Discover Your Competitive Strategy – Content Marketing Part 2 – Lesson 3 – SEO Unlocked
– [Neil] Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today I'm going to teach you how to supercharge your content marketing by learning from your competition. But before we get started,
I want to read a quote, "The trick to having good ideas "is to not sit around
in glorious isolation "and try to think big thoughts. "The trick is to get
more parts on the table." This is a quote from
Steve Johnson, I love it. And the reason being is, there's over a billion blogs
on the web, that's so many, that's roughly one for every seven people.
There's so many people
who are already doing what you're trying to do
with content marketing, you can learn from them. So why not take their concepts
of what's working for them, put it on the table so
you can learn from it. With your competitors, there's many different business
models that they may have, from getting leads for public speaking, to being affiliate play, to
selling software and tools, or getting more podcast listeners, to even getting more consulting leads or making money through advertising or selling products like e-commerce, content marketing works for all niches. So let's go over some of these examples. The first thing you need to do is put in your competitor's
domain into Ubersuggest. So go to ubersuggest.com, put in your competitor's domain name, and from there, you'll see a report and the report will show you, hey, who is linking to your competition. And the way you get there is in the left hand navigation side, make sure you click on Backlinks so that way you can see this report.
And this will show you
the pages on their sites that are performing well
from a SEO standpoint, right? What are the pages that
people want to link to because they feel they're ultra valuable? And if you look at the arrow there, that arrow shows you the linking site, and what page it's pointing to. The target shows a target URL
on your competitors website that other people are linking to. And that'll give you idea of
what's working and what's not. The third step is to go top pages in the left hand navigation and look for the popular pages. This will show you all the pages whether they're the e-commerce page, or a content rich page, or a video page, that's driving traffic
based on social shares, backlinks, and estimated visits. If you click under View
All, under Estimated Visits, It'll show you all the keywords that drive traffic to that page.
The fourth step when you're going to your competition's site and you're looking at their content, because you've now found
this data from Ubersuggest. So when you're on that top pages report, you would click on over to their website and look to see if they have
any emails, product, services, sign up for them. So, I would go to HubSpot, for example, and download that free PDF or
ebook that they're offering. And once I do, it'll
give me a understanding of how HubSpot is doing their marketing, and this will give me ideas of where I need to take
my content marketing. So now let's dive a little bit deeper into different examples. Let's start off with affiliates. There's a ton of affiliate
sites out there, it's big. A good example of affiliate
site is Wirecutter. They'll write articles
on everything out there that benefit people, and you can see this in the
Ubersuggest top pages report. And you can see what's popular
from the best dishwashers to the best vacuum cleaners. And when they have these articles, you bet that when they're talking about the best vacuum cleaners, they may give you 10, 11 vacuum
cleaners that are amazing and do thorough reviews, but for each of them, you bet that they're using affiliate link and that's how they're making money.
Another one is Outdoor Gearlab. They talk about all the
outdoor gear that you need if you love hiking or camping
or anything like that. And their website covers
a lot of popular articles. And you can see again in Ubersuggest in the top pages report, by them having articles on the
best outdoor winter jackets or things like the best
backpacks for camping. And you can see this database
on the estimated visits as well as the social shares. So you see the social
shares on the right side and the estimated visits on the left side. And keep in mind the estimated visits is the estimated visits from Google each month to that webpage.
Some software examples if you have a B2C or B2B software company. Marketo, which is now owned by Adobe. You can go to their website,
check out their products, request a demo, download some
of their ebooks, seminars. It'll give you idea of what
they're doing to attract people. Again, you want to go
to the top pages report, look at your competitors,
see what's popular. Oh, they got a guide on mobile marketing, oh, they got another one
on content marketing. And you would just go through this and it'll give you ideas
of what's working for them based on estimated visits as well as social shares and backlinks.
Canva, another popular app,
I use this one all the time. And you can see again,
through the top pages that they have things around photo editors and templates and cards. These are all things that people love so you can do like top
10 ways to edit a photo or even more specific, how to add a blur effect to your photo. That's another example of a content piece that you can write that
people love to read. Podcasting. You've seen a lot of podcasts out there, whether it's Dr. Axe who's on health. Dr. Axe has an amazing
site, amazing podcast, if you haven't checked
it out, make sure you do. And listen to their podcast episodes. Because if this is your competition, you'll get an understanding of what they're doing, what's working. Make sure you go to their Apple Store, check out everything, the reviews, what people are saying what
they like, what they dislike. This will give you ideas as well. Joe Rogan, another podcast, super popular. You want to listen to his content, assuming he's your competition. You can also go and put in
his URL into Ubersuggest and go to the backlinks report, you'll see who he's linking to.
You can also end up using
the top pages report which will show you what's
popular on his site. So you can do that for any
one of your competitors whose goal is to use content
to get more podcast listings or if you have a podcast and that's your main source of content, you can use this to see who's linking, what products they're selling into. Because this will all help you figure out how you can generate
sales from your podcast, as well as how you can get the viewership and listens as well.
Consulting examples. You can just copy my site for this, I've done it pretty
well, I've fine tuned it. Go to the Services tab on neilpatel.com, that'll give you some
ideas on what I'm doing. I'm driving a lot of traffic
from my other content pages, you can see my top pages and you'll see banners and sidebar ads, that drive traffic to my consulting page which helps drive leads as well. For people who sell products, there's a lot of examples of this. One of my favorite examples is e-commerce. There's so many sites
that use content marketing and sell products, Lego is a great example of this. Even as an adult, I still
loved Legos to death. My niece and nephew, they're
always creating Legos. Even my brother in law Heathen, he started creating like
remote controlled Lego cars and plays with his kids with that. And if you type in your
e-commerce competitors into Ubersuggest and
go to their top pages, you'll see what's driving them traffic.
And there's some interesting examples here like Lego, Marvel superheroes. You can create an article breaking down all the Lego, Marvel superheroes, and the cool products and the vehicles that
they have and the outfits and all these changes that
you can end up making. And what's cool about this is you can sell them
through those articles and use affiliate links, or you can copy the same strategy. Now your business isn't Legos, but whatever your business may be, you can use the same
concept that Legos is doing to generate more sales. And it's super effective. If you look at their traffic, they get millions of visitors a month, they have millions of
backlinks, it's in very well. And the last example that I want to share with you is courses.
I used to have courses that I would sell, now I just give them away for free like I'm doing with SEO Unlocked. But one of my old paid courses were advanced marketing program. I would create a lot
of content around this, people loved it, they would consume it and I would drive paid users from my content marketing and blog posts, and then when they got into the course, there was more videos,
audio files, tutorials, and that will help people consume and learn more information. We finally come to the
end of content marketing. I want you to go to
neilpatel.com/training, if you're not already
there, go to SEO Unlocked, and under this video, what you'll find is a few sheets that'll help you get the most out of
your content marketing. One, you want to make sure your WordPress site is optimized for SEO, so make sure you download
that cheat sheet. I want you to also create
one to two customer personas, this is super important
because you have to remember, you're selling to someone eventually. And of course I want you to
create a good list of keywords.
If you don't have a good list of keywords, you're going to find that
you're going to write content that very few people are going to read. Thank you for watching, I look forward to helping you
next week grow your backlinks..
