Winning the Content Competition and Ranking First

When you think of brand competition what do you think of? Your mind probably goes straight to those brands your sales team tells you are going head to head with you for product features and services. I’ll bet you’re pretty good at keeping track of what those folks are doing, and you’ve created content that addresses your unique value proposition for your sales team to convince and convert prospects. Sound familiar?
What’s missing in that scenario is the ability to identify and discover your content competitors. In other words, all the content that may be taking traffic away from you and creating a barrier for audiences looking for information that will lead them to your product, service, or features. Now when you think of competitors, think of everyone, including those brands who may have peripheral products, but who are interfering with your message and then find a way to outrank them.

Content Competition Discovery

You know what marketers need more than anything else? Time. Am I right? When someone tells you all the things you need to do, in addition to what you’re already doing now, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to find the time. There are a few buy telemarketing data things you can do to make content competition discovery more time efficient and effective and still leave time to make your own content decisions based on the data you gather.
Screen Shot Competitor Discovery Social
“Discovering new competitors is a little different for everyone in terms of what that exact mix will look like, but we created Competitor Discovery here a little over a year ago to automate the process and take the work out of the marketer’s hands,” notes Erin O’Brien, COO GinzaMetrics.
No matter what tool you use, employ these important tactics to improve your ability to discover and outrank content competitors:

Create keyword groups
Create content groups
Segment content by medium, method, and message
Monitor social signals
Before you get started, get a list of clearly defined keywords. Look beyond just the keywords that you’re already tracking. Get a list of all the keywords and topics relevant to your industry including those that are driving traffic to your content, those driving traffic to competitor content, and those that could be driving traffic to your site, but you aren’t using yet. Having a keyword discovery feature in your marketing intelligence platform will help discover those keywords you haven’t targeted yet.

Create Keyword Groups
Once you have a good list of keywords, create keyword groups. Create groups based on those things relevant to your brand and your marketing efforts. Keyword groups may include:

Product features

Product lines
Persona types
Trending topics
Geographies
Campaigns
“When creating keywords groups, keep in mind that keywords can belong to multiple groups. Keyword groups are one way to narrow down what you’re finding for the competition and will help you target your efforts to those things that actually matter to your brand,” states Erin.
The keyword groups you select will determine what type of competitor you monitor. Keyword groups that focus on product features and product lines will help you track those sales competitors, the ones you are probably already aware of, but may not be getting a complete picture of all the content they’re producing that competes directly with you. On the other hand, keyword groups that focus on persona types, topics, and campaigns may yield more industry-relevant publications and reveal some brands that you haven’t considered in the past.
Grouped marketing content traffic performance

Create Content Groups and Segment by Content Type
Creating content groups is much like creating keyword groups, except that you determine which content you have that fits into your pre-defined groups and then you track those URLs together.
When you’re grouping content, consider the types of content you already have and create groups based on the medium of the message. There can be a difference in how different mediums rank with your audience. Creating groups based on the medium will give you a way to filter out your results as well as get some insights into which mediums are working best for you. These might include:

Video
Slide deck
Landing page
Blog post
Webinar
Podcast
EBook
other
“The goal of content competitor discovery is to use the keywords and topics you’re already targeting and monitoring, and use them to discover any other content that is ranking highly for those keywords,” notes Erin.
Although there may be many brands that overlap you on a few keywords, those probably aren’t worth your time pursuing. Instead, set your sights on those brands with content that overlaps yours with at least a dozen of the same keywords. Competitor social signals

Social Media Signals

Monitoring the social media platforms will help keep you up to date on what people are sharing and finding relevant in your industry. It may also give you a way to discover other players who are capturing audience attent

Organic search is still the number one source of website traffic for organizations and nearly 90% of organizations are using content marketing to engage audiences and create conversions. The need for consistent and strategic SEO has never been greater, especially with the recent changes in local and mobile. Yet, in some organizations, SEO is not the top priority. While trying to improve rankings and beat the competition, organizations are simultaneously putting SEO recommendations on the back burner.
For SEOs who are frustrated and tired of creating reports and recommendations that are never fully implemented, knowing how to prove SEO success will help make it a priority.

SEO de-prioritization
Content and search recommendations
Although it might feel like your SEO recommendations and reports are being ignored, it’s more likely that they have fallen somewhere lower on the list of priorities than you’d like. For the people actually responsible for making the changes, they may feel there are more interesting, exciting, and maybe urgent tasks to perform, like creating content. This is obviously a mistake, and I don’t need to tell anyone in SEO why content creation shouldn’t be a shot in the dark, but we’ll get back to that.
“When there’s a disconnect with the overall importance of search and SEO inside an organization, it could be a de-prioritization on the scale of things, like where people spend time and budget, But I think SEO and the information gathered from search, in general, has implications beyond just how it impacts the marketing stack,” states Erin O’Brien, President and COO.
When shared with the right. People, and in the right way, SEO data can have far reaching implications in an organization, including informing future product. Development and new feature releases. When shared with the product development team, SEO can give insight into:

How people are talking about your industry

How they’re naturally searching for features.
What conversations they’re having and questions they’re asking.
How they’re describing their problems.
How language used to talk about the industry is changing over time.
What new key players have entered the market.
Using this information, brands can get a deeper understanding of core issues, how those issues are changing and evolving over time, and how the changes in the market can inform changes or additions to the product line.

Show success with an SEO pilot program
Everyone loves a success story. Especially the C-suite and especially when the success story shows a contribution to the bottom line. To move SEO from the middle of the priority list and put it top of mind for the decision makers in your organization, try establishing a small test case through a pilot program.
Narrow your SEO focus to a particular campaign or 12 keyword research tools product within the company to demonstrate the importance and the impact of SEO. A pilot program will help to narrow down the scope of work and show positive results in a very focused and easily digested way.
“Sometimes the list of SEO recommendations can be an extremely daunting thing, especially if you’re starting the a site and content audit and you get a list of 10,000 recommendations. A pilot program is a way to narrow the number of recommendations you’re dealing with to a manageable size and a way to compare the small group of things you’ve optimized against other content,” notes Erin.
chart modules
Even in a small team, or if you don’t have a dedicated SEO department, SEO pilot programs can be started adjacent to other marketing programs and used as a benchmark to compare results of those efforts that employ good SEO practices, versus those that are business as usual.

Show immediate SEO results

If you’re going to prove the success of SEO, you’ll want to start with the quick fixes that show immediate results. A good place to start is with optimizing page structure. Whether you’re creating new content, or going back to improve the findability of older content, the page must be built correctly to get preferred SERP results. Some easy fixes for page structure include:

Optimize H1 tags to include only text.
Ensure that there is only one H1 tag per page.
Include a unique title tag.
Longer than 5 characters
Shorter than 55 characters
Include a unique meta description.
There are other, more difficult, fixes that affect. Page structure and crawlability including URL length, redirects, 404 errors, and duplicate page titles that. Require someone with technical coding knowledge to tackle. while some. Optimizations wax and wane kcrj in importance, you’ll want to make sure the content throughout your site has a. Structure easily crawlable by search engines. page structure and crawlability improvements produce increased overall findability and better. Ranking for content that might otherwise get passed over by the search bots because it’s not structured well.
Small organizations and large organizations have their own unique roadblocks to consistently creating pages with