Finding Competitive Content Gaps

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This lesson teaches you how to use Research to find proven content opportunities by analyzing your competitors. You'll learn two key strategic workflows: finding net-new content gaps and identifying "striking distance" pages for quick optimization wins.

Topics include

  • Comparing your domain to a competitor's in Research
  • Finding content gaps and "striking distance" opportunities
  • Sending new topics and existing pages to Writing Assistant

Transcript

Why? Guess what works when your competitors are already showing you a path to success? By analyzing their high performing content, you can find a proven data-driven strategy to expand your own digital footprint.

Cindy, our content manager, is back in research. This time. Instead of starting with a topic, she's gonna start with a competitor. She enters the competitor's domain, then adds her own domain for a side-by-side comparison.

In the overview tab, she can quickly get a sense of their investment in organic search by looking at high level trends for things like model traffic and ranked keywords.

Now for the tactical part, Cindy switches to the related keywords tab and applies the first domain exclusive filter. This magic button instantly shows her all the keywords where her competitor ranks in the top 10, but her sites know where to be found. It's a list of her biggest content gaps.

This list is still pretty big, so she refines it further using the keyword filters to exclude any branded terms than adding an include filter. For a top of mind subtopic, she filters for informational search intent to find keywords that align with her blog strategy.

As she scans the list, she finds a high volume keyword that's a perfect fit for her content calendar. She clicks the blue arrow to quickly check out the top ranking pages. The competition looks tough, but she's confident her team can create a better, more comprehensive resource.

She selects this as her primary keyword for a new article, adds some closely related keywords and leaves the URL field blank to start a fresh draft.

Creating net new content is powerful, but what about getting more from the content you already have? Here's a quick pro tip for finding low hanging fruit.

Let's pop back to research. This time. Instead of looking for gaps, Cindy uses the keyword ranks filter and sets the range for her domain to positions 11 through 20. This reveals her pages that are on the cusp of page one, her best optimization opportunities.

She spots a great keyword, copies the URL of her existing page that's ranking and heads back to writing assistant.

This time in the setup screen, she pastes the URL into the field to pull in her existing content that's ready for a refresh, and that's how you use competitive insights to drive your entire content plan.

So go ahead, take a peek at your competition and see what opportunities you can uncover.

 
 

Step-by-step

Here are the steps we cover in the video, with relevant links to more information. Be sure to watch to get more context and decision support for potential choices you might have to make as you go:

  1. Go to Research (Performance > Research).
  2. Enter a competitor's domain, then your own domain in the comparison field.
  3. Go to the Related Keywords tab.
    1. Workflow 1 (New Content): Apply the 1st Domain Exclusive quick filter to find where they rank and you don't.
    2. Workflow 2 (Optimization): With the 1st Domain Exclusive filter still applied, add a Keyword Ranks filter for your domain in positions 11-20 to find low-hanging fruit.
  4. Find a target keyword and use the three-dot menu to Go to Writing Assistant.

In Writing Assistant, remember to leave the URL field blank for net-new content, or paste your existing URL for "striking distance" optimizations.