5 Ways to Analyze Topic Coverage Using MarketMuse

Here’s how to use MarketMuse to understand how well your site covers a specific subject. There are five different ways of analyzing your coverage and we’ll look at them all.

Let’s use Content Marketing Institute as an example and look at the coverage around the topic “strategy”. Doing this, we quickly discover that “strategy” is too broad a term as there are many different possibilities, including:

• Email marketing strategy
• SEO strategy
• Influencer marketing strategy
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy
• Affiliate marketing strategy
• Mobile marketing strategy
• Content syndication strategy
• Retention marketing strategy
• Event marketing strategy
• Branding strategy

And we’re not even considering any strategies not related to marketing. But I want to start with “strategy” first to get an over-all sense of the coverage around different marketing strategies.

Check Page Inventory

Look for URLs and Page titles that contain the term “strategy”.

I’ve set up a filter using the template “Tracked Pages” and added a filter to look form URLs or Page Titles that contain the term “strategy”.

I’ve made some slight changes to the table configuration so I only see the columns in which I’m interested. Plus, I’ve sorted it by Page Authority descending so I can focus on the highest authority pages.

There’s nearly 400 results, which is far too many to work with. So I’m going to narrow my focus to “content strategy”.

Here’s the filter for that setup.

Along with the results.

We’re down to 157 pages, which is more reasonable. But notice something?

There’s only a handful of pages performing well, and after that, Page Authority drops like a rock.

Check All Inventory

Look for all the topics that a specific page ranks for.

I use All Inventory when I think I may want to act on specific results. By that I mean sending the topic/URL combination to Research and Optimize so that I can either optimize and existing page or creating a new piece of content.

In this case, I’m going to start with the page with the highest Page Authority and look for opportunities to either optimize or create new content. Here’s what the filter looks like.

Full Inventory All with URL AND Rank.png

I’ve made a couple of changes to the table configuration so that I only see the columns most important to me.

Now I could go through each row and make one of four decisions:

1. Do nothing.
2. Optimize the page for the topic — assuming that’s what the page is about.
3. Update the page to better cover this topic. If the ranking keyword isn’t what the page is about I may add a paragraph or a section. But I’m not going to optimize the page and turn it into something else. There’s not way one page can be optimized for 100+ search terms with different intents.
4. Create a new piece of content and link to it from this existing page. The laser focus of the new page allows me to better satisfy the intent of that term and benefit from the existing authority I already have.

One or two high-authority pages can give you ample opportunities for creating supporting content and building out a cluster. Often, that may be more than enough.

But in this case, we’re going to delve deeper into how the term “content strategy” is covered across The Content Marketing Institute’s website.

Check Topic Inventory

Look for all the topics that contain the term “content strategy”.

This is a simple filter looking for “topic contains content strategy”. I’ve set up the table so I can see if there’s multiple pages addressing the same topic, in addition to personalized metrics, volume, and value.

There are a lot of opportunities here, but the list is too long. I could further refine the list by rank range, combined with Personalized Difficulty (PD), Topic Authority (TA), and value. That would give me a list of high-potential ($ valuable) quick wins (low PD and high TA).

But we’re going to go even deeper into how the term “content strategy” is covered across The Content Marketing Institute’s website. Instead of looking at pages and topics that contain “content strategy” we’re expanding our view to consider anything that’s semantically related to our subject.

Check Heatmap

Use “explore a website” to find pages semantically related to the term “content strategy”

To get here, you need to:

1. Enter a topic into Research.
2. Go to Heatmap
3. Press on the “explore a website tab” and enter in the domain of the website

What you see is a content quality analysis of the 20 pages that are the most semantically relevant to “content strategy”. I can see how well they cover the subject and where the gaps are, both at the page and site level.

But what I can’t see is my coverage of all the topics across my site that are semantically related to “content strategy”. For that, we need Reflect.

Check Reflect

Look for all topics semantically related to “content strategy” (not)-covered across your site.

Since you’ve already entered a topic into Research, just go to Topic Navigator and click on the tab labeled Reflect.

Reflect creates a topic universe for the subject (content strategy) consisting of:

• The topic model.
• Variants of the topics in the model.
• Related keywords.
• Questions.

Then it displays only those in your Topic Inventory along with your highest ranking page and its position, plus personalized metrics. Create a short list by filtering on Personalized Difficulty, Topic Authority, and volume. Use the list to decide which opportunities to pursue and whether to optimize an existing page or create new content.

Take Aways

Look for pages with high Page Authority that perform well in terms of ranking. These pages can serve as a starting point for optimizing or creating new content. Avoid trying to optimize a single page for multiple search terms with different intents. Consider creating new pieces of content that are highly focused on specific topics and link them to existing high-authority pages. This approach allows you to satisfy the intent of each search term while leveraging the existing authority of your website. Use tools like Heatmap and Reflect to analyze the coverage of semantically related topics across your website. Identify gaps in content and prioritize opportunities for optimization or new content creation.