Competitors and building a keyword strategy

You now have keywords, clusters and a map. This lesson turns them into a strategy, which is a short, prioritised plan that someone else could follow and that you can measure.

Who are your search competitors?

Your business competitors sell what you sell. Your search competitors are whoever ranks for the topics you want, and these are often different:

• Marketplaces and large retailers, for product terms.
• Directories and review sites, for local services.
• Magazines, forums and video, for informational questions.

Search your five most important topics in a private window. The sites that appear repeatedly are your real search competitors.

Free competitor analysis

You can learn a lot without paid tools:

• Structure: look at their navigation, categories and /sitemap.xml. Which topics do they give their own pages?
• Their best pages: for each important topic, open the top result and note the format, depth, what it answers, and what it leaves out.
• Signals of trust: authorship, reviews, guarantees, original photos and data.
• Gaps: questions none of them answer well, which are your opportunity.

Prioritise

Score each topic in your keyword map from 1 to 3 on:

• Business value: how directly it leads to sales or enquiries.
• Intent fit: whether you can create the kind of page that ranks.
• Effort: how much work it takes. Improving an existing page is usually less work than writing a new one.
• Competition: the strength of the sites ranking now.

Start with high-value topics where you already have a page that gets some impressions. Those are often the quickest wins.

A one-page strategy

1. Goal: the business outcome, for example "more repair enquiries from Šiauliai and the surrounding area".
2. Baseline: current clicks, impressions and enquiries, with dates, from your Search Console setup lesson.
3. Priority topics: the top five, each with its target page and the reason it comes first.
4. Content gaps: new pages to create, in order.
5. Measurement: what you will check and when, for example monthly Search Console data for each target page, compared with the baseline.
6. Review date: when you will revisit the plan. Every three months is a sensible start.

What comes next

Stage 2 continues with on-page SEO: making each mapped page clearly answer its topic, from titles and headings to content structure and internal links.