How to steal ideas from your online competition to boost the visibility of your own content

It pays to be aware of your competition’s best-performing content.

What are the standards for high-performing content within your B2B niche? If you’re not really sure, it may be time to start snooping around your online competition.

Competitor research and analysis forms the basis of any sound content marketing strategy, but it’s useful to keep one eye on your online competition generally. Doing so is important for generating new topic ideas or content buckets, and to be able to answer the question this blog posed at its start.

Ultimately, your content should be driven by your audience and target personas, but if you know what content is most profitable for your online competition that’s also relevant. Once you’re aware of this, you can start to compete in the same space and boost the visibility of your content.

Tools to identify and analyse your online competition
There are countless SEO tools available, from SEMrush to WooRank. Each can tell you something about who your online competitors are when analysing your own domain, and what content is performing well for each competitor by entering their domain into the tool’s search bar.

Depending on the tool/s you choose, you can learn:

• What content gets the most engagement across social media and the web (BuzzSumo is ideal for this)
• What phrases and keywords are most important to them organically
• What phrases and keywords they are using in their paid ad campaigns – if a competitor is paying to rank for a particular keyword, that demonstrates its value to them
• What pages have the most backlinks pointed at them – this tells you what pages are most important to their content strategy and audience 
• If more than one competitor has backlinks to pages on the same content bucket or topic – this could be a topic for you to target

Analysing your online competition’s content

When you use an SEO tool to analyse your online competition, take a high-level view of the content on their website:

• Do they produce good quality content?
• Are they writing for expert readers?
• Is it largely long or short-form content?
• Do they create and use videos?
• Do they create and use images or infographics?
• How do they organise and structure the content on key landing pages?

Doing this will give you a clear sense of how they present content and provide insight into what they think their audience will engage with. You can use these insights to guide your own content strategy. What content are they missing? Can you fill in the gaps? How can client or customer queries enrich your content? Take inspiration from the topics being discussed and the way in which the content is presented and distributed. Would anything appeal to your target audience, and can you compete by creating something even better? If yes, add these ideas to your editorial calendar.  
What makes your competitor’s top-performing content successful?

When you’ve got an overview of an online competitor’s content, take a closer look at their top-performing content:

• What need are they satisfying?
• What problem are they solving, and how are they solving it through their content?
• What type of content gets more engagement, and why do you think this is?

For example, does a piece of content have a lot of relevant backlinks (or inbound links) and does it rank for multiple related keywords and phrases? Is the piece of content informative in scope and engaging in presentation? By assessing a competitor’s top-performing content you should be able to see why that content is successful and how it’s meeting the expectations of its audience.

You can use these insights to guide ongoing keyword research for your own content and to the creation of new content buckets/topics/themes.

How can you create similar content of the same standard but still differentiate your brand?
Differentiation is important. With this in mind, we recommend being guided by what your competitors do and remain aware of what’s working for them. However, don’t replicate their content strategy. Focus on your target audience and address their pain points. How can you do this creatively through content? And if a particular tactic or piece of content proves successful, do more of it.

If you need support with competitor analysis or creating content that can drive your marketing strategy forward and bring more visibility for your brand, contact us today.

If you need support to write engaging, audience-driven content for your B2B brand or agency, contact Copestone today.