Understand What A Content Marketing Competitive Analysis Is
What exactly is a competitive content marketing analysis? As the name suggests, it is a form of analysis that is performed on your competitors to evaluate their content marketing activities and overall strategy. Performing such analysis gives you a more complete picture of what they are doing and how you can use this knowledge to create your own strategy. Here are the three main reasons why you would want to perform this analysis:
- You will understand how your content marketing compares to that of your competitors. You will also understand what your target audience expects.
- You will find gaps in your content strategy as well as in your competitors’ activities. You will look at top-performing and low-performing content to identify the most effective tactics.
- You will freshen up your own content strategy by bringing in new ideas, addressing issues or challenges it may have, and so on.
Research Who Your Competitors Are And Make A List
The first and most obvious step is to research who your competitors are and make a list unless you already know who they are. In most cases, these are brands in your own niche creating the same content as you are. However, the reality is a bit complicated.
Because you are working with content here, it’s not just the brands that you will be competing against. There are likely different media outlets (e.g. blogs, social media influencers, YouTube channels) creating content in your niche that are not your competitors when it comes to selling the products or services you are selling. These competitors should also be added to your list because you ARE competing with them in terms of content.
Collect Information About Your Competitors
Once you have your list of competitors, you can start collecting information about them and doing more in-depth research. You will need to start with basic information about them and then eventually analyze their content marketing activities.
The most common content types you need to pay attention to include:
- Blog posts and articles
- Videos, both long and short
- Podcasts and audio recordings
- Webinars, e-books, white papers
- Presentations, and infographics
- Email newsletters
Assess Your Competitors’ Business Core And Positioning
A very important step during your research is to assess your competitors’ business core and positioning. You need to pay attention to the subtle and the obvious elements of their online presence to understand this. For instance, the basic information you started from will already give you an idea about the kind of businesses you are competing against. Take a look at their meta titles and descriptions. Look at website navigation, linking strategy, and on-site optimization. Check out their social media profiles. Pay attention to their branding. All of these will help you identify how these businesses position themselves which will, in turn, help you analyze their content marketing activities more accurately.
Choose Your SEO Metrics And Standards For Analysis
Once you have collected enough information about your competitors and their content, you can begin your analysis. But before that, you will need to choose your SEO metrics and standards for the said analysis. Here are the most common SEO metrics that are used in such analysis:
- Monthly organic search traffic
- Domain authority score
- Top country by traffic
- Average time on site
- Estimated number of top keywords
- Estimated number of backlinks You can use other metrics as well, but these should be the ones you turn to first. Comparing these metrics to your own site’s performance will give you an idea of where you stand among your competitors.
Perform Analysis Of Their Key SEO Metrics
Now that you have chosen your SEO metrics and standards, you can actually perform the analysis. To do this, use one of the many analysis tools available online that will give you the numbers for the said metrics for your competitors.
Perhaps the most commonly used tool, in this case, is Google Analytics simply because it’s so easy to use and has so many features offered for free. If you are already using it for your own website, it will be relatively easy for you to get all the information you need for your competitors. Otherwise, you can always use a different tool if you want to.
Carefully Review Their On-Site Content
In addition to the SEO metrics, you should also carefully review your competitors’ on-site content. The on-site content you need to check includes:
- Key content categories
- Blog content quality
- Content length
- Key content formats
- User acquisition
- Influencers and thought leaders
Evaluate Their Content Quantity And Quality
Speaking of content quality, it’s a good idea to evaluate both your competitors’ content quality and quantity. Both of these are essential to your competitors’ (and your own) strategies’ success.
How detailed and long the content is, what kind of structure it follows, how complex it is (what is its readability level), whether it is original or curated/sourced from somewhere – all of these aspects directly influence the quantity and quality of blog content. Also, pay attention to content topics. Which ones are the most popular? Which ones are evergreen and which aren’t?
Closely Examine Their Top-Performing Content
Last but not least, you need to closely examine the top-performing content of your competitors to see what really works for them. Of course, in some cases, the high performance of a specific piece of content can be pure coincidence or luck, so you need to be careful with that. Nevertheless, looking at top-performing content is the best way to see which tactics are the most effective for your competitors. After you have completed your analysis, you can put it into action and start creating your own content strategy. Try the techniques used by your competitors, but don’t directly copy them. Find your own way of content marketing.
Final Thoughts
All in all, the accuracy and usefulness of your competitive content marketing analysis directly depend on how much attention you pay to detail and how well you do your research. Utilize the tips in this article to help you conduct a successful competitive content marketing analysis and use your findings to put together an effective content strategy.