User Competitor Insights to Rank Better

Ben: Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Michael. Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Dillon: Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben. It's great to be here.
Ben: Love it. Michael, I'm excited for the subject today. It's really fascinating, something that honestly I need to get better at. So before we dive into that though, Michael, share a little bit about your background. Let us get to know you.

Michael Dillon: Yeah, sure. I usually like to tell my career story in three parts, right? Three chapters, if you will. So in my chapter one, my story, I like to call this the music years, right? I was actually working in the music industry doing something I really loved. I just, I love music. I wanted to be surrounded by music. And I worked for a couple of different companies for about eight years and it expanded doing things in business operations to eventually growing to be a VP of sales.

Michael Dillon: And I really enjoyed that, but I was forced, like a lot of people were at 2008, in 2008 to reevaluate things. And towards the end of my tenure of what I was doing, I started to dabble a lot more in internet marketing. It was kind of new to us as a company at that point in time. And so I kind of dove in and I was doing tremendously well with it. I really, really enjoyed it. And I just wanted to continue to ensconce myself in everything that was like internet marketing at that time because I just had so much great success and fun doing it.

Michael Dillon: So, when I had to kind of look at reinventing myself after, you know, all the things that happened with the economy in 2008, I actually decided to change teams and go from doing, you know, business operations and sales to doing marketing. And that led me to my chapter two. And so like in my chapter two, I like to call it the agency years. I worked for about 13 years in digital marketing agencies and in-house at a couple of different companies as well as starting to grow my consultancy kind of side hustle.

Michael Dillon: And I started at first in SEO and kind of grew that because I just wanted to continue to absorb and learn as much information as possible, you know, took courses and cross-trained with departments in social media and paid media and leadership as well. And as I was doing all this and continuing to upskill, I was faced with my biggest challenge, which was my son was born and he had kind of a myriad of different health issues. And so that kind of forced me to look at life through a different lens. And, you know, through that, I created kind of created this new filter for how I wanted to work on what I wanted to work on.

Michael Dillon: And that was basically on causes or with people that I really, really felt I could help and that I enjoyed working with. And that led me to me and my family, we moved from New York to Florida. I worked in-house at an agency for a couple of years with like one of the best mentors I've ever worked with. It was a Google ads trainer and just learned a tremendous amount from him. And then also worked in-house at a B2B SaaS health tech company for a number of years, leading their marketing efforts.

Michael Dillon: And while this was going on, the consultancy was just continuing to grow and grow until eventually I just decided, you know, I just need to move full force into doing this myself and just working as, you know, as I do today, my chapter three part of it is, you know, I'm just a full-time fractional CMO and growth advisor, marketing consultant. I work in different capacities with different groups of people. But, as you can see, my career trajectory kind of, you know, I was going one way and then I just jumped teams and then it was kind of like a rocket ship in the other direction.

Michael Dillon: And I think that a lot of the experience I got doing sales and doing business operations really helped me to excel in the marketing side of things. So I have a really good kind of foundational understanding of how they all work together.

Competitor Analysis for SEO

Ben: So Michael, for today's subject, you've got a fascinating experience, and I haven't really dove into this as much as I should, but you can really figure out how to create content that ranks based off of a competitor analysis. So to start this off, how are you researching competitors? How are you gathering this information in the first place? What are you looking at?

Michael Dillon: Yeah, sure. And that's changed throughout the years and I've evolved this process, but it came about. I'll tell a quick backstory. In my early marketing career, when I first started, I was very heavily focused on link building and SEO. We had the earliest version of Ahrefs, right? And this is like 12, 13 years ago, whatever it was. And I was kind of empowered to be the person that operated and learned that tool. And when we went to go, the company went to go speak and engage with like PubCon, which is a big SEO convention in Las Vegas.

Michael Dillon: We were kind of simultaneously running our booth, helping them with their booth. And, you know, I got to speak a lot to, I was just completely ensconced in this. So over the years as the tool evolved and I was doing a lot of competitor analysis for our own clients, strictly just based on performance, I started to kind of put together a lot of ideas as to, well, you can look a lot at a lot of these type of metrics.

Michael Dillon: and indicator as to what pages are strong in any industry. If you create a certain page or you write about a certain topic, it's going to do well if the domain authority is strong and all of these different things. And so a couple of years later at another industry, I had a project task to create something that was almost like a guide for their internal marketing team.

Michael Dillon: to write blogs that performed, right? And so I started to put together all of the frameworks of, okay, well, here's how you would achieve this. But I had always been looking at like, okay, when I'm going to tackle anything, I'm always looking at who's doing it really well, competitor analysis. And there was, you know, a lot of ability to do that with Ahrefs, but I was like, you know, that really only took it so far. It was very detailed in a lot of technical SEO aspects and things like that, but there's so much more to it than just that.

Michael Dillon: Right. And so I started to take what I knew about different things, especially that were happening at the time. And this is, you know, way prior to AI. and that's the biggest caveat for the conversation today is that AI has changed a lot of things and will continue to do so. especially with SGE being rolled out, but back then when I was first creating this, you could really look at a couple of different things. And I would say the Ahrefs and the technical aspect of a website and how they were doing there was one of three parts.

Michael Dillon: The second was in the a lot of the scoring when it comes to readability, right? Like at what grade level was this written at? What's the readability score? How many words are on the page? And you started to see people like really, really write a lot about this, like Brian Dean and.

Michael Dillon: I think Rand Fishkin and all these really big names in SEO that were super knowledgeable and had done tons of research. I just started pulling because I'm always the student of the game, right? Like I really spend a lot of time every week and have for years collecting. I do a weekly LinkedIn post that's like all my favorite things, tips and stuff like that. And I, you know, I just, I always make sure that I spend time learning, studying, upscaling.

Michael Dillon: And so I've been pulling all these ideas from all these different sources and it started to form this idea that, Hey, let's put it on a page. Let's put it on a graph and let's start comparing these things on different pages. Right. And so I developed a kind of like a spreadsheet, if you will, that would take, you know, the people that were ranking for anything at any given time. And, and usually I like to use Ahrefs for this because it would summarize like the last 30 days of rankings, for example, right. A snapshot of a ranking is never really what you want to rely on.

Michael Dillon: anybody's computer on any given day, right? So anyway, take the snapshot of that or take the 30 days of that and, you know, kind of look at who's in the top 10, how long they've been there.

Michael Dillon: and all of the different things that they have done on their, not just on the page, but on the website itself, right? And compare them so that you can kind of create some cumulative averages to get an understanding of, well, all of the top 10 have a bar set at this as a minimum, right? And here's what the averages are. And then look to when you're creating your own content, really understand what it is that they're writing about.

Michael Dillon: and try to do better. It's not just about copying what somebody else did. You have to do it better. You're not in that top 10 for a reason. You have to make what you're doing as good as what they're doing and better and different. So what is the better? What is the different? Right? And leave space to be creative about that. But...

Michael Dillon: I think that it's also making sure that it's driving value, right? Like, is it solving problems? Is it, is it curing some kind of, some kind of desire that somebody has when they read that content, things like that. And.

Michael Dillon: You know, it just kind of all formulated into math, right? That's really how it came about is, and then when we take this, we started applying it client after client after client, regardless of industry, regardless of keyword set, it worked. It started to really, really work. And I came from this school of backlink building, right? Backlink building was very important to getting organic rankings. And when I started to approach it in this different way where it was creative,

Michael Dillon: the content based on the value that it could provide. The backlink building became more of an afterthought than a fourth, you know, like it used to be the first thought and then it became the last thought because in a lot of ways, if you didn't need to build your own backlinks because you were able to gain them organically or you maybe are in a competition where, you know, the top 10 rankings hardly have any backlinks. It's not really what is,

Michael Dillon: you know, what's ranking there is getting authority from that. So I think that a lot of people forget that every organic auction, if you want to call it that, is graded on a curve, right? It's just based on whatever anybody's created about that topic, that keyword, whatever. And so you don't always have to do all the same things for every piece of content you're creating in order to try to get it to rank. You need to compare it against who's doing it well now and then really identify how do you do it better.

Michael Dillon: That's probably the most long-winded way of explaining that but I wanted to give as much detail as possible without like diving into the spreadsheet or anything like that.

Ben: I love it.

Ben: Yeah.

How to Track Competitors

Ben: No, I love it. I love it. So a couple of questions to follow up with that. Number one, maybe just start rattling off if you're okay with it, certain things that you're looking for on the competitor sites. You know, when it comes to, it sounds like on the technical side, you're obviously probably looking at length and all sorts of things like that. And then also qualitatively what, what questions are answering things like that. Just what are a couple of those things to keep an eye out if you're looking at competitors that are ranking already.

Michael Dillon: Mm-hmm.

Michael Dillon: Yeah, and some of these might be a little old school now. I think you probably read that some people say, don't pay any attention to this type of thing anymore. Like keyword density is probably one of those, right? Where it's...

Michael Dillon: You know, I think back in the day, people used to say like, you want to write somewhere between two to 3 % of the keyword within, within the actual blog or article that you're writing. And it should be in a couple of headers. It should be in your title tag, all of these different things. And two to 3 % was the standard. But if you look.

Michael Dillon: at trying to rank for something and you look at who's in the top 10, if all of them have keyword density at 5%, at 6%, at 7 % and yours is at two, guess what? It's gonna make a difference. We tested it like at the agency I was at, we actually tested these theories because so many people would say, hey, you can ignore this now, you can ignore this now. And despite that, it didn't turn out to be true when we put it against an actual AB type of test.

Michael Dillon: Right. So we would make optimizations. We would do this on our own stuff all the time. So, you know, that's one, right? So I think there's, there's plenty of others and, and like, I think you could take all the lists that all the experts create and say, yeah, all that stuff is on there. Right. So you're talking about like the length of the URL, the, the keyword in the title tag or the meta description, in the headers. Right. but then I think like some of the stuff I also mentioned before,

Key Metrics to Monitor

Michael Dillon: How often are long sentences used? What's the readability score? Are you using passive voice? What's the grade level, right? Grade level to me is super important because if you're writing for doctors, okay, cool. Grade level can be high. If you're writing for, if you're writing about, I don't know.

Michael Dillon: control or something like that, you don't need to have a 12th grade reading level, right? And that matters because if you're writing at a very high level using really long syllable words and things like that, people are going to bounce. As we know, bounce rate is an indirect ranking factor, right? So like these things all correlate to each other. So tracking what is everybody using when it comes to these different reading metrics, also super important. Keyword variations, right? Like, you know, for semantic indexing and things like that. What else is being

Michael Dillon: used on the page, where is it being used, how is it being used, word count, seen tons of articles about ideal word count, that can matter but it's not the only thing that matters. So like this is why I mentioned all of these things formulate a score.

Michael Dillon: and formulate averages as you took, and like we would use that, we create a scoring rubric to kind of identify, okay, here's the minimum metrics we need to hit. Here's the ideal metrics we want to hit. And if you know that going into the writing, it helps.

Michael Dillon: your content creators understand, well, this is what, when I'm creating, this is what I need to do. I need to make sure that this is it. And then the technical stuff is super important too, page speed, right? There's all the mobile friendliness and that was a big thing back in the day, making sure that you had a mobile version of your website that loaded quick. Those things are still super important, right? But...

Ben: Yeah.

Michael Dillon: I mean, you could go so far as images, right? What images are being used and how are they, are they stock images that don't add any value? Could you replace a stock image with something that is data storytelling and easy to understand, right? Things like that. So, I mean, it goes in depth, but that's a whole bunch of them right there that can really help you look and compare at who's ranking and how they're doing those things. You get, you start to get an idea.

Ben: I love that.

Ben: Okay. All right, Michael, these episodes go by really quick. So one final question. How is AI changing all of this? The competitor analysis, the SEO, the landscape of it all. What should we be thinking about with AI and search and content?

The Role of AI in SEO

Michael Dillon: I think one thing that AI is going to change is certainly the search engine results, right? And like what does rank and why, right? Because I think a lot of people are going to use, I think search or SGE is going to really dominate a lot of broad searches, right? So you have to get, I think first off, you have to get a lot more long tail and understand how are you going to serve up some value with what you're trying to create so that AI just doesn't take it away from you, right? I think in terms of doing the competitive,

Michael Dillon: analysis you can speed up a lot of things right because you can have

Michael Dillon: AI do the work of multiple different tools, right? So I, you know, when I was describing what I was describing before, I, there was at least four different tools and four different subscriptions that I would use in order to get a lot of the metrics that would go into a spreadsheet where I would create the formulas to get to the numbers, right? I think AI can speed a lot of that up for people, right? In order to understand, you know, some of the metrics of, of a webpage that you're trying to evaluate for competitor analysis.

Michael Dillon: And then I think it also can help, right? So I know there are tools out there that I'll say, that I'll identify, hey, in this 2000 word article that you wrote, you're using passive voice way too much.

Michael Dillon: AI can give you suggestions as to how to get rid of that, right? Or how to lower the grade level so that it's not too high brow for your audience or too low brow for your audience, things like that, so that you can improve upon it in order to make the optimizations you need to then finish and publish it, what you want to be better than the rest.

Ben: I love that. I love that. Well, Michael, this is great. This gives a lot of things to think about when it comes to SEO and how to grow your business and your content. But if anyone wants to reach out and continue the conversation and connect with you, what's the best place to find you?

Michael Dillon: Yeah, so my LinkedIn is probably number one, right? So Michael Thomas Dillon on LinkedIn and I also have a website askmicheldillon .com where you could, you know, set a meeting with me if you want to go into any of these topics a little bit further.

Ben: I love it, love it. And we'll link to all of it in the show notes so everyone can find it really quickly. Michael, again, thanks for the time and the insights today.

Michael Dillon: Perfect.

Michael Dillon: Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. It's been great talking to you.

Ben: Love it.

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