3 best practices of competitor SEO you should know
In this article, I show 3 examples of brands that are killing it in competitor SEO.
One of the lowest hanging fruits in SEO is to create content for "alternative" and "versus" queries. Some brands take it a step further and rank for use cases of their competitors. In this article, I highlight 3 examples of brands that are doing this really well for your inspiration.
Back when I worked at Atlassian, there was one move from our competitor Zendesk that put us in awe: the Zendesk Alternatives.
Zendesk went out to create a fictional band called "The Zendesk Alternatives" to rank for the query "zendesk alternative". Crazy but it worked.
The effort paid off.
Even today, it's on #2, which is rare to see because Google interprets the user intent for "alternative" queries in a way that prefers review sites (like G2).
Aaaah, the good 'ol hacky days.
Does competitor SEO still work?
The short answer is "yes". You should have to be smart about it.
To take a step back, "competitor SEO" describes the art and science of ranking for
"alternative queries", e.g. "zendesk alternative"
"versus queries", e.g. "salesforce vs. hubspot"
competitor documentation
Ranking for such queries is so incredibly powerful because you catch customers in two central points in their user journey. The first is when they're a customer of one of your competitors and you want to persuade them to become your customer instead. The second point is when a prospect evaluates your product against a competitor and you want to steer their choice in your favor.
Either way, you address users at the very end of their buyer's journey and that's where you want to be the most present. If you do nothing else, do this because you build a funnel or content strategy from the ground up. Once you got your competitor SEO strategy in place, you can create more content for earlier parts of the buyer's journey (what used to be MOFU and TOFU).
Example 1: Filmora
Wondershare Filmora is a software company for video editing software and they're going up against a big incumbent: Adobe.
Adobe Premiere Pro is the #1 competitor product for Wondershare but they have a clever strategy to gain customers: attacking Adobe's documentation.
Adobe Premiere's product documentation is... thin and complicated at best. Filmora identified that gap and created how-to content for specific problems in Premiere Pro.
Example: https://filmora.wondershare.com/adobe-premiere/split-screen.html
Convertkit did an interesting thing with competitor SEO: they created a blog article about why you shouldn't switch from Mailchimp to Convertkit.
This is not reverse psychology but rather a play on reverse value, i.e. do you not want something better?
https://help.convertkit.com/en/articles/2502565-switch-from-mailchimp
Example 2: Wistia
I know what it's like to go against Youtube, one of the largest tech platforms out there as a former member of Dailymotion.
What I find really clever (and meta) is that Phil Nottingham explained the pros and cons of Wistia vs. Youtube in a Wistia video and in a Youtube video (see below).
I probably shouldn't write this because the competition is always watching but whatever. The point of Competitor SEO is to attack the weaknesses of your competitor as close to the point of conversion as possible.
Here's how to do it.
Step 1: Find your competitors from a search perspective.
Show a detailed comparison of your solution versus your competitor. Don't forget to add a CTA throughout the page and use videos if you can.
Note that you're not limited to creating alternative pages for comparisons with your brand but also between two other competitors.
industry landing pages
product videos
Use case landing pages
There are probably even more opportunities to get traffic from your competitor depending on what vertical you operate in.