Develop a Plan to Compete

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

532 ratings

University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

532 ratings

Course 3 of 6 in the Specialization Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Learn the ins and outs of optimizing a website, from conducting an initial audit to presenting your findings and recommendations. Hands-on activities include learning how to select and apply appropriate keywords throughout a website, incorporating keyword research in a content marketing strategy, and optimizing a site for local search. You will also learn strategies for setting goals and client/stakeholder expectations, building effective analytics and reports, and communicating SEO improvements.

From the lesson

Introduction

Welcome to week 1! As you may remember from Module 4 within the last course, Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals, keywords are an extremely important tool for helping your customers find you in an often crowded field. Effective use of keywords on your optimized website can result in free targeted traffic to your site, helping you to reach your business goals. In this module, you will use the keyword research you conducted in the last course and you will learn a process for selecting the best keywords to optimize your website in search results. We will look at concepts like relevancy to the site, keyword intent, how competitive the keyword is in organic search, and how well that term might convert once it receives traffic. We’ll also discuss how to identify and evaluate competitors, how to map keywords to pages, and how to create a keyword map for your clients and your own site. There is a lot to discuss in our first module, so if you are taking this course without learning the materials of module 4 within the SEO Fundamentals course, I highly recommend you complete that module before diving into this one. So, let’s get started learning how to apply keyword research!

Applying Keyword Research Introduction0:48

Why do a Competitive Analysis?2:44

How to Perform a Competitive Keyword Analysis5:48

Analyzing Your Competition6:59

Develop a Plan to Compete10:18

Competing With Page Level Information4:10

Dealing with Larger Sites4:09

Mapping Keywords to Pages3:40

Questions to Ask3:52

Keyword Mapping Processes4:32

Creating a Keyword Map for Clients4:12

Meet the Instructors

Rebekah May
SEO Manager & Lead SEO Instructor, Lead Qual
UC Davis Division of Continuing and Professional Education

Hello again.

In the last lesson, we learned how to identify our competitors.

But just knowing who they are is not enough

if we are going to reach our business goals.

In this lesson, we'll learn how to analyze and even rank our competition

using keyword analysis, so we have a good idea of who we can beat and who we can't.

We'll also delve into how to set reasonable expectations and

develop a plan for placing ourselves in the best possible competitive position.

Now that we've identified our competitors,

our next step is to evaluate our competition.

This will help us determine which competitors should be the easiest to beat,

which ones we should be the most concerned with, and

what we can do to compete well in search.

In the last lesson,

I showed you how to obtain data regarding your top competitors.

This is an example of what the spreadsheet and data looks like

once I repeated this process for each of the key words I am researching.

Let's take a moment to analyze these results.

We can see Google's semantic algorithm at work here.

For example, you can see that the first keyword group for e-textbook rental,

and the second group for electronic textbook rental are almost the same.

When you pay closer attention, you will see that none of the title tags for

the sites under electronic textbook rental actually use the word electronic.

So we can see that there is a very strong relationship between E and

electronic that Google is recognizing in this case.

This is important to keep in mind when deciding final keywords to target

as it may be unnecessary to target both in some cases.

In the case of the third result,

only two of the results contain the keyword digital in the title tag.

The other keywords all target online as their keyword.

So like above, this is a combination of semantic relevance and

other SEO factors that indicate digital textbooks is relevant to the site.

However, note that the third result for

digital textbook rental isn't even a site devoted to textbooks.

This is a site for

random news stories that just happen to publish one about textbook rental.

And the site has the lowest page authority and linking domains.

However, digital textbooks is placed first in the title tag, and

it is also part of the URL.

The content on the page also utilizes the term.

This can give you an idea of an important of proper keyword selection and usage.

Keep in mind that because the site is not dedicated to text book rentals,

they aren't what many clients would consider a direct competitor.

However, the site is an organic competitor, and it's important to outrank

this page because the page contains a list of places to rent text books.

And this may drive the audience to your competition.

Companies you work with will often tell you who their competition is, but

they often do not take organic competition like this into account.

So its important to be aware of the results, and not discount them

just because it wasn't named by your client or considered direct competition.

Next, I like to highlight sites that appear for all of these terms.

For example, Amazon tends to rank in the first three results for

all of my keywords.

Highlighting competitors like this allows me to see which keywords have the lowest

competition, as well as get a good idea of my competition across the board.

Since a site should focus on multiple keywords, it's a good idea to perform

an in-depth competitive analysis of a variety of keywords.

This helps us see how hard it is to compete overall.

In this case, my biggest competitors are Amazon, which I

highlighted dark red because it appears in the first position multiple times.

This means it is the most difficult of the sites to compete with.

The next is Chegg, which appears in the second or third result most frequently.

So it is the next level competitor I need to watch out for.

I chose a shade down from the dark red.

CourseSmart is the third competitor which appears in the third or

fourth result most frequently, and is the next main competitor to look out for.

Barnes & Noble as well as the Digital Reader site

take up the top five 50% of the time.

So while those will be important to get to at some point,

my main focus right now is on the three I selected.

Amazon is going to be hard to beat.

They have a very strong brand, authoritative domain, and

two pages dedicated to textbook rentals that both rank well.

That doesn't mean you won't beat them.

It just means that getting your relevance and trust high enough to overcome

the domain authority of a giant like Amazon will take some time and effort.

It looks like CourseSmart, when we look at the URLs in our ranking,

is their homepage which contains very little content.

So they are ranking mainly on brand and site authority for that term.

Chegg has built a page dedicated to e-textbooks,

which while less authority, has some good content that's helping them rank.

You'll notice that Chegg also has less authority than Barnes and

Noble which ranks under Chegg in the top result.

But the page that is ranking for Barnes and Noble, has very little content.

This is because Barnes and Noble has a lot of authority, but

is not entirely devoted to textbooks like Chegg is.

So Barnes and Noble has a more difficult time getting a better ranking.

Based on this analysis, ranking on the first page looks doable.

These top five are somewhat promising, but the top three are the hardest to beat.

And there is no guarantees that we can outrank those sites,

at least not until we have built up good authority and history.

Ranking here won't be easy, as this is highly competitive.

But if you or your client have a decent marketing budget to write good content,

and perform outreach for

good links, you stand a decent chance of ranking on here over time.

It's important to set proper expectations.

Even getting on the first page will require a lot of effort, but

it is possible.

Now the next thing I like to do is repeat this process for

other sets of keywords that I find to be high value.

In this case, I also liked online textbook rental related keywords,

so I'll go do those next.

This is the example I did for the term online textbook rental.

When I compare these results, I can see that there are a lot more sites

which are consistently appearing in the top 5 results.

We can see some familiar results here compared to the last batch we looked at.

We can tell that Chegg and

CourseSmart are really strong in this space and they're getting top rankings for

a variety of targeted words in both of the categories I looked at.

Amazon doesn't rank as well with this query as they did with the last, but

they are still a top contender.

With this analysis, we can see that there are some sites that appear here

who did not appear in the sites we looked at under electronic related keywords.

Next, we want to compare all of these keywords

to get a really good idea of who our biggest competitors are across the board.

I repeated my analysis of competitors for general textbook related keywords and

for keywords related to long tail queries and questions.

I then went through each sheet I created and

placed each competitor in a new column under their respective keyword category.

Barnes and Noble wasn't very high on the competitiveness scale, but

they have brand recognition.

So I included them at the bottom of the two keyword lists

that they showed up most frequently on.

The next step is to organize this a little better.

So I color coded this to see competitors from strongest to weakest.

The dark green is Chegg who is the most competitive,

while each code down in level of competitiveness from there.

I chose the space on where the site showed up most frequently, and

the number of keywords the site appear on.

For example, Chegg usually showed in the top five results, for

every keyword I selected.

Amazon showed as frequently as BookRenter, but ranked more highly,

when it did show up.

After this, I found my top competition in order of

the most to least competitive is Chegg, Amazon,

Bookrenter, Valore, Textbook Rentals,

Coursesmart, Barnes and Noble, and Bigwords.

You should now have a good understanding of how to determine

who your main competitors are for a variety of top keywords.

You should now know how to analyze that information

to determine who your top competition is overall.

Next, we will analyze our top competitors so we can see what they

are doing well SEO-wise, areas they are falling down on, and

how to turn this into an opportunity for our site to rank well.

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