Competitive Content Frequency Analysis
Optimizing Your Content Plan with Competitive Frequency Insights
There is an abundance of advice on how to craft SEO-optimized texts, structure paragraphs, and choose keywords. Yet, the concept of Content Frequency—the rate at which a site publishes on a given topic—receives comparatively less attention.
Content Frequency addresses crucial questions such as:
- How much content do we need to produce to dominate a topic?
- How often do we publish on a specific subject?
- How frequently do top players publish?
- How much content have we published?
- How much content do our competitors publish?
In the following sections, we will explore how analyzing content frequency is essential for creating balanced editorial plans and effectively positioning on a macro-topic.
Why Analyze Publication Frequency?
Let’s start with a definition: Content Frequency measures the number of pieces published on a specific topic by the sites we want to analyze. Essentially, it is the relationship between the number of pieces created on a set of semantically related keywords and the time frame during which they were published.
But do we conduct proper content analysis when structuring an editorial plan? Typically, we analyze keywords, positioning, and related topics—but we often overlook frequency, the critical time/density factor. Key questions include:
- How many pieces should we create for each topic?
- How much should we write overall to cover all relevant topics?
This type of analysis is especially valuable when performed in relation to competitors.
Analyzing Content Frequency Compared to Competitors: 4 Steps
If our main market competitor ranks better on organic SERPs and attracts more traffic, they likely have a superior content strategy.
We can uncover this by following these four steps:
- Identify Competitors: Select competitors to investigate based on their site content.
- Scrape Content: Use low-code/no-code methods like Google Sheets, the Chrome Scraper extension, or Screaming Frog to extract information such as publication date, category, author, and tags for each article.
- Aggregate and Normalize Data: Combine data and standardize it for readability.
- Compare Data: Analyze the normalized data to extract actionable insights.
Questions Addressed by Content Frequency Analysis
Content frequency analysis provides answers to several critical questions:
- How much do we publish versus the most visible competitors?
- What traffic do our competitors generate, and on which topics?
- What are the characteristics of their content?
- How does our content rank compared to others?
- What click-through rates (CTR) do their content and keywords achieve?
- On what types of SERPs are their content hosted?
These insights may reveal surprising conclusions: for example, a competitor’s publishing frequency might be three times ours, eroding our positioning and traffic.
Strategic Conclusions on SEO-Oriented Content Production
However, producing a large volume of articles isn’t always the optimal path. A 2020 analysis by SparkToro, based on SimilarWeb data, highlights that Click-Through Rates (CTR) are increasingly impacted by “Zero Click Searches.” These account for over 46% of desktop results and more than 77% of mobile results.
Given that most traffic now comes from mobile, even well-positioned content might not generate sessions or clicks. These are the metrics traditionally used to measure success. Consider “Position Zero” results: once a coveted goal, they now often experience CTR drops of over 50%. Is this a problem? Not necessarily.
The truth is that users see Position Zero results first, and by design, these provide immediate answers without requiring a click. Shouldn’t we factor this into our strategies?
In conclusion, it is vital to analyze both our searches and those of competitors to understand what users are looking for. From there, identify the topics we need to cover and determine how extensively to address them to remain competitive. Finally, expand content by breaking topics into detailed subtopics, always prioritizing user benefit and utility—even if it means evolving beyond traditional SEO KPIs to align with changing search engines, tools, and consumer behaviors.