Have you found yourself watching your competitors on the top of Google results? If so, they likely have strong content ideas that people want to share. When people talk, discuss, or share your content, eventually, you are going to have lots of online traffic and an increase in sales.

No matter what kind of business you run, having an eye on the competition is a good thing for you. You can learn from their mistakes and, of course, steal their best content ideas. I’m not talking about plagiarism, so do not copy exactly what they do. In fact, Google doesn’t like “copy-paste” content, so that you risk getting a penalty when you do this. I’m talking about smart “stealing” which is when you see what your competitors do and then do it better yourself.

For example, if you see that a blog post within your niche has tons of shares on Facebook and Twitter calls it “50 Tips on How to Lose Weight”, you can write a post with 100 tips on how to lose weight and try to make an eye-catching headline.

However, if you ask me, the better question is: How can I find the most popular content from my competitors? In this guide, I’m going to share some tips and tricks on how you can find and create better content ideas and improve your rank so that you get tons of traffic and shares for your website.

Find Your Competitors’ Most Popular Content

The first thing you need to do is find out where the traffic of your competitors is coming from. This is where Ahrefs tool will come in handy, and the best part is that you can use their free trial and see how useful this tool actually is.

In order to copy and improve your competitors’ content ideas, you need to know what blog posts and websites perform the best. When you do this research, you should pay close attention to the following criteria:

• What content brings the most organic traffic to the site?
• What content is the most sharable on social media?
• What content has the highest number of backlinks?
• What keywords bring lots of organic traffic?

Ahrefs will help you answer all these questions. Use their Site Explorer tool by simply copying and pasting the website URL you want to analyze.

The “Top Pages” tab on the left shows you the pages that bring the most organic traffic to the site. As an example, I decided to analyze WDL:

You can see links on the top pages along with their values, keywords, and volume. You can also choose to see what position these pages have on Google and more.

To learn what the most sharable pages of a website on social media are, go to the “Top Content” tab. There, you can, for example, sort through results by a certain social media network to see what pages have the most shares on Twitter.

Similarly, you can also see a post’s popularity by looking at the total number of shares:

On Best by Links tab ranks pages of the particular website on the number of incoming links. This is simply going through what content brings many backlinks.

You can also use Site Explorer to see broken or lost links as well as organic keywords. Select the most relevant keywords in order to create the best, high-quality content. This is a great way to help ensure that you create better content and provide the most value to your readers. This is the key to stealing someone’s content idea, you just need to improve it.

There are also alternative tools which can do a similar job for you such as SEMrush and Link Explorer by MOZ.

Search for Competitive Brands in Google

When you search for a certain brand or certain brands in Google, along with the name of the website, you will also see some extended links after it. Have you ever wondered why Google shows them?

The truth is that these links are put there to make it easier for users to find what they want. Google creates these sitelinks by analyzing the most popular pages on the website. This means that these links are the most visited pages of that specific site. Knowing this, you can improve your own content strategy.

Make Social Media Audit

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media networks are a perfect place to share new content as they can help generate new leads and engage with existing ones. It’s also important to remember that the number of social shares affects your ranking on Google.

Run an audit on all of your competitors’ social media profiles paying close attention to the following things:

• How many posts do they publish on each network?
• Do they use images, hashtags, or both?
• How many followers and likes they have?
• Do they add a call-to-action to each of their social media posts?
• What do their bios, profile pictures, and cover photos look like?

These questions can be applied to any social media platform including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. After you complete analysis of at least 2-3 of your competitors’ profiles, you’ll be able to create a similar content plan for your own social media pages.

Encourage your audience to share your content on social media with these useful WordPress plugins from Codester. Pick the one you like and grow your social media presence eventually.

Think About What Makes Their Content Stand Out

The last thing to consider if you want to use content ideas of your competitors – think what makes you click on website pages, read articles, and sign up for webinars. Sometimes, you open a website, and found yourself in an hour, after reading six ten posts and downloading the second eBook.

Do you wonder why their content is better and/or more engaging than yours? Step back and think about what they do. Do they use eye-catching headlines or images? Is their content is written in a unique and creative way? What keywords do they use and what content do their readers comment on? Maybe they have a modern, beautiful website?

Ask yourself all these questions and after that, think about which of these approaches can be applied to your own business.

Over to You

I hope these tips will help you to steal some of your competitors’ content ideas in a smart yet easy way. What techniques do you use to steal someone else’s content idea? Do you have “stolen” content ideas which bypassed your competitors and brought you a lot of traffic? If so, share them with us in the comment section below.