{"id":37649,"date":"2020-07-08T10:24:33","date_gmt":"2020-07-08T10:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.similarweb.dev\/corp\/?p=37649"},"modified":"2025-03-30T11:00:26","modified_gmt":"2025-03-30T11:00:26","slug":"unbeatable-content-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/marketing\/seo\/unbeatable-content-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Use Competitive Research Tools to Create an Unbeatable Content & SEO Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our increasingly digital world, having a great product is no longer enough to drive sales. You have to ensure that the right people know your brand and understand why it is better than your competitors. One of the most cost-effective ways to accomplish this is by implementing a strong content and SEO strategy, since that will drive free, organic traffic to your website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Although there are many tools you can use to develop your website\u2019s organic strategy, such as Google Keyword Planner, the best way to get an edge over your competitors is to conduct competitive research. Similarweb<\/b> and MarketMuse<\/b> are two competitive research tools<\/a> that pair together perfectly to give you insight into SEO and content trends in your industry – helping you understand how your competitors are driving organic traffic, and allowing you to audit your own website\u2019s content and SEO strategies to find opportunities for growth.<\/p>\n

What are the Benefits of Similarweb\u2019s Competitive Data?<\/h2>\n

Before we dive into the capabilities of each of these tools, you first need to understand the value of competitive data. Competitive data is the cornerstone of any strong digital marketing strategy<\/a>. This is true whether you focus on PPC campaigns<\/a>, affiliate marketing<\/a>, or SEO strategy<\/a>. It allows you to see traffic trends in your industry, and gives you an inside look into how your competitors are driving traffic so that you can optimize accordingly.<\/p>\n

When using competitive data to craft an SEO strategy, you are able to see which keywords are driving traffic, and what the market share<\/a> is for each keyword. So not only are you able to see where you are over-indexing, but also where you have new keyword opportunities. By using Similarweb\u2019s Category Level Top Keywords, you can discover new and trending keywords in your industry and begin optimizing your SEO strategy.<\/p>\n

\"Competitive<\/p>\n

Another major reason the importance of competitive data cannot be overstated is that it allows you to uncover how you can create content with a high ROI, and prove it by monitoring your results. Similarweb helps you understand real user intent for specific keywords by showing you which keywords are driving the most traffic in your industry and the exact search terms in user queries. This lets you know which queries are driving real clicks, as well as to which landing pages those clicks lead.<\/p>\n

Additionally, you can conduct all of this research and save your projects in custom dashboards so you can monitor changes as they occur. Similarweb provides fresh keyword data<\/a> from as recently as the last 7 days<\/a>. Understanding how you perform against the competition and what your overall organic search traffic share<\/a> is in almost real-time is crucial to evaluating the impact of your SEO strategy.<\/p>\n

How to Understand Your Competitive Landscape Using MarketMuse<\/h2>\n

MarketMuse<\/a>, an AI platform that enables content strategists and SEO managers to evaluate content quality at scale, is critical for understanding your competitive landscape<\/a>. MarketMuse\u2019s platform is built around a topic modeling technology that analyzes tens of thousands of pieces of content for any chosen topic or keyword, resulting in a knowledge graph<\/a> that showcases related topics, concepts, and entities that a piece of content should include in order to be comprehensive and to rank well.<\/p>\n

It works for everything from a single page document to an entire domain to determine how well any topic has been covered. Moreover, MarketMuse is capable of measuring content quality across multiple domains to see for which topics each domain ranks, and how well each domain covers the topics at hand.<\/p>\n

This type of intelligence makes it possible for marketers to identify gaps in competitors\u2019 content for any topic, and reveals the strengths, or weaknesses, of each of their pages. You can use this information to ensure your content is always the most comprehensive, giving you the advantage when it comes to search engine rankings and driving organic traffic on competitive topics.<\/p>\n

How To Pair Similarweb and MarketMuse to Get Cutting Edge Competitive Insights<\/h2>\n

Similarweb and MarketMuse data layer together perfectly for you to uncover high-value topics and perform competitive SEO research<\/a> to understand how to win more traffic via organic search.<\/p>\n

For example, if you look into SEO opportunities for a large bank that aims to expand its content inventory related to its key offerings, you find some really interesting areas for growth.<\/p>\n

Similarweb shows that if we compare the timeframes from June 2018-May 2019 to June 2019- May 2020, the Finance category in the US grew by over 7%, YoY, with the majority of that growth occurring post-February 2020.<\/p>\n

\"20,<\/p>\n

Now that you know the overall industry trend, it\u2019s time to drill deeper into how that impacts your bank. The first question you have to ask is: Where is the traffic coming from?<\/p>\n

Similarweb provides some insight into this important question as you can see below:<\/p>\n

\"Traffic<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that Organic Search, Direct, and Referrals are the primary channels responsible for the increase in finance-related traffic. Organic Search actually overtook Direct to claim the top spot of driving related traffic for finance sites over the last 3 months. Meanwhile, Social, Paid Search, Display Ads, and Mail, have all had constant traffic rates since June 2019.<\/p>\n

The fact that traffic volume from organic search is increasing suggests there is a great opportunity for players in the finance industry to increase their market share<\/a> through a content and SEO strategy that is based on new and trending topics<\/a> that people are searching. Similarweb reveals closed-garden data to where you have the best keyword opportunities, and by filtering for non-branded search queries, you can identify high-search-volume topics<\/a> that are trending upward.<\/p>\n

\"identify<\/p>\n

As shown above, searches for mortgage calculator<\/i> are up 29%<\/b>, accounting for an estimated monthly search volume of 3.5 million<\/b>. This suggests that for a bank offering mortgages, highlighting and investing in content about the availability of a mortgage calculator would move people beyond the Awareness phase of the user journey. Additionally, diving into the search intent<\/a> reveals that these searchers are actively looking for the best mortgage options, so you can assume that they would be high-quality traffic<\/a>, and therefore capturing their interest and attention will create high-quality leads.<\/p>\n

How Do Your Competitors Stack-Up?<\/h2>\n

Before you target the keyword mortgage calculator<\/i>, you must first understand the quality of existing content for this topic. To help do this, we looked at three sites that ranked highly for this keyword to see the number and strength of the pages they have covering the topic and how well each of those pages rank. We pulled data from a wide variety of sites including publishers, real estate agencies, and financial institutions to run this analysis.<\/p>\n

To determine which pages from each domain relate to our core topic, MarketMuse generates a topic model for the chosen topic which outlines the competition’s content for the subject at hand. It then analyzes the relevant domains, and uses a similar scoring methodology to identify any pages that cover the topic model.<\/p>\n

This analysis determines how many pages on each domain are related to the chosen topic, and pulls the strongest pages based on their relationship to the topic model. You can see several examples below.<\/p>\n

Rocket Mortgage<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Related<\/p>\n

The pages analyzed above are from the following URLs:<\/b><\/p>\n