When I first started working on this client’s site, I noticed that it was ranking for most of its main keywords #1-3. One might easily assume that there was not much room for this site to grow. But using Ahrefs, I found that this site was ranking at the bottom of page one for a combined volume of over 200,000 monthly searches on various variations of long-tail keywords. So, while the site was originally targeting “how to x ____”, it was not optimized for a whole myriad of long tails like “how to help with ____ for teenagers”.
I optimized for these keywords by mixing them into critical spots like the SEO title tag, H1, H2, etc, while additionally sending links with these keywords in the anchor text. As a result, the longtail allowed us to increase traffic by over 5x. These keywords would not have been possible without Ahrefs’ clever reverse ranking lookup feature (highly recommended).