Deciding on which keywords to target can mean the difference between rising up the ranking ladder, or falling down. From backlink analysis to competitor analysis, there are numerous ways to determine your keyword focus and gain a competitive edge. In this article, we take you through some simple steps to ensure your website can reach its ranking potential.

What is keyword competition?

As we already know,  keywords are mega important when it comes to your SEO strategy. Keyword competition is the measure of how difficult it will be to rank using a particular keyword, phrase or sentence. Some keywords and phrases can be highly sought after, meaning that they are not only expensive to bid on, but also nigh-on impossible to come by. Keyword analysis should always be undertaken thoroughly before launching your new website. If you are offering a product or service in a very competitive market place you may need to think outside the box. Using the data acquired after analysing your keyword competition, try finding longer relevant tail keyword variations, and cleverly crafted alternatives to other keywords visitors may use to search for you online.

Keyword Competition Analysis – Best Practices

When it comes to choosing your list of keywords, it’s important to include relevant and descriptive keywords based on your business, products, and services, however, before you determine the level of competition for a keyword you need to know who your competitors are.

It is important to remember that the amount of search results you get when you search for a specific keyword is not a number of competitors you will have. A lot of websites don’t necessarily focus on a specific keyword, even though they show up in search results. What should matter to you is ranking on the first page of search results for a specific keyword or phrase.

People are much less likely to click a result on page two of the search engine results pages, so you need to be within the top 10 organic search results that get displayed when a user searches for something. This is why you can consider the top 10 sites that currently rank for a keyword, as your main competitors.

Assessing Your Competitors

Now that you’ve established who exactly your competitors are, you can now focus on the strength of each of these competitors. You need to determine whether it’s a realistic goal for you to outrank them for a specific keyword. There are a few things you can look at to determine your competitors.

  • Check the page title of each result. If a website is trying to rank for a keyword, they will have the keyword within their page title.
  • Check the content of the page. If they have well-written content that seems to be focused on specific keyword or phrase, they are trying to target the keyword.
  • Check their backlinks. This is a very important factor when determining the strength of your competitors. This might require some research, but there are many tools available to do this. If they have a lot of backlinks from reputable, high-ranking websites, they are likely actively trying to rank for a specific

To accurately assess your competitors, you will likely need a suite of tools, but there are many great ones available online. The tool ahrefs.com is one of the most popular ones and highly recommended. Remember, the more thorough you are, the better your results will be. You want to accurately assess the level of competition for every keyword you want to rank for.

Unfortunately, in most cases, you need a higher budget to outrank all your competitors. But if you don’t have that available yet, start with the basics and make sure that your website ranks on the first page of Google’s search results. You need to start by being among the top 10 websites listed.

The Importance of Content

One way to rank well for specific keywords is by having relevant, authoritative content. With high-quality content. You will find it much easier to rank for a specific keyword. Good quality content will also naturally rank within Google and other search engines, so you make your job much easier.

If you naturally have great content on your website, you also need fewer backlinks to help you rank well. Don’t completely overlook low competition keywords – this is a great way to get your foot in the door. Focus on these keywords and create or edit content around. These topics will help you to get your organic search traffic going and help boost your overall SEO efforts.

While you are still busy working on your competitive keywords, these low competition keywords can help you get ranked and systematically build your trust with search engines and visitors. This is a great way to get started, especially if you don’t have a large budget to work with. Many SEOs often overlook this aspect, which means that there may be missing out on valuable traffic.

Ranking well for a list of keywords takes hard work and it is an ongoing effort. But you need to start somewhere, and the perfect place is determining your competitors. This way you will know you’re up against and gradually work to build up a position within search engine result pages.

We’re here to help

Choosing the right keywords can do a lot in terms of rankings, but there’s much more that goes into making your site the best it can be. If you want to create great content to boost your SEO efforts, speak to the experts at The Content Works – drop us a line on 0207 305 55 99 or email hello@thecontentworks.uk.

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