How to Conduct A Competitive Content Analysis

You might think you know your competitors, but do you really know your competitors?

Without an in-depth competitor analysis, you’re going to miss out on the important details that could take your marketing strategy from zero to hero. For a truly detailed competitor analysis, you need to deep dive into digital marketing analysis and split it up into:

• Competitive content analysis
• Competitive keyword research
• Competitive SEO analysis
• Competitive PPC analysis

Today, we’re ticking off the ‘competitor analysis for content’ box on this to-do list. ✅

What is competitive content analysis and why is it important?

A competitive content analysis is the process of understanding and assessing your competitors’ content strategies. This means reviewing their messaging, tone and structure, as well as diving deeper into their blogs, social media platforms and any other types of content they write.

Your goals of competitive content analysis are to find out:

What’s working for your competitors

What’s not working for your competitors

️ And where the opportunities are for you to swoop in (and win that traffic)

Seeing what your competitors are up to is all part of the success plan where you’ll create realistic benchmarks, find traffic gaps and opportunities, and ensure you’re delivering unique and relevant content.

It’s time to analyze, adapt and conquer. Let’s get started.

How to do competitive content analysis in 5 steps

1) Define your competitors

We’re living in a competitive world with over 250,000 new websites being created every day, and only a limited number of people in the world – your idea of what competition is needs to go deeper than just a competing product.

These days, there are four types of competition:

• Direct competition
• Indirect competition
• Replacement competition
• Potential competition

All these types of competition need to be considered and monitored, and competitive content analysis is just one way to assess how much of a competitor each of them are – particularly, in the field of online content.

Create (and continuously update) your content competitor list, because content ranks and there’s only one top position on Google.

2) Analyze competitors’ content with these key SEO metrics

Sure, reading and subscribing to your competitors’ content might give you a good idea about what you like and don’t like about it, but what do your target audience think about it?

If you want to really know what’s working, beyond what you see on the SERPs, as well as get insights into what drives their strategies, SEO is where it’s at. Here are the key SEO metrics and considerations you should be looking at:

Organic traffic:

Look into how many visitors are getting to your competitors’ websites through organic search. This gives you a good benchmark of what to expect in your industry, and tells you how good at SEO your competitors are.

Using Similarweb, you can get a full view of your competitors’ performance on search, including number of visitors, organic versus paid performance, branded traffic, and other search terms that got them there.

On-site engagement:

But it’s not all about the traffic, it’s about how that traffic engages with a website. You can determine the quality of the visitors’ experience by looking at engagement metrics, including:

• Visit duration: How much time are visitors spending on the site?
• Page views: How many pages are visitors looking at?
• Bounce rate: What’s the share of visitors leaving the site without any interaction?

If visit duration and page views are low and the bounce rate is high, it implies (most of the time) that the page is not what visitors thought it would be. This might mean it’s misaligned with the page title or metadata, or it provides little value.

Keyword rankings:

Delve into the search terms that get users to your competitors’ site to identify keyword gaps and inform your own keyword strategy and list of target keywords.

Similarweb makes this easy for you with its Keywords tool. You can see all the keywords driving both paid and organic (or one or the other, thanks to the filters) to any company’s website.

Our Rank Tracker tool also provides you with daily insight into the SERPs, showing how your content weighs up against your competitors for visibility, position and clicks.

Backlinks and referring traffic:

Backlinks and referrals are one way to prove that your website has E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and tells Google that your content is useful and trustworthy.

Similarweb provides marketers with a high-level overview of backlinks, referral data and insights. With this information, you can:

• Understand the amount of referred traffic vs other marketing channels
• Spot content that is deemed relevant and valuable for other sites
• See what the referring domains are (and how you could work with them)
• See what domains they’re referring to in their content
• Determine any partnerships between your competitors and other domains

3) Audit your competitors’ content

When auditing your competitors’ content, you should review:

• Organization of content: What themes and how are they categorized?
• Content formats: What kind of content are they publishing?
• Frequency of content: How often is new or optimized content being published?
• Marketing channels: Where are their users coming from?
• Call-to-actions: Where are they sending their users?
• Authors: What level of expertise do the content authors have?
• Target audience: Who are they trying to reach or resonate with?

Above you’ll see our Marketing Channels feature, giving an overview of where the content comes from. By clicking through to each of them, uncovers more detail. For example, our tool can tell you the organic and paid keywords – either together or separately – that bring people to your competitors’ site.

4) Stalk their social media

When reviewing the digital acquisition from different marketing channels, you’re likely to have stumbled across social media platforms as big referrers to your competitors’ websites. Or, you might have seen the opposite.

Whether social media brought the traffic or not, it’s important to look at your competitors’ social media to see the main platforms they use, the content that’s being published, and the content that gets good engagement. We’re all about that #inspo.

Ask yourself questions like: Are users liking, commenting or sharing their posts? Are they praising or complaining? This is your direct window into what users are thinking, so don’t overlook it.

Watch out for any influencer collaborations too, as your stalking will have to stretch to their channels as well for full insight into your competitors’ social media strategies.

5) Strategize, optimize and take first prize

This is your chance to take all the insights, ideas and just everything you’ve learnt in your competitive content analysis, and start thinking about your own strategy. A content strategy that flies high above any of your competitors’ strategies, getting you to the top spots on Google and on your target audience’s screens.

To get to those heights, you want to know what they’re doing – then do it 10x better.

Some tools to help you fill the gaps in your competitor-crushing content strategy? Sure thing:

Keyword Gap Analysis

Our Keyword Gap tool is ideal for spotting keyword opportunities that you’re currently missing out on. Comparing your website versus your competitors’ websites, it scans through all the content and shows the common keywords you share, the ones you ‘own’, and the ones you’re missing out on.

Here we can see that Nike, Adidas and New Balance have very similar core keywords, but Nike reigns supreme in the content world, covering a wider range of search terms. 

Organic and Popular Pages

Organic Pages and Popular Pages gives you an idea of which of your competitors’ pages are doing well on organic search, and which are doing well in terms of engagement. You can then analyze these pages and work out what’s getting the attention – from Google or searchers. Is it a video? An interactive tool? A particular tone of voice?

You can take these findings and apply them to your own strategy. Take a look at moneyhelper.org.uk. As a government website, it provides a lot of advice via landing pages, blog posts, and more – but in terms of popular pages, it’s the variation of calculators.

It’s no real wonder that interactive tools are so high up on the digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2024.

Search Tracker

Spotting these opportunities and adapting your strategy is all well and good, but the problem is, the search landscape is always changing – and that has an impact on your content.

Our new Search Tracker module includes (the previously mentioned) Rank Tracker and Brand Protection giving you a holistic view of what’s happening on search. Yep, on both paid and organic search. With fresh, real-user and real-time data, you can spot and react fast to any changes, whether that’s seeing a dip in your organic search rankings, or a competitor bidding on your most business-critical keyword of the season.

Spot it quick, react quick, win back that traffic quick. 

You get ‘em, marketer

With endless Google algorithm updates, new SERP feature optimizations released, previously unheard-of search habits coming through on the reg, and – not to mention – your competitors changing tactics, your strategy needs to be constantly evolving. Otherwise, you’ll quickly get left behind.

Keep up the good work with your competitive content analysis by reviewing your competitors’ content periodically to see what’s changing. Or be one step ahead of the game, by using the freshest data on the market to see the changes as they happen – not a month later.

Try Similarweb for free today or speak with one of our experts.

FAQs

What is a competitive content analysis?

A competitive content analysis is a process of assessing and evaluating the content of your competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your content strategy.

Why is defining competitors important in content analysis?

By defining your competitors, you can gain insights into who you’re up against and which companies or brands are targeting the same audience as you. This provides a clearer focus on where to direct your analysis efforts.

Which key SEO metrics should I focus on when analyzing content?

Important SEO metrics include keyword ranking, backlink profiles, domain authority, page loading speed, organic traffic, and on-page optimizations like meta descriptions and title tags.

How do I effectively audit my competitors’ content?

To audit your competitors’ content, start by listing out the types of content they produce (e.g., blogs, infographics, videos), assess the quality and relevance of the content, note the frequency of their content updates, and analyze their content engagement metrics like shares, comments, and likes.

How often should I perform a competitive content analysis?

The digital landscape is dynamic, so it’s advisable to perform a competitive content analysis at least twice a year – however, it pays off to regularly monitor the SERPs and your competitors’ content so you don’t miss any important changes that will affect your website and content performance.