Competitive content analysis measures other businesses' content strategies to identify the methods they leverage to achieve positive results—from the content types they use to drive engagement to the SEO tactics they implement for better search rankings, and more.
These insights help you spot where you can improve your own performance and whether there are any competitor weaknesses you can capitalize on. That's why in this post, I'll show you how to perform a thorough competitive content analysis in six easy steps.
What you will learn
- What competitor content analysis is and why it matters
- How to identify the right competitors
- How to uncover content gaps and opportunities
- How to apply insights to improve your SEO strategy
What is competitor content analysis?
Competitive content analysis breaks down your competition's content strategy across multiple areas from their top-ranking pages and preferred distribution channels to their publishing frequency, popular content types, and overall content structure.
This gives you valuable information about how they appeal to target audiences and search engine algorithms.
Of course, copying other businesses isn't the main goal here—you want to learn from them.
Competitive analysis helps you understand what works for your competitors, what doesn't, whether there are any gaps you can fill, and how you can do so.
Why you should analyze competitive content
Analyzing your top-ranking competitors' keyword strategies, content formats, and backlink profiles helps you pinpoint the exact type of content search engines and readers deem helpful and relevant at a given time.
Search engine optimization is a super competitive field—search engines reward high-quality content that satisfies users' needs.
And just like with any other market, competition drives innovation.
You need to continuously analyze competitors' strategies to find better and better ways to capture your audience's interest. Otherwise, you might fall off the rankings.
How to conduct competitive content analysis in 6 steps
Now that we've covered the what and why, let's see how to conduct a competitive content analysis in six simple steps.
1. Pick content competitors based on relevance, target audience, and positioning
First, you should know there are two competitor types:
- Direct competitors: Businesses sharing the same target audience and product/service offerings— think WhatsApp and Telegram.
- Indirect competitors: Businesses with slightly different product/service offerings, but that fulfill a target audience's particular needs in different ways—WhatsApp and Zoom, for example.
SEO-wise, these details are important because both direct and indirect competitors often overlap in their target audiences and keywords, but for different purposes. You should ideally find both direct and indirect competitors.
“Don’t just go after who ranks #1. Sometimes your most valuable insights come from competitors one tier below—that’s where real opportunity lives.”
— Kristavja Caci, SEO Content Marketer at Surfer
The insights you draw from direct competitors will be most relevant to you. Still, indirect competitors can also surface gaps that your direct competition may not cover.
Here's how to do it:
First, type in a set of primary keywords relevant to your brand and look for recurring top-ranking domains across search results.
Then evaluate each competitor's relevance based on the following factors:
- Product/service offerings: Do they offer the exact same products or services as you? Or do they try to fulfill the audience's needs through different means?
- Brand authority: Are they seen as authoritative sources within your primary niche? If not, in which industries do they have the most influence?
- Audience targeting: Do their audiences have the same demographics and interests as yours? What particular pain points do they target?
How to pick an organic content competitor
Let's go through a practical example.
Suppose I type "travel miles guide" in the search bar. Here are the top five results:
Upgraded Points, Daily Drop, and The Points Guy are direct competitors—they are travel websites that target visitors looking to travel economically.
NerdWallet is a huge financial company that runs a blog covering all things personal finance-related. NerdWallet has a much broader target audience—financially conscious travelers are more of a secondary segment for them, not necessarily the main audience.
TravelPro, on the other hand, is an online luggage store. Its content marketing strategy aims to generate leads and get users (who were otherwise looking for travel tips) to visit the store. They primarily target travelers in general—again, not necessarily those who travel on a budget.
If I were running Upgraded Points, for example, I would probably treat Daily Drop and The Points Guy as my direct competition.
Still, The Points Guy is a huge industry authority, so shifting my focus to outrank Daily Drop would be more realistic here.
If you're using Surfer, you'll find your organic competitors in the Customize tab.
2. Break down your competitor’s content strategy
Once you've shortlisted your competitors, examine their overall content strategy to see how they engage with their audiences.
You first want to look at publishing frequency and the most popular content types.
Publishing frequency
Check how often competitors post new content, and whether their publishing frequency is consistent.
If your competitor consistently posts new content twice a week on Saturday and Sunday, for example, it probably means their audience is most active during the weekends.
Also, check if your competitor:
- Focuses on fresh posts or content updates: It helps spot whether they generate traffic through fresh topic ideas or historical optimization—also helpful to identify evergreen topic ideas.
- Frequently alternates between particular topics: Useful to identify topic clusters, or other patterns that indicate audiences are interested in a specific sub-niche. Pattern breaks can signal new target keywords, rising trends, or reactions to algorithm changes.
- Includes surface-level or outdated content: Spots gaps you could fill in to outrank your competitor with up-to-date, higher quality content.
For example, NerdWallet consistently posts a mix of new pieces and financial guides several times a week.
This tells us their content strategy targets both quick, short-term traffic through news pieces as well as long-term traffic opportunities via educational evergreen posts.
Content categories
Categorize your competitors' content across listicles, how-to guides, and so on. This helps determine whether your competitors aim to attract organic traffic via SEO-oriented blog posts or achieve thought leadership through opinion pieces, for example.
A clever way to do so is by simply looking at your competitor's site's main navigation menu—websites typically use it to display popular topic clusters or draw attention to particular topics they consider most relevant.
Here's how the main navigation for UpgradedPoints looks:
The website splits each menu item into three key content categories: product/service roundups, in-depth reviews, and buying guides.
UpgradedPoints' product-centric approach hints that most of its audience views the website as a resource for conscious purchase decisions.
Perhaps pivoting our own content strategy to cover more practical travel money-saving tips and guides might work for us here—it's a niche UpgradedPoints doesn't seem to fully capitalize on.
3. Review their SEO performance to find top performers
Use tools to analyze key SEO metrics on your competitors' websites. This helps you draw additional data-backed conclusions about their target audience and content strategy.
Here are key SEO metrics you should focus on:
- Top pages by traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Organic clicks
- Backlinks
Let's go through each particular metric in more detail.
Top pages
Identify your competitors' top-performing pages traffic-wise to see the type of audiences they attract the most. Also, look for patterns in the content types and formats they cover to see the strategies that work best for them.
For example, Daily Drop's top-performing page leads to Daily Drop Pro—the website's travel search tool.
Excluding the homepage, the other top-performers lead to product-oriented content like reviews and quick round-ups—similar to UpgradedPoints.
That means a good portion of Daily Drop's traffic consists of bottom-of-the-funnel searchers—users who are ready to convert. Content that serves navigational, transactional and commercial intent works best for them here—landing pages, product roundups, and reviews.
If you were to run a similar business model, for example, you could position yourself as an alternative to the platform.
Keyword rankings
On a similar note, check your competitors' top-ranking keywords. This helps cross-reference and solidify conclusions drawn from their top-ranking pages.
Daily Drop's most popular search terms include branded keywords.
Again, that means most users look for this website in particular—positioning yourself as an alternative may be a viable option.
Still, it's also super important to benchmark your competitors' keyword performance against your own. This helps spot areas where competitors outrank you, perfect to fill content gaps you might not have known about.
Here's a brief comparison between Daily Drop and UpgradedPoints:
UpgradedPoints outranks Daily Drop for Chase Bank-based keywords by quite a significant margin. Still, Daily Drop—a smaller website—is slightly ahead of UpgradedPoints for American Express-based search terms.
Following the same principle, you can identify keywords your competitors rank for, but you completely miss.
Either way, pay particular attention to long-tail and transactional keywords. These have lower search volumes, but also lower competition. Plus, these keywords indicate high-purchase intent—they can attract quality website traffic.
Organic clicks
Use traffic estimation tools to identify how much traffic high-ranking web pages attract for their target keywords.
For example, a high-ranking page with lower than usual traffic may indicate that the content in question doesn't satisfy user intent—a gap you can fill in.
Here's what happens if I type "get travel miles" in the search bar:
NerdWallet and Travel Miles 101 occupy the top two search results. NerdWallet's listing leads to an in-depth guide covering the topic, while Travel Miles 101's leads to the website's homepage.
Here's a comparison of both pages' organic clicks:
NerdWallet attracts significantly more clicks compared to Travel Miles 101. That means NerdWallet does a much better job at aligning its content with the keywords' primary search intent, which is informational.
Also, try to identify pages with high traffic but low domain authority—a metric that indicates how a website would rank in relation to its competitors.
For example, if your domain authority is higher than your competitor's, you'll be more likely to outrank them when targeting the same keywords.
Backlinks
Perform backlink analysis on your competitors' websites to spot pages with a high number of inbound links, the type of content these pages cover, and where these links come from.
It's a good idea to dedicate resources to link building strategies, even if your competitors don't have a lot of links.
A high number of quality links boosts domain authority and can indicate the pages in question include high-quality content around sought-after topics—perfect to identify relevant content ideas.
The NerdWallet page I just showed has over 500 backlinks, which is huge.
Also, try to identify whether backlinks are acquired naturally or via partnerships.
In this case, the number of linking websites is quite high too, so we can assume NerdWallet acquired most of these links naturally.
That means the content is genuinely relevant, highly sharable, and authoritative—other websites link back to it to allow readers to research the topic in extra detail.
4. Look for content gaps and opportunities
Compare your competitors' entire content inventory against your own to see whether you missed any relevant topics.
Categorize their content across various stages of the buyer's journey—awareness, consideration, and decision stages.
This helps uncover areas where competitors may under or over-invest and see how they adjust their content strategy to appeal to users across each particular stage.
Also, try to identify subtopics or questions competitors don't address in their content, especially if they target long-tail keywords or other low-competition areas. A clever way to do so is through the People Also Ask (PAA) section on organic search results.
Google uses search trends and user search history to generate questions the algorithms deem relevant—super useful to identify new sub-topics.
For example, here's the PAA section for the "get travel miles" keyword:
The PAA section includes questions about whether travel miles expire and if it's possible to cash them out—points the NerdWallet blog posts I showed earlier don't cover.
Still, try to perform an in-depth competitor analysis to spot other topic clusters your competition may not fully capitalize on.
For example, analyzing NerdWallet's keyword gap shows that it's page ranks near the bottom of search results for the "insurance on a used car" keyword. The other websites I covered in this post don't cover this topic at all.
Plus, NerdWallet is mainly outranked by low-authority sites—covering an in-depth blog post here may give us a competitive advantage.
Here's how you can analyze your competitor's content for gaps with Surfer.
- Head to Surfer Content Editor
- Toggle the Import content from URL switch
- Enter your competitor's URL and the main keyword.
In the editing window, open the Topics tab in the top-right. Surfer will take a minute to analyze competitor pages.
Here, you'll find how well your competitor has covered the topic and which pieces of information they've left out of their page.
You can then use this information to ensure your content answers the topic better than them.
5. Analyze competitor content structure
Next, perform page-level competitive analysis to break down your competitor's SEO strategy, topical depth, content formats, and CTAs.
Page content
Evaluate your competitors' content across the following areas:
- Style and depth: Check the content's overall language and style to see if it keeps the target audience engaged, as well as evaluate content length and depth—if it's shallow, an in-depth blog post here might be a good idea, for example.
- Formatting: Check headings, subheadings, bullet points, visuals, and tables for structure and readability—poor formatting makes the content hard to read and causes visitors to leave the page.
- On-page SEO elements: Assess keyword coverage, schema markups, internal and external links, alt texts, page speed, and so on—it helps identify any strengths or weaknesses you could learn from.
For example, AwwardWallet's content shows up twice in AI Overviews for the "hilton diamond status match to airline" search term.
That means these pages must do something right search engine optimization-wise. Plugging the content in Surfer will help us see exactly what. Here's how:
First, import the page in question into Surfer.
Then check the blog post's Content Score and other related data. Surfer measures the content's on-page SEO performance based on numerous factors like NLP keyword coverage and structure.
In this case, AwwardWallet's content is quite well optimized, but there's still some room for improvement.
You can get into more details by analyzing the content's topical coverage like I showed you earlier.
This is where you can really fill in the gaps.
AwwardWallet's content covered five out of eight topics. A more in-depth blog post covering all the related topics may help you outrank the page.
Content formats
Identify popular formats your competitors use and link them to content marketing funnel stages. Case studies work well for the consideration stage, while informative videos and blog posts align with the awareness stage, for instance.
One of AwwardWallet's posts listed in AI Overviews is short and super straightforward:
That's because the content targets readers in the retention phase, readers who are already members of Delta SkyMiles and Hilton Honors programs.
The blog post educates readers on how to gain higher-tier membership status. This particular post doesn't need to go through the ins and outs of each membership program—readers are familiar with them at this point.
In contrast, the other AI Overview-listed AwardWallet post goes into a lot more depth.
That's because this particular piece targets readers in the consideration stage, where they evaluate all their options before making a decision.
CTAs
CTAs help reveal your competitor's overall content marketing objectives—whether they use content to drive leads, newsletter signups, free trial subscriptions, or even purchases, for instance.
Evaluating your competitors' CTA will also give you further confirmation about the funnel stages they target, as CTAs will take readers to the next stage.
For example, ThePointsGuy doubles down on newsletter sign-ups via popups.
Notice how ThePointsGuy incentivizes users to enter their email addresses by giving a free travel miles cheat sheet.
Since most readers read the blog to learn how they can maximize their travel points, this offer successfully aligns with their needs and intent.
6. Research competitive content distribution
Run competitor analysis on social media platforms to draw actionable insights about your competition's content marketing strategy.
Look for patterns to spot the content types repurposed as infographics, videos, and carousels, and check the repurposed content's engagement levels to see the formats that drive the best results with tools like BuzzSumo and Brand24.
For example, Bankrate repurposed this case study into a LinkedIn infographic post:
The case study is data-heavy and highly professional—a LinkedIn infographic is the perfect repurposing format here. As such, Bankrate aims to boost brand authority with this post.
In contrast, NerdWallet uses TikTok to drive traffic to its car insurance comparison tool:
This more casual format also works—it's friendlier, more humanizing, and aims to get target audiences to warm up to the brand.
That said, it's safe to conclude that NerdWallet uses TikTok to increase brand awareness and visibility, as well as drive traffic to its website.
In any case, always take your competitors' audiences and content marketing objectives when you analyze their social media presence.
This helps see whether parts of their content distribution strategies may work for you as well.
Key takeaways
- Competitive content analysis measures other businesses' content marketing efforts to help identify opportunities for better rankings and audience targeting.
- Research both your direct and indirect competition—insights from direct competitors will likely align the best with your own strategy, while conclusions drawn from indirect ones can uncover extra opportunities.
- Perform competitor analysis on publishing frequency and content types to see how other companies target and appeal to their audience.
- Measure top-ranking pages and keywords, as well as organic traffic and backlinks, to confirm whether competitor content aligns with both search engines and target audiences. Compare metrics against your own performance to identify opportunities for better rankings.
- Run through your competitor's site and use Google's PAA section to spot topic gaps you can fill in.
- Analyze topical depth, content formats, and CTAs to spot how other businesses use content to drive leads down the marketing funnel and uncover potential weaknesses.
- Check your competitors' content distribution channels—it helps identify effective social channels and repurposing formats engagement-wise.
