Writing content and targeting the right keywords is always a difficult battle.
Now In Article Insights the fight got just a bit easier as we are happy to announce the arrival of the “Competitors” report tab.
With a simple quick glance you can see:
- Who your competitors are
- What keywords they are focusing on
- What keywords you are missing!
You can also use the average keyword usage and average word count statistics to decide which article is easier or harder to write.
How to analyze your competitors content
Once you are in Article Insights; Start by entering your article keyword.
For today’s example walkthrough we are going to use “self defense bangkok”.
Once the background analysis is complete you are brought immediately to the topics screen. For now we can ignore this and move to the juicy part.
(The topics tab shows you all the article topics associated to your article keyword and also breaks down each topic to its most important word groups. Its just another way to slice the data)
Click on the “Competitors” tab!
This tab is how you can spy on your competitors.
The first thing you see is a listing of the top 25 ranking web pages for your article keyword.
Imagine that your competitor is at the number #2 position. What does all that data mean?
The words directly under the URL are the top 10 keywords the page is focusing on. As you can see, in our #2 spot its about “kali” in “bangkok”
The next 2 numbers refer to the total number of important keywords being used and the number of words on the page.
As you can see its using 22 of all known important keywords for the article keyword “self defense bangkok” and has an article that is around 359 words long.
How does this compare to the average?
Compared to all of the 25 sites, the #2 spot is using more keywords but its article is about half as short as the average.
So what does this tell us?
It turns out that the average keyword usage and average word count gives us a good idea as to how much effort we have to put into creating an article that will rank in the top spot in Google.
For comparison, check out the statistics for broader keyword like “self defense”. Its bound to have a higher traffic potential which we can verify using the Google keyword planner tool.
Indeed, it turns out the average monthly search volume is almost 1000x times higher.
What does the competitors tab say in Article Insights?
The avg keyword usage and avg word count is much higher. In fact its at least doubled. From 17 vs 45 keywords to 687 to 1,201 words.
From this we can gather that to write a competitive article for “self defense” we would target at least 45 keywords and write an article 1,200+ words long.
These 2 numbers work better than “keyword difficulty” scores you see around the web for estimating ranking difficulty. Why?
Because you can mentally scope out and estimate how much effort and time it would take to write an article 1,200 words long vs one that is only 600 words long.
Side Note: If you look at the top 10 keywords under each listing you can see that self defense topics vary from self defense in legal discourse Vs self defense techniques. You might want to write an article that covered both aspects to really rack up the keyword and word count while staying relevant to the search results!
How to find gaps in your content
Using the competitor tab its easy to figure out what important keywords your competitors are using, that you might be missing out on.
Start by copying (or writing) an article that you want to rank for, inside the Article Insights article window.
In the example below, our pretend article is highlighted in red. I’m pretending to be a Krav Maga school with the content here.
Article Insights analyzes your content in real time and every time an important focus keyword appears in your article, it turns into a blue color.
We can now scan visually to find gaps (ie grey words).
By looking over the grey words its easy to see what keywords your competitors are using that you can steal from.
Remember, that each keyword on the list is something Google themselves considers relevant to the search results, even if you didn’t realize it.
So here is what the gaps tells us in:
Missing Martial Arts Keywords
In yellow I have highlighted 3 other martial arts keywords that appear in the Google search results that my “fake” Krav Maga site is missing.
How do we use those keywords? It would be very easy to talk about how Krav Maga is different from “kali” “muay thai” and “wing chun”.
The thing here is that if you add just those 3 words into your article three important things happen.
- You get more traffic to your site from people who used “self defense bangkok kali/muay thai/wing chun” as now you have a fighting chance to list on Google for those extra terms now that you added them.
- Google sees that you used “related keywords” and will consider your article and by extension your site to be a more relevant “single source of truth”. Just like how Wikipedia ranks well overall as its a storehouse of information.
- You are providing better and more useful information to readers who come on your site via well informed targeted content.
Unknown Missed Opportunities
The term “women” is highlighted in green because its an incidental keyword that on first glance would not appear to be related to “self defense bangkok”.
In fact if I asked you to write down all the keywords you think are related to “self defense” you probably wouldn’t write down “woman”.
That is until we discovered that Google thinks its important. In fact a site targeting “woman” self defense workshops appears on the search results. How we use the term “woman” is ultimately up to us however I would go out of my way to include in our fictitious website… “Our krav maga lessons are also an excellent way for woman learn how to defend themselves. We also offer woman only classes on request.”
So now you have uncovered a competitive “gem” something that you would have missed out on, but because of some easy detective work on Article Insights you were able to uncover and exploit.
What other competitive gems are you missing because you didn’t know about them?
In fact it would have been impossible to find this gem by using traditional tools like the Google Keyword Planner or even sites like the keyword tool on Wordstream.com
Here are some screenshots as proof.
