How To Conduct A Competitor Keyword Analysis - Zounax
Competing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is essential in the digital era. It’s no longer enough to have a website that serves as an online brochure for your business. You need to have high-ranking content on Google, Bing and other search engines if you want to be seen by potential customers—and get their attention. The first step toward achieving this goal is competitor keyword analysis: identifying keywords that your competitors rank for and figuring out how you can use them to improve your own rankings in the SERPs.
What is a competitor keyword analysis?
A competitor keyword analysis is a way to find new keywords to target. It can also help you understand your competitors’ strategy, as well as find keywords that they’re targeting and ones that you can target.
Why should you perform a competitor keyword analysis?
You should perform a competitor keyword analysis for several reasons:
- To find out what keywords your competitors are targeting. This can help you determine what products and services they’re promoting, which will help you in determining where to focus your marketing efforts.
- To find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for, so that you can see how well-optimized their content is compared to yours. If it looks like they’ve done a better job than you have, then it’s probably time for some copywriting improvements!
- To see which keywords they’ve optimized their content for, so that if there’s anything specific missing from your own website (like an image of something), then it’s easy enough to add it later without having to go back through the whole process again (which would mean losing all progress).
How to perform a competitor keyword analysis?
It’s important to understand how your competitors are optimizing their websites and how they are ranking for their keywords in order to get a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t. If you want to increase your site traffic and conversions, then it is essential that you know what keywords your competitors are targeting.
In this article, we will show you how to perform a competitor keyword analysis so that you can learn more about the keywords they are targeting and which ones they are ranking for. This will give you an idea of which keywords could be used by us on our own website and which ones we should avoid using at all costs!
Create the initial list of keywords
The first step in this process is to find your competitors’ top keywords and pages. You will need to use a keyword research tool for this, but it’s not as intimidating or complicated as you might think! Using a keyword research tool isn’t difficult at all; you just need to know how to use it properly. Here are some tips:
Make sure that you have access to Google Search Console or another analytics platform that can provide information about your competitor’s top keywords and pages. If not, then your best bet is going directly through Google itself by searching for competitor domains using the “site:” command (e.g., site:domainname). This will give you all the search results from the domain name entered (in this case, “domianname”), so make sure that whatever site or page ranking well on Google is one owned by your competitors rather than one unrelated or irrelevant site like Wikipedia!
Add keyword variations to your initial list of keywords
Add keyword variations to your initial list of keywords. With this method, you can find more relevant keywords that are related to your business. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner for this purpose or use Keywordtool.io, a free tool that provides suggestions based on the words you enter in the search bar.
Research your competitors’ search engine optimization performance
Use the data from these tools to identify what keywords your competitors rank for in Google SERPs (search engine results pages) and which ones they don’t rank for yet but could potentially rank for if they optimized their pages accordingly. These are called “opportunities.”
You can also find ideas for keywords in Google Keyword Planner.
This tool is a great way to get an overall view of what people are searching for, as well as how competitive they are.
You’ll be able to see the search volume and cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword you enter. It helps you determine whether or not it’s worth targeting.
Find out whether you can outrank your competitors
The next step is to check the rank of your competitors.
The first thing you want to look at is their content strategy. How many articles do they have on the topic? What kinds of keywords are they targeting with each article, and how often do they update those articles? Do they have an established publishing schedule, or do they publish sporadically?
Another thing you’ll want to look at is their backlinks. Where are they getting their backlinks from and how many do they have (and what type)? Are these domains that are relevant in terms of topic, or are most of them coming from unrelated industries with no relation whatsoever?
Then, check out their on-page SEO: what is it like? Is there anything unique about it that could help you stand out, such as images or videos embedded into blog posts with descriptive captions about them (this could help improve search rankings)? Or does it look like something we’ve already seen before on other sites that target similar keywords (which makes me think this market isn’t worth getting into).
Competitor keyword research
The average consumer is bombarded with more than 3,000 advertisements per day. This means that you need to put your best foot forward in order to cut through the noise and get noticed. Competitor keyword research is a great way to discover new opportunities for targeting high-value keywords, but there’s much more to it than just finding similar words or terms used by your competitors on their websites.
This can help you learn what they’re doing right, how they’re doing it wrong (which will give you insight into what not to do), and how they might be better off handling their content marketing strategy if they were using a different approach.
Conclusion
With a competitor keyword analysis, you can find out what your competitors are doing well and what they’re not doing so well. This information can help you make better decisions about how to target high-value keywords for your website. For example, if you notice that one of your competitors is using content marketing to rank for certain keywords but has lower authority than another competitor who isn’t using content marketing at all, then it might be worth considering more content on your own site as an SEO strategy.
Curious about the ins and outs of digital marketing?
Subscribe to our email newsletter for the latest digital marketing insights, and also make sure to read our blogs. See you next time!
