content-moat-calculator

Content Moat Calculator

Estimate the total content investment needed to establish topical authority in a niche. Analyzes competitors' content volume and quality to give you a go/no-go decision before investing months of work. Answers the question: "How many pages do I need to dominate this topic?"

Stage

S3: Blog & SEO — This decides what blog content to build. It's the feasibility check that saves you from starting a content strategy you can't finish.

When to Use

• User is deciding whether to invest in a niche/topic
• User asks "how many articles do I need to rank?"
• User wants to understand the content investment required
• User says "content moat", "topical authority", "feasibility", "content gap"
• After keyword-cluster-architect to estimate effort for the planned clusters
• Before committing to a major content initiative

Input Schema

niche: string                 # REQUIRED — the topic to analyze
                              # e.g., "AI video tools", "email marketing for SaaS"

hub_keyword: string           # OPTIONAL — main keyword to analyze competitors for
                              # Default: inferred from niche

your_current_pages: number    # OPTIONAL — how many pages you already have on this topic
                              # Default: 0

publishing_capacity: string   # OPTIONAL — "1/week" | "2/week" | "3/week" | "5/week"
                              # Default: "2/week"

Chaining from S3 keyword-cluster-architect: Use keyword_clusters.total_clusters and keyword_clusters.hub.keyword.

Workflow

Step 1: Analyze Top Competitors

Read shared/references/seo-strategy.md for moat calculation methodology.

1. web_search for [hub_keyword] or main niche keyword
2. Identify top 5 ranking sites (exclude giants like Wikipedia, Reddit)
3. For each competitor:
   • web_search: site:[competitor.com] [niche topic] — count pages on this topic
   • Note: content depth (word count), content freshness (publish dates), content types (blog, comparison, tutorial)