010. Competitive Keyword Research

Welcome everyone. I'm Milo Garcia from Boundify. Welcome everybody to our tenth episode of Boundify Life. I hope everyone is having a great evening today. We are, as always, in a Zoom meeting. If you want to jump into another of our episodes later on, you can do so on our webpage. This video will be available also on Demand on our YouTube channel and now in our podcast. And and something that I'm exploring right now is having this sessions stream live on LinkedIn. So if you happen to be there right now, just say hi or leave a comment. I will be happy to read it later. And today we have a very, very interesting topic, something called competitive keyword research. And so obviously I want to start right away with the definition of that term. So in some cases, usually when you are doing either paid advertising or content creation, you need to do some research to understand where you should either put your budget, if you are doing advertising, or what kind of content do you need to create. And so usually you do some little research around the keywords that you might use on search engines. However, it's always helpful to understand what your competition is doing too. Not just to copy honestly, it's more about you might be missing opportunities or you also might find a different angle on what your competitors are doing and find leverage in certain ways. So having in the mix competition is always helpful. And that's pretty much what competitive keyword research is. It's an analysis of the keywords that you may use for any given business and you include your competition on it. So during this, I hope is less than an hour, I will dive a little bit into some of the tools, some of the best practices that you can do to accomplish this. By no means you have to use the tools that I will use. There are many out there, both free and paid, and obviously you need to invest a little bit of time on it to at least figure out what is your you're trying to accomplish. So as always, I like to start with kind of example. So I will use imagine I will imagine this hypothetical company that offers video conferencing services, right? Not the software like Zoom. More about someone that works with tools like those to help companies implement video conferencing and audio conferencing services, or rooms in this case, right. Corporations. So imagine that that company has a website and they are wondering, well what kind of content do we need to create and what kind of keywords do we need to beat into search engines like Google or Bing to show up when someone is looking for our services? That will be like kind of the initial idea. So I will start with the obvious ideas and then we will dive from there pretty quickly. So let me start sharing my screen very quickly here and let me talk about some of the tools that you can use. I will put another one here. Ubersuggest and the Keyword Planner, obviously. Well, I will get Keyword Planner. There you go. I will go right away into the tooltip. That will be easier. And I will use one account and I will use boundify as an example, of course. Okay. I don't know exactly why it wouldn't work, but I will do it at the end. So I have three tools in front of me right now. Some of the options available, the three tools have a free version that you can use. And for example, some of them are more focused on competitive information than others. Oh, and finally I will just show Google itself. So imagine that you are starting the research. Usually what I recommend is to have a small list of 5 to 10 keywords that you are interested on. I will start in this one with a very simple query will be video conferencing services. And even if you just start with something like video conferencing, Google itself will show you some ideas that you can use for reference, like services, software platforms, monitor companies. So that might give you an idea. So the reason I always start with the search results themselves is because it's really, really important that you understand the intent behind the query, both for content and for paid. For example, here I'm just using video conferencing and you see some ads, some related to actual services like the one from AT&T and others more related to the software that you may use, like the one from GoToMeeting. So you have different intents here. But definitely if you go for services where what you might expect is a list of companies, or you can see here service and software being compared like G2 and obviously Zoom here and more ads. And you can see that people is also looking for things around that, right? Like the. For small services, for companies, software. So this is the first approach that you might have where you might find your edge. Because for example, one thing that you might discover is that the user is going to be in different stages of their learning process. Some of them will be more about understanding what video conferencing services look like and work or where are they. And some of them will be more about comparison between doing on your own or hiring a company to do so. And finally there will be those that will be looking for your brand. Specifically I'm not using Obviously in this example, any particular company. But imagine that you have a company and someone might be looking into your service and doing a comparison between yours and someone else. So you need to have that clarity behind it. So usually going for search will help you to understand that. Because if you go for example, for, then you go for tools, right? Whatever ad and or content that you're gonna create is going to compete against these ideas, right? So you have to be really in line with those to have an opportunity to rank. Or in the case of the ads, you might discover there are some opportunities there. If, for example, someone is searching for services and a software company showing up, that will be one example where you are maybe wasting money because you are showing for tools, when in reality someone might be searching for service or the other way around. So you start here and have a little bit of understanding. Then you shift into a tool like in this case I'm gonna use SpyFu and I will show you some of their same results that you can find on Semrush and lastly in ubersuggest. So let us use that and take a look at the basic information that you want to understand. Video conferencing services. So the first thing that probably you want to know is the size of the opportunity. This is one that confuses people a lot because you might have keywords that are valuable to you, but you need to understand if there's a lot of people searching for them. Because if there's not a lot of people searching for them, even if you create content or even if you pay for ads, it might not bring you the volume that you're looking for, right? In those cases, and we talked about this in another episode, maybe you were better off on a social platform creating the demand instead of just harvesting because there's not enough people searching for what you offer. If you have something that is brand new or nobody knows very well, that might be a better approach. That's part of the reason I choose this particular query because I know there's a lot of volume intent for this and you can see it. For example, even when I use a phrase that is still kind of a specific, like video conferencing services, we still have close to 1,000 searches in the US per month. And obviously there's still there's a portion of that amount of searches that end up in a click on which pretty much translate into the volume that you will have on your website. And there's going to be a portion of those clicks that will come from paid advertising. In this case, the 14%. And the rest, most of the rest is going to go through organic results. And that's the reason you probably will want to invest on both strategies at some point, because you can just get so much from paid until you capture the whole of the clicks available on paid advertising. And then you will have to create content to capture the rest of the clicks that you will not be able to capture. Just doing paid tools like this will give you an idea of the cost per click. So, for example, and I did this on purpose, words and phrases like video conferencing have a high. It's a very competitive landscape, it really is. So I will expect something like this, like $20 per click for just video conferencing services, because it's a query that has a lot of commercial intent. And obviously there's a lot of competition here. But most importantly, tools like these will show you three or four different angles on whatever idea you have. One that is the first one that usually they have is similar keywords. And you want to take a look on the similar keywords because usually when you create content and when you create advertising, usually you show up for those terms too, right? If you create a piece of content that talks about video conferencing services, it's probable that you will also will show up, for example, for video conference service, which is just not the plural. And maybe if you are using references or you are creating a piece of content that you talked about, you know, free options, for example, you might show up for that one too. So similar will give you an idea of the broader volume available to you. Not just the specific keyword that you use. That's an area where you can go and from that initial list that you have, with just five to maybe 10 terms, you can explore multiple options. Actually, here's where you start narrowing down into, well, maybe if there's a lot of competition and a lot of volume still yet available there, I can find a narrower niche where my product better suits my audience. Like, for example, if your video conferencing services is just for small businesses, maybe you can go for just small businesses. You have less volume, but usually this tool is not showing here. You will have less competition because the term will be more specific so you can optimize your budget or you can rank your content faster if you are creating content for it. Now, the other idea that you want to explore too is the keywords that usually also rank together with the similar keywords. The idea is similar. The only difference is that here, not necessarily the queries here include the word that you have like for example. Yes, if you are exploring video conferencing services, a word or a keyword that will rank to will be video conferencing. But there are some others like strangely like best web hosting. Some of them will not be that helpful for you depending on the search. But this will give you an idea of keywords that might be related. For example, if you were going to a recipe for an apple pie, then probably you will find that when someone is searching for their recipe, it's also searching for the ingredients. And that will give you ideas for content. Or if you are trying to target people at the bottom of the funnel, what kind of advertising or content can you create at the top when they are researching for the rest? Something that is very particular to just paid is is the also buys for, right? Is keywords that the competition is also buying that are related to the keyword you're exploring. And finally, this one, the questions is geared toward more content creation. So that will be the first step on your search. Here you are highly focusing on the keywords that you have in front of you. But if you want to learn a little bit about what the competition might be doing, and this is again just spyfu, then you can go to something like this area where you can see what some of the domains are doing for that particular keyword and you can start gauging which one is your competition. Who is your competition? One of the things that I all were always relate to this area is that most of us before looking at tools like this, consider our digital competition and our real competition to be the same. But they are not, right? For example, if I am a company that offer the services in digital, usually my competition will be the same tools that I used to provide my service. Like in this case Logitech and GoToMeeting, right? Might be the tools that a company that provides video conferencing services uses. And obviously they have big pockets. Even this one is a little bit strange, right? Like Capterra, which is a reviewing website, is in the space because someone looking for video conferencing tools probably is looking for or trying to understand which tools are the best. So you are competing against them and they have a healthy budget here. So this is something to have in mind that usually your digital competition will be different from your real competition. But there are ways that you can see if your competition is doing something in particular through domains and things like that. Also this is easier to find or it's not easy, but it's easy to see On Google itself, you can just. This is kind of like the reflection of the results or the the domains that ranked the highest on Google. And you can explore that and that will give you an idea again of who is your competition and the kind of content that they are creating. Because if you want to have any chance of ranking for those particular terms, then you probably want to explore what your competition is building already and go above and beyond what they have already produced. Right. One particular thing that you gotta pay attention here is what is called domains extent, which is the authority that the domain has, because that in part is going to indicate how hard it's going to be for you to rank for those terms. And obviously that will determine the mix on your efforts on SEO or organic versus the efforts they will do on paid eventually. So. So that will give you an idea of the landscape here. And one recommendation that I have is that usually you take this information and you put it on an X file type or document and that way that you can start accumulating the information, play with it, and come up with a smaller list that you can work on it. So imagine that, for example, we are continuing to explore these. We get some keywords and now we want to explore or understand what our competition is doing. So one example here will be, I want to know, for example, for, let's see, unlimited, what do they have? Yes, this is a good one. For example here, I chose this one. I guess this is truly a company that offers, yes, it's truly a conference that offers conferencing services. They are heavy on services themselves. They should maybe like this one, telephone conference services. And this is the other part where you have to be very wary of. You look at your competition because you want to find things that you are overlooking for your own business. Because it will be very hard or not that common to find exactly the same terms for the different kind of competition that you might have. Even if, for example, you are a company like Zoom, not all the features that Zoom have matches another teleconferencing or video conferencing solution. So you are looking for opportunities here, but not exactly to replicate them. Is am I missing something? Right? Because there are some of them that really might not apply to you. Imagine, for example, that you say, well, we are in the video conferencing world, but we don't offer audio conferencing services. And if a company like this one is offering audio conferencing services, then those keywords are not of interest to you and they will not really be your competition. Because you are not going to beat for them. The same goes for, for example, if you say, well, I found on my research something like Capterra, let me go there again and find them. And so Capterra might be bidding for video conferencing services, but if we go to the keywords that they have as a total, then we will find that there's a bunch of them that are not related at all with video conferencing, like CRM software and ERP software. Because obviously they are in a different space. They are just trying to show up for terms that are related to people that is comparing solutions and they want to be an option there. So very important to be wary about that. Obviously, if you have a company in mind, then you can just type in here and find the keywords that they might be looking into. Another great thing that you can do and let me go back here, is that for whatever company that you are exploring, if it matters to you, let me go back to. It might be maybe at the bottom, yes. Like for example, this will give you an idea of the ads that they are using right now and what ads are relevant to you and which ads are not. Like for example here you can see that this is geared toward more like the tool itself and not the service. So might not be a good copy or text to reference for. But this one where you are seeing more like video, web, audio conferencing services from AT&T might give you an idea of what are the features, the benefits that your competition is using. And you might find yourselves in a different position. You can say, well, what do I bring that is different to the table that I can compare to when I show against these guys on the search terms? Right. So that would be a good idea to start with. So just very similar to what you can do in SpyFu, another very popular tool will be Sembrush and you do pretty much the same idea. Let me do video conferencing services. One of the things that I like about SEMrush that tools like SpyFu or a tool like SpyFu lacks, is that SpyFu, while it has a wealth of information about competition, it's only focused on the US and the UK. And SEMrush, while it might lack on some of the information from paid, it has a more comprehensive coverage of obviously the organic part and different countries. So they have way more databases from different countries. So especially for example, when we are doing international campaigns or exploring Spanish content in Spanish, we rely more on centros to do this kind of research. But the idea is very similar. You will have an estimation of volume, how hard the keyword is, where the volume is coming from, what is the average value of the keyword, which again, kind of like helps you to understand what would be the budget, but at the same time helps you to understand what is the value of the content that you are creating. Because you create a piece of content that brings, I don't know, 10% of the volume available there, you are saving yourself a couple of hundreds of dollars or a couple of thousand dollars, depending what you're doing over the course of many, many years. So, and that's how the value of organic comes into. But you will find something very similar. You will find related keywords, right? Keywords that include the term and volume. And you will have an idea of all the available combinations. Here you will be able to narrow down and say, well, maybe I will not go for video conferencing services, but maybe I go for a specific location where definitely I will have less volume, but I will have less competition. I might be able to dominate that one. And even if I'm going to do paid, I might get cheaper cost per click. So you can narrow down here and find great keywords from your initial list. You will have the questions so you can create content and you will have related keywords that will give you additional ideas. And you have also the list of the, the pages that ranked first for that keyword and an example of the copy. So let me stop sharing here very quickly and go to the ad section and find the Keyword Planner. So both SpyFu and SEMrush allows you to do that search. And if you have some of the pay plans. I'm so sorry. Oh yes, got it. Finally. And if you have some of the pay plans, then you can have more information about it. But another tool that I really like, even when you will not have. When you will not have. Let me delete here. Yes. And share the screen again. It will not have competition. It will still give you conferencing services in the US it will still give you a lot of information directly from the source, in this case from Google. So again, if you are doing competitive research, it's always good to take those keywords that you found on your competition, the ones that are relevant to you, and go through the Keyword Planner to get a little more detail. If you're doing, especially if they're doing paid, Keyword Planner is free. The only restriction is that you have to have an AdWords account, you have to have an advertising account. But, but you don't have to pay anything to have it. You just create it with your Google id. And after that you navigate to this section on the tools and you just go to the keyword planner on the planning section and it will give you this very similar idea. You can find keywords for location for different locations like countries and states and cities internationally. You choose the language and obviously this is going to be all Google and it will give you a very similar idea. Things that I like about it is that usually it's very good at matching similar keywords with related ones and it will give you an idea of potential volume. And here are some of the concepts that I'm trying to explore to you here, right? If you say, for example, well, if I offer video conferencing services, why I can't go or why I shouldn't go for video conferencing, well, the reason is yes, you have a lot of volume here, maybe you will have a lower cost per click, but it will be highly relevant. Because if you go for video conferencing and you don't control well the match that you will do in paid advertising, then you might also show up for things that are not of your interest. If you are a company that offers services, then maybe you want to show up for Zoom video conferencing, which is an option here too, right? Unless you are zoom or the competition. And again, if you keep exploring here you will find keywords that will have way lower volume, but they might be related to you. Like for example this one, audio video conferencing or if you happen to have an integration with some of the tools or one of the brands, then this might be an option for you. Again, this depends on the buyer journey or the stage that you're focusing your efforts and the kind of strategy you're implementing. If you are creating content and want to rank, usually you go for top of the funnel and in those cases if you have the capabilities, then you can go for broader keywords like just video conferencing that have a ton of volume but there's a lot of competition there and you will be able to see on those tools. But if you are doing, especially if you're doing more bottom of the funnel transactional terms and you are intending on spending, then is worth exploring more specific or narrow keywords like this. And even you know, you can go even more specific going for a vertical, a location or a specific kind of service that you want to offer. So this is in a nutshell, what you can do on Tools like this. There's a final note is that you can use something very powerful to this ubersuggest tool works pretty similar to Semrush. I like it because it's just a cleaner interface. Let me try here. Conferencing. There you go. It's just a cleaner interface, but it will have a very similar idea. You go for one of your keywords, you can see some of the competition cost per clicks. You can see what pages are ranking higher for those keywords and then you can find related ones. And it will give you an overview of the type of content that you can create and obviously what your competition might be. And to understand. Let me sign in here because he's asking me for logging in. And if you want to explore your competition, let us imagine that you are. Let me use the same Zoom us. Let's see if you use the competition in this case just. I'm just using Zoom for reference. But you will see obviously the keywords that they rank for will be obviously Zoom. But there will be more that you can explore. And the keywords that matter to you, to you, you export them and put them in a document and that way you can continue your research. This is an overview again, a tool that you can take advantage of. It's free and just like Semrush will allow you to explore keywords for different countries, not just the US and the uk like spyfu. And they will allow you to start the research and compile a list that you can work upon later on.

So yeah, Emily, just to compliment a little bit about what you're saying, and you mentioned it, you really did a very good presentation now, as always. But I just want to tell you, keywords and keyword selection are really important for your SEO. I mean, the keywords you focus are not only the most important part of the SEO strategy, but also your content, but also works for your content strategy and your paid marketing strategy. When you're designing your keyword ranking strategy, it's important you know to really understand how competitive keywords work within your industry and among your competitors. As you mentioned. Not that you want to copy your competitors, but you need to to understand exactly what they are doing. For example, keyword competitions is a measure of how hard it is to improve your page rank based on a particular keyword. Keyword value can vary greatly depending on the keyword's popularity and competition within your industry. But the competitive keyword research is a process that allows you to really uncover new opportunities to draw or to guide your customers to your site. To your products. It's also well to learn from others experience on SEO keyword ranking. That's why I think it's very important. And also you gain valuable insight from the behavior of your customers. You really can gain clear understanding of the questions and the terms that your potential customers are asking when their search for the information. I think that's a very relevant information that you need to do when you try to use these keywords.

Yes, I love that last comment because it's true, especially when you're doing top of the funnel research. Those terms will inform you what kind of questions your audience is doing at the beginning and you can help them along the way. And that way when they're looking for the solutions, you will be top of mind. That's how actually you build brands, right? How do you build a brand? Because people remember you either from the experience that they have for the product they already purchased or in the case that they have never experienced your brand for the information that you have shared with them before purchase. So yeah, thank you Leo. That's all that I have for today. I hope you find it useful. As always, leave any comments on the live session if you want to hear more about different kind of topics that we will be sharing here. I look forward to, you know, engaging with you on LinkedIn later on and until next week then. Thank you everyone.