How To Deep Dive Into Your Competitors Content

You’ll probably see me talk about SEMRush on this website a lot. There is SO much that can be gained from the tools there. You can learn so much about keywords and competitors, it’s practically a must-have in any businesses wheel house.

Today I want to talk about one particular point of interest – content.

How do you know what your competitors are writing about without going through every page on their site? How do you get content ideas without writing them all down?

It’s easy – you download the report.

This tool not only tells you how many pages of content they have, it gives you the links and the title/topic of each post so you can check it out for yourself.

In the case of the example I am going to show you, at the time of this post, they has 3,949 pages of content.

WHEW, Mama. WHEW!

Let’s take a look at SEMRush a little so we can find this information.

Use SEMRush to Search Their URL

This is the dashboard. You’ll notice I typed in their domain without the www. I have found that using the www. excludes some results as some people don’t use them when backlinking, etc. Without it, you get the whole list.

Once you hit search, be prepared to be hit with A TON of information. No joke, this thing is a killer.

From looking at this first results page I can see they get almost 100k viewers a month. They have a huge amount a traffic. A decent number of backlinks. They aren’t spending anything on ads. They have 63k keywords in Google, most of them with a huge number of searches each month.

 

Determine the Pages Being Indexed

If you scroll down on that dashboard shown above, you’ll see a box on the lower left called “Indexed Pages.” This section is GOLD. It may not look like it’s offering to much. You can’t see the whole URL at first glance, etc.

That little blue “View Full Report” button is where you go to dig.

Get the List

Now that you’ve made it to the full report, be prepared to have your mind blown. They are naturally sorted by the pages with the most backlinks. Naturally, this is content that the author has taken the time to link back to the most – or that other people have found helpful and linked back to.

To me, it screams that this content MAY be the most popular or most in demand.

You see where it says “Indexed Pages 1-100 (3948)” – take a look to the right. See that little export button? Push it.

With the push of that button, you just snagged a list of their blog posts, pages, titles and total number of backlinks in a format you can work through.

Get Inspired

Once you have the file downloaded, you have no excuse to not be completely flooded with ideas. Seriously. If the download features your biggest competitor, this list should be something you work at.

I am NOT saying to copy content. No. But, I am saying that sometimes it’s hard to come up with ideas when you have writers block, etc. KNowing what others are writing about or having a list like this that you can reference will give you the opportunity to look for content that might be of interest to you and your audience.

 

Other Tasks

Go back and do this exact same process with your own site. You’ll notice in the screenshot above that the example I used here has many pages not found (404 showing in the third column). That should be corrected. In your case – correct it.

I want to say one more time that this is NOT a method for copying peoples work. This is a research tool just like many others I have and will write about. Every good business person has competitive data, it’s time you did too.