Competitive Keyword Analysis Guide To Selecting The Right Keywords

Most SEO campaigns start with the selection of the right keywords. As per this Ahref’s report, about .16% of the most popular keywords are responsible for 60.67% of internet searches. Selecting the right keywords for your needs requires strong competitive keyword analysis skills. We will discuss those skills in this article.

Your keyword choices are important for your paid marketing strategy and content strategy. Whenever you are creating your keyword research strategy, do not do it in a vacuum. Knowing what your competition is up to means conducting a thorough competitive keyword analysis. An effective competitive keyword analysis will help you in selecting the right keywords.

The basic goal of competitive keyword analysis is to see what is working for others in the market. You can adopt these strategies for your business and get an edge over your competition. For marketers, the key to this entire process is good keyword research.

Competitive Keyword Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide To Choosing The Right Keywords

Do you want to know what competitive keyword analysis is and how your business can benefit? Let us get into the details so you can learn more about it.

What Is Competitive Keyword Analysis?

Competitive keyword analysis is evaluating keywords’ rankings and their specific use. The goal of this analysis is to get an overview of available opportunities.

There are various reasons to perform competitive keyword analysis. Some of the most important ones are:

· Competitive Keyword Analysis can help you take advantage of competitors’ traffic and grow yours.

· Finding the best keywords with the highest search volume but low competition.

· Uncover new keyword opportunities faster and learn from the experiences of others.

· It can also help you find the keywords giving the highest return on investment (ROI).

· Effective analysis assists in knowing which keywords are driving traffic to your competitors.

· Competitive Keyword Analysis can answer which keywords to target to outperform your competition.

An effective competitive keyword analysis can bring many winning opportunities to your attention. It can also help you understand how you compare against your competitors. You can do this to achieve higher search engine rankings, spending less, and with the largest ROI.

How To Find And Analyze Different Keyword Types?

Usually, prospects interact with your business at different stages of their interest. Not targeting the right keyword types will cause you to lose potential customers. To win this battle, you must leverage the power of knowing which keywords your prospects are searching for at each step of the funnel.

Here we have listed what you need to map throughout your competitors’ buying cycle. Knowing these will help you bring more opportunities to your business.

Your Customers Journey

It is important to create the right solution for your prospects at different stages of the buying cycle. It helps you to know customers have different requirements at different stages of the buying cycle. Competitive analyses are to find keywords that can work for all these stages.

You must find out corresponding keywords for every stage of the customer’s journey. Determine the competitiveness of your chosen keywords at each stage of the customer journey to maximize your returns.

Important Tip:

The spreadsheet is an important tool to track your competitive keywords at the various customer journey stages. Master this tool first.

How To Find Keywords That Work

There are 4 stages of the customer journey, awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. Each stage has different keywords requirements. Let us get to know which type of keywords are best to use at each stage of the customer journey.

· Awareness

It is the very first step of your customer’s journey. Using informational keywords about your products will help. It is an important step to build your audience by providing the best solutions for their pain points.

· Consideration

This stage can help you gain a competitive edge. For this, you have to use navigational keywords, with search queries for products, their reviews, and comparisons. At this stage, your keywords become more competitive.

· Conversion

At this stage, your prospect will convert into a customer. So, using both transactional and commercial keywords here is appropriate. Various tools can assist you in finding reliable keywords for this stage. One of the best tools for this is Jaaxy.

· Retention

This most important stage of the customer journey is often overlooked. This stage is an amazing opportunity to turn your one-time customer into a lifetime one. At this stage, go for navigational keywords to ensure customer retention. You can source keywords for the retention stage from online community groups, customer support kits, Quora, Reddit, brand searches, and more.

The Step-By-Step Guide To Competitive Keyword Analysis

Competitive keyword analysis is a keyword research model that is highly sophisticated. Various questions come to mind here. Some of these are what keywords you should target. Which strategy offers the highest possible ROI? And many more.

An effective competitive keyword analysis can give you answers to these questions. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Explore The Content Strategy Of Your Competitors

First, you need to have a high-level view of your competition’s SEO landscape. For this, you need to follow these steps:

Identify Your Competitors

Before diving into the details of how to perform competitive keyword analysis, you must know who your competitors are. It sounds easy to analyze your competition in the market with a quick internet search. In reality, it requires a bit of nuanced thinking. For this, you must understand the types of competition you face in the market.

Use keywords that describe your business or its services. Go deep and do thorough research to get the list of top names in your industry. Check out each of them and review your top competitors. Getting soft target competition can help you.

Analyze The Metrics Of All Competitors

Once you know who your competitors are, you need to explore each individual site. Ahrefs is an ideal tool you can use for this. You can use Ahrefs to pull keywords and SEO metrics. These will give you a glimpse into how rooted your competitor is.

You can even use the Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool here to understand the performance of all your competitor’s keywords. The batch analysis here will return you many metrics. Our major focus will be on tabs like domain score, organic keywords, organic monthly traffic, and backlink profile.

Measure SEO Health Of Your Competitors

Besides these metrics, there are some key considerations to get a better idea about your competition. To know the SEO performance of your competitors, you need to know:

· Traffic by countries

· Monthly visits on site

· Pageviews

· Sources of traffic

· Top-performing backlinks

· Demographics of site traffic

· Average time visitors spend on the website and more.

SimilarWeb is another amazing tool for all this. These things are important to know more about your competitors.

This will let you know how well your competitors are performing at different stages of the customer journey.

2. Determine Effective Keywords Opportunities For Your Business

Are you here to find the best-performing keywords for your digital marketing efforts? Find out the most effective keyword opportunities from your competitors. You can mix your top keyword list with the top-performing keywords of your competitors. This will help you get the highest rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) which translates into more sales.

· Determine Your Competitors Keywords

Use an effective tool like Ahrefs or Alexa to get keywords your competitors are using. Alexa provides a free trial to users.

Not you sure which of these tools will work best for you? Give Alexa a try. Sign up for a free trial and provide the link to your competitor’s site. This tool will give you a list of opportunities, organic, and paid keywords under its “Keywords” tab.

Export this file into the spreadsheet you have designed. It is possible to end up with some duplicate keywords. Fine-tune your list per your needs before using it in your content or marketing campaigns.

· Filter Out Your Competitor’s Keywords

Have you got a list of your competitor’s keywords? It is time to analyze those keywords. For best results, you have to choose low competition keywords. Start removing keywords with high competition from your list. Delete these keywords for now.

Create a new spreadsheet and place the remaining keywords into it to determine individual stats. Choose the best keywords for your content and marketing campaigns.

· Remember Competitive Keyword Analysis For Paid Keywords

Keep in mind while gathering keywords from your competitors, also export their marketing keywords. For this, you can use tools like SpyFu to get paid marketing keywords with both monthly costs and Cost Per Click (CPC). It is important to identify which sources are essential for you to beat your competition.

With this, you will get answers to various questions. Some of the most common ones are about your ability to beat your competitors in paid search. You can also learn about your ability to drive traffic with paid resources through your sales funnel.

Whenever you are deciding on paid campaigns’ keywords, choose ones with high-volume and low CPC.

· Keywords’ Classification Is Important Here

Generally, people target single categorical keywords in their content. This approach to keyword analysis is completely unacceptable. At different stages of the customer journey, you will see keywords change their meaning. It is better to classify your keywords based on search intent and stage of the customer journey. This will help you have a winning list of keywords.

3. Stand Out Among Your Competitors

Here you have gotten all the essential information about the keywords’ strategy of your competitors. Now you must figure out how to use these keywords to stand out from your competitors. For this, collect the data of your various competitors and compare. In this comparison, you will use data from different SEO aspects, including:

· The Number Of Quality Backlinks

To analyze the backlink profile of your competitors, use a backlink database tool like Ahrefs.

· User Experience And Satisfaction

To analyze this factor, you need to track various metrics. These metrics include bounce rate, average visitors’ time on site, site load time, and more.

· Quality Content

Content quality is king. You must explore the content of your competitors well to see what they are doing as well as analyze both on-page and off-page SEO strategies.  This will help you understand the SEO and keywords gaps easily. It will help you develop a more effective and stronger strategy enabling you to beat your competitors. Do not forget to find the aspects where your competitors are weak. Knowing these aspects will help you to pass by your competition.

Conclusion

Competition is inevitable in every industry. It is important for you to regularly conduct competitive keyword analysis. As a result, new keywords will come up, so you can update your keyword strategy. It is important to stay competitive and attract the most customers to your business. Make sure you follow this guide to get the best results from your competitive keyword analysis.

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