Let’s break Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis into two halves.
Keyword research! That’s something you will come across often when you start your career in Digital Marketing or just buy and develop a Website for your own business. Keyword research can be called the core, when it comes to either uploading information or any type of data on the Internet, or just looking for them.
Keyword. What exactly does it mean in the Internet world?
Keyword is a word or a phrase that help search engines to identify, categorize and find data from the Internet when you search for information using search engines. Keywords play a huge role in Search Engine Optimization, as they act as identification markers for contents on the Internet. So, without keywords, Internet users will be fed with irrelevant content when they search using search engines.
How to do a Keyword Research?
Let’s dig in further into this topic! I’m listing out the points below for better understanding
- Identify Core keywords based on the concept or theme of your website. For instance, Shoes, accessories and so on if it is an Online clothing store.
- Core keywords should also be derived from finding out the highest number of search volumes that are made relevant to the business or service.
- Once these core keywords are finalized, add variations (products and services) and modifiers (add-ons) to those core keywords along with location, to form a long-tailed keyword.
- For instance, Best sport shoes in Dubai, top automatic watches in India and so on. Here, Shoes and watches remain the same. Best and top act as modifiers and sport and automatic act as variations.
- To rank in the first few pages of the SERP (Search engine result page) longtail keywords are essential. It is easier to optimize contents and to rank a longtail keyword than a short tailed one, as the search volume for longtail keyword is low compared to the short tailed. Some of the top websites usually use longtail keywords.
There are as many tools that are needed to perform a good research. These tools help you to identify the keyword with high/low search volume, and competition. They also provide us information on what keyword our competitors are targeting at. Some of these tools are,
- Google trends
- Keyword planner (ads.google)
- Uber suggest
- LSI Graph
- Answer the public
- Keywordtool.io, and so on.
Competitor Analysis
As I previously stated about using these above tools to find out what our competitors are targeting on, just like Keyword research, Competitor analysis is also about understanding and learning our competitors’ behavior, adapting and optimizing our contents accordingly to stay on top of SERP.
Look for similar content as yours in the Internet. Write down your competitors and the keywords they are targeting for. Use Keyword-planner to understand your competitor’s targets. Write down the volume for your competitors’ keywords so you can target them with better, authentic and unique content. Understand your audience provide content based on their expectations.
Tools like ahrefs, semrush can also help you run audits on your competitors’ websites to find their usage and targets. These information can help you alter and optimize contents on your site according to the need.
Effective keyword research and competitor analysis will help you bring out the best of your website and it’s contents and to rank your web pages, blogs and galleries in SERP. Following the right SEO strategies will benefit your website on a longer run, preventing heavy expenses for promotion/marketing.
Stay tuned for more insights on SEO and other Digital marketing contents..