Why a Competitive Content Analysis is the Key to Remain Ahead in the Game?

Content always has a central role to play in every marketing strategy. Have you thought about why content is considered to be so important? The reason is that customers no longer prefer transacting with a business that’s only interested in sales. On the flip side, they prefer doing business with a company that has a story to tell.  However, creating content that perfectly portrays your value proposition is a hard job. Detailed content analysis is the key to creating compelling content. 

Quality content can not only make your brand stand out from the herd but also make new audiences aware of the product(s) and service(s) you have on offer. This is why most businesses today are focusing on creating content that can attract, engage, and ultimately convert visitors into customers. 

In this post, we’ve tried to analyze how detailed content analysis can help you fuel your content creation endeavors. 

What is Competitive Content Analysis?

Competitive content analysis is the process of analyzing your competitors for understanding the type of content they are producing and the response from the audience. All these not only help in gauging the competition but also highlights the key points for creating impactful content and bringing in more engagement on your brand’s website. Let us see how it can help your brand grow. 

• The most common mistake that content strategists often make is that they forget to look at the bigger picture and work with a tunnel vision of only working on fine-tuning their own content. But without having a proper idea of the market or the trends, it is not possible to produce engaging content.  Keeping a brand trendy is one of the most important things to do in today’s time of free internet. If a brand fails to keep up with the current trends, it doesn’t take much time for the audience to switch to another trendier one. This is why competitive content analysis is so crucial.

• The game of content production is always a hit and miss. Sometimes what might be best according to you might’ve already been tried by some other brand and failed in wooing the audience. Knowing this will save your time and effort in working for failure. A proper competitive content analysis lets you build your strategy on the successes and failures of your competitors so that you don’t waste your resources creating content that your audiences won’t prefer.

• Competitive content analysis helps you or your strategic team identify the market gaps. Despite content overflow, when you start analyzing your competitors, you might come across a segment of the audience that hadn’t been catered to by your competitors. Based on this information, you can design your content strategy to lure these audiences towards your brand and increase the bandwidth of your loyal audience.

• In today’s cut-throat competition, it is very easy for a brand to lose its individuality as businesses are strongly competing to create meaningful content. Creating content that’s already there hampers the brand’s image as the audience is not able to differentiate it from another. With proper competitive analysis, you can always keep your content fresh by taking new ideas and giving your spin on them. This will lend to a better connection with the audience and improve your brand image by making you stand apart from the herd.

• When you study your competitors and the market, there will be times you’ll get to know what might be the next big thing in the future. A strategic content analysis will help your team prepare a plan that will help put your brand in the limelight while others are still figuring their way out.

Why is Competitive Content Analysis So Important for Your Business?

While SEO processes like link building, keyword mapping, and optimizing content are important for SEO success, competitive content analysis ensures you’re on the right track. In fact, to a great extent, doing SEO without proper competitive content analysis limits the desired output of the SEO. Here’s why you or your marketing team should focus on competitive content analysis:

1. Help Find Proper Keywords

Keywords play a major role in bringing traffic to a website but it won’t be possible for you to constantly keep track of the most useful and engaging keywords. This may hamper the inflow of traffic to your website. Through competitive content analysis, you can do a keyword gap mapping to find out which keywords are working best for your competitors but you are still to use them on your content. Based on this information, you can optimize your existing content or create new pieces.

2. Boosts Link Building Efforts

Link building is a crucial aspect of SEO, but it isn’t so easy finding the right websites to build links for a pathway of traffic. Using competitive content analysis, you can get to know about the websites your competitors are linked with, and based on that you too can start creating your link profile with the websites.

3. Discovers Brand Mentions

Competitive content analysis is not simply about focusing on others ignoring your own. On the contrary, you even need to analyze your brand judging by what others are creating. Brand mentions play a significant part in the overall growth of a business. So the more brand mentions you have for your business, the more you’re going to succeed. Again, proper competitive content analysis can help you analyze what customers are mentioning about your brand. For instance, whether they have positive or negative sentiments or want a revamped product(s). 

How Can You Perform a Competitive Content Analysis?

Performing a content analysis can be tricky. Here’s how you can do it: 

1. Identify Your Main Competition

Knowing your main competitors is the most common yet crucial thing to do. Make a list of all the competitors working on the same product or service as you and analyze critically. You’ll find several sites on the internet to help you find your competition. You can also try asking your potential customers about their current services and where there is a scope for improvement. Based on that you can prepare your strategy.

2. Look for Online Reviews

Customers these days love sharing their experiences on the internet. Be it a good or a bad one, they share it with others through reviews. Be sure to look for these online reviews and get a better idea of where your competitors are lacking or what good they are doing that’s bringing them attention from the audience.

3. Make Use Tools

There might be times when you’re feeling overwhelmed with all the information especially if you’re doing all the analysis on your own. There are several tools available for doing competitive content analysis. Here are some of the best ones we think would be helpful for you.

• SEMrush
• BuzzSumo
• SpyFu
• Owletter

There are several other tools available on the internet, and you don’t need to stick to the ones we mentioned above. We’d advise you to try a few of them and see which one suits your needs better.

Parting Words 

We understand it’s going to be daunting the first time you start doing competitive content analysis and the overflow of information might make you want to put it in the backseat for the future. But this will only hamper you and your brand in the long run. Follow the steps mentioned above thoroughly and with time you’re sure to get a hang out of it. Competitive content analysis when done properly can do wonders for your brand, so make sure it is a constant.