competitive keyword research for seo

Leap Frog your competitors’ SEO strategies

Dennis Hart, President Analytics SEO LLC@analyticsseo www.analyticsseo.com

Big Marketing Data™ &Software for Professional Marketers

5 Tips


And overtake them on the SERPs that matter most

Leap Frog your competitor’s SEO strategies

1. Competitive LandscapeFind your “ONLINE Competitors”

2. Competitive AuditCompare key metrics to understand your competitor’s strategy

3. Competitive RankingsFind Your Keyword Competition

4. Universal SearchFind the opportunities

5. Find Competitive Linking OpportunitiesTarget high quality comp. links

1. Competitive Landscape

Marketplace Potential

Who are your TRUE ONLINE Competitors

1. Ask your client or internal stakeholderTerrestrial distortion- local competitors may

be the least of your worries ONLINE2. Check the “first page” for a few keywords

Market distortion- may identify competitors that are way to big or way too small

3. Use various available toolsUsing a bucket of keywords you can assess

your actual online “marketplace”

Define your Competitors


Find Your TRUE ONLINE Competitors1. Search for your top

keywords and keep track of which websites are ranking better or worse than you are.

2. The Sites that are ranking better are your targets. Those below you may be targeting you.

3. Based on the available volume of searches for those keywords, you can calculate your Marketplace Potential.



You could also make use of Big Data to find lots and lots of overlapping keywords across lots and lots of domains

But that has its challenges…


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Insights Big Data and Graph Databases can help with….

1. How big is your market?• How many competing sites?• How many organic ranking keywords?• What is the market search volume (add

SEMRush, Adwords)?• Is the market growing or declining? Is it

seasonal?• Which keywords are trending up/down, which

are seasonal?

2. Who you are really competing with… Examples:

• MeetingZone.com vs Match.com• Snowandrock.com

^ There are a number of studies that give you CTR% estimates by ranking position. We use anonymized data from GWT.

Graph Databases for SERP data

It’s like Venn Diagrams on Steroids!

2. Competitive Audit

Competitive Audit

Once you understand your TRUE online competitors,you’ll need to assess the strengths and weakness across various metrics.

You can pick up clues as to what your competitors are doing and how you may be able to overtake them.


Lots of Readily Available Site Metrics

What Why How

Site Maps They follow best practices Check manually, various tools

Robots.txt They are directing the SEs Check manually, various tools

Page Load Speed Relatively new indicator Pingdom, Google Page Speed Insights

Custom 404 They care about overall user experience

Check manually, 404checker

Domain Age How long have they been in the market?

Webconfs.com (multi), manually

Alexa Rank Kinda old, but not a bad indicator of site overall

Alexa

Lots of Readily Available Link Metrics

What Why How

Inbound Links Overall popularity Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz, ASEO

Referring Domains Overall diversity Majestic, ASEO

Referring IP’s More specific diversity metric

Majestic, ASEO

Referring Subnets Most specific diversity metric

Majestic, ASEO

Deep Link Ratio Did they buy a bunch of links?

Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz, ASEO

Competitive Audit

3. Competitive Rankings

Overlapping Keywords = Opportunity

SpyFu

Analytics SEO

1. Find your

2. Compare your competitors’ ranking against your own rankings

keyword competition

Rankings Across Competitors

Multi-sort to see the Keywords your competitors are ranking better for than you

Competitor 1 ranking 1-10 AND Competitor 2 ranking 1-50 AND Competitor 3 ranking 1-50 AND “Your Site” ranking >10

You CAN overtake them!

4. Universal Search

Typical Scenario

Search is no longer just about those 10 blue links.

Step 1- Set up “Places” (Google+ Business Page)

Step 2- Add Categories, Descriptions, Images, etc.

Step 3- Hope you’ve done it right and check back later.

OR…Local, Images, Video, Shopping, etc.

Finding the best opportunities

Find the keywords that ALREADY generate Universal Search results- THEN Optimize

Local, Images, Video, Shopping, etc.

5. Competitive Link Analysis

Competitive Link Analysis

Even with equal amount of links, not all links are equal.

Competitive Link Analysis

Target the competitor’s links with the highest: Trust Flow, Citation Flow, (Majestic) Domain Authority, Page Authority (Moz) Domain Rank (ahrefs)


When empowered with this data you’ll be ready to overtake your competitors by:• Implementing technical best

practices• Writing better content• Sharing in more relevant

neighborhoods