Killer Competitor Research – Lana Burgess

Lana Burgess — Brighton SEO 2019 — Killer competitor content research and strategy from Lana Burgess

What was the talk about?

Competitor research often begins by finding the largest sites who have written about the topics you’re interested in. Once you have these examples, you then take inspiration from what has been written. But what about the things your target audience is interested in? During her talk, Lana Burgess looked at the importance of search intent.

Lana outlined a three-stage process to inform your competitor research strategy:

• Trigger
• Need
• Search intent

While this is the foundation of the approach presented by Lana, she pointed out that you must be aware that the search intent will change based on the different levels of the sales funnel. Having set out your stall correctly, Lana’s talk gave some excellent tips on how to then get to your end goal:

• Search in Google incognito
• Look at the format and of high ranking content
• Use social proof to give authority
• Measure your success and action your reports

Fave quote

“This is the content Google thinks best fits the search intent – make it your mission to understand why Google loves this content.”

Potential impact on the industry

Sites new and old can benefit from competitor research – no matter how large your business is, there will always be others who are doing interesting and valuable things that you’ve not thought of. By approaching this valuable strategy from the angle of search intent, you can create content that adds genuine value to your audience. The result of this is that the industry will continue to shift towards good content and away from keyword stuffing.

Key takeaways

• Start with – trigger, need, search intent
• Ask yourself what Google sees in high-performing content
• Measure your success