5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing

The biggest challenge that you may face from your competitors might be on the search engines. If you want to improve your search engine rankings, you need to beat your competitors at SEO. Although you can take various actions – for example read 10 tips on how to write SEO content for your website – the best way to beat your competitors is through SEO content writing.

Why search engines-based content writing enables you to beat even your toughest competitors?

The beauty of content writing is that it makes your presence on the Internet unique. Only you can write the way you write. No matter how hard your competitors try, they cannot be “You” – only you can be “You”. This is why even smaller companies on the Internet can pose big dangers to their bigger counterparts.

What is SEO content writing and how it helps you beat your competitors?

Being a content writer often hired by clients who want to improve their search engine rankings through content writing, I have written a lot on the topic. You can read this blog post that says SEO content writing actually improves your search engine rankings or you can read Does SEO content writing improve your search engine rankings?

Anyway, there are thousands of companies on the Internet that provide you “SEO content” to help you increase search engine traffic to your website and many of these companies can actually help you.

SEO content writing in isolation doesn’t help you improve your search engine rankings – many factors play an important part. But SEO content is definitely one of the most important building blocks. It’s like, if you don’t have content, what will the search engines crawl, index and then rank? Obviously you need content.

And what sort of content gets ranked well? Good content. Well-written content. Content that is appreciated by people. Content that gets recommended. Content that people link to.

So, having good, relevant, topical, well-written and well-formatted content is a must. Everything comes after that.

Briefly, these are the 5 ways to beat your competitors at SEO with content writing:

1. Create unique content
2. Solve problems better than your competitors do
3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases
4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner
5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Now let’s go through these points one by one, in detail

1. Create unique content

Unique content automatically gives you an edge, because being unique, only you have it, or very few people have it. How does this help your SEO? On the same topic, the search engines like Google want to present different perspectives to their users so that they may find content they are not aware of, but may be useful to them. So well-written unique content is often ranked higher by search engines.

2. Solve problems better than your competitors do

This is a brute-force way of legitimately beating your competitors with better SEO content. If you solve problems better than your competitors, even if you don’t rank well, initially, compared to them, more people will visit, share, and recommend your links, eventually giving you an SEO edge over your competitors.

3. Create content around less competitive keywords and phrases

You don’t have to write content around keywords your competitors are already ranking well for. There might be many keyword variations your competitors might have ignored, or somehow couldn’t have achieved better rankings for. You can try different spellings. You can try different phrases for the same expressions. You can try bigger phrases. You can try local variations your competitors might have ignored.

Find out the keywords and phrases your competitors haven’t been able to rank well and then create good-quality content around them. This will definitely give you good search engine rankings for these less competitive keywords and search terms.

4. Rewrite content published by your competitors in a better manner

This basically is the same as point 2 but here what I mean is, you can also create the general content similar to what your competitors are creating, just in a better manner. You have the talent. You have your own unique way of writing. You can even have the same titles if you are daring enough while completely rewriting the webpages or the blog posts. Turn smaller subheadings from your competitor’s website into complete webpages of your own. You can even create multiple webpages out of a single webpage, or combine multiple pages into a single webpage or blog post.

5. Keep your existing content up-to-date

Google likes to present its search results fresh out of the oven. If your content becomes stale, if it grows old, Google begins to ignore it in favor of newer webpages and blog posts.

Make updating your existing content an integral part of your SEO content writing strategy. Whatever webpages and blog posts that your have created, are your business assets. Keep track of them. Monitor them individually. Don’t just forget about them once your have created them. Revisit them to check whether there is some reason to update them or revise them. Even if you feel like changing a few sentences, changes them and the resubmit the link to Google.

Beating your competitors with SEO content writing might not be easy, and it may even prove to be a challenge, but if you want to take them up on this challenge, with strategy and hard-working, nothing should stop you.