If you were a ski company, now would be the best time to focus on creating and promoting ski content.
Tracking search volume over time gives you an early signal of trending topics and changing interests. This allows you professors edu email database to stay ahead of your competitors.
Identify your competitors
Let's say you run a backcountry ski tour company in Colorado.
Your direct competitors are companies that offer similar products and services. In this case, your direct competitors would be other providers of backcountry ski tours in Colorado.
You can easily find them by searching Google for the main keyword you are targeting: guided backcountry skiing colorado.
Googling for the main keyword - Guided backcountry skiing colorado
Indirect competitors serve your interests and your general audience, but offer different solutions. In this case, your indirect competitors would be websites targeting keywords like skiing in Colorado.
Let's do a quick Google search and check what we have.
Google search - skiing in colorado
At first glance, your indirect competitors are not strictly focused on offering backcountry ski tours, like you.
Analyze competitors' keyword strategies
Now that you have a list of competitors, it's time to analyze their keyword targeting strategies using keyword data. This reveals the specific terms and topics that drive traffic to your site.
Strategy 1: Analyze keyword overlap and differences between your site and your competitors.
With the help of an SEO tool , you can find competitor websites with a high percentage of keywords that overlap with your website. This can help you find more organic competitors than the manual method.
Organic Competitors Overview
You can use any great SEO tool to find content gaps – keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. This is a great way to find keyword opportunities to capitalize on.
Content gap
Content gap analysis
You can use a filter to find more relevant keyword ideas from your competitors. Think of a keyword that is highly relevant to your niche – in this case, it is skiing or skiing. You will get more relevant keyword ideas to target once you enter one of them as a filter.
find more relevant keyword ideas from your competitors
Strategy 2: Evaluate search volume to understand keyword priority and potential traffic.
The higher the search volume, the higher the potential traffic for the topic, provided you manage to rank well. Let's take one of the competing domains and analyze its main keywords.
Keyword tracking - competitor's domains and their top keywords
In this case, the competitor is ranking first for the keyword resorts in colorado for skiing, which could be a good topic to target. We can also see that they get about 9,532 organic traffic from a single keyword. Still, it will be hard to beat them since they are in the top position. Let’s check what keywords the page is ranking for to find more opportunities.
Keyword Impressions
The story changes when we filter out keywords that rank in positions 4-10. Let’s look at the search volume for these keywords. Notice that the search volume for these keywords is noticeably lower. These could be considered long -tail keywords , which represent quick wins to outrank your competitor, as most keywords are considered long-tail .
Strategy 3: Use tools to assess the difficulty and opportunity to rank for these keywords.
Volume alone does not determine the value of keywords. You should also evaluate the difficulty and your ability to outrank your competitors. Most SEO tools have a keyword difficulty metric that will help you determine the ranking difficulty for a specific keyword.
Keyword Difficulty
The best practice is to target “easy” keywords, as you can easily outrank competitors, even if they already have high traffic.