To create a content marketing strategy that’s more likely to succeed, you need pieces of content targeting content categories, relevant keywords, and topic ideas.

Sure, you’ll do keyword research to see what you should be covering in your content. But there are other areas you can use to create a well-rounded content strategy across content formats.

Think about your direct competitors, for example. Their content can be a source of inspiration and ideas for your own content strategy.

But doing a competitive content analysis — and knowing which of their content ideas to use in your own strategy — is tricky. There are a lot of content competitors out there for you to review, and not every topic will help drive organic traffic to your business.

In this article, I’m going to share how to choose the right high-performing topics for your content marketing campaign — brought to you straight from the competition.

Publish Google Docs to your blog in 1-click

• ✅ Export in seconds (not hours)
• ✅ Less VAs, interns, employees
• ✅ Save 6-100+ hours/week

Check out Wordable now →

What is Competitor Content Analysis? 

Competitor content analysis involves reviewing your direct and indirect competitors and their content strategies. It’s a structured process that allows you to pinpoint the following information: 

• Your competitor’s top-performing content 
• Any gaps in their existing content
• The keywords and phrases they’re trying to target

This helps you inform your own content marketing activity. It’s a great way to spark new content ideas and find areas where you can gain a competitive advantage. 

Besides, it’s a great way to gather more insight into what your customers see online. It helps you better understand their needs, their search intent, and how they engage with your competitors — all of which are useful for your own content strategy. 

5 Ways to Perform Competitor Content Analysis

Let’s take a look at some of the methods you can use to analyze competitor content to inform your content strategy.

1. Find Underserved Topics

Your competitor’s blog posts give away all the keywords and content angles that they’re targeting. But without context, this information isn’t entirely useful. 

What matters more is what’s working for them and what’s not.

As a first step, look at traffic analysis and SEO tools to see the top keywords your competition is ranking for.
Here, I’m looking into the keywords that are referring organic search traffic to Moosend, an email marketing service.

(Image Source)

From here, you can see which keywords are performing well for your competitors. But top-ranking search terms aren’t always worth targeting. 

Why? 

Because they’re either branded terms searched by loyal customers or high-volume search terms that aren’t worth targeting if you’re a small player.

To make the search terms more specific for your business, you could filter these search terms by location to get a better idea of relevant keywords. Filtering by country or city will help you pinpoint phrases more specific to where your company operates. 

Before you pick keywords for your content marketing campaign, there are a few things to know.

Firstly, not all keywords are the same.

In the above example, Moosend gets traffic for “cheap SMTP server.” If you’re an email marketing platform that doesn’t offer this specific service, there’s probably no need for you to write about it.

But you could create content targeting the phrase “Moosend delete account.” 

Think about it. People searching for this phrase are looking to close their accounts. Targeting this keyword helps you target customers looking to change their email marketing platform.
Moosend does have its own page targeting these search visitors.

(Image Source)

But aside from this, there’s nobody else writing anything on this topic.

Writing a comprehensive article with a call to action pointing to your platform could be a great way to bring qualified leads to your service. You could write similar articles about other top players in the email marketing industry and capture prospective customers at the discovery stage of their journey.

Secondly, don’t forget to review “underserved” keywords. 

This means finding words and phrases that your competitor isn’t targeting but that are relevant to your business. 

For example, if the phrase “free email marketing platform” is a good fit for your business but Moosend isn’t targeting it, it’s a good opportunity for you. 

These gaps in the content are golden opportunities for your content strategy. Fill the gaps, and you’ll hook the customers searching for these terms.

2. Identify who’s Sending Traffic

Finding where competitors get most of their traffic, opens a new door for your business. If you’re not already using the same avenues, you can look into using them. 

With competitor keyword research tools like Similarweb, you can check the largest referral sources to see the websites that link to the competition. 
These are the top referral sources for the popular form building application, Jotform:

(Image Source)

So how do you make sense of this information? 

Start by reviewing the niche of websites that link to your competitors the most. 

Jotform is linked extensively by the news website Express UK, the URL aggregator LinkTree, and a Brazilian jobs site, Jobbol. From here, you can identify linking opportunities for yourself. 

For example, if you’re a competitor with a form-building application, would it make sense to publish content that targets these specific industries? Maybe a few case studies on how to use your form-building tool to hire people or seek input from your followers on Instagram?

However you choose to tackle it, it’s a new avenue for prospects to access your content.

3. Don’t Forget Podcasts

If you’re a B2B marketer, you know that webinars and podcasts are useful branding tools. It seems as though every business has a webinar or a podcast, and the objective here is simple: 

Offer something valuable to capture leads throughout the customer journey.

However, it’s not the topic of these discussions that you should be reviewing. Instead, look for questions that other attendees ask. Or, if it’s an interview with an industry expert, look for the specific questions that they ask.

These questions are a goldmine for content marketers. They tell you the content topics that your potential audience is interested in, and they give you a new and unique angle to tackle. 

There are two ways to repurpose these questions for your content marketing campaign:

One way to do this is by creating comprehensive articles for each of these different questions. 

If there’s nothing out in the wild that addresses the question in the same way that you have, you might earn the top spot (or the featured snippet) for the keyword on Google search.

Here’s an example of a featured snippet: 

(Image Source)

The other way to do this is with FAQs.

Sometimes, the questions that people ask in webinars or podcasts don’t need a comprehensive article of their own. In this case, answering these questions by creating an FAQ-type article is the perfect alternative. 

You could cover a niche topic (like “insurance for freelance marketers”) more comprehensively than any other article on the internet. As a result, you’ll hopefully earn the top spot and generate a ton of backlinks from other websites that cover articles on similar topics.

4. Look at Customer Comments and Reviews

How do you define competition? 

Is it the businesses offering the same product or service as you do? Or does it include other people and businesses fighting for the same target audience? 

In the world of online marketing, it almost always refers to the latter. As long as they take attention from your site, they’re competitors.

YouTube videos are a great example of this. While some videos outrank traditional types of content in Google’s search rankings, a lot of prospective customers still watch videos directly from YouTube.

Either way, these videos provide a ton of insights on topics you can cover. Take a look at your competitor’s channels to see what information they’re covering and how people perceive the videos.

Ask yourself these questions when you’re taking a look: 

• Are there a lot of comments? 
• What do the comments say? 
• How many likes does the video have? 
• How many times has it been watched? 

All of this information will tell you if the topic is worth covering, and how to improve your own video content going forward. 

A word of caution here: what works on YouTube doesn’t always work on your blog content. 

Let’s say you’re working in the accounting space. Your audience might benefit from a detailed article on “How To File Taxes From the IRS Website”, but this level of detail might not work as a video. 

What we’re trying to say is that search intent matters. 

For “how-to” topics and product reviews, search users may prefer a video guide over text content. It’s up to you to understand the search intent and create content to match. 

If you’re unsure about whether to create a video or article, reviewing the comments is a great way to see what consumers think. 

Take a look at the comments on this video from the Wordable Youtube channel as an example: 

(Image Source)

These comments show that the video was helpful. If the comments said something like “I don’t follow” or “I think you missed a lot of important information”, you know that a detailed article might be a better option. 

On top of comments on YouTube videos, you can also take a look at customer reviews. 

Online commerce stores often carry sections like “Best Selling” and “New Arrivals” for products that are highly sought after.

Customers looking to buy these products inevitably look up reviews online as part of the decision-making process.

This is a great opportunity for you. 

If you have the content this audience is looking for, there’s a good chance you can make it to the top of their Google search. 

5. Perform Revenue Analysis

Competitor analysis doesn’t stop with content research. 

You can also use competitor content analysis to identify new revenue streams for your business. 

Several businesses diversify their income streams with display ads, email marketing, social media marketing, and partnerships. By reviewing paid placements in competitor content, you can start thinking about how to incorporate something similar into your own content. 

Some businesses go a step further and use affiliate marketing and sponsorship campaigns to get more value from their content. 

But here’s the thing — sponsored or affiliate content is different from informational pieces. 

Affiliate and sponsorship content leans on the side of copywriting, which involves different skills. It’s important to know this before you start writing because it affects the consumer experience. 

For example, if the consumer wants an information piece but stumbles across affiliate content, they might not get the information they’re looking for. 

You want to make sure that all your content reaches the right people at the right stage of the buying journey, so understanding the difference between informative and affiliate content is crucial.

Stay one step Ahead of the Competition with Wordable

A constant flow of content will help you stay one step ahead of the competition. You’ll fill content gaps, meet search intent, and provide consumers with a better experience. 

But competitive analysis is a two-way street. 

While you’re looking at your competition to see what’s working for them, your competition may also be looking at what you’re doing.

Fortunately, there are ways to keep your competitors at bay. For example, publishing high volumes of content. With a high publishing frequency, competitors will struggle to fully grasp your strategy and direction for each piece of content. 

To streamline your content publication, take a look at Wordable. 

With this platform, you can export your content from Google Docs to your blog in just 1-click. Automate the upload process, publish content in bulk, and create templates to save your publishing preferences. 

Check it out today and sign up for five free exports.

Related reading:

• 9 Content Marketing Tips to Stand Out in a Crowded Digital World
• How to Create a Mouthwatering Content Brief for Your Writers
• How to Create a Content Production Machine that Outpublishes Your Competition
• Pro Content Optimization Tips from Doing 300+ Articles per Month
• 5 Reasons You Need a Content Marketing Manager (+ How to Hire One)

Anand Srinivasan

Anand Srinivasan is the founder of Hubbion, a suite of business tools and resources. He is also the author of ‘How We Did It - 100 Entrepreneurs Share The Story Of Their Struggles and Life Experiences’.