How to 'Get Better' at Creating 'Better' Content than your Competitors

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2 years ago

Hi All,

Hope everyone is doing well.

One key skill we need to master is being able to create content on our websites that is more helpful, more engaging or more resource packed than other sites that are targeting our keywords.

We are always told to write 'better' content, but we can often be at a loss as to what 'better' content actually is.

So here's a quick tip for something practical you can do to improve your skills in this area.

Take a random search term and type it in to Google (for the purposes of writing this post I chose "How to make an omelette")

Take a look at the results, specifically the top result and one other that you'll find much further down, on say page 10+

I found at spot number 1: BBC Good Food and compared that to: Sauders Eggs which appears on Page 16 of the results.

When looking at the two sites, the main things that struck me was:

The lack of images or videos on the Sauders Egg page, whereas the BBC site has a video of someone showing you how to cook an omelette
The BBC site had information about nutrition, calories and so on which the Sauder egg site didn't
The BBC website has an active comment section at the foot of the page, the Sauder Egg site does not
The BBC site just shows you how to cook an omelette (answering the search intent of the query and nothing else) and has links to other pages on its site for specific omelette recipes, whereas the Sauder egg site lists different cheeses, meats etc that could go into an omelette on their 'how to cook' page, (so perhaps straying slightly away from the core question that was being asked)

Now imagine you were an SEO consultant advising the Sauder Egg company of things they could do to improve the usefulness of their post (which will help it to rank higher in Google) - what suggestions would you make?

Working out what your suggestions would be, improves your skill of spotting ways that content can be improved.

Two final points...

First, this exercise only needs to take a short amount of time, so you can gain a lot of value by spending just 10 minutes or so comparing two sites and;

Second, I recommend you look at sites that are relevant to your niche and those that have nothing to do with your niche. This will give you a much more rounded experience and can often generate ideas for your niche that you wouldn't otherwise have thought of.

So what do you think?

If you have a go at this exercise, why not share the 2 sites you looked at and what you thought about them and maybe others can see if they agree with your assessment?

It's one way to spend 10 minutes on a Sunday afternoon!

Best wishes

John