Don’t be “any worse” than your competition, be better and conquer them!

As always, the best content is the winner

Rand Fishkin of MOZ.com recently posted another of his great ‘Whiteboard Friday’ videos, and it is interesting when something from your past comes back and slaps you in the face!

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that Rand is putting-out outdated content, it had more to do with a conference that I once attended where the guest speaker was Tom Peters (a legendary writer of business practices). Tom was very prominent in the late 80’s onwards promoting best practice and systems to help people achieve their personal and professional goals.

There were many things that I took away from the conference but one of the memorable moments related to a story Tom told us about somebody feeling a little bruised by some of his hard, constructive comments, and so the guy retaliated with “Tom, we are no worse than any of our competition!

Mr Peters took great pleasure in blowing this statement out of the water and put a slide up using the phrase as a potential strapline for a fictitious business. It went along the lines of ‘Smith’s Widgets, we are no worse than anybody else!

Strive to be better than the rest

I have held onto this for more time than I wish to recall but during Rand’s video he brought this right up to date for me. Anyone who is serious about promoting their website and driving traffic to it, anyone who wants to grow their business online or increase their inbound traffic needs to have better content than the rest!

Good content that satisfies the user experience is now the basic standard that everyone should be looking to achieve, once you have arrived at that level you are ‘no worse’ than everyone else! In other words there is no reason for the search engines to promote you above the rest, there is no reason to link to your material.

There are those that say ‘less is more’, or ‘the devil is in the detail’, Rand Fishkin rightly says that sometimes you have to look at what is missing in some of the content that already exists online and then fill that hole!

Put a fire in your belly

Back in the day Tom Peters said “We are no worse than anybody else is a real reason to get up in the morning, the sort of statement that will put a fire in your belly!” His obvious sarcasm still resounds in my ear but now with a new wake-up call so perfectly framed by Rand Fishkin.

If you have content on your website that is outdated or is no worse than your direct competition, you really should revisit and see if there is a way to take your website from average to amazing!