Competitor content analysis with SEO tools
Spy on your competitors’ content strategy. Analyse their strengths and weaknesses. Start to build your own.
It’s important to know a right place to start, especially when there are multiple opportunities to explore, ask the question: what is the content that will bring the maximum business value?
Here’re a couple of things to consider before crafting your perfect plan of attack:
- Pick your fight. When you only have one legit content writer in the team (sometimes none…) Publishing 10 pieces of high-quality posts a day is not attainable. While watching your competitor tackling all aspects of the customer journey, it’s important to stay calm, drink tea and know their weakest spots to launch your strategy.
- Avoid going head-on. It’s glorious just to carry a strong belief that your article is just simply better…it will have a better click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate…
In reality, It takes time to catch up, and by the time you do, your competitor has moved on to new content. Think ahead and the grab the empty land first.
3. Connect the dots. When it comes to evergreen content, writing a 2000 words article is not enough. It requires constant updates to make sure that the content stays the most relevant.
A common strategy is to first map out all the relevant questions your customer may have, then answer each in short posts, and eventually link them all together in one mega post.
For example, have a look at this bathroom renovation guide published by Domain. The article links to several high quality posts on bathroom renovation. With more content adding to the post, this article may be the go-to-guide for bathroom renovation in the long run.
Qualitative Analysis
It’s a fun task! When you start to see trends in ideas vary by industries, and catch how it might be related to their overall business objectives, you can feel like the Sherlock Holmes working in digital marketing. He has a homeless network, you just have…internet and a smart brain.
A Qualitative Analysis can answer some big picture questions, such as:
- On-page content: What content are there? What’s their purpose?
- Off-page content: What content are there? What’s their purpose?
- Distribution: How your competitors ship this content to their customers? What’s the flow?
Use the list below while browsing your competitors’ website:
- What are the services/products competitors provide on their websites? Are they the same as yours or different?
- How do the competitors display the content on their service pages?
- What are content formats your competitors use? (Plain text, images, videos etc. )
- What other content your competitors provide on the website to enhance the buyers’ decision making journey?
Problem recognition-Product/service comparison-Purchasing-After-purchase
5. Where do your competitors distribute these content? Or some other channels?
6. What are the responses on social media? Do you see amplification?
7. What are the common topics of these content?
8. Can you see traits of your competitors’ content creation process? (Industry forum, keyword research, situational analysis etc. )
9. How often do the competitors publish and update the content?
10. How long is the content?
Quantitative Analysis
This is where things start to get analytical and more in-depth. After getting yourself familiarised with the type of content your competitors have invested in, it’s time to put them into even smaller segments and measure their effectiveness. Here’s how to analyse their content inventory:
From a search engine (SEO) perspective:
Step 1. Now you know where all the content lives, it’s time to grab all the URLs
When it comes to inspecting content, Screaming frog is my favorite tool to use for extracting all the URLs, titles, meta descriptions and word count.
It’s possible to hit the 500 link limit when you don’t have a license. Also, your computer RAM capacity might not be able to keep up with the good work.
To ease the situations above, Screaming frog has an include/exclude feature that allows you to take control of the URLs you want to craw. Configure the settings to crawl a section of the websites.
As an example, when you want to crawl pages from .com that only has /blog or /article in the URLs, you can include the regex:.*blog.*
Step 2. Map out the keywords
In general, your competitors include their keywords in the URLs, as cached slugs. So after you finish the crawl, download the file in EXCEL.
Use Text to Columns in Excel to separate the keywords from the URLs.
See my post on the Excel tricks every SEO needs to know for more details.
3. Start a new campaign in your keyword tracking tool
Import your list of keywords. See whether the articles are ranking for top positions. Some keywords are harder to rank for than the others.
If your competitors rank well for certain highly competitive keywords, it’s time to go back to qualitative and inspect how they were able to achieve this result. Are they ranking for Quick Answers? Local 3 packs?
To do this manually, open New Incognito Window by right clicking your mouse, type in the keyword, and see unadulterated results.
A good tool to extract blocks of content is Parse Hub. I’d recommend using it when you need to scrape large E-commerce website or online market places. Their content strategy often come hand in hand with product listing and service descriptions.
From a Social Media perspective:
There are two important metrics: Best by links and Most shared content. These two measurement gives a quick snapshot of the best performing content.
When an article is linked multiple times, it could indicate that
- The article is well-written and a linkable asset
- A link building strategy is in place.
My favourite tool to get this metric is Ahref-Top Pages. Again, make sure you specify the URL as /blog or /articles for a targeted outcome.
When an article is widely shared, it means the topic is applicable to the readers.
- The topic evokes emotional responses
- A social strategy is in place
I have yet to settle on my go-to tools for checking this. At the moment, I’m using Ahref and Buzzsumo to get the data.
Buzzsumo:
Go to Most Shared to have an overview of the content performance.
Let me know what process of content audit you go through to spy on competitors!
I’m always open to meet new likely-minded professionals. Add me on LinkedIn if you would like to have a quick chat.
