How to Analyze Competitors' Content Strategies | Lesson 5/8 | SEMrush Academy

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In this lesson, you'll learn how to do content benchmarking, which involves analysis of your competitors’ content and their content strategy.
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0:20 Content benchmarking
0:29 Post tracking tool
2:02 Topic research tool
3:03 Trending subtopics switch
3:51 Brand monitoring tool
5:10 On Page SEO Checker
5:34 Summary

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You might find it useful:
Apply your newly acquired knowledge by practicing with SEMrush and build up your real-world skills.
Go to On Page SEO Checker:
➠ https://bit.ly/2Xjs4Ci
Go to Post Tracking:
➠ https://bit.ly/2ZqN1h5
Go to Topic Research:
➠ https://bit.ly/2LSh49r
Go to Brand Monitoring:
➠ https://bit.ly/2WTgT43

Learn how to begin and build competitive analysis and research in our free course:
➠ https://bit.ly/2LMGPYZ
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Content benchmarking - On Page SEO Checker, Post Tracking, Topic Research, Brand Monitoring
Hi there! We're almost done with competitive analysis. Now you know who your top competitors are, how they plan and execute their SEO strategy, what keywords they use, and how they perform. Now, it's time to get on with content benchmarking, which involves analysis of your competitors' content and their content strategy in general.

Firstly, we'll begin with the Post Tracking tool to see how certain articles and blog posts of your competitors perform in terms of visibility and user engagement metrics.

Post Tracking
Let's explore the tool. At the top left corner of the screen, click the toolkit selector to switch temporarily to the Content Marketing Toolkit, then click Post Tracking, and then the Start Tracking button next to your project name.

On this page, enter the URL of the article you want to track.

The tool will measure its performance by the following metrics:

The number of keywords that a chosen URL is ranking for in the Google top 100. To see this, you'll need to add your keywords, or choose from the list of recommended ones that the article is already ranking for
Backlinks. After discovering your competitors' backlinks, you can use them for your link building later on
Shares. It takes a worthy piece of content to urge your audience to tell their friends and colleagues about it, so be aware of this metric too
To see the most notable shares on Twitter, click the Top contributors button. In the pop-up window, you'll get information on people, who shared a certain post, with the highest number of tweets or followers who shared a certain post.

After you've added several articles, you can find the aggregate of all these metrics for the added articles at the top. You can either add up to 50 articles to the existing group, or create a new group to start another study.

Now, let's find out how a topic you want to write about is covered by your competitors, and what pieces of content devoted to this topic are the most notable. This can be easily done with the Topic Research tool.

Topic Research
Let's explore the tool. Type your topic of interest into the search bar, then choose the target location - you can narrow this down to city level - and language. Below the search bar, enter your competitor's domain and click Get content ideas.

You'll see cards with subtopics on the tool's main screen, with some of them highlighted green. This means that your competitor has already created a piece of content about the subtopic and is ranking for it. Blue cards, in turn, comprise subtopics that are not yet covered by your competitor.

For your convenience, you can sort these cards either by:

Volume, which is the monthly average number of searches for a certain topic
Difficulty, which reflects how hard it is to rank for this topic, or
Topic efficiency, which is the ratio between volume and difficulty. Higher topic efficiency corresponds to higher volume and lower difficulty.
Alternatively, if you're looking for trending topics, turn on the Trending subtopic switch.

Pay attention to the color of bullhorns, they indicate how resonant a headline is - this is based on the number of backlinks earned by a certain piece of content with this specific headline.

You can save your findings by clicking the Favorites pictogram next to chosen headlines and questions. Then, from the Favorite Ideas tab you'll be able to export your research results to an Excel file, send a task to Trello, or arrange an activity in the SEMrush Marketing Calendar

Our next step will be to find the resources your competitors use to publish their content and to earn a mention or a backlink from. Most probably, these resources will also agree to grant backlinks and mentions to your website. And the Brand Monitoring tool will aid you in doing this.

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