Competitive Content Analysis: The Key to Writing Unique Content

High-quality content plays a significant role in a customer’s buying decision process. It’s what consumers use to gather information, discover solutions, and find answers to their biggest questions.

By providing users highly relevant content that’s optimized for SEO in Fort Lauderdale, you can help them make better purchasing decisions, and faster! And, when you create this kind of experience for your target audience in Fort Lauderdale, you’ll win them over.

However, in today’s highly competitive market, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to come up with unique content that stands out and captures the attention of your target audience.

We all know that every business needs to have an edge over their competitors. So, what can you do to come up with highly differentiated, fresh content for your audience?

Competitive content analysis is the answer.

In this article, we will discuss what competitive content analysis is, and the different tactics you can use to learn more about what your strongest competitors are doing online and outplay them by creating unique and highly differentiated content.

What Is Competitive Content Analysis?

Competitive content analysis is the process of evaluating your competitor’s content and strategy methodically. By gathering insight into your competitor’s content programs step-by-step, it’s easier to discover their weak spots and identify messaging gaps.

Why Is Competitive Content Analysis Necessary?

If you’re serious about wanting to get ahead of your competitors by writing high-quality, unique content, then you should do a competitive content analysis. It’s the first step towards achieving your goal. Conducting a competitive analysis can help you do the following:

Measure Your Work

Are your marketing efforts at par with other businesses in your industry? Or, do you need to step it up? By doing a competitive content analysis, you’ll be able to understand what type of content your target audience wants from you, the types of content your competitors are publishing, and how consumers prefer to engage with it.

Discover Content Gaps

Find out what your competitor’s top-performing and underperforming content are to determine what type of content your ideal audience likes to consume and what they don’t like. Doing this will give you an idea of what types of content you should be writing about, what you should avoid, any messaging gaps you need to fill, and content you need to refine.

Gather Inspiration and Fresh Ideas

You might be serving the same types of content to your audience without even realizing it. By stopping to see what your competitors are whipping up for their audience, you can get an idea of what to publish instead, and push you to think outside of the box to develop more creative content creation techniques.

5 Competitive Content Analysis Strategies

Now that we’ve established why doing a competitive content analysis is important, let’s delve into the different strategies you can use to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

1. Find Out What Your Top Competitors Have Put Out to Circulate

Sign up for their newsletter, follow them on social media, and subscribe to their blog. Make sure you get notified every time they do publish something. You should also use tools, such as Google Alerts and Social Mention, to help you keep track of everything your competitors do online.  

What’s great about using Google Alerts is that it can catch everything - from a mere mention of your competitor’s brand on social media to the times they publish a new blog post or get cited in a newspaper article.

You can use this to get an idea of what you should be publishing too and which topics you should discuss that they weren’t able to cover or explain in-depth. By identifying the topics or niches your competitors are dominating, you can find other areas where they’re not so great and focus on dominating that space instead.

2. Stalk Their Social Media Accounts‍

Stalk your competitors’ social media accounts and see how well their content is doing on each platform. Being active on social media and posting the right content on different social channels can keep your brand at the top of your target audience’s minds.

Take note of what they’re posting on different channels. What themes are they using? What kind of articles are they sharing? What type of content gets the most engagement on each channel?

Content search tools such as Buzzsumo, Similarweb, and Sprout Social lets you see your competitors’ top-performing content for certain topics, their engagements on social sites, and the total shares across the web. You can also use them to dig a little deeper into your competitors’ content, such as where these visitors come from, what they usually search for, and other relevant sites they visit.

What’s more, these tools can help you identify which influencers have shared their content, providing you an insight into what influencers in your industry are most responsive to and interested in.

We recommend that you follow the influencers in your industry, engage with them, and build a relationship. And, when you create a piece of content that you know they’re interested in, you can ask for their input to amplify the quality of your piece.

3. Find Out Which Keywords They Rank For

SEO in Fort Lauderdale is another essential component to create successful content. So, look into your competitors’ SEO strategies. This will help you better understand how well your SEO content is doing compared to your top competitors.

Additionally, it will give you the ability to shift your focus and resources on marketing efforts that actually drive the most value for your business, which keywords to use in your content, and where to get backlinks from.

Which keywords are they ranking for? What’s the percentage of their paid and organic traffic? Which sites are linking to their content? What keywords are driving quality traffic to their sites?

To make your life easier, you can use SEMRush and Ahrefs to check which keywords your competitors are ranking for, which of their content get the most backlinks, what keywords bring in the most traffic to their site.

4. Audit Their Site’s Performance

Having a fast, mobile-friendly, and SEO-optimized website can give you an advantage in search rankings, which is why you should know how well your site is performing compared to your competitors.

Google’s PageSpeed Insight, Mobile-Friendly Test, Hubspot Website Grader, and QuickSprout are designed to assess your competitors’ sites in terms of SEO, security, speed, and mobile friendliness.

5. Determine What Customers Are Saying About You and Your Competitors

Use social listening and read review sites to check what people are saying about you and your competitors. Check out both their positive and negative reviews so you know if there’s anything your competitors are not delivering well. And, get an idea if there are any unmet needs that you can fulfill and leverage to grow your business.

Looking for SEO in Fort Lauderdale?

Competitive content analysis is all about gathering information that will help you better discern how your top competitors are attracting customers, engaging their audiences, what SEO strategy in Fort Lauderdale they’re using, and what types of content their audience are most responsive to.

You can then use the data you’ve gathered to refine and improve your own content marketing strategy, so you can create unique content that will put you ahead of the competition.

Make sure to apply the best practices you’ve gathered from your top competitors and avoid the missteps they’ve done!

At Digital Resource, we can help you write expertly written content that will not only put you ahead of the competition but also put you on top of search results!

Are you creating SEO-optimized, quality content for your target audience? Use our free scan to find out today!