Timothy Carter

When it comes to SEO, everyone aims for the same thing: to get to the top of the search engines results page. Google shows 10 search results per page and the higher you are on that list, the more people find your website.  But some searches produce featured snippets that float above the other 10 website listings. We call this position zero, and in this post we will explain what it is and how you can rank for it.  What is Position Zero? Position zero is a featured snippet that appears above the traditional search engine results. Here’s an example: Usually, it is a direct answer to a search query. Featured snippets pull information directly from websites for convenience. That way, viewers get their answer at a glance. Then they can learn more by visiting the website. Featured Snippets stand out not only because they sit above the rest of the search results but because they are encased by borders. It’s Google’s way of saying this is the golden SERP spot. Featured snippets usually contain one listing, but in some cases they contain more than one. Why Aim for Position Zero? Now that you know what position zero is, let’s discuss why you should try to rank for it.  In many ways, trying to get your web pages to list at position zero is a no brainer. Who doesn’t want to be at the top of the search engine results page? But to appreciate the full impact of reaching position zero, consider the following: Position zero drives traffic. Plain and simple. The amount of web traffic you gain simply by being the top search result cannot be overstated. When position zero was first introduced, many webmasters feared it would lead to less traffic because searchers can get the information they need without clicking. But that didn’t happen. Viewers click on featured snippet websites more because they trust the site faster and want to learn more.  Position Zero helps you appear on voice searches. These days, people use smart technology more than ever. Voice Assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa are commonplace in many homes. And smartphones all have voice search capability. Ranking for position zero often means your web page is the voice search answer to a given question. So it makes sense to target featured snippets even if it’s just for voice search visibility.  12% of search results contain position zero results. Not every search query has a featured snippet, but 12% is a substantial amount. There are ample and often overlooked opportunities in position zero listings. Most featured snippets come in the form of instructions, recipes, and answers to how-to questions. In short, you’re more likely to capture a position zero result with a question/answer piece of content.  Position zero snippets steal traffic from other top search results. At the end of the day, position zero claims a significant amount of traffic on SERPs. If you let competitors rank for position zero, they will take that traffic away from you. Featured snippets simply subordinate all other search results.  When it comes to ranking in search engines, it simply doesn’t get any better than position zero. But most don’t know about it. It’s a little understood hidden gem waiting to be capitalized on.  How to Get to Position Zero The tricky part is earning the featured snippet position. While there is no simple method, the following tips will help you get you on the right track. Featured Snippet Forms First of all, featured snippets come in three main forms: paragraphs, lists, tables, and videos.  A paragraph snippet usually answers a question objectively and succinctly. A paragraph snippet typically gives a definition or a brief bit of information on a topic like why we dream while sleeping, for example. You should know that Google gives preference to answers with 40 to 50 words. This is relatively short. So if your answer to the target keyword is much longer, don’t count on it as position zero candidate.  As the name suggests, a list snippet is formatted as a list, whether bulleted or numbered, ordered or unordered, ranked or unranked. Often, list snippets show steps to a process or rank things like the richest people in the world, for example. They are ideal for featured snippets because they provide easily digestible information.  Table snippets are similar to list snippets, except they have rows and columns. So in a way, they can offer even more information at a glance. Examples of table snippets include the cost of living in Texas or the superbowl scores.  Finally, video snippets are video segment previews taken directly from YouTube. Google even timestamps the portion of the video that applies to the searched keyword. That way, you can cut straight to the chase if you choose to click play. To rank for a video snippet, make sure the video includes a voiceover or transcript because Google uses them to generate featured video snippets. Though not as common as other forms, video snippets can be a good way to attract traffic to your site.  No matter what kind of featured snippet content you aim for, it’s important to format it as either a paragraph, list, table, or video. Paragraph snippets are by far the most common kind of featured snippet, but list and table snippets make up a considerable amount, too. Featured Snippet Content Types In addition to its different forms, featured snippets contain different types of content. Here are the most common types of content you will find:  An answer to one of the 5W questions (Who, What, When, Where, and Why). When people have a question and want a quick answer, they just type the question into the search engine. Google knows this. So they curate featured snippets that most directly answer the question. Come up with 5W questions relevant to your product and you can direct more search traffic to your site. A how-to tutorial. These days, you can learn how to do just

Google is the king of search. In the web’s early days, competitors were commonplace. But today, around two-thirds of all searches are performed on Google, and the remaining few have either consolidated or dissolved. As a result, most search marketers only focus their efforts on Google rankings. The New York Times describes the power of Google’s index and some of the other reasons for Google’s search dominance: In 2000, just two years after it was founded, Google reached a milestone that would lay the foundation for its dominance over the next 20 years: It became the world’s largest search engine, with an index of more than one billion web pages… …Every Google search request provides Google with more data to make its search algorithm smarter. Google has performed so many more searches than any other or private search engine that it has established a huge advantage over rivals in understanding what consumers are looking for. That lead only continues to widen, since Google has a market share of about 90 percent. Google directs billions of users to locations across the internet, and websites, hungry for that traffic, create a different set of rules for the company. Websites often provide greater and more frequent access to Google’s so-called web crawlers — computers that automatically scour the internet and scan web pages — allowing the company to offer a more extensive and up-to-date index of what is available on the internet. It is estimated that Google has some 600 billion web pages indexed. The next closest is Bing with a mere fraction at 100 to 200 Billion. Is it any wonder why Google still dominates. The rest of the internet never caught up, and Google’s index just kept on getting bigger. However, the Internet is becoming more open, and despite the tiny amount of attention they seem to be generating, there are new (and even legacy) competitors vying to give Google a run for its money. As a search marketer, it’s probably not (yet) worth adjusting your strategy just to fit in with these new search engine or private search engine alternative or other Google alternatives—at least not yet. But it is worthwhile to learn what these competitors are up to, and why they’re putting up the effort. Knowing the landscape of the competition could prepare you for the rise of a new major search rival, or perhaps the absorption of their expertise into Google’s juggernaut algorithm. Google Flaws Justify Alternative Search Options Google and search are basically synonymous at this point. And while you should be tailoring your SEO and digital marketing strategy to Google, there’s also something to be said for untethering yourself as much as possible. Google has numerous issues, including: Privacy. This is by far the biggest strike against Google. While they may put on a good face, the truth is that Google does not prioritize the privacy of its users in any shape, form, or fashion. In fact, it’s the absence of privacy that allows them to be so successful. You’d be shocked by how much data Google has on you. And when the general public becomes more aware of this, a reckoning could come. Censorship. The bigger Google gets, the more it finds itself in a position to censor certain content. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with censoring illicit content. However, the fact that Google spends so much time studying censorship and has developed such robust technology around it that scares people from wondering how it could be used in the future. Limited capabilities. As sleek and advanced as Google is, it’s really quite limiting for those who want to run technical queries. If you’re trying to run highly technical searches and search the deep web, you’ll need alternative search engines or private search engines. There are dozens of other issues and problems, but most of them fall under one of these three categories. And eventually, once the search industry gains some worthy competitors, people will begin to realize that Google isn’t all that it seems. At this point, healthy competition will follow. And it’s a good idea to be prepared for this shift by already having a basic understanding of what’s out there. 19 Popular Search Engine Alternatives You Should Know Again, Google should certainly be the focus of any SEO, Google search alternatives or other Google alternatives and search strategy, but savvy business owners and marketers should at least be aware of what else exists. As things stand today, these are the most worthy alternative search engines on the web: ChatGPT Recently deemed as the Google Killer, ChatGPT is a great alternative to Google search because it offers a significantly more intuitive experience for finding information. Unlike traditional search engines, ChatGPT uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to understand the context of your query and provide you with more accurate results. This means that instead of searching through countless web pages, users can simply type their query as if they were talking to a friend and ChatGPT will understand the intent of their questions. In fact, Microsoft’s Bing, which we mention below as another good alternative to Google, has indicated that they will likely be integrating ChatGPT to their search engine after a sizeable investment in ChatGPT parent OpenAI. Additionally, ChatGPT is able to provide recommendations based on your past searches making it easier for you to find what you’re looking for even faster. With its smarter search results and better user experience, ChatGPT has become an invaluable tool in helping people find the information they need. Whether you are looking for a specific answer to a tricky question or just browsing for interesting articles, ChatGPT can help make your search easier and more effective. Google’s response to the potential challenge of ChatGPT is a more “grown-up” version of artificial intelligence called DeepMind. Search.co Our very own custom-developed ChatGPT tool is available at SEARCH.co. We developed SEARCH.co in-house to give users a means of accessing specific features available with artificial intelligence,

We all know, but sometimes forget that every website we visit looks a lot different on the back end than it does on the front end. We usually see a beautiful, inviting layout with some of the best content this website owner has to offer. But on the back end is an unintuitive, sometimes jarring smattering of computer code. If you’re familiar with HTML, or any modern programming language, you might be able to parse this, at least slightly – but even the most experienced programmers out there would probably admit it’s easier to understand and engage with a website without this code complicating things. For most people, this is the case. But the web isn’t just about “most people.” We also need to think about people with disabilities. And believe it or not, we also need to think about bots. Even though most people will never see or interact with it, the semantic HTML on the back end of your website can have a meaningful impact on your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and make your site more accessible and navigable for millions of people. So what exactly is semantic HTML? And why is it so important? What Is Semantic HTML? Before we can understand semantic HTML, we need to understand HTML. Hypertext Markup Language (HMTL) is the standard markup language for any materials that are designed to be displayed in web browsers. In other words, it’s a system of scripting and tagging that makes it easier for websites to be interpreted and displayed by web browsers. By default, these browsers don’t display HTML tags; instead, these are featured and processed only on the back end. HTML tags are indispensable in building web pages, and you can use them to deliver specific content assets, provide structure, and even include scripts to influence how the web page is processed and used. Semantic HTML is a strategy of intentionally using HTML tags to offer meaningful descriptions of content on your website. When reviewed, these descriptive HTML tags provide context to help crawlers and bots “understand” the purpose and structure of your website. Semantic HTML elements, while arguably unnecessary for your page to be a minimum viable, functioning product, are incredibly useful for keeping things organized and described in accessible language. It’s perhaps easiest to understand semantic HTML in relation to non-semantic HTML: non-semantic HTML tags like <div> and <span> are used to hold content, but they provide no meaningful descriptions of the relevance or meaning of that content. A website without semantic HTML might have all its content housed with these two tags. In contrast, a website with semantic HTML would use a wide variety of tags and elements to appropriately structure and organize that content. Why Does Semantic HTML Matter? Why should you care about semantic HTML? Well, for starters, it makes the lives of designers and developers much easier. When you look at the HTML code of a website, semantic HTML tags make it incredibly easy to parse. You can see how the author of the website wanted the content to be organized, and even find helpful descriptions about the types of content that are offered. Think of it like a book with an in-depth table of contents, clear chapter titles, bookmarks to flag important sections, and highlighted words throughout the text; it would be much easier to read this book than a book with all of the same text, but no real formatting for navigability or readability. Second, semantic HTML is a way of making your structure, hierarchy, and context clear for bots that crawl your website. Already, you’re probably thinking of the SEO implications; semantic HTML may not be a Google ranking factor, as we’ll see, but it can be valuable in ensuring your website is crawled, indexed, “understood,” and displayed appropriately by Google and other search engines. Depending on your goals, and how you use semantic HTML, this could be a strategy for improving the relevance of specific pieces of content for specific keywords and phrases, changing how your web content is viewed or displayed, or making your best content available in search engine results pages (SERPs). Third, semantic HTML elements can make it easier for people with certain types of disabilities to consume your content and browse your website. For example, people with visual impairments may not be able to see the photos on your website, but they may have software that allows them to read/hear a description of the alt text that describes what’s happening in the photo. To this end, mastering the art of semantic HTML makes your website more accessible. Semantic HTML Elements Semantic HTML can be used across a wide range of elements, including: Header tags (H1-H6). Headings are used to establish a hierarchy with clear labels, and can be used to describe the content included in a given section. The <h1> tag is the most important, with <h6> being the least important. Onsite SEO best practices typically dictate optimizing these header tags with meaningful descriptions – and target keywords. Paragraph tags (<p>). This HTML element is used to represent a block of text. It defines a paragraph for web crawlers. Lists (<ul>/<ol>). Lists can also be used to organize content with unordered and ordered list elements. You can also use <li> to define individual list items. Tables (<table>). While you’re organizing data, you can use the <table> element to create a table, with descriptions for rows (<tr>), columns (<th>), and individual data cells (<td>). Images (<img>). As you can guess, <img> allows you to describe and provide context for photos and graphics. With the alt attribute, you can describe what’s contained in the image, which is especially important for visually impaired users. Articles (<article>). All your news stories, blog posts, and other types of reusable content can be marked with the <article> element. Sections (<section>). These tags allow you to establish different components of a cohesive piece of content, such as chapters of a bigger document. Links or anchors

While their breadcrumbs trail didn’t work out so well in Hansel and Gretel, they work exceedingly well in helping visitors and search engine bots from getting lost while wading through your website. Not only do they make your website more accessible in Google search results, but they also have some implications to your SEO that may prove beneficial enough to take the small amount of time required to implement breadcrumbs. Let’s explore the different types of breadcrumbs, how you might use them and their various implications in terms of how they might prove beneficial to your SEO efforts. What Are Breadcrumbs? Breadcrumbs allow a user to retrace their steps from your home page to the web page that they’re currently viewing. A breadcrumb trail can reflect the structure of your website, a logical path or attributes of the current page. When used properly, they can add context to your innermost web pages while reducing many of the factors that might negatively affect your site’s SEO, such as your bounce rate. The Types of Breadcrumbs While there are many variations of breadcrumbs and breadcrumb schema markup, they generally fall into one of the three following types: 1. Location Breadcrumbs – These are breadcrumbs that trace back through the different layers of your website. Following one of these breadcrumbs will allow users to visit a page that plays host to similar pages in the same category.An example of hierarchy based breadcrumbs would be: Home > Law > Finances > Bankruptcy Information. 2. Path Breadcrumbs – This type of breadcrumb trail represents the various logical paths that a user could use to reach a page. That means multiple breadcrumbs can lead to the same page. 3. Attribute or Keyword Breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs of this nature follow a similar path as described by location breadcrumbs. The difference is that instead of using something like the page title or another unique identifier, keywords and attributes that describe the page are used. Technical support pages and e-commerce websites are two of the more common places where this breadcrumb is used. The last two types of SEO breadcrumbs can result in duplicate breadcrumbs, which may have a negative impact on how search engines interpret your website’s SEO attempts. If this is the case, then opt for location-based breadcrumbs. The Advantages of Breadcrumbs for Users Breadcrumbs are an essential part of helping users understand how your website works. They encourage positive actions, such as delving deeper into your website to look for other pages that will likely interest them in some way. When users undergo such positive actions, they reduce the negative factors like your website’s bounce rate. This helps your pages rank higher in SERPs. Below is a brief list of all the things that breadcrumbs can do for you website’s users: They help users understand the layout of your website. This makes breadcrumb navigation links one level higher to find similar content while staying on your website. They’re completely optional. They won’t overwhelm users that don’t want to use them, nor will they detract from your page due to their compact nature. They allow users to scan through your website and to view more content at a faster rate. They’re easy to implement and can be understood regardless of a user’s education, professional background or technical knowledge. The Advantages of Breadcrumbs for SEO Despite their numerous benefits for visitors, attribute based breadcrumbs have a number of advantages when it comes to search engines. Breadcrumb structured data can pass on context to the inner and outer pages of your website in a natural and logical way that search engines love. Here’s a brief list of what breadcrumbs can do to improve your SEO: They can point keywords to certain pages while helping search engines to see how one page relates to another on your website. When used in a hierarchy, this improves SEO done to both your category pages and your innermost pages. They reinforce and improve your website’s internal linking site structure. Pairing breadcrumbs with contextual linking to other related pages will result in larger gains when off-site SEO is applied. Schemas can be used to describe them. This allows Google and other advanced search engines to understand that what their robots are looking at is a breadcrumb, which in turn allows for additional functionality like the display of breadcrumbs in SERPs to become available. This can facilitate more users browsing your website’s inner pages. Optimizing Breadcrumbs for SEO Optimizing your breadcrumbs for SEO is a tedious balancing act. Too much optimization can result in over-optimization penalties, but there is no real penalty for “under-optimizing” so long as your breadcrumb structure remains intelligent. When optimizing for keywords, you should follow a structure similar to the one below: A link to your home page using your website’s main keyword > Your main keyword followed by a category keyword > Your main keyword with a keyword that describes the page the user is on As discussed earlier, it may be advantageous to omit certain parts to avoid over-optimizing. For example, it’s fine to just leave the category part as a single keyword or phrase that describes the category. Additional Tips for Usable Breadcrumbs Not all breadcrumbs are created equally, nor do they all perform as well. Below is a small list of tips that will help you ensure your breadcrumbs are friendly towards both users and search engines. If you add breadcrumbs with the right schema markup, then you can use almost any kind of styling when it comes to your breadcrumbs. It may be advantageous to style your breadcrumbs in a way that makes them appealing for visitors to use. If you can, use a plugin like Yoast SEO to quickly incorporate breadcrumbs schema markup. Don’t rely solely on your breadcrumbs. As Hansel and Gretel would likely say, relying on just breadcrumbs is a dangerous and fool-hardy move. Don’t replace the vital parts of your website like your navigation and internal linking with breadcrumbs, but do

Achieving true link building services at scale (and eventually improved rank in search engines) only happens after you reach the organic traffic tipping point. It’s the coveted position where your quality content achieves enough SERP visibility that you start to receive regular inbound links as a reward for your hard work. But this isn’t something that occurs just after a few months of effort. Scaling your link building to the point that you receive daily, quality inbound links from other bloggers can take years. There needs to be a consistent purpose in order to enjoy sustainable results. More specifically, quality backlinks at scale should be the aim of every webmaster. But building truly natural backlinks at scale can be time-intensive and expensive. In this blog post we discuss: the difficulties in scaling link building and how to scale your broken link building with a great (internal or outsourced) team. Let’s get at it! Is Your Link Building Stale? When you first launch a link building strategy for your website, it’s easy to see progress. Each step feels like you’re taking a giant leap toward something exciting and opportunistic. You go from zero backlinks to 10 backlinks – all the way up to 100! Your efforts are being rewarded and the data is there to support your expensive and time-consuming investment. Then, rather suddenly, it all slows down. It’s not that you’re moving in the wrong direction, but just that you aren’t making any significant gains. At some point, every business finds itself in a build-links rut where the underlying strategy becomes stale, repetitive, and low-returning. Nothing seems to work and the excitement of progress wears thin. The competition is surpassing you and all of those little techniques you were using so successfully six months ago no longer seem to provide much of a jolt. Listen…we’ve all been there. Every business finds itself in a marketing rut from time to time. And if you’re truly invested a link building strategies, you’ll reach a point where you feel like you’re treading water. The first step is to recognize that this is where you are. The second step is to create scalable systems and structures that help you break out of the rut. 6 Ways to Scale Up Your Link Building Scalable relationship-build links is a sexy term that rolls off the tongue and instantly makes you sound smart, but what does it mean? It means getting more consistent high-quality links built to your website: Most people have an incorrect view of what scalable Backlinking is. As digital marketing expert Geoff Kenyon explains, the majority of businesses and marketers try to find a way to transform Backlinking into a process and scale link building the production of that product. But this almost always leads to something gimmicky and unsustainable – like automated directories, link networks, comment and forum spam, the purchase of sidebar few links, and automated social bookmarking. While there’s a time and place for trying new things, the truth is that the staples of link-building have remained relatively consistent over the years and will continue to be predictable in the foreseeable future. If you’re failing at scaling different link-building products, then perhaps you need to be scaling your link-building processes, perhaps using a productized method of SEO sprints. A good goal would be to identify the biggest pain points in your current (manual) link-building process and to improve and streamline it wherever possible. If nothing else, you should be on the lookout for opportunities to spend your time and creative energy more wisely. For some brands – perhaps yours included – this looks like this: 1. Create More Linkable Assets Content is the foundation of any good link building campaign. This sounds rather elementary – and it is – but it’s amazing how many brands take shortcuts and invests in link-building without first establishing an inventory of quality content. In order to generate links, you need linkable assets. Every brand’s linkable assets will look different, but there are certain elements and characteristics that define this type of content: Content should be evergreen and timeless, so as to continue providing value long after publication. Content should be relevant to your target market. Linkable assets should be visually pleasing. Written content still works, but it should be formatted and supplemented in a way that appeals to visual thinkers. Focus on link bait type articles (e.g. common statistics, listicles, etc.) The more sticky, linkable assets you have, the far greater your chances are of generating backlinks over time. Try as you might, there’s simply no replacement for quality content. 2. Establish a Link Building Teams As Google’s Matt Cutts once said, Link building is sweat plus creativity. When building links efforts go stale, it typically has something to do with the people running the campaign. Generally speaking, they lack the expertise to take the strategy to the next level and are tired of doing the same old repetitive tasks with minimal understanding of the “why” behind them. To scale up your efforts, you need a team of people who are highly skilled and trained at crafting content, finding and securing building links opportunities, monitoring progress, and doing technical SEO work. Some of these people may work directly for you. Others may need to be outsourced, but your building links team should include: Project manager Outreach process reps Outreach manager Writers Editor Publishers If you’re looking to hire writers, I suggest ProBlogger’s premium job listing. For $75, you’re likely to receive 100+ candidates to review: The best link-building teams for agencies are those that perform white-label link-building at scale. In fact, most of our revenue is from other agencies who use our systems and processes to scale up their link building efforts. 3. Research the Mess Out of Your Competition It’s good to be focused on your brand, but be wary of putting on blinders and ignoring the world around you. There’s tremendous value in doing market research and understanding what your competitors are

Keyword research is relatively simple (and we’ll get to it shortly). But online keyword competition can be fierce. Consider the the total number of SERP results for “SEO”: Is it any wonder why you might be having difficulty ranking for a particular keyword or key phrase? The sheer volume of competitors in online search in nearly every conceivable niche makes those top 10 positions more coveted (and valuable) than ever. So, if you want to be successful in SEO, you need to understand what people are searching for, how often they’re searching for it, and why they’re searching for it. So how can you find this information? It all starts with a repeatable keyword research process of uncovering keyword phrase opportunities for your brand to rank higher in search engines. Step 1. Brainstorm your “seed” keywords You’ll start your keyword research by selecting what I call “seed” keywords. Seed keywords are those that you either already know your target audience is using to search for your product or services, or that you would use if you were a member of your target audience. Also be sure to include SEO power words in your seed keywords list. For example, since SEO.co is a content marketing agency, I can easily guess that my target audience might search for “content marketing agency,” or perhaps one or more of the following variations of that keyword: Content marketing services Link building services Digital marketing services Content writing SEO etc. When it comes to your initial focus, especially if you are a startup doing digital marketing, you will want to focus on the long-tail, particularly long-tail keywords where you feel you have a competitive advantage for matching the search intent of your target audience. Long-tail keywords are extended phrase search queries, such as “what is the best roofing company in Wyoming?” Compare that to a traditional “head” keyword or keyword phrase like “roofing company” or “roofing company Wyoming.” There’s no strict line to draw here, though generally, if a query is in sentence format, it can be considered as a long-tail phrase. Long-tail keyword research can be more advantageous because when they tend to have a much lower competition than head keywords. The catch is that the long tail, by nature, have low monthly search volume. It’s great to use long-tail keywords to rank quickly for niche positions, but if you’re looking for some heavy-hitting rankings to build over the long-term, head keywords are better. Step 2. Add seed keywords into your preferred keyword research tool Now that you’ve got your seed keywords, it’s time to start gathering data on them. Start by plugging at least one from each group into various third party and even free keyword research tools. Moz and Ahrefs are the industry standard, but don’t forget to use third party keyword tools in conjunction with Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics and Google Ads Keyword Planner. All three include quality data for finding quality keyword opportunities. Below is a Moz screenshot of the search results for my keyword, “content marketing services.” Source: Moz Keyword Explorer Or the same result from Ahrefs: If you want to generate an expanded keyword list of long-tail keywords, we like to use AnswerthePublic, which provides a fan-based UX for showing new keyword ideas, searches related to one another and other keyword variations you may not have considered. AnswerthePublic fan graph related result for the phrase “content marketing” Step 3. Conduct competitor research & content gap analysis Next, you’ll want to take a closer look at the competition, and what types of strategies they’re using in their search campaigns and how you stack up. Competitor content gap analysis helps you identify content opportunities by analyzing what your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. By understanding the gaps in their content strategy, you can develop and optimize your own content to capture those missed opportunities. Ahrefs “Content Gap Analysis” tool to help you understand where and how your competition is ranking for various keywords in search engines and how you can create new pages and posts to find new content ideas for your next post or page: You’ll get to see their names listed, as well as their relative competition “level,” and where they’re winning the keyword game. You can export the data and manipulate it to source keyword ideas for your next blog post. Compare the pages that rank for your target keywords with your own website’s content. Look for gaps where your competitors have content that you don’t. These gaps may indicate opportunities to create new content or improve existing content to fill those voids. SEMRush and Ahrefs are fantastic automatically listing some of your “main organic competitors” once you enter your website domain name: (Image source: SEMRush) Examine the content that your competitors have created for the keywords you’re targeting. Look at factors such as content length, format (blog post, video, infographic, etc.), depth of information, and engagement signals like comments and social shares. This analysis will help you understand why their content is performing well. There are a few reasons you need to learn about your competitors: Inspiration. If you can understand how they’ve optimized their websites, where they currently rank, and how they’re getting more relevant customers to their sites, you can adopt some of these techniques for yourself. Understanding competition levels. When you analyze keywords, you’ll be able to gauge what level of competition you’re in for. Are your competitors all fighting viciously for web real estate, or is it an open field? Discover weaknesses and opportunities. Are there certain niches that your competitors haven’t been able to touch? Are there opportunities for development they’ve missed? Based on your analysis, develop strategies to address the content gaps. This may involve creating new content targeting specific keywords or enhancing existing content to make it more comprehensive, valuable, or engaging. Consider the unique value propositions you can bring to the table. After implementing your content improvement strategies, monitor the performance of your