It helps you determine who the best players are and what strategies they use to beat their competition.

The goal of competitive keyword analysis is to figure out what you can use as keywords that will rank on Google’s first page for your target keyword and have a high chance of converting into sales.

You can’t simply go in and create a list of keywords that work, because there are so many variables:  

• What is the average cost per click for those keywords?
• How many people search for them each month?
• How many people buy from the sites that rank well for those keywords?
• How much competition does your keyword have?

 A competitive keyword analysis is an important process for SEO Managers and content marketers alike. It will help you:  

• Understand search engine algorithms better. This will give you more insight into how search engines like Google work and how they prioritize results in their SERPs.

• Understand what users want from your brand or product page, which will help guide future content creation efforts and even design decisions.

• Find the right keywords for your website and improve your website’s SEO.

• Have a better insight into which keywords your competitors are optimizing for and what they’re ranking for.

• Learn about the competitive landscape and how you can stand out in a seemingly saturated market. It helps you gain insight into what the competition is doing better than you, how to make improvements, and understand what gaps in the market you can fill.

Even if you and your competitor have the same product, your product-market fit may be different.

For example, if you have project management software, you may be targeting a small business audience while your competitor may target a tech startup crowd, and another may target an enterprise crowd.

Competitive analysis not only tells you how your PMF differs from your competition but also gives you an idea of gaps in the market that you can fill.

For example, you could create a new landing page for a subsection of your audience that you hadn’t thought about earlier.  

Content marketing is a pretty lucrative lead acquisition source. If you can find what your smaller competitors are ranking for, then you can produce better content, and outrank them.

For example, let’s say you want to rank for the term “content marketing” in Google, and The Moz Keyword Explorer shows that there are about 1,500 searches per month for this term.

If you were only able to come up with a few hundred keyword ideas that had some amount of search volume and didn’t overlap with other keywords (i.e., no more than 10%), then it would take you years to build a site that ranked for every single one of these keywords.

But if you could find out what your smaller competitors were ranking for — say by checking out their URLs — then you could focus on building content that was better and outranking them on those terms.

The ROI calculation — if you have lower traffic than the competition, but have a lot more content, then a competitive analysis will tell you if you are targeting the wrong keywords, or if you should improve your content to rank higher.

The same goes for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns — if you are getting a lot of clicks on your ads but not much engagement from those visitors, then it might be time to improve your copy and landing pages.

Competitive analysis can also help you in your content marketing efforts.

If other companies are writing about the same topic as yours, but with great results, then it might be worth trying some of their tactics to reach your target audience faster.

It is a process that helps you determine how well your website is performing in the market.

This type of analysis determines where your business stands in relation to your competition, and how much you can improve upon it.

While doing competitive analysis — do not go just by traffic volume. Because search intent matters. Your competition could have millions of pageviews, but if they are to the wrong keywords, then conversion may be way lower. So, quality > quantity.

How to identify a competitive keyword?

A competitive analysis will help you determine which keywords are most important to your business and which ones should be prioritized in your SEO efforts.

It can also help you identify any gaps where your competitors are outranking you on those terms.

Here’s how to find keywords:

• Create a list of relevant keywords by using keyword tools like Wordtracker, Google Trends or KeywordTool.io.
• Use the list of keywords to build a list of related terms (i.e., synonyms).
• Find high-volume, low-volume and ultra-competitive keywords for each term on your list.

• Search for similar terms that might appear on top of the SERPs (search engine results pages) based on volume and competitiveness.
• Analyse the results of these searches with the SEMRush Keyword Difficulty Tool (this tool will give you an idea of how difficult it is to rank for each term).

How to run a good competitive keyword analysis?

Here are some tips:

Identify your target keywords

A list of keywords or phrases (or “keywords” and/or “phrases” or whatever you want to call them) that you want to rank for in search engines.

Analyse your keywords

Once you have a list of relevant keywords, it’s time to conduct an actual analysis of each one by running Google Analytics reports and other tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. You should look at several metrics across all of your pages, including traffic sources, organic search queries, and mobile searches (if applicable).

Analyze the top 10 results for each keyword. Collect a list of websites that rank for those keywords, along with their page titles. This will be useful later when you’re looking at keyword difficulty scores.

Look at how much traffic each page gets and make a list of those pages that are getting good traffic but aren’t getting any results.

Decide what’s important to you

Once you’ve identified the most important keywords, look at their difficulty level (how many people search for them each month), cost per click (how much it costs per click), ad position (where it appears on the page), and organic traffic (how many visitors they drive each month).

Bank on the past

Gather AdWords data from previous campaigns so you can see which keywords worked best for each campaign.

Go deep into your competitors’ mindset

Accumulate domain knowledge about each website so you know what kind of content they publish and how relevant it is for your business.

It is clear that conducting a competitive analysis of keywords is a beneficial way to understand the competition within your market.

By understanding what keywords your competitors are targeting, you can better adjust your own SEO strategy.

Additionally, by analysing the search volume and difficulty of various keywords, you can identify which ones are more likely to result in conversions.

Ultimately, conducting a competitive analysis of keywords can help you better understand your competition and make strategic decisions to improve your chances of ranking in search engines.

The post Why run competitive analysis of keywords? appeared first on MintTwist.

Back then, search engine optimization was mostly about identifying those popular search queries and repeating them throughout your web pages for Google to be able to match them when that query is searched.

Obviously, this method resulted in two main problems:

• It ignored the context (of the query and in the document) so searchers were often served irrelevant results
• It offered too many opportunities to manipulate the relevancy signal by adding searchable queries within an irrelevant document

Google understood both of those weaknesses of that old-school method, so they worked hard to change the algorithm at its core, i.e. to teach the machine to understand queries like humans do.

Two most important query processing algorithms: Hummingbird and BERT

There must have been a lot of behind-the-scenes updates, tweaks and experiments but the two Google chose to announce and explain were Hummingbird and BERT.

Hummingbird

Google Hummingbird was announced back in 2013 and few SEOs grasped its significance back then, because the visible impact on search rankings was minimal.

Yet, it was more than a tweak to the algorithm.

Search Engine Land compares it to changing the car engine of an old car.

Instead of targeting one specific signal (links, content, etc.), Google announced changing the way they treated search queries, i.e. instead of taking a search query verbatim (word by word), Google was trying to take a query in the context.

This is where we learned that Google was using “things” (i.e. entities) to better understand the context and match to a more relevant document. 

From now on, Google was using “things instead of strings”, instead of using “keyword strings”, the algorithm was trying to identify concepts and entities within a query to better understand its meaning.In fact, Google’s massive knowledge graph, which had been introduced the previous year, was becoming more important with Hummingbird. ‘Things, not strings,’ is how Google describes the concept. And Google is expanding on this idea, making the company more of an answer engine than a search engine

BERT

BERT was a second big change to Google’s query processing algorithm. It was announced 6 years after Hummingbird, in 2019.

BERT is primarily Google’s effort to understand longer, more conversational queries.

To better understand BERT, watch this quick video from Google:

​​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lR8Fzays4I

In it Google explains the struggles the machine is facing when it is trying to understand a simple query. For example, if a recipe instruction was to mix the batter with the banana, you wouldn’t naturally think to use the banana as a mixing device:

But what’s obvious to humans isn’t really easy to understand to a machine. BERT is the combination of machine-learning algorithms helping Google understand human language in order to return relevant results.

Simply put, BERT is Google’s query processing algorithm helping Google understand and process queries like human beings would.

Conversational Search as a Whole

With both of those updates, Google could now respond in a more conversational way when it came to searches. In other words, it could search for what best answered a question, instead of just focusing on keywords. 

As mobile was becoming more and more important, people were searching more by literally asking questions and speaking to their phones. So Google started answering those questions in a more natural way.

Search for things like “Tell me about Impressionist artists’ and get a plethora of information at your fingertips, especially if you are making the search on a mobile phone.

So what does this mean for your SEO strategy?

On a higher level, this means one important thing: There’s no need to stress about exact-match keywords any more and that is true for all major tasks:

• Brand naming
• Content
• Backlinks

Brand naming: Don’t invest into keywords

The days when keyword-focused domains gave you a huge organic competitive advantage are not so distant: People are ready to invest huge money into a domain name just because it contains its target keyword.

Focus on branding. Think how easy that domain might be to remember and type into the address bar. Consider if it’s unique and original enough. Namify can help you find a cool domain name for as low as $2, and that domain name is sure to trigger niche associations for Google and your customers to easily classify you as a brand:

Additionally, when building your website, make sure to follow the recent performance and rendering standards.

Content optimisation: explore “things” behind the “strings”

While keyword research is still important for you to understand searching patterns and what people tend to struggle with, the actual optimization process is a bit different these days:

• No need to repeat the same keyword lots of times within your content
• Focus on depth and diversity of your content because that’s what Google will be looking at

Text Optimizer lets you explore “things” behind query strings allowing you to discover concepts and entities that make your page match user intent and better cover the topic:

Text Optimizer also shows popular questions on any topic.

Surveying your audience and social media following is another way to uncover important questions to address in your content.

Setting up a FAQ section on your site to cover niche questions is a good idea. You can also set up a course to address questions in more detail there and attract leads. There are quite a few platforms allowing you to create a course easily.It is also important to create diverse content, including visualizations, videos and even slideshows. Given how diverse Google’s SERPs are, you need to produce different formats of content to ensure your brand’s organic search visibility.

Backlinks: Avoid exact-match anchor text

ow that Google has a much deeper understanding of a natural language and context, forcing exact-match text into your link building strategy can do more harm than good (easier for Google to label you as a backlink spammer).

SE Ranking backlink tool is a great way to analyze your site’s backlink profile and identify if it is natural and diverse enough.

When planning your outreach or linkable assets, anchor text should no longer be part of your strategy.

If you have a website, and want to attract traffic to it and you are interested in performance based SEO, you need to focus on answering important questions, and not simply including keywords that people can search for. This makes web quality more important than ever. The more your website has quality information, and answers to questions that people may be interested in, the better it is for you.

Additionally, coming up with alternative traffic sources (which wouldn’t rely on Google) is still a great idea. Start a newsletter or create a social media strategy – both of these tactics will help you make the most of your organic traffic by giving you ways to bring those visitors back to your site.

Overall, Google’s query processing algorithms make low-quality SEO efforts even less effective and time-wasting. Creating high-quality content is what works, in the long run, regardless of how Google really interprets those search queries.

The post Google’s query processing algorithms and what they mean for your SEO strategy appeared first on MintTwist.