Competitor content analysis

What a competitor content analysis is

A competitor content analysis is a structured read of what three or four named rivals publish, ending in a written account of what they cover well, what they cover badly and what they do not cover at all. It looks outward. Every finding in it is about another company.

That is what separates it from a gap analysis, which starts with your buyer and lists the questions nothing on your site answers. The gap analysis asks what your customers need. This asks what the other side of the market has already said to them. Businesses often want both, and they are genuinely different pieces of work.

When you need one

It earns its keep in three situations. You keep losing deals to the same two or three companies and you want to know what a buyer read before choosing them. You are entering a market you have not sold into before and have no feel for what is normal there. Or you have a long publishing list of your own and no idea which subjects are already crowded and which are empty.

You do not need this if your problem is that your own site is thin and out of date. Fix your material first. An analysis of somebody else's website is a poor use of money when you already know what is wrong with your own.

What gets looked at

Three or four competitors, named by you on the first call, chosen because you actually lose to them rather than because they are the largest. For each one I go through everything a buyer could reach without paying.

• The selling pages. How they describe the service, what they promise, what they will not say, and where they put the price or refuse to.
• The published library. Articles, guides and downloads, sorted by subject, so the shape of what they have invested in becomes visible.
• The proof. Case studies, testimonials and named customers. Whose word they are relying on, and how specific they let it be.
• The answers. Which buyer questions they have bothered to answer in full, which is a strong sign of what their own customers kept asking.
• The silences. The subjects every one of them avoids, which is either an opportunity or a trap and needs saying which.

What does not go in it is a judgement about their business. How well a rival is really doing, what they charge behind the scenes and how they are run are interesting and largely unknowable from the outside. This looks only at what they have published, because that is the part your buyer sees.

What you get

The comparison grid. One spreadsheet. Subjects down the side, competitors across the top, and you in the last column. Each cell says covered well, covered thinly, or absent. It is the fastest way to see crowded ground and open ground on one screen.

The written analysis. Five to eight pages. One short section per competitor covering what they lead with, what their strongest page is and why it works. Then the part that matters: the open ground, ranked, with an honest note on each one about whether it is empty because nobody thought of it or empty because it does not sell.

The call. Forty-five minutes on video with whoever decides what gets published next.

A worked example

An illustration. A Halifax firm that installs commercial refrigeration names three rivals. All three publish heavily on choosing equipment, and between them they have 60 or 70 articles on the subject, so that ground is closed. None of the three says anything about what happens when a unit fails on a long weekend, what a service contract actually includes, or how a restaurant should budget for replacement over five years.

Those three silences are the finding. The written analysis says the first two are worth writing immediately, because every one of the firm's own sales calls contains them, and the third is worth a proper guide because nobody in the region has one. The firm stops planning the equipment-comparison article it was about to commission, which would have been its fortieth in a crowded field.

The open ground is the point of the exercise, and it needs saying that not all of it is worth taking. Some subjects are unoccupied because they are hard to write about without giving away something you sell, and the analysis marks those rather than pretending every empty square is a prize.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who you lose to, who you think you compete with, and what a typical losing deal sounds like. No charge.
2. The list. You confirm three or four competitors and anything you already know about them from sales.
3. The reading. Five to eight working days, depending on how much they have published.
4. Delivery and walkthrough. The grid and the analysis arrive the day before the call, so you read them cold first.

What it costs

Quoted after the first call, because the work scales with how much your rivals have published rather than with anything about you. Four quiet competitors is a small job; four that have been publishing weekly for a decade is not. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts, and the pricing page shows the shape of the four ways of working if you would rather this sat inside a larger piece.

What happens next

The open-ground list is a commissioning brief. Most owners take it into a topic strategy so the empty subjects become ground they intend to own, or into a content calendar and start writing. A few take it to the sales side and ask for battlecards, since most of the raw material is already gathered. None of that is assumed. The analysis is finished when it is delivered.