How To Do Content Marketing Competitor Analysis In 11 Steps

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Trying to figure out how your competitors always seem one step ahead with their content strategy? You're not alone. Many B2B marketers need help to crack the code of effective content marketing in a crowded field. Understanding what your competitors are doing right—and wrong—can give you the edge you need to enhance your B2B content marketing funnel. This article will guide you through analyzing your competitors' content so you can learn from their successes and avoid their mistakes.

Feather's notion to blog can streamline this process and give you a clearer view of the content marketing landscape, helping you achieve your objectives more efficiently.

What is Competitor Content Marketing Analysis?

How To Do Content Marketing Competitor Analysis

Picture yourself as a digital detective. Competitor content analysis is your magnifying glass. You’re studying the strategies of rivals to see what makes them successful. This means looking at:

Blog posts

Videos

Social media

SEO efforts

You’ll see how they reach their audience, what messages they click with their customers, and which channels they use for the biggest splash.

Why is Competitor Content Marketing Analysis Important?

It’s like having a playbook for what works and doesn’t in your space. Are they leading in organic search with long-form blogs? Are they ruling Instagram with reels and stories? Do they connect with humor or stick to a professional tone? This analysis answers these questions, helping you make your content strategy sharper.

How Many Competitors Does the Average Company Have?

Here’s a stat that shows how crowded the competition is. A 2020 Crayon report found that an average company has 29 competitors. That’s a lot of rivals. So, understanding how your competitors engage their audience isn’t just valuable; it’s essential. When done right, competitor content analysis gives you actionable insights, like gaps in their approach you can fill or successful tactics you can adapt to position your brand as the go-to in your space.

What are the Benefits of Competitor Content Marketing Analysis?

By leveraging this information, you don’t just keep up with the competition; you outpace them. Competitor content analysis gives you actionable insights, like gaps in their approach you can fill or successful tactics you can adapt to position your brand as the go-to in your space.

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Why You Should Analyze Your Competitor's Content Marketing

Understanding your competitors' content marketing is like checking the status of a race. You need to know where you stand compared to others trying to reach the same finish line. By doing this kind of competitive analysis, you can see how your content efforts measure up to industry standards.

This insight reveals what your audience finds interesting, allowing you to focus on what will truly engage them.

Learn from Their Mistakes

When you study your competitors, you're getting a free lesson. Examining their successes and failures can uncover valuable insights to help you shape your marketing strategies. Let’s say a competitor launches a campaign that flops. You can avoid making the same mistake by figuring out why it didn’t resonate with your audience.

Conversely, if you find out that customers are having issues with a competitor’s product, you can use this information to your advantage by highlighting how your product differs. For example, if their portable speaker has interference issues, you can craft a message like “Enjoy uninterrupted music with our portable music speaker that keeps noise to a minimum.”

Plan Your Content Strategy

Analyzing your competitors’ content can help you decide which keywords to target and which to avoid. By targeting the right keywords, you can attract traffic from search engine users to your brand’s website and introduce them to your marketing funnel.

You can use various tools to extract these keywords. Similarly, understanding which hashtags your competitors are actively using on social media can help you create more accurate content plans for your social media platforms.

The audience interested in your competitors’ content will likely be interested in what your brand offers. Therefore, studying your competitor’s social media presence can help you reach this interested audience.

This analysis can also help you identify the platforms on which your competitors are active and the type of interaction their content generates. This information can help you decide whether or not to enter these platforms and determine the type of content that will attract the audience interested in what your brand offers.

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How To Do Content Marketing Competitor Analysis In 11 Steps

1. Identify Your Competitors

To create a list of potential competitors, consider where your customers would turn if they didn’t buy from your company. An easy way to start is to search your product name or category on Google or another search engine and explore the results. You can also survey or interview existing customers to ask them what alternatives they considered before deciding on your product or service.

When you finalize your list, aim to include a diverse set of companies to assess the market accurately. You should consider businesses that fall into each of the three categories of competitors:

Direct Competitors

Direct competitors sell a similar product or service to a similar target audience. These are likely the companies that first come to mind when considering your competition. For example, McDonald’s likely considers other fast food burger chains like Wendy’s and Burger King its direct competitors.

Indirect Competitors

Indirect competitors sell a different product or service in the same category but target an audience similar to yours. For example, takeout pizza restaurants like Domino’s and Papa John’s are indirect competitors of McDonald’s.

Replacement Competitors

Replacement competitors exist outside your product category but satisfy a similar customer need. For McDonald’s, replacement competitors could be any solution consumers turn to when hungry, including products such as frozen meals. Replacement competitors are the hardest to identify of the three types of competitors.

When conducting a competitor analysis, you should focus most of your attention on direct and indirect competitors. Still, it’s worth briefly taking stock of potential replacement competitors that could threaten your business prospects.

2. Analyze Your Competitors’ Core Proposition

Begin with your primary and then secondary opponents. You must collect their background and general info to understand their content marketing objectives and market segments.

On-Page SEO

Take a quick peek at their main page’s headline and meta description. You can see this in the SERPs. Or you can take the help of SEOquake to extract it from their website.And don’t forget to examine their main page content. How do they describe themselves and their work?

Understanding Competitor Offerings and Strategies

Another way is to skim through your opponent’s site to visit the offerings and solutions sections. These sections commonly affect content marketing efforts and determine content types. So, it’s crucial to understand precisely what every opponent offers.

When doing so, you can also understand whether your opponent is successful or emerging in your field. Is your opponent already a widely known brand name? This will aid you in evaluating your advantages and constraints in an unbiased manner.

3. SEO Competitive Analysis

Use SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to investigate your direct and indirect competitors' SEO strategies.

Keyword Research

Identify opportunities and new keywords by peeking at what your competitors rank for. Note specific keywords that align with your business and product(s).

Backlink Profile and Strategy

Dig into your competitors' backlinks to see which websites link to them. Note trustworthy websites (at the referring domain level) and which pages receive the most backlinks, excluding the homepage. Use this insight to support your link-building strategy.

4. Make an Inventory of Their Marketing Collateral

You are ready to thoroughly explore the materials your opponents develop on their sites. Doing this will help you in two ways. Firstly, it will help you discover trending content marketing strategies in your field. Secondly, it will spark your mind with novel ways to upgrade your content marketing approach.

Make a list of every type of material and every website that has published it. That is, analyze all content types from their site and whatever they have posted elsewhere, from written content to video clips. Every type of content asset reveals the following:

The degree of content marketing allocation

The kind of content their users like

The scope and the comparative value of subjects and keywords

Different kinds of content pieces you can note are:

Blogs: Regularly posted blogs are brief write-ups that provide a view into the variety and related significance of the subjects and keywords discussed.

Audio Streaming and Recorded Podcasts: Audio clips can vary the staff's functions and views on specific subjects.

Live Webcasts: Archived and planned web events usually provide detailed insights into a specific subject per user demands.

White Papers and eBooks: From awareness stage materials to in-depth informational guides or study reports, detailed write-ups focus on crucial desired subjects.

Visual Media: Video-based content assets can give you a more exhaustive view of the opponent’s branding and style.

Slideshows: Whether SlideShare content or other forms, slide-based demonstrations are full of subject matter expertise and promotional material.

Email Series: Email messages show what type of material your competitors feel adds the most value to their existing and prospective users.

To find out how many web pages are on your website and any other opponent’s website, run the “site” operator when using Google. Simply look for “site:http://webaddress.com”; it will display all the web pages for that domain address.

5. Audit Your Competitors’ Content

This is where the hard work happens. It’s time to examine your competitors’ on-site content. It takes a few steps.

Key Content Categories

Look at your competitors' site menus, navigation tools, or blog tags to identify their broader content strategy. What main topics do they cover, and how do they divide them into subtopics?

Content’s Purpose

Take note of the content’s primary goal. Are they using the piece to drive conversions? Or is it positioned to attract backlinks?

Publishing Frequency

Do your best to figure out how often your competitors post. See who’s publishing a couple of times per month compared to multiple times weekly. Note whether your competitors follow a consistent schedule.

This information may be more complex if your competitors don’t include a publish date. You could watch their content over time to get a general idea of how frequently they publish.

Contributors

Finally, look at who is writing their content. Understanding who contributes to your competitors’ blogs gives you insight into tactics they use to add credibility to their brands.

Do they name authors?

Do they feature guest posts?

Do they feature other brands?

From what you can tell, how many contributors does the blog have? For instance, a competitor may include the names and credentials of expert contributors, which gives readers more reasons to trust the content and the brand.

6. Label and Assess Content Pieces

Analyzing your opponents’ emphasis on every content format and how the target market receives it is crucial. As you explore their content assets, observe how they classify their main content.

Studying your opponents’ content themes is an excellent way to discover your niche’s highly trending content categories. A great trick for locating this detail is to look at the key content categories and labels on your opponents’ websites.

Identifying Content Gaps

Going ahead in this study, you need to see the minute details separately in every type of content. Labeling and assessing the subject of every content asset reveals voids in content marketing. You can then fill them up and use them to your advantage.

According to a study by CMI, MarketingProfs, and ON24, 83% of marketing professionals say they try to stand out in the market by producing better-quality material, and 72% said they create content on subjects that competitors leave out.

Prioritize Your Content Analysis

As you analyze every content asset, notice the piece’s heading and meta tags, and go through as much of the material as possible. If an opponent has a lot of material to scan through, begin with the highly trending content and mediums or the latest posted material. Content marketing is a creative endeavor.

So, you can’t measure everything objectively. But, there are some standard parameters that you can consider to determine the level of their content’s performance. For instance:

Do they have a common layout?

Do you find any language errors or misspelled words?

Is the writing of content clear and straightforward?

How comprehensive is their content?

Do they include high-resolution visuals or styling?

Try to grade each of these parameters on a scale of 0 to 10 according to your judgment and assessment of their assets’ potential.

Decoding Your Competitor's Content Strategy

Analyzing the volume and usefulness of their collateral as categorized by subjects will point out those subjects you need to avoid and those your competitor has left out. Then you can cover this void. Take every content item and label it under a subject or in a group of subjects. As a result, you will have decoded your opponent’s content marketing plan into a comprehensive worksheet.

7. Analyze Trends/Patterns

The fun begins now. Arrange your quality and quantity numbers in line with your content inventory. The result would be a high-level laydown of your competitors’ content marketing.

Chart showing comparison of quantity and quality of Competitors’ content

When you examine the amount and quality of how much content your competitors have produced on different topics, you will get a sense of what you can do better.

You’ll learn the topics you should avoid and the holes in their content arsenal that you can fill. And in doing so, you’ll get a plan to stand out and succeed.

8. Examine Key Metrics

Another aspect of a great competitor content analysis is to pay attention to your competitors’ performance metrics. This way, you can zero down on what type of content you’re not producing at the moment that’s likely to do well.

Let’s say you find that many visitors are interested in your competitor’s video content. So, you might be better off creating more video clips, too. And you’d also get to know what level of performance you can expect from this content. Here’s what to consider:

Content Engagement: Analyze patterns related to the level of engagement. Looking at the number of likes, comments, and shares will help you understand how content is performing.

Organic Search Traffic per Month: When you have your competitors' organic search traffic metrics, you can compare and benchmark them for your content. You also shouldn’t overlook the time visitors spend consuming and engaging with your content. The more, the better.

So, how would you do this? The answer is an SEO analytics platform. You can pick from many, such as:

Ahrefs

SimilarWeb

Semrush

If you’re using SimilarWeb, for example, all you need to do is enter your competitor’s website address, and you get their traffic data.

Domain Authority: Domain authority helps you test the high-level success of your competitors’ content marketing activities. As before, compare your strategy to see where and how to improve.

Keywords Associated with Top-Ranking Content: Look at the keywords for which your competitors rank well. How many are there? This will allow you to learn who implements the best content marketing plan among your competitors. Take a page from their book and experiment with fresh content topics. Again, an SEO tool can help get this data.

Backlink Analysis: Are your competitors acquiring many backlinks? From where? This data lets you identify link-building opportunities for your content. As previously discussed, you’ll also require an SEO tool for this data.

While analyzing all the SEO data I have covered so far, try to zero in on your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. The question below will help you get started: What types of content are getting the most and the least engagement?

This will allow you to determine your brand’s standing among competitors and set realistic performance goals for your industry.

9. Analyze Content Promotion/Conversion Tactics

Many companies develop a great deal of content. They overlook two key things. First, they don’t make an effort to spread it. Second, there is no call to action for their target audience to take action and turn into a prospect.

Competitor Lead Generation Strategies

So, it would be great to identify your competitors’ content promotion techniques and how they get buyer details from their online presence. When analyzing competitors’ content marketing, examine factors such as email capture forms, pop-up displays, and lead magnets. Also, see if there are additional techniques at work.

As you do this, you’ll find commonalities in the kinds of resources and calls to action they put forth. Considering your industry, it’s an excellent signal of what’s likely to perform better.

Influencers and Thought Leaders

Nowadays, it’s common for brands to collaborate with thought leaders and related businesses. This collaboration results in content that captures readers' interest.

Find the names of thought leaders working with your competitors to develop content. And you’ll have the data of potential partners you can contact.

10. Research Their Content Distribution Channels

The best content goes unnoticed if no one sees it. Here's how your competitors spread their content across the web:

Social Media Presence: Identify the social media platforms your target audience leverages most actively. This can reveal valuable insights into where they spend their time online.

Email Marketing Efforts: Analyze if they utilize email marketing to distribute content. If so, explore the types of content they promote through email and the frequency of their campaigns.

Influencer Marketing Strategies: Investigate if they collaborate with influencers to amplify their content reach. Consider potential influencer partnerships that could benefit your content distribution strategy.

For example, your analysis might reveal that a competitor utilizes Instagram heavily to share visually appealing content showcasing their running shoes in action. They might also partner with fitness YouTubers to create sponsored content reviews.

11. Check Content Team

A 2021 study found that 42% of marketers mentioned that their organization's content marketing staff has only one to three team members. Only 3% of organizations possess a content marketing team of over 50 people.

In contrast, 21% of companies had no professional explicitly assigned for content marketing. Before hiring for your content marketing staff, look at your competitors' About or LinkedIn business pages. Why? This way, you’ll get a clear sense of how many content marketers they employ and the tasks they do. Check out the designation of every person in their content marketing staff. This will give you an idea of the type of people they invest the most in.

Analyzing Your Competitor's Team Structure

For example, do they have a lot of manpower devoted to social media marketing? Or are they putting more resources into video marketing? Head over to LinkedIn and open your competitor’s business page. Then go to the “People” tab. Now, type in terms like “content” and “marketing” in the search box.

5 Best Tips To Apply Competitor Analysis Insights To Your Content Marketing

1. Elevate Content Quality to Outshine Competitors

To stand out, your content must go beyond what competitors offer. The Content Marketing Institute found that 83% of B2B marketers set themselves apart by raising the bar for quality. Competitor analysis helps you identify where you can improve and innovate.

Focus on strategies like quoting experts, conducting original research, and using insights from surveys or industry leaders. Also, enhance the user experience using:

Clear structures

Visuals

Unique tones

2. Spot and Fill Content Gaps

Competitor analysis reveals topics your rivals might have missed. Instead of copying their ideas, look for opportunities that align with your business goals.

Experiment with overlooked formats like infographics, videos, or interactive elements. For example, infographics can boost your visibility in image search results and increase citations from other pieces.

3. Boost Your SEO Strategy

Analyzing competitors’ SEO practices keeps you competitive in search rankings. Use insights to refine your on-page SEO, including keyword placement and optimization techniques.

Go further by leveraging backlink analysis to gain new backlinks while weakening competitors’ link profiles. Stay updated with evolving SEO best practices to keep your content relevant.

4. Expand Your Content Distribution Channels

If your competitors are active on platforms like social media or email marketing and you’re not, seize this opportunity. Social media can amplify content visibility while waiting for SEO-driven traffic to build.

By filling these gaps, you can outperform competitors who neglect specific channels. Half of B2B content marketers differentiate themselves by actively promoting content rather than relying solely on organic search.

5. Optimize Content Volume and Formats

Analyzing competitors’ publishing frequency helps refine your content production schedule. If rivals produce less content, focus on fewer but more comprehensive pieces. If they publish more, increase your output while maintaining quality.

Repurpose existing content into various formats, like turning blog posts into videos or infographics, to maximize reach and engagement. Establishing a consistent schedule ensures your audience knows when to expect fresh content, building trust and loyalty over time.

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