outdo your competitors

In a world where more than 27 million pieces of content are shared on a daily basis, it can be difficult to stand out from the “content sea” long enough to get noticed by new readers. This is complicated by the fact that every business has competitors, and every single competitor wants to be stand out just as much as you do. So, you’re in a field where other businesses are likely looking to cover the same topics, news, and events as you are. That’s a tough deal. So, how do you ensure that your content is what stands out from the crowd, and you’re the one rising above field competitors? Let’s explore. Why Study Your Competitors? “Only the Paranoid Survive” If you’ve been in the management world for awhile, you’re probably familiar with Andy Grove’s famous book Only the Paranoid Survive. While Grove’s book title might seem dire, it’s actually a good lesson for anyone looking to outperform their competitors. The truth is that, in today’s world, content is competitive and in order to gain a cutting edge on the other companies in your industry, you need to be able to foster and engage a deep-seated curiosity about what your competitors are doing and how they’re doing it. Here at Express Writers, we’ve done just that. While we wouldn’t call ourselves “paranoid” by any stretch, we’ve dedicated ourselves to outperforming our competitors. Our Blog vs. Theirs: How We Outdid the Competition As a content creation company, we pride ourselves greatly on being able to write amazing content. Heck, check out this massive case study I just published on the fact of the matter: we outrank other writing companies by a whopping 5% on Google. We’re talking companies with literally 100x more funding than us. (Come on, guys, it’s as simple as using the service you provide! Actually…it’s a lot harder than that just sounded.) So, one small facet of our overall content marketing picture is to look at what our competitors are talking about, and how to do it a lot better. Check out how we did just that. Here’s a real case study of how we’ve outdone our competition: Them (Competitor): An agency in our industry field recently wrote a <500 word, general piece on “how to do content marketing for boring industries.” There was no formatting, sub headers, and it was written by a non-native English speaker (which would be okay if the writing flow wasn’t significantly off in a few sentences). Us: We took the idea we saw from our competitor as inspiration, went a step further, and first researched a long tail keyword with a viable opportunity. Using SEMrush and KWFinder, both of which are our go-to SEO tools, we found out that “guide to writing for boring industries” gave us both a great long-tail keyword and an idea for a topic. We handed this to one of our full-time copywriters, Ashley. She put a piece together for the Write Blog that was more than double the length and offered practical points that every business owner could put to use on how to create content for their online presence even if they were in a “boring” industry. Ashley talked about the actual writing content part instead of the broader content marketing picture, as our competitor did (we got more nitty-gritty): she showed our readers how to develop a metaphor, use statistics, and more. The piece included much more research, outbound/relevant and high quality links, and practical solutions. Here’s what the us vs. them looked like in the end. (Domain name removed from the competitor screenshot.) Them: Under 5 social shares. No comments. No rankings. Us: 91 social shares, a couple comments. Ready for the cool part? We be cool cats. #1 ranking for that keyword. Heck, we outdid Moz! So as you can see, in the end process we don’t just “copy” topics from others when we do study our competitors. (I don’t condone that.) We’ll go deep and look at what questions they’ve left unanswered in their content, or what’s missing from the value in the content, and how we can do it better. Sometimes, we’ll even look at the comments on the piece with questions from readers. And, we might back that up with checking to see what people are asking about on Quora in the topic; then we’ll write blogs to provide a fuller, clearer picture on the topic. As mentioned earlier, because of strategies like these, we have more content ranked in Google than any of our copywriting competitors, by an entire 5% visibility on average. In Google, 5% is a big deal. How’s that for a solid strategy? While you don’t need to lose sleep over what your competitors are or aren’t doing, it will serve you well to pay careful attention to what they might be missing within their content and how you can do it better. Here are five tips to get you started. 5 Key Ways You Can Write Better Content Than Your Competitors When it comes to scoping out your competitors’’ content, there are a few key places you want to look. These tips will help give you a structure you can develop further as you progress. 1. Keep an eye on the competition As is true with any sea, the content sea is always moving. Because of this, it’s important to stay on top of the game when it comes to monitoring your competitors. While we’re not advising that you install tracking software on their cars or anything quite that “out there”, we do advise that you use commonly available monitoring practices to keep an eye on their content creation efforts, especially in the following areas: Links. Who is linking to your competitor and which posts are earning those links? It’s easy to monitor links by using a service like BuzzSumo link alert. This service will let you know every time your competitor receives a link to content they’ve published, so you can get a feel for what is performing well and what’s not. Content performance. Of the content your competitor published in the last week or five days, … Read more