How to Create the Best Content by Spying On Your Competitors

In this highly competitive internet driven atmosphere, the word “steal” plays an important role in paving success paths for the businesses. However, here stealing does not mean to steal some physical element from someone but it refers to stealing great thoughts from your competitors so that you can emerge as a reputed name amidst your valued patrons. In the era of technology and internet, high quality content is one of the most powerful digital marketing strategies for achieving unparalleled success. For improving your website ranking over search engines or to make your website comes under the top ten pages of organic search, there is no way better than to write unique and compelling content for your website for enhancing user engagement.

Investing new ideas to develop unique content always require profound interpretation of thoughts derived from your competitors. This is called a perfect content strategy where you take ideas from your rivals and assimilate those ideas for extracting a perfect plan to create original and impressive content for your website. Therefore, it is important to know what you can learn from your rivals who are already successful in this IT industry to establish your own unique existence.

Who Are Your Competitors?

How could you figure out your competitors? This question may sounds simple but it offers an excellent starting point for developing strong content strategy.

• Internet searches: Searching on Internet is the best way of figuring out your competitors. This might seems to be an overly simple method, but typing desired keywords that you will use for promoting your business over internet in the search box of Google will help you in figuring out the businesses that use the same set of keywords for promoting their services and products among the online users. By implementing this way, you will know what latest techniques your competitors are using in their content strategy for promoting and selling their products or services. This will give you a depiction of how efficiently you can employ those similar ideas for creating high quality content for your website that will ultimately improves your products or services promotion on Internet.

However employing “similar” ideas does not mean directly stealing their ideas from under their noses; instead conduct a brainstorming session with your team members to decide new and unique ways to execute those ideas effectively in your content strategy for driving accomplishing better user engagement.

• Utilize latest tools for evaluating competitors’ strategies: Using the latest tools allows you to keep updated about your competitor’s content strategies on regular basis. Google Alerts is one of the latest tools that keep you notified about the new updates on services and products relating to your business and it also track your competitor’s planning and activities followed by them to keep their content update.

• Google Trends is another tool, which is carved in the niche of evaluation methods to let you explore the current content writing techniques used by your rivals. This tool helps in mapping the current trends followed in devising unique and original content in your area including the trends followed across the globe.

• Social Media can reveal more information: How can we forget talking about social media platforms that has become an inseparable part of our lives? Apart from keeping us connected with our family and friends, they provide us a platform to meet with our clients as well. In fact they play a vital role in paving great deals between businesses and their clients. Just like they help business in finding their customers, they are also best mediums to keep a check on your competitor’ updates. If we use the social sites for searching our friends and family members then why cannot we use these platforms for searching our competitors? You can easily maintain a track of your clients’ updates and activities by following them on Twitter, Facebook, and other social engines. Checking the ways they interact on the social media platform through their posts and shares will help you in concluding ideas to interact with your clients by developing great posts for your Facebook fan page as well.

• We the People: According to reputed info entrepreneurs, the distribution of questionnaires and talking with the clients is the best way of exploring information about your competitors. It will also give you a clear idea of how they keep their relation with their clients or even how they follow their clients for selling their services and products. We know that customers helps us in making our business grow so listening to their needs will help us in developing a powerful content strategy for your website that will definitely beat your competitors.

Recognizing your Competitor’s Best Content

We do not have to read every five paragraph essay to evaluate their popularity as there are key metrics that we can use for checking which articles or blog posts are best. On internet, if people like any content in form of an article or blog post, they majorly perform three things listed as follows:

• Share it socially
• Like
• Comment

How to Track Searches

This is the foremost way of evaluating best content of your competitor. You can enter and measure the extracted set of keywords for your business in Google’s Keyword Planner to see which keywords interest more to the users.

Following is an example showing the searches over iPad keywords performed by users over internet:

From the above figure, you can see that there are certain keywords with higher competition rate. You can use those keywords to develop your effective content strategy by including the ideas of your competitor as well. This is eventually help in enhancing the user engagement and conversion rates on your website.

How to Track Social Shares

It isn’t only Google that predicts the true value of content. If you have written some article or blog post and published it on your website, then its sharing over social platforms gives you an idea about the likings, sharing or commenting of that particular content thus ultimately revealing its popularity. This can’t be an effective way of structuring your content strategy without counting on your competitor’s social audience.

If you want to know which article or blog post of your competitor’s site gets maximum share or likes, then you can use varied tools that assist in performing social analysis of your competitor’s content. Buzzsumo is one such great tool, which reveals the popularity of your competitor’s content among its social audience. You simply have to plug in the URL and then head over to social analysis.

I am going to give the example using the URL www.greenlaneseo.com for make you clearly understand the tracking of social shares.

In the above image, you can see that the first article of this URL named as “Optimize NOW for Entities and Relationships” has got 37 Facebook share and 101 Twitter shares. You can also dig it more to find out who has share the post and what kind of posts do they usually share over these social sites?  This social metrics will surely help the social media marketers to use latest techniques for improving their website rankings and they will also get an idea of what type of posts to write for better traffic through social platforms.

How to Track Backlinks?

This is another effective way of finding out best content of our competitors, which is based on backlinks and page authority. Login to the Open Site Explorer and enter the domain name. Subsequently go to Top Pages. You will see that all the results will get populated and they can be easily exported as per your convenience.

From the above example, you can see that there are some overlaps with the most shared posts, which is why you need to analyze all the collected and correlated data. However the formulation of a perfect content strategy that will drive traffic to your website completely depends on how you have interpreted these collected data.

Collected some ideas, now time for implementation

Until now, you have collected enough clues about who your competitors are and what ideas you could use to find out their content strategies. After the collection of clues and ideas, it is the time for proper implementation of those ideas in building the best content strategy for your website so that you could achieve impressive traffic and leads through it. Remember, distribution is the key and it is vital to know some secrets of effective content distribution for greater success. 

Make sure not to forget what your competitors have done for the success of their websites. Another important thing is to remember how they have put everything together? Follow three important options listed below to develop a good content strategy:

• Develop a new funnel
• Develop content for performing off-page SEO
• Develop emphasis content

If you have new metrics for devising strategy, a new funnel is essential to be developed because you should have pre-conceived goals and there must be a top to bottom for every funnel to gain better results. Always ensure that your content should be engaging and appealing enough to attract users’ interest and a new funnel have the ability to run parallel to your website for getting better leads.

In a single note, if you really want your website to get tremendous traffics and better user engagement ratio, then you must have to keep the content promotion on the top of your list to get your website optimized according to popular search engines. For effective content promotion, your content strategy should be devised by collecting the ideas from your reputed competitors because then only you will be able to put your content in front of those users who will read it and share it over Internet.

About the author
Sandeep Sharma is a Project Manager with a prominent digital media marketing company TIS India and has been for the last 10 years. He loves to create aesthetically appealing websites & eye-popping user interfaces for international clients. You can follow him on Twitter and Google Plus.