In episode #606, Eric and Neil discuss how you can outrank your competitors simply by copying them. Tune in to hear how and what you should be copying.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: How to Outrank Your Competitors by Copying
- [00:53] Single Grain went from 4000 visitors/month to 100,000 visitors/month by copying great ideas from his competitors.
- [01:20] Take the best techniques, posts, podcasts and spin it to make it more useful.
- [01:36] Dr. Axe is a website that crushed the competition.
- [01:58] Dr. Axe checked which of their competitors’ URLS were getting the most traffic, had the fewest backlinks, and then wrote better versions of those pages.
- [02:57] This got them to 20 Million visitors per month.
- [03:34] AHREFS is one of Eric and Neil’s favorite tools. It can do a content gap analysis, which will help you see where others are failing. Fill in that gap!
- [04:25] Neil wrote The Beginners’ Guide to Online Marketing. It cost him around $20,000 or $30,000.
- [04:51] It was a combination of the strongest pieces out there; he made it more detailed, easier to digest, and combined text with infographics to make it more appealing.
- [05:05] A lot of people are doing 10x or 100x content.
- [05:20] Think how you can apply Neil’s techniques to your product or service in your industry.
- [05:52] If you continually create new content on the same topic, Google won’t know which page to rank higher, so they won’t rank them well at all.
- [06:07] Make sure your pages are more detailed and don’t repeat content.
- [06:11] That’s all for today!
- [06:13] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
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The post How to Outrank Your Competitors by Copying | Ep. #606 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today, we're going to talk about how you can outrank your competitors by copying. I love copying. I look at everything I've done. I literally copy people. I think about the championships I win, when I play games like EverQuest. It's just because I copied some German girl. So, anyway, that's kind of digressing, but in terms of what tools I use first and foremost, and I guess we can start with the results, too. We talked about the last episode, the Single Grain blog went from 4,000 to about 100,000 a month. It did take over five years, but it's just me copying a bunch of strategies. Like I look at, "Oh, Neil's doing these epic guides. Oh, [inaudible 00:01:02] is doing this [inaudible 00:01:03] spoke piece. Oh, this 10X content from Backlinko that seems to make sense in terms of making skyscraper content."
So there's a bunch of things you can do out there but I just like listening to podcasts like this. I like reading books and then I just get a bunch of ideas out there and I just make them into my own. And then, eventually, you become a marketing genius because you copied all this stuff.
Neil Patel: Yeah, and don't worry about what people think. Yeah, you're going to have some haters out there, but that's okay. If you're winning, you're winning. That's all that matters, as long as you're not doing anything unethical. I'm not saying blatantly copy. Spin it, make it your own, of course, and don't plagiarize. The best tragedy that I've seen is from Dr. Axe. Dr. Axe is a nutrition/health/fitness website. And they crush their competition. They weren't the first in this game. They weren't the first mover, but they get over 20 million visitors a month and they're one of the largest. Someone larger than them would be like WebMD, they're that large.
What Dr. Axe did was, they went to all their competitors, and Eric and I also use this strategy for our own sites and we have been for years, it works. They went to all their competitors, they put in the competitor URLS into tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. They saw what pages are driving their competitors, mostly organic traffic. They took all of those pages, they looked at which ones had the least amount of back links, both SEMrush and Ahrefs shows you that, and they prioritized them based on, which ones get the most traffic and have the least amount of links. And all they did was take all those URLS and write better versions.
So they're like, "Oh, this page is about bananas, and it talks about the nutrition benefits of a banana. Let's rewrite it, make it better, and ten times more detailed, and include better pictures of the bananas." So instead of a 500-word article, we're now at a 1500-word article, we're triple in length. That original one barely had any links, ours has way more pictures. We're going to hit up the people that linked to it and ask them, "Hey, why not link to ours. It's more detailed and more thorough."
That simple thing, is what got them to 20 million visitors a month. It's not rocket science. You can also get a lot of data from Google Search Console. You can see what is doing well on your website right now, getting a lot of impressions, not enough clicks. But it could have a decent amount of clicks, even then you can still redo it. You look at all the keywords that you're getting impressions for, you rewrite the article, make it two/three times in length. Don't just make it longer for the sake of it but more so, make sure you're adding value. And shove in the new keywords when they fit and they make sense, and you'll find over time, your traffic goes up. That's how you outrank by just copying your competitors.
Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean, Neil talked about the tool Ahrefs, which is one of our favorite SEO tools. So Ahrefs does have, and I believe SEMrush also has this as well, you have the ability to basically do a content gap analysis. So, if I'm looking at a couple of websites, let's say we're looking at NeilPatel.com, QuikSprout, and I'm looking at content that I don't rank for. I can just look at that, see the keywords that he's ranking for, or the pages that he's ranking for that I'm not ranking for and then go out there. Now, we've talked about this in the past. You use a skyscraper technique from Brian Dean, Backlinko, which just means the same thing that Neil is talking about. You write 10X pieces of content, use a tool like BuzzSumo. You go reach out to people that have linked to this 10X content or other content out there that is very similar, and you do competitive link building.
And then, from there, you know that you've created such a good piece of content that it's going to just naturally start to outrank because he's put so much more effort into it. So Neil remember that guide you wrote for ... if you all Google Online Marketing ... remember that guy you wrote for online marketing.
Neil Patel: Yeah, Beginner's Guide to Online Marketing.
Eric Siu: How much did you spend on that?
Neil Patel: I think around ... I don't know the amount now but my guess is somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dollars. The most expensive part was the design and the coding of the design. Cause think of it as like a 30,000-word [inaudible 00:04:45]graphic.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and then it wasn't like the most original piece out there. It was a combination of the strongest things out there. You've made it even better, right?
Neil Patel: Correct. I didn't reinvent online marketing. I just took what's the best pieces out there, put them in my own words, added my own two cents, made it way more detailed and actionable, and then released it.
Eric Siu: Yeah, so here's the thing. A lot of people are doing 10X content now all the time. So what Neil did was. It's not even just 10X content, it's 100X content. Most people aren't going to go out there, spend twenty to thirty grand of their own money, and go and do something like that. So think about how Neil did that and how you can apply that to your own industry, and that's how you can rank from really, really competitive head/tail keywords.
Neil Patel: You also want to consider doing 10X content, instead of just creating more and more content. If you look at all the sites that rank on the web, Wikipedia does extremely well. When you look for any topic on Wikipedia, they only have one page per topic. You're not going to find twenty pages on Wikipedia about Abraham Lincoln. If you do, eventually they'll all be merging into one page about Abraham Lincoln. And by doing that, it ensures that they do well.
What most people are doing in blogging and they have been for years, but Google switched up their algorithm the last few years, if you continually create new content on the same topic over and over again, Google won't know which page to rank high up at top, so they usually won't rank any of the pages that well. So make sure you're not just adding tons of pages on the same topic over and over again. But instead, you're making your pages more detailed and you're continually updating them.
Eric Siu: All right. So that's it for today, but check out our marketing goodies before we go and that's at singlegrain.com/giveaway. See you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today, we're going to talk about how you can outrank your competitors by copying. I love copying. I look at everything I've done. I literally copy people. I think about the championships I win, when I play games like EverQuest. It's just because I copied some German girl. So, anyway, that's kind of digressing, but in terms of what tools I use first and foremost, and I guess we can start with the results, too. We talked about the last episode, the Single Grain blog went from 4,000 to about 100,000 a month. It did take over five years, but it's just me copying a bunch of strategies. Like I look at, "Oh, Neil's doing these epic guides. Oh, [inaudible 00:01:02] is doing this [inaudible 00:01:03] spoke piece. Oh, this 10X content from Backlinko that seems to make sense in terms of making skyscraper content."
So there's a bunch of things you can do out there but I just like listening to podcasts like this. I like reading books and then I just get a bunch of ideas out there and I just make them into my own. And then, eventually, you become a marketing genius because you copied all this stuff.
Neil Patel: Yeah, and don't worry about what people think. Yeah, you're going to have some haters out there, but that's okay. If you're winning, you're winning. That's all that matters, as long as you're not doing anything unethical. I'm not saying blatantly copy. Spin it, make it your own, of course, and don't plagiarize. The best tragedy that I've seen is from Dr. Axe. Dr. Axe is a nutrition/health/fitness website. And they crush their competition. They weren't the first in this game. They weren't the first mover, but they get over 20 million visitors a month and they're one of the largest. Someone larger than them would be like WebMD, they're that large.
What Dr. Axe did was, they went to all their competitors, and Eric and I also use this strategy for our own sites and we have been for years, it works. They went to all their competitors, they put in the competitor URLS into tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. They saw what pages are driving their competitors, mostly organic traffic. They took all of those pages, they looked at which ones had the least amount of back links, both SEMrush and Ahrefs shows you that, and they prioritized them based on, which ones get the most traffic and have the least amount of links. And all they did was take all those URLS and write better versions.
So they're like, "Oh, this page is about bananas, and it talks about the nutrition benefits of a banana. Let's rewrite it, make it better, and ten times more detailed, and include better pictures of the bananas." So instead of a 500-word article, we're now at a 1500-word article, we're triple in length. That original one barely had any links, ours has way more pictures. We're going to hit up the people that linked to it and ask them, "Hey, why not link to ours. It's more detailed and more thorough."
That simple thing, is what got them to 20 million visitors a month. It's not rocket science. You can also get a lot of data from Google Search Console. You can see what is doing well on your website right now, getting a lot of impressions, not enough clicks. But it could have a decent amount of clicks, even then you can still redo it. You look at all the keywords that you're getting impressions for, you rewrite the article, make it two/three times in length. Don't just make it longer for the sake of it but more so, make sure you're adding value. And shove in the new keywords when they fit and they make sense, and you'll find over time, your traffic goes up. That's how you outrank by just copying your competitors.
Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean, Neil talked about the tool Ahrefs, which is one of our favorite SEO tools. So Ahrefs does have, and I believe SEMrush also has this as well, you have the ability to basically do a content gap analysis. So, if I'm looking at a couple of websites, let's say we're looking at NeilPatel.com, QuikSprout, and I'm looking at content that I don't rank for. I can just look at that, see the keywords that he's ranking for, or the pages that he's ranking for that I'm not ranking for and then go out there. Now, we've talked about this in the past. You use a skyscraper technique from Brian Dean, Backlinko, which just means the same thing that Neil is talking about. You write 10X pieces of content, use a tool like BuzzSumo. You go reach out to people that have linked to this 10X content or other content out there that is very similar, and you do competitive link building.
And then, from there, you know that you've created such a good piece of content that it's going to just naturally start to outrank because he's put so much more effort into it. So Neil remember that guide you wrote for ... if you all Google Online Marketing ... remember that guy you wrote for online marketing.
Neil Patel: Yeah, Beginner's Guide to Online Marketing.
Eric Siu: How much did you spend on that?
Neil Patel: I think around ... I don't know the amount now but my guess is somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand dollars. The most expensive part was the design and the coding of the design. Cause think of it as like a 30,000-word [inaudible 00:04:45]graphic.
Eric Siu: Yeah, and then it wasn't like the most original piece out there. It was a combination of the strongest things out there. You've made it even better, right?
Neil Patel: Correct. I didn't reinvent online marketing. I just took what's the best pieces out there, put them in my own words, added my own two cents, made it way more detailed and actionable, and then released it.
Eric Siu: Yeah, so here's the thing. A lot of people are doing 10X content now all the time. So what Neil did was. It's not even just 10X content, it's 100X content. Most people aren't going to go out there, spend twenty to thirty grand of their own money, and go and do something like that. So think about how Neil did that and how you can apply that to your own industry, and that's how you can rank from really, really competitive head/tail keywords.
Neil Patel: You also want to consider doing 10X content, instead of just creating more and more content. If you look at all the sites that rank on the web, Wikipedia does extremely well. When you look for any topic on Wikipedia, they only have one page per topic. You're not going to find twenty pages on Wikipedia about Abraham Lincoln. If you do, eventually they'll all be merging into one page about Abraham Lincoln. And by doing that, it ensures that they do well.
What most people are doing in blogging and they have been for years, but Google switched up their algorithm the last few years, if you continually create new content on the same topic over and over again, Google won't know which page to rank high up at top, so they usually won't rank any of the pages that well. So make sure you're not just adding tons of pages on the same topic over and over again. But instead, you're making your pages more detailed and you're continually updating them.
Eric Siu: All right. So that's it for today, but check out our marketing goodies before we go and that's at singlegrain.com/giveaway. See you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
