It comes as no surprise that the quality of your content is hugely important with respect to the performance of your website and its pages in search engines. While in the past it was easy to merely consider a few simple metrics in a content assessment, it is a much more nuanced inspection of variables today. You cannot simply have words that fill up a page in today’s content game, but you must rather have engaging content that is relevant to an audience and unique in its offerings. There is no silver bullet when it comes to achieving this goal, but using several metrics to assess your performance (and your competitors’) can make a difference. Below, we’ll discuss what to look at in order to do a comparative analysis between your content and your competitors’ content.

Spelling and Grammar

Start out by doing a blanket assessment of how proper your grammar and spelling is versus that of your competitors. While this might seem trivial at first, it can shed light on the competitors who may in fact be weaker in a variety of other areas. Nobody takes a blog post or piece of content seriously that is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, so be sure to pay careful attention to yours in order to ensure it has maximum effect.

Content Age

How often are you and your competitors producing new content? If there is a big discrepancy between two or more brands, then this could definitely be a variable that can be manipulated in a variety of ways. The more fresh, quality content you can be pinging search engines with on a regular basis, the more opportunities you’ll have to rank well in select SERPs. After assessing the performance of your competition in this regard, you can then find various SERPs to target where their presence is weak.

Post and Page Length

Be sure to inspect the overall length of the content on your site and your competitors’ websites. While it may seem a tad silly to count the words of a post or page, history and data show us that websites perform statistically better based on the number of words in the average post or page. If your brand doesn’t even have a blog, then it is certainly weaker than that of a competitor who has one and updates it regularly. Inevitably, figuring out which sites are strong and which are weak in this category provides another window through which to make the necessary moves against your competition.

Sharing Options

How well integrated are various forms of social sharing and social media in general on your website? If your competitors have a serious upper-hand in this category, then you are in a compromised position. It is a fool who thinks that people will always take the time to copy and paste links into their news feed, further propagating your content. It is also harder to track sharing through this method. Instead of being blind to this, ensure that social signals from your website are pinging search engines and that anyone who comes across your website has ample opportunities to easily share all of its content.