"Be better than yesterday."
It's a core value here at SpyFu and RivalFlow. We use it for high-level decisions and low-stakes gut-checks. In this case, it inspired us to make one change that would ripple into a far better outcome for customers across the board.
First, some context:
For a page to rank higher on the SERP, it needs to be more authoritative, more insightful and more helpful than other pages that Google has surfaced on the same topic. That's the strategy that powers RivalFlow. We find a relevant competitor on the SERP and compare your page content to theirs--the topics it covers, details, questions people want to know and so on.
That tells us what is missing from your page so we can create new copy that answers those missing questions.
But if we miss here and don't choose the right competitor page from the start, it causes the next step to fail, and the next step and so on, until it's a bad experience all around.
Talking to a customer told us just exactly what that looked like.
This customer had been using RivalFlow for his website and saw good suggestions up front: your page is losing out on clicks and ranks behind this competitor. With a known competitor, this passed the sniff test. It looked good at a glance, but in the next step, things started to slip.
We share the full story in this video. It helps to show how small differences in the competitor page can completely change the end results.
The writing project--the page-to-page analysis and suggested new text--fell short of the strong additions that his page needed.
The gap analysis just didn't make sense. On closer look, the project pitted his guide to a competitor's ecommerce product page. Very few of the additions would have done anything helpful for his page.
People who search for something like "secret door" could be looking for architectural ideas or guides to building them in your home. A retailer that sells premade, ready-to-install hidden doors won't have new details on their page that would be helpful for that specific search.
In the past, our recommendation system would match keywords, but it didn’t always take into account the deeper intent or the type of content it was up against. This would be like comparing a how-to guide with a services page. The two won't necessarily cover the same ground. Any recommended additions that came from a mismatched page would be filled with the wrong points.
That challenge stems from diverse SERPs--especially for short-tail keywords. With different ways to interpret a short phrase search, retail-centered product pages will rank alongside how-to articles.
Thinking about SERP diversity also helped us realize where to look. We could review individual entries on the SERP, not just by competitor domains, but by details that prove topic relevance and a better-aligned search intent. This would be a quality check inside our usual process.
We’ve overhauled the way RivalFlow analyzes SERP competitors, looking beyond just keywords and digging into the actual purpose of the page.
Our better recommendations eliminate the mismatches and pave the way toward stronger writing projects. Those projects give you better page additions to improve the quality of your page far more than before.
The new quality check ensures a more accurate content match. We look at page titles, URLs, and the actual page content--all with the objective of finding more relevant, helpful matches. All of this happens before we run our analysis on page gaps and give you new copy for your page.
The result is a set of identified questions that are contextually relevant and their answers. Adding those answers to your copy is more likely to drive engagement and higher rankings.
This is a matter of making a 5% improvement that translates to a 30% improvement in the quality of the output overall. If we can make a high quality recommendation up front, it carries into a much better outcome.
The new copy respects everything that you already brought to the table, and it makes your page more thorough than what your competitors are putting out.
If you’re a current RivalFlow user, you’ll feel the impact of this upgrade immediately in your writing projects. Better recommendations lead to better content, which in turn means better SEO outcomes. You can expect more relevant competitor analysis and suggestions that directly improve the quality of your work.
For those who tried RivalFlow before but weren’t impressed with the recommendations, now is the perfect time to give it another shot. This update--part of RivalFlow 2.0-- fundamentally changes the foundation of every writing project. It gives you smarter, more accurate suggestions that align with your specific content goals.
