Key phrase analysis and its benefits

Key phrase analysis is a critical factor in the success of most websites. But by going with the usual methods, you can miss out on a lot of good development opportunities.

If the phrase was not found anywhere when you performed the usual procedure of searching for the initial key phrase in Keywords Explorer (to do this, select the Keyword Ideas report, apply filters, and browse through the suggested variants).

Analyse your competitors' most popular pages

Everyone does keyphrase analysis in their own way, so competitors often end up in the first positions in the output for key phrases that you have not even considered.

There is a positive side to this.

By parsing the natural queries leading to your competitors' most popular pages, you can take advantage of their efforts to analyse key phrases and topics with traffic potential.

Perform a content difference analysis

If you see several competitors hitting the top of the results for a particular keyword phrase, it means it makes sense for you to target that keyword phrase as well.

For example, three newsletter tools - Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor and Get Response - are in the top five search results for the key phrase newsletter ideas....

The most effective way to find these key phrases is to run a content difference analysis.

Look for pages with natural traffic but no backlinks

According to research on over a billion pages, there is a clear correlation between the number of donor domains (backlinks from unique sites) of a page and its natural search traffic.

 How to do keyword phrase analysis

But that doesn't mean that a page with little or no backlinks can't get to the top of the results. Sometimes you may come across a page that gets decent natural traffic with almost no backlinks.

For example, this page about plants that repel mosquitoes has an average of about 5,200 natural visits per month, despite having only one backlink leading to it.

If you have a site for selling seeds, it might be worth writing an article on this topic because it is relevant and not subject to high competition. It will most likely be able to get to the top of the Google rendition with little or no backlinks.

Better look for pages for which the natural traffic graph shows a steady flow, especially over the last six months or longer.

The keyword phrases that get these pages into the search results have much higher long-term traffic potential.

Look for keyword phrases that bring forum threads to the top of the results

User-generated content rarely appears at the top of Google's results because it is often low-quality and poorly written. Therefore, if you see forum topics on the first page of search results, this is a sign of a keyword phrase with little competition.

Look for new keyword phrases in Google Search Console

If you've used Google Search Console, you know that the Search results report lists the keyword phrases that get your site ranked. Many of these will be keyword phrases that you specifically created content for, but not all of them.

This gives us the following easy way to find new topic ideas:

Look for keyword phrases with high click-through rates that you haven't previously targeted.

Look for promising augmented keyword phrases with traffic potential

You can easily find many augmented keyword phrases using the standard procedure in Keywords Explorer. Simply type a few keyword phrases related to your niche into the search engine, then go to the Keyword ideas report and add the words best, review and top to the Include filter.

But while this method works great, you may miss some keyword phrases with it.

Also, by using it, you may weed out keywords with low query volume, even though the overall topic may have high traffic potential.

For example, the keyphrase "best carbon steel pans" can easily be considered unpromising because its monthly query volume is only 100. But if you look at the top performing pages for that phrase, you'll see that they have quite a bit of traffic.

Since it would take forever to manually search through thousands of keyword phrases in the search results, we offer you a faster way to find augmented topics with traffic potential:
Paste the address of your competitor's website into Site Explorer.

Go to the Top pages report.

Add comma-separated words like best, review and top to the Include filter.

Search the resulting list for keyword phrases like best [product type] that have traffic.