Tools

12 Things To Look For in a Content Strategy Analysis Tool

CopyPress

August 2, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)

Content strategy analysis tools make it easier to review your content and understand what topics you already cover and how you can expand to provide more value to your audience. Instead of guessing what you think your audience wants to discover, or what will keep you in competition with others in your industry, these tools use data to produce those results. But with many tools on the market, how do you know which one is right for your business? Today, we’re discussing what to look for in a content strategy analysis tool with topics like:

Why Should you Use a Content Strategy Analysis Tool?
12 Best Characteristics of a Content Strategy Analysis Tool

Why Should You Use a Content Strategy Analysis Tool?

Content strategy analysis tools use data to find the best ways to scale your content creation. Sometimes, when you scale content, you push your resources—like your writing team—beyond their reasonable limits because you want to create content more quickly. For example, if a writer can only write five articles per week realistically, you may try to push them to write seven or nine to get more content to publish.

While this will increase your content output and give you more pieces to publish, stretching the resource limits can decrease the quality of the work you turn out. It’s not worth it to sacrifice quality for quantity. But with content strategy analysis tools, you don’t have to make that sacrifice. The data these tools provide helps your team work smarter, not harder.

The reports from these tools provide insights to make topic selection easier and also make your content plan more logical. When your development process is more streamlined, that allows your content creation team to turn out more content at the same high quality but do it more efficiently. Then you don’t have to sacrifice good content for more mediocre pieces.

12 Best Characteristics of a Content Strategy Analysis Tool

The best content marketing tools help you understand how your content performs on its own and how it compares to pieces your competitors share with your audience. Those two streams of information help you get ahead of the competition by targeting the information your audience wants and needs. Here are some characteristics to look for when you’re choosing the best content analysis tool for your company:

1. Content Performance

How is your content currently performing on search engines? One of the most basic pieces of information you can get out of a content analysis tool is a snapshot of the current state of your pieces. Without this information, the rest of the data you get doesn’t matter. You have nothing to use as a control group for comparisons. You also have no information on how to make improvements to what you’ve already done.

The best tools track performance metrics like search engine positioning and organic traffic. But some may also allow you to enter more information, like your department goals. Then, you can track things like your progress with key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure your return on investment (ROI) for each piece of content. The exact metrics you want to track may vary by brand, content, or campaign.

2. Competitor Identification

Most times, before you even dive into a content strategy analysis, you already know who your top business competitors are. But what if you don’t? Or what if you’ve misidentified who your biggest competition really is? A good analysis tool allows you to share information about the domains of the brands you think are your top competitors and confirm you’ve picked out the right ones.

But the tool should also suggest other potential competitors that you may not have considered. This information helps you get a better understanding of the state of the market in your industry. It identifies potential new competitors to keep on your radar that may try to take market share from you—or that you can swipe market share from—in the future.

3. Competitor SEO Comparisons

Most companies engage in content marketing to boost their SEO. Content pieces are a great, cost-effective marketing technique for increasing brand awareness. And most of this happens thanks to search engine traffic. The best content strategy analysis tools should compare some of your top SEO metrics with your competition. Information like organic keywords, traffic, and cost, as well as the number of pages in the Top 10 search results, provide a wealth of information.

These can show you where you’re already outpacing the competition and areas where you can improve to get more reach and brand recognition from the right audience. This type of SEO data can also show you areas where you can capitalize on getting more traffic to your website by targeting high search volume, low competition keywords, and topics. We’ll discuss these points in more detail below.

4. Keyword Analysis

Are you covering the right keywords for all your content topics? The best content strategy analysis tools have a keyword analysis program built right in. This segment can tell you which keywords and search phrases bring visitors to your website through both paid and organic channels. This information tells you what’s already working on your site. What content is getting the most traffic? What information does your audience want to see? How relevant is each topic to your brand or industry?

This data helps with further content analysis. If you can see what keywords are bringing you the most traffic, then you can also analyze those pieces and check metrics like the average time on page or the bounce rate for each piece of content. Doing so can help you determine once people find your content, are they staying and reading it? Apply those insights to future pieces your team creates or use them to optimize old content to get more traffic, better reach, and more conversions.

5. Content Focus Suggestions

You can’t rely on just your past top-performing content to bring in the kind of organic traffic and clients you need to sustain your business. It’s important to create new content all the time on all the topics your audience finds useful throughout your industry. But finding a way to break out of your traditional mold and provide something new that’s still appealing to your audience may be tricky. That’s where content focus suggestions help.

Content suggestions differ from keyword analysis. These recommendations appear as topics rather than individual focus keywords. Topics are broad and can have many related keywords within them. This type of strategy is helpful because it allows you to theme content to provide more and more pieces that interest your audience rather than covering one-off keywords that don’t provide more room for learning, growth, and expansion.

For example, look at the topic opportunities for Black Box Record Club. Currently, that domain doesn’t rank for keywords like “curate records” or “curated vinyl.” While this example lists those terms as keywords, they’re actually content topics. Within those topics, there are many long-tail keywords the company could target. Its marketing team may create blog posts titled “What Comes in a Curated Vinyl Subscription Box?” or “What Criteria Can I Use To Curate My Record Collection?”

6. Link Analysis

Backlinks are one of the best ways to prove your content’s worth to search engines and generate more traffic for your website. When you receive a lot of good backlinks, your content can quickly climb to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). But if most of your backlinks come from low-quality or spammy websites, that could hurt your rankings instead. A good content strategy analysis tool tells you where your backlinks come from to make sure low-authority websites aren’t draining your link juice.

Your tool may use metrics like citation flow (CF) and trust flow (TF) to determine how valuable a link is for your website. TF measures a link’s quality and how reputable it is to search engines. CF measures the current traffic level, or how much traffic that link brings to your website. These numbers can tell you if more of your traffic comes from high- or low-quality links.

If you find your domain has too many bad backlinks, you can work on disavowing them, or telling search engines you don’t want your content associated with those sources. Just like your content, the quantity doesn’t matter when you have low-quality backlinks.

7. Syndication Suggestions

A good content strategy analysis tool helps you find new ways to market your brand and your content. You can do that by finding top-quality syndication partners who help get your pieces in front of the right audience for more reach and recognition. One of the most important, but also trickiest, parts of content syndication is finding the right partnerships. If you plan to re-publish your content on a third-party website, you want to make sure that the site has good domain authority. You’ll also want to make sure the site has the potential to provide quality backlinks and increase your reach.

A top-notch content strategy analysis tool provides suggestions for the right partnerships within your niche. It might analyze factors like how similar your website is to the syndication partner and what type of reference domains you have in common. These factors, among others, can help you make decisions about which syndication partners serve your brand best.

8. Data Visualization

Most marketing analysis comes with a lot of data, and content analysis is no different. Having a bunch of data without a way to visualize it can get overwhelming. Data visualization tools give you a way to build charts and graphs that make it easier to evaluate your analysis.

By using data visualization, you can pull from the tool and make information accessible to multiple teams. The best programs allow for seamless sharing and understanding of data from those with strong analytical skills and those who just need a quick reference.

9. User Guide or Customer Support

Every analysis tool is different. Even if you’ve used one in the past, layouts, buttons, and nav features can vary from tool to tool. The best content analysis programs come with a user guide, instructions, or access to support so you have everything you need to extract and use the data you want.

While your team can learn to use any program or tool on their own, they shouldn’t have to. Look for tools that provide additional resources like user guides or tutorials. With learning resources like these, you can help your team get up to speed on a new program quickly and easily.

10. Customization Options

The best analysis tools are the ones you can customize to fit your brand’s and team’s needs. For instance, sorting content, filtering data, and adjusting dashboards or reports are several features many tools let you personalize to your team’s specific needs. Many tools you can use and purchase online come with product descriptions and user manuals to help your team understand the customization options available with any program.

But it’s also a good idea to talk to the customer service team if you have specific questions or needs from the tool. Support teams will tell you if some of your customizations are possible and give you instructions on how to make them happen. Some smaller software companies may also offer customization packages and user-requested features you wouldn’t know about unless you attempted to contact the brand.

11. Integration Capabilities

Make sure the program you choose integrates with other programs you already use. The most common integration needs may come from your current analytics programs. You want to make sure the new tool you select receives data from your already established programs. It’s also helpful to be able to send information from your new too back to your other analytics programs. This connection makes data analysis and visualization easier. It also requires less time and conversions from another program or a member of your strategy team to create documents and reports.

12. Affordability

No matter how great a content analysis tool is, it’s not right for your brand if it doesn’t fit your budget. There are plenty of tools out there, both free and paid, that offer all the features we recommend. Finding the right tool for your analysis objectives and your budget may take research and planning.

Talking with your company leadership and your finance department may help you understand if a specific tool is worth the investment. You may also find a free trial is a better option to test if a product is right for your brand.

Make CopyPress’s Content Analysis Tool Your Number One Choice

CopyPress has the right content strategy analysis tool for any team or budget. Our free report helps with every aspect of your content creation and analysis, like:

Showing your best content marketing opportunities to increase reach around the internet
Comparing your content to that of your top competitors
Looking at your website’s links and how you can revamp your linking strategy to increase authority and reputation with search engines
Discover “low-hanging fruit” that allows you to find ripe content opportunities that give you the maximum impact from your resources

After you request your report, set up a strategy call with our team to go over your results and get one-on-one insights about where to go next with our content marketing services to implement your content marketing plan. You’ll get all the information in the report plus tips and next steps to make your content marketing goals a reality. Drop your information in the form below to get the free report delivered right to your inbox.

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Kevin Doory

Director of SEO at Auto Revo

Christy Walters

CopyPress writer