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TRAFFIC COMPETITOR CONTENT AUDITING: TOOLS & INSIGHTS Competitor content audits give you invaluable insights into which content drives links and social shares, and also how much they are investing in their marketing endeavours in this area. Nichola Stott of theMediaFlow walks you through the process. content audit is an essential part of the research phase to inform any content-led marketing strategies. Not only will you get insight into what content works to drive links and social shares across the range of competitors, you will also get a sense of how and to what level they’re investing in their content marketing endeavours. In addition to your direct affiliate competitors this exercise can also be useful to conduct on operator sites, particularly those that do a great job with their content engagement and reach. Whilst you may not have anything like an operator’s budget or resource, you can identify common features of successful strategies using their broader data. Use the data for competitor insights, success characteristics, creative ideation and to inform your year-ahead calendar. What does success look like? First, decide what successful content looks like to you, so that you have a framework against which to measure the content assets you’re quantifying. As we all know, social stats and links can all be gamed, so we’re going to need to dig deeper into that data to ensure there’s quality below the quantity. I’d suggest we want to focus on the metrics that suggest the content is working to attract genuine engagement, first; then combine with qualitative analysis to explore themes. The data and metrics that you will want to evaluate quantitatively are as follows: ●●Titles ergo keyword targets and thematic ●●Asset type e.g. video, text, infographic, interactive ●●Editorial/quality links per URL ●●Social metrics in particular shares and any comments Illustration by Richard Jarvis, theMediaFlow CONDUCTING A COMPETITOR Content audit tools For the most part of your analysis you’re going to need some data and scraping tools to help with the volume work, before any manual assessment of best-piece qualities. First-off, Screaming Frog SEO Spider will help you crawl a site and any content sub-folder, to extract a nice list of all content page URLs, plus the title and data elements if that’s useful. You can use Majestic SEO Pages report to see the link metrics on a page-by-page basis, cleaning in Excel so you’re only looking at the content sub-folders. Search Metrics is great tool to show you social metrics on a page-by-page basis, including tweets, likes and shares per post. Semantria offers a free trial and provides text theme and sentiment analysis in Excel, so you can add in the content piece titles and text content to help pre-qualify which you want to consider for manual analysis. Finally, you can also go some way to get an idea as to the quality of your competitor content by running a Copyscape Batch report on a handful of their content URLs. This will tell you the level of content overlap with other published sources. Do remember that if their content is great it might be frequen