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Competitive Content Analysis at Scale: 4 Ways to do it Using MarketMuse

3 min read

The first step to create differentiated content is analyzing your competitors in the search engine results pages. Because if you don’t know what they’re doing, you can’t create something that’s objectively superior.

By the end of this post you’ll know your competition better than they know themselves. You’ll understand what’s working and what’s not, what are their strengths and where is their weakness. Even better, you’ll understand what you need to do to create helpful content that belongs on the first page of Google.

Let’s get started!

Discover How Top-Ranking Content is Created Using SERP X- Ray

SERP X-Ray lets you examine the “bones” of your SERP competitors content. Use it to discover:

  • What content types are being used.
  • The types of pages that rank.
  • What SERP features appear.
  • Hints as to the extent of their cluster.
  • What is the search intent.

Determine Competitive Strengths and Weakness With Heatmap

Heatmap quickly reveals gaps in topical coverage. The map is color coded based on how often a term is mentioned. Keep an eye out for the red squares (0 mentions) as that’s where the opportunity lies. Covering important topics that everyone else misses is a great way to stand out from the crowd.

The heatmap can be applied to either the SERP or a specific competitor website. For example, SERP X-Ray reveals a competitor with many internal links, potentially indicating a robust cluster. Analyze that competitor’s site in Heatmap to evaluate their content quality (Content Score) while keeping an eye out for possible gaps.

Spot Your Own Strengths, Weakness, Opprtunities and Threats Using Reflect

Available with a Premium subscription; Reflect is a reflection at the site level of your coverage of a topic cluster. You can see performance for the topics you’re tracking, including:

  • The topic.
  • The top ranking page associated with this topic.
  • Its rank (if any).
  • Personalized Difficulty.
  • Topic Authority.

Use this to understand your coverage and performance — particularly if there are any gaps. Personalized metrics help in making plans to create new content or update existing pages, as appropriate.

Dig Deep Into a Competitor’s Content by Adding Their Inventory In-Platform

Also available with a Premium subscription — adding a competitor’s content to your inventory allows you to go beyond the superficial and dig deep down into what makes their site tick. You’ll have all their pages, topics of interest, rankings, personalized metrics, and everything else on the platform at your disposal.

Using your competitor’s inventory enables you to complete the picture about:

  • How well they cover different topics.
  • How powerful their pages are.
  • How well they’re performing.
  • The extent to which they’ve built out cluster of supporting pages.
  • And how you can exploit their weaknesses.

You can have multiple independent inventories, so whatever you do in one won’t affect the others. Have them update as frequently as you want, or not at all, ideal if you’re doing a one-off project.

Contact your account manager to learn more about adding additional sites to your inventory.

What you should do now

When you’re ready… here are 3 ways we can help you publish better content, faster:

  1. Book time with MarketMuse Schedule a live demo with one of our strategists to see how MarketMuse can help your team reach their content goals.
  2. If you’d like to learn how to create better content faster, visit our blog. It’s full of resources to help scale content.
  3. If you know another marketer who’d enjoy reading this page, share it with them via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Stephen leads the content strategy blog for MarketMuse, an AI-powered Content Intelligence and Strategy Platform. You can connect with him on social or his personal blog.

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