I used to believe in the “build it and they will come” school of content strategy.
I would look at my competitors and rack my brains as to how I could better target the keywords that they are targeting.
And the ideas that I would come up with are just these really weird tangents, and my approaches were really off the beaten path.
Well, sadly, that strategy doesn’t work.
Believe it or not, people are not looking for something revolutionary or groundbreaking.
Instead, they’re looking for something more basic.
They have problems that they need solved and they are more willing to trust people who demonstrate an ability to solve these issues.
It doesn’t get any simpler than that!
So, my strategy now is to find my competitors, run their domains through SEO software tools, figure out the more successful ones, strip out their sitemap.xml, and run each piece of content through SEO tools.
I can see keyword opportunities, but I don’t stop there.
I look for themes and topics.
I look at the target keywords and I ask myself, “What is a person using this keyword truly looking for?”
And based on that information, I would target topics that my competitors are neglecting, overlooking, or badly executing.
These are topics that have at least some traffic.
But, even if they get zero traffic, I still do them anyways because they’re not going to show up for no reason (so as long as they fit the overall theme of the site that I’m building).
So far, it’s worked out!
If you want to succeed in the blogging game, you can’t hit your competitors head-on.
They’ve been in the game far longer and they have a few tricks up their sleeve—that’s suicidal.
Instead, look for a little hanging fruit and improve on what they’re doing.
That’s the bottom line.
Because if you build your website on value and you end up delivering experiences that your competitors either can’t do or won’t do, either way, you come out ahead.
