Crack the Code: Winning Strategies for Keyword Competition Analysis

Why Keyword Competition Analysis is Important

 

Understanding competition on specific keywords and phrases specific to your business is a crucial step in building your SEO keyword strategy. Building an SEO campaign around extremely competitive keywords may just be setting your campaign up for failure. However, creating a mix of different types of keywords, level of competitiveness and phrasing is integral to seeing success.

 

Let’s take a deep dive into the importance of examining the top-ranking websites for your target keyword phrases. This step of keyword research includes analyzing competitive content, backlink profiles, and on-page optimization. In doing this, you can effectively see what the competitive landscape is doing to ‘win at search’ in order to pivot your campaign to surpass.

 

Another aspect of competitive keyword research includes identifying gaps in the industry and competitive landscape in order to find a niche for your business on search. Sometimes targeting the highest volume keyword isn’t the most effective, while targeting smaller volumes will garner better results.

 

As an example, if Wikipedia, top news outlets or dictionaries are ranking in the top 1-5 positions for a phrase, as a business, targeting those keywords is likely to prove ineffective for hitting the top results.

 

Keeping goals realistic and revenue driven is a game-changer in your overall SEO strategy. Keyword competitive analysis is an essential building block in your SEO audit and strategy in order to see lasting results.

 

Build an SEO Strategy Utilizing Long-Tail Keywords for Strategic Advantage

 

If you aren’t familiar with long-tail keywords, they are 3+ word phrases that are more specific and typically less competitive. Utilizing long-tail keywords are a game-changer for both small and large businesses. While long-tail phrases usually have lower search volumes compared to broader terms, they often convert at a higher rate and are less competitive.

 

When building your SEO keyword strategy, consider targeting specific audiences within your products and services. For example, if you sell purses, instead of targeting a keyword like “purses” you would want to target something like “brown leather purse for women”. These types of keywords attract highly relevant traffic and increase conversion rates.

 

Competition around keywords are always something to keep at the forefront of your strategy. Most often, long-tail keywords have less competition than generic keywords. Generic keywords also have a stronger likelihood of broader search results, like Wikipedia.

 

To be effective with long-tail keywords, conducting extensive keyword research to identify the intent behind the phrases is paramount for SEO ranking success. Above all else, always incorporate the use of long-tail keywords naturally into your content to bring valuable traffic to your site.

 

Optimizing On-Page SEO Factors for Better Ranking

 

On-page SEO continues to play a fundamental role in your website’s ranking in SERP’s. Optimizing these factors continuously, aligned with the competitive landscape of your industry, can improve the visibility of your site.

 

So where do you start when it comes to on-page SEO?

 

One of the most important on-page SEO elements is keyword optimization. This means that you incorporate relevant keywords into your website’s content, consistently. You will want to essentially “map” which keywords that each page targets on your site. From there, you will integrate those phrases in the content, meta content, headings and body text. Be sure to always utilize keywords naturally and keep your visitor’s intent at the forefront of your content!

 

On-page SEO is much deeper than the above and includes many more elements from the URL structure, UX design, mobile optimization, internal linking and more. All of this works together to present the best information for a searcher, and thus results in higher rankings in SERP’s.

 

Dominating in search isn’t a quick fix. It takes months to begin ranking. However, by optimizing these on-page elements you can enhance the visibility of your site, while increasing your chances of dominating keyword competition.

 

Creating High-Quality Content Creation to Stand Out

 

 

We cannot stress the importance of creating high-quality content. In the day and age of AI generated content, visitors are thirsty for real impactful content. Building a content creation strategy that is aligned with your keyword research and competition is the first step in pumping out quality, relevant content.

 

What does high quality content look like?

 

Content that answers questions, informs site visitors, engages readers and attracts your target audience are key components of quality content.

 

When building content, you want to keep relevance, authenticity, and value at the forefront of each piece of content. Utilizing the competitive keyword analysis will help guide your content strategy to create impactful content that your audience is searching for.

 

Always incorporate graphics, videos and other visual elements that engage your audience while they are reading your content. This content can help your audience digest more complex information and serves as on-page SEO content for search engine purposes.

 

Consistency also plays an important role in creating website content. If you post five new pieces of content one month and then make no new updates for 6 months, that isn’t effective. You want to focus on consistently updating your website with fresh, relevant and engaging content for your audience. Building a blog is a great way to create content and post in a consistent manner. Consistency attracts search engine crawlers and can help you dominate in search results.

 

Altogether, high-quality, consistent content creation will help your brand stand out in search results. Always create valuable, engaging, consistent and human-based content for your audience.

 

Harnessing the Power of Backlinks for SEO Success

 

Off-page SEO refers to backlinks, or other websites linking directly to your website. Backlinks play an important role in the success of any SEO campaign. Focusing on increasing backlinks consistently can help improve your website’s authority for better ranking positions in search.

 

You want to think of backlinks as a check mark or validation from another website. These backlinks indicate that your website is trustworthy, provides valuable content and is authoritative in your industry. Search engines utilize backlinks as a ranking factor, therefore, it is important to ensure a healthy backlink profile with a strategy to increase.

 

There are numerous strategic ways to increase backlinks, however, the center point of any backlink strategy is high-quality, relevant content. You never want to purchase backlinks or build them quickly. Slow and steady will win the race when it comes to this aspect of SEO. A few ways you can build backlinks include:

• • 1. Launch a PR Campaign
    2. Guest Blog Posting
    3. Skyscraper Content Method
    4. Link Outreach

One important aspect of link building is to regularly monitor your website’s backlink profile. If any backlinks are included that are spammy, or could harm the authority of your website, you always want to disavow those links. Maintaining your backlink profile will help increase your chances of ranking in search results.

 

Ready to take your SEO efforts to the next level?

 

Backstage Digital is a full service digital marketing agency that lives and breathes SEO. Our services are built with transparency and results. Schedule a free discovery call to see if we are the right fit for your business here.