#071 Content Marketing VIP Newsletter
When analyzing top-ranking pages in the SERP, replace 'word count' with 'content depth' of each page.
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🎯 Actionable Insights
💡 1. How to do a site-level SEO competitor analysis?
Here's a guide on how to do a site-level analysis of your competitors to:
understand strengths
steal strategies
find areas of improvement/opportunities
Let's get started.
0/ Identify true competitor
Not every offline competitors are your true SEO competitor.
Start typing head terms in Google and see which pages/sites rank at the top. Do this for other search terms.
Give more focus on niche-specific sites.
1/ Top sub-folders
Find top sub-folders by traffic will give you insights about:
- top keywords
- content strategy
An example is → "ironcladapp. com/journal/"
When you look at the top keywords & articles, you will find opportunities to create glossary term pages.
This is why Ironclad has built an extensive glossary hub dealing with broad search terms such as:
Non-disclosure agreement (54,000 SV)
Contract management (2,600 SV)
Executed contract (3,600 SV)
Contract review (450 SV) & many more.
2/ Website structure
Understanding site structure and internal linking strategy of competitors will help you:
prioritize pages
create a better information architecture
Find opportunities for content hub
Analyze your competitor's site using screaming frog and check the following reports:
- Force-directed crawl diagram
- Directory tree graph
Here’s an example from analyzing Zapier. com will give insights about different content hubs and internal link strategies.
3/ Site navigation
Your competitors will generally put the most important pages in the site navigation.
Understand the type of pages listed in the header/footer.
- what type of service/product pages are added?
- are any articles/resources in the nav?
- found any content hub?
4/ Topical coverage
Google prefers sites that cover a topic in-depth.
Look at the number of indexed pages for a topic. The higher, the better.
Look at the blog category pages to find the depth.
Or, use the google search operator like this:
Site:[add your competitor’s domain] intitle:[type your head term]
5/ Third-party reviews
Google evaluates brand reputation by looking at third-party reviews about a website/brand.
Have an overview of how credible and reputable your SEO competitors are.
Here's how to do that using the google search:
[XYZ] reviews -site:xyz. com
This will show you the list of independent review pages about your competitor.
6/ Top pages by link growth
Identify page types that consistently drives backlink to your competitors.
Chances are you will find ideas for creating linkable assets.
Put your competitor's domain in Ahrefs & see what type of pages consistently acquire links over 30 days.
For example, VantageCircle is consistently getting links to 'quotes' pages.
So a brand in the same niche can try following a similar approach.
Quick recap:
0/ find competitors
1/ top sub-folders
2/ study website structure
3/ analyze site navigation elements
4/ topical coverage
5/ third-party reviews
6/ Find top pages by link growth
👉 Access content marketing VIP club to access SEO strategy breakdowns and in-depth guides.
💡 2. Two Metrics of Quality Content and How to Improve Them
We all have heard this SEO tip: "Create QUALITY content."
But the way you define the content quality is equally important.
Here are my top 2 elements to assess the content quality.
Searcher intent
Time to Value
Let me explain with examples.
1/ Searcher Intent: It is the WHY of the users.
Example:
The intent behind the search term 'top smartphones of 2022' is that the user is looking for a list of smartphones with detailed comparisons (price, reviews, brand, pros, cons, etc.).
So pages created with this intent will have a higher chance of ranking on the first page.
The below screenshot is from one of the top ranking pages for the exact search term:
Best way to understand the intent?
It's by looking at the SERP for the search query.
Look at the top 10 pages to understand the page type, user's needs, content structure, etc.
Identify the key differences between the top 5 pages and the next 5 pages (6th-10th pos.)
2/ The next element of quality content is: Time-to-value
That means how fast and easy it is for the reader to find the important information on the page.
Here's an example 👇
An article about '10 Key Elements of a Successful Creative Brief' has the following content structure.
Intro (320+ words)
List of elements
Here, the time to value is high (as the reader will have to go through the lengthy intro to find the imp. information)
Note: Your goal should be to make the time to value as low as possible.
That means readers should pull out the important information as quickly as possible.
A few common things that you may consider for lowering the time to value are:
Short, clear introduction about the purpose of the page
Add TOC in the above-the-fold
👉 Access content marketing VIP club to access SEO strategy breakdowns and in-depth guides.
💬 Bite-sized Insights
💡 1. Blog design best practices by Ross Hudgens
These are blog design best practices:
Font size of 18px+ for readability
Column width under 100 characters for readability
Blog inherits the main navigation for SEO/shopping
“Quick Answer” area to offer article TL;DR for users/Google
Small hero above the fold for a pop of color + optimal site speed
NerdWallet does a killer job with all the essentials, which is a big reason they perform the way they do.
If you want to win with content marketing, your content experience has to be dialed in.” – Ross Hudgens.
🗓️ Learning Resources and Tools
💡 1. The Local SEO Cheat Sheet [Free PDF Download]
Want to improve the local SEO aspect of your online business?
Check out this 5-page cheat sheet (PDF) that covers:
Basic website checklist for a local business
Technical SEO checklist
Planning a local brand reputation strategy
Content tips for structured citations and more.
👉 Download the local SEO cheat sheet (PDF) - by Moz
💡 2. Detect AI content with GLTR, an AI content detector
During Google’s helpful content update, we have seen many content sites negatively affected, mostly because of AI-written content.
But how easy is it to detect whether a blog post is written by an AI tool or a human?
This week, Kevin Indig shared two tools that will help you detect AI content
GLTR (free to try)
Huggingface’s GPT-2 Output Detector
Here’s the screenshot:
👉 Read the full case study here (by Kevin Indig)