{"id":2050,"date":"2011-06-06T12:39:45","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T09:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/?p=2050"},"modified":"2011-06-06T12:39:45","modified_gmt":"2011-06-06T09:39:45","slug":"combine-keyword-research-competitor-analysis-to-improve-your-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/combine-keyword-research-competitor-analysis-to-improve-your-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Combine Keyword Research & Competitor Analysis to improve your SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"keyword-research-competitor-analysis\"Most SEO Professionals and Online Marketers would agree that the creation of high quality content & services is the basic ingredient<\/strong> for a successful SEO & Online Marketing campaign. Still though just by providing great content & services and by optimizing<\/strong> your pages for the targeted keywords, it does not automatically lead to the increase of the search engine traffic.<\/p>\n

And when the On-page optimization fails to deliver the expected results, most people invest time and effort on Link Building<\/a> campaigns, they fine-tune their internal linking architecture<\/a>, they improve their website structure<\/a>, they correct technical problems<\/a> on their sites and they try several other techniques<\/a> to improve their rankings. And then again in many cases they fail<\/strong> to achieve the expected results. So what goes wrong? Do they miss something that could help them rank first on Search Engine Results or do they simply focus on the wrong keywords?<\/p>\n

The answer is quite straight forward; if the competition<\/strong> is not evaluated properly you will blow off your SEO campaign and you will waste your valuable resources while trying to achieve the wrong goals<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Focus on the right Goals<\/h2>\n

Either you are a webmaster or an SEO professional your target should be to increase your online sales<\/strong> or achieve your predefined goals<\/strong> (increase members\/subscribers, increase conversion rates etc). This can be achieved by improving your website\u2019s structure, your design<\/a>, your texts and your call to actions<\/a>, by reducing the conversion barriers and of course by driving high targeted traffic<\/strong> to your website. In this article we will focus on the last part.<\/p>\n

Generic vs Targeted Keywords<\/h2>\n

As we have thoroughly discussed in the past, a successful SEO campaign should focus both on Generic<\/strong> and on Targeted terms<\/strong>. Targeted terms generally are long-tailed queries that are less popular and competitive but drive more targeted traffic to the websites (example: \u201cluxury hotel in santorini\u201d). On the other hand, generic terms are usually shorter queries that are really popular and competitive but they drive less targeted traffic (example: \u201chotel\u201d).
\n\"keyword-ppl\"
\nOne of the most common mistakes<\/strong> that webmasters make is that they try to rank mainly for generic popular terms that are supposed to increase significantly their traffic. Thus they spend all of their resources trying to rank first for their generic \u201ctrophy\u201d keywords without evaluating the competition<\/strong>. Of course due to the intensity of the competition they don\u2019t manage to rank anywhere near the first page and thus they don\u2019t get any search engine traffic. Clearly in these cases, the decisions that were made during the Keyword Research and Keyword Selection processes were not correct and this can be the result of a sloppy Competitor Analysis<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Using Keyword Research & Competitor Analysis techniques<\/h2>\n

Keyword Research<\/h4>\n

As Dimitris Zotos has explained in the article \u201cKeyword Research: The core of your SEO Strategy<\/a>\u201d before starting the Keyword Research you should take into account the nature<\/strong> of your product\/service, your target audience<\/strong> and the keywords<\/strong> that your visitors are likely to type in order to find your product. You should be looking for both generic and targeted terms that are popular to the users and relevant to your website\u2019s content. There are several Keyword Research tools that you can use in order to build your Keyword List. Even though this can also be done manually, it is highly recommended <\/strong>to use a reliable tool that will also provide you with several useful statistics<\/strong> and metrics for each keyword. These metrics will become really handy during Keyword Selection. Below we present a screenshot from a report that was generated by our Keyword Research<\/a> tool.<\/p>\n

\n\"keyword-research\"<\/a>\n<\/div>\n

As you can see above, after typing in the Keyword Research<\/a> tool the seed term \u201chotel\u201d, we receive a list of keywords that are related to the initial term along with several useful statistics such as the Relevance<\/strong>, the Query Popularity<\/strong> (How popular is the term), the estimated Search Results<\/strong> and graphs<\/strong> that show us how much the Search Volume of the keyword changed over time.<\/p>\n

By creating many reports for several different \u201cseed terms\u201d we can build a detailed Keyword List that contains most of the important popular terms. Afterwards, by using the statistics<\/strong> that are provided in the list and by evaluating<\/strong> each term, we can select the most popular keywords that describe better our product\/service and we eliminate the ones that have low Query Popularity and very few Search Results.<\/p>\n

The above is a quite common SEO practice that most people use before<\/strong> optimizing their websites. Nevertheless this practice does not<\/strong> provide us with any information about how possible<\/strong> it is to achieve high rankings for those terms. In other words just by gathering the list of keywords, we get no idea of how difficult<\/strong> it is to rank for the terms. Thus before we finalize the Keyword List and before we start optimizing our texts for those terms, we need to screen the list and focus on the keywords for which we are likely to achieve high rankings.<\/p>\n

Keyword Selection & Keyword Screening<\/h4>\n

As we saw in the article \u201cAnalyzing Search Engine Results: The fine art of SEO<\/a>\u201d, in order to determine if it is possible to achieve good rankings for a given term, we need to Analyze the Competition<\/strong> and compare directly our website pages with the ones that rank high on SERPs. We will be focusing more on factors that have to do with the Authority<\/strong> and the Strength<\/strong> of our competitors and we will care less for the on-page optimization, since this is something that we can easily copy on our website.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately even if the Competitor Analysis technique is very effective<\/strong>, it is also extremely time consuming<\/strong>. Moreover despite the fact that we can automate the analysis by using the SERP Analysis<\/a> tool, we still need to create hundreds of reports and evaluate every single of them.<\/p>\n

To speed up this process we will use a different technique called Keyword Screening<\/strong> that will give us a clue of how difficult it is for a given page<\/strong> to rank on the first page of search engine results for a particular keyword. In order to achieve this we will use the Keyword Difficulty<\/a> tool to screen<\/strong> our Keyword List and evaluate the competitiveness of each term.<\/p>\n

Here is an example of how the Keyword Difficulty<\/a> tool works. Suppose that you have completed your Keyword Research and that you have came up with the following keyword list:<\/p>\n