Domination in a niche on search engines provides businesses with more interest to their products and services. The higher position in Google search results helps to advance in a profound way; for example, it differentiates a brand and drives more visitors. In other words, domination is great news for any business.
Every person thinking about developing SEO strategy feels a bit overwhelmed. Of course, there are tons of other businesses doing the same thing and trying their best to outperform each other. Just imagine it: your task is to investigate hundreds of companies and identify their weaknesses. Well, that’s the beauty of competition.
In order to help you succeed in modern fierce SEO competition, follow the strategy below.
Step 1. Check Your Site’s Ability to Rank
Before we get to the analysis of your competitors, you should take a quick look at yourself. To be exact, you have to determine your ability to compete with other major players in the niche.
Keyword Difficulty tool from Alexa is a perfect option. It analyzes your site and provides a Competitive Power Score using your past performance of attracting visitors.
As the result, you will make more confident and effective decision when planning SEO content.
Step 2. Determine Your Niche
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of competitive keywords analysis. “I know what I sell, how hard can it be to find a niche, right?” However, the businesses that pay a little attention do it at their own peril because one can’t dominate in a niche if one doesn’t know what it is.
Your company may provide a wide range of products and services, but what are those you want it to be known for? For example, a writing company might be mostly known for paper writing. The answer to this question defines the niche you have to select to dominate in search results.
Let’s suppose your company specializes in designing WordPress themes for business and offers some content marketing as well. Of course, ideally, you would like to dominate in both WordPress and content marketing niches. If you have all resources to do that, you certainly should, but if you can’t invest in developing two distinct SEO campaigns, the best idea is to focus on optimization effort for WordPress design because it is your specialization.
Step 3. Perform Keyword Research
Now, let’s move on to determining the keywords you can target. For this article, we’ll use “best WordPress themes” as an example. Naturally, a lot of companies develop themes for WordPress, so unless you have a reputation and tens of thousands of dollars to compete with the leading companies on the market, your chances are very slim.
Your best bet is to organize your applicable concepts and buckets. You can use Mindmup and similar tools to quickly brainstorm them and create a mindmap of ideas. For example, this simple mindmap was created using Mindmup.
Step 4. Identify Your Main Competitors
Once you have analyzed your ability to rank and identified the keywords for targeting, it’s time to proceed to determining the businesses you’ll have to compete with. The simplest way to do that is to type the keywords you have into Google and write down the top 10 websites that appear. In many cases, you’ll see the same sites appearing on different searches.
SemRush and Google Keyword Tool are commonly recommended tools for searching for the top competitors. Both of them are easy to use for checking potential traffic volumes and competition for specific keywords.
For example, the image below shows the competitive analysis for “Best WordPress themes” using SemRush. At this point, remember that you have to find your true competitors. For example, the startup selling custom WordPress themes cannot be considered a real competitor to the most popular site.
Step 5. Optimize with the Right Keywords
Now you know the niche you want to dominate. Well done! Let’s proceed to selecting the right keywords. The previous steps have provided you with a lot of keywords to choose from, but many of them are generic. Going after generic keywords will be a waste of your precious time, so we need to ensure that you’re going after those less competitive ones.
Less competition means more chances for getting noticed; in other words, it will be easier for you to rank higher.
Let’s return to the previous example to illustrate how you optimize for niche specific keywords. If you’re looking to develop keywords, you can use the following method:
Best WordPress themes + User. Example: best WordPress themes for small businesses
Best WordPress themes + Price. Example: best WordPress themes cheap, WordPress themes under $20, best budget WordPress themes, WordPress themes free.
Best WordPress themes + Design. Example: Best responsive WordPress themes, best elegant WordPress themes.
By using aspects like design, price, and end user, you’ll have a better chance of converting more people into clients.
Final Step: Apply Your Findings
You made it, now you have to apply the results of your research to your website. Be sure to perform this analysis on a regular basis because people tend to use different keywords when searching Google. So, if you find some keyword that also works great, include it into your SEO strategy right away.
Final Considerations
The work does not end with the final step, my friends. The next your biggest purpose is to produce authoritative and high-quality content on topics relevant to the niche you selected. Be sure to write for people, not for Google because the search engine appreciates the most useful content.
Diana Clark is a digital marketer with a considerable body of expertise in web development. Currently Diana manages Emergencyessays.com writing service. She also shares her experience across the web as a blogger. Feel free to connect Diana on Twitter @DianaCl97652243
