In this post I’ll show three ways to “spy” on your competitors to find out what’s the most popular content on their sites.
Tactic #1: Facebook Recommendations Tool
Go to this website and enter your competitor’s URL in the “Domain” field as shown in the picture. Facebook’s Recommendation Tool will show you their most popular content. Make sure you change the “Height” to 1,500 or more so you can see more results.
Tactic #2: Open Site Explorer’s Top Pages
Go to OpenSiteExplorer.org. Enter your competitor’s URL and click on “Top Pages”. Click on the link on the top-right corner that says “Download CSV”. Open the file you exported using Excel. In Excel go to Data > Filter. Now you’re going to filter only URLs with the word “blog” as shown in the picture below.
The results will be sorted by domain authority, meaning that the results at the top of the list are the most relevant ones.
Tactic #3: Check Out their Blogs
These are some sneaky ways to spy on your competitors:
- Try this advanced Google query (replace “search engine optimization” with your top keyword):
Look for something like this in the sidebar:
- Look at social signals, such as number of comments, number of Facebook likes and shares, and retweets.
Important Tip: Don’t Copy Your Competitors
Analyzing what’s working for your competitors and using that as inspiration for ideas is great. Doing exactly what your competitors are doing isn’t. Take a look at what’s working in your industry, find patterns and then create the best content the world has ever seen. In my next blog post I’ll be sharing some great tools to create phenomenal content with very little effort. Stay tuned! And, don’t forget to sign up for the Remarketing Tutorial Webinar taking place this Thursday. Remarketing is, in my opinion, the marketing tool of the future. This is THE webinar you don’t want to miss. See you there!
