How to track a competitor's content strategy (and steal the good parts)
Watch what they publish. Then watch what they stopped publishing, because an abandoned content topic is an abandoned bet and it tells you what did not work.
Everyone watches what a competitor publishes. Almost nobody watches what they stopped publishing, and the second one is more interesting.
Start with the sitemap
Before you click through their blog index like a person with time to waste, open their sitemap.
It is usually at slash sitemap dot xml. It lists everything they have published, often with dates, in one place, in thirty seconds. You get their entire content operation at a glance: how much, how often, on what, and when it slowed down.
This is the fastest competitor content research that exists and I have never once seen anyone start here.
Read the cadence
Volume over time tells you about investment, and investment tells you about belief.
A blog that published weekly for two years and now publishes monthly did not get lazy. Something changed. The person who believed in it left, or the budget was cut, or someone looked at the traffic and asked a hard question in a meeting.
A blog that suddenly tripled its output has money and a new bet. Possibly a new head of marketing who needs to show numbers by Q4.
Either way, the cadence is a report on the internal politics of their marketing team, published inadvertently, with timestamps.
Read the abandonment
Here is the good part.
Go look at what topics they used to write about and no longer do. There is almost always a cluster. Fourteen posts about one theme, all from eighteen months ago, and then nothing.
That was a bet. It failed, or the person who cared about it left, or the audience it targeted never converted.
That is enormously useful. It is a free negative result. They spent months and real money finding out that this content did not work, and they published the entire experiment in public, and you can read the conclusion without paying for it.
Sometimes it means do not bother. Sometimes it means they gave up too early and there is an opening. Either way you know more than you did.
Find their one good page
Most content operations are carried by two or three pages. Everything else is filler nobody reads.
Find the pages other sites actually link to, the ones that rank, the ones they keep updating. That is their real content asset, the one that brings in the traffic that brings in the customers.
That page is worth studying properly. Not to copy, but to understand why it works and to decide whether to compete on it directly or route around it.
Do not copy the topics
The worst outcome of competitor content research is that you end up writing the same posts they wrote, later, worse, and behind.
If they own a topic, they own it. Fighting them on it costs more than it returns.
What you want is the adjacent thing. The question their audience clearly has, that they have never answered, usually because it is slightly awkward for their product to answer honestly.
That is where the opening is. Not in the topics they covered, but in the ones they carefully did not.