The excitement of finishing a competitive keyword research project often gives way to the panic of fleeing from an avalanche of opportunities. Without an organizing principle, a spreadsheet full of keywords is a bottomless to-do list. It’s not enough to know what your competitors are ranking for — you need to know what content is powering those rankings and how you’re currently competing with that content. You need a blueprint to craft those keywords into a compelling structure.
Recently, I wrote a post about the current state of long-tail SEO[1]. While I had an angle for the piece in mind, I also knew it was a topic Moz and others had covered many times. I needed to understand the competitive landscape and make sure I wasn’t cannibalizing our own content.
This post covers one method to perform that competitive content research, using Google’s advanced search operators. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll pare down the keyword research and start our journey with just one phrase: “long tail seo.”
Find your best content (site:)
long tail seo site:moz.com
“long tail seo” site:moz.com
First, what has Moz already published on the subject? By pairing your target keywords with the [site:] operator, you can search for matching content only on your own site. I usually start with a broad-match search, but if your target phrases are made up of common words, you could also use quotation marks and exact-match search. Here’s the first piece of content I see:
Our best match on the subject is a Whiteboard Friday from five years ago. If I had nothing new to add to the subject and/or I was considering doing a video, this might end my journey. I don’t really want to compete with my own content that’s already performing well. In this case,