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