Every good digital marketing campaign has its foundation built on keyword research and analysis. Finding the right keywords with high relevance and commercial intent, grouping campaigns into relevant and more targeted ad groups, and getting rid of negative and fluff keywords, are some of the SEO activities essential for a successful PPC campaign.

However, to be able to cut any wasteful ad spend, and focus on only the best possible audience, it is also important to understand how competitive a keyword is.

Keyword competition analysis allows you to evaluate the difficulty of ranking on the first page of Google for a particular keyword. One of the most effective ways to do this is with a competitor analysis tool. Here’s how to figure out the market competition of a keyword.

Identify Your Competitors

Before you can find out how competitive a keyword is, you need to actually figure out your competitors. You can simply search Google for your targeted keywords and you’ll see who the biggest players are. You can also make use of tools such as SEMrush, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, or Alexa. Watch out for key metrics such as domain authority, level of competition, inbound link profile, overall website traffic, etc. Having this data allows you to compare all the metrics and evaluate the different results.

Identify Important Keywords

The next step is to gather high ROI keywords and add them to your own keyword database. You can generate possible keyword ideas by using Google’s Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tool. You can also use keyword analysis tools to get keywords that are already being used by your competitors. This allows you access to database of high ROI keyword opportunities.

A tool such as SEMrush can help you find a comprehensive list of your competitor keywords. The “Positions” tab in the SEMrush Organic Research section shows you every of your chosen competitor’s keywords, and allows you to download as a CSV file when you click on the “Export” button.

Narrow it down

Once you have a list of keywords, you need to start sifting through your list and remove high competitive keywords. Competing against high-authority websites or established brands may not be worth it. As soon as you have a list of relatively low-competition keywords, you need to filter out those that are not relevant to your service or niche. This will leave you with a list of more targeted keywords that you can rank for easily.

For all the keyword you have on your final list, run a simple Google search for each and evaluate further by checking out the number of inbound links, overall domain authority, content relevance and quality etc., to be sure if the keywords you have are low enough competition.

Conclusion

Keyword competition analysis is one of the best approaches and practices of search engine optimization. It allows to target keywords that allow you to rank better on search engines, instead of targeting aimlessly and missing. It may require time, commitment and continuous practice to be able to optimize the process continuously. However, you’ll be able to save that time, and your resources when you chose the right keywords.