Are you tired of being overshadowed by your competitors online? It’s time to take control and dominate your niche with competitive content analysis. In this article, we will explain the benefits of competitive content analysis and how it can help you outshine your competition.
Competitive content analysis is a crucial tool for any business or blogger looking to succeed online. By carefully analyzing and comparing your content to that of your competitors, you can gain a clear understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, and identify areas for improvement. This information can be invaluable in helping you refine and optimize your content strategy, allowing you to attract more traffic, engage your audience, and ultimately drive more sales and revenue.
But how exactly do you conduct competitive content analysis? And how can it help you dominate your niche? Keep reading to find out.
Table of Contents
What is competitive content analysis?
Competitive content analysis is a process of analyzing and comparing your content to that of your competitors. Analyzing your competitors’ content, keywords, and ranking pages can help you understand your strengths and weaknesses and identify opportunities for improvement.
You will need to review your competitors’:
- content
- blog articles
- keywords
- estimated organic traffic
- estimated paid traffic
- their competitors
Although this can be done manually, by reviewing each piece of content individually and comparing it to your own, using SEO tools to analyze and compare content is recommended.
Competitor analysis benefits
Let’s list some of the benefits you gain by analysing the content of your competitors websites.
Gain insight into your competitors’ content strategy
The goal of competitive content analysis is to gain a better understanding of your competitors’ content strategy, and to identify areas where you can improve your own content to gain an edge.
Your competitors content can be invaluable in helping you to refine and optimize your own content strategy, ensuring that you are creating the kind of content that will engage your audience and drive traffic to your website.
Identify gaps in the market
Competitive content analysis can also help you to identify gaps in the market and create unique, valuable content that differentiates you from your competitors.
Find topics and issues that your competitors are not addressing and use this information to create unique content that will attract a wider audience and drive more traffic and revenue to your website.
Learn your strengths and weaknesses
What are your competitors’ doing that you are not? Perhaps they are writing about topics you are not covering. Or they are targeting keywords you haven’t thought of.
Rather than guess why not find out exactly what they are up to. While you can’t steal their content you can certainly steal their ideas and keywords! Just make sure to write better content so you will rank higher.
Identify trends and shifts in the market
Competitor content analysis can also help you to stay ahead of the game. By regularly monitoring your competitors’ content, you can identify trends and shifts in the market and adjust your own strategy accordingly.
If your competitor starts writing about a new topic, you can monitor their organic traffic to decide if you also want to target that topic.
Competitor monitoring software
Although you can manually check a website against a checklist this is not a scalable approach. You want to spend time running your business not manually checking your competitors website. Use competitor monitoring software tools to automate this job for you.
For this article I will use the tool I am most familiar with – SE Ranking, other tools will have similar features.
SERP competitor rankings
SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page and refers to a search result page on Google (or other search engine). You want to be on the first page of Google to receive any search traffic.
The screenshot below shows a report of keywords a competitor website ranks for with the ranking position shown. I add two filters to the report:
- keyword word count is 3+
- difficulty of 15 or less (this is how challenging it will be to rank for that keyword)
When starting out with your website you need to target low competition keywords otherwise you will have no chance of ranking. This is why it’s good to filter you reports by keyword difficulty like I do in this. example.
From this report I get a good idea of keywords I can rank for along with their monthly search volume and difficulty shown. Most of the keywords may not be relevant so you will need to spend time searching for suitable candidate keywords.
Other reports show the total organic and paid traffic to the website and the number of keywords they currently rank for.
Analyzing keywords and phrases your competitors rank for can identify opportunities to improve your own SEO.
Track the following metrics from your competitors websites:
- Keyword rankings, new and lost keyword statistics
- Search volume and keyword difficulty
- CPC and number of advertisers
- Estimated cost per target keyword
- Search results overview by country
Want to know traffic distribution by country or region? No problem, the screenshot below shows a report breaking down traffic by country (or region).
Tracking your competitors’ rankings can also help you to identify opportunities for content marketing and link building. Content that is ranking highly for your competitors’ keywords will give you ideas for writing your own content targeting those same keywords.
You can also use this information to build links to your website from relevant, authoritative sources, which can improve your rankings and increase your visibility in the search results.
Competition rank tracker
It’s useful to track your competitors rankings over time. You can see the report below:
You can see visually how your competitor is doing over various different time ranges. You also see:
- New keywords
- Lost keywords
- Improved keywords
- Decreased keywords
- Unchanged keywords
In addition to the graph report shown above you also get a detailed table report that lets you analyze the keywords.
Filter the keywords by many different criteria. The filter options are shown below:
Filtering keyword reports is important because not all keywords will be relevant to you. Also, depending on how large your website is, you will not be able to rank for competitive keywords.
Look for keywords that have the following criteria:
- low competition
- decent monthly search volume
- low difficulty
- 3+ words
With practice, you can learn how to filter keywords to find the most relevant and easily rankable ones for your website.
Find similar companies in your niche
Find other competitors in your niche and see how much traffic their websites receive. Here is what the report looks like:
You also get a detailed report on all your competitors (this report gave over 400 websites). The detailed report will give you the following metrics:
- domain trust (high ranking websites have higher domain trust)
- common keywords (shared by all your competitors)
- missing keywords (the analyzed domain is missing keyword the other competitors rank. for)
- total keywords
- total traffic
In addition, you can filter the report by these metrics.
Show your competitors backlink profile
Backlinks are an important ranking signal for Google. How many backlinks does a competitor have? You can easily see their backlink profile over time with another report.
This report shows total, new and lost backlinks over time for a competitor. You can select the other tabs to see total traffic, keywords and total traffic cost.
Competitor adwords analysis
What ads has your competitor been using and how effective were they?
By analyzing your competitors’ ad campaigns, you can get ideas for how to optimize your own campaigns. For example, if you see that a competitor is using a specific ad format or targeting a particular demographic, you can test out similar strategies to see if they work for your business as well.
Below is a screenshot of report showing the most popular keyword ads for a competitor.
You can see all your competitors ads they have run with the following metrics:
- keyword
- traffic
- traffic share
- ad count
- search volume
- competition
- CPC (Cost per Click)
By hovering over the last column you can see the actual ad they ran, here is an example:
Keep track of your competitors ad campaigns and monitor what is working for them. Perhaps it will work for you too?
Estimate search traffic of your competitors
How much traffic is your competitor getting to their website?
Analyze traffic to your competitors’ website over various time periods. From this graph you can also view:
- total keywords their website ranks for
- cost of traffic via paid ads
- number of backlinks to their website
I could write about how good the SE Ranking Competition Research tool is, but it’s easier to see for yourself. Test it out by typing in a competitor website and checking out the report.
Final Thoughts
Competitive content analysis is a valuable tool for businesses looking to succeed online. By carefully comparing your content to that of your competitors, you can gain a clear understanding of your strengths and weaknesses and identify areas for improvement.
Learn from the best. Your competitors have likely already made mistakes and learned valuable lessons. By studying their websites, you can learn from their successes and avoid their pitfalls.
Save time. A competitor content analysis tool can save you hours of manual research by quickly and easily gathering all the data you need in one place. This means you can spend more time creating and implementing your own strategies, rather than trying to keep up with the competition.
By investing in competitor content analysis tool, you can gain the insights and knowledge you need to dominate your niche and outshine your competition.
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