Part of topic research involves understanding how competitors create their content and discovering the weaknesses that you can exploit. You can do this using Heatmap and SERP X-Ray.
SERP X-Ray
SERP X-Ray provides insight into the makeup and structure of the top 20 organic results. You see:
- Intent — so you know how to target your content.
- Content Score — to set the minimum bar for quality.
- Word Count — for how in-depth you’ll need to get.
- Subheadings (H2’s) per page — for how structured your article needs to be.
- Images and Videos — help allocate resources for additional content requirements.
- Links — reveal the extent of content clusters.
On the right, above the SERP Stats in SERP X-Ray, you may see some icons which vary, depending on your topic. These are Google Visual Elements, also known as SERP features. Here are the ones MarketMuse tracks.
Heatmap
Heatmap measures the content quality (topical coverage) of your competitors in the search engine results page (SERP). We do this by comparing their coverage to the topic model. It’s presented as a heat map so you can discover their weakness — order by Gaps to quickly find them.