Stuck for niche ideas? Try writing down everything you've done in the last year, then narrowing down that list to 2-3 things you'd enjoy blogging about. You don't even need to be an expert in these things, but it is useful if you have a desire to learn more about them.
Blog Spy is a new tool to find out what your competitors are blogging about and who you can outrank.
Here's a sneak preview of what Blog Spy can do:
I'm giving away Blog Spy for free when you buy the Niche Laboratory Pro + Blog Spy super bundle.
Blog Spy is a sister product to our Niche Laboratory Pro brainstorming and keyword finding tool.
Blog Spy is a Windows desktop application. Here's a screenshot (click to enlarge):
For several years now it's been obvious to me that Google have been moving away from the whole idea of keywords. After all if you use Google Analytics then you'll know that Google doesn't now normally provide the search terms users search for when they end up finding your site. Instead you'll see lots of (not provided) references instead.
Part of this is due to "privacy" issues (not that Google exactly worry about our privacy, but that's another story...). But a bigger reason is maybe due to the fact that Google themselves have moved away from the whole keyword thing. That was how Google used to rank sites. Now they're a lot more sophisticated and are characterising search results and sites based on ideas and user intent.
How does this affect us? As site builders we need to lose the idea of targeting specific keywords and think more about how our site fits a specific theme. I've noticed one thing with new sites I've been building: user engagement is now critically important. You need to ensure that your site has a low bounce rate and high metrics for user time spent on site. Both of these can be seen in Google Analytics.
How can you improve on these? By offering killer content that will keep distracted people busy for ages.
One great way of improving your site is to look at what your competitors are doing. And this is where Blog Spy can help you.
Blog Spy basically works by finding all of the blogs (either Wordpress and Blogger) that are already ranking well for search terms related to your niche.
By using site ranking data from Moz.com, it then orders all of the blogs from low page rank to high page rank. It will also put your own blog in this table. You can then easily see a colour coded list of blogs: green blogs have a lower page ranking than your site, orange blogs have a similar page rank to your site, and red blogs have higher page ranks than your own blog.
Here's a sample report for the niche websites niche.
What to do with this data?
Are you out of ideas?
Blog Spy will also show you up to ten recent posts that blogs in your niche have posted. See what they're blogging about - maybe you can also blog about it.
Here are some tips for getting the most out of Blog Spy:
Sounds good?
Here are the links for getting Blog Spy and there's also a sample report I made:
Did you like using this free SEO tool? I'd love to know what you're going to do with the data it's generated for you.
The first 3 visitors to post a comment on this page get a free "dofollow" link to their own website!
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Great tool, Brett! It gave me a few really good ideas for content which I can outrank competitors. So, thanks for that and keep up the good work!
And a word of advice for future users: you really should be using the Moz API . It helps a lot.
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