As press release distribution has shifted from an offline to online activity over the years, people are realizing the potential press release can have for increasing a company’s search engine presence, which brings me to my next point. SEO and press release writing works best when done together these days.

Many search marketing tactics come and go, but one channel of promotion that has steadily evolved is the practice of optimizing press releases. The good news is you don’t have to be an SEO expert to properly optimize your press releases.

The right release can go a long way in promoting any company or story, just like this list of successful press release examples. One of the greatest things about press releases today is that even if they don’t get picked up by a specific reporter, they are great distribution channels that can really boost your business’s online reputation.

Benefits Of Press Release Distribution

You may be wondering what SEO and press releases have to do with each other. It’s fairly simple! Today’s press release still helps companies get media coverage, and they can also provide SEO benefits.

The benefits of press release distribution are numerous. Here are 5 of them.

• 1. Use your news to get more customers. With today’s online press releases, the media is no longer the only audience you’re writing for. 80 million people get their news online every day. Many of these people are your potential customers. So, always keep your customers in mind when crafting your press releases.
• 2. Increased visibility and trust. The more people read about you, the more they know you. Press releases also let you build authority on different fronts, by stimulating journalists and media outlets to cover your story, giving your prospects a new reason to buy from you, land on your website, buy and spread the word about your new product or service.
• 3. Enhanced SEO efforts. Press releases published by several media outlets will offer you valuable backlinks to your website. By optimizing your content, you could increase its visibility online and make your articles searchable on the Internet.
• 4. The opportunity to brand yourself as an industry expert. Press releases are a great way to build trust and credibility in your field of activity. An excellent PR campaign will offer you the chance to brand yourself as a high-authority business owner and underline your unique attributes to your products or services.
• 5. Increase Sales. By basing your marketing strategy around a press release, you can tap into buying triggers like credibility, authority and likeability. If you’re using a press release to launch a new product or service, then you’re likely to see a growth in sales. You may experience this benefit even if you;re not specifically trying to increase sales!

Maximize Backlinking SEO for Press Release

There’s a good chance that your press release lacks one thing and that’s SEO – the tendency of being ranked and found on Google’s search engine.

As such, besides educating and informing your loyal viewers, you need to make sure your press release can be easily read especially by people who don’t know about you. To ensure that you press release is well written, make sure to hire credible writer or use a proven AI press release generator to create the press release. Next, you want to make sure your content is good enough for search engine optimization.

And how do we do that? Here are 5 quick tips for you to quickly implement and gain a wider audience that you deserve:

• 1. Choose Your Keyword(s)
  Aim for keywords that have high search volume and low search competition
• 2. Use Keywords In Headline, First Paragraph and Content Paragraphs
  Spread it out and put it on appropriate places in your release.
• 3. Anchor Text Backlinks
  This helps drive readers from the press release to your website therefore, creating additional traffic. Remember not to spam your release with backlinks though! 2- 3 will suffice.
• 4. Multimedia Variation
  Incorporate images, video, file attachments and audio into your content to keep viewers engaged and wanting more (If the press release site allows)
• 5. Maximize Press Release Distribution
  Use press release distribution services to establish your press release widespread across as many media outlets as possible.

A good way to make sure that you’re choosing the correct keyword for your press release is by using a SEO tool like SurgeGraph.

The keyword tool built into BiQ can give you amazing insights and data to help you choose the correct keyword for your press release.

You should choose a keyword that has low to moderate keyword difficulty, and at least 100 -100 search volume (or simply choose the keywords with the highest Opportunity Score.) When you have a list of keywords with such stats, this can boost your press release more and help your SEO efforts.

At the end of the day, SEO friendly press releases should have these elements incorporated to help you improve the reach of your press release. At the same time, it also helps in positioning your site to rank at the top of search engine result pages.

What’s In Store For Me?

Now that you know the benefits of having an optimized press release, it’s time to put your knowledge into practice. Assuming you have written a masterpiece, what should you do now? Well, just by writing isn’t sufficient to get your name out there.

Thanks to online PR services, your press release automatically becomes web content, which means it certainly has a shot at becoming news. The benefit of using a press release distribution service is that your release will be sent to the online news service such as Yahoo! News, BusinessInsider and many others, making them instantly available to your customers who are searching on the Internet.

With MarketersMEDIA Newswire’s wide distribution network and coverage, you’ll have the tools to execute your communications strategy more effectively.

If you need your message to get noticed by the media and the millions of online viewers out there, leveraging the top-notch partnerships of MarketersMEDIA Newswire can help you tell your story better and louder. Being able to rank on reputable news websites like Google News, Business Insider or Fox News simply by optimizing and distributing a press release offers attractive benefits at a nominal cost.

Reach out to huge viewership and customer base with instant publicity to generate massive traffic. You’re just one click away from achieving the best publicity. Track and analyze your success with complete data analysis and cost-effective method, exclusively on MarketersMEDIA Newswire. So, begin taking advantage over these great benefits of press releases for SEO now!

Time for some serious publicity! Always remember that having an optimized press release is sure to benefit you in more ways than one.

You will learn:

• Foundation about search intent: its importance and types.
• How to know and optimize search intent.
• What to pay attention to while understand the search intent.

An effective website should provide readers the information right when they need it most. Such informative websites will probably get a lot of readers and low bounce rates. In order to achieve that, identifying the user’s search intent behind each query is a way for SEOs and content creators to deliver better value to users.  

This article will show you the search intent and how to optimize for each type of intention now. A keyword research tool like BiQ Keyword Intelligence can be an important tool to help you.

What is a Search Intent?

Search intent, or User intent, is the main goal a user has when typing a query into a search engine. In other words, it is the why behind a search query: why did the person make this search? Do they want to learn something? Are they looking to make a purchase? Or, are they looking for a particular product?

For example, you want to cook up some chicken for dinner but want to find a fast and simple recipe to eat now. So you head to Google and search for “quick chicken recipes”.

The first result you click on seems to be good at first. However, the process takes over an hour. So you click back, and choose the second page. This one gives you some ways of cooking, and all of them takes less than 30 minutes. This is probably what you want.

The idea here is that, the second page provides you the more relevant result that you need, so you stay on that page.

Why do you need to know about search intent?

It is simply to say that satisfying search intent is ultimately Google’s top goal. If you want to succeed with SEO and content marketing, search intent is a big part of your approach. You need to be the most relevant result for the query. 

First and foremost, finding the right keywords and creating content that aligns with search intent is something you should focus on. There are a million of keywords for one topic, but do you know 0.16% of the most popular keywords are responsible for 60.67% of all searches? This means the little percentage is only taken by the keywords with the right search intent. How well you understand the search intent impacts your ability to rank and whether your readers are satisfied with your page’s content. 

Take a look at the keyword “title generator”. What do you notice about these results? They’re all tools. People who search for a “title generator” don’t want a piece of content that is only about the title generator or how it works. They want the content with full context. 

From time to time, consumer behavior also fluctuates, presenting challenges and opportunities for businesses. It is essential to be nimble, and to move quickly in order to meet demand in real time For instance, there is 150% increase in searches containing “near me with outdoor seating” these days. So your business can see whether your product/service is suitable with the keywords, and optimize for that.

Overall, a thorough understanding of search intent can assist you: 

• Target the right search terms after doing effective keyword research, which align with your audience’s needs.
• Create content that answers user questions and structure pages in a way that’s friendly to both users and search engines.
• Attract more traffic and rank higher by creating content that are more valuable and relevant to users.

4 types of search intent

Informational intent

The searcher is looking for information. 

This might be an answer to a simple question like “Who is Donald Trump?”. Or something that requires a longer and more in-depth answer like  “what is macroeconomics?” However, not all informational searches are formulated as questions. It could be in other forms like “PR definition”, “way to fold a plane”.

In the purchase intent, this type of search is at the top of funnel traffic. The content type is informative.

Navigational intent

The searcher is looking for a specific website. They might already know where they want to go (it can be landing pages, sites or location). It’s probably just quicker and easier for them to Google it than to type the entire URL into the address bar. They may also be unsure of the exact URL.

The search intent requires websites to be optimized for accurate and qualified queries. By doing so, the customers can get to the websites easier. 

For example: 

• seopressor.com
• seopressor blog
• kendall jenner instagram
• napoleon wikipedia

Commercial investigation

Searchers are in the market for a specific product or service but has yet to make a final decision on which solution is right for them. They’re most likely looking for reviews and comparisons and weighing up their options.

This intent requires websites to provide potential persuasion to customers about the benefits of your products/services; like the product comparison, listacles, detailed description. 

Other examples include: “coffee near me,” “cheapest restaurant in Singapore,” etc. These searches also have commercial investigation intent, in the form of local seaches.

Transactional intent

When searcher is looking to make a purchase, they’re probably in buying mode and at the end of the purchase intent. Most likely, they already made the purchasing decision and they are just looking for a place to buy it.

Here is where the landing pages of your product/service need to be optimize.

The examples are:

• buy woman hoodie
• netflix subscription
• all of us are dead new episode

How to know and optimize search intent

#1. How to determine the search intent: 

You can dominate search intent SEO by focusing on keyword intent. Here are the 2 ways to understand the search intent. 

Find from Google search results: 

The easiest way to determine search intent is to use the search results themselves.

Search intent is often obvious from the wording of the query. 

You can examine the types of content that come up on page one, to determine what medium a person expects when they search that term.

If the results start with Google Ads, shopping results with product reviews, a booking tool, or show a store’s location on a map, Google identify that as a transactional intent.

If the first search results are the URLs for a company, the knowledge panel for a company, a company’s tweets, and/or a company’s own Google Ads, Google identify that as a navigational query.

If the search results include the answer box, a table, a list of URLs, event listings, the ‘people also ask’ box, the knowledge panel, recipes, a map, and/or videos, that is an informational search.

Commercial search will usually contain Google Ads, answer boxes, and URL results.

Read or watch all of the top results and identify what they have in common. The search engines have obviously deemed that unifying thread are the most satisfactory result.

If applicable, look at the related results under ‘people also ask’, and make note of any questions you can answer in your content. 

Find from BiQ Keyword Intelligence: 

If you’re using a keyword research tool like BiQ Keyword Intelligence, you can use these modifiers to filter for keywords with specific intent. In a situation where you’re looking for some relevant informational keywords for blog posts: First, enter a few seed keywords into BiQ, choose your language and location, then click generate.

You can see the results as below. In the “Intent” column, it shows you the search intent of the keywords.

Remember that when performing keyword research, you also need to consider search intent in addition to keyword popularity and keyword difficulty. 

Your piece of content should contain a mix of keywords with high search volume as well as long-tail, highly specific keywords. BiQ also gives you number of short and long-tail keywords. You just need to match your keywords to users’ search intent and write your content. 

What else can you get with BiQ Keyword Intelligence? You can research keywords in 35+ languages, thus, collect and visit keywords board that you like.

With free access to Keyword Intelligence, you can:

• Check the search results to identify the type of intent behind your keywords
• Examine the types of content that come up on page one.
• Get common content ideas, popular questions related to the keyword, and trending searches involving that keyword. 

#2. How to optimize for each search intent:

• Informational Intent: 

To target keywords with informational intent, you should pay close attention to the information users are searching for. Then, you need to write your content to provide it as clearly as possible. 

For example, a “how-to” query typically looks for a structured process. You can see that content with this query has featured content appears as an ordered list, and with clear numbered steps. 

If you click through to the source, you’ll notice that each step is a subheader with detailed information below it. 

• Navigational Intent: 

First, you need make sure your site’s structure is organized and easy to navigate to target these navigational keywords. Each section of your site should be clearly labeled, with page titles, tags, headers, and descriptions that tell the user what information they’ll find there. 

• Commercial Intent:

Commercial searches are about products or services that people are interested in but aren’t quite ready to purchase. Usually they include words and phrases like “best” or “which [product] should I buy?”. 

• Transactional Intent: 

The best way for this intent directs users to a page designed for their purpose, whether it’s a product or a landing page. This page should have: 

Page Title, Description, and Headers that include keywords and indication of the purpose.

A clear Call to Action that’s easy for users to spot and understand

An eye-catching yet simple design that helps users find the information they need quickly and complete their conversion easily

What else should you do?

Besides the above-suggested method, you can also consider these two ways: users experience and customer journey.

Consider the user experience

You might be wondering how Google know a page is a good fit for Search Intent. The answer is that they look at how people interact with the SERPs.

In other words, they can tell if people aren’t loving a specific search result or if the keywords aren’t fitting for the search result. When this happens, the site will be downranked. 

So how do you make sure that people will love your page?

Pay attention to these elements:

• Limit Popups: Too much pop up can make users feel uncomfortable. So if you do use a popup, you should only use them with exit option on the page. 
• 14px+ Font: You can have the greatest blog post every written. But if it’s hard to read, people are going to bounce like a pogo stick. The font also need to be appropriate, and easy to read at the same time.
• Use Subheadings: Searchers want their answers fast and they aren’t going to read every single word of your page. Headings and subheadings let users skim your content for the main points.

• Use Videos and Images: Using visual makes your content more appeal to user to discoverand understand. 

Consider the customer journey

As Google stated, the emotional motivation driving a particular search is not only shaped by the category of the search intent but also where they are in their purchasing journey.

In many cases, you can determine a keyword’s intent based on the keyword and its search results. But, there are also other things that you need to know. For example, an informational keyword will often use question words or phrases to indicate what the user is learning.

As in the marketing funnel, the journey can look like this:

• Awareness: Informational keywords like “how to check backlinks”
• Consideration: Commercial keywords like “best backlink checker.”
• Conversion: Transactional or navigational keywords (often branded) like “BacklinkGap subscription.”

TL;DR

People’s queries reflect where they are in the conversion funnel. Understanding search intent can help you create effective content that targets potential customers.

A keyword research tool like BiQ Keyword Intelligence not only provides you a list of potential keywords but also shows you the search intent for each keyword. 

You will learn:

• The need to monitor backlinks and identify broken links
• How to find broken backlinks
• What to do to keep the quality of your backlink and grow.

One of the most effective ways to increase your online business is through backlinks. But your backlink profile is not always filled with quality links, sometimes you will experience broken links. And, you need to fix these links to keep your website quality in Google’s eyes.

That’s what we’re talking about today, along with how to manage your backlinks building.

What you need to know about backlink building

What are backlinks?

Backlinks are incredibly valuable for SEO as they are still one of the top 3 factors in Google ranking. This is because these backlinks are seen as a vote of some sort from one website to the other. 

There are inbound links and outbound links. Inbound links are links that come from other websites or a different domain name. Outbound links are those links on your website that link out to websites with a different domain name.

The backlinks received by your website are a good sign to all search engines that other sites find your website trustworthy. Thus, your site looks more legitimate and informative for potential users. Due to this, you’re able to move up the rankings with these types of backlink ‘votes.’

Why do you need to monitor and fix your backlinks?

The more authoritative backlinks a website has, the more Google will view it as an authority which in turn results in higher keyword rankings. As a result, you need to make sure your level of authority keeps maintaining or rising. 

If you get penalized, it reduces your page rank, decreasing the chances that your content will be found. In addition, you will never know in advance when your backlinks disappear or broke. You can even miss your backlinks for weeks and months if you do not monitor your profile regularly. Some webmasters and website owners who don’t update their website regularly might not even be aware that they have these broken links on their site unless a user tells them so.

Broken backlinks

A broken backlink is often referred to as a dead link. It occurs when a webpage linking to you becomes malfunctioning. To be more specific, when you click on a link that is supposed to take you to particular content (your page), it takes you to another page that shows a 404 error message. 

What causes broken link:

• The website is temporarily or permanently unavailable
• The web page has been deleted
• The web page permalink was modified or changed
• The web page was blocked by a firewall or other similar software

Why are broken links bad for your sites?

Firstly, broken backlinks affect your traffic. Traffic is one of the major components of having a good page ranking on search engines. One backlink fall off can decrease your sources of getting more readers.

Secondly, broken backlinks, if not fix quickly, can harm your SEO. In Google eye, these broken links can be seen as bad backlinks, adding no score to crawl your page higher.

It is important to update your website regularly because your partner’s website won’t always notify you if they have made any changes or moved the link to another location. There is also the possibility of external servers being brought down temporarily or permanently as well as domains could be expired or sold. 

So, the best thing is to control your site. You can take precautionary action by checking your website regularly. With a broken link checker, you can know whether the website that links to you is broken, so you can get rid of it as it can be considered bad backlinks.

Find broken backlinks with a Broken link checker

Before jumping into how to fix broken links, we first need to detect them. 

Use a backlink checker like BacklinkGap

BacklinkGap shows you which site linking to you is broken. Then you can nip them in the bud before they negatively impact your SEO. It’s often easier to use an SEO backlink checker like BacklinkGap to find these toxic backlinks. 

By using the monitoring feature, you can get your eyes on the backlinks you want. BacklinkGap will monitor these backlinks daily and notify you of any changes that happened.

The tool can help you identify broken links in an instant. It allows you to make better decisions and take quick actions to fix them. 

You can see your broken link in the list and add it to disavow list or add a tag to fix it then.

This backlink checker will also get you notified of new and lost backlinks. You can get the latest updates on any backlinks or referring domains that you’ve gained or lost. You can also immediately reach out to websites for missing or removed links.

While monitoring, you can adjust the dashboard by pause, resume or remove the backlinks. 

What to do after using a backlink checker?

As these are backlinks, it is hard for you to fix the link from your sites. There are only two ways, contact the webpage or disavow the link.

You can reach out to the webpage and notify them about the broken pages. Then, ask whether it can be fixed since they also need to improve their website quality.

Removing the link is the solution when you cannot contact the sites that link to you. It is often called disavow links. It can be time-consuming if you have a lot of broken links. But the process is straightforward, just locate the link in the content, then add it to a disavow file. You can disavow the bad backlinks like that with Google Search Console.

BacklinkGap is also here to help you say goodbye to these bad links. You can gather all your unwanted backlinks, disavow them, then relax as your rankings recover.

You add all the broken backlinks to the Disavow list in the tool. From the Disavow List view, you can see all the backlinks that you want to disavow. You can then extract the data you want in a CSV report.

A disavow file is a request for Google to ignore the links which you upload and ensure that they are not taken into account when analyzing your site’s ranking factors. It is a great way to handle toxic links.

You can simply upload them to Google’s Search Console disavow tool. Google does provide guidance regarding the formatting and disavow file limitations set. 

If you haven’t known much about disavow backlinks probably, read this: How to Disavow Links: A Guide with A Disavow Tool

How to build backlinks effectively?

Guest blogging

If your brand provides quality content, people will come back for more. It’s really as simple as that. 

Guest posting on other related sites allows you to display your depth of knowledge in your field. One last advantage of guest posting is that it allows you to get a backlink to your website, which is a major factor in SEO ranking. 

You can start by making a list of anywhere from 10-50 sites that you’d like to guest post for. Reach out, then provide your content.

Skyscraper technique

The skyscraper technique focuses on finding the best piece of content out there around a particular keyword. Then you need to create something even better with the goal of offering this new content as a replacement backlink to the websites that have linked to old content.

There are three steps that’ll make the skyscraper technique work:

• Find popular content that’s already ranking for your target keyword
• Create a piece of high-quality content
• Promote your piece of content to the blogs and publications that refer or link back to some of the best performing pieces of content for your target keyword

Write testimonials

Not only is review helpful to a customer during the decision-making process but testimonials and reviews are also an excellent way to establish trust and credibility for your business. Testimonials and reviews provide benefits to three parties: The consumer, the reviewed business, and the reviewer. Since when leaving reviews, is a link-building opportunity. Your personal information when providing reviews can come with your business links.

If you’re interested in attracting links via the testimonial method, you’ll first need to reach out to companies with whom you do business. 

TL;DR

Website masters have to put a lot more effort to obtain quality backlinks. Monitor backlink is one vital work to get the eyes on every change in backlink profile. A broken backlink can harm your SEO and website reputation. You need to identify and choose the way to fix it as fast as possible. 

You can use a broken link checker like BacklinkGap to find broken backlinks faster.

Then, you also need to find the best ways the build backlinks more.

You will learn:

• Basic information about disavow oflinks.
• How to use a disavow tool
• What to do after disavowing.

Backlinks are important for your SEO. Getting links from other trustworthy websites is a great way to help Google see your site as authoritative. However, your backlink profile will not be perfect over time. You can have bad backlinks, negative SEO and when this happens, you need to disavow these backlinks.

Disavowing backlinks isn’t something you do on a whim. It is a fairly serious action that can significantly impact your search ranking, for better or for worse. You need the help of a disavow tool that works for Google SERP.

In this article, you will know how to disavow links with knowledge about bad links, google algorithms, and penalties. Besides the disavow tools from Google and Google Search Console, you will also be introduced to BacklinkGap, one incredible tool that supports building your backlink profile.

What is Disavow Backlink?

You must always remember that backlinks remain one of Google’s top three ranking factors. Buidling a consistent backlink is important since the more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic you can get from Google. Thus, disavowing backlinks is a process of instructing Google to ignore unwanted backlinks in order to positively impact ranking in SERPs. 

Google disavow allows webmasters to block dirty links (or dirty backlinks) from low-quality or irrelevant websites. Besides, it also helpsto avoid Google penalties caused by dirty backlinks. For example, if you have 100,000 backlinks on abc.com website, after just one click, your links on abc.com will not be considered as a backlink anymore, and Google will ignore it.

Although it seems like disavowing backlinks is in contrast to building backlinks because it decreases your link numbers. However, it’s an effort that helps you build your strong backlink profile.

Google Algorithm with Disavow Link

Changes in Penguin Algorithm:

Here, we will talk about Google’s algorithm, specifically today’s Penguin 4.0. 

One of the reasons Penguin is so dangerous is because you will never be informed if your website is penalized. The algorithm will no longer penalize dirty links on the website but only ignore or devalue the links. You can only assume that you were penalized by indirect signs, like a sharp drop in organic traffic or declined positions for some (or all) of your keywords, including the branded ones.

But that doesn’t mean you should keep building spammy backlinks and think “That’s fine. Google won’t penalize me and my website has not been downgraded at all.”

Penguin probably no longer penalize your site, but there are still Google’s own penalties out there. 

Thus, Penguin is real-time now. This implies that any page’s rankings may change each time Google updates the information about the pages and pages linking to them. So, both the positive and negative impacts of your actions will become noticeable faster.

This also means that the real-time algorithm allows you to recover from a Google penalty faster. If your site is penalized, you’ll see positive results sooner when  your webmaster does a good job improving it and removing harmful links. It can be right after Google recrawls your website’s pages.

Why do you need to disavow links?

Because the new Penguin takes a granular approach, it is essential to audit backlinks for each important subdomain and subdivision of your website.

The main reason to disavow links is to protect the site from “bad” links that are harming its reputation, and its rank on the SERPs. Bad links can be created for many reasons: competitors can use them to move higher in the rankings, users might accidentally create them by talking on an unsavory site, or Google’s algorithms might change in a way that causes a formerly useful link to become a problem.

Disavowing toxic links can help your site to recover from penalties or prevent them from happening in the first place. 

In addition, disavow link is a work of keeping your backlink profile healthy and clean. You can make a habit of regularly checking new and lost backlinks, their value and quality to find out suspicious ones. Or, you can conduct a deep backlink audit of your entire website monthly to constantly monitor your positions in SERPs. It is suggested that you should compare keyword rankings and investigate which keywords have taken a sudden drop in position to stay aware of strange rankings movement.  Make sure you’re tracking not only keywords your homepage is ranking for, but also keywords for all significant subdivisions. 

Google Penalty and how your bad backlinks might look like?

Google identifies its penalty as:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

The more backlink profile is plagued with toxic links, the harder it will be to fend off a penalty. Therefore, don’t try any spammy strategies, or generate thousands of unnatural links pointing to your website. If caught, you will spend way more time and effort removing the Google penalty and recovering from it.

Type of bad backlinks: 

Two of the biggest offenders are links that can be purchased in massive numbers from shady SEO sites and intentional backlink schemes that are utilizing a private backlink network (PBN).

Link farms, automated software, and PBNs are widely used for generating numerous bad links. The number of links may vary, from a few hundred to thousands. 

Toxic backlinks commonly display signs of low quality or an attempt to manipulate rankings such as:

• Coming from sites that have been set up only for the purpose of linking out.
• Coming from sites and content which aren’t topically relevant. 
• Coming from sites that aren’t indexed by Google.
• Being obviously forced into blog comments.
• Being hidden away in a website’s footer.
• Existing on every page on a website.
• Using ‘ exact match anchor text’ (using commercial ‘money’ terms and target keywords as the link text).
• Followed links clearly marked as sponsored.

2 things you can do:

When you spot these bad backlinks on your profile, what should you do?

Try removing links

You can remove these backlinks by sending disavow files to Google Search Console.

If you’re auditing a site, it’s a really good idea to go in and check to see if a disavow file already exists. It’s possible that it was created prior to Penguin 4.0.

It’s possible there are good links in your disavow file. But you can try removing links and see if it helps your rankings. 

Record everything and treat it as an experiment

Remember when you are disavowing things, you should record these experiences. Treat this as any other SEO process. 

If you disavow the right backlinks, and your rank goes up, that is a good try. You can record to know the look of that good-quality backlinks. 

If you make a mistake and your rankings drop, you should record to know what caused that. In the next try, you will be aware of previous mistake and make a better SEO. 

Google Disavow Tool

It is important that you use a Google disavow tool very carefully as  incorrect action can potentially harm your site’s performance. 

Whatever their cause, bad links hurt companies. The disavow tool is one way to stop the harm from continuing.

What should you use & How can you use it?

The first choice is generally Google Search Console. Thus, it is helpful to use third-party tools, such as Backlink Gap.

Google Search Console

Everyone that has a Google Analytics tracking tag on their website also has access to Google’s Search Console tool. Google Search Console provides such houses information on the linking structure of the site. 

You can conduct a link audit from the Link Report page of Search Console. Just click the big “Export External Links” button on the top right of the screen and choose “More Sample Links.” Export it as the file type of your choice.

Then, you need to open a new text file (extension must be .txt) and enter the URLs or domains from which you wish to disavow links in the file, following these rules (which is Google official rules and you can check it more at the Google Help Center):

• Enter only one URL or domain per line
• Domains (or subdomains) should contain the prefix “domain:”. Example: “domain:spammysite.com”
• The maximum file size should be 100,000 lines
• The maximum URL length should be 2048 characters

The next step is uploading the list to Google Search Console Disavow Tool

The above process sounds pretty simple until you realize that we skipped the hard part—identifying the bad backlinks. Google only serves you a list of domains and the amount of links that are linked to you when you run the external link report. There’s no information that would help you determine whether or not the link is worth keeping. 

The only way to know is to check out each domain manually, which is simply not feasible for most sites. Even a small site will accumulate thousands of backlinks after a few years. Even if you spot the obvious spam sites, it could be near impossible to know if a site is part of a PBN or is otherwise disliked by Google. That is why you need a tool like BacklinkGap.

A Disavow Link Tool Like BacklinkGap

With BacklinkGap, you can instantly identify spammy links. The tool allows you to congregate all the big insights to identify harmful, spammy, or unnatural backlinks that may potentially harm your rankings. For example, total referring domains with line chart, new & lost backlinks, the backlink types, etc. 

You can prevent negative SEO from affecting your rankings by taking prompt actions to assemble your list of pages or domains to disavow.

BacklinkGap helps you efficiently disavow bad links from your site. In the monitoring feature, you can add all your unnatural and unwanted backlinks to your “disavow list”. Then, you can perform a quick CSV export of your list so that you can simply upload them to Google’s Search Console disavow tool.

These backlinks that you manage on a single dashboard can help you to keep track of links that you’ve removed from your inbound list. You can easily keep your eyes on all the backlinks you’ve devalued. Experience a more refined way to measure the effects of your actions on your rankings or SEO campaign.

What to do after?

Keep monitoring your backlink profiles

No plan is efficient if you don’t monitor the progress. 

Backlink profile monitoring should be an integral part of your ongoing SEO activities. You need to know who is linking out to you. If there are any suspicious activities, you will be alerted to react in real-time and avoid a disruptive, (or devastating), penalty.

Tracking your progress will help to curb backlinks management and make a more prudent decision further on. A data-driven approach to backlink management allows you to spot weaknesses easily and craft your unique plan for success. 

The work of disavowing link does now stop after one time, you still need to come back and work on it again.

Do other link-building strategies

You need to consider about your link-building strategies also. Be careful with what you are doing will decrease the problem of attracting bad links. 

Guest blogging, skyscraper tactics, broken link building, etc, are what you can try out.If you have not know much about the tactics, you can read this article: How To Create Backlink: The Most Updated Guide 2022

TL;DR

Disavowing links is a tedious yet necessary task that you need to accomplish if you want to stay in good graces with Google. 

It is not always spammy links that need to be disavowed, you also need to look at the backlinks that come from the low-quality page. The overall quality of a website can help you determine how impactful a backlink from a site can be. If a site has a lower authority score, it probably won’t be that beneficial. Besides, you need to remember that getting backlinks from a variety of high-quality sites is better than getting multiple backlinks from just one domain, even if that domain is also high-quality. 

Use a Google disavow tool like BacklinkGap to create a disavow file quicker, and analyze the quality of thousand backlinks on a whim.

For most SMBs, the key to generating more traffic, leads, and sales lies in outsmarting your competition.

In digital marketing, especially, established brands make it incredibly difficult to compete. They not only can attract the best sales, marketing, and research talent but also possess the financial clout to quickly outmuscle you in a toe-to-toe contest. It means that if you’re not smart, you’ll forever feed on scraps.

So, how do you get past this hurdle? How can your small business compete despite these obvious challenges? Simple – competitor analysis – researching your competition! Competitor analysis allows you to;

• Find out what makes your competitor tick; what’s their secret?
• Uncover and exploit opportunities the competitor has overlooked

This guide should help you plan and execute one of the most rewarding forms of competitor research in digital marketing – competitive keyword analysis.

It’s not exactly easy. But, with dedication, you can do it even on your own. Let’s start with a definition;

What is Competitive Keyword Analysis?

Competitive keyword analysis, also known as SEO competitor analysis or SEO keyword competition analysis, is just that – unraveling your competitor’s keyword strategy. 

By analyzing the competitor’s keywords, you’re able to gain insight into the interests of your shared audience and adjust your SEO campaign accordingly to improve your SERP performance.

Benefits of SEO Competitor Keyword Analysis

There are three main reasons why you should prioritize competitor SEO analysis for your search engine optimization campaign;

• Discover keywords that work

Using SEO competitor research tools, you can find out the full list of keywords your primary competitors use, along with the number of clicks received for each keyword, and overall search volume. You can then sort out these terms to come up with a list of proven keywords to drive your campaign.

• Find out keywords you omitted

If you already do SEO, competitor SEO search can also be instrumental in finding out valuable keywords that you might have overlooked in the past. What’s even better is that most competitor SEO analysis tools now let you compare your SEO keywords with the competitor’s to uncover the keywords missing in your campaign.

• Gives you a competitive advantage

Business is about outsmarting the opponent. It’s about finding new ways to stay ahead of the pack. Competitive SEO analysis adds another weapon to your business intelligence arsenal. Once you know the keywords that are driving your competitor’s success, you can find high-performance long-tail versions and even alternative keywords to outrank that competitor.

Tools like RankingGap will certainly play a huge role in helping you work out your keywords, what your competitors rank for, and how you fare against them.

It has 4 core features or keyword views that cover the necessary areas of a keyword gap analysis practice.

But of course, before you jump straight into the tool itself, maybe learn a bit more on how to perform competitive keyword analysis.

How to Perform Competitive Keyword Analysis in 3 Steps

So, having learned about the above benefits, you’re probably thinking – where do I start my competitor keyword analysis? Here’s how to proceed;

Step #1: Define Your Competition

Who are your competitors?

Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward answer to this question. While it’s easy to discover your local rivals by searching your primary keywords in Google, SERP results alone won’t reveal all your global competitors.

For instance, for a local bakery trying to rank for the keyword “tasty buns in Texas,” the competition would be limited to bakeries in Texas. But, the moment the same bakery attempts to rank for a how-to article, it’d be up against even national brands such as Taste of Home and the Food Network. Making it to the first page then becomes a lot more difficult than in the first scenario.

For purposes of competitive keyword analysis, therefore, we prefer to define a competitor as; “anyone who ranks in the first result page for your target keywords, whether or not these people are your local business competitors.”

With the Competitor Discovery feature in RankingGap, you can quickly identify your top competitors. You just need to paste your domain to RankingGap and wait for the results. RankingGap will show you your top competitors in a chart view.

When you click on a specific competitor, you can get information about your competitors, including the common keywords, the estimated volume of web traffic, and the percentage of keywords on the first page of SERP.

Step #2: Find Out Your Competitor(s) Keywords

This part should be easy! Pick an opponent (one of your competitors) and use SEO analysis tools to discover the core keywords driving their campaign.

Begin by searching your target keyword in Google and see the results that come up. Then, pick brands/companies behind those results and analyze their SEO strategies one by one.

There are multiple tools you can use to accomplish this process, including Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Moz. We, however, prefer (and recommend) BiQ Ranking Intelligence. With BiQ, all you need is the competitor’s site URL. Once you enter the URL into BiQ, the dashboard fills up with all the intelligence data you need.

Even better, BiQ allows you to select from five SEO intelligence parameters, i.e., keyword, content, link, rank, and site intelligence. You only pay for the selected parameter(s).  

In this case, you’d select keyword intelligence. Under this parameter, BiQ will help you;

• Discover your competitor’s keyword profile
• Collect all the keywords you like
• Find trending keywords for your content
• Uncover hidden long-tail keyword opportunities
• Conduct keyword searches for local SEO
• Determine the real SEO value of each keyword

The “real SEO value” in this case refers to metrics such as search volume, average CPC, and the average competition for that keyword.

Here is how you can find out your competitors’ keywords with RankingGap.

In order to know what keywords both you and your competitors share, you need to first create a project by inserting your domain and your competitors’, Then, you pick your location and language setting.

When you set everything up, you can generate your project. When the results are out, go to the “Common” keyword view, which you are already on by default. 

You’ll see a list of keywords with your competitors’ ranking positions as compared to yours.

What’s displayed here are the keywords that you, including all your competitors, have. You can see the ranking and the rank movement on each column. Other data like CPC, Volume, Competition, and SERP Features are also shown.

If your ranking is lower than your competitors, then it is where you should do your optimization.

In addition, the “Gap” keyword view lets you tap into the keywords you don’t have and keywords that some of your competitors are missing as well. The “Missing” view will show the keywords that all of your competitors are ranking for except you. Finally, the “Unique” view is the keywords that you rank for but not your competitors.

With that amount of information, you can do your competitor keyword analysis and start planning your content strategy. 

Step #3: Pick the Best Competitive Keywords

Not all keywords are equal – some promise more traffic and leads than others. Additionally, some keywords are extremely competitive. Getting an article to the first page for the term “content marketing,” for example, isn’t easy because it’s one of the most competitive keywords at the moment. You need to pick keywords that justify your efforts.

For the above reasons, sometimes, you may need to assess every keyword on your list to pick out the right ones. It’s what makes this part a little more challenging. To shorten the process, we recommend that you focus on finding;

#1. Keywords your competitor ranks for that you don’t

Are you leaving a few vital keywords out of your SEO strategy? Could your competitor be ranking higher in SERPs because they use these keywords you’ve often overlooked? If so, you need to start using the keywords more often.

#2. High-ranking competitor content that doesn’t match search queries well

Is your competitor benefiting from a lack of quality content for a particular keyword? Do they have rather poor content at the top of SERPs because there are no quality alternatives? You can take advantage of this situation by creating high-quality articles around these keywords.

#3. Keywords your competitor is paying for that you can rank for naturally

If your competitor is paying for these keywords, it follows that they’re valuable keywords in your industry. So, what do you do? Try to see if you can rank organically for these words. Create quality articles around the keywords and submit them to Google for indexing.

Invest in Keyword Gap Analysis

Finally, competitive keyword analysis isn’t complete without keyword gap analysis. A gap analysis entails comparing two domains (such as your site and a competitor’s site) to identify disparities in keyword use and performance.

We’ve already talked about finding keywords that your competitor ranks for, but you don’t. A keyword gap analysis will help you reveal such keywords.

But that’s not everything. A gap analysis will also help you discover long-tail keywords you might have overlooked as well as terms you perhaps need to use more frequently. 

Having a tool like RankingGap will definitely up your SEO game and generate an actual ROI as compared to doing manual guesswork or basic keyword research.

Conclusion

Competitive keyword analysis can significantly benefit your SEO campaign. With informed SEO competitor analysis, you could even topple some of the mainstays in your industry to rank at the top of SERPs for specific keywords. It’s something you should prioritize going forward.

Using a competitor keyword analysis tool like RankingGap is what you need to speed up your SEO process.

This post was originally written by Vivian and published on February 16, 2021. It was most recently updated on Feb 22, 2022, by Claire Le.

You will learn:

• What you should pay attention for a higher ranking
• Why you need to know a keyword ranking
• Understand about keyword rank tracker
• How to choose the right keyword for your SEO

67.6% of all clicks go to the first five organic results in the search engine. Yes, it is an insane truth. If you fail to optimize your content marketing, you’re not able to reach more potential customers. As a result, you can’t achieve your business goals. 

While doing SEO, you need to keep your eyes on your performance. But, how do you know if your keyword research and SEO strategy are working?

A keyword rank tracker provides critical insight into how a website is performing in the SERPs. It will help you get a better idea of your website’s visibility based on your target keywords.

Moreover, it is one of the most important SEO tools that you can invest in by far.

Continue reading this blog, you can find the way to rank higher, as well as how to track your keywords in an easy way with a keyword rank tracker. 

Why do you need to rank high on SERP?

The SERPs determine how your site appears on Google’s first page.

Since 90% of content doesn’t get organic local search traffic on Google, the need to get a higher ranking has become critical to a business. 

In general, rankings higher on SERPs will allow you to achieve more referring domains, higher page authority, or higher website authority.

These are factors that influence the keyword rankings:

• Personalized results
• Location/IP address
• Device used
• Google data centers synchronization
• Time
• Search settings
• Other factors

It’s always surprising to find out how many businesses spend time and money investing in SEO without actually tracking their results. Not only do they not know where their website ranked, but they don’t know which keywords they’re currently ranked for — and if they’ve improved or decreased over the period.

If you want real results through SERPs, then you must track your website ranking consistently. This is the reason why you need to know more about keyword rank tracking.

Why do you need to know your keyword ranking?

Keyword tracking helps you determine whether your SEO strategy is working and if your optimization efforts are indeed paying off. 

It can help you monitor your rank drops: 

Keyword tracking tools can also be used to monitor rank drops and identify the cause of that decline. Rank drops typically occur because your competitors are outranking you, or it could also be due to technical errors, penalties, and similar. 

Reviewing keyword rankings is the best place to start when trying to troubleshoot such a drop. By spotting this information earlier, you can easily take the necessary steps to address that problem to avoid the same problem in the future.

It can help you monitor your competitors: 

Keyword tracking informs you which keywords your competitors are ranking for and missing out on. This allows you to make an informed decision and choose the keywords you can rank for. Keyword rankings deliver more than data of your domain’s performance. You also learn how well (or not) your competitors are ranking for your target phrases.

With thorough monitoring, you can track and analyze keywords to discover how your competitor is performing against your target keyword, Furthermore, you can find out their best performing content with the most high-quality backlinks, social engagement, and much more.

It can help you identify more keyword opportunities: 

Keyword tracking reveals how well your target keywords are ranking in the SERP. This information enables you to identify which keywords are the right choice for increasing your business or client’s visibility. By tracking the important keywords continuously, you’ll be able to identify an array of keyword opportunities based on search volume, competition, search intent, ranking pages and determine which ones to prioritize.

It can help you increase your business visibility:

Most users don’t pay much attention to the results at the bottom of the page of the search engine.

The results at the top are supposed to be the best matches, so that’s where they look for their information.

When you have a better keyword ranking, you will be closer to the top of the results. 

How do you know if you are doing well? Use Keyword Rank Tracker.

What is it?

Being successful with SEO is about making intelligent decisions. Rank tracker is a unique tool that gives you accurate insights for every optimization stage. 

A search engine results page (SERP) tracking tool helps to track your website’s SEO position for specific keywords. It shows you changes in keyword positions and allows you to compare them with your competitors.

When do you need to use it?

Most marketers will utilize this tool whenever a new marketing campaign or goal is established to improve your organic traffic.

Companies and businesses need to use SEO rank tracking software to monitor their progress. Understanding how your content ranks on SERP can help you make better decisions about the next content creation and optimization. 

For example, if you create several articles targeting phrases such as “best washing machine,” but don’t see an increase in your website performance, you can then analyze those articles to make adjustments for future content creation.

You can monitor keyword rankings for different pages to see what’s working in your business. If your keyword rankings are going up and your organic traffic is increasing, your SEO efforts are working.

Use our favorite tool – BiQ to know your keyword ranking

BiQ has 4 main features to choose from. To know your keyword ranking, you can use Rank Tracking.

BiQ’s Rank Tracking is more like a search engine ranking monitor that tells how your keywords rank daily, weekly, and monthly across the web. 

The first step to use this feature is to create a rank tracking profile (with your domain name). Then, you’ll access your site’s ranking data as shown.

After you know your keyword rankings, you can monitor your keyword ranking fluctuations throughout the day. These data will help you to re-strategize to boost your keyword ranking before competitors outshine you.

How to choose the right keyword rank tracker?

Rankings don’t make you money; traffic is what actually generates revenue. If you can not get the right tool and receive the relevant data, it is not worth the effort required to get more traffic.

To choose the relevant keyword rank tracker remember these things:

#1. Look at the range of features provided by the tool: 

There are a lot of features you can find in a rank tracker tool. Hence, it’s useful to know the typical features that you will use most. Of course, you do not want to waste money and receive tons of things you do not need.

Location & Languages

A good rank checker tool will help to target localized areas. This reduces the skewness of Google results, thus providing more accurate data to analyze. The best tool should be able to provide adequate data for hundreds of locations.

Different locations mean different languages. It would be a plus for the tool to also support others languages.

Filter your results

You do not want to see each result manually when you receive hundreds of keyword ranking, this is when the filter feature comes in.

In BiQ’s Rank Intelligence, you can make use of the “Advanced Filter” to sort out your keyword ranking data and identify underperforming keywords.

Support both desktop and mobile ranking

The rankings on the SERPs can vary on desktop and mobile. That’s why a great rank tracker should support the data about these two sides. 

Tagging feature to organize your tracking:

The tag feature allows you to divide relevant keywords into several groups, making it easier to track them. This is one of the added values provided in BIQ and often lacking in every other tool. 

With a tool like BiQ’s Rank Tracking, you can group your ranking keywords. For example, you can categorize them according to quality, content topic, and importance.

Quick update/custom update: 

Users would always want to get real-time information on how a site stands in SERP within one click. Instead of waiting 7 days, one expects instant ranking changes. 

The good news is: BiQ gives you daily updates. You will not miss any day of data. To see the full picture of your ranking graph, you just need to choose the correct period.

Accurate tracking:

If you are doing SEO for your clients, then you need to prove the campaign’s success by reporting to them. 

It’ll also allow you to see the SERP features and show you if your page ranks in the featured snippet, ask section, or video section. 

BiQ will snapshot the top 100 SERPs and show the users. So you will not only receive the average position, but you can also have a summary of any keywords gained or keyword loss.

#2. You should have a clear goal:

The above idea is to look at a rank tracker. You also need to identify something to decide the suitable tool from your side.

As per estimates, 90 percent of content gets no organic local search traffic on Google. That alone proves that SEO is challenging without the proper keyword ranking software at hand.

It is essential to understand why keywords are helpful for your business so that your optimization journey will be easier to go. 

During the journey, you will have some questions: Is your business looking to generate more sales or leads? To increase brand awareness or customer engagement? Depending on the overall goal, you should make a plan to generate qualified leads using specific keywords or topics successfully.

As a result, identifying your business goal at the beginning will guide you in the right direction. You know the right tool to use, then track the right keyword. Finally, you get specific results.

TL;DR

Your keyword rankings are an enormous part of SEO. Thus, a SERP keyword rank tracker can help you put your SEO strategy on the right track. It can show your drops and climbs and help you know your competitor’s work. From that, you can identify the keywords to focus on and get the opportunities to rank higher.

Seeing your keyword ranking and improving it from that baseline number can significantly help you get more traffic to your site. So, try out the excellent keyword rank tracker tool like BiQ to know your local ranking, and you can start your optimization plan now.

Ranking high and getting on the first page of Google is one of the quickest ways to drive more traffic, capture leads, and boost sales. But what should you do if you’re getting smashed down by your competitors all the time? 

In this article, you’ll discover exactly how to use keyword gap analysis to rank on the first page of Google and get the results you desire. 

I’ll help you steal competitors’ tactics, find their weaknesses, and build a solid strategy.

What to Know Before Conducting Keyword Gap Analysis?

There are certain things you should be aware of before conducting keyword gap analysis. Not knowing them could be disastrous and lead to unpleasant results.

Let’s prevent that by clarifying the most important SEO competitor analysis terms.

Why Do Keywords Matter?

Keywords are the building block of any SEO strategy. Every time people search for something on Google, they type in the keywords to the search box.

When they hit enter, they’ll get the results for the keyword they typed in. These results are shown and sorted by the search engine by the relevance, quality, etc.

If you’re looking to rank high and get as much traffic as possible, you must discover what keywords people search for and create high-quality content around them. 

It’s the only way to rank high, get more traffic, and maximize your potential.

What to Look for When Picking Keywords?

Picking the right keywords is vital for running a bulletproof SEO strategy. Yet, most people keep picking the wrong keyword and wonder why they aren’t getting any traffic.

The first thing you must realize is that contrary to common belief, you shouldn’t pick the keywords with the highest traffic. This is because these keywords are usually impossible to rank for and will only waste your time.

Instead, it’s much better to pick keywords with moderate traffic and less competition. 

Also, the more specific the keyword is, the better you zero in on your audience and tailor your content to them, which will increase the quality and relevance.

That’s the reason why you should always pick long-tail keywords over short-tail ones.

In essence, long-tail keywords are 3+ words long and specific, unlike short-tail keywords.  You can see examples of both short-tail and long-tail keywords below.

You should also care about the searcher’s intent. In other words, why is somebody looking for this keyword?

If somebody is looking to learn more about how antivirus works, there is no reason to sell these people the best antivirus on the market, right? They don’t care about that. They are just looking for more information, not buying.

If you mess up the searcher’s intent, your content will become less relevant, and the quality will suffer. So be sure to avoid that at any cost.

Here are the three search intents you can use with your keywords.

Make your content aligned with the searcher’s intent and pick long-tail keywords that are much easier to rank.

What Is an SEO Competitor Analysis?

There are multiple ways you can go about researching keywords, such as brainstorming, using keyword research tools, competitive keyword research, etc.

But these techniques only assume that you’ll rank high – THERE IS NO GUARANTEE.

Unfortunately, in today’s world, you can’t afford to only guess and hope your strategy will work. And that’s why you must conduct a competitor analysis…

Competitor analysis allows you to analyze your competitors and find out what works. It takes away all the guesswork and helps you find out proven strategies that have shown results to your competitors. 

There are multiple ways you can go about competitor analysis which you can see below.

In this article, we’ll be looking closely at the first technique – keyword gap analysis. It will help you close the gap between you and your competitors and rank higher fast.

What Is a Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword gap analysis allows you to find out what keywords your competitors rank that you don’t. It can help you discover missed opportunities and find keywords that your audience searches for.

It can also give you insights into what your readers want and give you new content ideas. 

This can make your content strategy more complete, fix your weaknesses, and fill in the gap between you and your competitors.

It’s one of the most effective ways to find great keywords and create useful content. But if you’re looking to make the most out of it, you must pick the right competitors, study them relentlessly and discover their strengths and weaknesses. 

This may not always be as straightforward as it may sound. Keep on reading to discover how to do it properly and supercharge your results.

The Fundamentals of Keyword Gap Analysis

Now that you know what keyword gap analysis is, let’s look at some of the juicy benefits that can motivate you to pursue it with your business.

Here are a couple of reasons why you must use keyword gap analysis in your SEO.

BETTER SEARCH VISIBILITY

Spying on your competitors can help you discover why they are getting more traffic than you do and find lucrative keywords you aren’t using in your strategy. 

You can then use them in your content, move up in the rankings, and beat competitors.

MORE CONTENT IDEAS

Coming up with new content ideas isn’t easy, especially when you have already created a lot of content.

But we all know how important publishing content regularly is.

Competitor keyword analysis can give you a hand and help you develop tons of fresh content ideas you can use in your strategy.

OPTIMIZED CONTENT

Compare your content with the competitors’ content and find out what they do differently. For example, what keywords are they using, and what are the structure and the length of the content?

Conducting a competitor keyword analysis will help you discover all these things, better optimize your content, and make it high-quality. 

It’s the easiest way to improve your content and drive more substantial results.

BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR AUDIENCE

Finding out related keywords you aren’t using can uncover new opportunities to go deeper about the topic and answer your audience’s questions.

This can make your content more valuable and help you rank in People Also Ask snippets.

Creating high-quality content that answers all of your readers’ questions should be your number one priority, and that’s why you must conduct competitor keyword analysis.

What Areas of Competitor’s Website Should You Analyze?

There are a lot of things you can analyze with the keyword gap analysis. However, you definitely shouldn’t focus on only one area – the written content.

There are a lot of other areas you should consider which we will cover next.

TITLE

The title or the headline of your content is the most critical part of content. It will help you hook the readers, make them click, and also assist you in ranking high.

This is because the title is the first indicator by which the search engine tries to understand what your content is about and if it’s relevant to the search query.

And to make it as relevant as possible, you’ll need to include keywords in it.

A keyword gap analysis will help you compare your titles with competitors, find out the differences, and fix any issues. It can also help you discover how to create better titles that can maximize your results.

URL

Another area (which is often overlooked) is the URL of the content. Whether you believe it or not, including the right keywords in there can make a massive difference in the long run.

Fortunately for you, a lot of companies skip it, which can give you a competitive advantage.

Be sure to analyze it, find the differences, and use more appropriate keywords inside the URL of your content.

Quick Tip: Don’t make your URLs too long. It’s not optimal and can hurt your rankings.

META DESCRIPTION

A meta description is another area you should pay attention to. The meta description is the subtext of your search result.

It should act as a quick summary of your page and present a hook and a strong benefit for the searchers to click. It’s also an ideal place to include related keywords that describe your page so Google can rank it properly.

Comparing your keywords to the competitors’ can help you spot the inaccuracies that may cost you the search result position.

ALT TEXT

Image alt text is not only something most bloggers ignore. It’s also something most bloggers avoid totally.

But this is not optimal, and if that’s you, you should start adding alt text to your images.

The alt text describes the image and helps the search engine better understand what’s on it.

It won’t make a huge difference but can give you a slight advantage that can be just enough to rank you higher. That’s why you should incorporate it into your keyword gap analysis.

Remember, it’s small details like keywords in the URL, alt texts, and meta description that make all the difference. You and your competitor’s keywords in these four areas can easily be analyzed and compared using a keyword gap analysis tool like RangkingGap. 

If you’re wondering how to do that, here are the four core strategies of keyword gap analysis that you need to know.

4 Keyword Gap Analysis Strategies You Need to Know

Now that you know what areas to analyze and work on let’s look at the four best keyword gap analysis strategies you must use.

They will allow you to perform the complete competitor analysis from scratch and give you the desired results in no time. So be sure to follow these strategies in the order we’re listing them to get the best results faster. 

#1 Keywords That You Rank, But Your Competitors Don’t

The first strategy of keyword gap analysis is finding out what keywords you are already ranking. There are multiple ways you can do that, such as manually typing the keywords you are trying to rank for to Google and getting your data there.

As you can see, if your site is neilpatel.com and your target keyword is “keyword gap analysis,” then you’re ranking in the 3rd position for that keyword.

However, doing it that way is extremely ineffective, inaccurate, and time-consuming.

I highly recommend using the proper tool to analyze your website and give you the ranking keywords automatically. It can save you countless hours that you can invest into improving your site and SEO game.

If you use the dedicated solution, all you need to do is type in your domain’s URL, click on the search button, and automatically get the full report generated.

You can see an example of that below.

If you use a keyword gap analysis tool, you can easily make comparisons of you and your competitor’s keywords. You’ll be able to find out their rankings and compare your results to discover the keywords only you rank.

These are the most vital keywords you should invest the majority of your time in. 

You should also track them to see whether your rankings are increasing or dropping. If they’re falling, you should update your content to stay on top.

All of this is what most bloggers do, though. Unfortunately, they stop there. However, if you’re looking to get the best results with the keyword gap analysis, you shouldn’t…

You should also look at the historical data of the keyword to predict future behavior. 

This is important because let’s say you’re ranking for a keyword in the 10th position. You decide that you want to rank it higher, so you start creating more content around it.

But what you may not know is that this keyword is declining in the searches and will slowly go flat. That’s why you must check the historical data of all your keywords. For that, you can either use your competitor analysis tool or Google Trends.

You simply go to Google Trends, type in your keyword, and set the time range.

As you can see above, “competitor analysis” is still worth pursuing because it keeps its position over time and is very stable. Do so for all your keywords to discover their value, predict future behavior, and avoid headaches with pursuing dead keywords.

Find your unique keywords, build your content around them, and rank higher effortlessly.

#2 Keywords That Competitors Rank, But You Don’t

Finding every high-volume keyword and ranking for it is close to impossible. There are many keywords you can rank for, and you certainly didn’t catch every valuable one.

And that’s why you should check up on your competitors and find out their keywords.

Specifically, you should look at keywords only your competitors rank, and you don’t. Go to your keyword gap analysis tool and get a list of competitors’ keywords ranking in the top 10 results on Google.

Compare them with yours and find keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t.

You should then sort them by the ranking position and determine why you aren’t ranking for them. Here are a couple of reasons for that.

1. You haven’t covered that part of your niche yet
2. You used a synonym or related keywords
3. It’s a new keyword, and you haven’t optimized your content yet.

Either way now is the best time to fix it, get ahead, and beat your competitors.

Let’s go over two strategies you can use to leverage these valuable keywords you aren’t ranking.

PRODUCE NEW CONTENT

If you compile a list of competitors’ unique keywords, you will quickly discover the parts of your niche you haven’t covered yet.

That can help you come up with new content ideas that have shown results.

Therefore, you should start creating new content to widen your reach, attract more people, and make your website more authoritative.

If you plan to do so, it’s ideal for connecting multiple keywords. Consider the table below. The website isn’t ranking for “SEO responsive design,” “SEO recent update,” and “SEO inbound marketing.”

You don’t need to create three articles about these keywords – it would only take a lot of time. Instead, you can merge them into one piece.

For instance, you can write an article about Recent SEO Updates in Inbound Marketing and discuss the importance of responsiveness due to the rise of mobile traffic. Just like that, you save yourself a lot of time and effort while you get the same results.

On top of that, you also create high-quality articles that will make your site more helpful.

REOPTIMIZE YOUR OLD CONTENT

Optimizing your content should be among the top priorities. Delivering accurate and fresh information will help you be more authoritative and prevent confusing or misleading your audience.

And you get a big juicy ranking boost from Google too…

The process of reoptimizing your article is pretty self-explanatory. You go through your old content, add a few sections, spit in new keywords, and make it more relevant.

After that, you can expect a significant boost in traffic, higher ranking, and beating competitors.

These keywords are crucial. You must start creating or re-optimizing content around them as soon as possible and filling in the competitive gap.

#3 Keywords That Both of You Rank

If you compare your keywords with your competitors’ keywords, you will have many keywords in common. However, you may find out that a specific competitor can be beating you in almost all of them.

It can be very frustrating, so let’s discover why that is and how to fix it…

COMPILE A LIST OF COMMON KEYWORDS

The first step of this competitor analysis strategy is finding out keywords you both rank. It’s similar to the previous strategy, except you’re looking for keywords both of you rank.

After you get that, it’s time to visit competitors’ websites.

FIND ARTICLES CONTAINING THE KEYWORD

Once on their website, it’s time to locate the articles that contain these keywords. This should be no problem because most of these keywords can give you a pretty good idea of what to look for.

For instance, if you see keywords like below, you know what to look for, right?

There should be no problem in identifying the articles with these keywords. However, going through all of your competitors’ posts manually and looking for suitable ones can be very overwhelming and time-consuming.

Fortunately, you can automate it by using Google search operators.

All you need to do is type site: your site name “target keyword” to Google. So if you’re looking for the keyword “whiskey decanter” and your competitor is surprisesandgifts.com, it would look like below.

This allows you to narrow down the articles to only those that use the target keyword. You can also search for articles that contain more than one keyword.

I did exactly that below and narrowed down the 160 results we got previously to only four.

Do the same and list down all of the articles that contain these keywords. You should also do likewise with your site and compare the search result number.

If you have created only one article with the keyword, while the competitors have created over 100 of them, it’s obvious that they will rank higher than you. 

Check it out before you move on to the next step.

COMPARE THE ARTICLES

Once you find the articles, it’s time to study them and discover what makes them superior to those you have created.

There are a lot of things that you need to inspect.

First, you should look at the keyword density and compare it to yours. For example, if you include a keyword in your article only two times while your competitors use it 15 times, there is a big chance that they will outrank you.

You should also check the word count – longer articles tend to outrank the shorter ones.

Second, you should inspect the header tags and find out what audience they are targeting. You might’ve missed the search intent or forgot to include a critical section.

All of that can cost you a ranking position in the SERP – Google is very strict.

You should also look at the article as a whole and find out what makes it different or better. The more you study it, the better results you get. So don’t be lazy on this step. Take your time and analyze it as much as possible.

It will go a long way in moving you up the ladder and making you the people’s go-to.

#4 Keywords That You & Most of Your Competitors Don’t Rank

These keywords are the gems of your SEO game. If you can spot them quickly, they may lead to extreme growth and many new readers. In addition to that, they can separate you from the rest and help you stand out.

But they are also extremely rare and hard to discover…

Fortunately, there are still ways and strategies to find them and leverage them. Here are a few actionable steps you can take to use them in your strategy.

CREATE A LIST OF COMPETITORS

If you’re looking to make this strategy successful, you can’t be comparing your site to only two or three competitors. Instead, compare it with at least 5 to 10 competing websites.

The more competitors you compare, the higher the chances of finding a unique keyword.

FIND UNIQUE KEYWORDS

Compare your competitors’ keywords and find some that only one or two of your competitors rank.

The fewer competitors rank for it, the better.

GROUP SIMILAR KEYWORDS

It’s ideal when you find multiple unique keywords that you can group together. You can then come up with unique content ideas and be more well-rounded.

It will help you with increasing your authority and getting new readers only you can serve.

5 Keyword Gap Analysis Best Practices

Now that you know about the four best keyword gap analysis strategies let’s look at some of the best practices you should follow. Doing so will allow you to get better results, prevent blunders, and stay on top of your SEO competitor analysis.

Here are the five best keyword gap analysis best practices to follow.

1. List Out & Analyze Your Competitors

Starting keyword gap analysis without having a clear picture of who your competitors are can lead to poor results. Moreover, it will only waste your time and effort. 

That’s why it’s critical to establish competing websites from the early beginning.

If you’re not sure who your competitors are or how to find them, don’t worry, we got you covered with the four best strategies for finding your competitors.

MARKET RESEARCH

Take a look at other companies selling similar products that you do. You can talk to your sales team to find out which or search for it manually with Google.

For instance, you could type something like below to Google if you’re in an SEO niche.

You’ll immediately get a huge list of all your competitors in a matter of a few seconds. 

After you get the list of competitors, you should reduce it to only the businesses that are similar in size and sell to the same audience.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

Another technique you can employ to get even more precise results is to ask your readers which other businesses they were evaluated. Again, this technique is superior to market research because it allows you to see your biggest rivals.

You don’t have to go through hundreds of brands and reduce them to the most relevant ones.

Instead, your readers will do the job for you, saving you time to invest in more important tasks.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is one of the best places for brands to connect with their audience and build an online presence. 

For you, as a business owner, it can also be an opportunity to find similar brands in your niche and identify competitors.

You can also go to forums like Quora or Reddit and find customers’ favorite brands.

ONLINE TOOLS

If you’re not on a tight budget, you can invest in online tools to analyze and list out the most relevant competitors automatically. It can drastically cut time, bring better results, and help you run a more solid keyword gap analysis.

If you decide to go with this option, I highly suggest you go with SimilarWeb or Contently.

They are highly intuitive and have the best combination of price and features. Both of them also feature the demo version, which you can try for free to see whether you like it.

No matter which option you choose, the quantity of competitors isn’t nearly as important as the quality. You must analyze the results, throw away companies that aren’t within your reach and focus only on the similar, more relevant ones. 

2. Identify & Compare Keywords

The four keyword gap analysis strategies we’ve talked about earlier work great. But maybe you just want to know what keywords your competitors use that you don’t and don’t care about the other three strategies.

However, if you’re looking to unlock the godly power of keyword gap analysis, you should think again…

Leveraging just one of these strategies will get you only so far, but using all of them combined will get you on the legendary level.

It will be more time-consuming, but the results are definitely worth it.

Here’s a brief yet comprehensive step-by-step method on how you can utilize RankingGap in uncovering these 4 amazing strategies:

STEP 1: CREATE YOUR PROJECT

First thing first, go to your dashboard. You’ll see a pretty straightforward user interface that easily tells you what to do. So here, select your preferred location and language, then indicate you and your competitors’ domain.

You would want to make sure that your domain is entered correctly. Instead of say, “https://www.freshworks.com”, the correct input would be “freshworks.com”.

comparing 5 websites simultaneously would be more effective as you can just straight up select the best keywords among your competitors.

Once done, you’re ready to create a new project.

STEP 2: START WITH A KEYWORD VIEW

Here’s the main biggest part that makes RankingGap what it is; The FOUR keyword views that accomplish all your keyword gap analyses.

Basically, you can start off with any of the views. But let’s just go with the flow below:

Common keyword view – This shows you keywords that both you and your competitors share. But here’s the catch…you could be ranking higher or lower than your competitors do. So, find a way to maintain or outrank those keywords.

Missing keyword view – This shows the keywords that all your competitors are ranking for except YOU! So, find the best and most performing ones to include in your own content.

Gap keyword view – This view uncovers keywords that only some of your competitors have. This means that these keywords are less competitive and in fact, valuable in discovering a new audience.

 Unique keyword view – This view lists out all the keywords that only you are ranking for. Amazingly, you are ahead of most of your competitors for these search queries.

STEP 3: REFINE KEYWORDS

While you’re in one of the views, you may scroll past some unwanted keywords. you may choose to sort it out if you’re just trying to get a quick glance at certain data (the most and least of the results).

But this method isn’t entirely effective. 

So, a better way here is to make good use of the “Advanced filter.” Just include the range that you want for the ranking position, volume, competition, or CPC.

STEP 4: STAR YOUR FAVORITE KEYWORD

If you are a fan of collecting and bookmarking things that you like, you can choose to star the keywords that you find valuable for later use or export.

You can choose to skip this step if you like. But the star feature definitely helps you organize and declutter your keywords by folds!

STEP 5: EXPORT KEYWORDS

Finally, you may want to consider exporting the keywords. You can do a quick export of 1,000 keywords (if there is), or if you’re the type that wants things fast, just export all.

And as I’ve mentioned in step 4, you can try to make clear what keywords you want first, star it, only then do you export them.

Once you’ve done the necessary, it’s time to move on to the 3rd best practice.

3. Further Refine And Filter Keywords Based on What You Identify

Now it’s time to look at the keywords you got from the four keyword gap analysis techniques and observe them further. There are three simple questions you should be able to answer.

1.What Are the Ranking Keywords Like?

Take a list of the keywords your competitors use and find out what are they like. For example, are they mostly plural or singular?

You should also discover the type of keywords they rank for.

Are they long-tail or short-tail keywords? Continue studying them and compare as many metrics as possible. In ideal circumstances, you would compare all of the metrics you see in the table below.

These will help you discover what your audience searches for and the lucrative keywords that work well within your niche.

2. What Is the Amount of Keywords Your Competitors Include per Page?

The second important thing to observe is how many keywords your competitors place on a single page. There are two parts to it.

First, you should find out how many different keywords they place on the page. You can easily find that out with the SEO Review Tool. Then, you hop on the page, type in the competitor’s URL, and hit enter.

You’ll get a list of the most common keywords they used on their page.

Second, you should also care about the keyword density – how often are keywords used on a single page. Again, you can see that in the SEO Review Tool too. 

You should be inspired by your competitors and analyze it, however…

Many companies overuse keywords, so don’t necessarily copy their density if it’s too high. Instead, I suggest shooting for 1 – 2% keyword density, which means using a keyword once or twice every 100 words.

Find out both of these metrics, compare them, and consider the change if necessary.

3. What Is the Content Surrounding a Particular High-Ranking Keyword?

Another key thing to look out for is the content surrounding the keyword. You should observe competitors find out how they place keywords on their webpage.

Is it natural, are they forcing it, or do they use it as an anchor text?

You should also care about whether they highlight it with bold or italics or just leave it blank to make it fit into the content.

Whatever it is, find that out, discover what works and use it in your strategy.

4. Categorize and Label Your Filtered Keywords

This step is especially great if you plan on creating new content with the keywords you’ve stolen from your competitors. The first thing you should do is sort out keywords by volume, CPC, competition, etc.

You should counter all of these together to get the keyword value.

Keywords with the highest value should be your main keywords, while the lower value keywords should act as related keywords supporting the main term.

You should then create a label for every keyword you have. I suggest you create two labels. First, mark it as the main or supporting keyword, and the second is to describe the topic you plan to use.  

After a while, you come to realize that some keywords don’t belong anywhere. They may have disastrous value, or you can’t fit them in any content you plan on creating.

These are usually irrelevant keywords you should get rid of because they’re worthless.

5. Recognize a Pattern in Your Final Keyword Group

Competitor keyword gap analysis shouldn’t end just with getting the list of relevant keywords you should use in your content. Instead, if done correctly, you should learn more about your audience and get to know them better.

If you look closely at the keywords you’ve stolen from competitors, you’ll come to realize a thing or two…

You should start realizing who your target audience is, how they think, and even predict the future behavior to discover what keywords will work in the future. The easiest way to do so is to create an ideal persona if you haven’t already.

I highly suggest using the Make My Persona tool from HubSpot for that.

It’s a 7-step process where you start by picking the persona’s profile picture and name and finish with the desires, problems, and education.

You can create your persona and be finished within a few minutes. After you get that, you can better personalize your content and maximize the results.

After you get that, you’ll get a clearer picture of who you are serving and what these people want. This will help you spot a pattern in your keywords, predict keywords that will improve your next content, and develop a winning strategy.

Content Gap VS Keyword Gap Analysis

What Is Content Gap Analysis?

Content gap analysis links your current content and the content that would drive desired results and fulfill your marketing goals.

It’s about identifying content you need to fill the gap between current and desired results.

There are multiple ways you can use to implement it in your business. In my opinion, one of the best ways to get the desired results quickly is to study your competitors. If they perform better, they most likely created a better piece of content than you did.

And all you need to do to fix it is compare your content to theirs, spot the difference, and make it better.

What’s the Difference Between the Two?

While content gap analysis focuses only on content, keyword gap analysis focuses on the search terms people type into Google and the way they think.

With content gap analysis, you can spot the difference between your content and the content that works, close the gap, and drive stronger results.

Keyword gap analysis works differently, though…

It focuses mainly on the keywords your site’s competitors rank for. It helps you get better insights into your audience, helps you discover how they think, and predicts their decisions in the future.

They work great hand in hand. Keyword gap analysis helps you get readers to your site, while content gap analysis will help you keep them reading longer.

Why Should You Be Focusing on Keyword Gap Analysis in Your SEO Practice?

Content gap analysis can do wonders for your content. It can fill in the gap on the market, make your content better, and help you retain more readers. 

However, it has not as near an impact as the keyword gap analysis…

While it can help you retain readers, keyword gap analysis is what gets them to your site. And that’s precisely why keyword gap analysis should be the cornerstone of your SEO practice if you’re looking to get substantial results.

You can have the best content, but you won’t get far if nobody types in your keywords.

If you want to incorporate both of them in your content, start with the keyword gap analysis and slowly progress to the content gap analysis.

Conclusion

Keyword gap analysis is vital for long-term success and getting to the desired results. But, unfortunately, it’s often overlooked by the SEO practice.

The reason behind it is simple – it’s tedious and a long process if you do it properly.

However, without getting a complete grasp of what your competitors do, you will not win in the race up the SERP. It’s definitely worth your time, and if you employ keyword gap analysis tools such as RankingGap, you should give it a go if you haven’t already.

You will learn:

• Understand the benefits of doing local SEO
• Know more about local rank tracker
• Know the best tool to track your ranking – Grid My Business

Whether you realize it or not, local SEO is a critical strategy for your business. Ignoring this aspect will only jeopardize your business more than you initially realized.

There are a lot of stages and works for a proper local SEO plan, and there are just not enough hours in the day to take care of everything that comes across your crowded plate.

But, checking the position of your business in local rankings doesn’t have to be another to-do list. You now can enable automatic local results monitoring and track local rankings every week with one local rank tracker. 

This article will show more about local SEO and local rank tracker. I will also show you one incredible tool to identify your ranking – Grid My Business.

What is Local SEO?

As mentioned, local SERPs, are the results that show up for a local-based query based on location. Local SEO refers to the process of optimizing your business’s website for a better local ranking in the SERPs while indirectly bringing better brand awareness. It is a subset of the traditional SEO commonly adopted by local businesses with physical stores to reach customers in their vicinity.

Results in search engines like Google and Bing will differ based on location, so searching for keywords yourself won’t give you objective answers. Searches in different cities, California and Nevada, will vary, as will searches in other areas, such as San Diego or Los Angeles.

The benefits of local SEO:

When roughly 97% of people use online search engines to look for local businesses, some businesses may gain an edge from a regional approach to SEO. Brick and mortar businesses like coffee shops or hardware stores are likely to benefit more when optimizing for local searches than the traditional SEO and here’s why:

#1. It helps you to increase traffic and sales. 

Reaching the top of local search engine rankings means you have to gain more website traffic, increase domain authority, and build brand authenticity. However, the ultimate benefit is the opportunity to attract more customers and increase conversion rates.

Since every SERP is localized, all businesses need to localized search results. Even if you sell globally or only deal with digital products, you should pay attention to how you perform on the local SERPs. Otherwise, you could potentially lose traffic and conversions.

Many people rely on Google My Business listings to discover a local business nearby to visit and support.

#2. It helps you to reduce advertising costs.

One of the must-do lists when planning a local SEO is to create a Google Business Profile, which is entirely free. There is no need to send out flyers, place ads in the newspaper, or conduct localized social media campaigns. By using local SEO, regional customers can easily find your business online.

#3. It can gain more foot traffic from local online visibility.

The fact is one in three people uses their smartphone to search for products before looking for a physical store. By optimizing your company’s local SEO, these local customers are more likely to find you and visit your store. 

If local customers find your business through an online search and have a positive experience, they are very likely to become repeat customers. Such customers are easier to retain and often refer businesses to others in the same locality, thus, bringing in more clientele.

Local Search and Google 3-pack

Local Search

A local search by which a user expects a subjective result is affected by the user’s location or location provided in the search keywords.

Examples:

• best sushi in Australia
• San Francisco watch shops
• Pizza in Chicago

The above search results take the user’s location or the location provided in the search query into consideration and therefore display the results that would match them best.

Previously, search results would be the same regardless of which country you searched from – provided you didn’t use specific geo-modifiers in your search. Now, Google and other search engines modify the search results based on location. Localization is arguably the most crucial filter Google passes its results through to build its SERP.

Google 3-Pack

Most rank trackers claim to track locally, but they only track the 3-pack. The Google 3-Pack, often also referred to as the Google Snack Pack, is a listing of three local businesses (with physical locations) below a Google Map with location points.

The results in the Local 3-Pack are strongly tied to the location the user is searching from, and it varies by which geo-modifier you use.

The Google 3-Pack shows up whenever your query has local intent or implied local intent. Searches with local intent might be: “coffee shop near me” or “Coffee shop in Kuala Lumpur”. 

Understand more about Local Rank Tracker

What is it?

A local rank tracker is a tool that helps you to check your website ranking as a local user. It makes you understand the results of your SEO campaign and identify the way your website is ranking on different search engines. 

All this obtained data can help you in the keyword process or give you the possibility of using them in the development of your marketing strategy.

What can you get from a Local Rank Tracker?

#1. You can see the most important SEO metrics:

If you’re running a local business, you must be able to receive and track accurate and relevant data on your rankings. When you want to refine the data, you can also add filters to see how you rank in different locations or on different devices.

#2. You can have your local ranking updates: 

The thing is that website rankings are constantly changing. Plus, they differ heavily across different geographic locations. 

Monitoring local rankings will provide you with a much better understanding of your website’s visibility on Google as well as on other search engines. This way you’ll automatically level up your SEO results that won’t take long to be noticed. 

You can even check your progress in different countries, cities, and zip code areas, and choose from daily, weekly or monthly updates.

#3. You can save your time:

You can typically set up local business listings across the web for free with tools like Google Business Profile and check your ranking automatically with tools. As a result, it can save you tons of time and effort to manage your business information on the internet. 

How to improve your local ranking

So you have gone through the information about local SEO and local rank tracking tools, and you might be struggling to know where you should start. Here are 5 tips for you to optimize your business local SEO.

Tip 1: Optimize for local keywords by creating content – BiQ

People use search engines to identify local businesses that provide the items or services they require. To rank in these search results, you’ll need to incorporate local keywords into your website.

When creating content with local intent, it’s critical to include local keywords in the title and meta description tags to help with local SEO. Thus, to delineate your site conceptually and geographically, your content will have to focus on long-tail keywords frequently.

To find keywords for your local search, you will need to conduct local SEO keyword research, and there is a tool that can make this process easier for you – BiQ Keyword Intelligence. 

You just need to put your main keyword, choose your local area and languages, then press generates and wait for a moment. You can get your related keywords, as well as the keyword intent, volume, trend, CPC, and value.

After you get your list of keywords, you should choose the keyword that has high volume but lower competition. A high-value keyword means it will bring more traffic to your website at a lower competition.

It can be quite challenging to decide which keyword to use at first, but as time goes by, you will get used to it and know your target words. That’s where you can sort the keyword value in.

Know more about SEO keywords here: Supercharge Your SEO with A Keyword Generator

Tip 2: Optimize your Google Business Profile  

Google Business Profile is often the first impression that people get for your business and brand, so it cannot be ignored. You can’t do local ranking without a proper Google My Business listing which will automatically improve SEO and increase the visibility of your business. In addition, it will effectively affect your business on the Local 3-Pack feature, Google Maps, and organic rankings.

In fact, this is one of the top factors that Google evaluates when ranking businesses based on local search and snack pack results.

To make your profile accurate and sufficient, you need a consistent NAP. A consistent NAP data is when your business name, address, and phone number are identically and accurately listed across all online platforms, including on your website, social media accounts, business listings, and other third-party websites.

Tip 3: Obtain and respond to customer reviews

To get into the local pack, you’ll need reviews, which are one of the top three factors for higher rankings. The quality and quantity of reviews on your local listings can easily bring people in as easily as it can deter customer away from you and towards the local competition. Responding to reviews is an opportunity to build a trusting relationship with each customer.

Remember that you should also make an effort to actively start asking for reviews. 

On the other hand, if you already have customer reviews, you should take some time to learn how to respond to negative reviews and positive feedback. Why? Because it shows that you care about the customer experiences and use reviews to improve it for future patrons.

Tip 4: Build links on a local level

Backlinks from 2-3 high authority websites can do much more for your search engine results than your imagination. Though link building has always been tough, it is not impossible. 

It’s a fact that most local events most probably need sponsors. If it’s possible for you to sponsor a local event, then you can try it out; as usual, your link will be nicely positioned on the event’s website.

More link-building strategies that could work for a local site include:

• Reaching out to the local websites that write local news, cover local businesses, and host local blogs. 
• Offering your product or service to a local blogger/review site in exchange for a backlink to your site.
• Giving to your local community by sponsoring charities or local organizations can lead to backlinks.

Tip 5: Track your local ranking and continue optimizing

The essential step to improve your local search rankings is investigating your current visibility. You just need to type your business name in our local search rank checker, add phrases commonly searched by your customer, and see how visible your business is right now.

The best tool to use: Grid My Business

Grid My Business is a local rank monitoring tool that will show you the local search rankings of your local business and your competitors’ on Google Maps in a grid view.

It supports all locations that can be found on Google Maps. Once you have finalized your targeted keywords, you can obtain profound insights into your local rankings with Grid My Business. 

Other great features of Grid My Business: 

• Max up your ranking discoveries with up to a 15 x 15 grid size for each scan.
• Identify local rankings of multiple search queries by performing a quick and easy bulk scan of up to 5 keywords per scan.
• Keep track, monitor, and compare your local ranking performances.
• Get precise and on-time weekly updates of all your rankings.
• Schedule an automated rank monitoring for any of your local businesses.
• Get a comprehensive white-label report of your local rank monitoring results.

How to use Grid My Business to monitor your rankings

Most local rank tracking tools will tell you your local ranking with data alone. And that’s it. You won’t know what your local competitors’ local rankings are for the same search query.

Grid My Business solves this problem by allowing you to monitor your local rankings on a grid. This grid will be placed on top of your business location. Not only will you get to see your local ranking position, but you will also get to see the top 20 business listings at every grid point!

The numbers on each grid point indicate your local ranking position for the search query you have added. 

There are only 3 simple steps for you to monitor your local rankings.

Step 1 – Insert Your Business Location & Search Query

First, you need to enter your business location at the field given (1). A list of relevant results will appear as suggestions; you should select the location that best matches your business location.

After that, add the search query that is relevant to your business. For example, I used a local search query such as “best bakery”.

Step 2 – Select Your Grid Parameters.

The grid is one of the most important features in Grid My Business. This determines the scope and coverage you want to view your results in.

There are two items to select here.

The first is grid size. It is pretty straightforward; you pick the size of the grid you want to view your results. There are seven grid sizes available:

Next, select a grid radius. The grid radius is the radius between each grid point. 

The scanning radius between each grid point increases at an interval of 0.1. The maximum radius you can select in Grid My Business is 100.

Step 3 – View Your Scan Results

Once you have selected everything, click on the “Scan Now” button to run your scan. Do note that it may take some time for the results to load. You can wait for the results or choose to run a new scan with a different search query and location if you like. You can find all your scans in the report feature.

Once your scan result has loaded, you will see a grid that looks like this.

You will see a maximum of 20 business listings when you click on each point. The listings are organized based on their current local rankings on Google 3-pack.

All it takes is just 3 simple steps to monitor your local rankings with Grid My Business. 

TL;DR

It is vital to know how your business truly ranks in local and organic search results. Your website’s global rankings may differ from local search rankings – what your customers see when searching locally. 
This article has helped you understand the impact of your SEO work and make data-driven decisions with a local rank tracker tool. Instantly view your search result ranking, your ranking position for tracked keywords, and more with Grid My Business now.

We all know that ever since the release of Penguin Algorithm Update, Google deals harsh penalties for websites that use black hat SEO techniques, so here’s an idea to keep you up at night:

What if a malicious party (say, your closest competitor) starts using those techniques on your site just to try and get you penalized?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is something that is commonly known as Negative SEO.

What Is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO is the act of using Black Hat SEO (the exact opposite of white hat SEO) on other websites in order to get them penalized by Google. Negative SEO can also include reducing the effectiveness of a website’s SEO properties by disabling or altering them.

Dealing with Negative SEO techniques can be quite tricky since some of them are out of your control, like pointing bad links (a.k.a link bomb) to your site. Another thing is, they are also a bit hard to detect.

Unlike some hacking practices that aim to deface or simply take down a website, a Negative SEO attack doesn’t affect a website’s look and feel.

Instead, the effects are only apparent once your website takes a dip in search ranking and incoming traffic.

But Why Would Anyone Commit A Negative SEO Attack?

Similar to hackers, people who do Negative SEO attacks might do it for various reasons. It can be intentional, such as sabotaging a competitor’s website, extortion, or simply for fun. Do not be surprised you will find plenty of these Negative SEO Services online easily.

And believe it or not, an unintentional Negative SEO attack can also happen. There are cases where family members, employees, or even hired SEO agencies deliberately do obsolete Black Hat practices on behalf of the owner thinking it will help their website ranking.

Types Of Negative SEO Attack

Just like normal SEO, Negative SEO also have both on-page as well off-page aspect to it:

Negative Off-Page SEO

As the name implies, Negative Off-Page SEO attacks without internally changing your website. Mostly it revolves around using Black Hat or negative SEO link building practices and points them to the target website:

= Link farms are a series of web pages created for the sole purpose of linking to another page on the web.

Ordinarily, inbound links are a good thing that helps to improve your site’s ranking… but if you have a lot of links coming in from the same unrelated, spammy websites, it tells Google that you are trying to artificially increase the number of links pointing to your page by creating link farms and you will get penalized. 

In a Negative SEO attack, malicious parties will create obvious link farms and heavily link to the target website.

Sometimes they will also purchase link farm services or buy site-wide ads to achieve the same effect. Since it’s hard for Google to tell who’s responsible for the links, it can lead to a Google penalty on the target site when detected.

= Copyright complaints are a bit more complex, but at their core, they usually involve someone claiming that you’ve posted material that belongs to them.

In many cases, this can result in the automatic removal of the page for up to 10 days – and wouldn’t it be just awful if your landing pages vanished right in the middle of your biggest campaigns?

= Finally, competitors can falsify duplicate content – basically just copying and pasting your web pages over and over, maybe even as part of those link farms we discussed above.

An influx of duplicated contents across domains might signal a manipulation attempt to get multiple different websites ranking with the same content. This used to be a popular Black Hat SEO technique before Google started cracking down on it.

As you can see, there are many different ways for negative SEO techniques to be done to your website… but no matter how tempting they might be, you should never even consider doing any of these yourself.

Even if it works in the short-term, it’s not going to be effective forever… and could land you in serious legal trouble if anyone can prove you were behind it.

Negative On-Page SEO

This form of attack is a little different and generally focuses on hacking into your site and changing things around. With as little as a few minutes to start messing with your setup, a hacker could easily disrupt your site’s coding, introduce viruses, and generally wreak havoc on everything you’ve tried to build.

The real threats are the ones that are hard to see, though, and consist of the following:

• Negatively altering your SEO properties: Let’s be honest – are you really that likely to notice if someone changes all the alt text on your pictures to be less effective? A lot of basic SEO techniques are intended to be “set and forget”, and that’s what can leave you vulnerable to on-page negative SEO strategies.

• Changing the Robots.txt: This is easily one of the most important files on your site when it comes to SEO because it tells crawlers how to interact with your site. It is normally used to tell Google which part you don’t want them to crawl and index such as a live but unfinished page. An attacker with access to your site can easily modify the robot.txt to tell Google to ignore important pages or even the whole website.

• Modifying Redirects: Search engines have an opinion on certain error pages – namely, they’re bad. Sites that automatically redirect from bad pages generally aren’t penalized too much, but if your redirects are changed, disabled, or scrambled, you could find yourself plummeting down the ratings.

The good news, as we’ll discuss later, is that on-page negative SEO attacks are much harder to perform… and much easier for a competent programming team to fix, too.

The Likelihood of Negative SEO Attacks

With all the stuff we’ve talked about here, you might be worried that there’s a rampant amount of negative SEO going on and you just haven’t caught up to it yet.

Well… not exactly.

Google is quite good at detecting when negative SEO is occurring. For example, if someone’s trying to do some Google Bowling and smash you over with site-wide links, there’s a good chance that the link from that site will only be counted as one vote from them – unlikely to do you any real harm.

Also, remember that while Google is actively hunting down Black Hat SEO practices, some might slip through for a while. This means that Negative SEO attempts won’t guarantee a penalty from Google for the victim. Not only that, but it might also do the opposite and actually help the target to rank better!

Similarly, hacking attempts are not that hard to avoid as long as you are using a robust system securing your site (make sure they are updated). Also, avoid using simple administrator passwords just because you think nobody is interested in ruining your humble site. You know what they say – better safe than sorry.

In general, Negative SEO can be costly, takes a lot of effort, and is highly risky. The return, on the other hand, isn’t even guaranteed and while it might work, it’s quite easy to fix once the target realizes what is happening.

In short – Negative SEO is a high risk, low reward activity. Unless there’s a very compelling reason (revenge maybe?), it is quite unlikely for anyone to attempt on doing it.

The most likely websites to be targeted for SEO are those in highly-competitive, high-money fields – gambling sites are a common example of this. Sites that are in calmer niches are far less likely to be hit by negative SEO – indeed, anything that happens is more likely to be an accident or a remnant of an old advertising strategy instead of a deliberate attack on you.

That doesn’t mean you should be complacent, though. Constant vigilance is the best way to protect your site and your reputation, so let’s look at what you can do to help protect your site.

How To Protect Your Website Against Negative SEO

Detection

The first step in protecting your website is to detect any signs of attack such as a sudden drop in organic traffic. This is easy to notice if you are constantly monitoring your traffic through Google Analytics.

You can also set up Google Webmaster Tools Email Alert. This will allow Google to notify you through email if your website is not indexed or receive a manual penalty.

If you haven’t done anything wrong, that can mean that your website is under attack. The sooner you know, the faster you can react and minimize the damage.

Disavowing

Google’s answer to Negative SEO is the Disavow tool. You can see the full process here – what it comes down to, though, is basically saying “I don’t like or trust that link, please don’t factor it into my rankings”. By disavowing low-quality links, you avoid associating your website with them so that your ranking and reputation is protected.

Utilizing the Disavow tool also tells Google that you care about the quality of links pointing to your site. This will be taken into consideration when Google’s Webspam Team is considering whether to penalize your site when they detect an influx of bad links pointing to it.

The Disavow tool is very useful against :

• Link Farms
• Google Bowling

To look for these low-quality links, you can use BacklinkGap. It’s essentially a free backlink checker tool that has the feature to add your unwanted backlinks into a disavow list.

When you have added your links to the list, just export it in a CSV format and put the list into Google’s Disavow tool.

Securing Your Administrator Login

Hackers generally require some sort of administrator access in order to mess around with your site, and by adding additional levels of security, you can drastically reduce the odds that they’ll be able to break in and start disrupting what you’re doing.

This will help you stop:

• Altered SEO properties
• Changes to important files
• Modified redirects

Revising SEO Settings

This isn’t tied to a particular problem, but you should regularly revise your SEO properties. This includes checking out your robot.txt once in a while or performing random checks on your contents’ internal coding (headers, image alt tag, etc).

If you are using SEOPressor Connect, checking SEO properties will be much easier as each content will have its SEOPressor score. If you regularly optimize your contents’ SEO properties to get a high SEOPressor score, then you can easily spot the ones with a bad score and fix them.

It is always better to be active and aggressive in searching for attacks on your site, rather than locking it up and expecting that nobody will be able to get in.

At the same time, you can use BiQ Rank Tracking to keep track of your website and keyword’s rank to notice if there are any unexpected ranking shifts. 

This especially helps in case of a negative attack and you can be quickly alerted that there is a competitor out there trying to ruin your rankings and take fast actions to recover it.  

And though many often avoid rank tracking because it calls for a huge expense. But BiQ executes everything differently because you only need to pay for the features that you use.

It just charges you for the features you actively use for the times you actually use it. That’s way cheaper than hiring SEO agencies or using the regular SEO suites.

Moreover, BiQ offers a free tier available for any new account sign-ups!

Final Thoughts

Back to the topic at hand, make no mistake, but negative SEO attacks are a real threat, not just a common one. And even though you can disavow links or report them to Google, it might take some time before Google can conclude that you are innocent and not the one who’s behind the Black Hat practices.

It’s better to be safe than sorry. Now that you know what is negative SEO, set aside some time every now and then to check for negative SEO, and if need be, resolve it using whichever technique is most appropriate. It is also a good idea to just be nice to others and avoid giving anyone any reason to attack you in the first place. After all, being nice is free.

You will learn:

• They needed basic information about keywords.
• How to find relevant keywords in a short time
• Know 5 common keyword finders: LSIGraph, BiQ, Moz, Answer the Public, and Semrush.

Whether you’re marketing a top 100 company or a startup, there’s little guarantee that your clients can find you online if you are not ranking for the right keywords.

However, determining which keywords to work with and ensuring they aren’t too competitive is often a bit of a challenge. Here is when the keyword finder can make it as effortless as possible for you. 

Here are some keyword research tips to carry out and a tool that can save your time.

Understand about keywords:

What is it?

Keywords are the terms that search engine users use to find your website, pages, and products. If it weren’t for keywords, there would be no need for search engines in the first place!

Keyword research is one of the first and foremost crucial steps in any marketing stage.

Why do you need to choose the relevant keywords? 

In fact, 0.16% of the most popular keywords are responsible for 60.67% of all searches. And according to Backlinko, the #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7%.

That means if you choose the right keywords to optimize your content SEO and rank higher, you can get a lot of organic traffic. 

When it comes to search engine optimization, the most critical factors determining your overall site performance are the keyword relevancy of your site. It is often the first step of any SEO campaign. By researching and selecting the most appropriate target keywords, you create the opportunity to rank well in search engines for that specific topic.

High rankings in search engines drive traffic to your website, and in turn, allow you to promote your products/ services online.

Two common types: Short-tail Keyword vs. Longtail Keyword

Sorted by length, there are two common types of keywords.

The first one is the  “Short-tail keyword,” also known as head/generic keywords, which are popular, broad search terms with a very high volume of search traffic. These terms are usually one or two words, and they are very competitive to rank for. Short-tail keywords have a tremendous search volume but are also highly competitive. The audiences use short-tail keywords when they are at the very first stage of researching stuff.

The audiences use short-tail keywords when they are at the very first stage of researching stuff.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are usually much more accessible to rank for compared to short-tail keywords. If your site is new or not highly ranked, it can take years of hard work and continuous improvement to rank for a short-tail keywords like “coffee” or “tea” — these are highly competitive search phrases. 

It’s beneficial to target long-tail keywords like “how to make a cappuccino” or even more specific questions like “how tea brings benefits to health.” Creating high-quality, helpful content around them can also strengthen your website relevancy with the topic, hence helping you to get discovered by the same people who may search for broader, more competitive keywords.

These keywords would be strategically placed in and around your website on your main pages, blog posts, headers, footing text, and other locations.

To know more about other types of keywords, read: 9 Types of Keywords in SEO You Need to Know to Convert

How to find the best keyword ideas with keyword research tools?

#1. Define your ‘seed’ keywords

Seed or the main keywords are the foundation of the keyword research process. Every keyword research tool asks for the main keyword to generate more keyword ideas. Seed keywords usually have one or two words. Thus, these short-tail keywords tend to have high monthly search volumes and high competition.

Seed keywords can be used to sprout other keywords for you to optimize your website. After identifying a few relevant seed keywords for your website, you can build them up with modifiers to generate long-tail keywords.

Because they affect your website’s long-tail keywords, you need to select the right seed keywords. 

Don’t worry too much about competition when selecting seed keywords — their short and generic format makes them more competitive than longer and more specific keywords. Instead, choose seed keywords that reflect your website’s content and that you can build upon with the use of modifiers.

For example, if you sell fishing equipment, then seed keywords might be:

• Fish rope
• Fishing tool
• Gripper
• Hook

#2. See what keywords your competitors rank for.

Looking for the keywords already sending traffic to your competitors is another way to do keyword research. However, you need to first identify those competitors. Then, you can start looking into your competitor keywords.

Here’s a tool that helps you discover your competitors and also see their keywords – RankingGap.

Using this tool, it will be a lot easier to find keyword opportunities that your competitors have missed out on, putting you far ahead of the race.

With the Competitor Discovery feature, you can identify your top competitors. RankingGap shows you the Competitor Graph, with the statistics about total ranked keywords, estimated traffic, and so on.

As you can see below, even if you’re pretty familiar with your industry, you can still find plenty of unique keyword ideas by studying your competitors that you probably wouldn’t have seen from brainstorming alone.

RankingGap is one of the tools with simple UI/UX that any SEO or keyword research newbie can navigate easily.

There are four views:

• Common: You and your competitors are ranking for.
• Missing: Keywords that your competitors all have but you don’t.
• Gap: Keywords that only some of your competitors have.
• Unique: Keywords that are uniquely yours.

It could be a good idea to prioritize high-volume keywords that your competitors are not currently ranking. On the flip side, you could also see which keywords your competitors are already ranking for and try to outrank them.

#3. Use keyword research tools:

Competitors can be a great source of keyword ideas. But there are tons of keywords your competitors aren’t targeting, and you can find these opportunity gaps by using free keyword research tools for SEO.

Keyword research tools often work the same way. You plug in a seed keyword and get to see a list of keyword ideas from their database.

A keyword research tool helps you find the right keywords for your content writing or optimisation. Most keyword research tools also provide accurate search engine data to guide your keyword selection. The key idea here is to select keywords with high search volume but low competition. When the right keywords are used strategically in your content, they can be extremely helpful in boosting your search ranking. Next, let’s take a look at some of my personal keyword tools.

Top 5 best keyword finders:

LSIGraph

LSIGraph Keyword Research is a powerful tool to help you easily find semantic keywords to use for your blog. Semantic keywords are contextually-related keywords like synonyms, co-occurring terms, or implied words that you can use to increase your blog content’s keyword density without falling into the trap of keyword stuffing.  

One reason why I love LSIGraph is how easy and intuitive it is.

Just enter your seed keyword, choose your search location and language, and wait for the result. LSIGraph returns a list of semantic keywords you can use in your writing. 

LSIGraph shows you important metrics for each of the keywords including its search volume, difficulty, cost-per-click, and competition. LSIGraph’s in-house metric, their Opportunity Score, evaluates the keywords and tells you which keywords you can rank for with the least amount of effort.

Those are the keywords you should prioritize in your blog content. 

Besides finding you the most profitable keywords, LSIGraph also shows you how top-ranking pages are structuring their content with LSIGraph SERP Analyzer so you can emulate them.  

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz is an attractive and well-laid-out keyword research tool. You can put a keyword in Keyword Explorer and get information like monthly search volume and SERP features (like local packs or featured snippets) ranking for that term. 

You can see monthly volume, organic difficulty, organic click-through rate (CTR), and a priority score for each search term. The priority score aggregates the difficulty, opportunity, and volume to show how likely you are to rank for that keyword phrase in a simple score.

Keyword Explorer delivers a long list of top keywords for each term, with monthly search volume and relevancy.

BiQ – Keyword Intelligence

BiQ generates long-tail keywords that are linked semantically to your main keywords. You only need to enter a single seed keyword for BiQ to generate numerous long-tail keywords. 

BiQ’s features include keyword intelligence which helps you conduct local SEO and decipher customer behavior through keyword intent analysis. 

When you get your related SEO keywords, you can evaluate them through the keyword intent (whether informational, navigational, or transactional), volume, trend, and value. BiQ even gives you the content ideas and popular questions people often search for on the SERPs.

Besides, BiQ comes with other useful features like content intelligence, rank intelligence, and rank tracker.

Semrush

Semrush Keyword Magic Tool is one of several free tools offered by SEO giant Semrush. You can always sign up for the paid service down the road if you’d like.

The Keyword Magic Tool starts with a seed keyword. You can sort keywords into topic-specific subgroups, apply smart filters to narrow or expand your search, and quickly export your findings. You can see related keywords by topic and semantically related keywords or by keywords with similar phrasing.

The Keyword Magic Tool gives you access to more than 20 billion keywords from over 120 geographical databases.

Answer the Public

AnswerThePublic is a keyword research tool that aggregates Google autocomplete suggestions and helps you find long-tail keywords related to a topic. It does this by creating word clouds that visually group related queries.

Answer the Public finds questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabetical, and related searches. This free tool populates commonly searched questions around a specific keyword.

You’ll see a visualization by default, but you can switch to a regular list.

#4. Study your niche

Some keywords will be apparent, like “green tea benefits.” But it’s those obvious keywords that are also hard to rank for, as everyone has the same idea, the competition will also increase.

Consider your customers (the targeted ones) to shortlist your best keyword list. You should know what their needs, problems, and pain points are.

A good starting point is to browse industry forums, groups, and Q&A sites. This will help you find more issues that your prospective customers are struggling with. These struggles can then be converted into different blog posts or content on your website to help your SEO.

TL;DR

Once you find out which tools and features are most relevant to your keyword research, you can use them to build a comprehensive content strategy that will increase traffic and boost your rankings. 

Wouldn’t it be great if you used a keyword finder tool that took all that data and helped you quickly create an actionable plan for content marketing improvement?

You will learn:

• The importance of keywords in content marketing
• Know the top 8 best tools for finding relevant keywords.

Content marketing is essential for making your business appear more in front of your customers. 

However, there are several obstacles that you will face, especially when it comes to SEO and finding your keywords.

For example, you want to rank for keyword A. Due to the nature of the semantic web, you need more related keywords in your content to send a stronger signal to Google that you are highly relevant to the topic.

If not, you can’t expect the users to somehow find your website or blog posts on the SERPs. This is especially true if you don’t know what they are looking for and make the right use of keywords. 

Search engines have become more sophisticated and are now able to identify pages that make good use of keywords. As a result, the results obtained from keyword-generating tools have become even more critical.

An incredible keyword generator tool is a solution for getting the relevant keywords (and semantic keywords) to help you rank higher. 

Typically, keyword generator tools allow you to check the search volumes of specific search queries. What more can these tools do? In this article, we have outlined the details of keywords generators and listed 8 best tools for you to choose.

The importance of keywords:

Keyword research will always play a part in a thorough SEO strategy. And, of course, it is an ongoing process that never really ends.

If you want your website to get traffic from Google or other search engines, you need to make sure that your website is sending the right signals to them. This means that you should be utilizing words that your potential audience is looking for.

So what do you often use keywords for?

#1. Use keywords in your blog posts:

Keyword research is an essential SEO task. You can’t compete without content that rocks. It represents a vital part of finding the right keywords to use for your site. 

Keywords are important because they are the linchpin between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to fill that need. Every business goal in ranking on search engines is to drive organic traffic to your site from the search engine result pages. In order to do that, the keywords you choose to target (meaning, among other things, the ones you choose to include in your content) will determine what kind of traffic you get. 

Besides your overall content, there are several places for you to put your keywords:

• In the title, subtitles
• In the meta description
• In the pictures’ ALT
• In the URL

As a result of using the relevant keywords to attract your customers and let the search engine know your content, you can rank higher on the SERPs. When the majority selects the website on the first page, your site ranking will increase along with the organic traffic.

#2. Use keywords as inspiration:

Using related keywords in your blog posts will increase your SEO metrics and also show the search engine what you are writing.

If possible, use one of the related keywords and primary keywords in the post title, subheading, and the page’s meta description and SEO title.

Or, you can use related keywords as inspiration for other content. Keyword research provides rich data about what people (prospects) want to know about your industry, products, and services. If you know what information your prospects are looking for you can more easily develop content on your website to meet their needs.

When you create a list of phrases that relate to a primary keyword for your site, you should look for high-performing, low-competition keywords that can be the primary phrase for other content you create.

Why do you need a keyword generator?

For those who are wondering what a keyword generator is; a keyword generator is an online keyword research tool that helps you generate hundreds of relevant keywords for any topic (or even long-tail keywords). It provides suggestions for paid and organic content marketing campaigns.

Whatever goals you have and whatever business you run, picking the right SEO keywords lays the basis of the foundation for your SEO campaign. So it’s better to ensure you have your SEO toolset with a few of these free and easy-to-use tools.

It is important to note that a keyword generator does much more than simply identify a few words that could be helpful in the copy posted on a given website.

Generally, keyword research tools allow you to check the search volumes of specific search queries.

So overall, it automates the keyword research process and saves you tons of time.

Top 8 Keyword Generators:

There are paid and free keyword generators out there. It is important to know that there are good free keyword generator tools. You don’t necessarily need to pay for one the very first time. It’s all about finding the one that works best for you.

LSIGraph

LSIGraph helps you easily find the best semantic keywords to use for your content. Semantic keywords are contextually-related keywords like synonyms, co-occurring terms, or implied words that you can use to increase your keyword density without the pitfalls of keyword stuffing. 

LSIGraph is easy and intuitive to use. Just enter your seed keyword, choose your search location and language, and wait for the result. LSIGraph returns a list of semantic keywords you can use in your content. 

LSIGraph shows you important metrics for each of the keywords including its search volume, difficulty, cost-per-click, and competition.

LSIGraph’s in-house metric, their Opportunity Score, evaluates the keywords and tells you which keywords you can rank for with the least amount of effort.

BiQ

BiQ has four features: Keyword Intelligence, Content Intelligence, Rank Tracker, and Rank Intelligence. BiQ Keyword Intelligence is simple to use, you just need to type in the website URL, and the tool will run for a few minutes. After that, there will be a list of keywords your website is ranking for. 

It is powered by AI to compare your content and the Top 10 ranking results in your target keyword’s SERP. Keyword intelligence can also help you create semantically related words in real-time. Similarly, it allows you to conduct SEO keyword research in over 50 languages with long-tail key phrases and keywords.

With over 2.5 billion keywords in the database, the tool presents the related keywords of your niche in an easily understandable interface alongside important keyword metrics.

Not only that, BiQ has more exciting features. If you’re looking for interesting ideas for your next blog post, you can head to content ideas for a range of keywords you can target. Besides, if you’re eager to know some of the questions revolving around the content you’re about to create, the popular questions tab can help you out!

You can easily use BiQ to discover the ranking content and search snippets you should be targeting. You can perform all this on a single platform that closes all those additional tabs that make your site stuck.

WordStream

WordStream helps you discover, export new keywords and performance data to lead you to succeed in Google Ads and Bing Ads. It gives you hundreds of relevant keyword results with actionable information like competition level and estimated CPC.

It’s a fantastic alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner. Once you’ve got your keyword list, download it as a CSV file to make it super-easy to upload directly into your Google Ads or Bing Ads account. 

SemRush

There is keyword difficulty and the number of search results returned by the selected search engine for the query. There is a good deal of stats for analysis in each query. SemRush also has the Competitive Density metric that measures the competition among advertisers bidding for the given keyword in PPC campaigns.

Besides, you can see the keyword difficulty metrics or volumes of your keyword. SERP Features support you by identifying keywords triggers and how many URLs are displayed.

WordTracker

By using WordTracker, you can find related keywords for more substantial content that ranks better. The SERP preview lets you see the search results and the difficulty of the competition right in the tool.

The unique point of Wordtracker Scout is that it has a Google Chrome extension. When you’re next on a competing webpage, you can hover over the content and click the W button, which generates a cloud summary of the page’s keywords and insights. 

Ubersuggest

Like many keyword tools on this list, Ubersuggest involves you entering a seed keyword, hitting enter, and viewing a ton of keyword suggestions along with search volume and SEO difficulty stats. 

You’ll get hundreds of suggestions from head terms to long-tail phrases from our free keyword tool. You’ll also see volume, competition, and even seasonal trends for each keyword.

With Ubersuggest, you can see the exact content in your space that people are linking to. You then approach each of these sites and ask them to link to you.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs Keyword Generator is one of the free tools offered by Ahrefs, which is a popular paid service. Enter any target keyword or phrase, and it will pull the top 100 keyword ideas from its database.

For each keyword phrase, the Keyword Generator displays:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty from 1 to 100
• How recently this result was updated
• A list of questions related to your search term

Ahrefs Keyword Generator is an efficient and valuable free tool that allows you to do unlimited searches without creating an account. However, it does not allow you to download your results. 

Google Trends

Anybody doing local keyword research knows that search patterns differ between countries. But, surprisingly, the trends also vary considerably from region to region — this is why a precise local keyword tool is needed.

Google Trends is here to help you identify city/location-specific search volume variation. Just have the tool compare two synonymic queries to see how misleading a country-level keyword analysis could be for local biz.

While Google Trends isn’t specifically a keyword tool, it can give you an idea of where to start your keyword research.

This platform shows you a visual chart of the popularity of particular keyword over time to make it easier to decide when to use it.

TL;DR

Overall, keyword research is the foundation of a well-informed SEO strategy. So if you want to understand your audience better, attract more traffic and get a higher ranking, use these free SEO keyword tools to pave the way.

While it’s tempting to jump straight in with expensive monthly subscriptions to a powerful SEO tool, it’s usually better to try out a few first and then see if you want to upgrade your digital marketing tools. An excellent keyword generator like LSIGraph definitely should be your top choice. 

You will learn:

• The importance of keywords in SEO.
• How to come up with the best list of keyword ideas
• Get to know one outstanding keyword generator that can help you find the relevant keywords – LSIGraph.

Many new businesses don’t even consider doing keyword research, and because of this, they struggle to get visitors to their website, no matter how hard they try. Others simply go after keywords that are the most popular (but also very competitive) and fail to rank well in Search Engines.

Still, keywords play an essential role in SEO. And we also understand that generating keyword ideas, especially the one that brings you traffic, is not easy work.

I firmly believe that finding a standard and effective keyword research method is what everyone who has been working in the field of SEO is doing.

This blog can help you to find everything you need to know when researching your relevant keywords. Go through the 5 steps to get incredible keyword ideas with us now, and you can start doing your own quality keyword finding.

One good news: You don’t have to guess whether a specific keyword is the best choice for your organic traffic goals; because there are tons of excellent tools out there specifically designed to help you identify the best search terms and phrases to use in your text.

The importance of keywords in content marketing

Keywords are words or phrases that help search engines identify the topics that your content covers. Algorithms of the SERP have sophisticated systems for analyzing the keywords that users employ in their queries and the terms used throughout a given piece of content. This helps them match the user with the content that best answers their needs.

Keyword optimization is one of the most widely adopted SEO techniques. Within optimizing content, the common goal for businesses is to rank highest on the SERP.

Keyword research and optimization can improve your chances of showing up on page 1 of the search results. Data from 2020 shows that most title tags on Google’s first page contained keywords that were an exact or partial match of that search query.

The excellent and reasonable coverage of keywords helps you communicate to Google that your web page is a relevant match for a query. That means keywords can improve search engine rankings by assisting Google in understanding the web page content.

Aside from rankings, keyword research has other benefits that can help you better serve your consumer.

The majority of your advertising and marketing will use keywords as the primary method for attracting customers, and keywords are words or phrases that are used to match your ads or content with the terms people are searching for. These will be the proper foundation of your campaigns. So selecting high-quality, relevant keywords for your campaigns is critical.

In the end, the right keywords will get your content in front of the right people at the right time, thus, driving more qualified traffic to your web pages.

All of these above matter for SEO. To elaborate, keyword research helps you understand the way your target audience might describe and look for your products or services. It also shows you how people ask for more information on your topics when using a search engine.

Yet, there is one emerging problem: The vast majority, up to 92.42% of keywords, have a monthly search volume less than 10. 

So it is significant to see that choosing the relevant keywords is vital yet not easy.

How to get keyword ideas for your SEO content?

Keep reading because the five simple steps outlined below will walk you through how to research keywords for SEO:

#1. Brainstorm to find niche topics and main keywords:

Without thinking about anything else, start your process by writing down all of the things that interest you (of course, it needs to connect to your business). These can be personal interests or professional interests.

Think about what you want to discover or enjoy doing while surfing the internet to learn more about your niche. Imagine what they’re searching for and the terms you’re going to use. Think of specific search words for each product or service category you have available and use personas to get in your customer’s head.

Imagine you have a photography studio and thought photography blogging could be a great niche. You can share photos, learn about camera technology, and provide information about your service. 

Or another example, you have a cooking class business. Your target audience would be people interested in taking up cooking classes. Even if you don’t have the time or budget to start a massive social media campaign, you can create a food blog to analyze recipes online. You could also discuss choosing the perfect ingredients and weighing the benefits of organic versus GMO ingredients.

Another example, you are starting a blog about the gym. The first keywords that come to your mind are ones that you would use in a Google search:

• Gym for beginners
• Gym tips
• Gym skill
• Gym clubs

These would be your seed keywords and broad topic ideas. 

#2. Make sure you know your searchers’ intention: 

Search intent (also called user intent) is users’ primary goal when typing a query in search engines. 

There are 4 main types of searcher intents, and each comes with different goals:

Navigational: people search for a specific page or website. 

You can have product keywords that focus on a particular product category, brand name, or service. People using these phrases are in the early buying stage. For instance:

• Best
• Affordable
• Quality

Informational: people search for detailed information such as definitions, recipes, how-to, or in-depth information about the product/service.

The bulk of keywords online is “Informational keywords.” It’s natural for people to look for information before starting the buying process. Information keywords tend to include words like:

• How to
• Best way to
• Ways to
• Steps to
• I need to

Transactional: people search for something when they are ready to make a purchase. 

Specifically, keywords related to transactional can be the type of “Buy Now” keywords. These are keywords that people use before making a purchase. Here are words that tend to be part of these types of search queries:

• Buy
• Coupon
• Discount
• Deal
• Shipping
• Sale

Commercial investigation: people search for the comparison of products or reviews. This is similar to information intentions, but it goes more to the commercial side.

For the commercial investigation, product keywords tend to include:

• Review
• Best
• Top 10
• Cheap
• Affordable
• Comparison

You will need to determine what keywords to focus on for each intent. Besides, you need to identify a suitable searcher’s intentions for each goal.

If one of your goals is to make money online, you must select commercial intent keywords. 

#3. Find your list of keyword ideas

It’s time for you to get your keywords. There are many ways, but commonly, we will show you the 3 most accessible and fastest methods.

Get keywords from Google.

If you are on the fence about a keyword, run a Google search with it. 

Google has more data on search activity than anyone. Ever noticed as you type a phrase into the Google search field, it begins guessing what you’re looking for? The system is anticipating your needs based on the popularity of past searches and attempting to save you time by offering suggestions. So, you need to see what sites, phases, and words come up. Would your site make sense with those results? Are there ads on the results page? Does it look like there’s a lot of competition for that keyword?

Apply this “Google Suggest” way. 

And also, you can even get more ideas on the related content suggested at the end of the search result pages:

Get keywords from the keyword generator tools.

Without keyword research tools, finding the correct terms to incorporate into your blog or online store content to help it rank on search engine results pages would be like throwing darts in a dark room. 

You can get serious with our favorite tool. You have more tools that you can use to find more keyword ideas. Some of them are free, freemium, or paid.

LSIGraph is one of our favorite paid keyword research tools. LSIGraph’s Keyword Research offers plenty of data on what people search for and how competitors rank for similar terms.

A simple search returns tonnes of semantic keywords. Semantic keywords are contextually-related keywords like synonyms, co-occurring terms, or implied words that you could use in your content to increase your keyword density while avoiding the trap of keyword stuffing. 

LSIGraph shows you important metrics for each of the keywords including its search volume, difficulty, cost-per-click, and competition. Their proprietary Opportunity Score evaluates the keywords and tells you which keywords you can rank for with the least amount of effort.

Besides finding you the best keywords, LSIGraph also shows you how top-ranking pages are structuring their content with LSIGraph SERP Analyzer so you can structure your content page after them.

You can also use LSIGraph to find long-tail keywords–keywords that contain at least three words, and questions and sentences that could be used as title inspiration.

LSIGraph is intuitive to use even if you do not have a background in SEO.

Get keywords from your competitor:

Another way to find valuable keywords is to spy on your competitors.

Investigating your competitors can be a great way to come up with ideas that you never would have thought of in the first place and can inform the rest of your keyword research later on. We’re typically referring to keywords that your competitor ranks well in search results, as well as the keywords of top competitors that are targeting but have failed to rank well for.

Of course, you can not do this manually. You can use a tool to support you, and RankingGap can be the one for you. 

RankingGap is one of the latest and unique keyword gap analysis tools that were made to let users conduct our keyword gap analyses quickly and efficiently.

The 4 keyword views, Common – Missing – Gap – Unique, were specially designed to help users claim their competitive advantage.

To read more about competitor keywords analysis, read this: SEO Competitor Analysis: A complete guide you need to know.

#4. Shortlist your keyword buckets.

The fourth step is to analyze the data to choose your best keywords group.

The tip here for you is to organize by theme. Group all of your keywords into tightly related themes, and as you look at that list of articles, see if you can break them up into sub-themes. And again, the more thematic, the better results that you’ll have. 

So if you have an ad group for women’s bags, you would want to get more granular and create themed keywords such as women’s handbags, women’s backpacks, women’s clutch, women’s fashion bags, and so on.

The above tip is based on the meaning; however, the most important are search volume, CPC, or cost-per-click. 

The search volume shows how many users search for each keyword per month. The higher the search volume, the more users are interested in that particular keyword.

The cost-per-click is data pulled in from Google AdWords or Google Ads that represents how many advertisers are trying to place ads for that keyword. 

So when discussing how to find keywords, the ideal keyword would have a high monthly search volume but a low cost-per-click. This means that many users are searching for this information, but not many websites are trying to rank for it.

Even though a keyword may have a lot of search traffic, you always want to ask yourself if that keyword will bring you quality traffic. 

For example, “Glass Tile” might have a ton of search volume, but if you only sell ceramic tile, your chance of making a sale from those visitors is low. Make sure that the keywords you target result in conversions and revenue.

#5. Apply keywords in your work:

Now, you can use your keywords in your content. 

• Include Keywords in Titles

When your page shows up in search results, the page title is the first thing someone will see. When the keyword they’re searching for appears in the title, it indicates that they’ve found what they’re looking for. And most importantly, Google pays attention to those page titles as well!

Try to use your keyword at the beginning of the title for maximum effectiveness.

• Include Keywords in Meta Descriptions

When someone searches for “content marketing for beginners,” they not only see it in our title but in the meta description as well. This is to get an overview of the page content without click reading.

• Include Keywords (Often and Naturally) in Content

You provide relevant content that answers questions and assists visitors in purchasing. Engaging, easy-to-understand content will hook visitors and keep them on your page, but you also need to include keywords so that Google can show them your page.

It’s best to assign a keyword to a single page and then do everything you can to optimize your page for that keyword.

TL;DR

Using the correct keywords is critical for you to attract the right audience. You don’t want to drive opposing traffic to your site, in other words, an audience that is misdirected and not interested in your products.

You can now use many SEO keyword generator tools to generate tons of keyword ideas. Try out the incredible one like LSIGraph to quicken your process.

You will learn:

• Understand SEO keywords, from what it is to their importance
• Know how to use an SEO keyword generator effectively

Whether you’re a big business trying to dominate the competition or an SEO agency working with small businesses, finding the right keywords is essential for improving a website’s rankings. Keywords and SEO are directly connected to running a successful search marketing campaign.

However, sometimes this work is not easy, especially when you started off from a blank canvas.

Getting the right SEO keywords is a delicate process involving trial and error, but the basics are easy to understand. This article will show you all the information needed to find the relevant keywords for your content marketing.

We will also show you how you can save time using a keyword generator. Let’s get started today!

Understand SEO keywords

What is an SEO keyword? 

“Keyword” is a popular term that we’ve all heard. If you’re new to SEO, you might be confused about what keywords are and why they’re so important.

SEO keywords are the words and phrases in your content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. They are what your readers type to search for in the search engines.

The importance of SEO keywords:

In fact, according to Zero Limit Web, the first 5 organic results in the SERPs account for 67.6% of all clicks. 

When you align your content creation and optimization with the words, topics, products, and services your target audience is looking for, you have a better chance of showing up in the search results.

It’s true that SEO has many more elements than a keyword, but it arguably plays the most essential role throughout the process.

You need to know how people are looking for your products, services, or information and make it easier for them to find you. Otherwise, they’ll land on one of the many other pages in the Google results.

To drive search engine traffic, whether, through organic search or paid search advertisements, you need the right keywords. Do you know that 15% of all Google search terms have never been searched for before? 

While we certainly can’t optimize for that 15%, what we can do is to ensure that we show up for the rest of the 85%.

To rank for that 85%, you need to help the search engines understand what your page is about.

For example, if a blog post has a title tag with the keyword “best coffee shop,” and a list of the best coffee shops in your city, it is telling search engines that it’s a relevant page to show for people looking for a coffee shop in your city.

As a result, SEO keywords give you a better chance of showing up in the search results.

It’s time to use an SEO keyword generator

What is it?

When creating website content, you need a tool that can help you write the most relevant content. An SEO keyword generator is one of these tools since it automates the keyword research process and shows you all the keywords that you should use in your content.

An SEO keyword generator is a tool that helps you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrases. Some tools also show data like search volume and trends to help you analyze the effectiveness of keywords.

What can you do with an SEO keyword generator?

A keyword generator has a number of great features that give you information to do SEO better. For example:

• Traffic estimations 
• Keyword search volume and competition
• Best keywords for a selected language or country
• CPC
• Historical data

What do these data mean?

• Search Volume: The number shows how frequently people searched the phrase in the last months. This is important to make sure the keywords are something people are actively looking for. If a keyword has 0 search volume, you probably want to look elsewhere.
• Cost-per-click: When you run a marketing campaign, you also need to consider your budget to run ads. The CPC data is extracted from Google AdWords so you can be sure of how valuable a keyword is. Keywords with higher CPC are usually more valuable, but they are also more expensive to target.
• Competition: This shows you how difficult or easy it is to rank for this keyword.

A good keyword generator can also help you find new trending keywords before the competition as their keyword suggestions are constantly updated based on search trends and topic popularity.

There are several SEO keyword tools that you can use to find keywords related to your business, both free and paid. To determine which you should use, you should consider which features you’ll need and your budget.

To help you shortlist the best tools, we introduce you to our 3 favorite generators: LSIGraph, BiQ and RankingGap. Let’s see what you can do with these SEO keyword generators.

LSIGraph

LSIGraph is a powerful tool to help you easily find semantic keywords to use for your content. Semantic keywords are contextually-related keywords like synonyms, co-occurring terms, or implied words that you can use to increase your keyword density without falling into the trap of keyword stuffing.  

LSIGraph is one of our favorite keyword research tools due to how simple and intuitive it is to use, even for users with little SEO knowledge. 

Just enter your seed keyword, choose your search location and language, and wait for the result. LSIGraph returns a list of semantic keywords you can use in your content. 

LSIGraph displays the important metrics for each of the keywords including its search volume, difficulty, cost-per-click, and competition.

What’s unique about LSIGraph is their proprietary Opportunity Score which evaluates the keywords and tells you which ones you can rank for with the least amount of effort.

BiQ – Keyword Intelligence

BiQ allows you to conduct SEO keyword research in over 50 languages with long-tail key phrases and keywords. All these words are linked semantically to your main keywords. You only need to enter a single seed keyword for BiQ to generate numerous long-tail keywords. 

BiQ’s features include keyword intelligence, content intelligence, rank intelligence, and rank tracking, which helps you conduct local SEO and decipher customer behavior through keyword intent analysis.

As a result, you can also easily use BiQ to discover the ranking content and search snippets you should be targeting.

RankingGap – Identify the gap in keywords between you and your competitors

This keyword gap analysis tool can identify specific keyword gaps against your competitor. In the end, you can establish a laser focus strategy to reduce the gap and outrank them.

RankingGap isn’t just a keyword research tool but also a rank discovery tool. You can have a massive list of common (keywords you share with your competitors), missing (keywords you don’t have but all your competitors do), and unique (keywords only you have) views.

What is the next step?

You might wonder what you need to do after finding out your list of relevant keywords. Now you can make these SEO keywords work for your content and get SEO results like search-driven traffic, conversions, and so on.

Choose your keywords group.

Based on metrics and data from tools (such as CPC, volume, competition, latent semantic value, etc.), you can sort out the most valuable keywords for you.

Read more about search volume here: What is a Good Keyword Search Volume? The Ultimate Guide 

Then, keyword grouping is a step you must apply here to get the best use of these keywords. By dividing your keywords into small, manageable groups of related keywords, you’ll cut down on your workload.

To kick off this process, you can start thinking about the topics you want to rank for in generic buckets. About 5-10 topic buckets, essential to your business, are enough for you. Each of those topic buckets will have your related keywords.

Apply to your content

On the one hand, SEO best practices recommend that you include relevant keywords in a number of high-attention areas on your site, these are places like titles, headings, URL, and more.

For a more comprehensive list of where to use your SEO keywords, here are our suggestions:

• Using the keyword in the title of the page
• Using the keyword in the URL
• Using the related keyword, and variations, throughout the page copy (when relevant)
• Using the keyword in the meta tags, especially the meta description
• Using the keyword in any image file paths and the images’ alt ext
• Using the keyword as the anchor text links back to the page from elsewhere on the site

However, do not spam your keywords every part and do not force these words into your content. 

TL;DR

So now you have learned basic information about SEO keywords. Using the right SEO keywords can help you communicate with the SERPs and rank higher. You can also catch your target audience and gain more traffic to your sites. Although the finding keyword process can be complicated, an SEO keyword generator is vital for you to do online marketing work.

Remember that choosing the correct keywords is essential for a blog to succeed, but this is just one of the aspects to work on, and you cannot neglect other important factors. Be sure to re-evaluate these keywords every few months — once a quarter is a good benchmark. 

What will you learn?

• Understand clearly about competitor analysis and competitor analysis tool
• Get to know the top 8 competitor analysis tools

Even if you are already ranking at the top of the search results for all your most important keywords, you can still be defeated if you overlook your competitors’ actions.

This is when you need to do a competitor analysis.

With competitive analysis, you will be taking a step back and looking at the overall market, where you stand, who the competitors are, and what the search landscape looks like for the most valuable keywords.

This seems like a lot of work to do, especially if you do all these manually.

But fret not, you can always quicken this process with a competitor analysis tool. 

This blog will show you more information about competitor analysis and 8 of the best competitor analysis tools to help you with your work.

Before we proceed, let’s start with understanding what competitor analysis is.

Understanding Competitor Analysis

What is it?

Competitor analysis is a process of investigating your competitor’s website to determine what keywords or long-tail phrases they rank for.

Targeting competitor keywords helps you appear on the same SERPs as your competitors or rank higher than them.

Why should we do competitor keyword analysis?

With a surge in the number of competitors in business, we must always be moving and adapting before we succumb to our competitors.

Firstly, the core idea behind competitor analysis is to understand the competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities and make decisive changes to your current marketing strategy.

Competitor analysis enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is critical for staying relevant and ensuring that your product and marketing campaigns are outperforming industry standards.

Keyword gap research is a core part of competitor analysis, it helps you uncover the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors’ websites. This gives you insight into their audience’s interests and helps you choose the next keywords. It is also helpful in discovering long-tail keywords which have a click-through rate of 3% to 5% higher than generic searches.

What you need to pay attention to when analyzing competitors

When it comes to competitor research, it is helpful to get a comprehensive list of your keywords. Here, you’ve got two ways to approach them:

• You approach this at a domain level. You use a competitor analysis tool to find out who are the other domains who are similarly ranking for your keywords.
• You approach this from a keyword perspective. You use a competitors analysis tool to find out other pages that are targeting the same keywords you are aiming to rank. 

For the perfect competitive analysis, you should check both to have a more comprehensive list of competitors that you should look at. According to BrightEdge, 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic searches. If this is done right, you can find the relevant keywords and rank higher, you can attract so much more traffic.

In conclusion, competitor keyword analysis helps you learn more about your competitors, their strategies to rank in search engines, and how you can outrank them and drive more traffic to your website.

It can also tell you where your competitors are falling short. As a result, you can identify the gap – areas of opportunities in the marketplace for your business. Then, you can try out new, unique marketing strategies they haven’t taken advantage of.

After some keyword analysis, you can find exactly which terms, and therefore, which topics you might still need to cover. Keyword gap is a brilliant tactic to generate keyword suggestions and discover opportunities for content creation.

Why do we need a competitor analysis tool?

Doing competitor keyword analysis is not a process you can just grind through. Of course, you can do the entire thing manually but checking the Search Engine Result Pages one-by-one is incredibly inefficient. This is when a competitor analysis tool can come into play.

With the right tool, the whole process can be streamlined and automated to a huge degree. You do not have to do everything manually since the tool can give you accurate data in just a few clicks.

The in-depth competitor analysis data from the tool will ensure that you stay on top of your marketing activities and reap the full benefit. In the end, using a competitor analysis tool just saves you so much time and effort.

However, since there are a lot of brands for you to choose from, we have sorted out the top 8 best tools to get you started.

Top 8 best competitor analysis tools 

#1. RankingGap – Our favorite tool 

The best thing about RankingGap is that you can compare your website with four of your competitors in one go. This helps to effectively determine the best keywords within your niche much quicker than other solutions that does this one-by-one

There are a lot of things you can do with RankingGap. First, we will show you how to find common keywords that you and your competitors ranked.

This is the most straightforward way of performing keyword gap research with RankingGap – to know what keywords you and your competitors share.

Firstly, create a project by inserting your domain and your competitors’. You can also pick a specific location and language combination depending on your use case.

Next, create the project. When the results are ready, you can go to the “Common” keyword tab (which you are already on by default) to see a list of keywords both you and your competitors are ranking.

On top of this, you also get to see the rankings you and your competitors are currently at. This gives you the idea of who you are leading when it comes to different keywords. If your ranking is lower than your competitors, this is the gap that you need to fill.

In addition to this, RankingGap also offers a range of different features. For example:

• Performing keyword and content optimization
• Knowing what content is missing from your site
• Discovering the gaps in your competitor’s strategies
• Analyzing and identifying your website’s strengths, etc.
• Filtering your results to analyze data easier.

RankingGap’s newest feature – Competitor Discovery can even help you with the very first step of identifying your rivals.

The best thing here is that RankingGap shows you the metrics of competitors, filtering the high-low competitors.

#2. SEMrush

Besides letting you see the keywords used by your competitors to rank high, SEMrush also allows you to compare your keyword rating with other websites and also filter the results using various criteria.

SEMrush shows you what category a domain belongs to based on the keywords it ranks in Google. Knowing this will help you locate successful keywords your competitors are using to rank well in Google and whether those keywords are relevant to your niche.

With SEMrush, you can determine how competitors attract traffic — so you can capture some of theirs. This tool also reveals their top pages, keyword strategies, and advertising methods.

The most valuable pieces of data about your competitor you can get from SEMrush are top organic keywords. This is where you can see the keywords your competitor ranks for particular URLs.

#3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs gives you specific ideas on how your rivals use certain keywords to rank on the web. This information is critical in helping you formulate user-friendly content that will work magic in terms of digital marketing.

The Keywords Explorer tool approaches keyword research by doing a “top pages” analysis, identifying dozens or even hundreds of keywords relevant to an article or blog’s topic rather than just specific keywords.

If you feel some inconsistency with your keyword strategy, use the Content Gap report. This report allows you to spot the keywords your rivals are visible for, but your domain isn’t

You can also keep track of all the keywords that matter since the tool monitors over 150 million. With a mouse click, you can add specific keywords and then see information for all of the top pages that rank for that subject.

It also makes it easier to break down the parent topic, which gives you specific ideas on how your competitors are attempting to rank for user intent.

#4. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo provides detailed reports about what your rivals are ranking for and other factors contributing to your competitor’s high ranking.

The best aspect of BuzzSumo is that it lets you compare two domains side by side, so you can see how the two domains rank in the search engines in contrast to one another. So, for instance, you can set your website against your competitor’s and get a detailed analysis of where you stand compared to your competitor.

This means that you can add your own website as one and your competitor as another for a super in-depth analysis of where you are versus where they are.

When it comes to competitor analysis in social media and content shares, Buzzsumo is your go-to tool here. It’s a social media analytics tool that handles influencer marketing, content marketing, or PR.

#5. Moz

Moz offers several tools that can help you analyze your competitors’ keywords. Its Domain SEO Analysis Tool can show you websites that target the same keywords you do, for instance. You can also use Moz’s Keyword Explorer to compare your keyword rankings to your competitors.

Moz is also the ideal analysis tool when you want to discover how your competitor has built their online presence. Link explorer helps you research your rival’s linking strategy.

#6. SimilarWeb

With the help of this data, you can tell for sure which keywords should be your priority because they have the potential to bring more traffic to your client’s site.

SimilarWeb is one of the most versatile competitor analysis tools you can find. It shows where most of your competitors’ traffic comes from, together with any similar pages they visit. Traffic is broken down into 4 sources, including paid, social, search, and direct traffic, so you can see how each source performs.

SimilarWeb also shows you the list of competitors based on what sites are ranking in search engines for the same set of keywords.

This competitive analysis tool will help you benchmark against your competition, monitor your industry, and reveal your competitors’ analytics and online strategy.

#7. SpyFu

SpyFu is a dedicated competitor research tool that can provide a substantial amount of data on your competition. 

SpyFu is a search analytics tool that shows users keywords that websites buy on Google AdWords. That means you can identify all the keywords your competitors have bought and every ad test they’ve run.

If you’re trying to identify your most aggressive competitors, SpyFu can also give you a list of competitor names for the domain you’re analyzing. This tool gives you access to everything from their organic keyword rankings to the keywords they target with Google Ads so that you can develop a more competitive strategy.

SpyFu gives you an in-depth look into your rival’s marketing campaigns—especially their Google Ads activity. Including every keyword, they’ve bought on Google Ads, every organic rank, and every ad variation.

Search for the brand you want to look at, then SpyFu will give you a comprehensive rundown of their Google Ads campaigns. 

#8. KW Finder

KW Finder is a keyword research tool that helps identify which keywords your customers are using in their Google search. 

You can also use it to conduct a competitor analysis on other brands’ SEO strategies. Simply enter the domain of the competitor you want to track, and KW Finder will give you a breakdown of their top-ranking keywords. 

You can then use that data to create SEO-driven content that brings more users to your site.

TL;DR 

Not all keywords are worth putting equal effort into. Use the information from this blog to strategically work out which keywords you should be actively monitoring and optimizing for. Learning from your competitors is a fast and effective way to optimize your competitive landscape.

Carrying out these competitor SEO analysis actions is just the beginning, and as we know, SEO is a long game. Stay up-to-date with the latest search engine rankings by using an automated keyword monitoring tool instead.

After all, choosing a suitable competitor analysis tool for your work is necessary. Our favorite tool, RankingGap, might be the one you should try out.

I have… and if you think about it, aren’t they redirecting viewers attention away from the blog posts to other websites?

Well, they do and website owners are well aware of this. However, website owners still add links because some types of links matter for search engine optimization. Yes, you read that correctly… LINKS MATTER FOR SEO.

These are the 5 types of links that will be discussed in this article:

1. Internal Links
2. External Links
3. Natural Links
4. Manually Obtained Links
5. Self-Created Links

Today, we shall understand further about the types of links and the links that matter for SEO. Excited and eager to learn? Great, that’s the attitude we want!

Search engines actually look at links on websites to help them decide which website to rank on top and on the first page. It is only one of the many factors that search engines consider when evaluating a domain. A search engine can tell whether a website is of good quality through links.

Links transfer values and equity from one page to another and they are called link juice. Link Equity is measured in a few dimensions, mainly, trustworthiness, topic relevance, value and authoritativeness of a page.

In the past, when Google first started, the quality of a website was determined through the number of links a particular website receives. However, many individuals took advantage of it and created several websites that link to their own main website.

These individuals tried to deceive Google that their websites are important, popular and relevant. You guessed it right… as a result, most of them ranked on the first page of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).

Today, things are not how they used to be. Google search engine introduced Google Panda in February 2011. The aim was to remove lower-quality sites from the top page and place higher-quality sites to the top. Search engines now tell the quality of a website by evaluating the website thoroughly using many criteria.

You can read more about the criteria that Google considers when ranking a website here. For those of you who do not know, the underlined “here” in blue is an external link. What is an external link, I hear you ask? I’ve got you covered, read on to find out.

By the end of this post, you will understand more about the different types of links on and off a website and also know how to utilize each of them.

What is a Link?

Link is the relation between two things, or in this case, pages. It is what connects web pages to one another. A very simple way of putting it is anything that leads you to somewhere after you click on it is called a link. It could be in the form of text, image, and even videos.

The Two Types of Links On A Website

The links you see on your website are called Internal Links and Outbound Links.

What is an Internal Link?

Internal links are links you see on a webpage that navigates you to another web page of the SAME domain. These links allow viewers to stay on your page longer as they are redirected around your website. As a result, it increases your website authority which contributes to ranking.

What is an External Link?

External links, or what we like to call “outbound links”, are links that bring you to another domain while surfing a particular website. This type of link is usually used to provide viewers with further explanations done by other website owners.

An external link is considered as the most important criterion that will help you rank. Why does an external link matter? It is believed that external links cannot be unfairly controlled.

The Different Types of Links Off A Website

Now that we are done with links we can see on your website, let us move on to links that are not on our own websites. These links are called backlinks and they include natural links, manually obtained link and self-created links.

What Is a Backlink?

Backlinks are also known as inbound links. They are links and connections created by another website to your website.

Let’s refresh, what is outbound and inbound links (from our perspective)?:

• Internal Links: We send our readers from one of our webpage to another.
• Outbound Links: We send our readers to another website.
• Inbound Links: Other websites send their readers to our website.

The more backlinks a website receives, the more relevant, useful and important it is. These backlinks will contribute to your ranking on the SERP. The 3 types of backlinks will be explained as we go on.

What is a natural link?

A natural link is a link that you receive from other website owners without you asking for it. In other words, it indicates your page has great content. Think of it this way, if you are an athlete and perceived as cool, people give you attention without you asking.

It’s the same goes for a natural link; your content is too good that people are willing to feature them. Other website owners redirect their readers to your page because your page contains content they think is worth sharing.

What is a manually obtained link?

Manually obtained links are links you obtain through efforts. What do I mean by that? You have to put in time and energy, contacting other website owners and bloggers to link and feature your page.

These manual links building technique, asking around for links, is common among small businesses where they are still unknown in the industry. One does not simply feature another website as it will affect the quality of another.

In order for you to get links, you should show bloggers and other businesses that your content is worth sharing and featuring. Keep in mind that the websites you want to be featured have to be relevant to yours otherwise the link will not provide much authority and value.

So.. why do natural links and manually obtained links matter?

It is the same concept as external links. If you get links from other websites, it tells search engines that your website is relevant and of good quality. Both types of web links are considered as good links. What do I mean by good? Do I mean there are bad backlinks as well?

The answer is yes. It is called the self-created links designed to fool search engines.

What is a self-created link?

This is the only link among the 5 types in this article that does not matter for SEO. As the name suggests, self-created links are links that are created by a website owner themselves to fool search engines that their links are relevant and important.

The difference between good and bad backlinks is obvious now… good backlinks are links created by other people while bad backlinks are links created by owners themselves. There are many types of self-created links such as adding a backlink on forums and blog comments.

The anchor text to your links also matters

Something that is just as important to the nature of your links are the anchor texts that you’re using. Without a proper strategy, your links can appear spamy and hurt your SEO and your rankings!

A great tool that can be used to inspect your on-page SEO and make sure that your anchor texts are properly optimized and not too spammy is the BiQ SEO Suite.

There is a content checker built into the tool that can quickly scan your content for any important SEO rule of thumbs that you should be following. And one of them includes checking your anchor text to make sure that it’s not appearing too spammy as to not discount the quality of your links.

Now that you know links matter and the way they work, you can use them effectively and correctly.

As mentioned, good quality content is what leads other website owners to link your page to theirs. As we’re talking about good quality, just a heads up, you will want to make sure that your website does not contain any broken link. If your website contains broken links, it is nothing different compared to bad quality content.

Broken links give users a bad experience. Imagine this, a viewer found your site with hope to understand better on a particular topic. You have great content but somewhere in the middle, you decided to create a link to redirect your viewers to another page as you think they have a better explanation on that particular area.

Your viewers clicked into the link and find out that the link is broken. They’re disappointed and feel that your website isn’t updated and will not bother to read on as well because they do not want to be redirected to another broken link.

Just like that, a piece of good content was ruined just because of another website. I’m very sure you wouldn’t want this to happen on your website. It is not even your fault to start with…

As website owners, we all strive to provide our readers with the ultimate experience, don’t you agree? You must be thinking about how you can get more links to your website and how you can make sure your website does not have any broken links.

Well, how about a free backlink checker tool?

BacklinkGap is a free backlink checker tool that lets you check your backlinks for.. well, for free! You only need to sign up for an account (with no catches, mind you), and insert your domain into the search bar, and hit “check now”.

You’ll gain insight to various analytics like your total number of backlinks, referring domains, anchor texts, and your friendship score as well.

Fret not, we have the solution to these two… just by using a single plugin.

SEOPressor Connect is a tool that allows you to fully optimize your content by providing you optimization suggestions, errors, and alerts. Ultimately, it increases your chances of ranking higher for quality content and receiving backlinks.

As for broken links, do you need to spend your precious time manually checking your websites for broken links? No. Not anymore. SEOPressor Connect has “Link Manager” as its feature. Link Manager is a dashboard that will show you all the broken links your web pages has.

All of us need a little help sometimes and SEOPressor Connect has been a great help since I first used it. I believe you will love SEOPressor Connect as much as I do!

We’ve come to the end of this article. These are the 4 types of links that matter for SEO. Isn’t it surprising that there’s actually so much to learn for something(links) so simple? If you’ve read it this far, I have a surprise for you.

That’s not it… There are actually many more to learn about links.
Here’s something that you should learn next (It’s for your own benefit): Link Building.

What will you learn?

• Understand SEO and local SEO, as well as the importance of local SEO
• Take a look at the top 14 best local SEO tools and which one is our favorite.

The percentage of clicks will consistently drop as you go further down the search engine results page because logically, sites with a more relevant result will be positioned at the top of the search engine results.

So, businesses need to try their best to climb the ranks. This is especially true when it comes to Local businesses when there are only 3 prominent spots (Google 3 Packs) for near me searches. Local SEO is an essential part of your SEO strategy to help you increase CTR, traffic and rank higher on the SERP.

However, optimizing local SEO is complex and can take a lot of time. In this situation, the best local SEO tool will be the secret weapon for businesses to prosper.

In this guide, we’ll keep things organized for you with SEO and local SEO information. We also recommend the top 14 best local SEO tools to boost local rankings. 

Get-to-know SEO and Local SEO

What is Local SEO?

SEO is critical to your online marketing efforts. Because of this, a lot of marketers choose to implement various SEO tools, including free local SEO tools, to track, measure, and analyze their SEO efforts. You may already be using some of the top local SEO tools, such as Google Analytics. However, you mustn’t forget about your local SEO efforts as well.

The use of Local SEO

Local SEO is an essential part of your SEO strategy, especially if you’re a minor to mid-sized company that relies on the business of local customers. There are many different local SEO strategies that you can implement, from optimizing your content using local SEO keywords to submitting your NAP (name, address, and phone number) to various local directories. To help organize and streamline your local SEO efforts, you should use these crucial local SEO tools.

Why is local SEO important? 

Do you know that 72% of consumers that did a local search visited a store within five miles? 

97% of people learn more about a local company online than anywhere else in this digital era. That’s where another benefit of SEO comes into use — it can promote your business 24/7, both online and offline.

As consumers move through the buying funnel, they conduct many different searches. As you use local SEO efficiently, you can also increase your brand visibility online. 

What is a local SEO tool?

A local SEO tool helps you to organize, streamline, and track all of your local SEO efforts.

With a local SEO tool, you can easily track your rankings, spy on competitors, develop SEO-optimized keywords, monitor your performance, encourage customer engagement, and much more.

Top 14 best local SEO tools

The following are 14 different local SEO software that you might find extremely useful, some of which are available at a small cost and some of which are free local SEO tools.

1. BiQ Cloud

BiQ is an SEO suite that democratizes the pricing model and lets you scale as your needs grow. BiQ can help you with most of the challenging parts – finding the right keywords to include on your location pages.

This tool isn’t like the traditional SEO tools you see in the market, thanks to their approach to granular cost control. From products such as Keyword Intelligence, Content Intelligence, Rank Intelligence, and Rank Tracking, you’re sure to benefit from it in one way or the other.

Let’s look at how BiQ can help you do your local SEO keyword research without further ado.

After entering your keyword, you can choose from more than 100,000 locations and 35 languages.

Finding local keywords with Rank Intelligence – discover the content gap between your business and your competitors.

Once you have selected your preferred location and language, the keywords returned would be more specific to the targeted people searching for your business. The tool would help you in creating more localized content. Thus, increasing your site’s visibility locally. 

At BiQ, not only will you be taught how to dominate your niche wherever you are located, but you’d also be able to find the most valuable keywords.

If you are not sure which keywords to choose, sort the value of the keyword. It’s simple: The higher the value of the keyword, the more traffic it can potentially bring to your website. 

2. Grid My Business

Grid My Business is a grid-based local rank tracker specifically designed to track and compare your Google My Business ranking performance against the top 20s in the local SERP through a specific search query. 

You can find all the locations the same as on Google Maps.

Grid My Business can track and monitor your business’ and competitors’ local search rankings. You need to use that data to your advantage and craft your local SEO strategies around it. 

There are 5 outstanding features of this tool:

• Customizable grid parameters: This local rank tracking tool is a relatively new strategy for local businesses. With just a 15 by 15 grid, you can quickly identify close to 300 rank positions in one search query.

• Bulk search queries: Grid My Business also allows you to identify local rankings of multiple search queries by performing a quick and easy bulk scan of up to 5 keywords per scan.  

• Side-by-side comparison view: With this feature, you can compare the two results that are generated on different dates of the same query.

• Monitoring reports: You can find all the previous scanning on the reports page. Details include place, search query, search setting, and monitoring will be provided. The “Active” status means that the tool will keep analyzing data for your query every 3 days, with updated data.

• Scheduled scanning: You can add your scan details; location, search query, grid size, and radius. Then, you can select the date and time of your intended scheduled scan. This feature helps you save tons of time.

To use Grid My Business, you only need 3 simple steps. 

Firstly, enter the company name/location that you want to track. Then, add the keywords which you want to know the ranking. 

Secondly, choose the grid size, and suitable radius based on your preference.

Finally, just click “Scan Now” and wait for the result.

Each grid point is your ranking in that area. So you can see that the above business is doing great with their local SEO work. 

One more incredible thing about Grid My Business is that it can be used for free with basic features and you can access all the features at a very cheap price.

3. Whitespark Local Citation Finder

The Whitespark Local Citation Finder is one of the full-fledged local listing management tools you can invest in. In addition to essential local listing management, the tool allows you to identify where you should list your business to improve local SEO rankings.

It also boasts several additional features, including the ability to collect customer feedback and online reviews, monitor local search rankings by a city, discover and create link opportunities, and more. You can use the tool-free for limited search results.

4. Moz Local

Moz Local is a primary local listing management tool that allows users to manage local listings and claim and verify listing submissions. The tool also works with data aggregators to help push listings, ensuring that your business is visible. Additionally, the tool will scan through your citations and notify you of any errors that it finds, which could be hurting your local SEO.

Last but not least, Moz Local will give you a rundown on the categories and media used for your citation. It’s available for a relatively affordable price (compared to other local listing management tools).

5. BrightLocal  

BrightLocal is a collection of tools available in various packages that start at $19.99 a month. These tools offer the ability to compare rankings against your competition on three major search engines – to find out where your competitors are listed, and monitor online reviews, just to name a few.

6. Synup

Synup is extremely useful for submitting your NAP to local directories. It’s a tool that allows you to easily manage your local listings, review and analyze your listings and NAP data.

It’s one of the most comprehensive directory lists that you can have. Besides, Synup allows you to check listings and examine if you have existing citations on them, should you add your NAP to listings, and fix incorrect data on current listings. It does cost $25 a month; however, it’s a highly effective tool.

7. Yext

Yext is similar to Synup as it also offers review monitoring, analytics, and local listing management (not to mention widgets).

However, what makes it stand apart from many local listing tools is that it’s one of the few – if not the only – automated local listing management tool on the market. Yext allows you to get your listing data populated right away and provides the ability to update your NAP information in real-time.

8. Local SEO Checklist

This organizational tool will help you do everything to boost your local SEO rankings while offering users 40 options that detail specific tasks. It can also help you optimize your site and increase your ranking by developing your blog, on-page SEO, social media, and more. It’s an essential checklist, but it’s free!

9. Schema Creator  

Schema Creator allows you to build schema.org microdata quickly, thereby making it easier for search engines to identify and index your site’s content. This makes it more likely for your content to show up on relevant searches.

10. Google Ad Keyword Planner

This tool works well for strengthening your local SEO keywords. During the keyword research phase, you can identify the traffic for specific keywords and find new local keywords based on local searches.

The Keyword Planner tool even allows you to conduct research based on geographic regions. Not only is it a valuable tool to have for your local SEO keyword efforts, but it’s arguably one of the most useful free SEO tools available as well.

11. Ahrefs

Ahrefs can help with your local SEO strategy by providing you with a detailed backlink profile for any website you want. The tool lets you see who is linking to your site, what anchor text they’re using for your backlinks, and how strong your backlinks are.

It also allows you to check the strength of your competitor’s backlinks. The tool is used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, accounting for its steep price point. At its very basic, it will cost you $99 a month, while full-fledged agency plans cost $999 a month.

12. Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, is the best way to provide customers with information about your business. Without an optimized Google Business Profile, you’re missing out on your online audience.  

In Google Business Profile, small businesses can set up their official Google business profile, and upload images of their store and products. The tool also helps you to engage with your customers by responding to reviews and posting informative posts about your business on your page.

If you want your business to appear in Google’s local SEO 3-pack, at the top of results, you need to claim and optimize your Google Business Profile listing.

However, also remember that you should be, at a minimum, posting at least one post per week to your Google Business Profile page. This is a great reputation builder and customers will see that you are engaged as a business owner.

13. Google Search Console 

Google Search Console ensures your website remains Google-friendly. You can also use it to check the keywords Google ranks your site for and the number of pages Google has indexed from your site.

Google Search Console can also help you know how your website performs on the SERP in different countries, things like impressions and CTR.

The overview report in Google Search Console featured three main reports: Performance, Coverage and Enhancements. 

The URL Inspection tool might be one of our favorites because you get to see how Google views your website. This tool allows you to test how Google renders your site. If you published a new blog post or redesigned a webpage, you can use this URL inspection tool to signal Google to crawl that page.

14. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a website analytics tool for site optimizations. It tracks and reports web traffic to users. Google Analytics can track session duration, bounce rate, and pages per session and get insights from demographic data to use in your overall marketing strategy.

Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools out there to understand your digital performance, no matter your website’s size. Google Analytics is able to track not just one, but multiple websites that you own. When it comes to local SEO, it can tell you how your website performs when it comes to different audiences coming from different backgrounds. For example, If you are interested in only seeing how French visitors interact with the website, you can apply a geographic filter to only analyze visitors coming from France

Once you have this information, you will be able to optimize your website accordingly and maximize your customers’ experience.

To use this feature, of course, you will need to set up a Google Analytics account (if you don’t already have one). You can sign up for a free account here.

TL;DR 

Using these local SEO tools will make it easier to implement your local SEO strategies and measure their performance by tracking them, thereby helping to ensure that your local SEO efforts are as strong as they can be. 

Although we point out 14 best local SEO tools for your business, you’ll still need to put in the work depending on the tools you use. Choosing the best local SEO tool which is suitable for your work is important. Though tools can help you do a more effective job in local SEO, they are still not a replacement for hard work.

This post was originally written by Joanne and published on April 4, 2017. It was most recently updated on January 04, 2022, by Claire Le.

What will you learn?

• Understand what are good titles and meta descriptions?
• The perfect length for both title and meta description.
• Changes in title and meta description throughout the years
• Tools to help you create great title and meta description

It’s true: title tags and meta descriptions won’t directly help your website magically rise to the top of the search engine results (at least not the way most people imagine). From 2020, Google’s advice is to not focus too much on these, as many of the snippets Google chooses are dynamic and not pulled from your meta descriptions.

However, well-written title tags and meta descriptions are still the number one elements that decide your CTR (and CTR is one of the top-ranking factors, go figures)

A lot of how Google decides what search result snippet to show is based on the searchers’ query and the content on your page. According to Google’s blog, there’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search result snippets are always truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width.

Here’s the average title and meta description length on December 2021

Best Practices For A Good Headline or Title Tag in 2022

We recommend keeping your headline at under or approximately 60 characters to fit Google results that have a 600-pixel word limit and avoid truncation. Additionally, here are some other SEO best practices:

1. Always describe the page’s content accurately. Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.
2. Create unique titles for each page. This helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
3. Use brief, but descriptive titles. Titles should be both short and informative. If it is too long or less relevant, Google may only show a portion of it or one that’s automatically generated in the Google search result.
4. The most crucial step is to make sure you carry out keyword research to ensure you use high-value keywords in your title tag

Use tools like title generators to kickstart your ideation process. You can easily get thousands of title ideas with our title generator.

Best Practices For A Good Meta Description Length in 2022

Meanwhile, your meta description length should be kept descriptive and between 150 and 160 characters for optimal length, and this includes spaces. Additionally, you also want to make sure to: 

1. Accurately summarize the page content. While there’s no minimal or maximal meta title length for the text in the description, Google recommends making sure that it’s long enough to be fully shown in Google results (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search).
2. Use unique descriptions for each page. Having a different description of meta tags for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain.
3. Include your primary keyword and related keywords naturally

(*Updated in December 2021*)

Before that, more good reads on meta description best practices and the do’s and don’ts with meta description examples. 

Download our title and meta description best practice checklist that got us a 265% increase in traffic!

Brief History of Title and Meta Description 

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has made significant changes to the titles and meta descriptions length on the Google Search Results. More characters for both titles and meta descriptions are displayed in the search results now compared to the previous weeks.

What Are The Changes?

Space of Google Search Results. 

To compare it with before Google made the changes, the latest search result is now 600 pixels wide, which is about 100 pixels wider.

This is not the only change that we’ve noticed. Let’s look into more details on the other prominent changes.

Desktop

Today, Google has finally made some changes and increased the titles to 70-71 characters. I know, it doesn’t seem much, but at least you can still fit in another word or two in your title, which will make a difference.

But if you’re already happy with your current title, you can choose to add your site name at the end of the title for branding purposes.

You’ll still need to monitor the traffic and click-through rate (CTR) of your old titles compared to the new ones as it will affect your SEO. The organic results for your site will probably be higher or lower as well, which is why you have to keep things in check.

If you still can’t really see the differences yet, let me show you.

Here, I have a screenshot of the title before Google make the changes:

Google only shows 54 characters of this title and truncates the rest of it.

And this is what happens after Google make the changes:

Google displays the entire title on the search results, which has 63 characters.

Not only has Google increased the length of the titles to be displayed, but the meta descriptions also showed some changes too.

When writing meta descriptions, we tend to keep it between 150-160 characters because Google usually truncates snippets that are longer than 160 characters. Besides, Google used to display only 2 lines of meta descriptions on their search results page. Just like this:

But look at what I’ve found today:

This has once again proven that Google made some changes to its search results page. And Google not only made changes to the desktop titles. The titles and meta descriptions on mobile search have also increased and are even longer than on the desktop.

Mobile

Google has increased the length of mobile titles from about 55-60 characters to 78 characters. So now the titles on mobile search have 7-8 characters more than the desktop titles.

The same goes for the meta descriptions. Mobile has less room for meta descriptions than a desktop site, with a maximum of 120 characters. 

Let’s take a look at an example from the mobile search results.

Comparing it to the titles and meta descriptions on desktop:

With these changes that we noticed on mobile search results, we think that it may be worth it to optimize your title tags for mobile if you have more visitors from mobile than desktop.

It is definitely interesting seeing Google adding the extra characters to both titles and meta descriptions in the desktop and mobile searches. But the decision on whether to increase the titles and meta descriptions length is still up to you.

Here’s a quick recap of the perfect title and meta description length for your web pages:

Our Thoughts?

These new changes may not be a bad thing, especially for those who were struggling within the title constraints. Furthermore, more characters equal to more semantic keywords that we can include in our titles and meta descriptions for it to be displayed in Google search results.

Because if you haven’t already, you should use semantic keywords in your meta descriptions to help Google know what your content is about.

After all, Google is now looking at understanding the total context rather than the keyword density. If everything is done right, you’ll see yourself at the top of the ranks!

Once again, while we strongly recommend adding in your primary and related keywords to your title and meta descriptions, do avoid spamming keywords and overusing them to prevent Google’s penalty.

Taking this opportunity, we’d like to recommend a keyword research tool that helps you find your best semantic keywords. It’s called BiQ SEO Suite

When it comes to identifying the keywords to optimize your title and meta description, you can find everything you need using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence. 

You can easily get access to the much-needed keyword data like the total related keywords, search trend, volume, and search intent to identify the most profitable related keywords to include them in your meta description. 

An extra tip when writing your meta description is also to include popular questions as the first line in your description because not only are they relatable but often questions are easy to pique at our curiosity which most likely drives us to click. (You can find them on the same module too!)

Also, it’s important to note that making an edit to your title and meta description is a double-edged sword!

Though editing your meta description can result in an amazing 286% increase in traffic, it can also cause suffering in website traffic when you fall out of certain keywords.

That’s why once you have edited your title and meta description, it’s very important to keep track of your ROI. 

Use BiQ’s Rank Tracking feature and start tracking the movements of your content across the SERP. 

Voila, everything was done on a single platform. Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg. Sign up for a BiQ free tier account and ALL the features it has to offer. 

Also, check out this meta description of best practices written by the BiQ team that will show you through the whole process using their tool.

TL;DR

Keep your title length around 60 characters.

For your meta description length, keep it around 160 characters.

Although title tags and meta descriptions don’t count as a ranking factor, CTR is.  Optimizing your title and description to increase your CTR is crucial for your ranking. If you prefer to write a unique title in a short time, you can use a title generator like Blog Title Generator to help you. 

This post was originally written by Joanne and published on April 13, 2016. It was most recently updated by Claire on Dec 28, 2021

What will you learn?

• Understand more about local SEO and its importance
• Know more about a local SEO software: What it is, why you need it, and what features it has 
• Get to know more about our favorite tool: Grid My Business

Businesses with a physical location always try to stand out and make sure that their stores are easy to find for customers. The issue is when owners don’t know where they rank on Google.

One of the best ways to know this is by using local search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. Doing local SEO means businesses need to adapt to the trends, especially when it comes to marketing strategies and customer interactions quickly.

However, a business owner and a marketer also have a lot of things to work on besides local SEO. Thanks to the development of technology and the invention of local SEO software. Owners can now remove the guesswork and develop a systemized way to improve their search visibility.

Using the best local SEO software will ensure that you can do everything you need to guarantee that your business will rank (highly) on the local search engine result page.

In this blog, you can understand more about local SEO and what you need to focus more on when doing local SEO and how to use local SEO tools to optimize the results.

Keep reading to discover the complete list of benefits of Local SEO and its software. Shall we begin? 

What is Local SEO, and why do you need it?

Local SEO is the process of increasing your business’s presence in the local search to attract more customers. This marketing strategy is booming more than ever, and Google Maps are the new gold standard for your rankings.

Local SEO has proved to be a game-changer in the digital marketing industry. As a business owner, you need to find local SEO software to increase your online visibility and help grow your business. 

Local SEO activities include citation building, listings management, and reputation management.

Why do you need Local SEO?

Local SEO is like a game-changer in the digital marketing industry. 

Here are some other benefits of adopting local SEO services and why local SEO is essential:

#1. Local SEO helps your business stand out online.

A key benefit of SEO that many companies overlook is improving your credibility among consumers. Ranking on the first page of search results signals to users that Google trusts your website. Customers can also find you easier.

92% of searchers will pick businesses on the first page of the local search results. So, not having your business listed online is akin to almost not even existing.

Local SEO increases your online visibility on the SERP. Local SEO emphasizes optimizing your Google My Business listing. This listing, which appears in local searches and specific searches for your business, provides users with details about your company.

#2. Local SEO helps to increase your website traffics and lead to sales

One of the most mentioned benefits of SEO is the increased sales, leads, and market share that companies see. As your business appears on the first page of SERP, it means that you have a better level of brand awareness among your most valuable customers. 

If your company continues to appear in their search results, it captures their attention. You’re also a valuable resource for industry information, which increases your value to your audiences.

Do you think that local SEO only affects your online business? It can help you grow your business both online and offline. According to Think with Google, “78% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours and 28% of those searches result in a purchase”.

Firstly, by appearing on the first page of search results for high-value keywords your target audience uses, you’re earning clicks and visits from the consumers that matter most to you.

Secondly, local SEO solutions will also bring more foot traffic to your location, leading to offline sales and more customers to physical stores.

For example, many people will search for a “restaurant near me” to visit a restaurant close to them. This allows you to show up in search results and attract them to your physical location.

3 things you must pay attention to in local SEO to rank higher

There are several ways local SEO can help local businesses be discovered and remain relevant online. Optimized local website content and local listings get your business in front of people searching for products or services online, yet it also has some notes to focus on.

#1. Find underperforming keywords

Underperforming keywords are those that you don’t rank for in the first or second positions on the SERPs.. They’re underperforming because most people click on one of the first two results, meaning if you rank in lower positions, you’re missing out on tons of traffic.

Google Search Console is one tool to help you find those keywords.

To find these underperforming keywords in Google Search Console, go to the “Search Results” report and toggle the average CTR and position data. You can find the low-ranking keywords in the queries report and the middle-ranking position.

To read more about using Google Search Console, read: Using Google Search Console: The Definitive Guide.

#2. Pick a keyword to rank higher for

Keywords are so important that they can make or break your entire SEO campaign.

You can start with a list of keywords, identify the keywords on your list that aren’t super competitive. Then you can see how many people search for the keywords in your inventory, or know Google’s estimate of how much an advertiser generally spends for a single click.

BiQ Keyword Intelligence can help you with this. 

#3. Local rank tracking

You need to track your ranking to know whether your efforts are working.

Rank tracking is the process of checking search engine ranking positions for specific keywords over time. A rank tracker is a software or tool that automates this process for you. 

What is local SEO software, and why do we need it? 

Ever feel like you’re constantly fighting an uphill battle of SEO to try and rank for your business? 

It can be highly time-consuming for digital marketers – that’s why there are Local SEO software tools available to help. These tools help streamline and automate critical local SEO activities, making it easier for digital marketers and small businesses to maintain control over their presence online. 

Local SEO software works on the principle of local SEO to help businesses promote their offerings to local customers. Local SEO software is excellent for tiny, brick-and-mortar businesses like grocery stores, bars, restaurants, clinics, law offices, and many others.

How can Local SEO software help you?

The software offers businesses a solution to being discovered in local search results by customers. If your business is not already listed online, this software can list your business online for free. 

Let’s not forget that local SEO software helps you with your local business listings online but they also help track your progress. It provides you with a range of statistics to know your business performance.

With this software, you can monitor the performance of your local SEO efforts by tracking the clicks, page visits, and conversions that come from the channels in your local SEO strategy.

Local SEO software can also save a ton of time for you. When using local SEO software, you can easily list your business for free, also automatically receive reports about statistics, 

How to use local SEO software? 

Plenty of guides shows you how to do local SEO from start to finish. But they can be daunting, as it’s a complex subject. The following information will give you simple tips when choosing a local SEO software and introduce you to a simple tool.

What features do you need to pay attention to when choosing a local SEO software? 

Here are some factors to consider when choosing the best local SEO software for you. Remember: It is not vital to find software that satisfies all the below features.

• Tracking keywords based on the specific locations:

Specific locations support the process of exploring your rankings on Google Maps. For example: setting your search location from your targeted Zip code, address, neighbor, and city. 

A business’ rank can be seen in different geographic areas to show clients what they’re up against and how well they are doing. It’s also helpful for determining any potential Google Business Profile listing which may have spent money on advertising.

• Managing and updating local business listings and citations:

This feature provides customers with information about your business. Such as a Button to the website, a button for directions, photos of the inside and outside of the location, physical address, hours of operation, website, etc. 

In some tools, you can even see how complete your business profile is on major search engines and determine what areas you need to improve.

• Monitoring online reputation and online reviews: 

You can track the ratings and reviews of your business in real-time and receive alerts for when a new one comes in the tools. Sometimes, you can also respond to all Google business reviews.

• Analyze website traffic and content performance:

Track how well your local listings show up for searches conducted in the area surrounding your retail locations

• Create SEO reports to track local SEO progress: 

There are dozens of businesses in your geographical area who want to be number one on the local 3 pack. Monitoring and reporting are a must! Generate unlimited reports with trackable results for clients!

• Tools for auditing and analyzing competitor

This feature can show you comparisons, like the visitor traffic comparison between your site and your competitors for monitored keywords.

Our favorite Local SEO Software: Grid My Business

There are many popular local SEO softwares on the market; some are specialized, niche tools, while others are more complete software platforms.

Depending on the local search, your needs may require more than one local SEO tool. So you will have to choose the most suitable tool for your work.

In this part, we want to introduce you to one of our favorite Local SEO software that can bring you many benefits during the SEO process – Grid My Business.

The best thing about Grid My Business is that it supports all locations that can be found on Google Maps.

With 5 main features in Grid My Business, you can track and monitor the business’ and competitors’ local search rankings. 

#1. Monitor ranking:

You can monitor your local rankings on a grid. This grid will be placed on top of your business location. 

You can see your local ranking position, as well as the top 20 business listings at every point. The numbers on the point represent your position. 

#2. Bulk Scan

The bulk scanning feature allows you to scan more than one search query at a time. So this saves you a lot of time.

The maximum number of queries you can scan is five. You can only select the 9×9 or 11×11 grid size for this feature

#3. Report

Each scan result that you run will automatically be saved; then, you can find the local SEO report by heading to “My Reports.” 

There are details of every scan you have generated previously on this page, including Place, Search query, Search settings (grid size and radius), Time and date of your last scan, Number of reports generated with similar backgrounds, and Monitoring Status.

#4. Monitor 

On the “My Reports” page, you will see some of your reports being classified as either active or inactive.

Reports with an active status mean that the tool will monitor and update your local rankings every three days.

#5. Location

You can view all locations you have previously added in Grid My Busines when performing scans. You can also see how many scans have been completed and are currently being monitored.

Grid My Business is one of the best free SEO tools to give you statistics and information to optimize your local SEO with various features. Grid My Business will introduce the managing and updating of business listings in 2022.

TL;DR 

Local SEO software is essential to help you know how your business ranks in local and organic search results.

All the information in this blog has helped you to understand the impact of your on-page SEO work and making data-driven decisions through this trending marketing strategy, thus learning more about local SEO tools.

What will you learn?

• Understand what are good titles and meta descriptions?
• The perfect length for both title and meta description.
• Changes in title and meta description throughout the years
• Tools to help you create great title and meta description

It’s true: title tags and meta descriptions won’t directly help your website magically rise to the top of the search engine results (at least not the way most people imagine). From 2020, Google’s advice is to not focus too much on these, as many of the snippets Google chooses are dynamic and not pulled from your meta descriptions.

However, well-written title tags and meta descriptions are still the number one elements that decide your CTR (and CTR is one of the top-ranking factors, go figures)

A lot of how Google decides what search result snippet to show is based on the searchers’ query and the content on your page. According to Google’s blog, there’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search result snippets are always truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width.

Here’s the average title and meta description length on December 2021

Best Practices For A Good Headline or Title Tag in 2022

We recommend keeping your headline at under or approximately 60 characters to fit Google results that have a 600-pixel word limit and avoid truncation. Additionally, here are some other SEO best practices:

1. Always describe the page’s content accurately. Choose a title that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.
2. Create unique titles for each page. This helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
3. Use brief, but descriptive titles. Titles should be both short and informative. If it is too long or less relevant, Google may only show a portion of it or one that’s automatically generated in the Google search result.
4. The most crucial step is to make sure you carry out keyword research to ensure you use high-value keywords in your title tag

Use tools like title generators to kickstart your ideation process. You can easily get thousands of title ideas with our title generator.

Best Practices For A Good Meta Description Length in 2022

Meanwhile, your meta description length should be kept descriptive and between 150 and 160 characters for optimal length, and this includes spaces. Additionally, you also want to make sure to: 

1. Accurately summarize the page content. While there’s no minimal or maximal meta title length for the text in the description, Google recommends making sure that it’s long enough to be fully shown in Google results (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search).
2. Use unique descriptions for each page. Having a different description of meta tags for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain.
3. Include your primary keyword and related keywords naturally

(*Updated in December 2021*)

Before that, more good reads on meta description best practices and the do’s and don’ts with meta description examples. 

Download our title and meta description best practice checklist that got us a 265% increase in traffic!

Brief History of Title and Meta Description 

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has made significant changes to the titles and meta descriptions length on the Google Search Results. More characters for both titles and meta descriptions are displayed in the search results now compared to the previous weeks.

What Are The Changes?

Space of Google Search Results. 

To compare it with before Google made the changes, the latest search result is now 600 pixels wide, which is about 100 pixels wider.

This is not the only change that we’ve noticed. Let’s look into more details on the other prominent changes.

Desktop

Today, Google has finally made some changes and increased the titles to 70-71 characters. I know, it doesn’t seem much, but at least you can still fit in another word or two in your title, which will make a difference.

But if you’re already happy with your current title, you can choose to add your site name at the end of the title for branding purposes.

You’ll still need to monitor the traffic and click-through rate (CTR) of your old titles compared to the new ones as it will affect your SEO. The organic results for your site will probably be higher or lower as well, which is why you have to keep things in check.

If you still can’t really see the differences yet, let me show you.

Here, I have a screenshot of the title before Google make the changes:

Google only shows 54 characters of this title and truncates the rest of it.

And this is what happens after Google make the changes:

Google displays the entire title on the search results, which has 63 characters.

Not only has Google increased the length of the titles to be displayed, but the meta descriptions also showed some changes too.

When writing meta descriptions, we tend to keep it between 150-160 characters because Google usually truncates snippets that are longer than 160 characters. Besides, Google used to display only 2 lines of meta descriptions on their search results page. Just like this:

But look at what I’ve found today:

This has once again proven that Google made some changes to its search results page. And Google not only made changes to the desktop titles. The titles and meta descriptions on mobile search have also increased and are even longer than on the desktop.

Mobile

Google has increased the length of mobile titles from about 55-60 characters to 78 characters. So now the titles on mobile search have 7-8 characters more than the desktop titles.

The same goes for the meta descriptions. Mobile has less room for meta descriptions than a desktop site, with a maximum of 120 characters. 

Let’s take a look at an example from the mobile search results.

Comparing it to the titles and meta descriptions on desktop:

With these changes that we noticed on mobile search results, we think that it may be worth it to optimize your title tags for mobile if you have more visitors from mobile than desktop.

It is definitely interesting seeing Google adding the extra characters to both titles and meta descriptions in the desktop and mobile searches. But the decision on whether to increase the titles and meta descriptions length is still up to you.

Here’s a quick recap of the perfect title and meta description length for your web pages:

Our Thoughts?

These new changes may not be a bad thing, especially for those who were struggling within the title constraints. Furthermore, more characters equal to more semantic keywords that we can include in our titles and meta descriptions for it to be displayed in Google search results.

Because if you haven’t already, you should use semantic keywords in your meta descriptions to help Google know what your content is about.

After all, Google is now looking at understanding the total context rather than the keyword density. If everything is done right, you’ll see yourself at the top of the ranks!

Once again, while we strongly recommend adding in your primary and related keywords to your title and meta descriptions, do avoid spamming keywords and overusing them to prevent Google’s penalty.

Taking this opportunity, we’d like to recommend a keyword research tool that helps you find your best semantic keywords. It’s called BiQ SEO Suite

When it comes to identifying the keywords to optimize your title and meta description, you can find everything you need using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence. 

You can easily get access to the much-needed keyword data like the total related keywords, search trend, volume, and search intent to identify the most profitable related keywords to include them in your meta description. 

An extra tip when writing your meta description is also to include popular questions as the first line in your description because not only are they relatable but often questions are easy to pique at our curiosity which most likely drives us to click. (You can find them on the same module too!)

Also, it’s important to note that making an edit to your title and meta description is a double-edged sword!

Though editing your meta description can result in an amazing 286% increase in traffic, it can also cause suffering in website traffic when you fall out of certain keywords.

That’s why once you have edited your title and meta description, it’s very important to keep track of your ROI. 

Use BiQ’s Rank Tracking feature and start tracking the movements of your content across the SERP. 

Voila, everything was done on a single platform. Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg. Sign up for a BiQ free tier account and ALL the features it has to offer. 

Also, check out this meta description of best practices written by the BiQ team that will show you through the whole process using their tool.

TL;DR

Keep your title length around 60 characters.

For your meta description length, keep it around 160 characters.

Although title tags and meta descriptions don’t count as a ranking factor, CTR is.  Optimizing your title and description to increase your CTR is crucial for your ranking. If you prefer to write a unique title in a short time, you can use a title generator like Blog Title Generator to help you. 

This post was originally written by Joanne and published on April 13, 2016. It was most recently updated on Dec 28, 2021

Do you want to boost your website’s SEO next year? Do you want a great search engine ranking all 2022? Then you’re in the right place!

Each year, SEO specialists put in great effort to ensure their content ranks high on google. Sometimes they are successful, other times not so much. Have you ever asked yourself what the strategies those “specialists” adopt are? If not, then you might want to have a rethink. 

There are several SEO strategies for 2022 already in place that should be of interest to you. This article has carefully mapped out 10 SEO strategies for 2022 that would improve your website’s ranking. 

1- Create new content

One of the tips to make your website rank high on Google is by creating new content. It would interest you to know that a total of 4.4 million blog posts are published each day. To not fall behind, you must create new content, as this cannot be overemphasized enough. 

Having fresh content has proven to be more valuable than old content. Thus, if you are wondering why your contents are not highly ranked, then this is one of the reasons why.  Additionally, it’s not just by producing new content, but by ensuring that it has a proper link building and is of high quality. 

So, include content updating in your project management tools for great results. As seen in the image above, figure out how much content you need, your budget, how soon they need to be completed, and set the process in motion. 

2- Have unnecessary links removed

Another SEO strategy 2022 that you need to adhere to is identifying your unnecessary backlinks with a SEO tool or a backlinks API, then removing them. It would help if you asked yourself the following questions; 

• Does every page of the website need to have a link to the team page? Well, it isn’t necessary in this case. 
• Does every page of the website need to have a link to the contact form? Well, absolutely not, as it is not necessary. 

The importance of removing unnecessary links is that the little ones left stand a chance of having a ranking signal on Google.

3- Channel your attention on featured snippets

One of the SEO strategies for 2022 you would need to adopt is by focusing more on featured snippets. 

There are a few recommendations that you might want to try out, and one of them is: 

• Using questions:  If you are thinking of a possible way to earn more featured snippets, use questions. Most of the time, these questions could come in the form of queries, so it is advisable to have questions and answers in mind when writing content. 
• Include long-term keywords: One notable way for your content to return featured snippets is to include long-term keywords. Thus, the longer, the better, and vice versa, according to SEMrush. 

4- Satisfy your users

This is one of the greatest SEO strategies that people could learn to stand out in 2022. Google bots scan the web all day to find relevant results to various search inquiries. Satisfy your audience by only putting out content that serves a purpose and is valuable to them. 

Imagine a user needs a certain piece of information, and your website happens to be on the first page? This not only makes you appear more credible but also satisfies their need. That would invariably boost your Google ranking, as people feel fulfilled when they get exactly what they are searching for. 

Instead of constantly trying different tricks and hacks to get on the first page of search engine results, take the time to create valuable content and let it happen organically. The results are a lot better and long-lasting. 

5- Update old content

While it is important to create new and exciting content, it is also important that your old content be upgraded and repurposed. Repurposing content is the process of taking the base of your content and recreating it in different formats.For example you can turn a blog post into an infographic The image above from Express Writers shows a step-by-step process on how to update existing content. 

To ensure your old content stays relevant, one vital step to take would be to do a link audit. This means that you are expected to update and replace any outdated link in your content. 

By carrying out a link audit, you are invariably achieving two tasks such as:  

• You are improving your user experience 
• You are avoiding being penalized for having too many broken links by Google. 

Plus, you might want to link relevant new content to the old one as well. By doing so, you would be helping your post rank higher. This is one SEO strategy that would yield positive results. 

You can also use SEO content writing tools like BiQ’s Content Intelligence which will provide you with useful data and suggestions to edit your content to be SEO-friendly. 

6- Mobile Search Engine Performance 

Improving your mobile search engine performance is a good SEO strategy to focus on next year.  

If you have solely been focusing your SEO on desktop computers, then it is high time you diversify a bit and start focusing more on mobile search engines. 

Admittedly, SEO for desktop computers isn’t a bad choice to make. However, it should interest you to know that about 60% of people are more inclined to do their search on mobile devices as each day passes by. 

So, by the year 2022, that statistic will tremendously increase. This is why now is the right time to act to remain relevant on Google ranking. 

7- Invest in website security 

A compromised website is a bright red flag to Google and your audience and is very bad for SEO. It would interest you to know that one of the greatest threats in the digital space is cyber security. According to research, 82% of users will immediately leave a website that is not secure. 

Hackers are all over the internet space and are ready to steal your information without your knowledge. These hackers look to pounce more on WordPress websites, especially as it has more than a quarter of the market share. 

According to statistics, the highest number of vulnerabilities is connected to WordPress. There has been a significant increase in the number of vulnerabilities in the past few years. 

One way to ensure your website is secured is by having the HTTPS protocol enabled. Aside from it being a safety measure, it also creates a minor SEO boost as sites with HTTPS are what Google prefers most, especially for visitors. 

8- Write Longer Content

The main focus should be to deliver quality content, and one possible way to do so is by ensuring the content is longer and filled with valuable information. 

This is one SEO strategy for 2022 you simply can’t ignore. If you need more visibility, especially if you are delivering web pages, then one possible way is to ensure your content is longer. 

Having emphasized the need for longer content, what should the length of content be for it to be classified as long content? 

For your content to rank high on SEO, it is expected to be at least 2000 words. Some research was being carried out, which pointed to 1,890 words appearing on the first page of google search results. This is according to Brian Dean, alongside his team. 

9- Keep E-A-T in mind

“E-A-T,” which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, are important elements that could be a deciding factor for the ranking of your website. 

There are several areas that Google would be looking at to determine your ranking. They are; 

• Reviews: A positive or powerful review could play a part in your ranking. 
• Customer service reputation: Another area Google would most likely keep an eye on is your website’s customer service reputation. A good reputation could be an added SEO boost rather than a bad one.
• Feedback: Aside from reviews and customer service reputation, feedback happens to be another focus Google would monitor too. 

Also, it is important to boost the credibility of your content, and one of the possible ways of doing so is by professionally addressing complaints. 

In addition, if you have any credentials or certifications which you would like to share, then do so in your content, as this would boost your authority. This is one SEO strategy that should be adhered to. 

10- Always include images

When making your list of SEO strategies for your business in 2022, ensure you factor in a budget for high-quality images. Just as well as over 20% of web searches on the internet take place on Google images. 

This is why it is important to invest in visual content, as this could affect your rank on Google. The images uploaded should be of high quality and have some level of relevance to your keyword. 

Moreover, it is not just about uploading quality pictures, but those pictures should not be unnecessarily large. Having large images on your website can cause speed issues, which can lead to an increase in bounce rate. 

You can optimize the images on your website using several tools like Squoosh. This tool is not only easy to use but also gets the job done as well. If you are looking for a way to match your keywords to your image, then using image alt tags should be the first move you take. 

There are other SEO strategies for 2022 other than those mentioned above ten. Another one is to optimize your voice search. As seen in the image above, the world is changing fast, and people are more likely to use Siri and Alexa assistants rather than manual typing. 

This is why you should always be willing to make the necessary adjustments and follow the trends as they evolve. Using video as a marketing tool is also another vital SEO strategy for 2022.

The year 2022 is fast approaching, and SEO specialists are already devising means to ensure their clients’ website ranks high on Google. This is why you should prepare by using this article as a guide in doing so. 

Andrej Fedek is the creator and the one-person owner of the InterCoolStudio. As an experienced marketer, he is driven by turning leads into customers. His goals always include White Hat SEO. Except for being a boss, he is a real team player with a great sense of equality.

What will you learn?

• The importance of optimizing blog titles
• What aspects contribute to a great blog title, with examples, tips and formulas given
• Secret weapon: Use Blog Title Generator to save your thinking stage time.

Have you ever wondered why your post did not attract high traffic, even though you had spent hours writing thousands of words and creating appealing designs? Have you thought about checking your blog title?

Do not overlook the importance of a blog title. While your blog might be positioned on the top in SERP, it’s possible that you will not get as many clicks as you’re expecting. Because to win the click, you need to pay attention to your titles. You need to make them more exciting and hook the reader’s attention. 

You might ask, “But how can I make my title more appealing?”.

Luckily, you have us. There are many useful tips in this post you can apply to benefit as much as possible. Your job is to finish this post and take your blog to the next level with a higher CTR. 

First, let’s clear this up. 

This article will let you know the importance of blog titles and the factors affecting their appeal. Then, you can find 6 tips and 20+ formulas to apply in your title. We will also show you one secret weapon to speed up your process: Blog Title Generator.

Why is an interesting blog title vital? 

Whenever you navigate to any page, you will notice a title for that page at the top of your browser. 

You will typically see these shown inside the actual tab in your web browser. It is the headline used to describe the page itself. 

Even when search engines index a page, they refer to the title tag to figure out the focus of a page.

With endless competitions mushrooming in every corner of the internet, using on-point and catchy blog titles is crucial. Why? 

1. It empowers readers to click on your posts.

Blog posts remain the most popular form of content, and more than 3.5 million blog posts are published every day. If you want to compete, you have to stand out. 

Differentiate yourself by tackling your chosen topic from a unique angle. A great title can make the readers interested in understanding more of the content. Making features that grab the readers’ eyes and spark their curiosity will urge them to stick around longer and read more.

2. Creates a higher SEO score.

A truth: Title tags have more potential and SEO value than most people realize.

When search engines analyze a page, they look for key phrases mentioned in the title tag. These phrases also need to be prevalent throughout other page elements, such as headers and meta descriptions. 

3. Makes your content consistent

There are various formats of blog posts – general articles, listicles, product roundups, to name a few. Choosing an interesting and relevant title ensures that your content title and type are consistent with each 

Pro Tip: Write your blog title before you write your blog post. This practice will assist you with characterizing the value proposition so you can connect it with the blog post. It also helps guarantee that your title will deliver on its promise.

4. Leads to higher CTR – higher ranking

First of all, if you do not know what CTR is, this is a short description:

Your click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who see your result in the search results and click to find out more. To know whether a blog post tends to perform well in the SERPs, you use CTR to judge its performance.

Along with the apparent advantage of driving more clicks on your blog posts, having a high organic CTR has other benefits. Most notably,  it is the chance to improve your overall rankings. If your blog post has a significantly higher CTR than different URLs for the same keyword, it proves to a search engine that your content meets that criteria–and, therefore, should rank higher.

What makes a successful blog title? 

When I talk about the most awesome headlines, it implies unique titles. It might go with “Nature 4-letter words: Wind, hail, rain,” or “The story of a seagull and the cat who taught her to fly.” These are intriguing titles but don’t appeal to SEO. 

People are usually much more drawn into a blog post or an article with a creative title than a boring title. It’s just in our nature – we’re curious to see what’s in the blog of an exciting title versus something boring.

Example of great blog titles 

Let’s look at some examples of great headlines.

Imagine you are running an online shop or are thinking about starting one, and come across this title: “No one is going to buy your products (Unless you know this).” Are you going to read that? It’s also interesting to you because of your situation, I bet you’re gonna read that. And assuming you enjoy the post, you’re also likely to share it. 

Do you like these catchy headline examples?

• BiQ Rewards Program – Blogging Your Way To Winning $1,000
• Here’s Why You’re Not Ranking (+ Ways to Fix)
• Increase Website Traffic: 38 Actionable Methods For 10x More Traffic
• SEO Mistakes You Need to Avoid 

So now you can think a bit of what a great title looks like. Stand still, we will show you more about how to title your blog.

Factors that influence great blog titles

Of course, everyone has their own opinion on how to write catchy blog post titles. The best practices I share below are merely the ones we’ve found to be true over the years and have helped us thrive in our content creation efforts.

Appeal to your target personas.

Understanding your readers’ challenges and suggesting that your blog post offers a solution immediately in your headline will encourage clicks and shares. For example, think of headlines including “that will” in them. Or maybe, state the pain point, then mention “for you,” “for beginners,” etc.

The best headlines are the ones that capture the pain points of your target personas and introduce a topic that will make their lives better. 

Promise to provide value to their target personas. 

Readers want to know what they’re getting into before they click on a headline, which is why you want yours to state what your posts are about clearly. Then your content should deliver whatever your blog post titles have promised, so your readers don’t feel like they’ve wasted their time.

The best blog titles are the dazzling ones, SEO keyword-friendly, and offer some benefit to your target group.

Be specific.

When writing your titles, try to be specific. A vague headline such as “Big Little Lies Season 2” would be less compelling than the example above because it doesn’t promise any benefits to the reader. Telling readers to expect the trailer and release date will get them excited.

Think about psychology.

According to SocialMediaToday, five key elements help influence social shares: Curiosity – Amazement – Interest – Astonishment – Uncertainty.

While there are some exceptions (like news of disasters or outrage over incompetence), you should focus on content that evokes positive emotions for the most part.

Now that you understand just how critical user experience is and how closely Google and other search engines track it, shouldn’t you do something about it? 

Tips to form great titles for blogs

#1. “How To…”

It shows that the content will teach the readers how to do, achieve, or make something. Note that they all start with “How to.” This title isn’t just a stylistic choice on the part of the website. Optimizing your blog post titles for search intent using these terms is a solid strategy. 

Showing that you have a solution to a problem makes your blog a valuable resource for readers. Even when readers aren’t looking to solve a specific issue, they’re almost always looking for digestible information. 

Good blog titles tell readers that your content will educate them. Who doesn’t love a good “How to” article? Or “Expert Tips for …” article?

#2. Ask a question to spark curiosity. 

Searchers often use terms such as “how,” “why,” and “what” when looking up information in search engines, which makes these titles ideal for top ten spots on the SERPs. And when done right, they can make your traffic soar. 

This happens because our brains are programmed to be curious. Title tags that contain a question have a 14.1% higher CTR vs. pages that don’t have a question in their title. 

Your audience will want to know the answer to the question you asked them and will want to know if the short answer is yes or no. And for that, readers have to read the full article. 

Of course, when writing this blog post title, make sure your content provides the answer to the question. 

#3. Avoiding clickbait clichés.

Remember that you must write in-depth and deliver on the promises you made in your blog title with your value proposition and research. If not, that causes poor reader experience that could increase your bounce rate and cause you to lose readers. 

If you just want clicks, these phrases like “you need to,” “this is what,” etc., will help you achieve that goal. If your goal is to write a stimulating title matched with quality content, then you’ll want to leave these clickbait clichés behind. 

#4. Use numbers wisely

Including statistics in your blog post title is clever to attract more clicks. Why? They both promise the reader efficiency. According to Backlinko, including numbers in your blog titles can increase your clickthrough rate by 36%!

Pro Tip: If you have multiple numbers to increase your credibility and your audience’s perception of success, write several headlines with numerous numbers. Then A/B test them to eventually choose the best one and change your blog title even after your post is published. That will give you more initial shares and click-throughs and boost your long-term traffic to that blog post.

#5. Include your SEO keyword

I say it that way because Google rewards content with resistant keywords with better rankings. Suppose time indicates length and depth, those who spend more time creating SEO titles have more opportunities to get traffic and social shares from this pillar of successful blog posts.

In that case, those who spend more time creating SEO titles have more opportunities to get traffic and social shares from this pillar of successful blog posts. But wait, if you’re wondering what your SEO Keyword might be, you can carefully find out using Google Search Engine, BiQ Keyword or LSIGraph.

Formulas of an incredible blog title 

In this part, we will provide you with a list of 20+ blog title formulas. You can choose the most suitable one to apply in your blog post.

With these examples, tips, and formulas, you can probably make an excellent title for your blog. However, if you want to save more time with this brainstorming part, I introduce you to a helpful title generator for blogs – Blog Title Generator.

Save time with Blog Title Generator

What is it?

Blog Title Generator is a tool that helps you to create numerous ideas for your content. Modern technologies like this SEO title generator can use a range of algorithms and intelligent designs to give you the most incredible traffic. 

How does it work?

Simple, accessible, and high-quality are three things that can describe this blog name generator.

By putting your keyword in (1), choosing the relevant term (2), and clicking Generate title (3), you can have thousands of best blog post titles.

If you are not satisfied with the 4 titles shown, you can click (4) for more ideas.

Choose a suitable blog title. Which version of these headlines works best? Some are better for SEO, while others attract people’s attention from social shares. 

TL;DR

You now have everything you need to write crazy good and appealing blog headlines and email subject lines. Note that there are 5 most effective tips to increase your blog title CTR.

• “How to..”
• Ask a question
• Avoid clickbait – Write what you promise
• Use statistics
• Include SEO keywords

Finally, using a blog post title generator like Blog Title Generator is also one outstanding way to speed up your content-creating process.  If you can learn all of the little ways to optimize your blog title, you have the potential to see a significant improvement in your website’s organic search visibility.

SEO is a really wide field that encompasses a large range of aspects and this range is always expanding. That being said, a keyword gap analysis seems to be one of those aspects where people kind of know about it or are actually doing it, but they just don’t realize that it is actually a keyword gap analysis. It’s actually super important to know about though, so we’re here to break down the basics. 

In this article, we will be talking about:

–what a keyword gap analysis is
-why you should be doing one
-how you can do a keyword gap analysis
-what tool you can use to do one

So, what’s a keyword gap analysis?

A keyword gap analysis (also known as a competitive keyword analysis) is an approach to analyzing the gap between you and your competitors’ ranking keywords. The point is to discover keyword opportunities that you’ve missed and find keywords that your target audience searches for. It’s the key to outranking your competitors at their own game.

Who should be doing it?

Many types of people or businesses can benefit from conducting a keyword gap analysis:
-bloggers and e-commerce owners
-marketing, e-commerce, and digital marketing departments
-SEO consultants and agencies
-small to big online businesses

Why should you do a keyword gap analysis?

So you know what a keyword gap analysis is now but you’re probably still clueless about why you should be conducting one. There are a whole lot of reasons.

• Gain higher search visibility 

When you conduct a keyword gap analysis, you can discover the profitable keywords that are benefiting your competitors and gaining them traffic. You can then use those keywords in your own content and move up the rankings. 

• Get more content ideas

We know how important it is to publish content regularly to gain consistent traffic. It’s hard though, especially when you’ve already exhausted your brain coming up with all those past ideas. A keyword gap analysis can help you refresh that brain of yours and give you fresh content ideas.

• Make sure your content is optimized

You ought to compare your content with that of your competitors so that you can see what they’re doing differently and are doing better at. Some stuff that you can take note of is the structure of their content or the length of it. You can take some pointers from them. It’s a really easy way to figure out how you can improve your content.

• Understand your audience better and maybe expand it

A keyword gap analysis can help you find new keywords that can connect you better to your audience by addressing their needs. When you use keywords that come from competitor sites, you might even get the chance to “steal” their audience.

How do you conduct a Keyword Gap Analysis?

It’s honestly a very simple process to conduct a keyword gap analysis, yet you gain so many benefits. Just by conducting one, you stand to gain a “cheat sheet” on how to improve your content, increase traffic and outrank your competitors. So just take note of these simple steps:

• Identify a strong competitor
  

One of the main points for conducting a keyword gap analysis is to outrank your competitors. In order to do that, you need to know who your competitors are and decide which one is the one you want to go against. You can choose your competitor based on their size, ranking position, website traffic, and so on.

Make sure that you focus on competitors that are doing better than you but aren’t too far off, you want to be able to catch up. You don’t want to waste your time and effort trying to rank for keywords that you don’t stand a chance at.

To identify competitors, you just need to type in your target keyword on Google and note the websites that show up on the first page of the SERP. If you see websites that appear more than once on the first page, this means that the website has a high authority for that particular topic.

Or if you would like to automate the process, you can use tools like RankingGap or SimilarWeb to identify your competitors. In RankingGap, all you need to do is input your own domain and you’ll be given a list of competitors along with metrics such as their domain name, total ranked keywords, estimated traffic and so on.

• Identify the right target keywords

You want to analyze your competitor’s keywords and choose the right ones to target yourself. You can get them from a bunch of places:

–Meta description: this is the subtext that you will see below the title in the search results. It provides a quick summary of what the webpage is about. You can also right-click on the page to inspect the source code, you can then search for meta-description and see how your competitor is describing his page.

–Meta title: also known as a title tag, it refers to the text that is displayed on the SERP and browser tabs to indicate the topic of a webpage

–Page content: this refers to all the information contained within a website. It can include the text, links, images, audio, and so on.

–Schema: this is a semantic vocabulary of tags that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in the SERPs. You can use Google’s Structured Data tool to easily extract your competitors’ schemes.

–Headers: this is the separate bit of text that’s at the top of articles you read. In the source code, you will find them listed as H2 or H3.

–Anchor text: this is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. They normally appear as blue underlined texts

–Alt tag text: this is used within HTML codes to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. You can view the alt text by right-clicking the image and choosing the Inspect option. You can then view the alt text and other attributes for the image in the HTML code.

•  Separate the keywords into classes

Now that you’ve gotten a list of keywords to target, you’ll want to start separating them into classes just so that you’re more organized and easily distinguish them for further analysis. Here are a few suggestions on what kind of classes you can create:

-Keywords that you’re focusing on but your competitor isn’t
-Keywords that your competitor is focusing but you aren’t
-Category of the keyword

By the way, we couldn’t contain our excitement but we actually know of a tool that can help you automate all of these processes. Keep reading if you want to find out! 

• Identify the “golden” opportunities

This is where you identify the keyword opportunities that you’ve been missing out on. Analyze them and think how they would fit in your campaign, make sure that they align with your current targeting objectives as well. Don’t just shove a keyword in without thinking about why you want this keyword there or whether it will fit or not. You might want to think about whether you’re already ranking for the keyword, whether it has a high search volume, and so on.  

• Start re-optimizing your content

Now that you have your keywords, it’s time to re-optimize your content. You might think that there’s no point in re-optimizing old content and that you should focus on putting out new content instead, but research shows that 76% of blog traffic comes from old posts.

This is your chance to redo the content that wasn’t fully optimized when it was first published. You might want to use SEO content editing tools that help you analyze your content and let you know exactly where to place those new keywords to maximize SEO. 

Tools like BiQ’s Content Intelligence have features such as Word Vector SEO that can show which paragraphs need editing to increase the relevancy of the keywords. 

Remember that body content isn’t the only place you can optimize, make sure to check your:

-Title tag
-Meta description
-Headings
-Alt text
-Link anchor text
And so on

• Keep track of your content performanc

Once you’ve done the reoptimization, you’ll want to know whether it’s working (or not). To do that, you should be tracking the content performance to see whether it has improved or not after the reoptimization is done.

There are several content performance metrics that you can choose from. You might want to see the amount of traffic, the number of people who click the “purchase” button, the number of people who subscribe to your content, and so on. Just pick the ones that are most relevant to you.

If you’re looking for a rank tracking tool, we recommend BiQ’s Rank Tracking. It has a lot of amazing features such as allowing a one glance snapshot of website ranking, providing a view on ranking distribution, an advanced tagging system, and so on. 

And that’s it! That is the main process of conducting a keyword gap analysis. All you need to do now is repeat this process for other competitors and you’re set! 

Now that you have an idea of what the keyword gap analysis process is, let’s take a look at the number 1 tool that I highly recommend using to conduct a keyword gap analysis.

RankingGap

This is a special keyword gap analysis tool. Its unique feature is that it provides four keyword analysis views in one go. We’re going to provide a small example by conducting a keyword gap analysis using SEOPressor.com and Backlinko. 

As you can see in the screenshot below, after inputting both of the websites, we’ll be met with an overview of the keyword analysis views. 

These views are Common, Missing, Gap, and Unique keyword views. But what do these keyword views mean:

Common– Common keywords are keywords that both you and your competitors rank for
Missing– Missing keywords are keywords that all your competitors are ranking for, except you
Gap– Gap keywords are keywords that some of your competitors are ranking for, while you are not
Unique– Unique keywords are keywords that only you are ranking for, but all your competitors aren’t 

In this example, we merely wanted to do a keyword gap analysis of the entire domain but you can even get more precise by checking the exact URL box that does the keyword gap analysis for a subdomain or webpage. 

So when we do the keyword gap analysis, say we’re looking at the Gap keyword view and see a bunch of keywords that Backlinko is ranking for but we’re not and we want to rank for these keywords. We will just take note of these keywords, maybe starring them, and add them to our lists. 

Once we’ve got a list of keywords that we want to rank for and classify them, we can start analyzing them further by thinking about how we can incorporate them into our website. For example, let’s say we’re focusing on the keyword “google trends”, we want to decide on whether it’s a viable keyword to rank for. We might think about whether it has a high enough search volume, do we want to rank for this keyword through a blog post or some other aspect on our website, and so on.

When that step is over, it’s time to actually take action. We might’ve decided on ranking for this keyword through our blog posts so we need to reoptimize them. We have two options, one is to create a completely new blog post centered around “google trends’ while the other is to reoptimize an existing blog post. We can actually do both. When we’re editing or creating these blog posts, we make sure to use SEO content editing tools to ensure that our content is perfectly optimized.

It’s also crucial that we include the keyword “google trends” in every possible area such as meta description, title, alt tags, and so on.

Besides that, we want to point out a few unique features present within RankingGap. 

The first is the crown icon you can see above one of the keywords, this is an indication that you are ranking the highest for that particular keyword among your competitors. As for the green icons, those indicate the SERP features that are present within the SERP for that keyword, so you have examples like video, related searches, top stories, and so on. 

You can also find out what page is the keyword ranking for by clicking “View URL”.

You can filter through the keywords by selecting particular ranges for the ranking position, search volume, competition, and cost per click. 

That’s basically all you need to know about RankingGap. Those are all the key features and how they can benefit you so we hope that you’ll give the tool a try. 

Conclusion

We’re finally at the end of this article so congratulations for sticking around this long. I hope that you’ve gained enough knowledge about what a keyword gap analysis is to feel confident enough about conducting one yourself. 

Just to recap, a keyword gap analysis is an approach to discovering the keyword opportunities that you’re missing out on. You ought to be doing it in order to get more content ideas, higher search visibility, and new audiences. You can do it by using tools such as RankingGap and following the four strategies suggested.

Creating blog posts that are appealing to both search engines and readers is an art. Writing effective content will necessitate not only time and effort, but also basic optimization knowledge, good writing skills, and profound proofreading.

Visit one of the essay review websites, such as Best Writers Online, for writing assistance. So, do you know how to write articles about SEO content that will rank highly in Google searches?

What Is SEO Content?

There is a significant difference between writing regular content and writing SEO-oriented content. To understand what is meant by “SEO content,” it is helpful to break the phrase down into components:

• The term“SEO” refers to the process of optimizing a website for search engines such as Google;
• By“content,” one means any information that exists on the network and can be accessed via the network.

As a result, by combining these two concepts, one gets the following definition: SEO content is any content created to attract traffic from search engines.

Writing articles for SEO entails creating content that is well optimized for both search engines and your target audience, whereas regular content writing is written only for people.

You can get help with written content by visiting an essay writing service website such as Writing Judge.

What Is SEO Content Used For?

SEO content is used to:

• The output of the site to the top based on the specified list of search queries;

• Bring more people to a resource;
• Converting new users into buyers, subscribers, etc.

What Are Different Types Of SEO Content?

The SEO content may include any of the following:

Product Pages

A good product page can serve as both SEO content and the target PPC page.

Blog Posts

A blog is one of the simplest ways to generate a steady stream of SEO content. In general, blog posts are more appealing and frequently attract incoming links than product pages.

So, they can be a great way to boost your site’s authority. Blogs are very adaptable, and you can use them to include any of the following types of content on this list.

Articles

Consider a news article, an interview, or a topic article. It is the most common type of content on most newspaper or magazine websites.

Lists

The list may also be an article, formatted in a specific way (for example, “10 ways to renovate a house”) makes scanning easier. When this topic appears in search results or on social media, it appears more clickable.

Guides

A guide is a longer piece of content that explains in detail how to do something. You can publish the entire guide on your website, a resume or excerpt, requiring visitors to fill out a registration form to read the entire guide.

It may be a good way to generate leads, but keep in mind that putting up a registration wall will likely reduce the amount of SEO traffic you can direct to this guide.

Videos

In 2020, 96% of content consumers said they had increased their consumption of online video content. And statistics proved that!

As a result, over 99% of video marketers said they would continue to use video in the future to promote their content. Why?

Because there are fewer videos on the Internet than text pages, it may be easier to rank a competitive keyword on the first page by creating a video instead of an article.

Depending on the type of site or business, video can be a great way to attract an audience. Consider creating video tutorials on how to use your products. Alternatively, illustrate the process associated with your business.

For example, a plumber can create a video showing how to release a sink. Note on SEO: You should consider including a text transcription of your video.

Infographics

Infographics, or large-format images that contain a lot of data (often in the form of graphs or charts) on a single topic, can generate a lot of page views and links.

However, because the majority of the content is embedded in the image and thus cannot be read by search engines like text, it is critical to carefully optimize the rest of the page.

What Is The Best Way To Write SEO Content?

The work on SEO content preparation and writing is now done differently than before. It is critical that your content contains all of the required components while also being competitive.

Three-quarters of your time is better spent on finding a potentially free niche that can be occupied and becoming a leader in it. Here are some pointers to help you get there.

#1 Determine Your Target Audience And Learn Its Needs

Take some time to get to know your target audience before you start writing for them.

Learn about your target audience’s demographics based on age, location, gender, and education. Why do you need to know these parameters?

You can choose the approach to content that best suits your target audience by better understanding it. To collect the necessary data, use tools such as SurveyMonkey.

Also, ask your readers direct questions about topics that may be of interest to them. Google Analytics can also be used to gather comprehensive location and popular search data. This information will help you enhance your SEO strategy further.

Aside from that, you can seek inspiration for new topics on Quora. It is beneficial for a variety of reasons:

• For promoting your website;
• It is a source of the traffic to increase your site’s attendance;
• It is a platform for honing writing abilities;
• It is a blog idea generation platform.

#2 Create A Consumer Profile

A user profile is a fictitious image created from data gathered during an audience study. You can create a typical buyer image if you know their age and location. Once you have defined an image, you can tailor your ideas to this fictitious person.

For example, if the character is a teenager who enjoys sports, the content should be centered on sporting events.

#3 Keyword Research

First and foremost, search engines such as Google require information about the subject matter of your content. You will not get any search traffic if you create content without targeting any specific keywords.

You cannot write SEO-friendly content without researching keywords. The key to increasing search traffic is to find and use keywords with high search intent but low competitiveness.

When looking for the right keywords, it is important to consider both short-tail and long-tail keywords. Both types of keywords are important for increasing traffic.

When compared to short-tail keywords, however, long-tail keywords not only rank better but also have a higher conversion rate. To find the above and conduct proper keyword research, you can check out this blog post on keyword discovery to find out what tools you can use.

Keyword research is one component, and proper search engine optimization of your content is another. If you want to improve your search ranking, insert your main keywords in the appropriate places:

• The title of your blog post;
• Blog post headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3, etc.);
• In the first paragraph of your blog post;
• Last paragraph of your blog post;
• Meta-descriptions for your blog posts;
• Image captions in your blog posts;
• URL of your blog article.

Here are some key reasons for locating the best keywords:

• By using the right keywords in your content, you will attract “target visitors from search engines”;
• Keywords help to boost your website’s conversion rate;
• Keyword research provides you with many potential blog post ideas that will increase your sales and search traffic;
• You can learn which keywords perform well for your competitors. This will make it easier for your content to rank higher.

#4 Select Catchy Headlines

No matter how mind-blowing and informative your content is, a bad headline will turn people off from publishing it. Make your headlines interesting and informative as possible to attract more attention.

You can also include keywords in the headline to improve your SEO content.

#5 Structure Your SEO Content

The content of your publication may be extensive enough. However, due to the disorganization in the structure, users may simply not want to read your content.

Instead, they will go to your competitors, whose content may be many times worse but easier to read. Divide your content into smaller paragraphs and use subtitles to avoid this. Use various lists to make reading the material easy and enjoyable.

Search engines rely on the backend organization too. To maintain a well-structured article, it is critical to use the correct tag hierarchy when tagging headers (H1, H2, H3).

#6 Make Use Of Graphics

Modern writing tips encourage the use of multimedia in addition to written content. This hybrid strategy integrates visual elements and makes your content more accessible.

Here are some of the most common graphics examples that may be useful for your content:

• Infographics;
• Images in GIF format;
• Images;
• Tables;
• Video.

Furthermore, media content is beneficial to SEO. It allows you to optimize metadata such as alternative text and image descriptions.

Use target keys to spell out alt-text and give graphics unique names. Search robots are not always capable of recognizing what is in the image. Algorithms now use alt-text as a priority description.

Make sure that your content is SEO-friendly as well by using SEO content editing tools like BiQ’sContent Intelligence.

#7 Improve Organic Traffic By Attracting Links From Other Websites

Whether you know it or not, Google prioritizes the search result in the search results, based on the quality of its available links.

This means that if you want to rank first for a potential keyword or topic, you can get this rating by attracting as many quality links from other sites as possible. Google prioritizes web pages with a large number of links.

As a result, if you truly want to increase organic traffic with your content, you should not overlook the importance of attracting links from other sites.

#8 Link Building

Internal textual references are critical for SEO. They send strong signals to search engines about the importance of another page on your website.

Maintain balance when linking to content that your audience might be interested in. Put links where they are truly needed and provide the user with valuable additional information.

Make strong anchors.

Wanda Lafond is a professional content writer, copywriter, content strategist, and communications consultant. She started young with her writing career from being a high school writer to a university editor, and now she is a writer in professional writing platforms— her years of expertise have honed her skills to create compelling and results-driven content every single time.

When you upload a video to YouTube, it’s given a unique alphanumeric code called a”video ID.” This video ID represents your specific video on the website. Optimization is the practice of improving the chances of getting attention for your videos by using keywords effectively in order to be found more often. By optimizing your content, through appropriate keyword selection and overall content structure, you increase the total number of views you get on each video. Optimizing your YouTube videos can lead to increased income from advertisements placed prior to or during each video.

The best reason to boost your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) through YouTube optimization is that it will help you rank better in searches on YouTube itself as well as other major search engines like Google. Videos that are optimized tend to get noticed more often, compared to videos that are not optimized and can help you build a larger audience for your channel.

A single video can be optimized in more than one way, which is why the term”YouTube optimization” is rather ambiguous.  There are ways to optimize a video by optimizing the title, description, tags, and even the content. Optimization can be done manually or through software.

The Two Main Ingredients:

1. Keywords

Interesting title + Optimized description = higher view count!

Well, not quite that simple. Keywords are what help people find your videos when searching online. If you’re able to use the right ones, then you’ll get more views on YouTube and attract an audience that is interested in your topic. You can then provide them with even more information while keeping them watching for longer periods of time if they like it.

How to choose relevant keywords?

Think about what people would search when looking for a video similar to yours. You want to make sure that whatever words or phrases someone types in when looking for a specific topic, your video will appear as one of the top few results they see. This means adding relevant keywords to help people find your video, which depending on what they are searching for could be multiple possibilities.

        2. Tags

Tags also help people find your videos, and like keywords, they can bring up a variety of related topics.

What are the most important tags to consider using?

YouTube suggests that you use at least one or two main tags which are included in the title but shouldn’t overdo it. It’s advised that each tag include not more than two words. This is because if someone types in”cheese” as a search term, there will be lots of results associated with “cheese”, so they might pick out popular ones to view instead. If you have too many different variations of the word cheese, for example,”cheese recipes”, “gourmet cheese”, etc., this could become overwhelming for them to sort through.

How to optimize your videos for better search engine rankings

1. Make sure your video is in HD

Videos in high definition tend to rank better on YouTube and other search engines than lower-quality videos. To make it easier on viewers, upload your videos in the highest possible definition you have access to.

2. Provide a title that accurately describes the content of the video

It’s important to include the subject of your video in the first few words, as well as make sure that this title includes terms that may be more specific to what you are trying to rank for. Be sure not to make it too long or else some search engines will actually cut off the first few words of it.

3. Include a short and informative description of what you’re going to be talking about in your video

This is a great place to add in words that you’ll be using as keywords. It’s good practice to include 1-2 sentences at the beginning of your description and then continue on with what you intend to describe in your video.

4. Use relevant keywords when uploading so people can find it easier

This is the most important step to take on YouTube. You’ll want to include 5-8 of the most relevant keywords that you think your audience will use when searching for videos related to yours. Try to avoid using generic words, as this can lead people with similar interests but not looking specifically for your video to not find it. You can use keyword research tools such as LSIGraph and BiQ to help you with this. You can also learn more about keyword discovery here.

5. Add tags to help categorize your videos 

Tags are another great way to use keywords for your videos. This is especially helpful when people want to find a variety of different videos within one particular topic. Tags are separated by commas, and you can add up to 10 of them. Make sure to mention the most important words in your description when adding tags.

6. Create an intro for each video with information such as who you are, what you’re doing, and why they should watch this particular one

This helps build up the audience for your channel, as well as gives everyone a better idea of what they are potentially getting into before clicking on it. If you’ve been consistent with your branding and have a series of videos that follow a particular topic, mention this in the beginning as well.

7. Share your videos on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.

Between your own social media accounts, comments on other pages similar to yours, or just mentioning it in passing conversation, any way you can get the word out about your videos is a good thing. Take advantage of any chance you have to let others know about what you’re doing.

8. Add a link at the end of your video telling viewers where they can find more content from you

Including a link to your channel, along with related content from the same topic of your video is a good way to get people interested in checking out more videos. This also helps them find you on other social media sites as well.

9. Keep your videos short and concise

Don’t make your videos any longer than the amount of content you’d like to include. If they appear too long, people probably won’t watch them and instead choose a video with less time to sit through it. Include enough information to get your point across without boring people. Use Short Video Generator to make your Youtube videos more attractive.

10. Include a call-to-action at the end of each video that directs people to subscribe or share with their friends

This is good for both getting more people to find your videos and continuing the engagement with your current viewers. Many viewers might not see this section right away if it isn’t smack-dab in the middle of the video, so be sure to include something that stands out to get attention.

11. Upload regularly

If you only upload your videos once in a blue moon, it wont help your channel gain any authority or credibility on YouTube. Regularly uploading videos shows that you are dedicated to providing quality content on a regular basis which includes keywords people will be searching for and related tags. It also means that each of your videos has more opportunities to rank higher with search engines like Google by receiving more views than if it wasn’t uploaded regularly.

In conclusion, with YouTube’s algorithm, videos relevant to what people are searching for will rank higher with search engines. YouTube Optimization is all about making sure your video gains as much popularity as possible so it reaches the widest audience possible.

It’s also important that people can find your video easily when searching for something specific through both YouTube Search and Google search since those are the two main sources where viewers will land on your page from. The more relevant your video is, the more likely it will be found by someone looking for something. Try mentioning relevant keywords in your description when uploading a video, tagging them appropriately, creating an intro including creating good descriptions for your videos as well as titles., sharing on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as other websites related to your topic that could potentially link back to your channel or videos, keeping them short and concise while giving enough information so viewers fully understand the content of the video but also making sure not to bore them by talking too long about any one subject and including a call-to-action at the end telling viewers where they can find follow your channel or other similar types of content from you. 

By doing these things on a consistent basis, you will gain more viewers and subscribers to your channel which in turn makes it easier for others to find your videos because there are more of them available. This also increases the likelihood that they’ll watch future videos if they liked this one. These are just some ways that will help increase views and subscribers which in turn should lead to more people watching your video and increasing its ranking.

VeronicaFortuna is a content writer and PR outreach specialist for VEED.IO. She also self-published a poetry collection entitled Wait in Hope.

The goal of SEO is to rank at the top of search engine results to get the much-desired online visibility. After all, the Top 3 results are said to hoard almost 75.1% of all clicks. 

The same goes for local businesses as well. With more consumers taking to the search engine to look for businesses in their neighborhood, your potential customers cannot find you if you do not appear at the top of the search results.  

According to Google, there are as many as 1.6 billion searches with local intent every day. In other words, there are a lot of local searches happening on Google. 

So how do you become the top-ranking answer for these local searches? Well, the only solution is to make your small business become locally visible online. 

What is Local Search Visibility?

Local search visibility is the idea of reaching audiences in your vicinity when they are searching about your brand, products, or services online. 

This could mean targeting local-driven keywords on search engines like Google and Bing. Or optimizing your profile on Google My Business, Yelp, and Tripadvisor – wherever your local audiences might be. 

Image Source: GeekFlare

By building your local presence and marketing online, you can effectively boost your business traffic and sales.

For better understanding, local visibility is a part of local SEO and is different from regular SEO that is international by nature. It is based on a separate set of ranking criteria that focuses on distance, prominence, and relevance.

Naturally, this means different online marketing tactics. So what are the steps to increase your online visibility and make your local business profile rank higher in search engines? 

Well, we have got your back! Your local SEO strategy should be a proper mix of these 8 tactics: 

8 Tips to Increase Your Local Visibility Online

1. Get customer reviews

As a local business, customer reviews are your lifeblood. Because not only does your review profile play a factor in where your business rank, consumers love reviews! And they often base their final purchasing decision on what others have to say. 

And they often base their final purchasing decision on what others have to say. 

Image Source: WordTracker

From deciding which products or services they should buy to what they should eat and travel, reviews have become an integral part of a business on the internet, which means managing your online reputation is more important than ever. 

Bright Local did a study on local services ads clicks and found that review ratings are the biggest driver of clicks on the local SERPs, even above paid ads!  

That’s why always make sure to encourage your customers to share reviews! Provide excellent service and make sure all your review URLs for Google My Business or Trustpilot are readily available. In any case, implement an active review acquisition strategy in your business. 

You can train staff to verbally mention how much a review would be appreciated, especially when a customer seems happy. Or send a friendly email reminder to prompt your customers to leave a review and provide an incentive. 

More importantly, make sure you respond to your customer reviews. Many reviewers feel that if they take the time to leave a good review of a business, it’s only common courtesy to receive a “thank you” from the company. 

However, keep in mind to avoid impersonal and robotic-feeling of using the exact phrasing for all owner responses. Vary your message and have fun. Your statement of gratitude can be brief in length, but it should be uniquely worded. 

Image Source: Vendasta

Customers observe when a business responds to the majority of its positive and negative feedback. This action will signal to new customers that the company genuinely cares about what their customers have to say and will further incentivize new customers to take a moment to share their own experiences.

2. NAP citations

Local search results rank businesses based on consistency across listings using a simple standard known as NAP, short for Name, Address, and Phone Number. 

In other words, this means Google recognizes your business based on your NAP citations, and it expects that wherever your business is listed, this information should look the same. 

So, for example, if you decided on “Marinova’s Pet Feed & Supply Co.”, then write it only in that manner, not as “Marinova’s Pet Feed and Supply Co.” or “Marinova’s Pet Feed & Supply.”

Plus, many online marketing experts recommend sending important business announcements using press releases when building your business NAP citations. 

Image Source: MarketersMEDIA

Running your business announcement on reputable media outlets like FOX News or New York Times provides additional exposure. It helps build NAP consistency on an authoritative outlet that will add credibility to your business. 

3. Insert your listing in business directories

Google My Business is a good start, but having your local business listing on other online directories, especially those famous in your area or industry, can bring your online visibility to the next level. 

For example, if you are a business owner in the United States or Canada, you want to list your business on Yelp. According to Alexa, the platform has over 184 million reviews worldwide and is one of the top 50 most visited websites in the United States. 

Image Source: SEJ

Or perhaps you are running a restaurant or homestay; then you would want to be sure to list on TripAdvisor. Consumers often go to these online directories and review sites to find actual user recommendations, so having your business there will help expand your visibility. 

Review your online listings to reflect your business information if your businesses are already found on these sites. To an extent, these business listings also contribute to NAP citation, and making sure your company’s name, address, phone number, website URL, and email address is correct will avoid any penalty. 

Some other directories worth looking into are Better Business Bureau (BBB) and the local Chamber of Commerce business group in your neighborhood. This can benefit by validating your authority in Google.

Other sites like Bing, Apple Map, Angie’s List, Yellow Pages, G2 Review, Trustpilot, CitySearch, and MapQuest.can also expand your online visibility in local search results. 

But most importantly, actively manage your local listings and respond to all the customer reviews. We know this may sound like too big of a bite. So again, analyze and select only the ones that are relevant to your business. 

Outdated listings don’t produce results. Create a review schedule to update listings routinely, and particularly if the business changes. Keep a master list of places you are represented online to avoid missing one when you update.

4. Have a mobile-friendly website

Local SEO works even if you don‘t have a website. However, having a mobile-friendly website can only bring you advantages. It helps drive more traffic and leads to your premises as they search for products or services that your business offers.  

Moreover, most consumers now rely on their smartphones to get any information or discover nearby businesses. To grab their attention, you’d need to have a mobile-friendly website that makes it easy for the audience to learn about your business. 

Image Source: SEJ

Besides, mobile-friendliness is a Google ranking factor and can contribute to the visibility and ranking of your business. As a general rule of thumb, make sure your website is fast and offers convenience. Otherwise, people may leave the website while they are browsing. 

You can always check your website with Google Core Web Vitals to see if you meet the search engine requirements.

5. Optimize your website for local content

Content marketing is also another method to improve your local visibility online. However, your focus here is to create content that speaks or relates directly to your local audience. 

For example, you think people might be searching for the best pet shop in Orlando. For your business to show up in the results, you need to do proper keyword targeting. We recommend using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to do your keyword research. 

The tool supports location and language-based results that can identify more specific geo-targeted searches and find the exact search terms people are using in the area.

Content marketing is also another method to improve your local visibility online. However, your focus here is to create content that speaks or relates directly to your local audience. 

Turns out, instead of ‘pet shop’, locals here are more likely to search for ‘pet store’ instead. So in this scenario, it’s better to include the term ‘pet store’ in your business description. 

And that’s just the beginning; make sure to use BiQ Keyword Intelligence to uncover all the terms your potential customers are using to find your products and services. 

Once you have these locally relevant keywords, optimize them into your website’s homepage, meta description, and URLs to have your website rank better for them. Integrate these keywords into both your on-page and off-page SEO efforts to see better results. 

Along with product and service keywords, you might also want to focus on keywords with informational search intent. Potential customers are always on the look for helpful information about their questions and problems. 

Using the example of an Orlando pet store again, your customers may be first-time owners and are looking for some vital advice into picking which cat breed might be suitable for them.

By creating helpful content that will answer your consumers, you can show that your website is constantly updated and attract highly relevant traffic who might walk into your store doorstep the next day. 

Keyword-targeting aside, here are some other ideas on creating local that will help boost geographical relevance: 

• Writing blog posts around local news stories, activities, events, or industry
• Creating videos about local charities or causes that your business supports
• Setting up location-specific web pages on your website with high-quality local content if you serve different parts of a region

6. Schema markup

Schema.org markup has plenty of uses when it comes to local SEO. There are various markups for all kinds of businesses like doctors, attorneys, and regular brick-and-mortar businesses. 

You can find the complete list of schema markups for local businesses here. 

Including a structured data markup on your website will allow search engines to understand and recognizees your local business better to show your GMB page result. 

Moreover, it helps enrich your search result display — making it more user-friendly and engaging. Now let’s quickly go through two essential markups we think would work great to boost the visibility of most businesses.

First, starting with the Local Business Schema Markup. 

Here’s the result! This is an example of Sun’s Donuts after using the local business markup that now shows a Knowledge Graph panel when people search for the brand.  

Image Source; SEJ

Another is the Review Schema markup, and you should implement it if your local business has raving reviews. By adding this markup, your search results will display your reviews and 5-star ratings, which will let you stand out from your competition. 

Image Source: Blurpoint

These are just two of the examples. There are more Google-rich snippet results that can make a huge difference, like the breadcrumbs markup and site navigation schema markup. 

So make sure you check out the schema markup list and implement what works for you. 

7. Use social media

Social media like Facebook and Instagram is a high-visibility medium. And creating a social media profile for your local business can effectively boost your local prominence. 

Image Source: Social Media Worldwide

Recent data show that one-third of the global population is active on social media, which means your potential customers are there too. Besides, having a business account on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can open up more platforms to interact with your customers. 

Before you get started, here are some crucial tips. While producing a high-quality social media campaign across many platforms can help you boost your business, it’s meaningless if you cannot maintain a consistent social media presence. 

Small businesses often fall into the trap of updating social media pages sporadically.

Instead, choose your platforms. Plan and craft an effective strategy to engage people on social media. Make sure you post regularly (at least once a week) to keep your products and services top of your customers’ minds. 

8. Optimize your GMB page

Now, if you are serious about winning customers on Google, you need to rank on the Google Local 3-pack. And the key to doing that is optimizing your GMB page. 

First and foremost, ensure that your Google My Business account is claimed and verified. This will allow you to edit your business information, and you want to make sure you meticulously complete every relevant section. 

Use high-quality and captivating photos descriptive of your business and make use of videos. Many often skip this, but videos are highly effective at telling a story and can be an effective marketing tool to get customers into your store. 

To further optimize it, you can also include the target and relevant keywords you found using BiQ Keyword Intelligence naturally into your business description, FAQ, and even posts. 

Image Source: WordStream

This will strengthen your business relevance to these search terms and increase the chance of having your business show up when people key in these queries. 

Above all, manage your GMB and keep it active! Answer questions posted by users and respond to any reviews you get! 

If you have completed the strategies mentioned above, there is approximately an 80% chance that you can rank your page to the Google SERP top 10. 

However, when the competition between local search rankings is fierce, how do you ensure that your business’ web page appears at the top of the Google SERP for your target audience?

What other ways are there to secure your strategy to improve search visibility?

This is when a local rank tracking tool comes in handy.

Bonus: Local Rank Tracking Tool in 2021

Grid My Business

Grid My Business is a relatively new local SEO tool specializing in monitoring search visibility and providing valuable insights to its users.

In just one click away, you can instantly obtain important information about your local business, such as real-time local rankings and local competitors, based on the search query you aim to rank.

The best thing about Grid My Business is that it also supports all locations that can be found on Google Maps. You can choose the see the search visibility based on the grid size and location you want to see. 

Identifying your actual local competitors, monitoring their local search rankings, and learning their strengths and weaknesses can enable you to stay ahead of the local ranking competition.

Thus, you will be able to increase your business’ search visibility for local SERP effectively. 

Improve your local business’ SERP search visibility with Grid My Business now!

Conclusion

Becoming the busiest store on the street is every local business owner’s dream. 

And with your customers going online to search for information before making their purchase decision, online visibility is the next best weapon for local businesses. 

Whether you offer products, services, or running a brick-and-mortar store, building for local search visibility will make your marketing efforts more impactful. It can be pretty simple with these 8 tactics we have shared. 

Fundamentally, the right keywords can make all the difference. Check out BiQ and Grid My Business to improve online visibility for your local business and see your sales go up today!

Image Source: IDL Web Inc

Business owners, big or small, need the same thing- visibility. With visibility or awareness of your business, your chances of getting sales would increase. So begs the question, how does one get visibility in the vast sea of search results in Google? 

Local SEO is the answer! 

If you’re not easy to find with a quick Google search, you’re missing out on many visitors (who are all potential customers). To put it the other way, the local ranking could be the key factor to staying relevant and growing your business. 

Image Source: EduinPro 

What is Local Seo?

When someone searches for a business or a place near their location, they will get local results across Google. If you have a brick-and-mortar store or other local business listing, then local SERPs can significantly impact how easily people can find your business online.

A study by Google shows that 76% of consumers that search for something local on their phone visits a store that day. 

For instance, when you search for “vets near me” to find the nearest vet clinic as their pet had suddenly fallen ill or “best tattoo parlors in [location]” to find a well-reviewed and professional tattoo artist. 

Local SERPs, as mentioned, are the results that show up for a local-based query based on location. Local SEO refers to the process of optimizing your business’s website for a better local ranking in the SERPs and indirectly better brand awareness. 

Case in point, for in-person customers, it is valuable to you to rank highly in local queries around your area. This will no doubt boost your visibility for the most relevant customers.

How to improve your local rankings

You may find that your business doesn’t show up for relevant searches in your area, and what should you do to improve your local rankings and why? 

With better local rankings, your page visits, as well as your conversions, will increase. With that said, here are 7 best tips for taking your local ranking to another level:

1. Optimize for local keywords by creating content

Content is king. People use search engines to identify local businesses that provide the items or services they require. To rank in these search results, you’ll need to incorporate local keywords into your website.

And this is one approach to improve brand recognition and appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone searches for a keyword.

Image Source: WebFX

For example, when they type “event planners”, Google will most probably recommend some event planning companies near their location like “event planning in Los Angeles”. 

When creating content with local intent, it’s critical to include local keywords in the title and meta description tags to help with local SEO. To delineate your site conceptually and geographically, your content will have to focus on long-tail keywords frequently.

For instance, overarching web pages may include “Seattle SEO Firm,” while a blog post could consist of “Best SEO Firms in Seattle.”

To find keywords for your local search, you will need to conduct local SEO keyword research, and BiQ can simplify this process. 

BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence tool can help you to untapped local keyword opportunities. 

First, enter your target keyword. Then, choose your preferred locations and languages.

The fantastic keyword tool will show you the list of relevant keywords the local people are using. 

Your target keyword’s search volume could be 1,000 in your preferred location and possibly less than 100 in another. That’s simply because of the different demands in different places. 

So choose the keyword that has high volume but lower competition. I know it can be pretty challenging to decide which keyword to use. That’s where you can sort the keyword value in Keyword Intelligence. 

A high-value keyword means it will bring more traffic to your website at a lower competition. 

2. Claim and optimize your GMB listing

Image Source: StoreHub

For your local ranking in Google, you can’t do without a proper Google My Business listing which will automatically improve SEO and increase the visibility of your business. This is one of the top factors that Google will evaluate when ranking businesses based on local search and snack pack results. 

With an optimized GMB, your business can get ahead of your competitors that are not listed, bring free discovery, and receive free reviews that will allow potential customers to read reviews from your previous customers to boost your credibility. 

To claim or create your listing, go to the Google My Business website. 

Image Source: Sprout Social

To improve your local ranking, you can further optimize your GMB profile by regularly sharing business updates and fresh content. For tips to do that, you can refer here. 

3. Optimize website to make it mobile-friendly

Image Source: Website Planet 

It is not surprising that mobile devices are used more than desktops. After all, they are mobile, which means they are more convenient when you want a quick search for something. 

A study by Uberall showed that 82% of shoppers had done a “near me” search with their mobile devices.

With this statistic in mind, you must optimize your website to make it mobile-friendly so that mobile visitors will not have any trouble navigating your site or finding information about your business. Indirectly, you’ll get to miss the sky-high bounce rate.

Besides, Google has rolled out a mobile-first index where it predominantly uses mobile versions of websites for indexing and ranking. 

This means that your business’s website isn’t mobile-friendly and your competitor’s site is, then you’ll lose out because they will rank better than you.

Another tip is to add call-to-action buttons on both your site and GMB listing, as this could make a massive difference for your business as 60% of mobile users have contacted a business directly from search results. 

Mobile optimization is not an option anymore. 

It’s also a ranking signal, so it counts big time toward your spot in the SERPs.

4. Obtain and respond to reviews

Image Source: see all media 

When you search for a specific service or business, have you ever wondered why some companies appear at the top of your results rather than others? What sets them apart?

The answer: a good number of Google reviews.

I found my dentist through Google, and what made me choose their clinic was the reasonable amount of good reviews. 

The funny thing is, when I was there, I saw this piece of paper on their bulletin board near the counter written, “Leave your review about us on Google, and you’re entitled to a free tooth cleaning session!”. 

No wonder there were lots of reviews on their GMB listing, and in return, they had an excellent local ranking! Sometimes to receive, you have to give first. 

In Brightlocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, they have reported a significant increase in the perception of reviews among consumers over the last decade.

For that reason, it makes total sense for Google to see these as valuable factors for rankings.

Not only should you focus on getting good reviews, but you should also always actively participate in responding to the reviews, good or bad! 

Image Source: Search Engine Land

According to Google themself, businesses should interact with customers by responding to reviews that they leave about your business, showing accountability and credibility. 

5. Build links on a local level

Image Source: BrightLocal

According to BrightLocal, link signals such as linking domain authority and quantity are principal for your local organic rankings and snack pack results – as links made up 31% of the localized organic ranking factors in 2020.

Image Source: BrightLocal

Link building is an effective way to boost local businesses’ performance in SERPs, according to the expert survey.

The majority of local firms have connections with other businesses in the local area.

To start, I recommend starting by building links from people that you already know by listing out all:

• Distributors
• Supplier
• Wholesaler
• Contractor
• Neighboring business

That you have any relationship with.

After that, you can then look for a specific page on their website where a link to you would make sense.

Some other tips for you to raise your local link building game to another level is by: 

i) Sponsoring local events 

It’s a fact that most local events most probably need sponsors. If you can sponsor a local event, you can try it out. As usual, your link will have a nice place on the event’s website.

And your support doesn’t have to be straight cash.  Are you a printing company? You can offer to print out their flyers. Run a bakery? Consider donating a few boxes of custom cupcakes for their event.

You get the idea.

ii) Local PR

Local newspapers and local news sites are STARVING for stories. 

The only catch is that you need to give the news sites a heads up at least a few days before your event so they can prepare. Plus, you can help them write up the story with background deets before the event even happens.

Image Source: Newsroom

The only catch is that you must notify the news sites at least a few days ahead of time to prepare. You can also assist them in writing the story by providing background information beforehand.

6. Have accurate NAP citations

Image Source: SE Ranking

According to Moz, Google considers citation signals such as citation volume and NAP consistency in local search results. This indicates that your business’s information should be on significant citation websites such as Bing Maps, Yelp, and Facebook, besides the GMB listing. 

A consistent NAP data is when your business name, address, and phone number are identically and accurately listed across all online platforms, including your website, social media accounts, business listings, and other third-party websites.

NAP consistency is crucial not only for search engine ranking algorithms, but it may also directly impact how customers perceive your company and whether they have a pleasant or negative experience with it.

Some ways to make sure that your NAP citations are consistent is to run a NAP Audit with tools like WhiteSpark and Loganix.

7. Take advantage of trends/issues in your area

Image Source: Night Watch

Keeping track of online conversations regarding your business, industry, or pertinent issues and trends in your local area is known as social listening. 

You’ll acquire vital information and insights into your target audiences’ interests and priorities and, as a result, allowing you to make better, more educated business decisions.

For instance, you can use tools such as Quora, Reddit, or Twitter to find out what problems people in your area are facing, such as the lack of good sushi places in your area. Then maybe now it’s time to hire more experienced and professional sushi chefs for your restaurant. You can then optimize your GMB SEO by sharing updates about your new team of expert sushi chefs, for instance.

Or maybe you’ve noticed people wishing your hair salon also provided manicure services. You could expand your service offering and share this update on your GMB profile.

On the other hand, the next time you hit a wall coming up with content ideas, remember to integrate these social listening tips into your content research process.

Local Rank Tracking Tool 2021: Grid My Business

All the above tips can increase your local rankings, but how do you constantly measure and track your local rankings, especially when you have a long list of target keywords? And why is tracking your local rankings so crucial to your local business?

Why is local rank tracking so important?

Local rank tracking keeps you updated on how you rank among your competitors, allowing you to respond quickly to these changes and remain visible in relevant searches. 

Especially for brick-and-mortar businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, hairdressers, and dentists that are tied to a physical location, it’s even more critical.

How to track your local rankings with Grid My Business?

Once you have signed up, Grid My Business will retrieve and display precise results on your local rankings for a specific keyword as they appear in the Google Maps and SERP local three packs. Remember to select the grid and distance you want to cover on Google Map. 

As a result, you’ll know where you rank, who you outrank, and where you need to improve your local SEO strategy.

You can even schedule an automated rank monitoring and obtain precise weekly updates of your local search rankings in a comprehensive white-label report. 

By having this report, you can easily keep track, monitor, and even have a side-to-side comparison with your local competitors. Thus, supporting your local SEO ahead of the competition.

Get your Grid My Business now!

Local Ranking: Your Business’s Holy Grail 

SEO changes quite rapidly. You never know when Google will introduce new features on its SERPs for local searches, but you can count on these changes coming. That’s why it’s essential to always stay on top of local SEO.

Many factors influence your visibility in these searches. By implementing these top 7 tips, you can expect your local SEO efforts to be better than ever. 

Once you get your local ranking signals right, soon you’ll be able to serve more people in your geographic region- and grow faster. 

What is Google Maps marketing, and how does it work? Marketing with Google Maps is a business tactic that uses Google Maps’ functionality to make your business easier to find. Check out our complete guide to learn how you can improve your Google Map SEO. 

Google Maps is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools that the search engine company has developed. It lets us know the layout of roads that helps us get around cities and towns and fills us in with important landmarks and business info that makes our lives so much easier. 

For local business owners, Google Maps is also an incredible marketing tool. By simply creating a Google My Business (GMB) profile, businesses can appear in Google Maps and become accessible to many potential customers. 

Digital marketers call this idea of using Google My Business and optimizing for local search ranking — Google Maps Marketing.

Image Source: Agentfire

First, let’s learn what exactly does Google Maps Marketing entails and the key SEO factors that influence your rankings on the Maps.

What is Google Maps Marketing?

Image Source: Search Engine Journal

Google Maps marketing is the process of making your business stand out among Google Maps listings. The goal is to optimize your business to rank higher in local search results and attract customers searching for your products or services. 

However, let’s be clear. When we talk about Google Maps marketing, it does not refer to just a single platform. Google Maps results are shown in many places, including the Local 3-Pack results, voice searches, and the Google Maps app with 5 billion downloads. 

To succeed in Google Maps marketing, businesses would need a combination of local SEO, paid search, GMB listing management, and reputation building.

Then again, is Google Maps marketing for you? This depends on the types of business you are running, but for most local businesses, the answer is yes!

Importance of Google Maps Marketing

Based on Google’s statistics, local searches and Google Maps drive consumers to over 1.5 billion destinations each year. 

46% of all searches made on Google are looking for local information, and among this, 93% of local search results display the Google Local 3-Pack, which are local businesses that have a listing in Google Maps. 

Image Source: Webflow

Naturally, people doing these local searches are potential customers ready to buy your products or request your services. 70% of customers are likely to visit the store based on their online information. 

This thus makes Google Maps one of the most powerful marketing tools for local businesses. By marketing on Google Maps, not only will you be able to increase your local visibility, but better positioning will earn you more sales and revenue compared to your competitors.

However, these results depend on your positioning in Google Maps for relevant searches. So the goal here is to achieve as high a placement as possible in local business results listings on Google SERPs and let’s take a look at what this means. 

Proximity-based on Google Maps Results

Google Maps listing is primarily based on your physical location. With increasing mobile search volume, proximity-based Google Maps results are becoming more commonplace. 

For example, do a quick Google search on your mobile device or signed-in browser for a short-tail keyword like ‘hardware shop’.

You will notice that the results returned are businesses near you and are listed based on how close they are to your current location. 

Rankings on Google Maps Results

On the other hand, not every user has their location data enabled on their mobile device. Sometimes, there are scenarios when we are simply researching for businesses out of our vicinity. In these cases, ranked Google Maps results are shown. 

These Maps listing results are independent of the user’s location and based on optimization best practices, where Google Maps marketing comes into play. 

A quick tip: Check to see if you are already ranking on the Google 3-Pack for any local search terms. If yes, make sure to use a local rank monitoring tool like our BiQ’s Rank Tracking to keep track of your position. 

Google Maps Marketing Strategy

Now that you understand how it works let’s look at the 6 tactics you can use to boost your rankings on Google Maps.

1.  Get Your GMB Listing Verified

To get your business on Google Maps, you first need to have a Google My Business profile. 

Google My Business (GMB) enables business owners to show their business listings on Google search and Map results. Almost any type of business can register or claim their GMB listing, and here is a quick guide to setting up your GMB profile. 

Image Source: Imgur

Note that you should never skip the last step of verifying your business. Many people fail or forget to verify their listings. Still, unless your GMB profile is verified, you won’t be able to manage your business information in Search, Maps, and other Google properties. 

Besides, verification is necessary to confirm the physical location of your business and check whether you’re authorized to own the listing. Only after that will you be able to make changes to your business across Google and view local search insights. 

2. Optimize Your GMB listing

So once you have your GMB listing verified, it’s time to optimize your profile. 

GMB signals like categories, keywords in the business description, and more are all ranking factors that will influence your rankings and chances of getting into the much-coveted Local 3-Pack. There are only 3 spots, and you want to make sure you show up for relevant searches to reach your potential customers.

To achieve this, make sure to include keywords your audience uses to find businesses like yours in your description. Let’s say you are an owner of a hardware shop, and your business description should also include keywords like paint, power tools, or other related terms. 

Here we recommend using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence for all your keyword research. Our tool supports local SEO efforts and allows you to access language and location-specific keyword data. As of now, there are more than 100,000 locations and 35 languages you can choose from.  

The Keyword Intelligence tool will start to analyze your target keyword and return with related keywords and search phrases which you can then use to describe your business.

However, avoid cramming all your keywords into the description. You can also include them naturally in your Q&A section or responses to queries and comments. Because this will too help improve your Business Profile’s ranking for relevant searches. 

Now that you have already optimized keywords on your website with BiQ tracking and monitoring your local search rankings is equally critical to check the optimization results of your website.

Grid My Business is one of the best local rank tracking tools to monitor and compare your local search ranking performances. It supports all locations that can be found on Google Maps. 

You can obtain more profound insights into your local rankings with Grid My Business. By performing a quick and easy bulk scan of up to 5 keywords per scan, you can identify local rankings of multiple search queries.

Enhance my Google Map Marketing strategy with Grid My Business now!

3. Get Awesome Reviews

Now, quick question. If you were to get search results like the one below, which business would you most likely choose? 

Image Source: WordStream

It should be obvious. Reviews play a key role in influencing a customer’s decision to purchase or not and are thus also a key ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. 

Though having a high number of reviews doesn’t guarantee you the #1 ranking in the Local Pack, it will most certainly stand out from your competition. 

People often rely on other user reviews and recommendations to make their final decisions. 

That’s why make sure you are actively soliciting reviews from your customers. 

If your GMB listing is still new, you can reach out to your loyal, long-time customers to get the momentum going. Otherwise, add this effort into your marketing funnel by drafting an automated email reminder post-purchase to ask for a review.

If done correctly, this will keep a steady stream of reviews coming in, which also acts as a strong signal that reminds Google your business is active.  

But more importantly, make sure you are constantly monitoring and responding to your reviews. Replying to customer feedback reveals a lot about your business to prospects, incentivizes additional customers to leave their reviews, and improves your local SEO. 

Image Source: LocalIQ 

Even if you receive a negative review, don’t launch a personal attack. Be courteous and thank the customer for their feedback. In contrast, another option is to flag the review as inappropriate if it violates the Google guidelines. 

4. Accurate NAP Citations

Another vital signal in local SEO is NAP consistency, and it refers to the accuracy of a location-based business’ Name, Address, and Phone Number across the internet. 

This is often regarded as a minimum requirement in the local search optimization strategy, and you need to check if your business details are accurate wherever mentioned. This could include business listings in local directories, social media, and websites. 

Citations do not necessarily have to link back to your website to provide search engines with positive signals regarding your business. However, ensure your citations are correct across all mentions to let Google and Bing know that your business is legitimate.

5. Add Relevant Business Pictures

According to Google, businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions to their location and 35% higher clickthrough rates to their websites. 

Honestly, this is no surprise. People love great visuals, and the brain can often process much more information from an image than through words. 

Image Source: Partoo

Using the right product and location images can help better engage buyer’s attention, increase trust and boost conversion rates. 

So a quick tip here is to invest in photography and capture images that can evoke an emotional response or desire for customers to visit your shop. 

6. Utilize Paid Ads

Lastly, although marketing for Google Maps is free, for businesses looking for quick results and have more room in their marketing budget, using local search ads can be a great option. 

Image Source: Conversion Pipeline

Similar to regular Google ads, these paid local ads will bring your business listing to the top of Google Map searches for keywords relevant to your business. It works by using location targeting and appears in both desktop and mobile searches. 

Remember to experiment and track your performance to understand how customers respond to your ads when using ads for your business. Use these data to inform further your marketing campaign of what queries you should target and the preferred actions for users. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, Google Maps marketing is highly competitive. It is the ideal standard for local search, especially for local businesses looking to drive online and in-person traffic. 

So if you are using local SEO practices, be patient and continuously improve your local visibility. Because once you succeed, the benefit reaps will elevate your business to greater heights. 

If you’ve been actively marketing your business online, you would have most likely come across organic SEO and local SEO. Though both sound like excellent search optimization strategies, you might find yourself wondering which is better for your business.

This post will walk you through the differences between organic SEO vs. local SEO and how they are related. First, let’s start with the definitions. 

What is SEO? 

Image Source: Merpati Blue

Search Engine Optimization (otherwise known as SEO) is the process of improving your site visibility when people search for products or services related to your business. 

Marketers adopt many optimization tactics and best practices adhering to search algorithms to rank high in search results. Some quick examples are keyword research, link building, improving page speed, and more. 

Generally, when optimizing a website for SEO, you are looking to create content that will answer relevant queries your target audiences may be actively seeking for. 

This could be a keyword like pizza recipe or a question spoken into voice search on your mobile device like how do you make a pizza from scratch?

Compared to local SEO, organic SEO is optimizing for searches that do not contain local intent. That is, users are looking for information rather than a specific location. 

Benefits of SEO

SEO can benefit businesses of all sizes and industries, especially now, as 3.5 billion searches are done daily. 

Almost everyone is conducting searches to find answers. And this makes SEO a fundamental part of digital marketing if you are looking to reach potential users and buyers looking for info online. With SEO, here are some significant benefits:

Image Source: Designer Daily

• Drive website traffic – Search can be a primary source of digital traffic for businesses. By ranking in the top results for relevant search terms, you can generate hyper-targeted and high-quality traffic to your website. 
• Build brand trust and credibility – Ranking on the first page of Google boost business credibility. Users generally trust Google to deliver relevant and valuable content first, and as statistics show – 75% of users do not move onto page 2. 
• Increased engagement and conversions – While SEO results may be time-consuming. When done correctly, businesses can expect an incredible ROI because search engine leads offer a close rate of 14.6%, nearly 12% greater than traditional marketing.
• Cheaper than other strategies – Though we can hardly say that SEO is cheap nor easy, it is one of the most cost-effective tactics compared to all other marketing strategies for delivering brand awareness and relevant traffic to your website. 

What is Local SEO? 

A subset of the traditional SEO, local SEO refers to optimization techniques that focus on local searches. This strategy is usually adopted by local businesses with physical stores to reach customers in their vicinity. 

Let’s take pizza as an example again. If you search the term pizza on your mobile device, it will most likely bring you local results and recommendations of pizza places rather than recipes. 

Here, you will see the Local 3-Pack results that Google thinks are the top three pizza places near you. 

However, beyond proximity, another instance of local SEO is result-based ranking on Google Maps. Let’s say you own a hotel in Auckland. Instead of targeting locals, you are reaching out to international travelers planning a trip to New Zealand. 

Without proximity as a factor, Google relies on other local ranking metrics like keywords, NAP citations, reviews, and more to decide on Google Maps rankings. 

Image Source: Quora

One thing is, local search rankings are always derived from GMB listings. So unless you have a Google My Business profile, your business will not appear for local searches. 

Benefits of Local SEO

With that said, some businesses may gain an edge from a local approach to SEO. 

Brick and mortar businesses like coffee shops or hardware stores are likely to benefit more when optimizing for local searches rather than the traditional SEO and here’s why: 

• Gain more foot traffic from local online visibility – 46% of searches on Google are seeking local recommendations. By optimizing your company’s local SEO, these local customers are more likely to find you and visit your store.
• Increase traffic and sales – On average, 56% of actions on GMB listings are website visits. Manytoin relies on Google My Business listings to discover a local business nearby to visit and support. 
• Reduce advertising costs – Creating a GMB profile is completely free. Building your rank will allow you to use Google Maps and search results as a free advertisement for your business and gain more valuable clicks than a paid ad. 

Differences Between SEO and Local SEO

By now, you should understand that both traditional and local SEO focus on improving your rankings in online search results so more people can find and purchase from your business. 

Image Source; Ask Any Difference

However, there are still some fundamental differences between them which you should know to decide which strategy is better implemented for your business. 

1. Audience 

The first significant difference in local vs. organic SEO is the target audience and their search intent.

Organic SEO results focus on answering people who are looking for information to a question.

They are looking for resources and are not necessarily making any transactions. They want to know facts and information that will solve their current issue. 

If your goal is to improve your website’s visibility and brand recognition, targeting audiences using organic SEO would be a better solution.

This is because while they might not be ready buyers, they might be willing to sign up for your funnel and can become potential leads in the future. 

Image Source: BrainPulse

On the other hand, local SEO allows you to capture people actively searching for a product or service from a business in their vicinity.

Local searches will specifically include the type of product, service, or business and either the name of their city or the term “near me”.

Statistics show that they fully intend to pick a business to make their purchase, usually on the same day.

So when you rank high in your local search territory, it will help searchers in your area connect with your business. 

2. SERPs

Image Source: Bipper Media

As you can see, organic search results happen when search engines determine that there’s no local intent in the search and that the user is looking for information rather than a location. 

Naturally, if you are a business with a physical store, you will want to rank your business high in local searches. Whereas, if you want your business to show up for certain search terms but not for a specific location, you want to rank higher in organic search. 

Unlike organic SEO, local SEO results go beyond the usual SERPs and can be found on maps and business directories like Google Maps apps, Local Packs, and even voice search.

3. Content

Content is a crucial part of both local and organic SEO. Search engines love content, and it is what they use to tell them what your site is all about and if you regularly update.

However, content works in different ways for both optimization strategies. 

Organic SEO is concerned with content focused on topics and keyword groups relevant to your target audiences. For example, if you run a plumbing business, you want content about slab leaks or how to inspect a leaking pipe.  

In terms of local SEO, your content marketing efforts should produce content geared towards how your local target audience speaks and behaves by targeting the local keywords they use. 

Image Source: SEJ

For instance, your target audience in Lakeland prefers to use “dentists in Lakeland,” while in New York, they use “dentists near me”. 

By understanding what queries your local customers are using, you can create localized content that helps convert your local audience and establish your geographic focus to search engines. 

4. Link Citations

Citations are considered a ranking factor for local SEO as to what backlinks are to organic SEO. Both are crucial elements for their respective optimization strategy. 

Local citations happen when you directly mention your business’s name, address, and phone number. We call this NAP, and like backlinks, consistency and increase in quantities will benefit your SEO by determining online authority to your business. 

However, for a citation to truly benefit your SEO strategy, it must match the NAP details you have on your Google My Business listing and your website. 

Image Source: Jeff Bullas

Meanwhile, backlinks, which are direct links to your website from a page on another website, are highly dependent on a mix of quality and quantity. 

You want your backlinks to come from other relevant and authoritative sites, as well as being linked using an anchor text that includes an important keyword. To earn high-quality backlinks, one SEO method is to create skyscraper content.

How Do SEO and Local SEO Affect Each other?

Local SEO is essentially a part of SEO. That’s why any efforts to boost your local visibility can also improve your overall search visibility worldwide. 

Just follow this line of thought! When first building your visibility, you create a GMB listing to establish your expertise at the smaller local level. As more people find your business and talk about it through reviews or blog mentions, this grows your overall search value to the search engine and improves your rankings. 

Several overlapping SEO practices can help both local and organic search rankings. For instance, both strategies require researching and incorporating target keywords into business descriptions and high-quality content to build relevancy. 

Here we recommend using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to help you with your keyword discovery. Our tool supports localized results and allows you to uncover search queries according to your preferred location and language.

Whether you use these keywords for on-site local SEO efforts like optimizing your Google My Business description or organic SEO efforts like writing an informative blog post, both your local and organic SEO efforts will help improve your website rankings. 

However, do note that this works both ways. While local and organic SEO practices can improve your rankings, they can also negatively affect your rankings when done incorrectly. 

A solution to this is to use our BiQ’s Rank Tracking tool to keep track of your local rankings. This can especially come in handy during optimization strategies, as changes in rankings are not often reflected immediately. 

Another newly released local rank tracking tool we highly recommend is Grid My Business. For your information, BiQ and Grid My Business are sister brands both invested by the same investors, but we are 2 independent product teams, imagine us like Google Map and Google Mail.

Grid My Business is a local rank monitoring tool that will show you the local search rankings of your local business and your competitors’ on Google Maps in a grid view. 

It supports all locations that can be found on Google Maps. Once you have finalized your targeted keywords, you can obtain more profound insights into your local rankings with Grid My Business. 

Grid My Business allows you to uncover ranking opportunities among your pool of competitors based on each specific search query. You can identify local rankings of multiple search queries by performing a quick and easy bulk scan of up to 5 keywords per scan. It saves time saves money. 

Besides that, you can also schedule an automated rank monitoring and obtain precise weekly updates of all your local search rankings in a comprehensive white-label report. 

By having this report, you can easily keep track, monitor, and even have a side-to-side comparison with your local competitors. Thus, supporting your local SEO ahead of the competition.

Track my local search rankings with Grid My Business now!

Conclusion

Ultimately, both local and organic SEO serve important but different purposes for digital marketing. And depending on the kind of business you have, you would want to invest in one of the optimization strategies.

If you run a business that relies on a local customer base, you will start with local SEO. Whereas your business operates solely online and you do not have a physical storefront to attract customers, your need for local SEO would probably only be for managing your company’s reputation.

Then again, if you are a local business looking to grow and want to target a larger market than just your local area, combining both local and organic SEO would help you elevate your business. 

As people rely more heavily on search engines to find answers for most of their questions, Google is becoming a big part of how users discover products and services in their area. 

For local businesses, this means you need to build visibility online. And lucky for you, Google has also created a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses to manage their online presence called Google My Business (GMB).

However, to truly succeed in local SEO, Google Local 3-Pack is the most valuable SERP real estate that you should be aiming for. 

First, let’s understand what exactly is a Google 3-Pack.

What is Google 3-Pack?

Google 3-Pack is a list of the first 3 businesses that pop up in the search results when you do local searches, including keywords like near me or terms referring to a specific location, such as an Italian restaurant in New York.

These results are derived from Google My Business listings and only appear when Google understands that you are looking for local businesses. 

As you can see, the Google Local 3-pack is displayed above other organic listings, which makes it one of the most desirable estates on Google’s result page for local businesses. 

This local pack feature was introduced as early as 2014 in Google’s Pigeon update. The goal was to provide more relevant results for queries that include localized keywords. 

Initially, the local pack started with 10 results but was later cut down to show only seven, and finally, in August 2015 was reduced to the current Google 3-Pack. These changes were made to provide a better user experience and optimize search results for hyper-local areas. 

While this has made it more competitive for local businesses, ranking on the Google 3-Pack is definitely worth the effort. 

Importance of Google 3-Pack

The Local 3-Pack appears in the #1 position 93% of the time when a local search is performed, and among all Google’s searches conducted 46% have local intent. This gives small businesses a chance to outrank even national or global organizations for local-related searches!

Image Source: Moz

Not just any searches; these are searches made by users with high purchasing intent. This can potentially bring you a higher return on investment than any other marketing strategy. 

According to a case study done by Moz that analyzed where users were clicking when they arrived at local search results, the team found that: 

• 44% of people clicked on a result in the Local Pack 
• 8% chose to load more local results
• 19% clicked on the paid result
• 29% clicked on the organic listings. 

This shows how influential ranking in the Google 3-Pack can be in bringing success to local businesses. It’s the most prominent feature in SERP, and people have to scroll down to reach the #1 organic ranking.

To understand how you can benefit from it, let’s quickly go through its anatomy.

Google Local 3-Pack Anatomy

The standard Local 3-Pack displays the most important details that most users searching for a business would like to know, and this includes:

Image Source: StableWP

• Business name
• Ratings
• Phone number  
• Opening hours
• Website link 
• Business location and direction 

All this information can be easily updated in your Google My Business profile and is meant to help users find the most relevant results to take action. 

How to Rank on Google 3-Pack

Given how Google Local 3-pack results broadly vary based on a searcher’s proximity to the location, it can be difficult to consistently rank for the feature. 

Luckily, that’s not all there is to it. 

Besides proximity, there are other significant factors that Google takes into consideration when deciding what businesses should rank in the Local 3-Pack, and they are:

Image Source: Stablewp

Based on these ranking factors, here are some local optimization tactics you can use to tip the scale in your favor.

1. Get Positive Reviews for Your Business

Great reviews can bolster users’ confidence. They act as word-of-mouth recommendations and are very useful for convincing potential customers that your products or services are right for them. 

Image Source: Link Assistant

Most people form an opinion about your business after reading your online reviews. So make sure to solicit as many positive customer reviews as possible. The key here is to provide extraordinary service and nudge your users to leave a review. 

You can do this by including a “Review Us” call-to-action after their purchase and lead them to your GMB Review URL. This will get your reviews to feature on your business profile, showing up on Google Map and Local-Pack results. 

Testimonials are a strong signal to Google and can be a strong optimization tactic to tell if your business is trustworthy. So, more importantly, remember to manage your reviews in your GMB listing and respond to both positive and negative reviews. 

2. Ensure Your NAP Citations are Accurate 

Then again, Google My Business and your website are not the only places where your potential customers might be looking for you. 

Just do a quick Google search on your brand, and you might find your business mentioned on review sites like TripAdvisor and Trustpilot or online directories like Yelp and Foursquare.

Image Source: Reviewtrackers

Though having your business internet profiles can help bring in more customers to your business, before anything, you need to make sure that your NAP is consistent and accurate across all profiles. 

What is NAP? Short for “Name, Address, and Phone number”, NAP is an important Google ranking signal representing the vital business information potential customers use to find or contact you.

The more NAP citations you have, the better for your business as they build up your authority and act as signals to tell Google your business is relevant. 

Especially if the information is accurate and consistent, Google will trust the validity of the data and increase your chances of ranking in the Local 3-Packs.

However, do note that Google takes this seriously. If your NAP details are not consistent, they might mislead customers and lead to loss of revenue and reputation, which will result in a big minus with Google.

Surprisingly, citation inconsistencies are the #1 issue affecting local rankings. So make sure to check your online presence and claim all your online profiles to manage your NAP citations!

3. Local Link Building to Raise Your Ranking

Still, the source of site authority comes down to backlinks. For local SEO, link building requires more involvement from the local community to get a positive impact.  

Image Source: Search Engine Land

To boost the geographical aspect of your business website or webpage, you will require links from local websites, and that can be from the church homepage or the local high school down the road, and even neighborhood watch websites.

These sites don’t need to have a high domain authority to influence your rankings. 

Instead, with these backlinks, you are letting Google know that your business is where it says it is and is also trusted by these other local institutions, which will help boost prominence.

Note that when building links, it is essential that you do it in a natural context. Make sure the content surrounding the link is relevant to that on the target page. Provide valuable local content for your readers instead of just placing a link. 

4. Establish a Strong Social Media Presence

Of course, let’s not forget about social media. By building a strong presence on social media, you can establish yourself as an authoritative Google local listing through your loyal followers. 

Image Source: Zanet 

While there are many social media platforms to choose from, we recommend starting with a Facebook business page. It’s the largest social network and has a high chance to appear in search results for local-related searches. 

Plus, some people prefer to look up or reach businesses on Facebook through their messaging app. So make sure you create and manage your social media profiles to build a solid online reputation truly. 

5. Conduct On-Page Optimization 

Essentially, local SEO is still built on SEO fundamentals. To improve your visibility on Google and other search engines, you need to conduct on-page SEO for your website. 

The goal here is to rank high for location-related searches, and there are a few things that are particularly important if you want to rank in Google’s local 3-pack:

a. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly

Local searches made are now mostly done on smartphones or tablets. Naturally, this has led Google to prioritize responsive and mobile-friendly sites in rankings. 

Image Source: Cheeky Monkey Media

For local businesses, this means your website should be mobile-ready to meet users’ needs. Check if your website passes the mobile-friendly test or follow the suggestions to optimize. 

b. Boost your website’s loading speed

Page loading speed is a major Google ranking factor. After all, it’s critical for your site to load as fast as possible to provide a good user experience. 

To check your site loading speed, you can use Page Speed Insights, a free tool provided by Google. Just insert your site URL onto the platform, and it will automatically analyze your website if it passes the core web vital elements.

Image Source: Medium 

c. Make phone numbers clickable to get more calls

Do you know that 76% of all mobile searches end with a phone call? Today’s users have come to expect an intuitive experience when they visit your site. 

By making the phone number clickable on your site, you are encouraging them to contact you. It’s easy to make your site’s phone number clickable; just add the tel: schema to your page’s HTML editor, like this:

Image Source: Stablewp

You might be surprised, but a minor improvement like this can lead to a huge increase in calls as well as visits to your local business. 

d. Create local content to boost relevance

Whether you are a small business or a giant corporation, you need to create content on your site to boost your online visibility. 

Content is king, and it’s what gets you discovered in Google when people are searching for terms related to your business, industry, product, or service. 

For local SEO, you can engage your potential and existing customers by developing quality local content. If you are active in a locality, you should be aware of the local market and know what customers are looking for.

To further refine your local content strategy, we recommend using our BiQ SEO Suite for your local content creation process. 

First, by using our BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence, you can search based on city or country to find what local keywords most people are searching for. 

Once you identify your target keywords, you can also use our BiQ Content Intelligence to create your local content. It is a real-time editor and will provide you with suggestions on improving your writing to make sure it is fully optimized. 

After you have identified the targeted local keywords and created optimized content for your website, it is crucial to track and monitor the effectiveness of your keywords through local search rankings on Google SERP. 

With this, we suggest you try the latest best local rank tracking tool in 2021 – Grid My Business. 

Grid My Business is a local rank monitoring tool that will show you the local search rankings of your local business and your competitors’ on Google Maps in a grid view.

It supports all locations that can be found on Google Maps. Once you have finalized your targeted keywords, you can obtain more profound insights into your local rankings with Grid My Business. 

This ultimate local rank tracking tool allows you to uncover ranking opportunities among your pool of competitors based on each specific search query. 

You can identify local rankings of multiple search queries by performing a quick and easy bulk scan of up to 5 keywords per scan. It saves time saves money. 

Besides that, you can also schedule an automated rank monitoring and obtain precise weekly updates of all your local search rankings in a comprehensive white-label report. 

By having this report, you can easily keep track, monitor, and even have a side-to-side comparison with your local competitors. Thus, supporting your local SEO ahead of the competition.

Track my local search rankings with Grid My Business now!

Conclusion

Ultimately, local SEO is the most effective online marketing strategy for any brick-and-mortar business to attract nearby customers in your area. 

When you rank in Google 3-Pack, the impact can be huge! You’ll not just get a ton of organic traffic to your site, but you’ll also reach eager visitors that are ready to buy your product or request your services. 

So if you want to put your small business on the map, make sure to follow our guidelines and optimize to increase your chances of getting into the local 3-pack today!

Whether you are a small restaurant owner or an online marketing agency, you need a Google My Business profile.

Image Source: Tech4Law

Commonly abbreviated as GMB, Google My Business is an online business directory that Google has created to help businesses manage represented on Google search and Maps. 

It is an entirely free tool that lets you interact with your online target audience as they discover information about your brand, working hours, map coordinates, direction, contact details, and reviews from existing customers. 

Image Source: Full Funnel Marketing

Through GMB, businesses can also access interactive features like reviews and questions and publish a variety of media like photos, videos, and posts, which makes it one of the most effective marketing tools.  

First, let’s get onto the same page regarding why Google My Business is essential for local businesses and exactly how you can optimize your GMB listing. 

Importance of GMB Listing

Setting up your Google My Business goes beyond free advertising and gaining more search visibility. It is an effective tool that transforms attention into action.

This is because many searchers, especially mobile users, rely on Google to access credible contact information and use their quick call-to-action buttons.

In fact, a study by BrightLocal shows that 64% of online searchers use GMB profiles to contact details for local businesses. Creating a GMB profile will give potential customers who are searching for you a quick and easy glimpse of your business information. 

Besides, creating a GMB profile allows you to manage your brand’s search results as it grants you the editing capability for what shows up in your profile. Using the correct methods, you can also use your Business Profile as an effective SEO and lead generation tool.  

Image Source: Jeff Bullas

It goes without saying that setting up your Google My Business profile can also guarantee you additional visibility. For example, the Local Pack that appears above organic search results is entirely made up of GMB profiles.

On the other hand, GMB will also get you a placement on Google Maps, enabling your business to reach people looking for a specific product or service near them. These are ready-buyers with high purchasing intent.

Ultimately, this assures that your business name will reflect in both brand and related product or service searches to help establish your business credibility. 

Besides, a GMB profile is easy to set up! Let’s go through it together. 

How to Set Up Your GMB Listing

a. Set up a new Google account for your business or log in to your existing GMB account.

b. Go to google.com/business and click “Manage Now”. Type in your business name here to find out if there is an existing GMB listing, or click next to add your business to Google. 

c. Select your business category. This is a required field and detrimental to the search terms your business will appear in Google. To select the most accurate category, we recommend testing out the search terms in Google and researching your competitors to find the best category fit. 

d. Add a contact number and website URL. A key thing to note here is to make sure you use an official business number answered. If you don’t already have a website, Google will also allow you to create a new Google Website based on the information provided.

e. Verify your business. The goal is to gain full access to your Business Profile on Google, so make sure you complete your business verification and claim ownership. 

Now you’re done! But remember setting up your business profile is just the first step of boosting your local SEO. Once you have an officially verified listing, it’s time to optimize your GMB listing.

7 Ways to Optimize GMB Listing

1. Have accurate NAP 

To start, one of the most vital and fundamental ways to optimize your GMB listing is to ensure NAP consistency. This relates to how accurate and up-to-date your location-based business’ contact information is across all local directories, social media profiles, and websites.  

 Many businesses often miss out on this local SEO ranking factor and have multiple business profiles showing different contact information. 

These inconsistencies and errors have the potential to harm your search rankings, so do a quick Google check on your business and see if your NAP is consistent across all online listings.

Image Source: MarketersMEDIA

A quick tip to boost NAP consistency is to build local citations. Use press releases and online directories to get your business’ Name, Address, and Phone number out there to increase discoverability and awareness. 

2. Write the Perfect Business Description

When it comes to the perfect business description, you need to incorporate target keywords into your business profile so you can tell Google what you’re trying to rank for. 

This should go beyond short-tail keywords like cab service in London or hairdresser nearby. Here we recommend using BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to help you discover and extend your business search terms. 

When people are looking for businesses, there’s a specific search intent behind it. You need to understand your target audiences and why your business is necessary to reach your audiences better. 

Let’s say you operate a cab service in London; you should understand that some people may be looking for cab services in London for sightseeing while some may be looking for cab services in London with the cheapest fare. 

Understanding how your business operates and who your target audiences are can help you create a better business description that is more relevant and engaging. 

Most importantly, use your keywords naturally and appeal to readers instead of Google bots. 

3. Upload Relevant Photos of their Business

Based on a study by Synup, online business listings with photos can get 35% more clicks and are 2x more likely to be considered reputable, 

Adding an eye-catching and relevant profile picture for your Google My Business profile is like having an excellent Tinder picture. It helps you create an excellent first impression and is usually what makes users swipe right. 

As Google allows you to add multiple photos and videos, make sure the images you include highlight the best features of your business and help you stand out from the rest of your competition. Here are some quick tips:

• Logo – Your logo helps your customers recognize your business on Google, so make sure your logo image follows Google’s standard dimensions of 250 X 250 pixels while maintaining high resolution. 
• Storefront Photo – Photos of your storefront will help customers quickly locate your business from any direction. To make the most of your exterior photos in GMB, upload well-lit photos from each direction that customers might approach your business. 
• Product/ Service Photo – These photos give your customers a better understanding of what goods and services your business is offering. It is also a chance to promote and appeal to potential customers. For example, bars can show a picture of their signature drinks, or hotels can have pictures of their amenities to attract traveling customers. 

You can learn more about GMB’s photos and videos guidelines here. 

4. Monitor and Respond to Reviews

People read reviews before making a purchase. That’s why managing user reviews on your GMB listing is essential.  

Both good and bad customer reviews can significantly influence the way potential customers think about your product or business, in addition to affecting your local search rankings. 

By keeping a close eye on your reviews on Google, you can showcase your business in the best light and minimize the impact that any negative opinion might have on your business.

Even just responding to a review can positively signal to Google that you are active and build users’ trust in your business. 

Image Source: BirdEye

Additionally, your responses to reviews can also be the perfect place to include keywords to boost your search relevancy. Just make sure you use them naturally just as you would with any other SEO strategy. 

5. Set Up Q&A to Answer Customer Inquiries

The thing is, you can also use the Q&A section in your GMB listing for your business advantage.

Today’s shoppers often check the internet and do some research before they make a purchase, whether it’s online or offline. They are curious about the prices and quality of your product or service, but will not necessarily take the hassle to inquire. 

In this case, answering expected questions in your business profile’s Q&A section will be perfect for these people who are looking for ready information. Plus, it will make your listing look super useful to people that are researching and comparing businesses or services. 

To create an effective Q&A for your business, curate a list of questions and answers your business often encounters. Research your competition and also include questions and answers that would reflect your competitive edge.

Plus, you can also use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence to get more keyword insight, especially in our Popular Question tab. You can simply type in your main keyword and our tool will generate a list of related questions that your customer might be asking too. 

6. Claim Your GMB Listing

As we have stressed over and over again, a Google My Business listing is important to help customers and prospective clients find your business easily. 

80% of consumers lose trust in a local business if they see incorrect or inconsistent contact details or business names online, so no matter what, claiming your business listing is a must even if you are an online business. 

You need to claim it to keep your details consistent and updated to provide the best user experience. This also includes analyzing and optimizing your business based on the statistics you will get from your Google My Business profile.

7. Track and Monitor Your Local Rank Tracking

Now that you have your GMB Listing optimized, it is crucial to track and monitor the effectiveness of your keywords through local search rankings on Google SERP. 

Grid My Business is a local rank monitoring tool that will show you the local search rankings of your local business and your competitors’ on Google Maps in a grid view. It supports all locations that can be found on Google Maps. Once you have finalized your targeted keywords, you can obtain more profound insights into your local rankings with Grid My Business.

This ultimate local rank tracking tool allows you to uncover ranking opportunities among your pool of competitors based on each specific search query. You can identify local rankings of multiple search queries by performing a quick and easy bulk scan of up to 5 keywords per scan. It Saves time and saves money. 

Besides that, you can also schedule an automated rank monitoring and obtain precise weekly updates of all your local search rankings in a comprehensive white-label report. By having this report, you can easily keep track, monitor, and even have a side-to-side comparison with your local competitors. Thus, supporting your local SEO ahead of the competition.

Track my local search rankings with Grid My Business now!

Conclusion

Managing your company brand and image is important for any business. As Google is making it easier for users to find out more about a company brand, managing and optimizing your GMB is essential for every business. This is not just to maximize your search visibility but also to build a positive image. 

Remember, setting up your GMB profile is just the start of your local marketing journey. No matter how niche your business is, competition is rife in local search and you must have the right SEO tools on hand to help you optimize your rankings.

If you ever need help maximizing your online presence, try out BiQ Suite and Grid My Business today to improve your SEO and reach relevant audiences. 

Today, the digital marketing landscape is very important. Every business has to have a strong online presence to generate traffic and meet customers’ expectations. 

This is where SEO copywriting comes in. The art and science of producing online content that both search engines and people love, mastering SEO copywriting become the key to creating content that will rank high on Google’s search engine result page (SERP).

Among the many SEO techniques, keyword research and competitive keyword analysis (aka keyword gap analysis) play a huge element in SEO copywriting. 

According to Westebbe Marketing, bloggers who are focused on SEO reports and heavily invest in keyword research for their posts are more likely to see strong results.

In fact, numbers show that the results actually double when these bloggers usually or always do keyword research for their posts when compared to bloggers who only do it sometimes. 

It’s evident. Keyword research is fundamental to creating a performing copy. 

However, to truly understand what good copywriting entails, let’s get a quick look at what poor copywriting means. 

What is Poor Copywriting?

Poor or bad copywriting is confusing, has no substance, and doesn’t convert. The problem is, nobody writes bad copy on purpose. So, if you ever find your content or sales message not converting, it is most likely due to one of these two reasons. 

One, you most probably lack the basic knowledge on the principles of copywriting and are writing copy for yourself and your company, but not for your customers. 

For example, your copy may be singing praises about your awesome product but does not answer your prospect’s question of, “what’s in it for me?”

It may be a simple principle but many new marketers often fall into this trap and talk only about themselves. Just take this copywriting example by Rareloop.

The homepage copy reads “We’re digital artisans. An expert team passionate about crafting bespoke websites and apps.” which only speaks to their ego and doesn’t give readers a clue what they are about.  

Second, your keyword research is not done properly. 

Many writers often create their copy first and think about SEO later, but this becomes only about inserting keywords rather than writing a copy that answers search intent.  

When you have your target keyword in mind before you put pen to paper, your writing will sound more natural and engaging, instead of being awkward or forced.

And if that’s not the case, another scenario is you have most likely selected a keyword that seemingly fits but isn’t relevant to your audience. 

As a whole, the key to good copywriting has always been writing based on pre-selected target keywords that you know will be driving relevant traffic to your business.  

In fact, good copywriting follows a certain framework and here we are going to show you how – by using keyword gap analysis to create converting content. Now let’s get started. 

Learn more on how to use Keyword Gap Analysis to boost SEO traffic.

Why is Keyword Gap Analysis Important In Copywriting?

It’s important to get into the habit of researching your competitors and keywords before you start writing your copy. 

A keyword gap analysis considers both your competitors and keywords as it compares your rankings to other domain’s rankings to identify keyword opportunities. 

This is an extension of ordinary keyword research and allows you to understand your strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitors. Using this data insight, you can better gauge how you should refine your keyword strategy.  

Through this, you can find sales-driving keywords in the buyer’s journey that you should be prioritizing in your content creation to drive site traffic. This may include hidden keywords that sometimes you or your competitors may not be aware of. 

It is only when you have these target keywords that you can create better copywriting to get higher rankings and better connect with your target audience. 

Besides, keywords can be a great way to start your content if you have no idea what to write. Not only are they a data-driven source of inspiration, they are more likely to get you potential customers for your site!

Are you convinced now? To integrate keyword gap analysis into your copywriting, here are three questions to guide you through the process. 

How to Research Your Competitors? 

Before anything, you need to first know who your competitors are. 

In digital marketing, almost anyone and everyone can end up as your competition. In addition to direct competitors, you are also competing with indirect competitors and other businesses for the same target market.

In this scenario, knowing who your competitors are and their keyword strategy can be a determining factor in winning the rankings. A quick Google search for your industry keywords will show you the leading websites in your niche. 

Additionally, to find low-hanging to middle-range targets, you can plug your website into competitive analysis tools like SimilarWeb or Alexa. 

On SimilarWeb, you’d want to pay attention to the similar websites section to find businesses similar to yours. Check out these competitors and select those that you find are suitable targets. 

To narrow down on your competitors, get a deeper understanding of them through research. Read their reviews, customer feedback, Google search engine results for their brand and see where they stand in the industry. 

Find out what people are saying about the business and see if there are any opportunities or gaps that your business might be fulfilling better. 

Once you’ve identified your competitors, it’s time to run a keyword audit for each domain to start researching their keyword assets.  

How to Research Keywords? 

To look into their digital marketing strategy and come up with tactics to outrank them, you need to understand your competitor’s ranking keywords. 

Here, we suggest using BiQ Rank Intelligence to uncover your competitors’ keyword rankings and important data. Our tool is easy to use and you simply need to insert the domain link and set your keyword discovery range from #1 to #20 with traffic equal to or more than 100.

This is so that it will filter out only valuable keywords that you should be focusing on, without the noise. But please feel free to set your own metrics. 

Most importantly, do this for your domain as well as all your competitors, and move them in a spreadsheet. 

Make sure you list all the keyword information, especially the SERP features and ranking URL that is shown in our BiQ tool to draw out valuable insights. 

How to Use Keyword Gap Analysis In Copywriting? 

Now that you have the necessary keyword rankings data of your website and your competitors, it’s time to compare and check your keyword rankings against your competitors to gain better insights. 

Generally, what you are looking for are: 

• Valuable keyword opportunities your site is not targeting
• High-volume keywords in which your site is ranking in #4 to #15 which you could boost 

Start by comparing your ranking keywords to your competitors’ and see if there are any missing keywords. By keeping an eye on the successful keywords your competitors are ranking for, you may find new opportunities you originally thought were irrelevant. 

Next, have a look at common keywords that both you and your competitors are ranking. Sort these keywords by ranking URL and check to see how your competitors are doing and also how well you are ranking compared to them. 

According to a report by Ahrefs, the average #1 ranking page is most likely to rank in the Top 10 results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords.

That’s why make sure to identify and collect these semantic keyword groups that were included and optimize them in your content for a boost.  

Additionally, take the chance to compare how many keywords you and your competitors are ranking for in an article written on the same topic. Compare and identify which content you can further optimize and improve on. 

You may also want to find what strategy each competitor has adopted to secure a ranking for a certain keyword. If you find competitors taking additional effort to secure a specific keyword, this is a signal that you should start paying attention to the keyword as well. 

Overall, what you want to look at when comparing your keyword rankings and your competitor’s keyword rankings are the keyword patterns. 

Take note if the website is ranking for mostly long-tail or short-tail keywords, high competition or low competition keywords, keywords with an answer box, and more. The idea is to gather keyword insights to strategize methods you can stay relevant among your competition. 

Our other tool, RankingGap can help you find out the keywords missing in your website by comparing yours to your competitors’ websites!

To make your keyword gap analysis more efficient, you can also sort your keywords into these categories:

a. Keywords you rank for, but they don’t

One of the best methods to grow your traffic exponentially is to focus on your high-ranking keywords to build on your keyword strengths. You can do this by examining your top rankings and find semantically related keywords you have yet to target and optimize them into your existing content. If the keyword warrants new content, write a new article and interlink it with your existing content. Since Google already takes you to be the authority on the topic, this will make it easier for your newer content to rank well too. 

b. Keywords they rank for, but you don’t

Sometimes, you may not always have the luxury of low competition keywords. When it comes to this category of competitor keywords you are not ranking for, you want to focus on finding the keywords that give your competitors the highest ROI. Here you want to identify the common recurring keywords your competitors are after, what they are doing to rank for them, and how you can beat them. Try looking for gaps that are yet to be filled or try tackling the keyword using a different angle to outrank your competition. 

c. Hidden Valuable Keywords Not Used by Competitors

This category consists of valuable keyword opportunities. If you manage to find keywords with high search volumes that haven’t been targeted by other SEOs in your space, make sure to prioritize these keywords first.  Since your competitors are not aware of these keywords, there’s a first-mover advantage here, so make sure you target them immediately to secure a better foothold and position.

Start Writing Your Content

Now it’s time to use those keywords and start copywriting. While you may now be targeting the right keywords, keep in mind that it’s not just about keyword inclusion. 

To win at your keywords, you should aim to create useful, compelling, and valuable content that people will gladly promote on social media platforms. 

Again, great SEO copywriting is for both people and search engines. 

To help make sure you fulfill both criterias, you can check your written content using our BiQ Content Intelligence. 

Because not only is the tool handy enough to check your paragraphs for sentiment analysis and readability, it also compares your content WordGraph report against the Top 10 ranking search results of your keywords to help you optimize your relevancy. 

All you need to do is edit according to the suggestions and score a healthy SEO mark. Then naturally, this will help your content rank better which generates higher SEO traffic and raise better visibility and brand awareness on Google SERPs.

Check out our ultimate guide to Keyword Gap Analysis to build a solid strategy and outrank your competitors!

Conclusion

All in all, great copywriting is founded on the basis of good keyword research fundamentals. 

By considering both keywords and competitors, doing a keyword gap analysis is your answer to connecting your writing to your potential paying customers. 

So make sure to follow the steps in our keyword gap analysis guide before you start your SEO copywriting. 

Businesses exist because of customers. 

Regardless of what industry you are in or what products or services you sell, your customers are the most important part of your business. Because without customers, there is simply no business for your company to exist. 

As a result, your marketing must factor in what influences consumer behavior. 

Marketing is so much more than creating a catchy phrase or jingle. You need to figure out how to meet your customers’ needs, what their values are, and speak to them in ways that they would want to engage to build a successful marketing campaign.

But what exactly is consumer behavior and why is it important to marketers? 

What is Consumer Behavior?

Consumer behavior definition in marketing is the study of how people make purchasing decisions and understanding the reasons that affect their purchase, such as social or psychological factors. 

It is a study that uses data insights from surveys and reports to find the “why” behind each buying decision. Often, this means looking into different facets of consumer behavior and answering questions like: 

• What are the consumer perceptions about a certain brand, product, or service?
• What motivates a consumer to select one product over another and why? 
• What factors in a consumer’s everyday environment affect buying decisions and why?

Of course, there are many more. But using the answers to these questions can help businesses make better decisions and effective marketing strategies by aligning their techniques with their desired target audiences. 

Importance of Consumer Behavior in Marketing

As we have seen time and time again, successful brands and companies align their marketing strategies to factors affecting consumer behavior as to the foundation.

They’re not generating products and marketing plans based on their ideas alone, but instead, look into how consumers behave and take that information to match up their product design and marketing strategy to what consumers want and need. 

Every consumer has a different thought process and motivation for buying a product. Despite being customers of the same product, their difference in lifestyle or income can have influences on behavior and their approach to purchasing. 

As marketers understand the varying factors, they can adopt customer differentiation to tailor their strategies according to different consumer groups. With this, businesses can expand the width of their services to be able to effectively serve a wider group of consumers. 

Besides, customers have come to expect personalization from companies. According to a report by Instapage, 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized or catered to them.

This makes learning consumer behavior more necessary than before, as companies need to understand how to appeal to these consumers.

An extra point is, studying consumer behavior can also be helpful to quickly identify consumer opportunities. By studying what customers are looking for or emerging trends, your company can be the first to identify gaps that are not met. 

For example, a recent change in consumer behavior is driven by COVID-19 that warrants the increasing need for health supplements that boost immunity.

Nutritional companies that monitored the change in eating patterns of consumers would be able to quickly react to this trend and produce immunity and respiratory health-boosting supplements to fill in the void in the marketplace. 

Now that you understand the importance of your consumer behavior in marketing, this next section will show you how to put it to use in a 4-step process. 

How to Integrate Consumer Behavior with Marketing?

1. Understand Your Consumers

First and foremost, it’s critical to understand your consumers. And where better to understand the factors that influence buying behavior of your target audiences than directly from your customers themselves. 

Encourage your customers to drop a review or sign up with review platforms like G2 or Trustpilot to help solicit feedback. 

Then, take the time to read your reviews, get feedback from customer support and search up your own products or website online to see what people are saying about your brand. 

You can even do a quick Google search to see what people are saying about you. Just simply search your ”brand name + reviews”. 

When going through your reviews, make sure you read them neutrally and try understanding where your consumers are coming from. 

Here, you should be able to identify important insights like what is your customer’s favorite feature, why do customers prefer you from other brands, and more. 

Most importantly, take the opportunity to create a buyer persona. This should help you have a better idea of who you are speaking to when creating your marketing campaigns. 

For example, BiQ’s buyer persona may be male, small business entrepreneurs in their 30s who are operating a digital marketing business. 

Take a look at how Keyword Gap Analysis drives success in Digital Marketing.

2. Know your Competitors

As good as you are with your customers, you must know your competitors even better. And in digital marketing, you can have direct and indirect competitors. 

To quickly explain, direct competitors are businesses that compete with you directly by selling similar products or services. Meanwhile, indirect competitors are businesses that might be selling a different product or service but are potential substitute options. For example, think McDonald’s and Subway. 

No matter the competitor, you are competing for the same resources — target audience.

By learning about who your competitors are and what they are offering can help you to make your products, services, and marketing stand out. It will also let you communicate with your target audience and set your prices competitively to navigate challenges in your market. 

So how do you do this? It’s easy. Simply paste your domain URL in competitive analysis sites like Alexa or SEMrush to identify similar competition.

Next, dig up information on your competitors. Find out who they are and similarly, go through their reviews, customer feedback on them, and look for gaps you can take advantage of. 

Look at this review for example, while many praise SEMrush SEO features and solutions, it can still be hard to navigate and overwhelming for beginners.  

Understanding this gap, we have created BiQ SEO Suite which places emphasis on ease of use and friendly interface that has brought us our customers today!

3. Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Minimize the Gap Between Yourself and Your Competitors

At last, you can’t talk about digital marketing without keywords. 

Now that you have your customers and competitors down, it’s time to do a complete keyword analysis for your domain and your competitors.

This is known as keyword gap analysis and it offers a side-by-side comparison between your keyword profile and your competitors’. 

You can use tools like BiQ Rank Intelligence and simply enter the domains to start your keyword audit and discovery. The report will show you all the ranking keywords for each site and you can analyze them according to their rankings and traffic to compare them. 

When going through the list, you want to look for overlapping and common keywords missing from your site. To make this easy, group your keywords into two categories:

a. Keywords you rank for, but they don’t

This category consists of your keyword strengths and represents search terms that you might be ranking higher over your competitors. 

Make sure you track these keywords using BiQ’s Rank Tracking to keep track of your site traffic. Your ranking should correspond to your site traffic and will be a good indicator of the increase or drop based on your ranking. 

This will let you keep an eye on the competitors who are trying to steal your keywords while tracking algorithm changes and other anomalies. 

More importantly, these keywords should also inform you which are the relevant keywords you should be targeting. As you are already ranking high for these keywords, Google sees you as the authority for the topic and you might want to get an extra boost when you optimize or create content for related keyword groups. 

b. Keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you don’t

This list consists of your keyword opportunities. Your competitors most likely have done the SEO and identify the valuable keywords that your audiences are searching for. 

So make sure to identify decent volume, valuable keywords missing from your list and add them to your keyword strategy. You can target them by analyzing Google’s search results and finding gaps that will allow you to create better content. 

On the other hand, if there are keywords you have already created content for but have still yet to rank high, analyze your ranking competitors’ keywords and identify if there are any missing keywords you should be optimizing into your existing content to make it more relevant. 

For both scenarios, we recommend using BiQ’s Content Intelligence that will make the writing and optimizing process much easier. It offers WordGraph analysis which will automatically compare your content to the Top 10 rankings and provide suggestions to improve.  

At the same time, take the chance to understand the keyword strategy your competitors have and decipher their tactics to get high traffic. 

Overall, you should get insights and identify the differences between each domain’s ranking keywords. Look into your data and see what kind of keywords are each domain ranking for? 

For example, is your domain ranking better for long-tail or short-tail keywords? What about your competitors’? How many keywords does your competitor include in their content? and more.

The key is to identify patterns and find search terms that you may have missed. 

Often, many marketers target high volume keywords but you also want to pay attention to low search, high intent keywords as well. 

Just imagine if you are an ecommerce store selling trainers, there are obvious phrases like brands and models of shoes that all your competitors will be targeting, but what about the specific long-tail keywords?

For example, extra-small shoe sizes, specific styles of shoes like cricket cleats. These phrases may not have a high volume of traffic, but by nature, they have high intent and are more likely to convert compared to keywords like Nike shoes. 

You want to make sure you discover these hidden keywords during your gap analysis. 

4. Understand The Types of Consumer Behavior In Your Industry

Now before you begin creating content for these keywords, there are 4 types of consumer behaviors you should know to better build your marketing funnel:

• Routine Shopping – Regular purchases done by consumers, this behavior is associated with low product pricing and shows low involvement without the need for much research. An example would be grocery shopping at the supermarket or buying snacks.
• Limited Decision Making – Buying products occasionally. Consumers in this category are purchasing something that costs more but is not expensive and will require a moderate amount of time for research, often through recommendations as they make the purchase. For example, buying clothes or looking for a good Mexican food place. 
• Extensive Decision Making – Products in this category are usually unfamiliar to customers, expensive, and not frequently bought. This may take a longer time for research and consumers will be looking at multiple factors such as checking product ratings, asking friends and professionals for more information, comparing options before making the final decision. 
• Impulse Buying – Impulse buyers often show the tendency of a customer making purchasing decisions at the spur of the moment, without planning in advance. These purchase decisions are often triggered by emotions or feelings. 

Knowing this, your digital marketing interactions should be founded based on these 4 types of buying behavior. 

Let’s say you are targeting impulse buyers, your sales page copywriting then should focus on triggering your customer’s emotions and place emphasis on limited-time offers.

5. Use the Discovered Hidden Keywords

Finally, one last important lesson is that even if you have your keywords, you need to learn how to use your keywords with the right type of content to convert your audience into qualified leads.

While most SEOs often resort to written content, you should also use different content types like infographics, videos, and other forms of content that match the user’s search intent. 

According to a report by Wyzowl, 96% of people prefer watching an explainer video to learn more about a product or service and 84% of people say they made the decision to purchase a product or service after watching a brand’s video. 

Despite this, in 2021, we still only see 14% of businesses using videos in their marketing mix.

What’s most important here is to always meet the search intent of the target keyword and align it with what your consumers are looking for. And most importantly, use these hidden keywords in your marketing to invoke a specific consumer behavior you want to target. 

Read how to drive more organic traffic to your site on our recent blog.

Key Takeaway: Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Target Buyer Keywords and Shape Consumer Behavior

As the business world evolves, so do consumer habits and tastes. What stays the same is that consumer behavior is still the most vital component to crafting a great marketing campaign.

Digital marketing is about basing decisions on actual data. Understanding your consumer behaviors can deliver insights that will help you make better digital marketing decisions that drive action. 

By integrating competitive keyword analysis and consumer behavior, your business can get an unprecedented advantage over your competitors in terms of product visibility and conversion. 

So what are you waiting for? Start implementing keyword gap analysis into your marketing strategy today with RankingGap!

You can learn more about our keyword gap analysis strategies in our main blog here.

What is Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword Gap Analysis or aka Competitive Keyword Analysis is the process of discovering the keywords (gap) that drives organic traffic to your competitors’ site, but not to yours. In other words, this procedure will help you discover the opportunities you might be missing out on. 

Organic vs Paid Traffic 

Organic traffic refers to the visitors that visited your site or page from an unpaid search result or from your content reaching them, hence the term “organic”. Whereas for paid traffic, visitors visit your site from paid search ads. 

Organic traffic is known to be the most valuable source of traffic because if your content is ranked in the top five SERP by Google, this means that your content is high quality. In addition, organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate on average. 

A study by Chitika demonstrated the importance of landing on the first page of Google searches. 

The chart shows that the results in the first page of Google receive 92% of all the search traffic while the traffic drops by 95% on the second page. 

While ranking in the top 10 searches on Google is rewarding, the downside to organic searches is that it takes time to get indexed and to start generating traffic from this source. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet”.

Rather than having to wait patiently for your SEO to grow, you can alternatively pay for the chance to be seen on the first page of Google immediately. Google’s Adwords program is the most used pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program available today.

However, the amount of unique accounts or visitors your site gets to reach really depends on how much you are willing to spend on the ads. Logically, the more you spend, the more traffic you will get. 

In spite of that, your leads will stop coming in as soon as you turn off the ads. Not to mention that though the traffic going in is large, they might not be the right target or niche for your site. 

You need to keep in mind that paid search uses a charging model based on cost per click, not per lead. 

It is no brainer that organic traffic has much better advantages than paid searches- long-term ROI, brand sustainability, and most importantly, cost-effective. So, how do we boost it? 

Pro tip: Read up our comprehensive strategies to Keyword Gap Analysis.

First: Research Your Topic

What are you trying to sell? Products or services? In order to rank high on the search page, you need SEO keyword tools to know what keywords are related to the products or services that you are selling. 

More importantly, you have to know what your audience is typing into the search engines. The smartest way to do this is by using a good and reliable keyword research tool like BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence tool. or LSIGraph’s Keyword Research.

With this tool, you can choose the right keyword to target based on the metrics available, such as keyword volume, trends, keyword competition, related keywords, and more. 

Find a topic you would want to inspect and its relevant keyword. For example, if you want to focus on digital marketing, the relevant keyword that you can research could be social media marketing. 

If you are unsure which keyword to use, you can sort the keywords based on their value. The higher valued keyword means it can potentially bring more traffic to your website at a lower competition. 

What makes BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence stand out from the rest of the keyword research tools on the market is the keyword analyzer feature. It helps you see why someone might be searching for the keyword in the search engine. With this data, you will be able to plan your content in such a way that meets your users’ needs. 

Second: Use Keyword Research/ Keyword Audit to Identify Opportunities

How do one identify a keyword opportunity? To start off, you can identify “low-hanging fruit”. These are keywords that have a high search volume and low competition that your site isn’t ranking for. 

You can do this with BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence tool where you can untap local keyword opportunities. 

First, enter your target keyword. Then,  choose your preferred locations and languages. 

The fantastic keyword tool will show you the list of relevant keywords the local people are using. 

Your target keyword’s search volume could be 1,000 in your preferred location and possibly less than 100 in another. That’s simply because of the different demands in different places. 

So choose the keyword that has high volume but lower competition. I know it can be quite challenging to decide which keyword to use. That’s where you can sort the keyword value in Keyword Intelligence. 

A high-value keyword means it will bring more traffic to your website at a lower competition. 

Alternatively, you can do a keyword audit as it remains as one of the most important and effective practices to building a strong SEO strategy. Many variables must be considered in keyword auditing, including the precise search phrases your audience uses and the type of content they seek. As a result, the keyword audit process provides insight into your target audience’s ideas, desires, and anxieties, making it a very powerful marketing tool.

Though this tactic is effective, the drawback is that it involves a lot of data about keywords which is very difficult to keep track of. Thankfully, there are some keyword audit tools available like Moz or Google Keyword Planner. 

You can learn how to do a comprehensive keyword audit on your site here.

Third: Research Your Competitors

To start off, you must choose your competitor wisely. Focus on the top-performing competitors that rank high on the SERPs for your target keywords. 

To carry out competitive research, you can start by typing your target keyword into Google and listing them out.

The domain authority of some of these competitors will be significantly higher. Consider filtering out those with authority that is similar to yours. It is better to look at competitors that are performing slightly better than you as it is easier to catch up to them. 

It is not a smart choice to be aiming for keywords that you have no chance to rank for at all. 

Alternatively, you can “stalk” their performance through reviews or customer feedback. Through this tactic, you can figure out what they are doing right and wrong. Usually what works for your competitors has a higher chance to work for you too. 

Fourth: Use Keyword Gap Analysis To Compare And Research Your Competitors

Why should you do a competitive keyword analysis?

If your competitors are targeting relevant keywords and getting traffic from them, then they’re likely highly relevant to your business, too. 

Now that you have a list of your competitors, it is time for comparison. 

Compare among each of your high-ranking competitors and list out what keywords that they have in common. Now, compare yourself with these competitors. You want to discover these keywords, keywords patterns, or keyphrases that you were missing on.

Identify and collect all the semantic keywords used:

• Keywords you rank for, but they don’t
  • Know which keywords that you have an advantage over your competitors.
  • Use it to keep track of your website’s traffic (drop or increase).
  • Know which relevant keywords you should be targeting instead.

• Keywords they rank for, but you don’t
  • Identify the high volume, valuable keywords that your competitors are ranking on the SERP, steal them, and employ them in your content.
  • Understand the strategy or keywords your competitors have that leads them to high traffic.
  • Analyze valuable keywords your competitors use for your content ideas/strategy as well as re-optimizing existing content.

Ensure to audit them in detail based on your current targeting objectives to figure out what keywords would work well for your marketing campaign.

Find out the difference between Content Gap Analysis & Keyword Gap Analysis in our recent blog.

To make this process easier, you can also use BiQ’s Rank Intelligence to quickly identify the golden keywords that your competitors are ranking for.

First, enter your website URL into Rank Intelligence. Then, select the country where the audience is based. 

You will get to see all the keywords your website is ranking for together with the important insights such as search volume, cost-per-click, and competition, and so on. 

These insights let you know what are the search terms that searchers are searching for to reach your website. 

Ultimately, you have to remember the goal of this process- to uncover hidden and valuable keywords used and not used by your competitors. 

Fifth: Craft And Publish Your Content

Finally, you are now ready to create your content with all the golden keywords you have found through the keyword gap analysis process.

To boost organic traffic for existing articles or blogs, you can now reoptimize and replace your old keywords with high-valued and high-ranking keywords. 

On the other hand, you can also leverage long-tailed keywords as short-tailed keywords are more challenging if you’re just starting out. These long-tail keywords provide more insight into what the search is about, and can drive more qualified traffic to your site. 

Pro Tip: Impressive copywriting techniques can also increase traffic. 

Last but not least, ensure that your article is formatted and is readable as it will affect your SEO. When the content on your website is clear to your target audience, people will learn about your service or product, and search engines will favour the site and rank it higher as a result.

Here are some tips on how to increase readability for your audiences and the search engine:

• Include relevant images to break up lengthy texts or paragraphs
• Use headings effectively
• Use bullets and lists like this one to provide information effectively
• Keep your content concise and interesting

Here’s our little secret to Digital Marketing success.

Final Thoughts

Repeating the keyword competitive analysis method from time to time is a good idea. It’s a great method to identify things you might have overlooked.

To recap, here are the five steps of keyword gap analysis you need to conduct to boost your organic traffic:

Step 1: Research your topic of interest to find the relevant and high-value keywords

Step 2: Identify keyword opportunities with keyword audit

Step 3: Identify and research your competitors to see where they rank and what works for them

Step 4: Identify high-ranking keywords that your competitor is ranking for through competitive keyword analysis 

Step 5: Reoptimize your old content with the new keywords or draft and format your post and publish them

We are not saying that with these steps you will get tremendous traffic in 24 hours’ time, but with reasonable time, your content will certainly grow if you have put this keyword gap analysis to good use. 

Try them out in RankingGap, and don’t forget about us when you get famous!

Nowadays, digital marketing is necessary. So is Keyword Gap tool. 

More and more people are searching and buying products online. But customers are not buying immediately. Instead, they go on a journey — to Google around, read some articles, compare brands and see reviews before they finally make their purchase.

Digital marketing is what helps you connect with your audiences at each stage of the buyer journey. It better positions your brand to reach your target audiences and let them know why they should buy your products and how their products can fix your problems. 

However, online marketing is an increasingly competitive landscape. Companies face both direct and indirect competition that are all fighting for the same attention. 

According to DialogTech, the global digital advertising expenditure is currently on track to reach $389 billion in 2021 as businesses are pouring massive amounts into advertising campaigns. With many businesses competing for limited ad space, this increases the cost of acquisition – making ads more expensive than ever.  

That’s why one of the best traffic generation methods remains to be SEO and content marketing. Just take a look at examples like Hubspot and Shopify that have successfully built an evergreen traffic empire using content marketing.

When it comes to finding SEO success, there is an advanced marketing skill you should better hone called keyword gap analysis.

What is Keyword Gap Analysis? 

You are creating content for the internet. It goes without saying that to succeed, you need to take a minute to analyze your targeted keywords and competition. 

Keyword gap research is an extension of keyword research tools and refers to the process of analyzing and comparing your keyword rankings to your competitors’ to identify keyword opportunities you may be missing.

From analyzing your competition, you can curate a list of target keywords that might be missing from your content strategy, along with insights on your competitors’ marketing strategies. This will lead you to create better content that has a higher chance of ranking. 

Read up our post to learn about the difference between Keyword Gap Analysis & Content Gap Analysis.

How to Master It?

Learning keyword gap analysis can skyrocket your understanding of content marketing. 

Rather than running aimlessly and creating content on every high-traffic keyword, competitive keyword analysis will allow you to learn which keywords have the best potential ROI and what you should do to win your competition.

Here, we have outlined the 3 simple steps to conduct a keyword gap analysis. So without further ado, let’s get started!  

1. Use Keyword Audit to Learn About Your Competitors

When it comes to strengthening your website’s SEO, doing a periodic keyword audit is one of the most effective practices. It builds and calibrates your keyword list and helps determine which terms you should be optimizing for. Here’s how it works. 

What is a Keyword Audit?

For a quick definition, a keyword audit refers to the process of analyzing and assessing your site’s existing rankings and search campaigns for insights on planning your content marketing strategy moving forward. 

There are many keyword audit tools out there – both free and paid that automates that keyword auditing process. Here, we will review the steps to do a keyword audit using our own BiQ Rank Intelligence. 

All you need to do is simply insert your domain URL and the tool will reveal all the keywords you are currently ranking for on Google and their breakdown. 

Now, you only want a list of high potential keywords to target, so make sure you set the filter to display only keywords ranking between #1 to #20. 

These are keywords you want to focus on improving to boost the ranks and get more traffic. However, most marketers just stop here. 

They optimize the content and then wait to check if the ranking shows any improvement. Rinse and repeat. But this rarely shows any results as it lacks any direction for optimizing.  

In any case, to truly find success in your SEO and keyword rankings, what you need to do is competitive keyword analysis.

By comparing your website’s keyword rankings with two or more competitors, you can get a much richer analysis. 

That’s why put your competitors’ domain through BiQ Rank Intelligence as well, and get their list of ranking keywords and we can now start with your keyword gap analysis. 

2. Use Keyword Gap Analysis for Keyword Discoveries

Basically, what you want to look for are keyword opportunities and gaps. This can be identified more easily when you categorize the ranking keywords between you and your competitors into these three fields: 

1. Keywords that your competitors rank, but you don’t 
2. Keywords you are ranking for, but your competitors don’t
3. Overlapping keywords that you and your competitors are ranking for.  

In addition to this labeling, it’s also important to fill in the necessary information. After all, a good keyword report should be complete with data and insights whenever we look at them. 

So get a sheet ready and make sure each keyword has its corresponding data including each domain ranking position, ranking page URL, volume, CPC, competition, etc. While you are at it, classify each keyword category or niche as well.

This is important because it lets you identify unexpected keywords when you are unable to classify them, which would help you weed out keywords that are irrelevant to your business.  

At the end of the day, your keyword sheet should look something like this. 

Now that it is complete, you can start going through the keyword list to see if there are any repeating patterns. Like for example: is your domain mostly ranking for long-tail keywords or short-tail keywords? 

Here are some questions you should be asking when going through the list:

• Are there any patterns for search terms ranking on Page 1? For example, are the keywords mostly singular or plural? Are they long-tail or short-tail keywords? and so on.
• How many keywords did your competitors include on their page? This is especially important for overlapping keywords that both you and your competitors share. You want to find out if any keywords are missing from your page and take this opportunity to optimize your content to target those terms.
• What is the type of content surrounding a high-ranking keyword? Does the SERP for the keyword have a higher preference for image or video results? Did your competitor create a video or infographic for that search term?
• What are the ranking keywords with answer box or featured snippet? Which domain is getting more featured snippet results? 
• Are there any valuable keywords you missed? Like for example, keywords with high volume, related to your business or buyer keywords that are likely to convert.
• Has the search algorithm shown a ranking preference for certain topics? This will get you an idea of what each domain has built relevancy for over the web and allow you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. 

Of course, there are many other questions you can be asking. But most importantly, you should find the answer to: What are the keywords you could potentially rank for, or what are the keywords you could rank for better? 

Once you have your potential keywords, rank them to find out which are the ones you should prioritize. You can sort it by keyword volume to see which offers the best ROI or look at your top-ranking keywords to build on your strength.

For a broader view, you can also arrange it according to its categories to see which niche provides the most popular keyword groups. 

This can also help you identify keyword topics that might have high cumulative traffic. Because sometimes dozens of smaller, niche keywords can add up to high cumulative traffic and give you a competitive edge.

Look at your data from different angles to identify potential keyword opportunities. Transform the analyzed and collected data into your weapon to outperform your competitors. 

Read up the ultimate guide to Keyword Gap Analysis here!

3. Begin Drafting Your Copy

With your keyword list ready, now it’s time to start optimizing your existing content or start creating a brand new page for your keyword.

Here we suggest doing it on our BiQ Content Intelligence. It’s perfect for both optimizing existing content or creating new content. 

For existing content, just paste your URL and main keyword into the tool and it will give you a quick SEO analysis based on the Word Vector module. 

The tool adds another level of competitive analysis by comparing your content against the Top 10 organic ranking results in SERP and tells you how relevant your writing is and if your keyword density is up to par. 

Additionally, you can also get a glance at your content readability and sentiment analysis that lets you know if your content caters to your target audience. 

Meanwhile, for creating new content, you can just insert your target keyword and start writing. The block editor will provide you real-time analysis and suggestions to make sure your content is SEO-friendly.

Conclusion

Ultimately, your competition should be part of your marketing equation. 

Keyword gap analysis or competitive analysis is often overlooked in digital marketing strategies, as most search marketers just stop at the keyword research phase. 

Without having any knowledge of your competitors and how search engines perceive your target keywords, it will be a challenge to really succeed in the SERPs. 

That’s why make sure you follow the steps in this guide to master the keyword gap analysis process to build a solid content marketing strategy that outranks your competitors.

You can try out Keyword Gap Analysis in our other tool – RankingGap. 

To your success!

Imagine being able to reverse engineer someone else’s ranking strategy and identify their weaknesses so you can win big? Well, there’s a way and that is through SEO gap analysis. 

You are not creating content in a vacuum after all. 

In addition to keyword research and identifying potential high-traffic keywords to target, you also need to be looking at what the internet has to offer and how your competitors stand to find better keywords and content opportunities. 

SEOs and marketers have a toolbox full of strategies to help you identify these gaps, but among the two most popular tactics are content gap analysis and keyword gap analysis.

Sounds similar? Don’t worry, we will guide you through the differences in these two approaches and how you can use them to inform your keyword strategy.

Now let’s start with a quick definition and how they work. 

What is Content Gap Analysis?

A content gap analysis is a great way to start your search campaign. It analyzes your existing content and allows you to discover potential content pieces and topics that your readers want, but are missing from your site. 

Usually, this is done through finding the keywords your competitors are ranking for but you don’t. The idea is simple and that is to discover and fill in the content gap between you and your competitors. 

Besides, if your competitors are targeting these keywords, chances are prospects searching for these keywords could be looking for your business too. 

What is Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword gap analysis, otherwise known as competitive keyword analysis, is a more thorough approach to analyzing the gap between you and your competitor’s ranking keywords.

Instead of only identifying the keywords that you are not ranking for, the process is more centered on bridging the gap and discovering valuable keyword opportunities that you should target for better search visibility and traffic.

Like content gap analysis, it adopts competitors’ keywords that you are not ranking for but extends to common keywords as well. 

It takes into consideration your ranking keywords and how it is performing compared to your competition. Through this practice, you are not only looking for search terms you have yet to target or rank but identifying and understanding how you can better optimize your content.

Moreover, the process identifies questions that users may be asking related to your keyword that will help you uncover new content insights. 

Content vs Keyword Gap Analysis

To better illustrate the difference between content gap vs keyword gap analysis, think of content gap as part of keyword gap analysis framework. 

While both gap analysis compares your existing keyword strategy to your competitors, content gap focuses on keywords you do not rank while keyword gap analysis focuses on wider areas of opportunities to improve your overall search visibility. 

How Does Content Gap Analysis Work?

Though content gap analysis was previously done manually, Ahrefs has introduced a Content Gap tool that automated the whole process.

It allows you to compare your ranking keywords with a bunch of competitors at the same time, and you can filter the keyword results into:

• Keywords that any of your competitors are ranking for
• Keywords that a certain number of your competitors are ranking for
• Keywords that all of your competitors are ranking for

This data can help you get insight into understanding each website’s business model, keyword strategy, competition, as well as what is missing from your target keyword list.

Using this filter, you can easily access all the keywords that your competitors rank for in search results, but you do not. 

The only caveat to this is that you might be trying to rank for search terms that aren’t related to your products or target audience, so think twice before you target them.

In addition to the domain level, you can also conduct content gap analysis on a page level using Ahrefs Content Explorer which allows you to uncover all the ranking keywords for a page. 

Compare this with your content on the topic to see if there are any missing keywords you can include to better optimize your content. 

How Does Keyword Gap Analysis Work? 

With keyword gap analysis, you are looking to discover better ranking opportunities, and that can be for new keywords or improving on existing rankings.

When conducting your competitive keyword analysis, you are looking to find valuable and relevant keyword opportunities. Keep in mind to assess their ranking difficulty and identify only keywords that can truly bring value to your business. 

Now we know it’s not always easy to rank high for the keywords you are competing with, but some keywords that might be more worth the effort than others.

Here are four categories of keywords that you should focus on to better close the gap between you and your competitors:

1. Keywords that you rank for, but your competitors don’t

There are thousands of websites out there trying to steal your rankings, and of course, you want to avoid that at all costs.

That’s why knowing what your top ranking keywords are and consistently tracking their SERP results is fundamental to prevent your competitors from stealing them. You can use rank tracking tools like BiQ Rank Tracker to be on alert.

Besides, when you know which are your top-ranking keywords, you can also play on your home turf leverage to further optimize and easily rank for related keywords. 

Let’s say you are ranking for a long-tail keyword like “what is the best shaving cream for men”. In this scenario, you can create skyscraper content to target related short tail keywords like “shaving cream for men” or “men’s shaving lotion”. 

Just make sure to interlink your content to strengthen your authority on the subject. 

On the other hand, if you are already ranking for a short tail keyword, you might find that the page is simultaneously holding various top positions for similar ranking keywords. 

This is proven by an Ahrefs study noting that the average top-ranking page in the top 10 search results is ranking for almost 1,000 related search terms. 

But still, some might be ranked lower than others. 

In that case, creating an in-depth content that directly answers the keyword’s search intent would land you on a better ranking, especially given your authority in the subject. 

2. Keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t 

If your competitors are targeting these keywords to rank, it’s most likely highly relevant to your business too. 

Find the keywords with decent or high volume and steal them to employ in your content. Most importantly, understand the strategy that your competitors are using and replicate them to get high traffic. 

Still, it’s unlikely that all the keywords are relevant to your business so make sure to sift through them to find the only relevant opportunities. 

There are three things to consider when targeting these keywords: 

1. Business value – Is this search term made by potential customer prospects? How likely will these searchers buy what you sell?
2. Search volume – What is the average number of monthly searches for the keyword? Does the search volume have high organic traffic potential that justifies content creation? 
3. Buyer journey – What is the search intent behind the keyword? What stage of the buyer’s journey are they at?

Answering these questions will help you understand if the keyword will fit into your content strategy and how.

3. Keywords that both you and your competitors rank for

Where you rank on search matters. If you and your competitors are both ranking for the same keywords, you must rank closer if not in the #1 position. 

Backlinko studies have pointed out that the #1 ranking result is likely to be driving 10X more clicks and traffic compared to the #10 ranking content. So make sure to prioritize reoptimization in your content strategy especially for keywords on the first page. 

You can identify these keywords by using BiQ’s Rank Intelligence to uncover your keywords that are ranking on the 1st page and further improve them. 

Just input your domain URL and set the filter to show only those results positioning from #2 to #10. Arrange the keyword list according to potential traffic volume and kickstart your content re-optimization from there. 

At the same time, you can also check in on your #1 position rankings and strategize methods to stay ahead of your competition. Always make sure your content is updated and relevant to avoid competitors from stealing your spot. 

One SEO tool that can help you improve your content relevance and performance is BiQ’s Content Intelligence. 

Using its Word Vector mode, you can optimize based on the suggestions to further improve your contextual relevance as compared to the top 10 ranking search results.

4. Ranking keywords that you and most of your competitors don’t have

Everyone wants to rank for competitive keywords, but that’s impossible in the short term, especially when your website is just starting out. 

When analyzing your competitors’ keyword list, you also want to find low competition keywords that are easy to rank for. 

These searches are often very specific, and you want to find a keyword that is in the sweet spot of being not popular enough to be overly crowded with competitors, but still common enough to send you website traffic. 

Sometimes, you may uncover hidden keyword gems or new trending keywords that your competitors have yet to realize. 

Just take the search term “growth hacking” for example. Although it was first coined by Dropbox marketer Sean Ellis back in 2013, the term only started gaining popularity a few years later and is seeing its peak now. 

Now, the keyword has almost a thousand related keywords and over 669K total monthly search volume.

Key Takeaway: Start Your Gap Analysis

As the web gets more competitive and many are evolving in using keyword research and great content to benefit their business, you need to evaluate what your competitors are doing.

Doing a content and keyword gap analysis will help you see how your site stands comparatively and discover untapped keywords and ranking opportunities. 

Performing a keyword gap analysis especially can help you pinpoint ways you can further expand your existing content and bridge the keyword gap based on your strengths and weaknesses. 

So take action now and once you identify your gap keywords, strategize with creativity to close the gap or start a business from an angle your competitors never thought of.

If you want to know more about the amazing strategies and steps in conquering your competitor keywords, head straight to our Ultimate Keyword Gap Analysis Strategies blog post.

Search engines are the starting point for 93 percent of website visits. Besides, 75 percent of internet users don’t scroll beyond the first page of search engine results.

These statistics point to two conclusions. First, ranking on the first page for particular terms can be more useful and vital than most forms of advertising. Second, you should strive to be on the first page if you’re to catch people’s attention. 

For you to tap into these benefits of organic search results, you need a solid SEO content strategy. Here are the tools that can help you streamline your SEO content creation process and make it more effective:

• Google Trends

If you’re just starting and you haven’t settled on the subject matter yet, Google Keyword Trend is the perfect starting point. Google Trends is a feature that shows you how many times a search term has been entered into Google Search comparative to the total search volume in a given time frame. 

Google Trends can help you discover event-driven spikes in given keyword search volume. Besides, Google Trends provides you with vital keyword-related data like geographical data of users and search volume index. The platform also allows you to change the time frame, location, industry or category, and search (in the news, web, YouTube, or shopping) for more detailed data. 

Once you’ve established what users/ potential customers are searching for online, you should settle on particular low-competition and high-search-volume keywords. If you don’t rank highly for such keywords, your content won’t be visible on search engine results. 

An effective rule of thumb is to focus on about two keywords in every article or blog post. This will allow you to create focused and detailed content as well as enable you to locate your keywords in strategic places – for instance in your headline. Having fewer keywords will also help you avoid keyword stuffing. 

Keyword Research Tools

• Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner enables you to know the keywords which are popular in given niches. It also helps you find out the competitiveness of given phrases. An effective SEO strategy is built on keywords that are high-volume as well as not too competitive. But what stands out about this keyword planner is that its data comes straight from Google and so it’s extremely accurate. Moreover, it’s free!

• LSIGraph

LSI helps you find the most lucrative semantically related keywords/phrases for your paid marketing and SEO. LSI keywords are phrases related to the main keyword. You should use them in your SEO content to help search engine crawlers to contextualize your content better.

Better still, LSIGraph helps you discover the top-ranking content for your keyword, which is fantastic because for you to outrank everyone else, you must learn from the best.

Research Search Intent and Create Outline 

• SEOPressor’s Blog Title Generator

If you choose to start your article with a headline, you can use this title generator to create multiple title ideas from your keywords. To generate title ideas, you only need to enter your keyword. If you don’t like the ideas, you can refresh and generate another set of unique ideas. 

The main reason why you should use SEOPressor’s title generator is that it spawns titles that are useful and relevant to readers.

• Answer the Public 

Answer the Public is a visual research tool that helps connect your keywords with search questions and suggested searches. Google and Bing’s auto search results are a treasure trove of insights for marketers.  

As you type a keyword into Answer the public, you’re provided with an aggregated view of search questions. This macro view of search questions provides a window into the ‘searchers’ emotions and motivations. This is an effective but underutilized source of marketing research. 

• BiQ keyword Intelligence

BiQ generates long-tail keywords that are linked semantically to your main keywords. You only need to enter a single seed keyword for BiQ to generate numerous long-tail keywords. 

BiQ’s features include keyword intelligence which helps you conduct local SEO and decipher customer behavior through keyword intent analysis. Its content intelligence feature provides you AI-guided optimization steps and tone suggestions. Besides, BiQ comes with other useful features like site intelligence, rank intelligence, markup intelligence and more.

Optimizing Your Content

• SEOPressor WordPress plugin

SEOPressor  WordPress plugin gathers vital SEO analytics of your site in one place. It thus helps you to ensure that your content is presented optimally – that you have adhered to the SEO best practices and the most favorable keyword density.

You’re able to bolster your SEO, thanks to SEOPressor score which scales from 0 to 100. The score is based on your content’s readability, word count, and semantic quality. The higher you score, the higher you’re likely to rank. 

Besides, this plugin provides you with suggestions on how to optimize your content naturally. For instance, it suggests where you should place keywords, and warns you of keyword stuffing. It also recommends LSI keywords. 

• GDoc SEO Assistant

 GDoc helps online marketers, writers, and bloggers to analyze and boost the SEO value of their content. It bolsters your SEO efforts by providing data on your keywords, including trends, search volume, and competition

GDoc’s key features include SEO score which informs you how well you’ve optimized your content and the SEO Suggestion feature which provides you with real-time content optimization suggestions. Also, its Related Keyword feature helps you improve your content’s semantic relevance.

Post Editing Tool Readability and Grammar

• Hemingway App

Hemingway was the master of writing easy to read prose marked by short sentences. Online readers have short attention spans; they don’t want to read lengthy, flowery, and verbose sentences. The Hemingway app helps you create easy to read content with short sentences. 

All you have to do is to paste your article into the app, it then highlights problematic areas in several categories: use of adverbs, passive voice, overly difficult phrases or words, or exceedingly complex sentences. You can then scrolls through your content and rectify the highlighted areas – simplify complex sentences, use active verbs and get rid of unnecessary adverbs. 

The Hemingway app also categorizes your content based on its reading level. The lower the reading grade, the more accessible the content is to a wider audience. In the long run, the app helps you to become a better writer capable of spotting and fixing errors.

• Grammarly

For your content to be SEO-friendly, it must be grammatically correct and logically structured. Even if your content is useful, no one will want to read it if it’s incoherent and flooded with basic errors. You won’t have clients if your content isn’t easy to read.

Grammarly uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence help you create clear and effective online content. It checks for grammar errors, spelling errors, and incremental plagiarism. It also offers suggestions about tone, delivery style, vocabulary, and concision.

The best thing about Grammarly is that you can install it into your browser where it’ll grammar- and spell-check all the stuff you write online. You can also download its desktop app for offline use.

Conclusion 

Great writing tools enable you to craft compelling content by helping your brainstorm ideas, find errors, perfect copy, and ultimately create content ranks high on search engines. To create optimal content, try out the above writing tools.

It’s a question every SEO asks at a certain point. Why? Because like any other marketing activity, SEO costs money and the expenses can sometimes pile without much to show for it. Being a shrewd business owner, you must always find ways to maximize your returns while minimizing expenses.

So, what constitutes a “good SEO deal?”

Is it $500 per month? $5,000 per month? Or should you do your SEO on your own to eliminate expenses altogether? Let’s begin with what others are paying.

A Look at Industry Data

Since this is a question millions of digital marketers struggle with every year, there’s been considerable research on SEO pricing.

For example, I recently bumped upon one survey where 70% of small businesses said they spend under $100 on SEO per month. Another 17% of the respondents, meanwhile, said they spend between $101 and $199. According to this survey, therefore, close to 90% of small businesses spend under $200 on SEO per month.

More surprisingly, about 54% of the respondents said they spend nothing ($0.00) on SEO. Of the businesses in this category;

• The majority do SEO on their own
• The others disregard SEO entirely!

An even more detailed study report, however, was released recently by Ahrefs. Ahrefs’ study wasn’t focused on what marketers pay, but rather SEO pricing among agencies. The two key survey questions were;

1. How much do you charge for SEO services?
2. What SEO pricing model(s) do you use?

In total, 357 SEO agencies were interviewed, though at the end, only 348 “clean” submissions were accepted. The following were the key takeaways from the study;

• Most agencies (74.71%) charge a monthly retainer
• $501-$1,001 is the most popular retainer range
• About 36.78% charge an hourly rate
• Hourly rates rarely exceed $150 (88%)
• At least 50.44% charge $75-$150/hour

It’s worth noting that more experienced SEOs charge a higher price compared to the newer guys. The average hourly rate for agencies that have been in the industry for;

• <2 years is $79.39/hour
• 2-4 years is $110.69/hour
• 4-10 years is $118.85/hour
• >10 years is $142.50/hour

In summary, therefore, for a regular project, you’ll likely pay, on average;

• $110/hour
• $501-$1,001/month, or
• $1,001-$2,000/project

Making the Right Decision

Now that we know what agencies charge, we can focus on finding that “sweet deal.” Let’s begin by getting the paid vs. DIY SEO debate out of the way.

Pay or Do It Yourself?

A tough question, right?

The truth is that DIY SEO is cheaper. You don’t have to pay someone to do the job for you. So, you may not even have to allocate a budget for the SEO.

However, we also want to stress that DIY SEO isn’t free. Just because you’ve saving the budget doesn’t mean it’s free.

You’ll need to (according to Blue Corona);

• Educate yourself – 80+ hours/year
• Perform keyword search – 3 hours/week
• Engage in blogging – 24 hours/week
• Maintain your social media – 8 hours/week

The total time spent on DIY SEO, therefore, is 80 + (35/week x 52) = 1,900 hours per year. If your digital marketing ROI is $50/hour, 1,900 hours spent on SEO would equate to a $95,000 investment. So, is it free? NO. Is it cheaper? With regards to upfront costs, yes.

The biggest advantage of DIY SEO, however, is that once you get into the grove, you can achieve a lot more than you’d ever get from an agency or SEO consultant because of the greater dedication and will to succeed.  

So, How Much Should You Spend on SEO Services?

Well, we’ve already established what other marketers pay on average (i.e. $1,001 to $2,000 per project). You can always use that as a reference point.

However, you don’t have to pay that much. Indeed, depending on the type and size of your business, your location, and whether you choose to outsource or DIY your SEO, the cost will vary significantly.

What we want to stress is that;

• Cheap SEO is a trap and costly; avoid it
• SEO is a broad term. It’s not just about keywords
• Your SEO will need to grow as the business grows

Why is Great SEO an Important Investment for Your Business?

Since it’s impossible to put a fixed price on SEO, the best approach is to look at it as an investment which is just as important as the rest of your marketing. Here’s what makes great SEO vital;

• Organic search is often the primary source of website traffic
• SEO boosts brand trust and credibility
• Good SEO means a more satisfying user experience
• Good SEO boosts engagement and conversions

How Can You Invest in Your SEO for the Highest ROI?

Whether you choose to outsource or DIY, there are several steps you can take to establish and run a highly profitable SEO campaign.

• Aim to rank for evergreen and money keywords
• Improve your site navigation
• Optimize your website and content for mobile searches
• Optimize your site for speed. Faster sites get more traffic
• Write high-quality content that adds value
• Invest in inbound and outbound link building
• Consider using SEO tools to boost your ROI

DIY Search Engine Optimization with SEO Tools

If, like the majority of small business owners, you choose the DIY route, search engine optimization tools can prove invaluable. An SEO tool is a software program designed to help you with things such as spying on the competition, auditing your SEO strategy, keyword search, SEO tracking, and data mining.

Some of the popular SEO tools to consider are;

• Google keyword planner
• Google analytics
• Google trends
• SEMRush
• Ahrefs
• Moz Pro
• Screaming Frog
• Yoast SEO for WordPress

BiQ: Demystifying SEO Pricing and Paying Only for What You Use

Finally, you should also consider the new kid on the block – BiQ! Still in the beta stage, the BiQ SEO tool is different from the other SEO tools because you only pay for what you need.  

Traditionally, when you decide to start doing SEO, you go online, pick an agency, pay whatever they’re demanding, and then work begins. So, you never really get the chance to discuss the specific SEO services that you need because, you know, SEO is just SEO. It comes as a package, right?

Well, it doesn’t. SEO is an umbrella term. It comprises several elements, including keyword search, competitor analysis, SEO auditing, and so forth. What happens if you only use a few of these services? What if you need keyword analysis but not auditing?

With traditional SEO tools, you’d still pay the whole “SEO” cost, meaning that you end up paying even for services you don’t need.

That ends with BiQ.

With BiQ, SEO pricing is dependent on the specific services you need. Is it keyword intelligence? Content intelligence? Link intelligence? BiQ allows you to choose from these features (there are six in total) and pay only for what you need. Sign up for the closed Beta test at https://app.biq.cloud/sign-up.

Conclusion

SEO is a foundational pillar for any successful digital marketing campaign. And, it can be expensive. Fortunately, with tools such as Google Analytics and BiQ, you don’t have to worry about SEO pricing anymore. These tools make it possible to plan and execute an incredibly successful, low-cost SEO campaign – even on your own!

Want to get traffic that converts in a few clicks? It’s important to revisit your current keyword strategy and take a look at pain point SEO. 

For marketers, pain points sometimes are not as straightforward as an awful migraine or a bad hip that is aggravated by the weather. 

In this article, we will go through what you can do to ensure you’re creating more high-converting, end of funnel posts with a focus on customer pain points. And from pain point marketing show you how, you can drive traffic from the content back to your store.

Today we will be diving into the world of customer pain points and specifically how you can create SEO-driven content targeting these buyer keywords. 

We will also be looking at an amazing case study that delivers results by marketing themselves as indispensable to 

What are Customer Pain Points?

Real or perceived, pain points define a customer concern that they consciously bear and are actively seeking for a solution.

Like any problems, customer pain points can be diverse or in certain cases, the prospects might not even be aware of the pain point they are experiencing. 

Subsequently, Pain Point Marketing focuses on these problems and promotes your merchandise or services as a unique solution.

In theory, it’s through customer pain points that you are able to discover your potential leads and map your content to your buyer journey. 

To find them, you need to ask: 

Here are the four most predominant pain points;

• Financial pain points—Your prospects are concerned about the pricing of a product, solution, or current provider and may want an alternative affording them a lower cost.
• Convenience pain points—potential customers could be seeking for enhanced internal processes or outsourcing options, for instance, through assigning leads to sales representatives if not, nurturing lower-priority leads.
• Productivity pain points—in this case, prospects are looking for more efficient and time-saving solutions.
• Support pain points—on account of this, prospects pursue improved responses and assurances at decisive moments of the customer journey or support after-sales.

At the onset, it’s ideal to weigh where your solution plugs into the pain points in marketing categories.

Viewing these pain points in categories lets you think about how to position your company or product as a solution and the focus to highlight. 

Let’s say, your target audience falls into the support pain point. This means that he or she is already familiar with the service, instead of selling your benefits to them, it would be better to talk about the 24/7 support available or constant updates that your product has. 

Yet, as a marketer or blogger, you have to apply yourself more because most prospective customer concerns are layered and complex.

How Do You Identify Your Customer Pain Points?

Given you’re now more aware of what pain points are, you’ll need to piece together how to identify them definitively.

Even if a large proportion of your prospects are presumably coping with matching or almost identical pain points, the stimulus of these pain points ostensibly is as divergent as your clientele base.

For that reason, qualitative research is a key facet of distinguishing customer pain points.

Approach:

• Analyze your current customers as well as review social media platforms
• Assume the buyer’s viewpoint and outline the customer’s journey
• Undertake a qualitative customer and sales market survey

Often, you may presume ideas concerning your customer’s pain points, but then realize what alarms you regarding your merchandise, services, or website does nothing much to divulge the real problem.

So, pick the appropriate open-ended questions, encourage responses, and collate customer feedback.

Example Questions to Ask your customers in the research

• “What frustrates you regarding…?”
• “Granted the chance to alter one arrangement about… What would that be?  
• “What do you consider as the most challenging part of…?”
• “Where do you feel we can do better?
• “Ever had concerns with…?”
• “Say you’re to advise the management, what would be the first thing you’d raise?”

Well, some queries may seem to attract negative responses, so, single-out the questions you feel should apply! Also, you can blend these probes as part of a broader survey amid a more positive context.

Once you start obtaining feedback, watch for trends. If at least 30-40% of your respondents acknowledge a pressing issue, chances are you’ve identified a pain point.

In some cases, your customers’ pain points might not be that unnerving; it could be, they’re just needs.

An inquest into customer behavior through research can, therefore, support your firm’s SEO strategy.

Case Study;

Although it’s a household name today, Febreze suffered a rough patch before emerging as a leading brand. So, from becoming a potentially failed Procter & Gamble product, how did Febreze achieve this feat?

After a run of below-average results with their promotional campaigns, three things would lead to a complete turnaround in fortunes. First would be smart observational findings, next, active pain point marketing research, and finally, a comprehensive remodeling of its marketing strategy.

In the long run, the customer would end up enjoying the “feel good” factor, something that was missing in the early stages.

Understanding the particular customer needs your product or service fills is key to successfully adopting a top-down approach to content planning.

Do your prospects respond to marketing content that grants them a feeling of appreciation or importance? Customers desire products or services that make them feel special.

Additionally, your SEO strategy should be responsive to customer feedback and afford them assurances in case anything goes wrong. 

Digital marketing pain points SEO strategy can support your efforts, making you more responsive to customer concerns, as well as provide you with the means to offer assurances.

Amid this process, it’s essential to understand your prospects language, especially when they’re discussing their problems. And more so, identify the keywords they’re using: the money keywords.

Make use of Keyword Research tools such as Google Keyword Planner or LSIGraph to discover these pain point marketing keywords.

Steps-by-Step Guide to Keyword Research

It’s interesting how we can often fall into the trap of going for the most common keywords with the highest traffic.

Yes, if we are ranking for those keywords, they are a good ego boost for your traffic but this traffic are often people from the top of the funnel.

Find keyword ideas—when you’re conducting keyword research, start by reflecting on a topic, an idea, or head keyword, otherwise also known as a “seed.” Often, the seed comes from either industry knowledge or is related to the product or service you provide.

Search keyword volume—as you evaluate the relevance of specific keywords you target to use in your content, you’re likely to observe that search volume of most keywords varies significantly. Primarily, determine the variations of your specific keywords that are substantially popular amongst your searchers.

Determine search intent—establish what the searcher intends to find out. In that process, refine your content to suit the desired outcome of the user.

Utilize keywords silos—concerned about the organization of your content on a Webpage?  Instead of placing everything on one blog, you can help your searchers navigate to supplementary pages by providing supporting links within a page.

Use BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence

We might be tooting our own horn, but you can do everything and more using BiQ’s keyword intelligence. 

Aside from the functions above, you can also easily use BiQ to discover the ranking content and search snippets you should be targeting, all on a single platform that closes all those additional tabs that make your site stuck. 

Competitor Analysis can Help You Find Your Keywords and Potential Customers

Besides understanding your customers, it also pays to be conscious of your enterprise’s competitors’ pain points alongside their keywords.

Targeting to gain an advantage over your competitors? Use the following angle, especially if the customers are actively looking for alternatives:

• Comparison post
• The best product or service list
• Alternatives to Product
• Articles that talk about pricing

Target these Keywords and Create Relevant Content

Where customer pain points form the basis of your business, you should use them to inform your product and content marketing process.

Because of customer pain point marketing ties into the search intent, it’ll have a significant impact on the overall performance of the content you create—potentially resulting in enhanced customer experiences as well as an overall increase in conversions.

Address customer pain point marketing through mapping these concerns alongside the customer journey. Next, build content and an SEO strategy in the framework of applicable keywords. Finally, conduct strategic outreach.

So, anything that grants you an avenue to solve your customers’ concerns should form the focal point of your pain point marketing strategy. Design not just blog posts, but also podcasts, webinars, eBooks, case studies, videos, and more to help enlighten your customers.

Most importantly, always position your company as a potential solution. 

Bonus Tip: Aim for the long-tail keyword first

Typically, the more considerable the search volume, the higher the competition and input required to succeed in organic ranking. While it appears appealing to rank in keywords with a notable number of searches, these terms only make up a section of overall searches performed on the Web.

In fact, some of the keywords that have significant traction often depict ambiguous intent. What’s more, by targeting such phrases, you could even risk drawing prospects to your site whose objectives don’t match what you provide on the page.

Optimizing Existing Content to Address Pain Points

If you Google Analytics, do you notice any patterns? Arguably, a substantial portion of your blog traffic actually comes from a select few blog posts, right?

Well, each content you create differs compared to another. But obviously, some will be outright money-makers. Usually, the latter group addresses itself to the customer pain points.

Check if your high ranking blog post are actually fulfilling this pain point aim and not just information, is it link to a closure content. Or is it simply informational, if yes it’s time to optimize it. 

No Gain without Pain

Our solutions never exist in a vacuum, they are created as an answer to help a customer with their problems.

So why should it be any different with our content marketing? It’s not effective to concentrate only on driving traffic without cause.

Align your SEO and content marketing integration to address customer pain points. Because ultimately this is what helps you match content to search intent, which results in better user experience and better conversions. Tie your product into your content as the solution to your customer’s problems. 

Kickstart your pain point SEO strategy today and let us know if it is working for you down on the comments below.

Long Tail Keyword Research can set your brand apart from the others in your niche. These keywords improve your chances of standing out in search engine results that are occasionally dominated by big companies. The right long-tail keyword research also act as a compass for the right customers to find you with ease.

What is a Long Tail Keyword?

Think of long-tail keywords as ‘keyphrases.’ That is to say that they are just longer keywords made of a combination of the hot words that define your business and niche. A long-tail keyword would ideally include 3 to 4 keywords that are super-specific about what you are selling.

Long-tail keywords cater to strong buyer intent late in the sales funnel. Buyers that use long-tail keywords are at most times ready to buy. And so the keywords have to excel in clarity while speaking to their intellect and addressing their urgent intention.

Let’s say you provide tour services in West Virginia. Now the first keyword that comes to mind for your type of business is West Virginia Travel.

Now, for a phrase like that, your tour company will probably never appear on top of search results.

You will be up against big shots like Trip Advisor, CNN Travel, National Geographic, and many others. But you need to beat the drums about your business to the right buyers. Long tail keyword research can help you get customers who have made up their minds to go on a WV vacation and are planning their itineraries right now.

Specificity in keywords increases the number of words in the phrase. Specificity also increases your conversion rate. In the case of your WV tours, the most effective long-tail keywords would be something like West Virginia Mountain Climbing Tours.

From this example, you note that long-tail keywords can be even longer than 3 to terms.

What you want to attain with the keywords is cater to specific search intent. And so the number of words it takes to achieve that is not etched in stone.

Long Tail Keywords vs. Short Tail Keyword

When you search online, you will find many results about what long-tail keywords are and what they are not.  Now that it’s clear that long-tail keywords are not defined by a number, let’s explain them more clearly and see how they differ from short-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are search terms with highly specific buyer intent. They have a lower search volume and competition levels,   but they have higher conversion rates. In most cases, the keywords are longer than three words.

A short tail keyword, on the other hand, contains three or fewer words. An example for your WV tour company would be a phrase such as West Virginia Tours, or West Virginia Vacation. These phrases are highly competitive (your competitors are moving mountains to rank for them), and they have a high search volume.

Why are Long Tail Keywords Useful?

Long-tail keywords are a magnet for hot leads. While advertisers with big budgets will be bidding top dollar for short-tail search phrases, you can exponentially grow Your SEO ROI with long-tail keywords.  Even though they attract less traffic, traffic is more focused and ready to make a purchase.

Long-tail keywords are also known as buyer keywords. They help you get the message across to customers that are ready to make a buying decision.

Your message is more refined when you use long-tail keywords

It stands to reason that when you use a little more than three words to describe your business, you end up providing more details. Optimizing your content with long-tail keywords can, therefore, be an effective strategy to give customers the right information at an instant and shorten their buying journey.

Other reasons to use long-tail keywords in your content

• They add context to your content
• Many people search the internet using full sentences
• They are good content generation tools
• Long-tail keywords can  help you outrank your competition  by focusing on personalized searches
• They already include your short tail keywords; you get two sons-in-law with one daughter
• Long-tail keywords are easier to find

How to Find Long Tail Keywords?

Unlike the backbreaking task of short-tail keyword research, long-tail keyword research is much easier. The focus should be on words that can help you sell even before the buyer clicks on your link. As hinted before, the right long-tail keywords also strike the right mix with short tail keywords.

• Refer to Google autocomplete and suggest

Let’s say you want to have a variety of long-tail keywords for your tour company. Use Google Autocomplete and search for phrases such as West Virginia Tour then click space. Google will suggest a variety of keywords that are searched frequently along with ‘West Virginia Tour,’ as seen below.

You can also get further suggestions by typing in a letter after your short tail keyword

• Use Google’s Related Searches

One other quick way to do your long tail keyword research for SEO is by use of Related Searches. It works the same as Google Autocomplete, except, in this case, don’t use the space bar after your short tail keywords. Instead, press enter and go to the search engine results page. At the very bottom of this page, you will find Searches Related to your keyword.

• Use Your Own Google Analytics and Search Console

You already have content on your site, right? You have probably strategized and optimized for short-tail keywords at the moment. What you can do then is review your analytics to find out which search phrases are bringing people on your site pages.

Open Google Analytics and navigate to Traffic Sources, then Sources, Search, and Organic. There will be many search terms displayed, and in there, you will find a good number of long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.

• Quora questions and featured snippet questions

Q&A sites like Quora are a gold mine for long-tail keywords. The site is fueled by user questions and user-generated content that can guide you on what people want to know regarding your product or service.

Featured snippet questions are also a good source of long tail keyword research. These are short summaries of an answer displayed on the top of search results. The snippet is taken from a webpage.

• Browse Wikipedia Outlines

Look at Wikipedia’s table of content for long-tail keyword ideas around your base term. The headings on Wikipedia comprise of many reliable long-tail search term.  You would need to Google Wikipedia+ your short term keyword to get a list of possible long phrases from the site.

• Refer to competitor keywords and content

Look at what your competitors are doing and then do it even better. Start by looking at the top search engine results for the long tail keyword phrases you have in mind.

For instance, with the phrase West Virginia Tours, top competitors use these terms:

• West  Virginia tour packages
• West Virginia holiday packages
• West Virginia Vacation Packages & Travel deals

• Use many and different keyword research tools

One keyword research tool might not efficiently give you all the options with a high ranking or high conversion possibilities. It takes a variety of research tools to come up with an extensive list of keywords for your content.

• LSIGraph— helps to find long keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword
• BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence—looks for long keywords in your blogs and on competitor’s sites

5. Create Awesome Content for Targeted Long Tail Keywords

Once you get your list of powerful long-tail keywords, the next step is to create compelling content around them to draw more traffic. The content must be detailed with relevant user information. Sprinkle your content with links to and from social media, review sites, and directories to rank even higher with those keywords. That’s how to use long-tail keywords.

The takeaway

Long tail keyword research should be an essential part of your SEO strategy. These words are easier to rank for. They help you create content that is highly satisfying to user queries. They help to increase your conversion rates.

You won’t believe this, but, according to Impact Bound, up to 55.24% of all websites on the internet didn’t have a single backlink as of December 2019.

That’s over 750 million sites, given that there are about 1.5 billion active websites at the moment.

Hopefully, you’re not part of the 55.24%, because you’d be missing a huge opportunity and leaving lots of money on the table. Backlinks can help you;

• Increase web traffic
• Generate new leads
• Close more sales

Moreover, backlinks gradually boost your perceived authority, often leading to better search engine ranking.

In this guide, we discuss simple strategies on how to get backlinks for your marketing campaign. First though, a definition.

What are Backlinks?

A backlink is essentially a hyperlink connecting two different web resources. What makes it a “back” link is that it points to your site rather than coming from your site.

Think of it this way; you sell running shoes and recently released a new brand. Then, you also have a friend who doesn’t sell shoes, but instead deals in fitness trackers.

While blogging about their fitness trackers, if the friend mentions running shoes, she may choose to link your e-store so that those interested in running shoes can click and check out the options on your website.

When this happens, in marketing, we say that you’ve received a backlink from the friend. It’s worth mentioning that not all backlinks are sales-focused.

Why are Backlinks Important? A Case Study

In 2019, a hosting company approached one of their friends who helps clients design and execute link building strategies. The client was struggling to differentiate itself because of the competitiveness of the hosting industry.

Being a small company, they had;

• Limited marketing resources
• No time to run a full-out campaign

After a period of research and out-of-the-box thinking, the link-building provider discovered an untapped market for specific keywords. So, they began with keyword research, wrote high-quality, SEO-optimized articles for the client, then followed up with a link building drive.

Long story short, the first article they created is now the 4th most visited page on the client’s site. In total, the site’s traffic jumped 55.9% – within just months.

Benefits of Running a Backlink Campaign

As you can tell from the above case study, you stand to benefit immensely from backlinks. Among other things;

• Link building improves organic ranking    

If you search the term “SEO backlinks” in Google, for example, you’ll find that the top three articles/blogs all have hundreds of backlinks. Currently, the result in 2nd spot has over 8,000 backlinks.

The reason is simple – backlinks are one of Google’s most trusted rank signals. According to the search engine, a page with plenty of backlinks is a page with authority.

• Backlinks help with faster indexing 

One of the ways search engines discover new websites is by following backlinks from existing web pages. It means that it’s more difficult for search engines to discover your website if you don’t have any backlinks.

This is especially important for new websites. If you want search engines to discover your site faster and begin showing your content in result pages, you need backlinks.

• Backlinks generate referral traffic 

This is, perhaps, the biggest benefit of backlinks – they can help you generate tons of referral traffic. Think of the number of people who read articles on the Forbes website, for example.

In the U.S. alone, Forbes has 74 million+ monthly readers. Worldwide, 111+ million people visit Forbes.com every month.

Now, imagine if a few links to your site appeared on the Forbes website every few weeks! You’d have at least a few hundred thousand people clicking through to visit your site.

How to Get Quality Links

There are endless ways to get backlinks for your website. The following are eight simple strategies to get you started;

1. Write guest posts 

A guest post is a piece of content that you create to be posted on other people’s blogs or websites – with a backlink to your site. The process itself is known as guest posting.

You must, however, engage in genuine guest posting, devoid of shortcuts such as automation. Also, ensure to create high-quality guest posts. Don’t just do it to get backlinks.

You can refer to our detailed guide on this topic here: Guide to Guest Posting

2. Get an interview 

Readers love interviews because interviews are authentic. As such, interviews often get a lot of views.

Getting interviewed by a popular news outlet or industry leader and having the interview posted on the interviewer’s site can, therefore, earn you plenty of attention.

Always insist on having backlinks to your site included in the published interviews.

3. Get backlinks from press releases 

Press releases are a goldmine for traffic and, yes, backlinks. But, as with many other tactics on this list, there are a lot of marketers sending out press releases currently, so you need to be smart.

We recommend choosing multiple and strong keywords to increase the chances of your press release being found. Also, consider using industry bloggers and influencers to distribute the release.

4. Learn from your competitors’ backlinks 

Analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles will help you assess the competition, see what’s working in the industry, and identify strategies to use for your own backlink campaign.

You want to focus on the number of backlinks, authority sites linked, and sites driving the most traffic. Then, save your findings and steal some of the ideas.

5. Find hidden link building opportunities 

Two high-return options here are fixing broken links and linking unlinked mentions.

Fixing broken links involves finding broken links on other people’s websites, creating something similar to the broken resource, and asking the owner of the dead resource to instead link to your working resource.

Unlinked mentions, meanwhile, are instances where other people mention your name or brand but don’t include a link. You can ask them to link to your site.

6. Leverage popular Q&A platforms 

Community sites such as Quora and Reddit are especially good platforms to get backlinks.

On Quora, for example, in your answers, you’re allowed to leave a link to your resources, such as your website or app. The same applies to Reddit.

People who love your answers can then click on the link to visit your site for more information.

7. Invest in social media marketing

All the major social media platforms now allow users to post links to their resources (blogs, websites, etc.).

Even Instagram which initially restricted outbound links currently permits one such link in the user bio.

Use this opportunity to leave links not only to your products and promotions but also other valuable resources such as industry reports and guides.

8. Create infographics 

Infographics are currently one of the best performing pieces of content. For starters, an infographic is 30x more likely to be seen and read to the end compared to plain text content.

To earn backlinks from your infographics, provide an embed code that other people can copy and paste to embed the infographic on their own websites. Also, provide prominent and easily-visible share buttons.  

Conclusion

If you can implement all the above tips, you’re guaranteed to get backlinks in plenty to propel your marketing campaign to the next level. 

And when you’ve tried them out, do share with us your results down the comment section below. We look forward to seeing them!  

Looking to find winning keywords to target but don’t know where to start? All digital and SEO marketers know the importance of targeting the right keywords to attract internet traffic. 

One of the most important metrics in selecting your target keyword is its search volume, and the reason is simple.  Because if no one is searching for the keywords you are targeting, no one will find your content. 

In today’s post, we will be exploring everything you need to know about search volume. What is search volume, why is it important, and the most essential crux on what is a good keyword search volume and how to use it in your marketing? 

What is Keyword Search Volume?

For a quick definition, the keyword search volume describes the estimated number of searches for a specific keyword in a selected time frame.

Note: If you are using Google Keyword Planner, the search volume here represents an average monthly range which is not the most helpful indicator for potential search traffic.

Take the avg. monthly searches for “keyword search volume” at 1k to 10k range as an example, the number of searches can run anywhere between 1,001 to 10,000 which is too huge of a gap. 

This makes keywords targeting especially difficult. However to ease your mind, let us get you in on this little known trick to uncover the exact keyword volume using the volume forecast feature. 

Just watch this step-by-step walkthrough from Matthew Woodward to uncover the exact search volumes.

Despite that, as an SEO, we cannot entirely rely on the numbers that Google Keyword Planner provides.

You will understand me after you’ve done keyword research for a while, especially when you realize that some of your highest-traffic content might not have come from the most potential keywords.

Still, to better understand and decide on your targeted keyword volume, you need to look into the two factors.

(i) Seasonal vs Evergreen Keywords

Google Trends is a great tool to identify the overall popularity and seasonality of keywords.

One typical example is “best valentine’s gift” where you will find this search term garner an exceptionally high number of searches during the months of January and February, as opposed to any other time of the year.

So it would be in the best interest of businesses to optimize their content before and around the trend to meet the anticipation of audiences.  

On the other hand, search queries that are consistent throughout the year are known as evergreen keywords. They maintain fairly consistent search volumes throughout the year and maintain steady popularity at all times. 

For your keyword research, you should target both evergreen and seasonal keywords and also explore a broader scope of keywords associated with your niche. 

(ii) Keyword Clustering can Make a Huge Change on Potential Traffic

Another key factor that marketers often forget is the impact of keyword groupingon potential search volume.

Often times, we only refer to the volume of a single keyword when in reality one web page is ranking for multiple queries.

That’s why you don’t always get the complete picture by just looking at a single term, sometimes you need to look at the whole collection of similar keywords you could also otherwise be ranking for. 

Always use LSIGraph’s Keyword Research to discover semantically related keywords you should also target. For example, if you are creating a blog post on “pilates”, you should also discuss about the benefit of pilates, or pilates done using a reformer machine. 

Now that you have an idea about the context behind search volume, let’s go through the full process of how you should examine keyword search volume data.

First, let’s start with the Google Keyword Planner to get some quick keyword ideas. 

How to Research Keywords for Your SEO Strategy?

You will need to do keyword research to identify the most popular search terms. While there are many tools to accomplish this, Google Keyword Planner is among the effective ones. 

Google Keyword Planner is a free tool, but you have to set up a Google Ads Account. Once you have logged in, maneuver to the ‘Tools’ menu and then choose ‘Keyword Planner’ under ‘PLANNING.’ 

The keyword planner has two tools, namely ‘Discover new keywords’ and ‘Get search volume and forecasts.’

The former comes in handy when you want to generate new ideas, and you will be prompted to enter search terms related to your business. Every suggestion will display the average monthly searches, competition, and low and high top-of-page bid ranges.

Another important feature you should refer to is the Grouped Ideas tab to discover potential cluster keywords. 

Once you have your list of search terms, determine their popularity by using the ‘Get search volume and forecasts.’

Google will predict the volume of clicks and impressions you will get from each keyword if you decide to run campaigns on Google AdWords in the next 30 days. 

Unless you run a Google AdWords campaign, you cannot see the precise keyword volume for your keywords. Fortunately, there are other free keyword research tools that you can use, including:

1. Google Trends

It doesn’t matter how generic your keyword can be, once you have got your potential keywords, run them through Google Trends to explore when and where they are more likely to be searched. This can help you better understand the intent as well as craft your persona. 

2. LSIGraph 

LSIGraph Keyword Research will give you semantically linked keywords that you can use to increase your traffic. Search engines are not always correct in determining the precise results that users want. In the case of small businesses, for example, you want to maximize your visibility by using keywords that are specific to you. LSIGraph will generate additional keywords around the primary search term. 

3. BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence

BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence will generate the related keywords to your seed keyword. You will also see the popular questions around the search terms to get a better idea of what users are looking for. You can also opt to see the trending searches and topics to keep up with online trends. 

What is a Good Keyword Search Volume?

Once you have done your keyword research, it will be time to put the data in good use. 

While high volume keywords will bring the most traffic to your content, it is not always advisable to use them. These keywords are often too broad, in which case they will not result in any conversions on your website. As a digital advertiser, you do not only want to drive traffic, but you want the right traffic. 

Medium volume keywords have the advantage of being more specific, and they will attract a significant amount of targeted traffic. The term ‘house,’ for example, can be swapped for ‘three-bedroom apartment.’ Medium volume keywords often have two to three words. 

Long-Tail keywords include more than three words, and they attract highly-targeted traffic. They are typically low in volume, but they result in high conversions. 

When deciding on the keyword volume to target, evaluate your content aspirations and your site authority. Do you want to get more traffic? Do you want to increase the sales of your products and services? 

If your brand is well-established online, and you are well-ranked continuously by Google for your topic, then you can use high-volume keywords. The chances are that you can handle the competition, and you are looking to increase the user-base you already have.

A small business will fare better with less-competitive, low volume keywords that are specific to their business. 

Digital marketers should also perform a keyword gap analysis and curate high-quality content that will address the queries on incoming traffic. In addition to discovering related keywords, seek questions from potential consumers. You can use Q/A sites like Quora to identify the topics that people are interested in.

Another excellent SEO practice is to identify your competitors by analyzing the websites than rank highest in search engines for your topic. Your competitor’s content can give you ideas for the keyword gaps than you can fill. Also, pay attention to their keyword density and try to match or exceed it.

Target Search Intent On Top of Keyword Volume

Keyword research can help you get more traffic to your website. Keyword search volume is a handy tool used by digital marketers to determine the number of searches that a particular keyword gets over a timeframe. It is also recommended to identify the intent of the keyword, which are the queries that your target consumers are interested in. If you can provide content that is specific to the incoming traffic, then you have higher conversion chances. 

We all know from Bill Gates that “Content is King” — however nowadays creating compelling and customer-centric content is no longer enough to win rankings and shoppers.

Without perfectly SEO optimized content, even the best content can fail to perform in natural search. After all, what’s the point of creating content that’s useful if your target audience can’t find it?

That’s the reason why you need to create SEO content, but don’t mistake it as just inserting your keywords for a certain number of times in your content, that can only be further away from the truth.

In this post, you will be going through some of the content strategies we personally use here at SEOPressor and understand the inside process we use to create our content to get results like these.

Before we begin, here’s a quick definition. 

What is SEO Content Writing?

The term SEO content can be applied to any content that was created in order to earn a high ranking on Google’s SERP. 

SEO content writing then is to create content that is aimed to rank for targeted searches and keywords, or to help the overall website become more visible to major search engines

There’s a common misconception that SEO content is limited to blog posts.

This isn’t really true. Any content that you create can be created for the purpose of ranking high on Google’s search engine.

This can include not just blog posts, but also website pages, landing pages, product and service pages, videos, or even interactive tools published on your resources page.

As long as you created the content with the goal of earning a high page ranking, then it can be considered SEO content.

Why is SEO Content Marketing Important?

SEO content is important to both your SEO and your content marketing strategies.

Remember that SEO content is content that was created with the intention of ranking high on Google’s SERP. To achieve a high ranking, the content has to not only be well-written and informative, but it also has to match user intent, meaning that it must be relevant to your audience.

As such, not only will SEO content help to strengthen your SEO efforts, it will also help accomplish your content marketing goals.

It’s also important to keep in mind that creating good content isn’t enough. Optimizing your content for SEO is essential to its ability to attract qualified leads.

Content that doesn’t rank on the first page of Google’s SERP probably isn’t going to receive a lot of traffic since few users go past the first page. In fact, most users will click on one of the first three links that are displayed on their SERP, which means that ranking near the top is incredibly important. 

How Do You Create or Write Optimized Content?

Because of how important creating optimized content is to your SEO and content marketing strategies, you will want to make sure that you’re capable of generating content that achieves both SEO and content marketing goals. With that in mind, the following are some of the important steps that you will need to follow in order to create effective SEO content:

1. Find a Topic With High Potential Traffic

The first thing you should do is to identify topics that are relevant to your target audience. In order to identify such topics, you will need to have a good understanding of who your audience is and what their needs and challenges are. You’d be surprised at how many businesses get this wrong. It’s why you need to develop buyer personas, which address the demographics, needs, wants, challenges, interests, fears, goals, and more of your customers. Knowing who your audience is will make it easier to identify potential topics to focus on.

When generating topic ideas, be sure to do your keyword research. Use search engines to discover what types of content are ranking well for certain topic ideas. Be sure to check out the websites of businesses within your industry (including competing and non-competing businesses) as well to see what topics their best performing content focuses on.

2. Find Target Keywords and LSI Keywords

Once you have a list of topics, you should be able to come up with a list of keywords that are relevant to those topics.

However, you will want to perform keyword research to determine how effective those keywords are. You can do this by monitoring the search volume and the number of results for keywords over time.

There are many keyword research tools you can use to track these metrics. BiQ for example will allow you to identify what keywords your competition is ranking for and how well they are ranking for them.

Extensive keyword research can also help you identify other keywords that may be more effective at matching user intent.

You should also come up with a list of latent semantic indexing keywords, otherwise known as LSI keywords.

LSI keywords provide Google with more context about the content, making it easier for them to match your content with relevant search queries. For example, if you write a blog post with the keyword Apple computer repair, an LSI keyword could include Macbook Pro repair, Apple laptop repair, or Apple desktop repair. 

SEO content writing tips: In most cases, writing long-form content works better in SEO than writing a 500-word blog article

3. Analyze Search Intent and Answer Questions for Your Audience

Using your list of keywords, analyze the SERP of each one on Google. Evaluate the top ten results of each keyword to identify what Google thinks the search intent of the user’s query is.

Basically, this will allow you to see what kind of content performs best for each keyword. This, in turn, will make it easier for you to create quality content that matches your user intent and that’s properly optimized using effective keywords.

To make the process quick, we recommend you to use BiQ Keyword Intelligence to make do your keyword research and craft your content outline.

The tool will provide you content ideas related to your keyword, as well as popular questions that you can use as your outline headings.  

4. Make Your Content Visually Appealing

When it comes to the actual creation of your content, remember that we are visual creatures. It’s simply easier for us to consume content that’s visual, such as an image or a short video, than content that’s pure text. This isn’t just a basic observation, it’s been backed by countless statistics. Just consider the following:

• Email open rates are 19 percent higher while clickthrough rates are 65 percent higher when the word “video” is used in the email subject line.
  
• Providing directions with the use of illustrations helps people do 323 percent better than people attempting to follow directions that are solely text-based.
  
• 65 percent of all people are visual learners, which means they are much more likely to retain information obtained from visual content.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should avoid text-based content — written content can still be very effective. Just make sure that any content that’s text-based is supplemented with a visual, such as a chart, infographic, or picture. This makes your content easier to scan by providing context and breaks up the monotony of a text-based article or blog post.

5. Brainstorm Your Headline and Include Your Keyword

The first thing that people are going to read is the headline of your content. If your headline is generic or doesn’t properly summarize the content, people aren’t going to click on the link even if it ranks well. Because of this, it’s very important that you create a relevant and engaging headline that makes use of the keyword.

Your headlines should grab the attention of your audience so that they will want to check out your content. For example, instead of a headline that reads “Computer Repairs,” that’s about identifying whether your Apple computer is in need of repair, you might want to create a more unique title, like “5 Signs You Need Apple Computer Repairs.”

To help you get catchy headlines, you can simply insert your keyword into SEOPressor’s Blog Title Generator to generate quick headlines and content ideas. 

6. Social Media Promotion and Backlinks

It doesn’t matter how good your content is, just because you create it doesn’t mean that your audience will automatically show up. You need to promote your SEO content. Increasing awareness and exposure of your content will help to bring in more readers or viewers.

Promoting your content can help to increase your rankings as well since Google does consider other factors outside of keyword use when ranking pages.

For example, Google pays attention to social signals and backlinks. Both of these factors indicate that your content must be of high quality. After all, why would anyone link back to your content or share your content on social media if it wasn’t good?

7. Rewrite and Republish Your Content

Also, never ignore older content. Content that’s outdated can still be useful as far as SEO is concerned, but only if you revisit it. Otherwise, older content will remain outdated and therefore lack relevancy, which will hurt its ability to rank well.

Routinely revisit older content and update it, whether it’s by optimizing it for better keywords, rewriting it in order to improve its quality, or updating statistics that may be out-of-date.

8. Analyze and Track Your Results

The only way to determine whether your content is performing well is to monitor certain metrics. Before you begin monitoring and analyzing your content, you will need to establish what your goals are.

Without any goals or objectives, you’ll have nothing to benchmark your content’s performance against. With that in mind, the following are a couple of important metrics that you should track in order to monitor the performance of your SEO content:

• Traffic metrics – There are several traffic metrics you’ll want to follow. Traffic metrics give you an idea of how well the content was optimized for SEO. Important traffic metrics to follow include pageviews, users (unique visitors), unique page views, and traffic sources (where traffic is coming from).
  
• Engagement metrics – Just because you’re attracting a lot of traffic to a page doesn’t mean the content is effective. Monitor engagement metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, time on page, and bounce rate.
  
• Social signals – Social signals are a good way to determine if people like your content. Not to mention that they are important to boosting page rankings. Keep your eye on social signals such as comments, shares, and likes on all social channels you have a presence on.
  
• Backlinks – Backlinks indicate that other websites have identified your content as being of high quality. They are also an excellent source of quality traffic. Monitor how many backlinks you’re earning and from where.

SEO Content Strategy is Critical to Your Ranking

SEO content marketing should be a major part of your inbound marketing strategy. Good SEO best practices will help to increase your page rankings, thereby improving visibility on search engines, from Google to Bing and more. As a result, you’ll increase the exposure of your website and draw more qualified visitors.

As long as the content you generate is relevant and of high quality, as well as meet all SEO requirements, then it should also have a big impact on your ability to nurture your visitors and to capture them as leads.

Related posts:

• 20 Free Blogging and SEO Tools You Must Have (2021 Update)
• How To Improve Content Readability And How Does It Affects SEO
• How To Present SEO Report To Your Boss (or Clients)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) became the best way to reach a broad audience within the shortest possible time some time back. Even so, it has only recently gained immense popularity among most organizations.

Though several things have changed over the years to suit different technological advancements, following multiple major search algorithm updates, keywords remain one of the primary elements that determine your position on search engines.

Picking the best keyword for a specific business is only half the battle in achieving handsome returns in online marketing. Ranking for the keyword is the most challenging part of your advertising. Thankfully, this is not altogether impossible with the right strategies and tools to guide your choices.

The following are a few guidelines on how to rank for a keyword fast and at the very top of search engines.

Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the start of everything.

And also extremely important, so we’ll be spending more time talking about this.

Determine which keyword you want to rank for, and identifying its related keywords to use in the content is the first step of your SEO effort.

Your keywords should be the leading ones used by your target market and be well-aligned with your business values.

Though a particular keyword might be meaningful to you, it might not do much for your rank on search engines. Guesswork will only waste your time and the cash you spend on online marketing.

Refer to the keywords your competitor is ranking for

You can use any tools you like, but here at SEOPressor, we use BiQ’s Rank Intelligence tool to discover our competitors’ ranking keywords.

BiQ is really simple to use, I just type in the website URL and the tool will run for a few minutes, and voila, there’s the list of keywords the website is ranking for.

Which you can then steal, cough, I mean to refer to as your own keywords.

Or…in another simpler way,

you can do a keyword gap analysis. 

RankingGap is one of the tools with simple UI/UX that any SEO or keyword research newbies can navigate easily.

All you have to do is create a project that compares you and your competitors’ websites and viola! A list of highly valuable keywords generated that you can gain insights from.

If you are wondering how…the RankingGap tool reveals keywords that:

1. You and your competitors are ranking for (Common keyword view).
2. Keywords that your competitors all have but you don’t (Missing keyword view).
3. Keywords that only some of your competitors have (Gap keyword view).
4. Keywords that are uniquely yours (Unique keyword view).

Higher search volume, higher competition, go for long-tail keywords

Research for the keyword with just enough search volume for your site so that you make informed decisions.

Some people go for keywords with the highest volume, but these might be too competitive more so for new websites.

You should also ideally start with long-tail keywords, so you build a website’s reputation before moving to short-tail ones as you grow.

Long-tail keywords in short, is keywords specific to your business, or what you’re selling, or the topic you’re talking about, they can be perhaps 3 or 4 words long, they tend to not have explosive search volume, but the search trend is steady and you go for the long and steady win the race kind of strategy.

Using LSIGraph to discover valuable keywords to rank

One of the best tools for your keyword research effort is the free LSIGraph tool.

This tool helps you discover keywords that are related to the one you want to rank for so you can build an outline for your long-form content.

Use a Catchy Headline

People nowadays are in a rush.

They want to skim through your article fast to get what exactly you are offering and decide whether or not it is relevant to them.

It is essential to include catchy headlines that will boost the odds of people getting interested in your articles and reading or viewing it.

A research carried out by BuzzSumo concluded that emotional headlines for online articles were the best for driving engagement. If you intent on making your clients curious about your content, go for keywords that induce some kind of emotions.

The number 10 and list posts in headlines were also proven by the research to be extremely powerful for SEO.

To start, you can head over to Blog Title Generator to insert your keyword, pick if it’s a generic keyword, or is it a brand, or something else. And you’ll be presented with 10 headlines which can serve as your starting point to crafting your own catchy headlines.

Build Links

Having a varied and strong backlink profiles is one of the ways to push your domain, and serves as a boost to all the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

When someone links to you, it proves to search engines that your content and your domain are authoritative because people will barely link to mediocre sites.

Other than this, people trust sites with backlinks since these show that your content is exceptional enough to be shared with others. This will, in turn, build online traffic to your website and generate a lot of exposure in the right circles.

Building links is, however, not an easy task.

A good way to build your online presence to attract people’s attention to your website and in the way attract some backlinks is by sending out a press release.

At SEOPressor we use MarketersMEDIA. They have great reach to premium news sites like Yahoo Finance, the price is not terribly expensive like other famed newswires in the industry, but it gets the job done.

All in all, press releases reach a broad audience within a short time and are among the best choice you have to make a bang for your site online quickly to gain those backlinks.

Repurpose Your Site’s Content

You need not use different types of content to reach clients on different platforms.

You can research on the article that is performing best on one platform then share it on other platforms to reach clients looking for something different. The content can also be linked to each other, voila, backlinks!

You, for instance, can repurpose text contents like a blog post into videos and photos for YouTube and social media platforms.

This is because people on these platforms barely pay attention to long, wordy, thousand words posts.

Videos and photos, on the other hand, can be changed to long text posts and slideshows for the LinkedIn audience.

Google Search Console is the best tool when repurposing your content.

This tool analyses the impressions, traffic amount, and performance of the content on different platforms. This way, you can pick the best articles to repurpose and link to your site to maximize your returns in online marketing.

Do a Competitor Research

To gain insight into what works and does not for your industry, you should know what your competitors are doing.

Researching the content your competitors are using and how well it is working for them is your ideal approach in this case. You can then use your findings to inform what content to steer clear of or replicate then refine to become the best-performing content.

Not everything in your research will be relevant.

Focus on the URLs and domain that competitors are using and how well their title tags apply keyword use. You should also consider what business sizes are ranking best for specific keywords.

If, for example, you are a small brand, it would make little sense to use the same keyword as a huge brand in your field.

Again, for competitor research, BiQ is one of the best tools out there.

This is a suite of tools, including keyword, content, and ranking intelligence and rank tracking of the keywords and content that people in your industry are using. There are different pricing models for BiQ to suit your marketing budget and give you some crucial insight into the elements on which you should center your marketing content.

Pay Attention to the Elements of On-Page SEO

Most online marketers are excessively focused on getting backlinks and drawing traffic to their sites that they forget their on-page SEO.

Once you get relevant traffic to your website, you should know how best to keep them there and convince them to take some desired action. Things like slow-loading pages, broken inbound links, and duplicate content only drive away clients.

To optimize your on-page SEO, use GDoc SEO Assistant.

This is a free writing tool that automatically calculates the SEO score of your article as you write and point out any issues that might affect your on-page optimization.

The tool also guides you on the best way to guarantee that search engines will understand your content better and, in so doing, rank your site high.

Other than that, make sure to link from one post to another.

This is called interlinking and it can make a huge difference in helping the search engine, like Google, to understand your website, as a whole, better. Remember, the better Google can access and understand your website, the bigger chance you have to rank high.

Conclusion

Ranking high on search engines is the only way to actualize profits in the current competitive world of online marketing.

Few people will, after all, proceed to the second and third pages on search engines once they type in their query. If, therefore, your article does not show up within the first pages of search engines, your chances of making profits are significantly low.

Fortunately, the above guidelines will give you the best head start to know the keywords you should use and how best to apply them to optimize your SEO position. Keyword optimization for SEO not only applies to your website but also your social media sites. This way, you are sure to gain your desired position on search engines and social media platforms within the shortest possible time.

Let us know how you like our tips, or if you have your own little tip to rank high, fast. Now, good day and I’ll see you in the next blog post.

All businesses, irrespective of their sector, can significantly benefit from digital marketing.

It allows you to cost-efficiently reach clients, places your brand in the right circles, and positions your business in the same standing as your peers.

Moreover, digital marketing platforms – such as your website or Facebook page – can also double up as your online selling platforms.

A recent study by Google concluded that companies that invested in digital marketing report a 6% increase in sales. Those that combined digital and traditional marketing reported an increased 11% in sales.

These numbers might seem insignificant, but wouldn’t you want to increase your product margins even by the smallest percentages?

Even so, to harness the benefits of digital marketing, you need the right strategy for your campaign. This is mainly impossible without some tools to help with the management, delivery, and optimization of your campaigns. The following are some of your best tools for different platforms of digital marketing.

Email Marketing

Some people assume that email marketing is Facebook’s dreary cousin who never gets marketing party invites. If, however, you are investing in digital marketing, getting an email list should be among the first orders of business because it guarantees some of the highest profits. Here are the most effective marketing tools for emails currently.

1. AWeber

This is the go-to tool for both marketing newbies and pros. It seamlessly connects to platforms like WordPress and allows instant access to autoresponders, email templates, and email list managers. AWeber allows a free one month trial and has live chat, email, and phone supports as well as webinars.

2. Mailchimp

The popularity of Mailchimp is mainly because it has a free service plan for email marketing. This option allows you to send 12000 emails to a maximum of 2000 subscribers, but you can pay $10 monthly for an extra 500 subscribers. It offers autoresponders, simple analytics tracking, and segmenting of contact groups according to time zones and geographical locations.

3. GetResponse

GetResponse market themselves as the world’s easiest email marketing platform. Like most other email tools out there, GetResponse offers different types of messages including newsletters, autoresponders and RSS to email. A great feature of GetResponse is they also let you do A/B testing and then have the option to automatically send the best performing version for future emails.

On-Page SEO

Your on-page SEO will influence the way search engines like Google to interpret your content and, consequently, your rank on these engines. To get to the top pages on search engines, it is crucial to use the right tools to inform your on-page SEO efforts. Here are some of the best tools.

4. SEOPressor

Hello, it’s me. Yes, of course, our tool is on the list.

If you’re not familiar with SEOPressor, this is a plugin tool for WordPress. It allows you to view your content in the same way as Google and other search engines will see it. SEOPresser uses an algorithm to analyze over three billion data rows so that you can optimize elements like semantic building, link management, and crawler control for search engines while writing content.

5. GDoc SEO Assistant

This is a free tool in which you will only enter your keyword then start writing like you normally do. GDoc SEO Assistant then analyses your article in real-time and generates an SEO score. It will give you SEO suggestions, semantic quality density, content readability, and suggest the related keywords you can use.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the foundations of all elements of online marketing. Without the right words, you will barely attract your target market to your sites and will not rank in front of your competitors. The following are the keyword research tools that should form a part of your marketing tools list.

6. Google Trends

Most research tools will rely on old data to generate insight into what keywords work best for your industry. Google Trends nonetheless uses current data to provide some much-needed insight into geographical and seasonal search-related keywords. Moreover, it is a free tool.

7. Google Keyword Planner

The data used in this free tool comes straight from Google generating some of the most legit information. Google Keyword Planner primarily focuses on finding new keywords and picking their related search volumes. It, however, restricts your search volume data because it lumps keywords into large keyword range buckets.

8. BIQ

Unlike other keyword research tools, this allows you to manage your online marketing costs. BIQ offers granular cost control by picking elements like rank, content markup, and site intelligence. This way, it helps you pay only for the keywords you use rather than an entire package.

9. LSI Graph

This tool allows you to key in one keyword and get a range of suggestions on the subjects associated with your keyword. The recommendations are based on the rank of the subjects on search engines. In so doing, the LSI Graph generates an entire content strategy in case you want to cast a big net.

Video and Image Creation

It is not a secret that human beings are naturally drawn to photos and videos. Including these on your site is sure to keep people on your site longer and allow you to convince them to take the desired step. Here are the tools that should feature on your marketing tools list for video and image creation.

10. Canva

This suffices for the creation of all forms of graphic content on your website. You can use it for your site’s flowcharts, and headers as well as stunning social media images. Canva is easy and quick to use and free despite its exceptional results.

11. Wibbitz

This is a cutting-edge tool for the conversion of your text to video. The tool will analyze and summarize text, grab video, and licensed images from public media and allow your site to create a video clip of your text. Wibbitz is quick and easy to use and versatile enough to enable the creation of videos for all types of digital content.
Conversion Rate Optimization

Analytics

You will barely report any profits for all your online marketing efforts without conversions. You want to convert as many website visitors as possible into paying clients and actual leads. Here are your best choices for conversion rate optimization tools.

12. Crazy Egg

This gives you an insight into how people interact with your website. Its four outstanding features include scroll maps, confetti, overlay tools, and heat maps. You can segment your returning and new visitors with Crazy Egg and visualize their path in your marketing funnel, but its exporting features are confined to images and PDF.

13. Hotjar

This captures heat maps and screen recordings of the time clients spend on your site. With these, you can appreciate what pages people spend most of their time on and the action they take on your pages. Hotjar also comes with several training alternatives to boost your conversion rate efforts.

14. Google Analytics

The starter analytics tool for any website is Google Analytics. This is a free tool from Google that is easily accessible. The tool provides a number of data such as the number of visitors, the time spent on page, how many pages a visitor visited, the visitor’s demographic info and much much more. 

15. Google Search Console

Another great free tool from Google, the Search Console focus more on helping you to set up your website properly, go Google can understand it better, and perhaps ultimately, rank it better. Nevertheless, Search Console offers a number of useful reports such as the rankings, impressions, and clicks for your web pages, speed report, XML map report and more.

Data Reporting

You should justify the budget for your digital marketing platforms to the bosses. For these, it is essential to get the right reporting tools to showcase your spending and results. Here are the reporting tools that should be part of your online marketing tools list.

16. Google sheets

The tool is free, easily customizable, and accessible. It’s also highly similar to Microsoft Excel, other than it is 100% online. So it gets extra cookie point there. You can also use different add-ons with Google sheets, including Twitter archiver, mapping sheets, and Google Merchant Center.

17. Airtable

This tool combines the flexibility of spreadsheet interfaces with several rich features, including calendars, collaboration tools, and file attachments. There is a free version of the same, but it might not offer as many features as the charged version. Airtable is the best data presentation tool for small businesses and online marketing teams in large organizations.

18. Supermetrics

This aggregates data from different sources onto one reporting dashboard. The reports compiled by this tool include those from SEO and PPC tools, and website and social media analytics. Supermetrics, however, relies on a connection with Google Data Studio for the display of data and metrics.

Project Management

19. Trello

This free tool offers a clean kanban style interface and is highly popular as a project management tool among many freelancers, and small businesses alike. It is highly flexible and sharable, it also has a low learning curve so everyone in the business can pick up the tool in no time.

20. ClickUp

ClickUp is another wonderful, free project management tool. In the tool, you can easily assign a task to anyone, set a status, get daily alerts or catch up on the latest project status on the task toolbar. Every user on the board can any adding or editing on the board live, so everyone is on the same page and updated.

21. Asana

One of the biggest project management tool companies out there, Asana has a huge following among programmers. Users can add tasks, assign them to anyone, set due dates, comment on tasks and share relevant documents, all inside the tool. Notifications about upcoming deadlines can also be sent to a user’s inbox.

22. CoSchedule

The tool provides an editorial calendar tool, that can greatly stay the team to stay focused on the objective and push through every project. The features of the tool include Blog Editorial Calendar, WordPress Integration, Social Media Publishing, ReQueue Social Automation, and Task Management.

Social Media

There exists a huge untapped community on various social media that you haven’t but should tap into. Creating a presence for your business on social media can extend the reach of your brand and help you get more business. Here are a few online marketing tools that can help you out.

23. Hootsuite

Hootsuite supports most of the major social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ (now defunct) and YouTube. It offers an all-in-one dashboard where you can manage your different social media profiles in one place. They also provide analytics for you to keep track of your social profiles.

24. Buffer

Buffer is a smaller tool compared to Hootsuite, but it still supports a lot of the mainstream social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. But unlike Hootsuite that offers you analytics on your social profile as a whole, Buffer only analyses the individual posts that you have posted.

25. Sprout Social

Sprout Social starts at $99 per month and is slightly at the pricy side, however, this tool has some extra features that others don’t. The special features of Sprout Social include social listening, influencer identification, and an audience discovery function. This can be extremely helpful because it’s highlighting the interactive part of social media, which is what makes it so different from other online marketing fields.

At the end of the day…

Digital marketing is undoubtedly the best way to reach your target market nowadays, with almost everyone having internet access. Not all online marketing efforts, however, pay off for companies. This makes the use of the above tools all the more essential for your business.

You might have had little knowledge of what tools to use for your company. Thankfully the above tidbits will make a perfect guide of the tools that will work best for your marketing efforts. With them, you are sure to employ the right tactics for your online marketing.

Keyword research is the first step to any content writing and copywriting. 

However, it can be intimidating to look at the arrays of data associated with keyword research. 

What is search volume, what is the price tag shown for each keyword, is the higher the competition the better? 

In this guide, we will be giving you a simple overview of all the general stats you can get from any keyword research tools, how to make use of free keyword tools for your keyword research, and how to decide on a keyword following the circumstances of your content marketing effort.

Nothing is certain in marketing, especially not in keyword research, but we’ll try our best to help you better understand how to select the best keyword for your content marketing, and get the best result. 

Let’s get started. 

1. Do a Google Search on the Keyword you’re targeting 

Let’s say you’re running a dairy product online store, and you’re looking to get more traffic for the variety of cheese you have in stock, in this particular example, let’s go with cottage cheese. 

So just type in “cottage cheese” to Google, tab enter, and off we go!

2. Analyze the type of content ranked for your keyword

Now that you’re looking at the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) of your selected keyword, keep an eye on the type of content that is shown. 

Pay attention to the different types of content that are being specifically promoted by Google themselves in ways we called the SERP features. 

Google SERP features present different types of content, in this case – People Also Ask, Video Carousel, Recipe Carousel, and Nutritional Facts for cottage cheese. 

What is this important? 

When Google presents multiple types of content for a keyword, it means those types of content are actually interesting for the searchers. In other words, those kinds of content can bring in traffic. 

Now here’s a simple breakdown of the Google features you can find for the keyword “cottage cheese”.

People Also Asks

What it is – This is a list of questions, usually more specific, that are related to your keyword. You can see them as long-tail keywords. 

What it means – Your keyword is probably too general and there are more directions that you can branch into. 

What you can do with it – Base your content headline on the question itself and build your content to answer the question as best as you can. 

Video Carousel

What it is – A list of videos related to your keyword, usually hosted on YouTube.

What it means – People searching for cottage cheese are also interested in videos related to the topic.

What you can do with it – If you can, create and include a video on your content. You can then double your chance of ranking either your written content, video, or even both. 

Recipe Carousel

What it is – A list of recipes related to your keyword, in order to appear on this carousel, you’d have to mark up your content using schema markups. (Here’s a free handy tool to explore schema markup)

What it means – People are looking for recipes for cottage cheese, so this is a green light for you to start creating recipes as well if you want to compete. 

What you can do with it – Create recipes for cottage cheese, and remember to use schema markup to get all the available perks and advantages to rank better.