This article explains how to use MarketMuse heatmaps to analyze your competitor’s content strategy for a specific topic. You can see how to do this in the second half of the video starting at 2:07.
What are Heatmaps?
Heatmaps are a visual tool within MarketMuse that allows you to compare your content to your competitors based on a topic model.
Benefits of Using Heatmaps for Competitor Analysis
- Identify Content Gaps: Heatmaps can reveal what topics your competitors are missing in their content (shown as red squares in the heatmap). This allows you to create content that covers these areas and differentiate yourself from the competition.
- Understand Competitor Strategy: By analyzing the competitor’s content listed in the heatmap, you can gain insights into their approach to a particular topic.
- Refine Your Content Strategy: You can use the heatmap to see which high-scoring competitor content (blue and green squares) addresses the most relevant topics (left side of the heatmap). This helps you ensure your own content covers the essential aspects of the subject.
- Plan Your Content Cluster: Heatmaps can help you brainstorm related topics to include in your content cluster around a specific subject.
How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website with Heatmaps
- Enter your topic: Start by entering the main subject of your competitor’s content, such as “content marketing.”
- Analyze a Specific Website: Instead of looking at search results (SERP), choose “Explore a website” and enter the URL of your competitor’s website.
- Refine Your Analysis (Optional):
- To focus on a specific section of the website, exclude certain parts of the URL after the domain name.
- You can also include your own webpage’s URL in the optional field to compare it directly to the competitor’s content within the heatmap.
Understanding the Heatmap Results
- The heatmap will display the top 20 most relevant pages on the competitor’s website related to your topic.
- Each competitor’s page will be listed with its corresponding URL, content score, and ranking position (if any).
- The colored squares show how often each topic from the topic model (left side of the heatmap) is mentioned on each competitor’s page.
- Red: No mentions (opportunity for differentiation)
- Yellow: 1-2 mentions
- Green: 3-10 mentions
- Blue: 10+ mentions
Additional Tips
- You can export the heatmap data as a spreadsheet for further analysis.
By using heatmaps for competitor analysis, you can gain valuable insights to improve your content strategy and potentially outrank your competitors.