As a construction business owner, having a strong command of your competitor’s keyword analysis is one of your greatest advantages in SEO. The power of matching your target keywords with your competitors can help you find the best-performing ones, which will certainly help align your strategy.
Competitor keyword analysis is the key to devising a successful SEO strategy. So, how much do you know about competitor keyword analysis? How do you plan to do it? Do you ever know where to even start?
This blog post will serve as a complete guide for contractors who want to learn about competitor keyword analysis and level up their SEO game.
What is Competitor Keyword Analysis?
As the name suggests, competitor keyword analysis is the process of understanding what your competitors are searching for or what keywords they are using to outrank other competitors. This method of keyword analysis can help you identify the highest-intent keywords for your construction business (meaning those that will lead to conversions on your website) and get the results just in time.
Having an understanding of your competitor’s game plans, especially in keyword research, allows you to stand hand-in-hand with them on SERPs. Sure, you will know the keywords they will be using through conducting this method, but ultimately, with competitor keyword analysis, you can find out what your competitors have missed!
How Competitor Keyword Analysis Benefits Your Business?
We cited below a quick list of benefits you will gain when you start analyzing your competitor’s keywords:
1. A better understanding of your target audience
Learning about the keywords your competitors are targeting will give you a sneak peek into your target audience and the requirements. When you decipher the keywords, they will make it easier for you to approach your audience and better understand their search intent and their journey of making a purchase online.
Collecting such information can help you create content that genuinely resonates with your target audience and optimize your organic search success.
2. Knowing your real competitors
Conducting keyword analysis not only helps you understand the behavior and nature of your audience but also helps you identify your most challenging competitors. Identifying who they are will allow you to monitor them regularly, which will help you formulate effective SEO strategies that increase your ranking in SERPs.
You may be thinking of doing a manual search via Google about your closest competitors. You can find a few, but this list will not be helpful for you in the long run. Ensure that you have detailed insights and complete information about your competitors.
3. Enhanced keyword research strategy
Competitor keyword analysis will improve your whole keyword research strategy over time. Learning and understanding your competitor’s keywords can help you develop more powerful long-tail keywords. In turn, this can help you outrank your biggest competitors and increase your website’s visibility.
4. Explore new market opportunities
Conducting competitor keyword analysis makes generating new ideas for your content easy. By better understanding what your customers are looking for, you can generate content ideas and other strategies that will lead to high-quality and engaging blogs.
5. Improve digital marketing
Competitor keyword analysis is by far a multipurpose weapon when you want to ace all your digital marketing efforts. With this method, you can improve brand awareness, master all your marketing efforts, and, most especially, know your competitor’s product USPs. All of this information will help you boost your brand messaging and entire marketing campaign strategy.
Whether you want to know your target audience or enhance your keyword strategy, competitor keyword analysis is key to unlocking these possibilities.
Seven Ways to Do a Quick Yet Effective Competitor Keyword Analysis
We create a list of the most effective ways to do a quick and effective competitor keyword analysis that will surely outrank your competitors!
1. Understand the search intent of your customers clearly
Chasing after high-volume keywords with the hopes of getting more conversions and leads is by far the most deadly mistake website owners and marketers make. In reality, lead acquisition starts when you better understand your audience’s search intent.
·That said, you have to focus on your audience’s demographics. Here are the areas you need to know:
- The question they usually ask.
- The problems they encounter and struggle with
- The goals and objectives they want to set
When done properly, the above-mentioned tips can help you map out the right keywords based on what your target construction clients think and struggle with—whether they are at the top, middle, or bottom of your funnel.
2. Identify your top five competitors
It is crucial to know who your competitors are. So, you should at least figure out the top five. However, hundreds to thousands of businesses and companies provide the same service within your industry (construction) and niche.
To easily identify the top five, you should have the following things in mind:
- Doing competitor analysis with only limited competitors will give a clear idea.
- When figuring out your closest competitors, focus on the ones with the highest keyword intent.
- Look for competitors that target the same customer base as yours.
3. Find your Local SEO competitors
Your construction company may be located to one or more physical locations. If it is the case, then you should identify your local competitors, both online and offline. These competitors can be offering the same construction services you are currently offering to your target customers, filling the same market gap in your geographic area.
In this situation, you have to regularly track local keywords and compare your company’s proximity with other websites that rank for these keywords. This is to ensure your construction website ranks higher on Google, especially for location-specific keywords.
Finally, this also means you have to optimize your website with local SEO so you will constantly appear in local search results.
4. Make use of the right tools
The tools you use to find the keywords your biggest competitors are using can either make you or break you. So, you have to pay attention to this matter. This is mainly because the metrics these tools provide will show which set of keywords you have to go after. Apparently, some tools have more accurate metrics and other tools do not have.
We highly suggest taking advantage of the most commonly used tools for keyword research. These popular tools will give you access to tons of data, thus providing you with more accurate metrics. For this, you may use a combination of:
- SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to determine the keywords.
- Reporting tools such as Google Analytics 4 and Google Search console to create comparisons between your keyword analysis and existing traffic coming to your website.
5. Analyze marketing channels
One of the most vital aspects of competitor keyword analysis is deeply understanding how your competitors reach their audience. In other words, what specific marketing channels are they using? How useful or effective are they? How can you leverage them for your construction business?
These marketing channels can be categorized into eight categories:
- Direct: When a user enters the URL directly into the browser’s search bar.
- Organic search: When a user visits from the search engine’s organic results.
- Referral: When a user visits by clicking links on another website.
- Paid search: When a user visits from the search engine’s paid search ads.
- Organic social: When the user visits by clicking ads on social media.
- Email: When the user visits by clicking a banner or link in the email.
- Display ads: when the user visits by clicking some display ads.
6. Conduct a SWOT Analysis
For the interesting part, you need to conduct a SWOT analysis. This will transform your observations into actionable insights. SWOT simply stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
A SWOT analysis is like four boxes combined side by side – where you need to fill every quadrant of information based on your competitor’s keyword analysis findings. If you can completely fill out a SWOT analysis for both your construction brand and your closest competitors, you can spot the differences. As a result, it will help you determine where you are doing well and what areas you can improve.
7. Track and monitor the results
Assuming you have already finished your competitor keyword analysis. The next thing you will do is to track and monitor results. Doing so can help you measure its effectiveness and determine areas for improvement. You need to use the right tools to track and monitor the results.
We recently cited SEMrush and Google Analytics above, and these two tools are still highly recommended for tracking and monitoring results:
- Google Analytics enables you to track the performance of your construction website for a set of keywords and monitor the overall performance of your competitors.
- SEMrush, on the other hand, provides you with thorough information on keyword rankings, search volume, and overall competition.
Supercharge your SEO Strategy with ConstructionMarketing.io
Learning your competitor’s keywords as a resource is one important thing you should pay attention to. Not only does it give you clarity on how to make further keyword improvements, but it can also help spot hidden flaws in your own SEO approach. Overall, the importance of conducting competitor keyword analysis is just one step for your overall optimization campaign.
If you are having difficulty devising a successful SEO strategy that can potentially outrank your competitors, we are here to help!
At ConstructionMarketing.io, we prioritize high-competing keywords as the cornerstone of every successful SEO keyword strategy. Our team of experts will look at and compile multiple sets of keywords according to your niche, of course. Currently, we collect keywords from 8 to 10 different sources, including but not limited to:
- Your biggest competitors
- ·Third-party data tools
- Search engine results page landscape (SERPs)
- Your own data in Google Analytics and Google Search console
- Your industry’s data
- Suggestions from Google
- From our strategies and ideas, validated by you
As a leading construction marketing company, we aim to identify opportunities for your construction business to power up your campaign and take the competition by storm!