Investigate the content ranking well for a topic

Before creating new content, it is important to check out what content already ranks well for your topic. Researching the top-ranking content informs you:

• What types of content Google currently values as most relevant for the topic. For example, whether all product pages or blog posts ranking in the top positions.
• Whether any of your competitors rank well for the topic.

Using Conductor's Explorer reports, you can quickly identify the top five sites ranking for a topic and review related keywords. Using this information, you can easily create a content brief based on the keywords you’d like to target.

1. Starting in Explorer↗️, perform the steps described in the Keyword research for a topic with Explorer lesson.
2. In the Related Keyword table in Explorer, click the blue arrow to the left of your entered keyword to see the top five ranking results.
3. Visit each of the top pages by clicking the three-dot menu and selecting View Page. Review the content on each page. How is their content structured? What keywords are they targeting? From here, you can use what you learn from your answers to these questions to understand what Google considers relevant for your entered topic. 
4. Investigate the keywords driving traffic to each page by clicking the three-dot menu and selecting Research in Explorer.
5. Go to the Keywords tab in the Page report and sort the table by highest rank. These are the keywords driving traffic to this page.

What's next?

• If you find keywords you are interested in competing for, consider tracking them with Conductor.
• If you want to pass on what you've learned from your research, you can create a content optimization or creation brief with Conductor Actions.