Why it's important
Competitor analysis for content marketing takes a lot of time and effort, but provides you with valuable insights into how best to position yourself in the market and what opportunities exist for you to gain an advantage over your competition.
You can learn what sort of messaging, tone, voice and media type works best for your shared audience. Plus, auditing other site's content will give you clues about what keywords they target with various types of content. Focus on your most successful competitors and leverage what's working for them.
Getting it done
Step One: Create an inventory of your competitor's' content. Visit their site and review their navigation for pages/category that indicate content: About Us, learning center, blog and webinars. Be sure to check the footer as links to content are often hidden here. You can use a crawler at this point to compile a list of title tags, meta descriptions and HTML headers to determine target keywords for each piece of content.
Step Two: Evaluate the content.
- Quantity: How much of each media type do they produce? Does tone of voice shift between media?
- Frequency: How often do they publish new content? Does it change by topic? Content type?
- Topics: What sort of topics do they write about? This is very important as it indicates what areas they regard as being valuable to their business.
- Engagement: How successful is their content? Check the page's comments section and backlinks. Content that gets a lot of on page engagement and links indicates that the topics, style or highlighted features are important to customers. Use this information when planning your own content strategy.
- Quality: How well is it written? Content that has a lot of spelling and grammar issues won't be successful, and could make you look unprofessional. If your competitor is publishing a lot of low quality content on a certain topic, this is your opportunity to excel by fixing their errors and using it for yourself.