Reading Time: 4 minutesAs a company that relies on SEO, it’s important to know what your competitors are up to. You want to keep track of how often they are found as compared to your company – especially if people are finding them more. One way to aid in this research, and provide yourself with a small leg up, is to keep track of their keywords. Analyze the keywords they use and why they might be working better than yours.
Finding Competitor Keywords
The first thing you have to do is find the competitor’s keywords. There are many tools that can be used to find the competitor’s keywords easier. These tools and tactics can help you easily sift through the competitor’s website to locate their most precious keywords:
- BuzzSumo
- SEM Rush
- SpyFu
- AdWords’ Auction Insights
- Crowdsourcing Keyword Research
- Tag Clouds
These tools and tactics are useful to quickly search through any competitor’s pages and find the important keywords they use to help people find them. By using any of these, or others out there, you can easily find out what your competitors are up to and quickly beat them at their own game.
Importance of Keywords
Having access to the competitor’s keywords is very powerful. This means you have done the research and you now know what they know. The best part is, they don’t know you have this information so you now have a leg up.
Having your competitor’s keywords is important for your business for a few reasons:
- It helps you understand how they are performing in search engines and where you might surpass them.
- You can steal their keywords in an attempt to beat them in search results.
- You may discover new keywords you might have overlooked or not thought of previously.
With these top tricks up your sleeve, you can easily beat your competition at their own game. If you question any of the options above for searching through your competitor’s keywords, keep in mind that Google has a Keyword Planner Tool that allows you to do the same thing as those previously mentioned.
Performing Keyword Searches
Now that you’ve decided to proceed with a keyword search and you’ve chosen the perfect search engine for help, how do you move forward?
Your first step is to analyze your own keywords. Find a keyword difficulty tool to get all the details about your own site. This tool will provide you with information about ranking in search results and how easy finding your keywords can be. Most of these programs run on a 1-100 scale, and the higher you land on the scale, the easier it is to find your keywords. This tool can also help you with competitor’s scores. If your score is higher on the scale, there’s a good chance you’re already ahead of them in search results.
Your next step is to find the competitors. Use your own list, or have a program help you find a list of competitors to look into. Most of the programs available provide traffic level to the site, audience overlap between your site and theirs, and a ranking based on popularity (usually determined by visits and how long someone stays on the page). Once you’ve gathered your competitor list, it’s time for the next step: identifying keywords.
The first thing you want to search for are the organic site keywords. These are the keywords that show up the most on searches. They are natural rankings for search engines to move one site or another higher on the results list. It’s important to note which words drive more traffic to the site. These are going to be the main keywords you’ll want to pay attention to. Other important factors include the popularity of the keyword (how often do people search that word) and the advertising (how much ad space that word has on search engines).
Another important thing to look for are the paid keywords. These are terms that are included in the advertising on a search engine. When you search these keywords, they show ads for that word as well as the competitor’s pages. It’s possible that competitors are using their own resources to advertise with these keywords because of their popularity. In this situation, it would be more reasonable for you to focus on other keywords.
What Good Is a Keyword Analysis
Now that you’ve done your keyword analysis and have all the information you were seeking, what do you do with it? The answer to this question is simple: you use it. All of the time and effort you put into this analysis is not in vain. Now that you’ve done the research and have the results, it’s time to take action.
A keyword analysis answers a lot of important questions:
- Can you compete with your competition? If so, how?
- Which keywords are most used by your competition for the audience to find them?
- What keywords are they paying for?
- Are there opportunities available for paid keywords?
- What sites are best for guest blogging opportunities?
- Are there any keyword gaps in your competitor’s sites?
- Are there any organic opportunities?
- What about long-tail, low-competition keywords? Are there any available for your site?
These are the more important questions you will want to address with your research. Find what works for you and use it to blow the competition out of the water. The important thing to remember is to use this information appropriately to get ahead of the competition.
Conclusion
There are many tools to locate the keywords most important to your competition. You just have to chose the one that works best for you. Once you’ve done this, you can move on to finding keywords that your competition uses frequently or pays to advertise with. Once you’ve done your research, use it to move your own site forward.
Whether you’re using new keywords to keep up, taking something from your competitor’s arsenal, or finding holes in their keywords and filling them yourself; keyword searches can help your business thrive.
At Vizion Interactive, we have the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm to get results and keep clients happy! Learn more about how our SEO Audits, Local Listing Management, Website Redesign Consulting, and B2B digital marketing services can increase sales and boost your ROI. But don’t just take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say, along with our case studies.
