How to Perform a Competitive Keyword Analysis

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

505 ratings

University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

505 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 now that we've discussed why competitive analysis of key words is

important lets discuss how to perform that analysis in more detail.

The goal is to identify keywords that align with your website in

business schools.

And yet have enough search volume to bring traffic to your site.

We'll also use an example that demonstrates

how to use Google Analytics and other tools to help in your analysis.

Next we will analyze the spreadsheet of keywords we just created,

to select some terms we feel best match user intent.

We want to make sure the keywords we choose align with our site and

business goals.

We also want to locate keywords that have decent volume.

This way, we can be assured that we will receive traffic for these terms.

Let's get started.

This is the completed tab for keywords related to electronic textbooks.

Once I have keywords properly organized,

I start highlighting terms that I think would provide qualified traffic.

As you can see in this example, I've highlighted the keywords I thought

would best match our keyword goals for the site.

I chose these based on specificity.

For example, digital textbooks has a lot of volume, but

that keyword isn't as specific as a keyword like etextbook rental.

The keyword digital text books, is more difficult for us to gauge intent.

The consumer will be looking to buy, rent, or

just get an information on digital textbooks.

So we want to look at terms which include rental in them.

This way we know we are targeting the right phrases.

I selected e-texbook rental because it is more specific

to the intent we are looking for.

Then I chose related variations, like plural versions.

Now keep in mind that we don't need to optimize for

the plural and non-plural versions of these keywords.

If the page contains these keywords it'll naturally rank for

both plural and non-plural versions.

However, I like to highlight all variations.

This way I can gauge the monthly search volume for

a sections of keywords like this.

For example, looking at this, we can see that the plural form of e-books and

electronic textbook performs better than digital textbook rental related keywords.

I then moved on to highlighting additional electronic, digital, and

e-book rental terms.

I avoided the cheap terms for right now.

That's because those terms are a qualifier that I can add on later

to get more specific with my keyword selection and targeting.

You would then repeat this process for each keyword bucket you created.

Another thing I like to do is check how well

an audience might respond to a keyword.

If you have access to analytics data and

the webmaster has enabled tracking of searches performed within the site,

you can use this feature to gain additional insight into consumer intent.

The search analytics function allows you to gain

insight into what consumers are searching for within your own site.

In addition, analytics will provide useful engagement data for these queries.

In this example, I looked at a book rental website in analytics and

found that some of the top search volume was around the term e-book.

This shows clear usage of the term e-book.

And that the idea of electronic textbooks is obviously appealing to this audience.

This shows that phrases such as e-textbook rental,

should perform really well due to their close relation.

If you have access to Google Webmaster Tools for

this site, you may also find some information under search analytics.

This area show terms of your site showed up for in search.

In this case however the site is receiving a lot of long tail queries.

This isn't helpful towards the competitive analysis but

is a great area to check for other sites.

This example shows the impact of long tail queries we were discussing earlier

and how long tail queries will make up the majority of searches and

traffic to your site.

You can also view additional data on keyword information sites.

This example is from a site called spyfu.com.

Sites like this are primarily made for SEM users in mind.

But they do include some organic data that can come in handy for our research.

This example shows what SpyFu believes to be top organic searches for

a particular site.

You can enter your own website or competitor's websites to acquire data.

Other similar tool are SEMRush and KeywordSpy.com.

This particular example didn't provide us many additional insights, but

I wanted to show you the tool as this can occasionally be helpful

when analyzing keywords and competition.

You should now be able to select key words with good SEO potential

from your larger list of key words.

You should understand how potential key words might align with consumer intent

by analyzing data in Google Analytics, Google search console, or

web master tools and other key word sites.

That completes the video portion of this lesson.

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