Have you ever started your Keyword research in any Keyword tool only to discover that all of your dream keywords have unimaginably high difficulty? Are you getting drowned in Competition and just can’t find an opportunity to create content and Rank as a new Website?
We have been there, and I assure you, no matter how bad the competition, you will always find content ideas to pursue, and you will always find stuff to rank for!
This is a problem faced by every business trying to get their sweet spot on Google. I will show you how professional agencies overcome this using KOB Analysis.
What is KOB Analysis?
KOB or Keyword Opposition to Benefit is a step-by-step method to research and understand the full scope of topics in a particular niche and prioritize them based on their feasibility to rank and business potential, which is determined by assigning a KOB Score.
No matter your niche, there are always topics worth pursuing and relatively easier to rank.
With this step-by-step guide, you will learn how to research the entire scope of topics in your niche and come up with laser-targeted keywords and a content plan to kickstart your SEO Journey.
Finding Relevant Keyword Topics
First, we need to find who’s like us in the market. Basically, find a more similar competition that’s out there in the market currently ranking for our dream keywords.
Basically, it involves coming up with 1-2 seed terms that define your niche. For us, it’s SEO and Digital Marketing. Let’s see what Google has in store for us.
As an SEO service provider and marketing agency, we definitely do not count Wikipedia, WordStream or Search Engine Journal as our competitors. However, Neil Patel can be a competitor.
The similar result we get for digital marketing.
Now put that URL into Ahrefs or any Keyword Research tool. Go to the Anchors and Organic Keywords tab. There you will find a host of topics that you can explore for this keyword.
You can also change the original seed keyword to find even more topics.
Here’s what we found after a few hours of research.
You will get most of the data from Ahrefs, however, relevance is a column that you have to determine yourself. You can give it a score from 1-3 depending on how relevant and important is this keyword to your business.
Calculating the KOB Score and finding Opportunities
From Ahrefs, you will get the Traffic Value and the Keyword Difficulty data. Now it’s time to calculate the KOB Score. To put it in a formula, it looks like this:
If you are using AHrefs, you will get a difficulty score. Else you can calculate the difficulty score by multiplying the (Search Volume * CPC).
The KOB Score thus obtained gives a rough estimation of whether the particular topic is worth pursuing. Lower the KOB Score, the more suitable the term
By no means is this a completely reliable metric. Still, it is useful for better prioritizing our work and then applying a strategic layer of how to move forward with our content.
Finding The Actual Scope of Each Topic
We have found the KOB Score for each topic based on the analysis done so far. However, we are not quite done yet.
- Eliminate Higher Difficulty Keywords
We still need to find qualifying opportunities for our content marketing efforts. The best way to start is to eliminate all keywords with a keyword difficulty higher than your Ahref DR rating.
For example, if you are a DR 50 site, you should probably eliminate all Keywords with keyword difficulty of more than 70. If you are a new website, you perhaps should not target keywords with a difficulty of more than 30.
You can move that up to 50 since you will be researching topics that will be broad. Later you will go deep down researching keywords for each topic to find relevant content ideas for your articles.
- Add a Scope of Hours to Each Topic
With the remaining number of topics, you can add a scope of hours, which is an average estimation of the total time required to create all the necessary content to cover the topic completely.
With the scope defined, you can now calculate a revised KOB Score, which accurately scales the potential of that topic on a scale of 1-100.
This can drastically alter how you prioritize things because, once again, that big asset may require a significant amount of time to rank for. Still, it may not be worthwhile when you can do something very light and rank faster as a result.
Conclusion
So, that final step of scoping and comparing it to the KOB score essentially gets you a new, more data-driven assessment to prioritize your content appropriately and make an impact faster, making sure it’s leveraged against the actual time to create that content to have the greatest impact for your business.
The Entire sheet would hardly take 5-6 hours to create, and for a large enough business, it might take a day, but not more than that.
With this done, you now have a well-researched and data-driven approach to pursue topics you can actually rank for. Now all you need to do is niche down on each topic to find a cluster of content ideas and make it rank.
You can follow our in-depth guide on Topic Clustering to make sure you are building Content Marketing Machine that bulldozes your way up the Google search rankings.
Reference > Build a Content Marketing Machine to Capture the Search Market using Topic Clustering.
