How to check competitor keywords and decide how to challenge their ranking in search engines
16 April 2010
I've been working with Andrea Holley on improving her search engine optimization. Andrea website competes with other businesses in the field of relocation and cultural training. I've examined one of her competitors to see what words they use most on their homepage. This gives me an idea of which search terms Andrea can now compete.
How to check which words are most used on a webpage
webconfs.com offers a free tool to calculate the frequency at which words appear on any given webpage. Based on that tool, I would say the most relevant words are:
- culture
- class
- uk
- relocation
- cultural
- training
Note the most relevant words are not necessarily the most frequent ones. Common sense needs to be applied to decide whether a word, despite being repeated several times, is a likely search term candidate or not. In this example, "blog" is repeated several times but isn't really a useful search term so I discarded it.
How do you decide which frequently used words are worth targeting?
Deciding which searches are likely to be useful based on the nature of the business is once again a decision that requires a bit of thinking. It's impossible to make this decision mechanically. In this instance, I would say that likely searches could be:
- culture class
- cultural class
- cultural training
- relocation uk
Google Search Insight can now be used to compare how popular these search terms are when they are thrown together.
Recommendation on which words to target
Based on this comparison, I would then advise to target the following search terms:
- cultural training
- relocation uk
Note that "relocation uk" is not the most popular in the comparison, but it's from a different semantic field than "culture training", so for the sake of hitting a broader audience, it's worth including it in the targets. "cultural class" and "culture class" can be used as secondary search terms to reinforce "cultural training". I would also use these secondary search terms as the main search terms of a different webpage, so that both pages reinforce each other with links within the same website.
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