Keyword CountryDeciphering high ranking SEO strategies of your competitors
Before starting your quest to rank high on search engines, its good to know two things:
- Which keywords will be profitable for you to rank high on
- What are you up against? What are your competitor’s SEO strategies and whether you will be able to beat them?
You should NOT read this article any further if you have not figured out how certain keywords can make your rankings 10 times more profitable. In this complete step-by-step guide, we will discuss how you can decipher the search engine ranking strategies that your competitors have applied to achieve those rankings and how you can beat them.
Step 1: Initiate a Keyword research
Get a list of the most traffic pulling keywords of your industry. These keywords need to be loosely related and lateral in nature. This keyword list should have all the keywords with which your target audience might be searching for you. Now, you cannot brainstorm all these keywords on your own. So, let KeywordCountry do that for you.
Start a keyword research by typing in all the possible keywords that you know are related to your industry. Set the keyword research limit to 1500 – 4500 (depending upon the competitiveness of your niche) and Click Go.
Step 2: Add related keywords to your keyword list
You need to cover the entire keyword space of your industry where your target audience might be active. Add keywords from the keyword suggestion bar (beneath keyword worksheet) to make sure you cover all corners of your industry’s keyword space. You are going to reveal many easy traffic building strategies if you do.
Step 3: Send keywords to Site Analysis
Click Show Groups (link on the top of keyword worksheet) > Right click on any group name > Copy > List of all groups. These groups are main node keywords or theme keywords around which your entire industry is based. Initiate SEO Strategy Analysis module and paste the entire list there. Configure settings if you wish to, and click Go. KeywordCountry will go out and show you all the competitors who are ranking well on your theme keywords. Here is how the results look like:
- Keywords column: Shows you the number of keywords on which your competitor was found.
- Results column: How many results were found for your competitor.
- Estimated Traffic: This is the amount of traffic your competitors are driving with their SEO strategy.
- Search Engines: Shows you the search engines on which your rival is ranking high.
- Average Positions: This is the average position of your competitor across all keywords on respective Search engines
Step 4: Filter out most stable and successful SEO strategies
As you watch competitors load up on the screen, you will see many of your competitors are ranking on just one keyword only. These competitors have a weaker search engine ranking strategy as compared to ones that are ranking high on multiple keywords.
Simply filter the weaker ones out by clicking the Filter Drop down icon on the header of ‘Keywords’ column. Apply a ‘Greater than’ filter and set it to 4. This will make KeywordCountry show only those competitors who are ranking on a minimum of 5 keywords.
Step 5: Study each SEO strategy and design your own
After filtering, these are the competitors who are pulling a major amount of traffic in your niche. Click each one of them to open up a 360 degree view of their strategy to rank high on search engines.
Here is what each tab means in the report window:
- Results: This tab shows you what titles and descriptions were used by your competitor to achieve its rankings.
- Keywords: This tab shows you which keywords are driving about how much traffic to your competitor and how much of that comes from which search engine.
- Landing Pages: *IMPORTANT* This tab shows you exactly which landing pages are pulling how much traffic for your rival by ranking on what keywords. Click on the most traffic pulling page to see what type of content they have hosted and try to figure out what makes the content rank so high. This is exactly the content that you need to outrank by adopting a better strategy.
- Source: This tab simply shows you a Gantt chart of how long your competitor has been ranking on particular search engines.
Tip#1: Tracking your rival’s rankings
KeywordCountry helps you track the rankings of your competitors and estimate how much traffic they are gaining with their current SEO strategies. Just click ‘Set Alert’ (just below the project tab) when you are done with the SEO analysis project and KeywordCountry will alert you as soon as there are new high ranking competitors on the block.
To see the ranking trends, Open any competitors profile > Results Tab > Position Trend link, and KC will show you graphically how the rankings of your competitor are climbing and which landing pages are gaining more visibility across search engines.
Tip#2: Tracking changes in your competitor’s SEO efforts
Get alerts when your competitors change their webpages or content so that you know what they are upto. Goto PageSpy Module and add all the important pages of your competitor’s website in there. This makes KeywordCountry send you email whenever.
I’m new to keyword Country to this extend as explained in your step by step strategies.I am looking forward to more on adsense to as I embark on GAN and selling advertising services
Comment by Follow the Money — October 22, 2010 @ 5:09 pm
this is really good. Keeping an eye on the competition was always on top of my priority list. hope this alleviate my efforts..
Comment by Mobsy — January 22, 2011 @ 5:03 pm