Finding your Competitor Keywords
When it comes to digital marketing, finding and using the right keywords is a must. And this means conducting a whole lot of keywords research. The good news is there are tips and tricks that’ll help you target the right terms, such as competitive analysis. This is the process of finding relevant and valuable keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t.
Essentially, if your competitors have done keyword analysis for SEO and found search marketing topics that you have missed, they’ve done a lot of the hard work for you. So how can you find your competitors’ keywords that can help cover gaps in your strategy?
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Find Online Competitors
First things first, it’s important to know who you’re competing against in the search marketing world. You can do this by running a Google related search to find websites that are related to yours. This can be done by searching for related:yourwebsite.com.
You can also look for websites with overlapping keywords. You can use specific tools which will show your Competing Domains such as Ahref’s Site Explorer. Or simply type some of your keywords into the Google search bar and see who pops up. Hopefully, you’ll be ranking highly, but who is hot on your heels – or currently ranking above you? They might have some keywords knowledge that could benefit your SEO strategy.
When conducting competitive keyword analysis, go into sites of interest and see what keywords appear in URLs, headers, sub-headers, first paragraphs, image captions and more. Any new keyword variations can be noted in a spreadsheet under the pulled competitor.
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Build Your Keyword Database
Tools such as Alexa can help you build your competitor keyword database. This allows you to conduct ‘keyword research by site’ by plugging in your competitor’s URL in the search box. You’ll probably see that some of your keywords overlap and that’s fine – it shows you’re on the right track. You might also see some keywords that are sure to be overly competitive and difficult to rank for. These can be incorporated into your content but shouldn’t be prioritised. Instead, focus on keywords with lower search volumes that you’re more likely to rank for.
Analysing competitors might throw up something obvious such as adding geographical terms to your keywords. Such modifiers tend to have lower search volumes and are easier to rank for. They can also help to bring down your cost per click, improve your ad relevance, improve your click-through rate and increase traffic.
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Pull Individual Metrics for Each Competitor
Gathering key metrics for each site using tools such as Ubersuggest will help you to get a more thorough vision of competitor performance. Things to look at include organic keywords, organic monthly traffic, domain score which will tell you the overall authority of a site from 1 to 100 and link sources or referring domains – this is the number of domains that link back to the site. This thorough analysis of your competitors can be compared with your own data. How well are you doing in comparison and what should you be doing to get ahead? If you seem to be targeting all the same keywords but they’re above you in SERPs, improving your authority through increased backlinks might be the answer.
Contact Whitefish Marketing today for an SEO strategy specifically tailored to your brand.
