Competitor analysis is a crucial part of SEO. If your competitors are low-authority websites with a lot of organic traffic, then you’ve found a goldmine for your content ideas.
The principle is pretty simple – take the posts that bring a lot of traffic, improve the content, outrank the competitors and generate more organic traffic.
What is the website about?
To say that our client works in the food industry would be true, but also an understatement. The website in question is a small UK-based Shopify store focused on selling vegan, gluten-free products primarily to a younger audience. Adults are a target audience, too. A pretty specific niche, which represented a sort of SEO challenge for us.
The central part of the website is the webshop, with five available products. Each has a detailed description, plus the ingredients information and customer reviews. Other pages on the website include FAQ, Blog, and the standard About Us page.
All in all, the website is rather “clean”, i.e. the architecture is easy to follow, and the purchase process is effortless. The available budget for our SEO efforts was about 700€ per month.
SEO goal - Boost brand awareness by publishing informative, niche-related posts
Increasing brand awareness was our main SEO goal. We wanted to achieve that goal in these 3 steps:
- Publish new, informative posts relevant to the client’s niche
- New posts will increase organic traffic
- As a result, the brand awareness will grow
More precisely, we wanted new articles to generate 50.000 clicks every month. All posts were purely informative, so we’re not pushing sales at this point. That way, potential customers get familiar with the brand, which increases sales in return (probably not immediately, but soon).
We also wanted to “boost” product pages by adding internal links to them from the new posts. Product pages will get more power, which would lead to them having a better ranking. And that means more sales.
SEO strategy - Use low-quality competitors as an inspiration for new content
Creating quality content from scratch always takes time, and it should. So we decided to take a slightly better approach. First, we found low-authority websites in the same niche whose posts generated a lot of organic traffic. Low authority means these websites had some kind of combination of poor On-Page SEO, bad content, and a small number of high-quality backlinks.
The idea was to find topics relevant to our client’s niche, use the competitors’ content as inspiration, and then rewrite it in a better way. When we say a better way, we mean having better and more optimized content.
Targeted keywords were added to headings, meta titles, and meta descriptions. Internal and external links with appropriate anchor texts were incorporated, and images were optimized in terms of size, resolution, and ALT texts. We also wanted our content to be more detailed and informative, so our posts were much longer than our competitors.
Off-Page SEO efforts included contacting relevant websites in our targeted market and writing food and health-related (guest) blog posts. The website already had a decent amount of backlinks, so we just continued building on that.
Results
In total, 40 new blog posts were written and published. An increase in the number of impressions and clicks is clear, as seen by the metrics from Google Search Console:
Some posts are still being indexed, so we need to wait some time to actually see how they affected the brand awareness and sales. The goal of 50.000 clicks is not achieved yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Right now, we’re working on redesigning the website and adding new content at the same time. The focus is on optimizing product pages and adding product categories afterwards.
NOTE: We will update this case study in 6 months and show you the final results regarding sales.
