In today’s modern digital world, every marketer is trying to streamline its brand’s SEO strategy. You can optimize webpage with ever-changing algorithms, earn high-quality backlinks, and conduct thorough keyword research to increase rankings. Are you familiar with keywords? These are the words and phrases visitors use to search for products and services on Google. If your webpage consists of those particular words or phrases, Google spiders immediately crawl to your site and put it on the top results. Here, keyword research comes into play.
It unfolds ‘words’ people are using to search for brands, helping marketers target the relevant expressions. But is this enough to get higher rankings? In addition to targeting, you have to determine how much competition exists for that particular keyword. If hundreds of people are using the identical keyword, it would be challenging to rank for it. Therefore, assess which competitors are vying for ranking supremacy and increasing keyword difficulty.
After all, measuring keyword difficulty determines whether it is worth spending time and money optimizing a webpage for that keyword. Thus, before hopping onto SEO strategies, evaluate competitiveness. Here we are unfolding five smart ways to analyze keyword difficulty and rank on Google.
1. Focus On Search Intent
Usually, marketers opt for standard and the most popular keywords to drive maximum traffic. It may sound like a wise strategy but exposes your brand to intense competition. Thus, brands have to consider the search intent to rank for high-volume keywords. If an individual is searching for corporate lawyer reviews, there is a commercial intent of hiring one. Understand the purpose and leverage keyword difficulty to find high-intent keywords that are less difficult to rank. Traditionally, there are three types of search intents, have a look below.
• Transactional Intent: It is when people search intending to purchase. For instance – buy clothes, buying software, etc.
• Informational Intent: A search made to acquire information and learn about the product or service.
• Navigational Intent: Usually, when people want to reach their destination, they use brand names.
It is essential to optimize a webpage for all three search intents. Simultaneously, marketers have to optimize product pages more heavily for transactional and navigational content to facilitate purchase decisions. After all, a person searching for the best girl’s sweaters is closer to purchase than a visitor looking at how to choose a sweater. Hence, use keyword difficulty as a fulcrum to find keywords that meet your brand’s intent-based needs.
2. Look Into Page Content
Google’s utmost priority is user experience, which means it doesn’t rank irrelevant pages. Similarly, if your keyword is not relevant to the landing page, Google won’t count it as a ranking factor. Hence, when analyzing keyword difficulty, pay more attention to keyword placement on the page. It is essential to build some context and then place the anchor text to ensure it doesn’t sound spammy. Alongside context, the topic also has to align with the keyword. Google is smart enough to read the content and identify whether the keyword is abruptly placed or not.
Moreover, take advantage of on-page SEO tools to sprinkle ‘correct’ words into the content. It will identify keyword density while giving recommendations on how to improve. You can mention the keyword on the title tag, URL, headline, and content introduction to increase relevance. Besides keyword placement, concentrate on content quality.
3. Evaluate Link Profiles
If you are an old SEO player, you know metrics could be misleading. At times, sites with spammy links have a high domain and page authority, while webpages practicing white hat SEO are lagging. Thus, if a keyword looks competitive, don’t fall for it until you wade through the top ten link profiles. Since a lot of effort goes into ranking for a keyword, it makes sense to check how sites are cracking their first page. And there is no better way than inspecting their link profiles.
Firstly, copy the URL of one of the top ten sites and paste it into the keyword difficulty metrics. Click on the backlinks tab, and it will display all external links pointing to that site. Skim through the 10-25 links since these would be enough to detect whether the site uses black hat SEO or not. These are few indications of the black hat link profile.
• Low-quality web directories
• Spammy blog networks
• Inadequate blog comments
• Keyword optimized anchor text
• Article directories
The goal is not to go over the board with a link profile; it is another information to help in keyword research.
4. Assess Domain Authority
Google prefers ranking sites from authority pages such as Wikipedia, Amazon, etc. As a result, most webpages on authority sites get a significant advantage because they are on an authoritative domain. Hence, it is imperative to look at the areas you are competing against when evaluating keyword competition. Utilize an SEO-friendly tool or keyword difficulty metrics that display domain authority on the SERP outlay.
Usually, the sites will have a low page and high domain authority, giving you insights into which keywords to rank. Remember, page and domain authority are equally crucial, but when it comes to keyword ranking, put more emphasis on page authority. You can also look out for brand signals as these are an underrated part of discovering keyword difficulty. These signals indicate to search engines that your website is a large brand, giving you an edge over other brands.
5. Appraise Content Quality
Backlinks and on-page SEO are the two most important metrics when sizing up keyword difficulty. Most SEO tools use these two metrics to calculate the difficulty scores. Now, the question is, how to crack the top ten? If you want to rank for a competitive keyword, even for local SEO, brace yourself to match the top ten results’ quality. It might seem like a subjective process, but it is all about bringing high-quality content to the table. Create informative blogs and talk about things people are eager to know.
You can also back up your arguments with secondary researches to increase the credibility of your content. Likewise, flip through the top-ranking websites and inspect their layout, content design, etc. Believe it or not, but structure and design play a significant role in attracting audiences.
Final Thoughts On Keyword Difficult
Undoubtedly, the search engine is diverse, and learning the ropes takes time. Keyword difficulty is ranking metrics, describing the competitiveness of a particular keyword. It calculates a score from a practical perspective, giving you a fair idea of your search engine rankings. Similarly, analyzing these metrics helps in streamlining SEO strategy. With the help of link profiles and domain authority, you can put your efforts and time into relevant keywords to boost rankings.
