Competition analysis. It’s a topic that’s much discussed and spoken upon.  Competition analysis starts with identifying your potential competition.

How to go about it?

Simple!

There are two ways to go about it. First – look at the market from a customers’ point of view. Figure out whom they opt for when searching for a similar product or service. This will give you a fair idea of who’s your competition and what’s their market share. The second way is to group the look-alike brands, which share similar products, and strategies. This will help you understand what motivates them and how they influence the audience.

Competition analysis draws a fair picture of the current scenario – the market trends, the strengths, the weakness, the opportunities and the threats. Thus, you can be prepared to grab the opportunity and overcome the challenges.

Great, isn’t it?

Once you’ve started with competition analysis, studying the market, understanding the consumer behaviour you create a platform for your brand/product. Then comes the challenge of how to get your online store (your website) ranked.

Sounds difficult?

If yes, let me be clear enough, success never comes to those who want to achieve it in a day. Success is an on-going, tedious journey that can be accomplished with consistent efforts and over a period of time.

You are done with your competition analysis, you are through with your keyword research, and greatest of all is now you know the keywords your competition is ranking upon.

Now comes the biggest challenge, often a digital marketer especially fresher’s make a common mistake. They get confused while selecting the right set of keywords – you should /should not target each and every keyword of your competitor?

Obviously, it will be quiet stupid to rank for each and every keyword of your competitor. Reason being, your strategy, your intentions, and your objectives may not be as same as your competitors. Thus, it’s indispensable to scrutinize the keywords, match them as per your intentions, consider its search volume, prioritize them as per your strategy and target only those selected few. A few tools that might prove to be helpful are SEMrush and Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

Although, there is no mandatory or fundamental set of rules while selecting your keywords, however, jotted below are some of the rules I follow –

#1 KEEP THE FAST FIRST

While you design your marketing funnel, you define different sets of audiences, which includes, the immediate ones, the close ones, the far-fetched. So I would go after the ones that I believe are easy to get conversions, the keywords that target the immediate audience.

While doing so, remember the toughest period for any brand-agency relation is the initial phase, thus, this makes it crucial to pick up keywords that can be ranked fast and easily. Why am I saying this, well because this will give your campaign a takeoff.

#2 SIMILAR TARGET KEYWORDS THAT CONVERT WELL

Traffic with no doubt is the need of the hour, but the importance of having conversions has its own worth. These keywords are high intention keywords, which can be used well for your Paid campaigns.

#3 KEYWORDS WITH HIGH SEARCH VOLUME&HIGH ORGANIC CLICK-THROUGH RATE

Challenges are simply inevitable. They can’t be escaped. But definitely, there can be ways where we can lessen it. When I say challenges, I tell about how tough it is for me to get this keyword ranked.

THE HIGHER THE VOLUME, THE HIGHER THE CHALLENGES.

#4 BRAND KEYWORDS

While you get your keywords ranked, it is also important to create your market space and brand identity on SERPs. Thus, for me brand keywords are a miss-not. You can different combinations here – location + brand, Brand + general, Product + Brand, Product + Location etc.

#5 BIDDING ON COMPETITOR’S BRAND NAME

When done correctly, bidding on competitors’ brand name can boost your online marketing performance. There is no trick to it. In simple terms, if someone is looking for your direct competitor, your name will rank in SERP as well, considering the fact that while looking for your competitor’s product they might be interested in your product too.

If you follow these rules, you can generally use competitive keywords to build up a really good assortment of targetable, high potential keywords that can bring you some assured SEO returns.