Good Content Makes Your Competition Irrelevant

Today, I’m talking about how good content can lead to buyer behavior shifts that can crush competitors into irrelevancy. 

My wife is very pregnant right now.

Like, we’re going to have a baby within a few weeks.

She has spent the last 8 months doing a lot of baby research. She is not one to go into experiencing something new without all the information she can get her hands on.

So she read the book, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” Then she:

• Started listening to their podcast.
• Downloaded their app.
• Googled some questions and saw their website come up.
• Read some of their articles.

Today, she bypasses the search engines and often goes straight to their website for answers to her questions.

Why? Because she has been pleased with what she’s found there, and she loves the well-organized, succinct, yet thorough content available.

Her behavior around baby questions has shifted from search engine use to directly visiting whattoexpect.com

It’s understandable, too.

What to Expect has been absolutely crushing it from an SEO perspective with over 300,000 page one keywords and thousands of URLs of valuable content:

Content Compounds

To be honest, I haven’t been doing a lot of research for becoming a first-time dad.

I’m more of a “let’s just play this board game, and I’ll ask questions along the way” kind of guy. Giving me the instructions ahead of time is pretty useless. I just need to play to learn.

Rayanne has told me all about this website, though. I haven’t interacted with it, but because she trusts it, I trust it.

Now, I am more likely to bypass search engines and go straight to this website for help on day 0, week 1, week 2, etc.

They literally have content organized for me like that:

This website’s amazing content, which owns a ton of search engine real estate is shifting the behavior of not only its users (my wife) but its potential future users (me).

Airbnb did something similar.

Early adopters saw Airbnb results all over search engines then started talking about staying in Airbnbs. Then their friends started going directly to Airbnb to book their next vacation.

Good SEO-evidenced content compounds not only traffic from search but traffic, in general.

What’s the Cornerstone of Shifting Buyer Behavior?

It’s content.

Like really good, well-organized content.