Delving into the SERPs to find the most profitable and least competitive keyword opportunities and analyzing the competition to identify their strengths and weaknesses gives your website the best chance at focusing on the most efficient and rewarding SEO opportunities

The most successful websites are full of useful information that satisfies visitor’s needs. A website built with purpose will attract valuable traffic and convert at a high rate, becoming a sales tool for your company rather than just a home for your business on the web.

But building them is the difficult part. How do you gain visibility in competitive niches dominated by big names? How can you be sure your information appeals to the right audience?

The answer is research and analysis.

 

The Four Key Factors

Great page-level keyword research is achieved through a mixture of curiosity, tinkering, and a bit of spying (and some great analyzing tools!). Your efforts should always include these four key factors:

  • Analyzing search volumes for keywords
  • Identifying search results with bad or weak competition
  • Analyzing competing pages
  • Analyzing competitor strategies

Using these four factors helped one website go from zero to 100,000 visitors in just one year.

 

The Breakdown

Here’s a bit more on each factor:

Analyzing Search Volumes

Using a tool to analyze search volumes will help you identify areas for improvement. Are there areas where the site can easily rank better and bring in more relevant visitors? For example, it could be better to focus your efforts on a lower-competition keyword such as car accident attorney rather than personal injury lawyer if you specialize in dealing with car accident victims. If you identify a base of keywords with high search volumes where your rank isn’t optimal, you’ve found a few areas where you can improve.

 

Identifying Weak SERPs

Now that you have your terms, do some research to see which ones have the lowest quality competition. This is a good way to get some “easy wins” to build on. Examine the top results and focus on terms that are lacking big brand names, high-quality independent competitors, and sites that clearly have quality SEO professionals working with them (you will know by the meta title, meta description, URL, and whether or not they rank with images and other markup). These will be the easiest to beat. Take them over first before fighting bigger battles later on.

 

Analyze Competing Pages

Now that you’ve analyzed the SERP, check the pages themselves. If you find that the top results for each page have the following, then you’ve found an opportunity to move up and become the alpha dog:

  • Bad Copy
  • Poor Design
  • No Relevant Landing Pages
  • Few Quality Links

 

Analyze Competitor Strategies

The last step before building your pages will be to analyze your strongest competitors. They must be doing at least something right. Seeing which strategies are working for them is a great place to start. For example, a quick study of the leading lawyer pages might show that lawyers with a “call us now for your free consultation” button that directly calls a helpline performs better than an email submission form. Congrats, you’ve found the perfect addition to your web page!

Finding the best SEO opportunities and beating your competitors requires research, analysis, and building on their strengths while taking advantage of their weaknesses. If taking over the SERPs for your most relevant and profitable key terms sounds like something you’d be interested in, let BlueHat Marketing’s team of SEO experts know.