A fastidious guide to ranking using competitor’s keywords!
Within the marketing world, it is common knowledge that keywords play a huge role when it comes to getting your page ranked on Google. To those who might not be aware of what a keyword is, here’s a brief explanation. Keywords are words or phrases that define the content of your product or service. Keywords are mostly targeted toward the search engine queries that the users use to get information from the search engines. Although it’s necessary to find your own set of keywords, it’s almost impossible to do so without getting your competition’s best keywords.
But how do you get your competitor’s keywords? What even does ‘finding your competitor’s keywords’ mean? Find out everything you need to know about competitors, competitor’s keywords, and how to outrank them in this step-by-step guide.
The Steps To Finding Competitor’s Keywords and Outranking Them
Listed below are the steps to finding competitor’s keywords and outranking them using the same:
- Step 1: Finding your Competitors
- Step 2: Analyzing the Best Keywords
- Step 3: Setting Your Best Keywords to boost up Rank Score
Step 1 To Finding Competitor’s Keywords and Outranking Them: Finding Your Competitors
The first and foremost step towards stealing your competition’s best keyword is finding them. If you’re unable to find your competitor’s website or their keywords, you likely won’t be able to outrank them on search engine result pages (SERP).
If you are considering entering a new market with a new keyword, it’s better to start your research from the targeted keyword itself. Put your keyword on Google and see if there is enough competition for that specific keyword. If yes, try filtering them based on the domain age and authority. An authoritative page with mature backlinks can be harder to compete with than a relatively new website with fewer backlinks.
If the competition is too harsh, try adding words to the primary keyword and go for a long-tail keyword that has ample search traffic, but not enough competition.
Another way to search for your competitors’ domains is by using research tools like Semrush, Spyfu, and Buzzsumo. Some of which are discussed later.
Step 2 To Finding Competitor’s Keywords and Outranking Them: Analyzing the Best Keywords
Once you’ve set up your keyword(s), it’s time to find the keywords that your competitor is using to rank on SERPs. The main reason that you want to find your competitor keywords is that you either want to avoid them or put out better content than them to get the maximum traffic possible. But, targeting your competitor’s keywords can be detrimental if you keep pushing content that isn’t as valuable as theirs.
To analyze your competitor’s keywords, you can make use of specific methods and tools.
Browser Extensions
Browser extensions are the best tool to analyze competitors’ keywords for free. Despite having limited functionality, these tools offer data points that can be used to determine if you want to target the keyword or not.
For example, you get critical data such as:
- Estimated global rank depending on the site’s traffic and age
- The number of inbound links to the site
- The number of subscribers
- Better words and phrases to improve SEO
- Page authority and domain authority while looking for external links
With the help of this data, you can analyze if the keyword is worthy of your efforts or not.
Keyword Research Tools
Apart from browser extensions, dedicated keyword research tools can also help you scrutinize your competitor’s keywords. Although most of these tools aren’t free, you can get a more detailed report from them than free tools. Some great keyword research tools that can be used are listed below
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular tools for keyword research. It offers deep analytics on keywords and traffic data.
You can see how many keywords your competition’s website has ranked on and how much traffic volume they are getting from them. They also include a traffic cost metric in their dashboard, which lets you know how much PPC is worth of traffic they are getting every month.
Ahrefs
For competitive research, Ahrefs is by far the most productive tool out there. The Site Explorer feature of Ahfers combines three powerful tools in one interface. Organic traffic research, backlink checker, and paid traffic research.
The organic traffic research indicates which keywords your competitors are targeting and for which they are getting the most organic traffic. This feature in their dashboard also lets you know about the pages that are getting the most traffic.
To know the quality of your competition’s backlinks and to gauge their authoritarian presence, a backlink checker can be helpful.
If you intend to run paid ads to funnel traffic through your website, understanding how your competition is doing is very important. If they are succeeding by targeting specific keywords for paid ads, you can too.
Buzzsumo
More than an initial keyword research tool, Buzzsumo fares well when it comes to researching new keywords for your website. What differentiates Buzzsumo from other keyword research tools is that it can suggest new keywords based on what’s trending on social media and other platforms.
As there’s no greater content than what solves an issue, Buzzsumo lets you know what your audience is asking related to your keywords. While the suggestions can seldom be irrelevant, it mostly is an excellent tool for researching keywords and content.
SECockpit
SECockpit takes keyword research to a new dimension by including YouTube and Amazon results in their report. It takes a seed keyword–defined by you–and returns relevant keyword suggestions and competitor rankings for those keywords.
SECockpit is the best tool for researching long-tail keywords. As they include relevant keywords in their report by surfing through several sources, they are mostly better than other tools that revert results from predefined databases.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner mostly works for paid ads, but can still be effective for analyzing competitor keywords. Just like the paid tools, Google Keyword Planner also includes relevant keywords for your seed keyword in the report. You can also get a bid estimate for your keywords if you are looking to jump into PPC ads.
Data Scraping and Proxies
If you are tech-savvy and can design your bot for data scraping, you won’t need any third-party tools to get competitors’ keywords. Data scraping tools are also available as Software as a Service (SaaS) and can be bought.
If you intend to use the tools designed for keyword research, you might not need to use proxies. But, if you’re scraping your competitor’s website to extract their keywords, you should use proxies that mask your location from the website. You can get blocked by the servers if your web scraping tool makes frequent requests to the domain.
Step 3 To Finding Competitor’s Keywords and Outranking Them: Setting Your Best Keywords to boost up Rank Score
Your job is only half done after researching the keywords. You need to come up with your own set of keywords to rank your content on SERPs. For that, three strategies are most effective. The three strategies are:
Conversion Tracking
Not every keyword that you set your ads for will be profitable despite attracting substantial traffic. Some keywords just fundamentally target audiences that are here only for information. But you can’t filter them out until you track your conversions and understand which keywords are faring well and which aren’t.
With the data, you can tweak the keywords that aren’t performing as expected and replace them with more conversion-centric keywords. Google offers conversion tracking by default in their ad dashboards, but if you require to dive deeper, place tracking tags manually.
Using Content Analytics
Content drives SEO. But not understanding what type of content your audience is looking for and keeping on pushing articles that don’t generate traffic is a wasted effort. Content analytics is the practice of keeping track of your content to get informed about which one of them works best with your customers to push more similar content.
Employing Trial and Error Methods
Publish a bunch of content that includes different keywords and track their performance over some time. As you keep publishing different content with different keywords, you’ll get to know about the optimum set of keywords that you can rank for. With that info, it’s easier to push content that is more relevant to your audience and can generate more revenue for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is competitor's keywords strategy?
A competitor keyword strategy is a strategy in which you identify the keywords your competitors are targeting, and use that information to improve your own SEO and Performance marketing strategy.
What is competitor analysis in SEO?
Competitor analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors to gather insights about their SEO strategies, strengths, and weaknesses. Using the information gathered, you improve your own SEO strategy all the while identifying your strengths and weaknesses.
What are the 4 types of keyword matching?
Google Ads has four different keyword match types, they are:
-> Broad match
-> Phrase match
-> Exact match
-> Negative match
The Bottom Line
Getting your competitors’ keywords is one of the most fundamental elements of generating online traffic. Finding your competitor’s keywords paves the way for you to know if you have a chance to rank on those keywords or not. For that, you first need to find your competitor, screen their content for keywords, and finally implement them into your content. Here’s hoping this article of ours helped you in understanding the importance of competitor’s keywords, and how using the same you can outrank them. You can always check out other stuff we have written related to performance marketing in our blog. And if you would like our help in improving your business’s performance, contact us! Until then, ciao!
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