Keyword Analysis – Understanding Your Competition

Understand Your Competition

The reason why Search Engine Optimisation, works so well, is that many websites are either badly optimised, or not optimised at all. Ranking near the top on Search Engines is the key to bringing free, targeted traffic to your website, and Search Engine Optimisation will help to take your website above your competition, and towards that the 1 position. To get that number 1 position, you need to understand your competition.

Keyword Analysis

Keyword Analysis is the most important part to understanding your competition. You need to choose the best keywords for your website in order for it to compete with your competition. I believe the best way to do this is to look at your home page, read the content and then ask yourself – What 3 keywords best describes this page, or what 3 word phrase would I like this page to appear number 1 in Google for.

The reason for using 3 keywords is to produce a ‘long-tailed’ keyword phrase that is more specific to your business. You don’t want your keywords to be so specific that Google drags up every website from the bottom of the ocean, and you don’t want it so specific that it doesn’t even return a single listing, not even yours!

Leave out all little words and only concentrate on strong, powerful sounding words. If your business is location specific, then include the location as one of the words. An example could be this. If your business deals with property rentals, and you are based in Spain, then your keyword phrase could be ‘property rentals Spain’.

If your business is important to you, then I’m sure you’ll be happy to put aside 30 minutes while you do the following. You will be performing your own keyword analysis, which by the end, you should have a good understanding of your competition and what you need to do to beat them.

Hands-On Approach to Keyword Analysis

Get yourself a pad and pencil and type your keywords in Google. You want to write down a few things.

• Step 1 – You want to record the keywords used.
• Step 2 – You also want to write down the number of pages returned (look at this as your competition). This is the ‘Results 1-10 of about some big number‘ in the top-right corner. The higher the number, the harder it is going to be to rank well. If this number is less than 1 million, then these keywords may be worth considering.
• Step 3 – Look to see if there are any sponsored links at the top and the right-hand side. Jot this number down too. If the page is full of them, then this says there are many businesses willing to pay money to Google for the keywords you are using. This means your keywords are competitive and will be harder to rank well for. Try to find keywords with just a few sponsored links.
• Step 4 – Have a quick scan of the 10 results on the first page. The Titles and the Description. Do they all look like they’re in direct competition with you, or has Google thrown in a couple of websites not directly related? Any keywords Google finds, it makes bold. Is your page awash with bold blue keywords? Does it look like the blue screen of death? If so, these words are probably too competitive to use.

Look at the descriptions and like a thesaurus find yourself a different combination of words to use that still describe your business and repeat steps 1-4. By doing this 10, 20, 30 times you will get a good feel of what your potential visitors see when they search Google. You will also have done more SEO work for your business in the half an hour spent, than most of your competition have done in the lifetime of theirs.

SEO Expert Tip

Try to find keyword phrases that produce one or two websites strangely unrelated to your main business on the first page which only shows one or two of your your keywords bold in the title, not all three.