Simple Steps For Improving Your Online Customer Service
Subhasree Nag, 7 hours ago
One of the fundamental aspects of SEO strategy is competitor keyword research. Businesses can compare their keywords with their competitors through implementation and understanding when they understand to implement the process in their business. They can improve their strategy and get high-quality traffic.
We will go over the process of conducting a competitive keyword analysis. But precisely, it is the process of targeting your competitors’ keywords to improve their rankings in search engines and increase conversions. Competitor keyword analysis is as vital as technical SEO is for any website.
What is competitor keyword analysis?
Competitor keyword analysis is finding out what keywords your competitor is working on. These are the keywords that are ranking highly to create content that surpasses them in search results.
With this help, you can look for opportunities or gaps in your keyword research and improve your SEO strategy depending on those insights. You can also use competitor keyword analysis to determine those opportunities for high ROI. This way, with some work, you can outrank your competitor for a relevant keyword.
Importance of competitor keyword analysis
Competitor keyword analysis is a cornerstone for SEO. But what are the reasons for it? Let’s have a look.
Understanding your competitors
Getting a sneak peek into the keyword strategy gives you the secret sauce behind your competitor’s online success. You get to dive into the content themes and their best SEO practices, including on-page SEO as well as off-page SEO. This would give you an insight into where you need to improve.
Identifying opportunities
Finding your competitor’s keyword and comparing it with your keyword strategy can help you figure out and capitalize on those missed opportunities that are areas where you can still grow. This will shift your focus from less competitive to more lucrative keywords.
Planning the content
Doing an in-depth keyword analysis is like having a compass for your content strategy. It provides you with an insight into what your target audience is looking for. This way, you can create content that resonates with your target audience.
Improving website traffic and SEO
When you know what people are searching for, you can improvise and align your content with what your target audience wants and work on the right keywords. This way, your content will have a better chance of ranking high on search engine results.
This enhances your online visibility and gets high-quality visitors to your site who want to engage with the brand.
How to conduct a competitor keyword analysis?
With this process, you can conduct a competitor keyword analysis and figure out the user-intent and high-volume keywords to help your sites get a better ranking.
Use competitive analysis templates
Before analyzing competitor keywords, you should use a competitive analysis template. If you start with the analysis without using the template first, it is like boarding a flight in the economy without earplugs.
Firstly, it helps you deal with multidimensional keyword data. Secondly, it makes it easy to share the findings with your other team members, and they can even expand the analysis if they wish. Simply put, it is like a foundation for competitor keyword analysis.
Even though all these templates are useful for competitive analysis, the content marketing analysis template is more practical for this task.
Create a list of your competitors
Once you have the template ready, start filling in your competitors. Knowing your competition is going to make the process a lot easier. You can create a more effective and targeted SEO strategy if you know who your competitors are.
Your SERP (search engine result page) competitors or the brands that appear when you look for a keyword will be different than the product competitors. Instead of using market analysis to list your competitors, use SERP to find the search competitors.
Moreover, various tools can help you find SERP competitors. They are also known as organic competitors.
Check competitor’s keyword
Once you have figured out who your competitors are, you must make a list of keywords on which they are ranking. Look for the keywords that have outranked you and figure out where you lag. Think about how you can outshine them and devise a strategy based on this research.
Keep the keywords separate for every competitor site so you do not confuse them. You can use a tool to figure out the competitor keywords. various tools are available; check which one suits your needs most and then leverage those for your benefit.
Competitor keyword analysis is not a regular process like keyword research for creating content. Even if you have a strict budget, some apps can help you with this entire process and make things easy for you.
Identify keyword gaps
Once you have the list of keywords ready, you can start looking for ways you can get a better spot on SERPs and beat the competition. Identify the specific terms that are ranking for your competitors and which pages are ranking from their websites with those keywords.
You can follow your gut, or just use a tool to get an accurate answer. Various tools can help you figure things out.
Understand the audience for your competitor and yourself
Organic competitors do not always have to be product competitors, study their target audience, offerings, and strategy and compare them with your site before you use the content gap to make necessary changes.
Look at the buyer personas and identify the keywords that align with your business presenting you with different opportunities to outrank the competitors. With these buyer personas, you can look for the missing terms and streamline the keyword opportunities that benefit you.
Track your competitor’s performance
Even when you are done with the competitor keyword analysis, you should keep an eye on their performance and monthly search volume. Keep a check on their backlinks and their new keywords and stay updated about their progress as well.
Overall, these strategies are going to help you stay focused and outperform the competitors in lead generation and business development.
Best tools for keyword analysis
Parsing and crawling need a lot of resources. So, using a paid tool that is within your budget will make things easy for you and provide you with accurate data. Here are some of the best tools for competitor keyword analysis.
If you are just starting with competitor keyword analysis, starting with a Google search is best. It is powerful, it is free. And you get all the information from the source directly. It will provide you with all the minute details compared to any other tools. It gives all the real-time data and not just any estimations.
Semrush
Navigating through all the small details and extracting the data can be overwhelming. So, you can go to Semrush if you want to reduce the workload. It allows you to identify all your organic competitors.
Moreover, you can use “Keyword Gap” to see which keywords are missing from your strategy. You can also monitor SERPs changes with the help of “Position Changes” to see real-time ranking opportunities.
Ahrefs
Semrush and Ahrfs are a lot alike. Ahrefs also offers all the competitor insights that you require to prepare your keyword strategy. For identifying SERP competitors, there are “Competing Domains,” and a “Content Gap” to check where you are lagging.
Moreover, there is “Rank Tracker” for tracking your competitors in SERPs. Overall, it has everything you will need for a competitor keyword analysis.
Moz
Moz is a little behind Semrush and Ahrefs. However, it is still a fantastic tool for analyzing keywords. Moreover, their “Rivalry” metric looks for the domain authority, keyword similarity, and shared keyword volume from your top-listed competitors. It does not just rely on shared keyword volume. They also have a “Keywords to Improve” tool, which gives insights on those keywords that can rank.
SE Ranking
If you are a startup with a strict budget, then SE Ranking is one of the best tools. You can use this instead of Ahrefs and Semrush. Like those tools, this one also allows you to investigate your competitor’s data. You can figure out the missing keywords, reach daily rank and position changes, and filter competitive keywords.
Wrapping Up!
During the process of content creation, a competitor keyword analysis helps you stay focused. You can figure out precisely what your audience is looking for, which competitors are optimizing their websites for similar content, and what you must do to rank them.
As a result, when you are done with the process, you will be able to prepare an amazing digital marketing strategy to get a good ranking on the search results.
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Subhasree Nag
A self-proclaimed Swiftian, Instagram-holic, and blogger, Subhasree eats, breathes, and sleeps pop culture. When she is not imagining dates with Iron Man on Stark Tower (yes, she has the biggest crush on RDJ, which she won’t admit), she can be seen tweeting about the latest trends. Always the first one to break viral news, Subhasree is addicted to social media, and leaves out no opportunity of blogging about the same. She is our go-to source for the latest algorithm updates and our resident editor.
