No matter what industry you are in, marketing is a competition and gaining the most attention from your audience will make you the winner. So how do you see what your competitors are up to in order to be the first in front of your audience?

Monitoring your competitors content marketing efforts can give you a clear understanding on what type of content their audience responds to, how fierce or tame their marketing strategy is and also, how you can use their content to make yours even better.

Don’t forget you have business competitors – who you are likely aware of and you have search competitors – the ones that rank above you for the keywords you want. These are the people you will be competing with in SEO and you can use tools to quickly identify which websites overlap with you and how many keywords and which ones.

There are plenty of amazing tools you can use to help dig into your competitor’s content strategy, not only do they give you an idea of what type of content they produce and the keywords they’re ranking for, but can also give you an insight as to whether they have achieved featured snippets or other SERP features. We take a look at our favourite tools to help you find your competitors best performing content and how you can use that information to make yours better.

SEMRush

SEMrush is a great way to analyse your competitors’ content. Within the Organic Research Pages report, not only can you see the landing pages with the highest traffic percentage, but also if they appear on any SERP features such as Featured Snippets, Local Pack, People Also Ask and more.

You can also see all the organic keywords they are ranking for and the URL, you can then use the data to filter out what keywords their blog posts are specifically ranking for, their position, percentage of traffic and how they appear in the SERP.

Once you’ve got all the information, take their best performing blog posts based on how many SERP Features they have and the keywords they’re ranking for, and use the content ideas to either create better and more informative content on that specific subject or repurpose current content which is already live on your site.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another super handy tool for analysing your competitors’ content. Simply enter your competitor’s domain into the Ahrefs Content Explorer search bar and you’ll get a list of landing pages with Domain Rating, Referring Domains and Traffic.

Click on any of the blog URLs and you can see further information such as organic keywords that blog post is ranking for, backlinks and other useful details such as when the blog was published and the number of words on the page.

When you’re done researching their top-performing blog pages and the keywords they’re ranking well for, you can start to identify opportunities for your own content strategy by either creating a better resource than their top-ranking page or by writing about a similar topic that has potential but wasn’t covered on their site. You can also tailor that piece of content to have a stronger PR focus on it, which could potentially gain more backlinks than other content pieces on the site.

In Summary

Analysing your competitor’s content strategy is essentially about taking what your competition could do better at and turning it into a successful piece of content for you. The process to follow in order to achieve this can be done in three steps:

Finding keyword opportunities with low competition so you’ll be able to easily compete for a place high up in the SERPs.
Creating a better resource for keywords that your competitor is ranking well for.
Creating more “PRable” content so you can reach out to people and media outlets who might potentially link back to your page.

Finding great keyword opportunities based on your competitor’s domain analytics and targeting SERP Features is a good place to start with regards to your content marketing strategy, however, building quality backlinks to these new content pages from high authority domains is going to be a big factor in whether your content performs better than that of your competitors.

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