Your Key to Master Competitive Content Analysis
Source: Vecteezy
Alt: Secure Your Blog’s Future with Competitive Content Analysis
Gone are the days when simply publishing content was enough. You can see blogs and websites stuffed with content everywhere, and there’s a good reason for that – on average, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month than those without. It’s no surprise that everyone tries to tip the scales of user decisions in their favor.
Grab a clear idea of your rivals’ strategies – and you’ll be able to use those insights to create content that will hit the target at first sight.
With this guide, discover how to conduct a competitive content analysis and integrate it into your content marketing. Let’s secure your content strategy success with the right process of spying on your competitors.
Understanding Competitive Content Analysis
Ever wondered what competitive content analysis means? It’s essentially a way to examine and understand the content strategies of your competitors. This information isn’t used for duplication, but as a guide to find new opportunities and better your own content.
Doing a competitive content analysis helps you discover successful strategies in your industry. With this inside knowledge, you can make a stronger and more unique SEO content plan.
Most importantly, competitive content analysis is a valuable tool for improving your content quality and enhancing business growth. The real gain? You can find your competitors’ areas of weakness and capitalize on them.
Now that you know the basics of competitive content analysis, let’s look at why it’s so important for your business’s future success.
The value of competitive content analysis is huge:
- Shows what’s successful and what’s not for your competitors. You can use that information to improve your content strategy and gain an advantage.
- Finds gaps that existing content in the market isn’t filling, which you can take advantage of to set yourself apart.
- Allows a comprehensive review of several content and SEO factors, like competitors’ organic traffic, top-performing pages, and backlinks, among other key elements.
- Sheds light on your industry’s content marketing trends and customer likes. These insights help you stay ahead and meet your audience’s changing needs.
How to Perform a Competitor Content Analysis
Starting a competitor content analysis might seem overwhelming due to the vast amount of data available. This systematic approach involves a deep dive into your competitors’ strategies to grasp their content marketing mechanics thoroughly.
The first step we’ll do is to understand the goal of the analysis. Let’s say we’re looking for ways to improve the existing content in our blog.
Proceeding from there, we’ll select the primary metrics for content assessment that correlate with our goals. The key parameters we’d recommend considering, in this case, are:
- Content Relevance. First of all, look at their sitemap and blog. Which elements do they have there? Do they have a newsletter, a featured rubric, tags, or pagination? What’s their messaging, and is it consistent? Also, we’ll look at the relevance of content to audience needs and queries based on search intent and engagement metrics.
- SEO Performance. Understand the amount and quality of traffic each competitor has and which keywords bring it. Special attention should be paid to traffic sources, demographics, and platforms used to access the site (mobile/desktop).
- Backlinks Profile. Backlinks indicate content credibility. Using SEO platforms, you can appraise both the quantity and quality of backlinks and domain authority.
- User Engagement. By employing metrics like duration per visit, bounce rates, and social media interaction, we can study audience immersion levels. These are indices of content value.
- Competitive Benchmarks. We’ll also compare content volume, frequency, ranking, quality, and topic coverage with competitors.
- Social Media Footprint. Examination of followers, user interaction, and shared content allows for understanding what social selling tactics they use, if any.
Decoding Your Competitors’ Game
First off on your journey into competitive content analysis, it’s crucial to identify who your competitors truly are. There are primarily three types:
- Direct competitors are creating similar content and targeting the same audience as you.
- Indirect competitors are filling the same needs but divergently, where they have the same keywords but a different interpretation.
- Newbies, or newcomers, who are vying for the same audience and keywords.
The merit of this step lies in its ability to provide you with a competitive landscape and a broader picture of the market. By understanding this playing field, you can refine your content marketing strategy, thus bolstering your stand in the market.
SEO Competitor Analysis
An in-depth analysis equips you with a strong content quality and SEO perspective. With essential metrics like organic traffic, keywords, on-page optimization of effective and underperforming pages, and backlinks right at your fingertips, you’re armed to strategize and react to the competitive content ecosystem.
Use an SEO competitor analysis tool if needed. Special attention should be paid to traffic sources, demographics, and platforms used to access the site (mobile/desktop). Compare SEO facets like page load speed, etc. User experience should be reviewed at this point, too.
Tools for automating SEO competitor analysis like SE Ranking offer invaluable insights into the web’s most contested battlegrounds. For example, their competitor research tool delivers comprehensive metrics ranging from the organic and paid keywords your competitors rank for and allows you to peek at their highest-performing pages and ads driving traffic, right down to the detailed data regarding the number of backlinks and referring domains.
The key to competitive analysis of content is to gather ample data. The more data you acquire, the clearer your competitor’s content plan appears. Bear in mind: Competitive content analysis aims to comprehend what’s successful and why, not to replicate your competitors’ tactics. Utilize these findings to steer your content marketing approach and outmaneuver your rivals.
Conducting a Content Analysis
With the collected data, shift your focus from numbers to content itself. The audit should be comprehensive enough to evaluate the quantity and types of content published by the competitors. In this stage, we would scrutinize blog content focusing on:
- Standards. Assess factors such as ToV, grammatical precision, factual correctness, relevance, multimedia usage, expert opinions, surveys, proprietary business data, and quotes. It’s worth paying attention to how they incorporate their brand identity into the content.
- Diversity. Are they producing high-volume or high-quality content? Are they meeting audience needs? Evaluate the scope of content categories in your writings to competitors and contemplate broadening your content spectrum.
- Accuracy. Analyze if popular pages present accurate information, cite sources, and use data to support claims.
- Uniqueness. Go beyond a simple plagiarism check. Identify if the content includes unique elements like research, expert quotes, or custom visuals.
- Imagery. What type of visuals do they use (graphs, infographics, images etc.) and how effective they are? What is the purpose of the visual presentation of the content?
- Readability. Evaluate the content structure, grammar, and complexity. Analyze headers, tables of content, visual ease of reading, and writing difficulty level.
- Tone. Analyze how the writer addresses the audience and the subject matter. Look if they use humor and assess their formality level, friendliness, respectfulness, and person (1st, 2nd, or 3rd). The tone and voice used in calls to action (CTAs) should also be your area of interest. You can use a content analysis tool like Grammarly to assess it.
Another critical metric is the frequency of their publishing – are they regular, sporadic, or bursting only at peak periods? Monitoring these publishing habits not just once but on a quarterly basis can provide great insights on how to strategize your content production. Being constantly updated about your competitors’ activity can help you anticipate their moves and better schedule your content.
To dive even deeper, sign up for your top competitors’ newsletters, follow their social media accounts, and subscribe to their blogs. This will help you understand if they stick to a particular theme, the type of language they use, and their headline style. You’ll also get a sense of their blogging rhythm and user engagement from article comments and social media interactions.
Leveraging Distribution Channels
Content and SEO intersect broadly in this arena. If a competitor performs particularly well on a specific platform, delve into the SEO metrics fuelling their success. This includes analyzing their keyword strategy for different platforms, the extent of their organic traffic, and the nature of their backlinks.
To save you some time, here’s a checklist for researching the content distribution of your rivals:
- Social Media Analysis
– Identify which social media platforms competitors use (Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, X).
– Analyze how they share content on each platform.
– Focus on platforms most relevant to your brand.
– Consider the absence of a social media presence as a potential competitive advantage for you. - Internal Linking Strategy
– See if your competitors include links in their content.
– Look at the frequency and purpose of these links (e.g., other articles, product pages, etc.).
– Observe if competitors use banner ads or other forms of non-text prompts in their content.
Consider the different ways your competitors spread their messages, such as blogs, social media, podcasts, or videos. Look at how often they post, when they post, and the audience’s response to their content. The way customers react can give you valuable information on what they prefer.
Transforming Analysis to Action
Your competitive content analysis shouldn’t just stop at understanding. Use it to make improvements to your own content marketing approach.
Whether you need to create more of a particular type of content, optimize for different keywords, or use a new platform depends on what you find in your research. Useful resources such as the Competitor Analysis Matrix or the TOWS framework can summarize the next steps to take with your blog based on the findings from the analysis.
Source: Digital Leadership
Alt: TOWS analysis can help you summarize your takeaways and see the next steps
Summary
We live in wonderful times – AI changes marketing quickly, and adaptation has become a core strategy for success. Competitive content analysis helps you enhance content marketing by constantly studying competitors’ advances and tactics. This involves identifying your primary rivals, understanding their SEO strategies, and examining their content quality. Through constant learning and adaptation, you can stay ahead in your industry and safeguard your future.