Analyzing Your Competition

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From the course by University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

491 оценки

University of California, Davis

Optimizing a Website for Search

491 оценки

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
LeadQual & UC Davis Extension

Welcome back.

Now that you've selected potential keywords and done some preliminary

analysis, let's do a deeper analysis to learn more about the organic landscape.

In this lesson you'll learn how to determine

whether your chosen keywords will rank well for particular query.

We'll also discuss some useful tools that you can use

to identify your online competition and analyze the data we've collected.

Let's take a look at these important concepts.

Now that we'll selected potential key words.

Let's perform a competitive analysis to see what the organic landscape

looks like for our chosen keywords.

This will help us determine whether or not we can rank well for our particular query.

This will also help us identify who our online competition is.

The first thing I like to do is open another Excel file.

And make tabs for the main keyword themes I am going to be analyzing.

In this case,

I am going to be analyzing electronic textbook rental related keywords.

And online textbook rental related keywords.

I chose these two keyword themes because these provided keywords

which not only had volume but were very specific to my business.

I feel like online and

electronic keywords outperformed digital keywords as far as volume is concerned.

However since I still want to get a look at how competitive the digital keywords

may be in search, I am going to note this down as well.

Next, I will take a selection of my highlighted keywords and

look at who is ranking in the top results.

I'll then enter this information directly into Excel.

You can do this by typing keywords directly into Google, but note,

you may run the risk of getting local and personalized results.

I would make sure you turn off personalization

by ensuring you are not signed in to Google products.

To speed up the process, I prefer to use Moz's keyword difficulty tool,

which allows me to download a list of top competitors

rather than entering them into my Excel file manually.

This feature of Moz does require a paid subscription or a free trial and

is not necessary to the process.

You can follow these same steps without the tool by using Google directly.

Note that Moz will also provide you with a keyword difficulty score.

But I tend to ignored this as the score is only based on the domain authority and

incoming links of competing sites.

In order to fully assess why a site is ranking highly,

we will be looking at more than just these metrics.

What I'll do next is select keywords from my list

that will give me a good sense of competition.

Right now I am sticking to a theme of keywords.

In this case electronic and digital related key words.

I don't need to look at both plural and non-plural so

I'll just stick with the keywords that fit best.

In this case it's etext book rental, electronic textbook rental,

digital textbook rental, and ebook textbook rental.

Next, I went to Moz's keyword difficulty tool and

typed in the keywords I just chose.

You can see these keywords at the bottom with a difficulty score and

search volume to the right of the keyword.

Remember we are ignoring the difficulty score.

As we will be analyzing more factors than this.

Note that the volume you see here might be different than your keyword

research volume.

Moz pulls this from a different tool called grepwords.

Just ignore this for now as its not relevant to our analysis.

To get more detailed information such as who is ranking in the top five positions,

click on Vew under SERP analysis reports.

After clicking on the SERP analysis report for

the keyword e-textbook rental, I was brought to this page.

Each SERP analysis report will contain a snapshot of who is ranking where for

that specific search term.

In addition to the rank, Moz will also provide other authority and

trust related metrics that they keep track of.

You can still get the Backlink count and authority data presented here for

free by going to opensiteexplorer.org This will

require an extra step in your process, and you will also have to have an account

with a regular non-paid subscription to be able to run more than 3 reports a day.

Note that Moz's Backlink tool doesn't have

the most accurate estimate of your total Backlinks.

I find this is still decent for gauging the competitive landscape

since we aren't digging too deep into the Backlink profile.

However, if you really want to analyze you or your competitors' Backlink profile,

I would recommend another tool like Majestic SEO or Ahrefs.

After running a SERP analysis report, I download this data to Excel.

If you are using Google instead of MOZ, simply enter these competing sites

into your Excel file and look up page authority and

domain authority using open site explorer or any other tool you prefer.

After I download the SERP analysis report,

I'll add the top five competitors to the Excel file I created earlier.

I'll also add the competitor in the tenth position.

This gives me a good overview of who is on top and who is struggling to be on

page one without having to check a full page of websites.

If you are using Google instead of Moz, just enter this information in manually.

You will want to make sure you enter the following information.

The position the site is ranking for.

The page name, which is taken from the title tag.

The URL of the page that is ranking.

The page authority, domain authority, and number of back links.

I then go through and repeat the process for the main key words I selected.

You should now know how to identify top organic search competitors for your chosen

keyword phrases as well as different ways you can obtain and organize the data.

Next, we will move onto analyzing the data we obtained.

This will allow us to drill down further to determine which competitors

we should be most concerned about.

That completes the video portion of this lesson.

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