Copy Your Competitor’s Top Organic Pages using SEMrush
Last modified: January 13, 2020
You know that feeling you have when you go through your competitor’s website, read his posts and think to yourself that you wish you knew what worked for him and what didn’t? If only you would know what his top preforming pages were, you could copy the essence of the page (never copy actual content – that’s a big no no), do it better and get some quality traffic. Well, that’s actually possible now! If you actually follow the tips on this post, you are guaranteed to get more traffic very soon.
Get More Traffic Thanks to your Competitor
I’m assuming you all know about SEMrush, if not – read our comprehensive SEMrush review and learn all there is to know about this amazing tool. As a side note I can say that no online marketing is whole without using SEMrush, it adds so mush information for you to use and bypass your competition.
One feature that I love to use is the organic top pages. You can see your competitor’s top organically visited pages. This basically means you can see what the top pages that generate the most traffic are.
Here is a live example to show you how much potential this option has.
Say I sell WordPress themes and want to compete with WordPress.org, or better yet – I create themes and am looking for my next idea. Looking at WordPress’ top pages shows me that the most popular page by far is the “WP Facebook Login” plugin. This page generates almost 12% of the entire site’s organic traffic (in the US). That’s huge information for me.
If I would want to copy my “competitor” I would go down the list and create pages with the same type of content. Let’s look at another site’s pages.
Let’s take codeable.io for example. They have a very successful website and blog. If you have a blog about tech, development, WordPress etc. You could go through their top posts, find interesting topics that you haven’t written about yet and write some new posts.
In this example you can see that their top page is a post about companies that use developers doing outsourcing. This is probably a wildly searched topic since it generated almost a fifth of their entire website’s traffic. Going down the list you can actually see that their third top page is a post about how to detect what theme and plugins a website is using which we are obviously featured on. That would also be a great post you could write about – since now you know that a lot of people search for that topic.
Step 2: Check each Page’s Backlinks
Once you have your eye on a specific page, copy it’s URL and go to the backlinks area on SEMrush. Now add the PAGE URL into the tool and wait for the results.
These backlinks will give you an idea of what you could do do rank your new post that you are about to create. You might be able to contact some of the webmasters behind these backlinks and ask them to link to you too if you give some added value.
That’s basically it. So lets put these tips in simple action items:
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Action Items
- Find a competitor that you want to do some competitor research on
- Go through his top organic pages
- Write new posts with the same subjects and add try to do it better
- Check the post’s backlinks
- Try and obtain similar backlinks