Your competition has some of the best content around. But that doesn’t mean that you are doomed to fail. Whether you choose to go for content writing services or you write the content yourself, there are some things you can take to improve and blaze past your competition. Here are some practical tips on how you can do that.

Step 1: Analyze Your Competitors 

The first step is to analyze all your competitors. Now, this step can take some time but it is worth it because it can give you a basis to work with. Over half of the marketers today create content every single day. You want to study your competition and find out which keywords they are getting ranked highly for. You can take a look at their backlinks too. Then you can explore the type of content and the anchor text types they are using. One of the free tools you can use is Ubersuggest to perform competitive analysis. This can give you reports on backlinks, domain score, organic keywords, and more.

Step 2: Determine What Makes Your Competitors Tick

You want to determine what content is working for them and which topics they are focusing on. That is, go through the content they have created that is getting a lot of shares or that is exceedingly popular on social media. You can then add something to that conversation. But you want to take a brand new approach to the one they are taking. You need to think if you can present that topic another way such as with an opinion piece. If there is a trending topic, you want to avoid following everyone because you will come off as basic. Instead, get inspired by your competition and then write something that hasn’t been explored yet.

Step 3: Figure Out The Gaps

You don’t want to create the same type of content your competitors are creating. You want to focus on the types they have ignored. If your competition is all about long form text-only content then you can easily fill in the gap left by them by creating infographics or other visual content. Infographics can be made better if you place them along with the text so you are explaining better. This can help improve your search engine ranking and will help your readers too. Don’t add visual elements for the sake of it. You should only add them if they provide value and if they can more effectively explain something in greater detail.

Step 4: Focus On Headlines And Structure

Don’t underestimate the power of a headline and the structure of your content. A headline is the first thing your audience will notice about your content. And you want to get creative with it. Your content is also likely to get shared more if you have a killer headline that captivates the audience. You want to generate curiosity because that makes people want to click fast. You can get inspiration by searching for your topic on Google and looking at the results that show on the first page. Then add unique words and create a new headline. Similarly, pay attention to your content structure and how you break up your text.

Step 5: Don’t Forget Fast Loading Page

The webpage on which your content is on should be quite fast because Google cares about loading times. And so do people. If you have excellent content but your webpage doesn’t open timely then people are simply going to go to the other search result. To put things into perspective, check this out. A single second of delay in page loading leads to an 11% drop in page views, a 7% loss in conversions, and over 15% reduction is customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is imperative that you ensure your page loads fast. This can help you rank better on Google because loading speed is one of the factors used to assess the usefulness of a page.