in SimilarContent is Topic Difficulty. SC will tell you how difficult or easy it is to write about the topic.

The more LSI keywords you have in the topic the more difficult it is to write about and the less LSI you have the easier it is to write about the field. Affiliate marketing, as we can see, is easier to write about because it has a few LSI keywords. We can also see that 27 authors achieved top scores for the keyword. This means they have covered it in depth.
SC also shows you other important ranking factors such as Backlink Difficulty. In the case of the keyword affiliate marketing, you need 20 high-quality backlinks to get on the first page of Google.

You can also see the CPC, average clicks, and monthly search volume. After Ahrefs, SimilarContent is the first tool to count click percentages too. SC gives you the keyword cover score and much more.

4. High TF/IDF Score

When you analyze the content on Neil Patel’s blog, you can easily see that he gets a high ranking percentage even before he has published his articles. SimilarContent also helps you to achieve better performance for your articles. It does this by increasing the relevancy score of the keywords you have targeted.

It does this by showing you the TF/IDF score. If you analyze Neil Patel’s content, you’ll notice that he always gets scores of over 2 or even 3. This is while his competitors are only getting 1 or 1.5. To rank like Neil Patel, it is important to increase the frequency of keywords with high TF in your articles.
Content score is also important to consider. It refers to the percentage of LSI keywords covered in the article. Neil Patel maintains a good score of 10/18. For example, in some articles, he covers only 10 out of 18 LSI topics.
He doesn’t cover some of the topics relevant to the industry such as affiliate demerits or Shopify. But always makes sure to repeat high TF keywords, such as “affiliate”, as many times as possible. This ensures that he gets a high TF/IDF score of over 2 while the rest are getting less.

5. Focus on the Keyword as a Subject – Measured by Ranking Predictor

Neil Patel also focuses on using keywords as subjects to achieve his ranking success. You can also do this with the help of SC’s Ranking Predicator tool.
The Ranking Predicator shows you the predicted percentages for the keywords you want to rank for. Taking one of Neil Patel’s examples, we see that he uses keywords such as “affiliate marketing made simple.” This has a percentage of 68 and “affiliate marketing” with a percentage of 59.

In short, he knows that the articles will rank with these keywords even before he has published the content.

Conclusion

It is quite clear that some of the key factors that Neil Patel relies on for his successful ranking are shown in the high scores his content gets in Ranking Predictor, focus on producing in-depth and detailed content, and maintaining high readability scores at all times.
He is always using the highest TF keywords and even repeating them in the same article without making Google think of the keywords as SPAM. This strategy results in a high TF score of 2 and above.
SimilarContent is a useful tool that can help you rank your pages with just content instead of relying on backlinks, just as Neil Patel does.
SC helps you to achieve this in several ways including:

• It allows you to check the Relevancy Score of your content. Then it compares it with similar pieces of content on the web.
• It helps you to locate Exact LSI lacking in your articles to help them rank higher
• Ability to rank in Semantic keywords that your potential customers are searching for on the web
• It gives you the ability to rank with just a few or even without backlinks

More importantly, SimilarContent helps to find and implement the same methods Neil Patel uses to achieve high rankings on Google.
It helps you implement Neil Patel’s 5 secrets of ranking. The first one is using in-depth content. SC helps you to do this taking your content through the Content Score to measure how much you have covered the required topics and subtopics.
SC also helps you to measure the percentage of the words used in the article through the Keyword Coverage tool. If you have a percentage of 50 and above, you have a better chance of ranking highly on Google.
For instance, Neil Patel always gets above 50 and even as high as 90. Thirdly, SimilarContent gives you the TF/IDF score of your content. You can then try to achieve the same scores as Neil Patel. He gets above 2 or even 3 while the rest get only 1 or 1.5 at best.
With SimilarContent, you can also increase the relevancy score of the keywords you target. Neil Patel does this in his blogs to achieve a higher ranking percentage. By increasing the relevancy score, he knows his articles will rank high even before he publishes the content.
It is also important to ensure that your readability score is always above 60 and the number of words in each sentence is low. This is to ensure that your readers will stay longer on your page and reduce bounce rates.
SimilarContent is an effective tool that can help you to achieve the 5 factors that have helped Neil Patel rank in every keyword he targets.