When we launched RivalFlow, we imagined it primarily serving businesses with established SEO footprints—websites boasting 30 to 50 pages, ranking on hundreds or thousands of keywords. These sites seemed like natural candidates for a tool that builds on lifting ranked pages and expanding the details that their pages cover. But, as with any product, our early assumptions didn’t align perfectly with reality.
We stumbled onto a welcome surprise: there’s a significant appetite among smaller businesses—those still finding their footing in SEO. These include local businesses, small firms, and especially agencies managing multiple small clients. RivalFlow wasn’t just a tool for the well-established; it was becoming a lifeline for the underdogs.
From an SEO perspective, small sites face unique challenges. They compete in highly fragmented markets, where even their competitor landscape can vary wildly. For example, a dentist’s competitors might include every other practice within a 20-mile radius, creating a sprawling and diverse competitive set. These complexities demand a different approach, and RivalFlow has been evolving to meet those needs.
Since launch, we’ve rolled out over 600 updates to enhance RivalFlow’s performance, with many directly addressing the needs of small sites. Here’s how we’ve tackled these challenges head-on:
At first, RivalFlow provided a narrow list of competitors—15 to 30 per site. For small businesses, this missed the mark by leaving out key local players. We’ve since fixed that:
One of the adjustments we made was to stop limiting our search to websites that overlapped the domain's dominant keywords. Instead, we added a layer that looks at the content itself--what it covers and how that overlaps with what's on your page. This is a more authority-driven approach when we're choosing the sites and pages to go up against. The results include stronger, more relevant competitor recommendations that should give you more meaningful updates to make on your page.
Another challenge that small and local sites face led to a major update for everyone. Our review process always zeroed in on pages already a fair amount of traffic. (The idea being that we could nudge up the pages getting some traction and turn them into big players.) One catch is that pages like "About Us" and "Meet the Team" tend to land on our recommendation list when they aren't actually competitive in nature.
That's where we revamped our "Pick a Page" feature (formerly "Custom Projects") to let you take direct control over the pages you want to work on.
I'm not as separated from the pains of a small site owner as you might think. My sister runs Brightside Mortgage, and seeing SEO challenges through her site is eye-opening. For instance, she knows the value of creating content, so her blog is loaded with pages. Only, these pages are thin. The blog itself covers a lot of topics, but the individual pages need to go deeper into the details. By using Pick a Page, they--and all site owners--can improve their most important pages and focus on getting more traffic where it matters most.
Local businesses need SEO strategies that prioritize the right content. In addition to targeting specific pages, RivalFlow also lets you adjust the exact keyword that your page is targeting.
We saw this growing need emerge because of the specialty of certain small businesses. Dentists, for example, will create separate pages on gum care apart from reasons you might need a root canal. If their thin page on gum care was compared against a strong page that ranks for root canal-focused issues, the intent is all off. We turn over control to the customer. Usually we can detect the primary keyword the article should rank for, but you have a unique idea of what the page was meant to do.
When we started RivalFlow, it was tailored to solve the challenges faced by companies like SpyFu—a robust B2B SaaS company with an extensive content library and significant SEO presence. RivalFlow excelled in that space, but small businesses and agencies presented a new set of problems to solve.
These updates help focus on what you are truly targeting. We had focused more on broad topics to help us detect which pages were important and which competitors you should go up against. This is especially meaningful when these very content updates are about building up on the missing subtopics and questions that your audience needs answered.
Through constant iteration and customer feedback, RivalFlow has evolved into a tool that levels the playing field for small businesses, providing the insights they need to compete effectively.
Toward the end of the video, we mention an update for non-ranking pages. It's mentioned as a "coming soon," but good news--it's here! You can start making RivalFlow-driven SEO improvements to pages that don't rank yet. This gives customers even more ways to lift their SEO--turning missed opportunities into growth. Whether you’re managing a local law firm, a dentist’s office, or a blog-heavy site with thin content, RivalFlow has the tools to help you succeed.
