9-Step Cheat Sheet to Stealing Your Competition’s Best Content Ideas

For example, if they’re ranking for a keyword like “email marketing,” try to rank for a less difficult one, like “email campaign.” You also need to run a social media audit on your competitors. How often do they post it? Once you’ve analyzed the sites of your top competitors, you should have a list of tons of topics that you can write about that have performed well in the past. You can use existing images from other brands, but be sure you include a link to the page that you found the image on. Once you’ve completed your image, download it and add it into your blog post or e-book. Link to all of the other posts that you used as resources within your new content. Once you’ve created some killer content, the final step is to reach out to people who have linked to similar pieces of content in the past (AKA content from your competitors). Then, identify a contact at each company that you can email to let them know that you’ve created a similar piece of content that’s new, improved, and updated. Just ask them to link to your content instead. To get started, understand that there are four different kinds of competitors: direct competitors, indirect competitors, replacement competitors, and SERP competitors.

competition content stealing cheat sheet

Creating quality content that people want to share is the best way to boost your brand’s growth.

If people want to read, view, share and talk about what you’re putting out, you’re sure to see tons of traffic, increased sales, and higher engagement.

But how many times have you spent hours on an article (or another piece of content) only to see it go absolutely nowhere? It isn’t getting the clicks, shares, or comments that you’d hoped for.

Meanwhile, your competition is thriving. That’s why it’s time to steal your competition’s best content ideas (while simultaneously learning from their mistakes).

You obviously shouldn’t ever plagiarize content. However, it’s important to recognize that it’s hard to come up with completely original content ideas in today’s online world.

You might think you’ve thought of something “new,” but it’s probably already been done before.

That’s why you need to use your competition’s content as inspiration to create something even better.

Here’s a nine-step cheat sheet to stealing your competition’s best ideas.

To get started, you need to understand the different types of competitors.

1. Understand the different types of competitors

Your competitors can be divided up into four different categories.

The three most common categories are direct competitors, indirect competitors, and replacement competitors.

Direct competitors are the competitors that are the most obvious. They offer products and services that are more or less the same as yours.

Examples of direct competitors include Walmart and Target, Microsoft and Apple, or Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

Indirect competitors are businesses that sell the same products as you but also specialize in other areas.

Examples of indirect competitors are McDonald’s and Applebees or Nike and Timberland.

McDonald’s and Applebees are both restaurant chains, but McDonald’s is a fast-food chain while Applebees is a bar-and-grill chain.

Nike and Timberland are both shoe brands, but Nike is an athletic shoe brand while Timberland is an outdoor footwear brand.

Indirect competitors are usually harder to identify than direct competitors.

Replacement competitors are even harder to recognize.

These competitors don’t have to offer the exact same products or services as you do, but they do compete for the same customer base.

For example, mobile phones are a completely different market than digital cameras.

But phone manufacturers like Samsung became competitors with camera brands like Canon or Nikon as soon as they began including cameras on their phones.

If you want to identify direct, indirect, and replacement competitors, you need to do some audience research.

Try some social-listening tools like Hootsuite or Social Studio to get started.

You can even run some customer surveys. Google Consumer Surveys are a great resource.

This allow you to create custom questions and selections for each answer and then send them out to your current customers.

You can even have customers answer questions to your survey in exchange to access premium content or Google Play credits.

SERP competitors are the fourth category of competitor. SERP competitors are the sites ranking for the keywords that you’re currently trying to rank for.

They’re taking up space for the top rankings that you want and need. They can be any type of site, like a Wikipedia page or an article from a news site.

These competitors are funneling SERP traffic from you that you need in order to get more traffic. So you need to identify them and beat them as fast as possible.

Once you’ve found the keywords you want to target, find out who’s ranking above you for each one.

Use an SEO tool like Moz’s Open Site Explorer to find out exactly how your SERP competitors are ranking higher than you.

Next, you need to do even more sleuthing.

3. Use SimilarWeb to find out whether competitors are paying for traffic

You need to know the down low about how competitors are getting attention online.

Luckily, there are tons of tools out there that can help you find out how your competition is driving traffic and getting people to pay attention to them.

Some of your competitors are paying for their traffic.

SimilarWeb can help you find out which ones. The tool can also show you the source of the traffic, along with any keywords that your competition is currently ranking for.

Just enter your competitor’s URL to get a free report on any website or app.

Then, you’ll be able to get huge insights into their traffic, including total visits, the average visit duration, pages per visit, and their bounce rate.

Once you find out which competitors are paying to get to the top of the charts, you’ll know the goals that you need to meet to rank even higher than them.

Next, look at their SEO strategy and figure out how you can mimic it.

4. Take a look at their SEO strategy

You already know which keywords your competition is targeting thanks to SimilarWeb.

Now, you need to start trying to rank for the keywords that they aren’t ranking for yet.

The easiest way to do this is to use the exact same strategy that they’ve already used to rank high.

If you use the same successful SEO strategy that they used, you’ll be ranking just as well as they are, but for different keywords, in no time.

Rank for the keywords that your competitors have ignored to get ahead of them.

Find out which paid keywords and organic keywords your competitors are ranking for with a tool like SEMrush.

The tool shows you the exact SEO strategy that your competition is using by revealing which keywords are paid and which ones are organic.

Then, simply try to rank for similar keywords that aren’t on the list.

For example, if they’re ranking for a keyword like “email marketing,” try to rank for a less difficult one, like “email campaign.”

You also need to run a social media audit on your competitors.

5. Run a social media audit

Social media networks are a great place to share existing content and post new content.

They’re also an effective place to generate new leads or nurture the ones you already have.

Google also collects social signals from social media pages that can affect rankings.

That means that the number of Facebook shares or likes that your posts get can actually affect SERP results.

The same applies to your competitors. Run social media audits on your competitors for all of their accounts. Here’s what to look for on each platform.

Twitter:

Look at their recent posts. How many retweets do they usually get?
Do they use images or video in their tweets? What about hashtags? Which hashtags are they using?
Are they adding calls to action (CTAs) to their tweets?
How many followers do they have?
How many accounts are they following?
What does their bio look like?

Facebook: