/excel/

Taking inspiration from a competitor

What pages did we generate?

This one was quite different from the rest!

We found a competitor who'd been writing Excel-related posts for a number of decades, and noticed that their sitemap contained thousands of descriptive URLs. By this, I mean URLs like https://example.com/how-to-do-{x}-in-excel rather than https://example.com/t/194228.html.

We added an additional processing step, using some custom code, where we converted their URL slugs into a title, before feeding that into Byword. By doing this we essentially were able to get content coverage parity with that competitor in a matter of hours, ensuring we had content to compete with all of their pages. Our content wasn't as rich as theirs, but it was a good start considering this took us hours as opposed to decades.

You can see an example page here.

Why did we do this?

We did this in order to generate additional SEO coverage around one of Causal's core content areas, Microsoft Excel. I've already explored on prior pages why Excel users are a valuable demographic for Causal, even if not necessarily ready to convert/switch over to Causal.

Statistics

Pages Generated	1,583
Total Sessions	907k
Sessions per Month	236k
Position #1 Keywords	317

Notes

• If you'd like to read more, I actually posted a mildly viral tweet (by SEO Twitter standards, at least!) on the campaign.

• I'll soon be building functionality within Byword to emulate some of this process, both to write an article from a competitor's URL, and to do this at scale by scraping sitemaps.