Breaking Down Keyword Difficulty

Keyword Difficulty

Can I really rank on page 1?

In all cases you need to assess the keyword popularity and the competition separately you can not associate example “vegan supplements” in the same way that you would research words like “vegan pizza napkins” the two vary in search volume in a massive way one is extremely competitive while the other is relatively unheard of so approaching your research the same every time will not be viable and you need to assess your keyword’s landscape for competitors, popularity, work involved to rank highly and success ratio’s involved.

We go back to the David and Goliath reference where if you do your research effectively you can compete with the page 1 brands but starting out with a new brand new website and relatively low industry authority you will have to put in some work and this can be an uphill battle.

It is entirely possible to compete with a new website and plenty of people strat businesses and immediately pay for Google Ads of facebook Ads to get started. Do not underestimate the difficulty of the competitive keywords so using body keywords won’t be enough of a plan you need to unleash long tail and LSI into your keyword application to capture the wiser market and then hone in on those competitive terms as a wise sansei once said to his pupil “crawl before you walk and walk before you run” the same rule applies here.

How to Find Hidden Gem Keywords

There is a wealth of data hidden inside your Google Search Console. This is a software Google provides website owners with for free that help provide information about how your website is doing on Google search. You can find data on clicks, position, views and CTR all very important. If you use this effectively Google is telling you here are keywords that we think you should be using to get seen more.

I think a combination of Google Search Console data and Google Analytics data will give you a very clear map of what Google thinks you should be targeting. You will also see what people are doing, searching and engaging with on your website.

Many marketing agencies do not know how to combine these two data sources and use them effectively. Having trained thousands of marketing agency people I can say this with the utmost confidence that most of your account managers wouldn’t know how to log into the Google Search Console or read the Google Analytics data to the level they should be reading it at.

The aim of consulting and account managing is to provide the client with strategic insights and provide opportunities to get more traffic, and more sales and convert more with less ad budget. My short analysis is this:
SEO is fantastic at bringing you warm relevant interested web traffic that may convert into leads and sales for a low price. This method is sustainable over long periods of time.
Pay Per Click advertising is good at bringing high targeted web traffic that will most likely convert to a lead or sale, but is not sustainable.

To make use of your marketing budget I suggest looking at long-tail keywords for both SEO and Paid advertising.
A second point is to review what internal links and forms you have on your landing pages of any paid advertising so that you can create for yourself 2nd chances to convert leads.

As keyword cost per click prices increases on advertising platforms (We see it across all of them) your keyword selection becomes more critical.

To further support your marketing efforts I suggest having your marketing team/agency review your websites landing pages, page loading speeds and any internal linking to make sure that any web traffic that you get stays on your site as long as possible, can buy or book a service with ease and can find the information that they want when and where they want it.

Competitor Research

Reverse engineer your competitor’s keywords, backlinks, logo and company director’s name…wait what did he say? yes you heard me but wait its a complete joke just like the SEO & web design global leaders that offered to replicate a unnamed business owners competitor website and provided the finished website to the business owner in the complete same way that the competitor website was copied word for word but with the business owners company name as the title of the website and his profile image was used but the other company director’s name was still on the website 🙁 oh man oh man yes cheap ineffective web design and SEO who can copy a competitor website for you DFY service I would dare say that he paid more than $99 for that “Ultimate service”.

This highlights the fact that you should NOT just cut copy and paste a competitor website they may have unique leverage that you do not or they may be doing naughty things with their SEO so take a look at what they do analysis it and make up your own damn mind if you want to be the copy cat or the one being copied, Now think about that for a moment.

Things I look at with my clients competitor’s

• Keywords and topics used
• OnPage
• Backlink Profile
• Images and multi media being used
• Site Layout – Silo and navigational elements
• Calls To Action – CTA
• Content Quality and cross linking
• Social Reach & Engagement

Just to start me off Ill gather intel on these factors and make up my mind what we would replicate and what we would exploit as a weakness or avoid as they have the firm grip on until we are in a position to engage head on. I like to seek out of the ordinary keywords that the competitor isn’t ranking for and seems to not have much care for again unique market positioning can help increase reach or alienate from the market and thats what we can target.

While we want to achieve high rankings quickly and for the popular terms we also need to understand the longer drawn out picture of capturing a larger market by expanding our net to drag in smaller searches in a larger frequency all working towards the main position for all of these keywords and it is possible with work and planning the application.

So now we have more of an understanding on the importance of keywords and what keywords we want to be targeting we can move into the various tools and what they do for our keyword research. Thanks for reading.