9-Step Cheat Sheet to Stealing Your Competition’s Best Content Ideas

Source:

https://neilpatel.com/blog/competition-content-stealing-cheat-sheet/

Creating quality content that people want to share is the best way to boost your brand’s growth.

If people want to read, view, share and talk about what you’re putting out, you’re sure to see tons of traffic, increased sales, and higher engagement.

But how many times have you spent hours on an article (or another piece of content) only to see it go absolutely nowhere? It isn’t getting the clicks, shares, or comments that you’d hoped for.

Meanwhile, your competition is thriving. That’s why it’s time to steal your competition’s best content ideas (while simultaneously learning from their mistakes).

You obviously shouldn’t ever plagiarize content. However, it’s important to recognize that it’s hard to come up with completely original content ideas in today’s online world.

You might think you’ve thought of something “new,” but it’s probably already been done before.

That’s why you need to use your competition’s content as inspiration to create something even better.

Here’s a nine-step cheat sheet to stealing your competition’s best ideas.

To get started, you need to understand the different types of competitors.

1. Understand the different types of competitors

Your competitors can be divided up into four different categories.

The three most common categories are direct competitors, indirect competitors, and replacement competitors.

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Direct competitors are the competitors that are the most obvious. They offer products and services that are more or less the same as yours.

Examples of direct competitors include Walmart and Target, Microsoft and Apple, or Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

Indirect competitors are businesses that sell the same products as you but also specialize in other areas.

Examples of indirect competitors are McDonald’s and Applebees or Nike and Timberland.

McDonald’s and Applebees are both restaurant chains, but McDonald’s is a fast-food chain while Applebees is a bar-and-grill chain.

Nike and Timberland are both shoe brands, but Nike is an athletic shoe brand while Timberland is an outdoor footwear brand.

Indirect competitors are usually harder to identify than direct competitors.

Replacement competitors are even harder to recognize.

These competitors don’t have to offer the exact same products or services as you do, but they do compete for the same customer base.

For example, mobile phones are a completely different market than digital cameras.

But phone manufacturers like Samsung became competitors with camera brands like Canon or Nikon as soon as they began including cameras on their phones.

If you want to identify direct, indirect, and replacement competitors, you need to do some audience research.

Try some social-listening tools like Hootsuite or Social Studio to get started.

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You can even run some customer surveys. Google Consumer Surveys are a great resource.

This allow you to create custom questions and selections for each answer and then send them out to your current customers.

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You can even have customers answer questions to your survey in exchange to access premium content or Google Play credits.

SERP competitors are the fourth category of competitor. SERP competitors are the sites ranking for the keywords that you’re currently trying to rank for.

They’re taking up space for the top rankings that you want and need. They can be any type of site, like a Wikipedia page or an article from a news site.

These competitors are funneling SERP traffic from you that you need in order to get more traffic. So you need to identify them and beat them as fast as possible.

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Once you’ve found the keywords you want to target, find out who’s ranking above you for each one.

Use an SEO tool like Moz’s Open Site Explorer to find out exactly how your SERP competitors are ranking higher than you.

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Next, you need to do even more sleuthing.

3. Use SimilarWeb to find out whether competitors are paying for traffic

You need to know the down low about how competitors are getting attention online.

Luckily, there are tons of tools out there that can help you find out how your competition is driving traffic and getting people to pay attention to them.

Some of your competitors are paying for their traffic.

SimilarWeb can help you find out which ones. The tool can also show you the source of the traffic, along with any keywords that your competition is currently ranking for.

Just enter your competitor’s URL to get a free report on any website or app.

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Then, you’ll be able to get huge insights into their traffic, including total visits, the average visit duration, pages per visit, and their bounce rate.

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Once you find out which competitors are paying to get to the top of the charts, you’ll know the goals that you need to meet to rank even higher than them.

Next, look at their SEO strategy and figure out how you can mimic it.