In the SEO arena, terms have come and terms have gone. People have coined phrases, some of which have worked, and most of which aren’t relevant anymore. First, there was keyword density, then came anchor text, followed by duplicate content. The phrase that is doing the rounds these days is “content is king.”
It is true that without good content, your posts don’t hold value. But the thing that is currently spamming Google, is a lot of fair copies, of good original content. The problem businesses face is that despite good content, their pages aren’t getting the necessary hits that they should. If you come to think about it, what really matters in good content is:
- Uniqueness
- Expertise
- Good point of view
Stalking Your Competitors
Good quality content ideas come from a plethora of sources, including:
- Topic generators
- Customer poll results
- Your Sales/Service Team
Effective content largely comes from the culmination of data and crazy ideas. But it doesn’t always benefit you in the way you’d hope. It takes time and digging that most aren’t willing to get into.
However, there is a better way. You can track the content your competitors are putting up, and analyze the data. Since they will never be ready to part with information, you can find that out on your own.
Content Play Overview
Screaming Frog is a common SEO tool. It is a spider that tells you what search engine spiders may find. It is probably the easiest way to find the topics a website is concentrating on. If you already have keywords in mind, the spider searches them for you and gives you a bird-eye view of content on similar topics, from your competitor’s site.
Ubersuggest and keywordtool.io can be used to generate queries based on your keywords. Since most search results are answers to queries, enter your keyword and take a look at the popular queries made with relevance to it. Search these queries to learn the content being created for it.
At this point, starting jotting down points to analyze:
- Connections between posts
- Reasons behind the posts
- Links between posts
Different Sources of Data
Data can be collected from any of these:
- Searches
- Social media
- Backlinks
Use Google’s Keyword Planner to analyze the given possibility of keywords and understand the interest in your product. This can sometimes give an insight into previously neglected keywords that are creating more buzz than expected.
Tools like Buzzsumo and Topsy help you analyze the shares generated by content posted by your competitors. These shares can be further dug into to understand the social outreach of the sharers. Understanding link popularity helps you get a good feel for your market. If the product is not among the favorites, you can channel content in a different direction.
Once the data is available, it’s time to make your decisions. The best part of marketing is that nothing is for sure. It’s your call to make.