IXD302 – Conducting a Competitive Content Audit

Before I conduct my competitor analysis on similar/local companies for my proposed Hill Street, I want to do a quick content audit on at least one of the following sites to gain better insight into how a site is normally structured and displayed. This ultimately helps contextualize my information more relevantly when explaining myself in my proposal and gives me a better understanding of the insight of these brands. Additionally, this helps me identify pieces/pages of content that perform the best.

My intended content audit will be based on Titanic Quarter’s website, however, I could spend my entire life analyzing each page from top to bottom. This is a problem as there is too much content. Fortunately, I have a few tricks up my sleeve that will make the process quicker and give me a more in-depth analysis of statistical traffic into the site.

Before I analyze the content in a broad spectrum. I want to look at what kind of content brings users to the Titanic Quarters website. I can then reflect this basis onto my proposal.

Content I will be looking for:

  • User Posts
  • Videos
  • Images
  • Articles

Instead of dragging my knuckles through their website/social media looking at what content they post/engage with I decided to use a website called Buzzsumo which gives a snapshot of my competitor’s main content and looks at how well they are performing in a social manner.

To my surprise, there isn’t much social engagement through their posts. However, we can find that most of the engagement is through Facebook. This makes sense as most of this content is appealing to families/tourists which makes Facebook a beneficial player in the interactivity of the site and its socials.

Moving on to an alternative method, RivalIQ allows me to look at their social engagement/posts and what material holds the most engagement.

When looking at this material I have to bear in mind what content is most prominent on their site, e.g. mainly text-based or heavily visual? In this case, they use mainly visuals to engage with their audience. Their content however does not exclusively fall in line with what their main product is (Titantic). They show a mixture of content exploring the parameter of the titanic quarters and festive displays. Although, the posts showcasing the Titanic itself or the Titanic building contain the most engagement via Instagram (This social media was excluded from the previous site).

How has this helped me?

As titanicquarter.com is a competitor, I need to understand what makes the enemy good. Using these Websites has greatly helped me in finding what kind of content they provide and their social relevancy. Additionally, this helps me understand the users more.

Content AuditĀ 

Now it’s time for the content audit. As mentioned previously, the site contains an unlimited amount of pages and articles which I will talk about in my competitor analysis. However, the page’s structure and content seem to be very repetitive throughout the site, for this reason, I will be only limiting my audit to a few select pages. Thankfully, by looking at the websites I provided above I can look at the backlog and see the most popular URLs. This is where I will begin my content audit.

Below shows my content audit for titanicquarters.com

Conducting this content audit has provided me with more knowledge of what content the site presents and how it is structured. It also provides awareness of the marketing strategies of titanicquarters.com. As I am designing a proposal in this subject area I must be fully aware of the projects that I will hypothetically be commencing. As I am more aware of both the users and content I will now begin an in-depth analysis of the content on the site.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *