What is Competitive Keyword Analysis?
Competitive Keywords are the keywords used by competitors to rank higher than you do. You should use these keywords when writing your own content, so that they appear in the SERPs. If you want to outrank them, you must write content that ranks well for their keywords too.
The process of finding these keywords is called Competitive Keyword Analysis (CKA). CKA helps you find keywords that your competitors are targeting and which you could potentially target yourself. It’s very useful if you want to know what keywords to include in your content, how to optimize your site for those keywords, and how to avoid getting penalized for keyword stuffing.
There are many ways to conduct CKA. The most common method is to go through the websites of your competitors and look at the keywords they use. This way, you get a list of keywords that your competitors are using. However, this method doesn’t always work because some sites don’t make it easy to see the keywords they’re using. Another method is to use tools like SEMRush, SpyFu, Ahrefs, etc., to analyze your competitor’s backlinks.
In addition to looking at your competitors’ backlink profiles, you can also check their top 10 rankings for specific keywords. For example, you might notice that one of your competitors ranks number 1 for “how to build a website” while another ranks first for “free WordPress themes.” In this case, you would want to try to come up with content that targets the former keyword but avoids the latter.
You can also perform a manual analysis of your competitors’ backlinks. For example, you can visit the websites of your competitors, click through to their homepage, and then click through to any link that points to their home page. Then, you can analyze the anchor texts of those links to determine whether they contain any keywords that your competitors are ranking for.
Once you’ve identified your competitors’ keywords, you’ll need to decide which ones you’d like to compete for. There are two main types of keywords: broad match and exact match. Broad match keywords are keywords that are less specific. They tend to attract more traffic, since there are fewer competing results for them. However, they often lead to lower conversion rates. Exact match keywords are much narrower. Because there are fewer competing results, they typically convert better. But they usually bring in less traffic.
Keywords are divided into three categories: long tail, short tail, and head terms. Long tail keywords are highly targeted phrases that people type into search engines. Head terms are the keywords that people actually enter into the search box. Short tail keywords are everything else.
Benefits of SEO Competitor Keyword Analysis
Why should you do competitor analysis?
Competitors are your potential customers who are already doing business with you. They are your competitors because they are selling the same products or services as you. You want to know what they are offering so you can decide whether you want to offer them something similar or different. If you don’t understand how your competitors work, then you won’t be able to make smart decisions about your own marketing strategy.
The first step in understanding your competition is to find out their website URL’s. Once you’ve located these websites, you’ll need to analyze them to see if there are any commonalities among them. Commonalities could include things like:
1) The type of product/service offered (e.g., ecommerce vs. non-ecommerce);
2) The size of the market;
3) The amount of traffic coming from organic search results;
4) The number of backlinks pointing to the site;
5) The age of the domain name;
Keyword Gap Analysis
How to do Keyword Gap Analysis?
Keyword gap analysis is used to find out which keywords are most effective for your website. It helps you determine what kind of traffic you should expect from them.
There are two types of keyword gaps:
1) The first type is the difference between the number of times a keyword appears in the title tag and description meta tags. This type of gap is called “Title Tag” gap.
2) The second type of gap is the difference between the average position of a keyword in the URL and its position in the page’s body. This gap is called “URL” gap.
The following table shows how to calculate these gaps:
Gap Type Average Position Title Tag Description Meta Tags URL Avg. Pos. in URL Avg. Pos. Page Body Avg. Pos.
For example, if we want to know whether our keyword “seo services” is effective in generating traffic, we would look at the number of times this word occurs in the title tag (the first column), the number of times it occurs in the description meta tag (second column), and the number of times it appears in the URL (third column). If the numbers are similar, then we can assume that our keyword is working well. But if they differ significantly, then we’d better think twice before using that keyword.
Conclusion
Keyword analysis can help improve your SEO strategy. By using informed SEO competitors analysis, you could even overtake some of the mainstayers in your industry to rank first for certain keywords. You should definitely put Competitor Keyword Analysis at the top of your list for now.