11 Ways To Do SEO Content Research Beyond Competitor Analysis

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By Scott Adams Last updated Aug 29, 2024

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Early SEO milestones might be easy, but scaling the results needs an upgraded approach.

What could that look like?

Like startups that come up with a solid niche idea and compete significantly with larger companies, we SEO pros and content strategists need to work harder to develop unique, fresh, niche strategies.

However, whenever we think of creating strategies, we start looking at what competitors are doing. We start feeling that we can win this game by outperforming our competitors.

Remember: we win when our focus is on winning the game and not on how to make our competitors lose.

So, here comes an upgraded approach to our SEO strategy – going beyond competitor analysis.

However, since our SEO strategies heavily rely on content, we’ll discuss content research beyond competitor analysis in this blog.

Now, What Is Content Research Beyond Competitor Analysis?

Most of us analyze our competitors to develop content ideas. It’s easy and quick.

But…

What if your competitors are ranking in the top positions but are not serving users’ intent?

What if your competitors might not be yielding enough traffic despite better rankings?

What if your competitors are driving massive organic traffic but not enough conversions?

Also, there may be some competitors that are doing extremely well regarding content KPIs serving SEO growth.

You may feel that if the competitors can achieve such results in one year, you can achieve them in six months by copying their strategies.

But that’s where you limit yourself in growth. Your competitors’ SEO and content teams might also be struggling; who knows?

This is why your content research must go beyond competitor analysis.

In this approach, we don’t look at what content competitors have written.

We don’t want to copy them or repeat their mistakes. We want to work in ways that truly resonate with our target audiences, geographies, business models, and industries.

So, the “content research beyond competitor analysis” approach helps us bring unique and fresh perspectives to our content research, creating incredible value for our audience and clients and scaling our SEO results extensively.

11 Ways Of Content Research Beyond Competitor Analysis To Scale SEO ROI

We have 11 ways to use this approach. Let’s uncover them one by one with step-by-step processes and examples.

1. Use Semrush

This is our basic step of content research since most of our initial goal is driving organic traffic.

And because Semrush is handy for most of our team members at Missive Digital, we log in immediately to start our content research instead of looking at competitors.

We put seed, actual, long-tail, and more keywords to do our content research, depending on the search volume, keyword difficulty, and search intent.

For example, we have put “diamond jewelry” into Semrush and will add the filters according to our SEO strategy.

Another content research feature of Semrush that we use extensively is Topic Research. We choose the content topics based on which ones relate directly or indirectly to our website.

Screenshot from Semrush, August 2024

2. Use Ahrefs

To do the content research on Ahrefs, we follow the same steps as Semrush, but here, we also use Content Explorer.

We filter based on the Page Traffic and reference domains to identify queries that can bring us traffic and conversions.

Screenshot from Ahrefs, August 2024

Then, we also examine the frequency of republishing, which gives our team an idea of when to schedule it next for content optimization, considering the performance.

Screenshot from Ahrefs, August 2024

3. Use Google News

While auditing the content, if we realize that the client is already writing a lot of content, we try researching content ideas through Google News.