Keyword Research
Risto RehemägiCompetitor keyword analysis is a powerful technique for improving your SEO strategy and gaining a competitive edge in search results. By understanding the keywords your rivals are targeting and ranking for, you can optimize your own content to outrank them. In this guide, we'll explore effective methods and tools for finding and analyzing your competitors' keywords.
Why Perform Competitor Keyword Research?
Conducting keyword research on your competitors allows you to:
- Identify keywords to target to compete for rankings
- Discover untapped keyword opportunities not being targeted by rivals
- Find long-tail keywords used by your target audience
- Understand why competitors are outranking you for certain terms
Thorough competitor keyword analysis provides valuable insights to inform and enhance your SEO approach.
Competitor keyword research is essential for developing a comprehensive SEO strategy that takes into account the competitive landscape. By understanding the keywords your competitors are targeting and ranking for, you can identify areas where you need to improve your own keyword targeting and content optimization efforts.
Analyzing your competitors' keywords can also reveal untapped opportunities - keywords that are relevant to your business but that your rivals are not yet targeting heavily. These keyword gaps represent low-hanging fruit that you can target to gain a competitive advantage in search results.
Additionally, competitor keyword research provides insight into the long-tail keywords and specific phrases your target audience is using to find products or services like yours. By incorporating these terms into your own keyword strategy, you can better attract qualified traffic that is more likely to convert.
Finally, if your competitors are outranking you for important keywords, analyzing their keyword approach can help you understand why. Perhaps they are targeting certain terms more comprehensively, or have optimized their pages more effectively. These insights can guide your own efforts to improve rankings and overtake competitors in search results.
How to Find Competitors' Keywords
While there's no single tool that generates a complete list of competitor keywords with one click, you can use a combination of techniques to compile a comprehensive view of the keywords your rivals are targeting. A few effective methods include:
1. Use an SEO Spider Tool
Tools like Screaming Frog can crawl a competitor's site the way search engines do, extracting useful information like meta data, alt text, anchor text and more that indicate their target keywords. Performing a basic SEO audit on rival sites can uncover many of their keywords.
SEO spider tools automate the process of analyzing a competitor's site for keyword optimization. Rather than manually reviewing page source code, these tools can quickly crawl an entire site and extract key on-page elements at scale.
For example, Screaming Frog can generate reports showing all of the title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, and header tags used across a competitor's site. This data can be exported to a spreadsheet for easy analysis and filtering. You can sort and filter the data to look for patterns and frequently used keywords.
In addition to analyzing on-page elements, SEO spider tools can also extract other useful information like the anchor text used in a site's internal linking. If certain keywords are frequently used as anchor text, it's a signal that those terms are important to the site's overall keyword strategy.
2. Leverage Competitor Analysis Tools
Platforms like SEMrush and Ahrefs have powerful features for analyzing competitors' organic keywords. Just enter a rival's domain to see the terms they rank for, the pages that rank, and more. These tools make it easy to dissect a competitor's keyword strategy.
Competitor analysis tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs offer the most comprehensive view of a site's organic keyword footprint. These tools use their own databases of search results to show all of the keywords a particular domain or URL ranks for in Google.
To use these tools for competitor research, simply enter a rival's root domain or a specific page URL. You'll see a report showing all of the keywords that site ranks for organically, along with metrics like:
- The site's ranking position for each keyword
- Estimated monthly search volume for the keyword
- Keyword difficulty scores
- Estimated organic traffic generated by each keyword
- The specific page that ranks for the keyword
This data provides a clear picture of a competitor's most valuable keywords and pages from an organic search perspective. You can easily see which terms are driving the most traffic, and which pages have been optimized to rank for those keywords.
Many of these tools also offer competitive comparison features, allowing you to benchmark your own site's keyword rankings against multiple competitors at once. This can help you quickly identify keyword gaps and opportunities across your competitive set.
While these tools are paid, most offer limited free plans or free trials. The depth of insights they provide makes them well worth the investment for any serious SEO competitor analysis.
3. Look at Competitors' Top Content
Tools like BuzzSumo can show you a competitor's most shared and linked content. Analyzing these top performing pages can reveal the types of keywords and topics that resonate with your shared audience. Look for keyword trends and themes across their best content.
In addition to looking at competitors' keyword optimization, it can be valuable to analyze the topics and themes of their top performing content. Tools like BuzzSumo can show you which pages and articles are getting the most social shares and backlinks.
Enter a competitor's domain into BuzzSumo and you'll see a list of their most successful content, sorted by total social shares or backlinks. This provides insight into the topics and content types that perform best with your target audience.
As you review a competitor's top content, look for common threads in terms of the keywords and phrases used. Are there certain topics that come up again and again? Certain keyword themes that seem to resonate with readers?
For example, if a competitor's most shared articles tend to use words like "how to", "tips", "guide", etc, it may indicate that instructional content performs well with your shared audience. You could incorporate similar phrasing into your own content strategy.
Keep in mind that the most shared content may not always align perfectly with the most searched keywords. However, there is often overlap between topics that get engagement on social media and topics that people frequently search for. Mining competitors' top content can uncover valuable keyword opportunities to explore.
Putting Competitor Keywords Into Action
Once you've compiled a thorough list of competitor keywords, how can you put those insights to use? A few impactful next steps include:
- Identify keyword gaps and opportunities in your own content
- Target promising keywords with new, optimized content
- Update existing pages to better compete for valuable terms
- Gain a better understanding of your audience's needs and priorities
- Discover additional competitors who are ranking for your target keywords
The insights gained from competitor keyword research can inform multiple aspects of your SEO strategy:
Content Planning: Look for keywords that competitors are targeting but that you currently have little or no content optimized for. Prioritize creating new content around these keyword opportunities to close the gap with rivals. Develop an editorial calendar incorporating high-value keywords uncovered by your research.
On-Page Optimization: In addition to creating new content, look for opportunities to better optimize your existing pages to compete for valuable keywords. Use insights from competitor pages to guide your title tag optimization, meta descriptions, header tags, and other on-page elements.
Audience Insights: Analyzing competitor keywords can provide a clearer picture of your target audience's needs, interests and pain points. Look for patterns in the types of keywords and topics your rivals are targeting. What questions are they trying to answer? What problems are they trying to solve? Use these insights to hone your audience personas and create more relevant, targeted content.
Competitive Benchmarking: Competitor keyword research can also help you track your performance relative to rivals over time. Benchmark your rankings for core keywords against competitors and monitor how those metrics shift as you implement the insights from your research. Regular competitive analysis can help you stay ahead of industry rivals and adapt your strategy as the competitive landscape evolves.
Key Takeaways
Competitor keyword research is an essential piece of an effective SEO strategy. By analyzing rival sites' keywords, you can enhance your own approach to climb above them in search results. While no single tool provides a complete competitor keyword analysis, using a combination of manual and tool-based techniques can help you reverse engineer their keyword priorities.
The insights gained from competitor research can guide your content planning, keyword targeting, and audience understanding. But remember, the goal isn't to copy competitors, but rather to identify opportunities to outperform them by better meeting searcher needs.
If you need help conducting competitor keyword research or putting those insights into action, consider partnering with an experienced SEO agency. The right SEO partner can help you make the most of competitor insights to achieve your organic traffic and revenue goals.