WORKWEEK

The biggest leaps I feel I’ve made in my career in terms of learning and understanding more about content marketing and SEO have always come from analyzing competitor websites and asking: “Why would they do that?” 

It doesn’t have to be a competitor, either. Look at any of the major tech companies out there: Salesforce, SAP, Adobe, IBM, etc. What are those websites doing that you aren’t––and why might they be doing them? 

Now, unfortunately, sometimes big companies like that publish content simply because a leader wants it. But often enough, those organizations are forced to prioritize what they put effort behind. And how they’ve built and organized their websites and content aren’t typically an accident. What’s wild is that so few smaller organizations mimic them. 

At BigCommerce:

I was tasked with figuring out how we could rank for the term “ecommerce,” which was a real leap at the time for us. I ended up discovering that Oracle ranked #1 (today, #2 after Wikipedia) for “ERP.” That one page is driving more than 50K sessions to them, according to Ahrefs. It is a “What is” page. 

That finding changed my opinion on “glossary” type pages. It also shifted our SEO strategy away from the blog as our next page to SEO growth. It worked. 

At MarketerHire:

I looked at Toptal’s site and discovered that their landing pages had a “built-in” article further down on the page. And those pages that had it where ranking in the top 1-3 for whatever term seemed really relevant.

So, we did the same thing at MarketerHire to rank for things like “email marketing expert.” And it worked. We were on page 1 within a month, and in the top 1-5 within a few months. That page linked above is still running #5 on Google.

**It looks like Toptal has shifted that strategy to an FAQ strategy ever further down on the page. They also look like they aren’t ranking as well as they once were. This doesn’t mean the company hasn’t done well and optimized. Maybe the traffic they were getting wasn’t converting, and they needed to shift. I don’t know. I don’t work there.**

All of this to say, it’s worth asking if a competitor might be doing something. In fact, this works in the opposite way, too––especially with gated assets and campaign content, I find. Just because a page looks great, or a topic sounds good, doesn’t necessarily mean it is performing. 

Asking “Why” a competitor might publish a set of content around a specific topic, in a specific way, is critical to sharpening your own strategy, helping you find quick wins, and ensuring you are competing quickly and easily alongside even your most legacy of competitors. 

It’s good sleuthing.