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When starting a new marketing campaign, no matter the channel, you first need to get the lay of the land. Part of that is figuring out what your competition is up to when it comes to content marketing. Conducting competitive research for content marketing takes a serious amount of time and effort, but will provide you with valuable insights into how to position yourself in the market and what opportunities you have to quickly and easily gain an advantage over your competition.
Plus, with content marketing, you don’t need an inside man to learn other businesses’ strategies and priorities. With a careful eye and thorough investigation you can figure it out to your own benefit.
How to Find Their Content
The first step in competitive research for content marketing is to find your competitors’ content. This can be a long process if your competitors have big, complex sites that have lots of content in lots of different places. If this is the case, you’ll need to peek in every nook and cranny.
Start with the site’s navigation. Are there any links that clearly indicate content? Navigate through each option to check for sub-navigations. Check the usual suspects first:
- About Us: Some companies include long corporate histories and descriptions of products and/or services. Also check for news pages and press releases for content.
- Learning Center: Learning centers and other areas of educational and training materials are content-rich. They’re also great places to look for a site’s evergreen content as content here is in-depth, authoritative and ideally stays relevant for a long time.
- Blog: The obvious place to start when cataloging content. Many sites have multiple blogs for different types of content. For example, they may have one for posts relating to their niche and another blog for company and product news. Be sure to double and even triple check so you don’t miss any.
- Webinars: Content marketing isn’t limited to text. Audio and visual content like webinars and videos, with accompanying transcripts, can benefit a site’s SEO and promote brand awareness, product features and thought leadership.
Lastly, check the bottom navigation. There are usually some links here to content that’s harder to find or requires several clicks from the homepage. The bigger the site, the more likely it is that you’ll find important content here.
WooRank allows you to run a website audit for your site, alongside up to three competitors. This provides useful information, including related websites that can help you to discover other sites with similar content.
A second option is to use a tool like DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog to investigate your competitors’ sites. These tools will crawl a site and return a list of all its URLs along with important page information like title tag, meta description, H1 headers and image alt text. This information will be really helpful later on in your research.
If you aren’t using a crawler, create a spreadsheet to manually track your competitors’ pages and content. Take note of the URL, title tag, article title, category or topic, content type (blog post, whitepaper, product feature page, etc.) and date published.
Content Audit
Now that you’ve gone through the long, exhausting process of cataloging all of your competitors’ content, it’s time for the real work to start: the content audit. This is the part that will tell you what your competitors are targeting, how they’re doing it, if they’re doing it well and what gaps exist for you to fill.
What Keywords Do They Target?
Content marketing generally has two objectives: get your site to rank highly in organic search results and convert the people who consume it. Your content’s ability to be effective in achieving these objectives hinges on keywords used and page optimization for those keywords. Figuring out how your competition achieves this is the first step in the content audit.
Once you’ve compiled your list of content available on your competitor sites, take a look at each page. Identify the page’s target keywords by looking at the words and phrases used in:
- Title tags
- URL structure
- H1 tags
- Article titles
- Image alt text
- Internal and external link anchor text
- Keyword consistency (how often do they use keywords in each element on the page?)
Content audits are by their very nature a manual process, but you can help automate it a bit here by using a tool like DeepCrawl or Screaming Frog, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve crawled the site, you can export the list of URLs into a spreadsheet that includes some of the important information on page elements, like title tags and H1 tags, mentioned above. You’ll still need to manually evaluate each URL for page content, but this will help save you some time and effort.
You can also use your WooRank Advanced Review Keyword Cloud to find what keywords your competitors are targeting on their pages.
Make a note of the keywords used in each on page element in your spreadsheet. Then, do a quick search using those keywords. How does your competitor rank for that keyword? Do you rank for it as well? If so, are they outranking you?
Once you’ve determined what keywords your rivals are targeting, keep track of the ones you’re competing over with WooRank’s SERP Checker. This is a great tool to evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign. Monitor your ranking for your keywords over time and compare it against your competitors (maximum of 3).
Content Survey
The second step of the content audit is to take a survey of your competitors’ content. The content survey will give you a comprehensive look at their content strategy and how it compares to yours. There are four things to evaluate while surveying competitor content:
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