When many companies talk about their “content strategy,” they’re really just talking about further content creation.

They’re thinking about what they need to do next — not what they’ve done before. At best, they might – might – monitor the performance of content for insights about what their editorial calendar should include in the months to come.

However, the best online marketers know it’s important to look back at past content AND make adjustments to older pieces in order to improve results.

By conducting an online content analysis or a content audit, we’re not just trying to create new posts—we’re retroactively making old posts even better.

What Is a Content Audit in Online Content Analysis?

A content audit is the process of tracking all of your site’s past content, organizing it, and making improvements to optimize it where necessary.

It’s also fast becoming one of the most powerful ways companies can quickly improve their websites’ traffic.

Think of it like pruning a rose bush. As the years go by, some parts of the bush become healthy and robust. Others become sickly. If you don’t prune away those ailing areas, the problem threatens to spread and put an end to the bush’s purpose: creating beautiful roses.

The folks at Method and Metric summarize well:

Over the years, some of your content works better than others. That’s why you need to conduct content audits. It’s important that you separate the content you still want on your site from the kind that is holding it back.

Your site’s content can be broken down by:

“The Good”, which is your:

• Most traffic-generating content
• Most high-converting content
• Most linked content
• Most shared content

[su_note note_color=”#dfe2e3″ text_color=”#fffffff”] [su_heading size=”16″]Use BuzzSumo to find most shared content for any domain or topic[/su_heading]

[su_button url=”https://app.buzzsumo.com/research/content” target=”blank” background=”#329cdb” size=”5″ center=”yes”]Find the Most Shared Content for any Topic or Domain[/su_button] [/su_note]

“The Bad”:

• Content that generates below-average results

And “The Ugly”:

• Content that produces no ROI at all

These three categories each need to be addressed through a thorough online content analysis – or content audit.

4 Steps for a Successful Content Audit

Your first content audit will probably be quite time-consuming, even though it only involves four steps. Still, audits get easier each time and the results are always worth it.

1. Get Clear About What You Want from Your Content

As we touched on above, there are three main metrics you can hope to hit with your content:

• Traffic
• Backlinks
• Social Shares
• Conversions

Each of your webpages should contribute to at least one of these KPIs. Those that don’t are the ones that fall into “The Ugly.”

The only exception would be mandatory pages like “About Us”, “Contact Us”, etc. They may have room for improvement, but they’re not the main focus of this kind of widespread content analysis.

2. Organize Your Content

Alright, roll up your sleeves, because this is where the heavy-lifting starts.

To begin, find all of your websites’ pages. You might be able to easily pull these from your backend or your sitemap.

Otherwise, you’ll need to do a Google search of your entire site. This is what you’d enter into Google to do one for our site:

“site:BuzzSumo.com”

Google will then return every single page that exists for your website.

Once you have your webpages, create an Excel sheet with the following columns:

• URL
• Page Title
• Page Type (e.g. webpage, blog, landing page, etc.)
• Metrics:
  • Monthly Traffic
  • Backlinks
  • Shares
  • Conversions

Again, this step could take a while, but when you’re done, you’ll have a very valuable database you can use again and again in the future.

3. Measure Your Content’s Success

The next step to this in-depth online content analysis is to actually measure how well each of your pages is doing.

So, go through and see where your conversions have come from over the past year.

Using BuzzSumo, you can quickly find which pages have gained traction on social media.

BuzzSumo or various other platforms can help you to find backlinks to your content.

Use Google Analytics to find the traffic your individual URL’s receive. We like the Behavior > Site Content > Landing pages report for this task.

When that’s done, get the average for each metric. Fortunately, finding the average in Excel is extremely easy.

All pages that show above average results for any of those metrics go in “The Good” category.

Those that show below-average results are “The Bad.”

Any that have zeroes across the board is “The Ugly.”

4. Improve Your Content

Finally, we arrive at the point of this kind of online content analysis: improving the pages that need it.

For now, leave “The Good” alone. Unless you know that some of the information has become outdated, this category doesn’t require any attention.

The majority of your time will be spent on “The Bad.” This category has shown promise, so look for ways it could do better.

For example, if the page was built for traffic and is below average, you could add another keyword-rich section and some outbound links. You could also link to it from one of your own better-performing pages. Any of these changes will help your “Bad” pages do better and, thus, your site as a whole.

What about “The Ugly?”

Simple.

You delete them.

There are no such things as neutral pages on your website. They’re either helping your site or holding it back. The more you’re able to show high-value pages to Google, the better it’s going to rank and the more traffic you’ll generate and convert.

Audit Your Content at Least Once a Year

As Robert Rose once put it:

“When taking a content-first approach, our job as marketers is not to create more content … it’s to create the minimum amount of content with the maximum amount of results.”

In other words, there’s no prize for having the most pages on your site. You win by having pages that all make an impact.

That’s why you should regularly audit your content.

After you’ve completed this online content analysis once, you’ll have the database available to work from again and again. All you’ll need to do is update it and then run through the rest of the sequence above.

Over time, your website will generate better and better results as each audit raises the bar further. You’ll also find it influences the very approach your team takes to creating content in the first place, meaning less pruning is necessary to keep your site headed in the right direction.

Online content analysis goes easy with Buzzsumo’s Content Insights. Get to know which social networks, content type, and even publication days bring you the best results. Know more about this feature.

Delivering a data analysis that both motivates and enables marketers to take action is where the rubber meets the road in analytics.

It’s where analysts deliver marketing analytics value to our teams, clients or executives. It’s where we help them make informed marketing decisions that can lead to exponential growth. It’s a data-centered hero’s journey.

Let’s consider two different analysts. Rupertus and Anna-Lisa.

Rupertus’ team wants to know how a campaign or website performed.

To provide that data, Rupert must put long hours into measurement setup. Then, when asked, he’ll pull numbers, translate them into charts, and eventually send his lengthy report.

Throughout the process, he’s married to his laptop, putting long hours into busting out charts while skipping family dinners, an entire season of Game of Thrones, and once, a ski vacation.

Despite all that sweat and tears, Rupertus’ team members aren’t his biggest fans. His answers to their questions, despite his Excel wizardry, fail to inspire action. At best they take a look at one or two numbers. At worst, they’re annoyed with Rupertus for sending so much stuff to process.

If only Rupertus knew to read this article, he would realize that what marketers could really use are analyses tailored to drive action — not overwhelming reports.

So, you may be asking, what is the difference between a poor (though thorough) report and a great analysis?

A dead-end report doesn’t lead to or highlight recommended action. It describes what already happened, without adding value with suggestions about what will happen next.

A great analysis, on the contrary, avoids data puke and creates a file with a human touch that helps the viewer act on the data presented. It enables growth and improvement via informed action.

Consider Anna-Lisa. She knows that acting on data is how marketers get their analytics money’s worth. When she’s asked a question, she thinks about how her answer could help her team to make a decision.

Then, she uses automated reports to get a head start on creating analyses that convey her unique way of seeing the numbers. Per Aaron Mass’ tip on critical questions analysts need to ask, she tries to answer the progression of:

• What’s going on?
• Why is it going on?
• What can we do about it?
• What can we expect?

Anna-Lisa adds heaps of value to her teams, and they respect her highly for it.

To let you get her level of pay (along with vacation time only common in Nordic countries) here are three main things you can do to make bland reports into actionable analyses.

If your team could benefit from social engagement data, BuzzSumo has made it’s API more user-friendly, and all paid plans include exports.

1. Pack in Your Analyst Brain

Goal – help your team see what you see and think how you think.

Explicitly state the questions to ask of the data

Choose one main question you’re going to answer for the team, e.g. the way David Krevitt does when building the agency data pipeline.

Then imply the question in the title of your file. Next, elaborate on the question, and restate it specifically at the top of the charts. Emphasizing the question will focus the reader’s intention and get their minds to play detective.

Add conclusions and highlights

At the bottom of your chart section, state your findings, grounded in the data shown. This will often be the element the viewer pays most attention to. Follow Avinash’s steps for avoiding crappy dashboards:

1. Interpret current state – what is going on and why you think it is going on
2. Recommended action – what the team can do about it
3. Expected outcome – extra motivation to go take the recommended action

2. Use Context and Comparison to Help Readers Understand Data

Goal – create a benchmark that gives perspective.

Here, Rupertus would tell you that Vincent is six feet tall and leave it at that. Anna-Lisa would tell you that Vincent is six feet tall, but she’d also show you that average height in Vincent’s country of the Netherlands is 6’1”.

Context helps you avoid wrong conclusions, such as that Vincent must have been on his high school’s volleyball team.

In a similar fashion, some questions, like those about budget allocation, require comparison and can only be answered after considering the context of all channels.

For example, Anna-Lisa might compare site-wide performance over time, or juxtapose a channel’s trend to a site-wide trend. Moz has published an elaborate illustration in this SEO channel context analysis.

If you have your own favorite ways to illustrate comparisons or add context, let us know what they are in the comments below.

3. Lead the Viewer’s Eye to Conclusions From the Data

Goal – Help the team follow your storyline.

You know you’re being a Rupertus if your team has read your file and they’re still asking you questions such as “What do you suggest? or ”Why do you say that?”

Fortunately, it is easy to be as loved by all as Anna-Lisa.

She always aims to make her reasoning clear by using subtle visual clues that allow her to minimize the amount of text. To follow suit, use the following data visualization hacks.

Size & Distance

The main concept to follow is to add strong visual clues where you’d otherwise use numbers only. To apply this, you can enrich a dull table with bars. Alternatively, add a line to your time series that compares to a site-wide benchmark. Then, when you’re showing multiple scores, enrich each with bars.

BuzzSumo’s trend line in their exportable content analysis charts quickly put engagement numbers in perspective.

Color

To leverage color, highlight a time series to make a chart stand out in a grid. Or enrich your table with a heatmap that uses shades of one color (multi-color heat maps get hard to interpret).

Order

First, show a row with channel comparison of per session value. This will show which channel has the most valuable clicks. But to really know whether the channel is worth a budget increase, you need to consider the volume of its potential. So as a second element, include a row with channel comparison of volume.

This will help you validate the opportunity and show where new revenue can come from – without compromising revenue sources that are already established.

Look at the order of the whole Data Studio embed below to get inspired by its intention. We like to follow the order of:

1. Start broad to introduce what’s going on
2. Narrow down to break down why it’s going on and point out action items
3. Add insight to validate your recommendation for what to do about it. This makes it easier to estimate the outcome.

Bringing It All Together

Trying to be more like Anna-Lisa, we’ve put together the following analysis in revenue opportunity analysis template in Data Studio.

Feel free to copy it and use as a template. All you’ll need to do is to add your own data source based on a Google Analytics property that collects ecommerce data.

Conclusion

Our process is to first create visualizations for our own analysis. In this step, you get creative, make an analysis loaded with charts while it’s for your eyes only. You explore.

Then you trim it down big time, so you only keep elements that directly contribute to answering the main question.

Any ancillary questions have to support the main question and its answer.

Once you trim it down, you get a file like the one referenced here. For example, the report above was originally part of a larger file.

Analysts must find a balance between making their analysis quick to digest and backed by enough data.

The rule of thumb is: “Can I do without this chart in order to answer the question and inform action?”

Encourage action by making it as simple as possible, but not simpler (that is not a Spiderman quote, it’s by Albert Einstein indeed).

Some of the linked charts were first created when creating reporting solutions for MashMetrics. For more inspiration and best practice, check out data viz makeovers by Evergreen Data, Primp Your Slide by Lea Pica, Google Data Studio Gallery, and bkingdigital.com/#how. Please also share your own ideas and work samples with us via comments below.

Branko Kral is going to analyze data on how you engaged with this article and use that insight for his future content.

He’s a director of analytics, after all. He is also a linguist from Slovakia with an international background, entrepreneurial spirit and passion for community building. Based in the highly delightful Mammoth Lakes, CA, he helps develop remote professionals.

Competitor analysis can be a time consuming task – making it easy to push back on the to-do list – but it’s crucial for keeping ahead in an increasingly overcrowded content market.

By following the steps below you can ensure you’re aware of what your competitors are up to and how you can outperform them.

1.     Identify your competitors

You should already know who your key competitors are, but chances are there are some you’re unaware of.

By identifying your direct, indirect and ‘available spend’ competitors (also called perceived or replacement), you’ll have an extensive list – outside of the known competition – to focus on.

Direct competitors offer very similar products and services. You will probably know most of these.

Indirect competitors may offer similar products and services within a wider offer. These can often be found by doing keyword analysis and seeing who also appears on terms you are ranking for.

Perceived or replacement competitors may not offer similar products or even be in the same industry but they may offer products that can become perceived as replacements. Social listening and customer surveys can help you understand your audience and detect these competitors.

Few of us have time to carry out thorough analysis of 20+ sites, so narrow this list down to between three to five; incorporating a mix of the types above.

By doing this, you’ll be on your way to gaining a rounded view of the industry offering products and services similar to yours.

2.     Check out their onsite SEO

From load speed and H1 tags, to relevant on-page content, there are various ways you can gauge the success of your competitor’s onsite SEO.

AccuRanker’s competitor benchmarking guide outlines 12 questions to ask when analysing onsite SEO of your competitors. Things to look out for include whether your competitors are using internal linking, length of content, related keywords and how SEO friendly their URLs are.

The guide also comes with a free, downloadable checklist, helping to speed up your analysis process.

3.     Examine their on-page content

Having relevant, informative and engaging content not only allows a site to become a valuable resource, but including more content helps with rankings.

Try a couple of searches to see where the competition are appearing. If any seem to be ranking consistently high, check out their content to see what they’re doing and how you could exceed their efforts.

Writing reams of uninteresting text just to hit a word count isn’t wise, especially if this ends up equating to duplicate content (you can check for this with a tool like OnCrawl). But if your competitors offer valuable information about a product or service, and are including the relevant keywords early on in the content, it will be working in their favour.

Using multi-media on the page is even better. This helps to illustrate information in more detail, as well as engage users, encouraging them to spend more time on site and reducing bounce rates.

After you’ve scrutinised what the competition are doing, have a look at your own site too. Could you add additional informative content? Do you have video or audio content that could be added to pages to improve engagement?

If so, don’t hesitate in adding these improvements to your priority list.

4.     Investigate bigger content pieces

From their blog posts to larger campaigns, like infographics, interactive pieces and eBooks, your best competitors will be producing content that is being shared and linked to.

With Buzzsumo you can analyse your competitors’ domains to find their most socially shared content. This means, rather than trawl their site for pieces you think may have performed well, you will know for sure which pieces are shareable.

Narrow down this list to include a variety of content types, including blog posts and larger campaigns, before analysing the pieces themselves to determine what makes them appealing. This process can help generate topic ideas of your own, as well as identify any gaps in the market you can tap in to.

With Buzzsumo’s performance reports, you can compare your competitors and reveal who is performing well. You can then set up content alerts to monitor frontrunners, so you’ll immediately be made aware of any new content they’re uploading.

5.     Find their influencers

Once you’ve identified your competitors’ best performing pieces of content, take a look at who’s supporting it. Those linking to and sharing content from your competitors are likely to do the same for your pieces too.

When using Buzzsumo in step four, ensure you also ‘view sharers’ of the piece you’re investigating and filter by followers or engagement to reveal the most influential people. Export this and you have the makings of a prospecting list.

Since it’s not purely about how shareable content is, you can also use Majestic to input the URL of the content piece you’re focusing on and reveal which sites are linking to it.

Then, add any relevant, quality sites to your prospecting list; chances are, they’ll be interested in linking to similar content (yours) in the future.

Summary

The full process of competitor analysis, from identifying those you need to monitor, to scrutinising their content, isn’t a job that can be completed in minutes. However, set aside the time and the rewards will be obvious.

Analysing competitor progress can help you to see how you’re measuring up. In addition, you can use your findings to identify what works – and doesn’t – for your audience, identify content gaps you can begin to fill, as well as use their influencers to amplify your own content.

Rowena is a Content Composer at RocketMill. You can follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RowenaHeal.

Knowledge is power and never more so than today. In a fast changing world what you don’t know can you hurt you, mainly because your competitors know it. They’re watching what you do – are you watching back? Competitive intelligence is a key part of any business strategy and it applies equally to content marketing.

We have updated our competitor intelligence advice below and included competitor tracking using BuzzSumo’s new monitoring dashboards and Facebook Analyzer tool.

Back in 1999 Andy Grove of Intel wrote a classic management text “Only the Paranoid Survive”. Whilst this maybe an extreme view, if a good book title, there is something to be gained by having a paranoid curiosity about your competitors and gaining intelligence on what they are doing.

In this post I will show you how you can gather intelligence on your competitor’s content marketing, there is no substitute for data.

“too often, people substitute opinions for facts and emotions for analysis.”
― Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive

More importantly, we will look at how to turn this information into actionable insights so you can outperfom your competitors.

1. Monitor Your Competitors

Things don’t stand still.  A winning strategy today may not be the same as a winning strategy last year. One of your key tasks is to track your competitors and how well they are doing.
You can probably name your competitors. You probably check their sites out and look at their tweets when you have a second. But how forensic are you about keeping tabs on what they’re doing? This includes:

• reviewing the links they are acquiring to their content each day or week – who’s linking to them?
• reviewing their top content, what content did they publish last week and how well is it doing?
• being alerted every time they create break out content that gets a lot of shares – what worked?
• tracking their share of mentions in web content, on Facebook and on Twitter – what can you do to take a share?

Feeling like it’s time for a little healthy paranoia? Help is at hand. Here’s some simple ways to crawl all over your competitors’ content marketing.

Link Monitoring

Set up a BuzzSumo link alert. This will alert you every time there is a new link to their domain, a sub-domain or to a specific piece of content. Below the dashboard chart shows the number of links acquired by Moz and BuzzSumo in the last month. We have a long way to go to catch Moz but we growing our links faster and gained over 450 new links in the last month. From here you can go deeper and see who’s linking to your competitors. Are there domains that don’t link to you, but should? Now you have new ideas for your outreach and relationship building.

New Competitor Content 

Competitor knowledge is power, but it loses its currency very quickly. You need to know, in as close to real time as possible, what your competitors are publishing. You can set up a BuzzSumo alert to be notified every time new content is published by your competitor on their domain. This saves you having to visit and review their site for new content. You can also set a threshold, such as a minimum of 100 shares or for viral content that gets say 1,000 shares.

Here is an RSS feed of Moz’s most recently published content with over 500 shares.

You can also compare the volume of content published by competitor websites over time. Here is an example comparing Moz, Hubspot and BuzzSumo. Yep, we are the ones at the bottom.

You can also use BuzzSumo’s most shared search (see below) to review the performance of content published by a competitor in the last day, week, month or six months. See things that cause you to slap your head and say ‘we were going to do that?’ Maybe you’ll get there first now that you’re watching closely.

Mention Monitoring

You can set up an alert to be notifed every time a brand is mentioned in any web content such as an article or blog on the web. If your competitor’s brand name is not unique you can use advanced operators eg + or – to narrow your alerts. As with all alerts you can decide to receive your alerts in real time or as a daily digest and choose the language. As a competitor alert we suggest you leave the minimum number of shares at zero so you see everything.

Your alerts will also appear in your dashboard. Below is data on the number of mentions of Brandwatch and BuzzSumo in web content over the last month.

You still get a detailed note on every mention under the charts and a link to the post.

Mentions in web content are powerful as they build over time and have a flywheel effect, you brand will be seen each time the content is accessed, links are even more powerful. Mentions on Twitter by contrast are important in terms of buzz but they don’t build in the same way, as it is very rare for someone to search back through tweets compared to searching web content. However, you can track both public Facebook mentions and Twitter mentions.

Facebook Mentions

You also look at mentions of a competitor’s brand on Facebook using BuzzSumo’s new Facebook Analyzer tool. Below are the top performing Facebook posts mentioning Moz.

The tool will show you the total volume of interactions with posts over time, recent trends, top post formats and much more.

Twitter Mentions

If you want to see mentions of a competitor’s brand on Twitter you can use Topsy’s free analysis tool. Below is an example of mentions showing mentions of Buzzsumo recently. You can see the peak in mentions when we launched our new Facebook Analyzer tool.

2. In-Depth Review of Competitor Content Performance

So now you know the relative level of mentions and social shares your competitors are getting. But for really actionable insights, you need to go deeper to get to the why. Start with the content analysis section in BuzzSumo and undertake an overview of your competitor’s content for the last year, or any shorter period such as the last month.

In BuzzSumo Pro you can run detailed content analysis reports for a competitor. Simply enter a competitor’s domain, and you can run a detailed report showing the total articles published in a defined time period; the average shares per post; the shares by network and day published; and a breakdown by content format such as infographics, list posts, how to posts, videos, etc.

In BuzzSumo Pro you can also run this report as a domain comparison, which allows you to compare the performance of content published on your domain with a competitor’s content. Below is an example of Moz v BuzzSumo. Moz is way out in front with total volumes but BuzzSumo is winning in terms of average shares per article.

Review a Competitor’s Most Shared Content

Maybe the most direct analysis to to check out your competitors best performing content, and see how it compares to yours. By typing your competitor’s domain into BuzzSumo’s Most Shared search, you can see your competitor’s most shared content across all the main social networks. Thus at a glance you will be able to see your competitor’s top performing content including the headline, content type, and the networks where they are getting the most traction. Below as an example is Moz’s top content in the last month.

BuzzSumo will sort the list of most shared content by the number of total shares by default. You can re-sort the list by any of the networks such as by your competitor’s most shared content on LinkedIn.

3. Identify Where Can You Win

Knowledge isn’t power until you apply it. So you need to take all of these insights and decide how you can turn them to your advantage.

I like the comparison of tall city buildings and content marketing. No one visits the 5th tallest building in a city, all of the competitive advantage goes to the tallest buildings. Much the same is true in content marketing. Top content outperforms average content significantly, by a factor of ten or more. It is increasingly a winner-takes-all game as Rand Fishkin pointed out in his recent post on creating 10x content. People link and share the best post on a topic rather than an average article. To gain traction you need to make sure you have the best content that meets the needs of your audience.

So who has the best content on the latest developments in your market or the best practical case studies? You or your competitors? Where are the opportunities for you to develop the very best content?

The key is to identify the areas where you can dominate, relative to your competitors, where you can be the tallest building. Your competitive edge could stem from research, case studies or specific knowledge. Or you could produce the most comprehensive content or the best video. It takes time to become the tallest building. But on the way you could be the fastest growing, quirkiest, most different…in some way your content has to stand out.

4. How Is Their Content Amplified?

Content amplification is a critical part of any content marketing strategy. You may actually produce better content than your competitors but fail to amplify it as well as they do. There are a number of aspects to content amplification including:

• people sharing content
• sites linking to content
• Facebook promotion
• paid amplification via ads and promotion

Influential sharers

With BuzzSumo you can see who is sharing and amplifying your competitor’s content by clicking on ‘view sharers’  for a particular content item.  This will bring back a list of the influential people that have shared their content. For example, here are four influencers that shared their top post this month.

Are there influential shares who amplify your competitors’ content, but not yours? If so, what can you do about that?

BuzzSumo will show you whether you already follow the influencer on Twitter and give you the option to follow them and add them to a Twitter list. You might want to set up a Twitter list of people that share competitor content. From there it’s about building a relationship and making it mutual. But you have to start by finding them.

Backlinks

Both BuzzSumo and SEMrush will allow you to see who is linking to your competitor’s content. In BuzzSumo you can see who is linking to a specific blog post or the domain as a whole. In SEMrush you can do comparisons across multiple competitors as shown below.

Facebook Promotion

Facebook now drives 25% of all web traffic and we are seeing Facebook grow in importance.

Using BuzzSumo’s Facebook Analyzer you can review how your competitors are promoting and engaging their audience on Facebook. Below is a simple list view of Moz’s most engaging Facebook posts.

You can analyze by type, by date and time of posts to examine what is working best for them and draw conclusions for me.

Paid Ads

SEMrush is a great tool for reviewing the performance of paid Google ads. You can review the keywords they bid on, an estimate of how much they spend and even the ads themselves. Below is an example for Moz.

5. Refine Your Amplification Strategy

So once you’ve seen how your competitors are getting their content shared, What can you learn from your competitor’s amplification strategy?

• Do they have different influencers and amplifiers? Can you build relationships with them?
• Where are they attracting links from? Are these opportunities for you?
• What do they do well or poorly in terms of Facebook amplification that you can learn from?
• Do they use paid ads and what ideas can you steal?

10 questions you should be able to answer about your competitors

We’re all busy. You don’t have time to obsess about what your competitors are doing 24/7, you have your own business to drive on. But you need to be looking left and right. So focus on a set of questions to help you stay on top. Try to ask them at least once a month about your nearest competitor set.

1. What’s their best performing content this week / month?

2. How well shared is their content compared to ours?

3. How much do they publish compared to us?

4. What type of content do they produce? How long, what formats? Are we the same or different?

5. When do they publish it? Do they get more traction on a certain day?

6. Who amplifies it – who are their top 10 most influential sharers, are they different to ours?

7. Who links to them- what are the top 10 most authoritative domain links, are they different to ours?

8. What keywords do they target in ads? Same as ours or different?

9. What’s working best for them on Facebook?

10. What content is trending fastest for them today?

And a bonus 2 questions to turn insights into action:

9. What’s the number one thing they do way better than us?

10. How are we going to get better than them at it?

This isn’t about copying them. This is about turning your competitor knowledge into powerful insights to help you win.

Because, my paranoid friend, that’s what your competitors are doing to you.