Using Keywords to Analyze Competitors

We conclude this chapter by examining how keywords can be used to analyze your competition. To frame what follows, we will assume that competitors know and follow the same rules as you should when creating webpages and choosing keywords.

• Your competitors are creating specific webpages to rank on specific search queries.
• They know where to put the keywords to communicate with people and search engines:
  • Page title
  • Meta description
  • Page URL
  • Headings (the titles) in the webpage
  • The body (the text)
• They write their page title, URL, and meta descriptions to “sell” their webpage to people on SERPs.

This is useful from a competitive analysis viewpoint because it means you can easily study your competition based on specific keywords. It is also important to understand here that you should think of ranking on search queries in a way that is similar to selling products: you need to find a positioning that optimal for your webpage. That means finding a search query that is not overly competitive, and on which you believe it is likely that you will rank high. Hence, a first step is to understand how to analyze the competitiveness of specific keywords and associated search queries.