Complete guide to a competitive content analysis

Competitor content analysis is an integral part of running a successful business and this holds true for online brands as well, particularly when it comes to search marketing and SEO. 

While it may take quarterly or even annual studies to discover when you’re losing market share to the competition in terms of positioning or share of mind, you can see your competition start to outrank you in the search results immediately.

Studying how your competitors are using content to engage their audiences and drive interest in their products or services can help shine a light on your own content marketing approach.

Even if you’re not new to content marketing, taking the time to compare your efforts to those of your competitors can help you stay on top of trends. You can even discover new ways to capture your audience’s attention using content. 

What is a competitive content analysis?

A competitive content analysis is the process of analyzing your competitors’ content strategies in a structured way. By breaking down the analysis into steps, it’s easier to uncover your potential competitors’ top-performing content and weak spots and identify your competitive advantages

Moreover, a competitive content analysis helps marketers understand the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunity gaps when it comes to competitors’ content marketing activity. A complete competitive content analyzes your competitors existing content, SEO, and product strategies so you can differentiate your brand’s content.

Why to do a competitive content analysis?

There are many reasons to do a competitor content analysis, but the main purpose of the exercise is to help you:

• Benchmark your efforts: Understand how your content marketing efforts compare to others in your industry. You’ll see the type of content your target audience expects from you and how they prefer to engage with it.
• Find content gaps: Identify your competitors’ top-performing and low-performing content. Understand what your target audience likes (so you can do it better) and what content approaches don’t get a lot of traction (so you can avoid them).
• Keep your content fresh: Find fresh ideas to put a creative spin on, and make sure your content efforts stand out from the crowd. 

How to do a competitive content analysis?

Competitive content analysis will help you stay one step ahead of your competition. It will ensure that any content you create is unique and valuable for your target audience. And doing a competitive content analysis is not as difficult as you might think. You can make a copy of this template and use it as you go through each step below.

Step 1: Make a list of your competitors

The first step to do competitive content analysis is to make a list of your direct and indirect competitors. Your direct competitors are any brand, business, or person that offers the same products or services that you do. 

Your indirect competitors are any brand, business, or person that offers products or services that differ from yours but that could satisfy the same customer needs. They might also solve the same problem that your products or services do.

Also, you can examine media publications. Online magazines and blogs that create content on the same topic as your brand can be a useful way to get content ideas and to find potential partnerships.

Step 2: Review your competitors’ business core and positioning

Starting with your direct competitors, you’ll want to gather basic information about them so you can better understand their goals and target audience. 

Take a look at their homepage’s title and meta description. You can view this manually in Google search results or use the SEOquake Chrome Extension to scrape it from any page. Also review their homepage copy. How do they define who they are and what they do?

Also look at the top product or service categories on your competitors’ websites. These categories usually influence the content marketing direction and content categories; that’s why it’s important to take the time to understand exactly what each competitor offers.

In this step, you can also take note of whether your competitor is well-established or new in your market. Do they have brand recognition yet? This will help you assess your opportunities and limitations more objectively. 

You can gather this information by doing a manual Google search for each competitor company and seeing what comes up in the results. Then review their “About Us” pages on their websites and check Crunchbase to see if they have raised significant funding, etc.

Step 3: Analyze key SEO metrics

A proper competitor content analysis also involves looking at key SEO metrics to identify any potential content gaps your site may have compared to your competition. For example, you may discover that a lot of people are engaging with and sharing your competitor’s videos. This may mean there’s an opportunity for you to create more video content as well.

In this step, your goal is to understand how much traffic and engagement with content is expected in your niche. It’s also to understand which of your competitors are doing a good job creating that content.

1. Monthly organic search traffic

Gathering monthly organic search traffic numbers on your competitors can help you benchmark your own brand against them. To do this you’ll need an SEO or analytics tool, and there are several options. If you are using Semrush, go to Domain Overview. Type in your competitor’s website, and you’ll be able to view their Organic Search Traffic.

2. Domain authority score

A domain authority score is another metric you can use to assess the overall effectiveness of your competitors’ content marketing efforts. Use it to benchmark against your own content and SEO strategy. 

Several SEO tools generate their own version of this score. The Semrush Authority Score demonstrates a domain’s or webpage’s overall quality and SEO performance. It is based on a variety of metrics (such as organic search, website traffic and backlinks data) that showcase trustworthiness and authority, using a neural network and machine learning to ensure maximum accuracy.

3. Top country by traffic

Depending on your product or service, you may need to localize your content to appeal to your target audience. If you are competing with other brands or businesses in a specific region, you will want to analyze where their traffic originates.

4. Average time on site

The average time users spend on a site is another important engagement metric. It will help you understand whether or not people are actually enjoying or engaging with your competitors’ content. First, check the average time users are spending on your own website. You can use Google Analytics (Audience > Overview), making sure to establish the right date range.

5. Estimated number of top keywords

Next, you can look at how many keywords your competitors are ranking for on the first page of organic search results. This list of keywords can help you identify which of your competitors have the strongest SEO and content strategy. You’ll be able to learn from them and try new content ideas.

6. Estimated number of backlinks

Knowing which of your competitors generate a lot of backlinks can help you find more link magnet ideas and link-building opportunities.

Step 4: Review their on-site content

Now it’s time to take a deep dive into the website content your competitors are creating. This step will help you uncover content marketing trends in your niche as well as generate new ideas to improve your own content marketing strategy. 

1. Key content categories

Analyzing your competitors’ content categories is a great way to start figuring out your industry’s most popular content themes. A good way to find this information is by looking at the main blog sections and blog post tags on your competitor’s site.

2. Blog content quality

Analyzing the quality of your competitors’ content can be subjective. However, there are things you can look for to help you decide how well they are doing. For example:

• How detailed are the posts? Longreads (7,000+ word articles) perform extremely well, driving nearly 4X more traffic* than articles of average length (900-1,200 words).
• Do they follow a structure? At least 44%* of posts with a simple structure (i.e., that use H2 & H3) perform well in terms of traffic and engagement.
• Are they using quality images or design? Posts with at least one image receive twice as much traffic as text-only posts. They also get 30%* more shares and 25%* more backlinks.
• Is the content easy to read and understand? Posts containing at least one list per every 500 words of plain text receive 70%* more traffic than posts without lists.
• Do you notice any grammar or spelling mistakes?

3. Content length 

Assessing the average length of your competitors’ content will help you establish targets for your own content. Use tools such as the Word Counter Plus Chrome extension to measure the word count of a specific web page or blog post.

4. Key content formats

Now it’s time to create a list of content formats your competitors are using. Some examples of content formats you might find include:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Case studies
• Ebooks
• Reports
• Data visualizations 
• Interactive content
• Quizzes
• Podcasts

Be sure to check their blog alongside other pages on the site, such as testimonial pages, FAQs, etc. This will help to ensure you’re not missing anything.

Making a list of the key content formats your competitors are using will help you understand how much time and resources they invest in content marketing. You’ll also be able to see how often they create different types of content.

5. User acquisition

Many businesses create a lot of content but forget to include a call-to-action to help convert their readers or website visitors into leads. Therefore, it’s a good idea to check what tactics your competitors are using to capture potential customer contact information on their sites. 

Check for things like newsletter sign-up forms, banners or pop-up windows, gated offers, and other similar tactics. You may start to notice a pattern in the types of tools and calls-to-action they use. This can be a good indicator of what works well in your niche.

6. Influencers and thought leaders

Nowadays, many businesses also work with influencers and partners to help create content and engage with their audiences. If you notice your competitors are working with or promoting content created by influencers, make a list of their names and the type of content they are creating. That way you can reach out to them as well. 

Step 5: Turn your competitive content analysis into action

Now that you’ve gathered all of this information on your competitors’ content strategies, the final step is to summarize how you can make your content better. Base this on their (and your own) strengths and weaknesses. 

Additionally, you will now have everything you need to:

• Identify the competitors you should watch closely when it comes to content marketing 
• Generate new content ideas (topics, themes, and formats)
• Try new tactics to generate leads with your content
• Determine your own weak points 
• Test new ways to improve your overall content strategy 

After analyzing your direct competitors, you can also repeat the process for your indirect competitors. Remember, it’s also okay to skip some of the steps for any of your competitors if you don’t find them relevant. This process and our free template are flexible and can be customized to fit your specific business needs.

Benefits of competitor content analysis

Content marketing continues to be an integral part of successful digital marketing and SEO as search engines constantly provide the advice to “create good content.” However, consistently generating quality content ideas and executing them well is difficult, particularly if your goal is to rank your content in competitive SERPs.

Fortunately, your competitors are here to help! Through competitor content analysis you can learn:

• Which pages and topics your competitors identify as important.
• How your competitors earn organic traffic from search.
• Where gaps exist within your current content marketing strategy.
• Which low-investment content opportunities are available.
• Ways to improve existing content for better search performance.
• Which topics generate interest and backlinks within your niche.
• And how and why websites link to content within your space.

Understanding your competitors’ content strategies will help you outperform them where it matters most, in the search results.

Content analysis tools

These tools are specifically designed to evaluate the performance of your site and content. They can review keyword density, H tags, meta information, linking and other technical aspects of your site. Here are some great tools to consider.

1. Databox + Google Analytics

This is actually a combination of two platforms. Google Analytics is the go-to free resource for monitoring website traffic, traffic sources, and other information. However, it provides so much information that it can quickly become overwhelming, which is what makes Databox useful. Databox integrates with everything to put all of your data into an easy-to-read dashboard. Its pre-built template checks your:

• Pageviews by page
• Bounce rate by page
• New sessions by landing pages
• Goal completions
• Pageviews by city and country

2. Keyword Density Checker

This tool is specifically designed to help you optimize your site for the search results. It gives you the top listed keywords for a submitted URL and tells you whether the keyword is in the article title, meta description, and correlates to an HR tag on the page.

3. On-Page Optimization Tool

This tool from Marketing Ninja analyzes a page’s existing SEO, including meta-information, internal links, and keyword density. It allows you to check and determine whether your pages are being viewed the way you want a spider to crawl them.

4. Blaze

This content audit tool is designed to identify gaps and opportunities for improving your content. It inventories all the content on your site and shows you unique visitors, page views, time on page, and other information. It also allows you to easily tag content to strategize its category, ideal audience or whether it needs to be optimized.

5. Moz Link Explorer

This tool provides a link analysis of a domain and shows you the site’s domain authority, inbound links, ranking and the internal and external links.

6. Ahrefs

This website actually includes a number of tools that you can use to conduct a content analysis. The keyword explorer, for example, allows you to research keywords you want to rank for and estimates the level of difficulty or number of links you need to potentially rank on the first page of the search results. Ahrefs can also provide backlink audits to help you identify the best keywords for organic and paid search.

7. Check My Links

This tool crawls your website and looks for broken links. It’s useful as an extension, especially when you’re ready to publish new content that has numerous links.

8. Atomic Reach

This is another great tool for evaluating the quality of your content. It scans your content and scores it based on emotional impact, readability, vocabulary, and more. It will rapidly identify the content that works best on your site and also show you areas where you could make improvements.

9. SEMRush

This tool is useful for content analyses of your own site as well as your competitors.  SEMRush shows the rank of your and your competitor’s sites, shows SEO and content errors, clean as well as toxic backlinks, insights into keywords, and more. With so much functionality built-in, it can be incredibly useful for identifying opportunities for improvement as well as keywords you can rank for.

10. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is useful for information about your own site as well as your competitors.’ This tool can discover the type of content that performs best according to the domain, evaluate for brand mentions, and backlinks and also prove useful during a competitor analysis.

11. ClickFlow

ClickFlow  analyzes your website content and tells you which articles have a high impression rate determined based on the number of times that the page shows up in the search results but has a low click-through rate. This information is useful because, based on this information, you can then make changes to the title or meta description and test to see if you can improve the number of clicks through to the site.

12. Web Page Test

Google favors sites with a fast page load time. Web Page Test is valuable because it allows you to quickly and easily check your page load times and identify what on the page could be taking too long to load and slowing down your website.

Conclusion

Content creation is by far the most important marketing segment these days, and it’s the reason why you need to stay up to date with the latest developments in the field. No matter how innovative and creative you might be, you still have to monitor competitors’ activities to stay one step ahead of them. Competitive research and analysis are secret ingredients of successful content marketing.

It’s also important to remember that doing a competitive content analysis should be a regular part of your overall content strategy. Businesses come and go – and your competitors are also adjusting their content strategies to keep up with trends and ever-changing consumer behavior. It’s a good idea to check in with your competitors and do a competitor analysis on a quarterly or yearly basis. This will help you uncover new content ideas and assess your own.