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– 7 min read –

April 12, 2019

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How To Hack Your Competitors' Content Plan: Step-By-Step Guide

New script from Serpstat which collects data from API

Andrey Belousov

Growth Hacking Specialist at Serpstat

The competitor analysis can be really exhausting, especially when it comes to creating the content plan. Read this guide to know how you can accomplish this tedious task faster and benefit from the experience of your competitors.

You're definitely familiar with a cliché scene in action movies when the protagonist sits in front of his computer and types incomprehensible signs and codes on the screen. Everyone knows what that means: he has to fulfill a mission-impossible, on which the life of at least one city depends. What if I tell you about a secret tool that will allow you to put yourself in this situation and become a hacker?

Contents

1. What are the advantages of the script?
2. How to create a content plan using batch analysis of your competitors?
2.1. Determine your competitors
2.2. Set the growth hacking script
2.3. Find topics that generate the most traffic
3. Why should you pay attention to your goals?

If you're an active Serpstat user, you know how extensive the API capabilities of our tool are. Anyway, today I'm talking about a new script that takes your SEO and content marketing tasks to a new level. This free utility lets you simultaneously analyze multiple competitors for a set of parameters and discover new opportunities for your website or blog.

Please note that the script is in alpha-version. We're still working on it, so I can't yet guarantee the 100% result.

Try the script

What are the advantages of the script?

Among other things, you can now automatically find keywords and topics that bring the most traffic to your competitors and that you don't use on your website. At the end you get the following data:

URLs of your competitor' pages that are visited most frequently

List of keywords for which this page appears in search results

The potential traffic of this site

The value of the pages (CPC * Traffic)

Why do you need this data? Using this analysis, you can create content that attracts traffic and is the most profitable. Also, these topics are completely new to your website.

How to create a content plan using batch analysis of your competitors?

Determine your competitors

If you know your competitors, you can skip this step. But to increase your chances, I recommend you to check your assumptions. To do this:

Open the Serpstat main page and enter your website or important keywords.

Go to the Competitors section.

Voilà! All your competitors are obvious.

Check and complete your previous list of competitors.

Set the growth hacking script

To run competitor batch analysis, you should make some settings to the script:

Open the script page and enter your personal token (you can find it in your Serpstat profile.)

Select the appropriate region. For example, click on + United States.

Select the method Domain Keywords Match SDK.

Add the list of competitors.

Enter your domain to exclude results from your website.

Determine the maximum number of lines (Max Rows) and search volume of the keywords (Frequency). Depending on the results, you can vary these parameters. Be prepared that the more domains you examine at the same time, the slower the report loads.

If necessary, you can add negative keywords or vice versa.

Click on the button Load data.

Find topics that generate the most traffic

After the report loads, you can continue editing your data and preparing for analysis.

If you analyze big domains, you should set more lines for the analysis (Max Rows)

Open the SQL tab in the report, group by URLs, and click Evaluate SQL.

Download the table in the desired format:

You can take a closer look at the competitor data and analyze it. The most important is the first column, which shows which URLs of your competitors are the most popular. Study these pages carefully, and you can find and fill in the weak spots on your website.

TOP keyword: a search query that generates the most traffic for the corresponding page. This search term indicates the main topic of the article.

Keywords and ALL_Keywords: Keywords for which the page appeared in the search results.

Traffic: The potential traffic that the page gets. This added value depends on the number and search volume of the keywords for which a particular page ranks.

Cost: shows how high the costs for the contextual advertising are; it is calculated according to the formula: PPC * Traffic.

You can choose pages that promise maximum results with minimal effort. Since our task is to find the topics for the articles that attract the most visitors, note the Traffic column. Filter the results by the required columns and find topics that are relevant to your website.

Why should you pay attention to your goals?

Before you create the content on the topics found, think carefully about whether they match your goals and fit your target audience. Ask yourself the following questions:

Will this article be interesting and helpful for my readers?

Does it fit the positioning of my company (blog, product, etc?)

Is the mention of the services or products in this article appropriate?

If the answers are yes, use suggested topics. Do you still have questions about the script? Write a comment, please!

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