Find content opportunities based on search competitors

A little competitive analysis goes a long way when it comes to crafting a data-driven content strategy.

SERPs are more competitive than ever. And to get to the top (and stay there), it takes more than just creating high quality content — you have to hold a magnifying glass up to your search competitors and actually reverse-engineer their strategies.

While different industries will vary in terms of relative competitiveness on the SERPs, no robust content strategy would be complete without being informed by some element of competitive analysis.

We’ll cover how to:

• Identify focus segments and top competitors
• Dig up the keywords and content to beat
• Audit your offering with the searcher in mind
• Keep key competitors in your sights at all times

So, grab your spyglass and notepad and let’s get started.

Identify focus segments and top competitors

We’ve said it before — the key to making sense of enterprise-sized amounts of data is smart segmentation. Setting up tags and grouping your keywords strategically will enable you to glean nuanced insights from your SERP data. (And we’ve covered this topic in great depth in case you need a refresher.)

Once your keyword segmentation is all buttoned up, you’re ready to begin your investigation.

The first step is mapping out your competitive landscape. You’ll need to assess who you’re competing with on the SERPs and for which segments. Remember that different keyword groups will surface different competitors and that your search competitors will always include more than just your known business competitors.

Identify segments that might benefit from some TLC — where competitors are gaining ground and you’re losing visibility — and check the performance of any high priority tags, making note of any fluctuations you want to investigate further.

In STAT, our deep dive begins with the Competitive Landscape tab, which shows the top 10 organic competitors (and any pinned competitor sites, but more on that later) by share of voice. This gives us a high-level read on which segments to focus on and the most visible competitors that warrant further investigation.

For example, if we’re geology.com, by looking a little closer at the Top 10 Trending chart above for an essential keyword segment, we can see that over the past 90 days we’ve lost a significant amount of share of voice, and we see obvious gains from competitors like nps.gov and tripadvisor.com.

Take a look at the same graph filtered to just these three sites and you’ll see what we mean:

With such a big surge in share of voice by competitors for an important group of keywords, we’ll be sure to flag them for the next step of our investigation.

Dig up the keywords and content to beat

Once you’ve got a list in hand of the particular segments and competitors that you’d like to analyze further, it’s time to dive deep into this data. The goal now is to get visibility on the specific keywords and content within these segments that make up your SERP battleground.

This is also where you might surface a competitor or two that wasn’t big enough to make the top 10 share of voice list for the segment as a whole, but happens to be big competition on individual keywords. Be sure to make note of these URLs as well.

To dig deeper, you’ll want to drill down into the top 20 organic results for each keyword in your segments to get those ranking competitor URLs. And when it comes to prioritizing opportunities, look to search volume to surface the keywords with the most potential and weed out those that won’t be as impactful. This will leave you with a list of top priority keywords and the content that you need to beat.

In STAT, the handy Top 20 comparison report shows us all this information in one fell swoop. We can also use this report to compare one date with another to see exactly what (and when) rankings changed and identify the content responsible.

In the example above, we filtered to include only URLs containing the competitor names we identified in our previous step (nps.gov and tripadvisor.com) to produce the list of content we want to reverse-engineer.

While you’re identifying specific keyword opportunities across your segments, you may begin to notice topical patterns in the keywords you’re losing ground on — this can offer invaluable insight into potential topic pillars to target with robust related content.

Audit your offering with the searcher in mind

As you’re building out fresh pages and optimizing existing content with your new competitive intel, don’t get so caught up with your competitors that you forget to keep the most important person in mind: the searcher. This, incidentally, will also help to ensure you’re not leaving gaps for other competitors to capitalize on.

Check that your new content and the ranking pages you’ve chosen to optimize will satisfy the search intent of the keyword. For example, if a keyword is further down the funnel, are you serving up appropriate product comparison information to help push your user towards conversion?

If your pages aren’t matching the intent, you’ll want to either tweak that content or spin up something that does.

The easiest way to do this at scale in STAT is (you guessed it) to set up tags to segment these keywords by search intent stage, and then pull reports (like the Top 20 comparison report) and investigate your own ranking URLs the same way we’ve already suggested you analyze your competitors’.

Keep key competitors in your sights at all times

Of course, keeping eyes on your competitors shouldn’t be a one-time deal.

As we mentioned above, you may come across some competitors that don’t always show up on high-level looks but can bubble up as big problems at a granular keyword level — and you should always know when they’re making gains or losing ground.

By pinning these competitor sites in STAT, you can ensure they’ll automatically appear in your Competitive Landscape tab so they won’t slip under the radar.

You’ll also start to notice competitors that warrant a wider investigation. Ones that you’ll want to analyze head-to-head against your entire site — not just from a content perspective.

By adding a synced site in STAT for a competitor domain, it will automatically mirror the keywords you’re already tracking so you can view performance for the competitor site as if it was your own.

From there you can pull a synced sites comparison report to go deeper. Analyze average rank compared to your synced competitor to determine gaps and clearly identify the keywords, locations, and segments where you’re winning and losing in this head-to-head comparison.

FIND content opportunities WITH competitive SERP data

Whether you’re looking to increase the gap between you and your competitors where you’re already winning, or trying to catch up and overtake the competition where you’re not, we hope you’re feeling much more confident about how to conduct a competitive analysis to inform a winning content strategy.

SEO doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so your unique competitive landscape will look different depending on your site, vertical, and keywords — the key to success is tailoring your approach based on accurate, daily SERP data. If you’re curious to see STAT in action, give us a shout. We’d be happy to help.