An eLearning Marketer's Guide To SEO Competitor Analysis: Identifying The Best Keywords For Your Target Audience
Have you ever wondered why some of your competitors have been steadily increasing their organic traffic? By doing an SEO competitor analysis, you can spy on your rivals. Most importantly, you can investigate all the things they do right to attract potential corporate training buyers through search engines. But first, let me explain...
What is an SEO competitor analysis?
A competitor keyword analysis is a process SEO experts use to find valuable keywords that their competitors are ranking highly for but their website isn't, and then using that intel to direct organic traffic to their web pages instead. Of course, you don't always need to be an SEO expert to do competitive keyword analysis, but it would certainly help to reach out to a trusted source for guidance.
Now that we covered the basics of what an SEO competitor analysis is, let's proceed to the more juicy SEO tips. For example, when and why companies like yours need to conduct a competitor analysis to increase revenue. Or what are the best practices and where you should focus when you investigate several competitors and need to outrank them in the SERPs—that is if you're truly interested in finding engaging and trending topics that will act as lead magnets.
The more you invest in keywords and content marketing, the more relevant your organic traffic will be. Plus, you'll discover worthy topics to cover with your content. And of course, you'll understand how you can tie everything together with search intent. It's all about aligning your business goals to the needs of your buyer personas.
Trust me, we'll figure everything out together...
How To Use A Competitor Keyword Analysis To Beat Your eLearning Rivals
By running an SEO competitive analysis, you can take a step back and focus on the overall market area. By doing so, you'll manage to see where you stand compared to your competitors, but you'll also figure out which crucial keywords will bring you better organic traffic.
Even if you already have top rankings in the search results for niche-related high-volume keywords, there might always be another site around trying to steal your glory. Why let them take over your rankings if you can do something about it?
By following my tips, you'll be able to capitalize on your competitors' strengths and weaknesses. Thus, be on top and conquer the search landscape when it comes to targeting the eLearning audience.
So, here's what you need to consider for your SEO competitor analysis:
1. Who Are Your Actual Competitors?
When looking at competitive analysis, it is crucial to choose your rivals reasonably. For example, you might consider company X as your biggest competitor, but maybe a smaller company you never thought of could be outranking you for valuable long-tail keywords.
So, my tip here is to avoid focusing solely on the money keywords—that is if you don't want your competitive analysis to be skewed. We've seen plenty of companies that often focus only on the big money keywords. However, by doing so, they don't realize that maybe there's a competitor they consider less significant but has managed to dominate segments of their target market by ranking for long-tail keywords.
Also, it is equally important to examine organic competitors for specializations. It's not just about ranking for general terms. Why? Because you might be missing opportunities to target potential buyers that are looking for a specific solution.
For example, you might be ranking number one and number two for a huge cross-section of keywords related to microlearning and gamification, but for something more specialized, it might turn out that your competitors are entirely different. It is vital to check if any competitors are ranking at the top of the SERPs for searches around particular subsets of your products or services.
Don't miss out on the chance of examining specific areas that could bring you a considerable amount of traffic and conversions.
Thus, when you decide to do a competitive analysis, make sure to consider competitors who fit your entire business model and companies that are targeting a segment of the overall market.
2. Find Keyword Gaps
While it is vital to pay special attention to the keywords that you already rank for, indeed, there are plenty of keyword opportunities you might be missing.
By checking keyword gaps, you can see if you are lagging behind your competitors for a particular keyword phrase. This is extremely useful when you are only a position or two behind your primary competitor. By identifying the keyword gaps, you can enhance your content and eventually outrank them.
Once again, I advise you not to just look at your main competitor. Sometimes there might be another company that might be selling similar products or services to yours.
The most crucial insights you get from a keyword gap report is finding keywords that all your competitors are ranking for but you are not. This is why you should always include it in your SEO competitor analysis.
Before creating that list with the most interesting keywords you can pursue, you have more things to consider. For instance, why are your competitors ranking and not you? Though one can only speculate. Maybe they have better supplementary content for those particular keywords, or perhaps they have a higher number of backlinks to those specific pages than you. Or, they might just be better at SEO content writing.
After identifying your content keyword gaps, you can work on closing them. You can start by optimizing your already published content or simply start creating new articles to cover what's missing with better structure.
Don't forget to answer user intent no matter what your course of action is. Optimization can help adjust current content for the keywords, and rankings will usually follow.
3. Explore Popular Top Pages To Find Topics
Just as you want to know the most important keywords your competitors are ranking for, it is equally essential to identify which pages on their website have the most popularity.
For better insights on the best eLearning topics, you must consider details like:
- Are there any pages that rank for the most keywords?
- Can you find which pages have the most organic traffic?
The above is important because sometimes your competitors might have massive traffic to a specific page or set of pages for different reasons than you expect. For example, their most popular page might be about an infographic or about famous eLearning quotes.
Running an SEO competitive analysis will help you clear any misconceptions and find surprising results through data. What's more, checking and analyzing your competitors top performing pages will indicate what their visitors are looking for when they search on Google.
Gathering valuable keyword data will give you insights to grow your traffic exponentially. You'll be able to dig out keywords with high search volume that you haven't managed to target yet. Plus, you'll discover which keywords give your competitors the highest ROI and implement them in your SEO content strategy.
There's no doubt that traffic analysis is vital. Which top pages bring traffic to your competitors? Is this traffic coming organically or is it from different social media channels? Also, make sure to check their top shares to find even more keyword opportunities. Finally, don't forget to check which pages get the most traffic in your competitive landscape as a whole. There might be a pattern you're missing.
Competitive analysis in your market is the key to going after high competition keywords and winning. And remember: Sometimes, a small competitor can have the best content strategy. After all, long-tail keywords matter more than you think.
4. Focus On Search Intent Instead Of Search Volume
Even if some keywords have high search volume, this doesn't mean that ranking highly for them will bring your lots of organic search traffic. Thus, we recommend that you focus more on satisfying the user's search intent instead.
Meaning, you should focus on the main objective a user has in mind when searching online. For example, this search might be informational, "what is collaborative learning"; transactional, such as "buy a new LMS"; or navigational, when a user might search for "eLearning Industry" rather than entering the URL into the navigation bar.
So, your web pages need to meet the user's search intent with high-quality, optimized content. In this way, Google might reward you for offering content that provides valuable and relevant answers to their query, especially if you do it better than your competitors.
Thus, it is a good idea to go after "Google snippets" or "What people ask." Supply your ideal buyers with answers to their questions and you will win!
5. Identify Strengths And Weaknesses
eLearning content marketers have to understand where they excel and where they are weak. We've all fallen into the trap of feeling that our site is the best on the planet and that we can blame Google's algorithm for not getting higher rankings. I've got news for you. All site owners should be able to identify what's wrong with their website and their brand. It's your online ID, so appearance, content quality, and user experience do matter a lot.
My suggestion is to ask employees about their views as users or even run a customer survey to discover weaknesses and fix them ASAP. It's also a good idea to identify weak points for each of your competitors. And then, decide how you can take advantage of every opportunity you get.
What's more, you have to check your website's authority. Is your brand well-known? Do other sites have important links back to your site? How authoritative is your website if you compare it to one of your competitors?
You should make it your goal to increase your website authority. Why? The higher authority a site has, the better the chances to beat its competition for highly competitive keywords.
If you lack authority, I suggest you choose less popular terms with a decent amount of search volume. Or maybe look at longer-tail queries. In this way, you can target long-tail keywords that the big fish are not targeting. Then, as you grow your authority, you can start targeting some of the more competitive and popular keywords.
It's good to also check for technical issues, lost and declined keyword rankings, as well as new keyword rankings.
6. Content Quality And User Experience
Also, you must focus on content quality. Read what your competitors have published on their blogs. Do they have good-quality SEO content? Are they using long-form content? Do they only focus on product pages? An SEO competitor analysis will provide answers to all these crucial questions.
When you manage to find areas where they are lacking, you can fill the gap and outrank them in the SERPs.
Furthermore, don't forget to go through their eCommerce section if they have one. Maybe they have help guides on their product pages. Or maybe they have other gated assets like product-related how-tos. You might even find that some of them show off their ratings and product reviews.
All the above will give you plenty of ideas to improve your website and offer valuable content to your prospects. Plus, by offering a great user experience you'll get to see returning visitors.
Publishing quality content consistently in combination with lead nurturing is what will bring you the conversions you need to prove yourself to the C-suite.
Summing Up
One thing is sure: Google gives priority to websites that provide a relevant and positive user experience. For this very reason, content from such online companies has more chances of getting a boost in search results. So, your ultimate goal should be to deliver a great user experience by fulfilling users' search needs.
Content marketers who can answer the user's search intent by publishing better and more explicit content than other search competitors have more chances to see a ranking increase. Take a look at our 360 inbound marketing approach to learn how we make that happen!
An SEO competitor analysis is the best tool to help you conquer the SERPs. It will support you in positioning yourself as a more authoritative and trustworthy source of information. Plus, if you're an expert in your field, you'll get to show your expertise to the right readers by publishing content that targets relevant keywords!
So, consider conducting a keyword competitor analysis to define what content you need to cover. Then, fulfill the user's search intent rather than focusing solely on search volumes for the keywords you're targeting. In this way, your content will help you drive more relevant traffic to your page.
As a result, you'll start gradually climbing up the search rankings and gain more qualified leads.
And remember, quality organic traffic always comes from hard work (aka engaging content) and proper keyword investigation.
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