Understanding what keywords your competitors are targeting is essential for creating an effective SEO strategy.
Analyzing your competitor keywords helps you optimize your content strategically.
Competitor keyword analysis involves identifying who your competitors are, uncovering the keywords they rank for, and assessing the relevance and performance of these keywords.
This information can then be used to inform your own SEO strategy, helping you to attract more organic traffic, reach your target audience more effectively, and achieve your business goals.
In this post, we’ll discuss the step-by-step process of finding and analyzing competitor keywords using different tools.
So, without any further ado, let’s get started.
Table Of Contents
1 What Are Competitor Keywords?
Competitor keywords are the specific search terms and phrases that businesses in your industry use to attract traffic to their websites.
These keywords can be found in the content of their web pages, meta descriptions, blog posts, and paid search ads.
Analyzing these keywords helps you understand which terms drive traffic to your competitors, thereby giving you insights to improve your SEO and marketing strategies.
For instance, For example, if you compete with FlowerAura website, then flower pot delivery is a competitor keyword.
2 Importance of Competitor Keyword Research
Competitor keyword research is an essential component of a successful SEO strategy. It provides valuable insights that can significantly enhance your marketing efforts.
By analyzing the keywords that competitors target, you can gain a deeper understanding and identify opportunities to optimize your content.
This research helps to uncover gaps in your keyword strategy, revealing terms that competitors rank for but you do not, allowing you to target these untapped opportunities and improve your search engine rankings.
It also helps in refining paid search campaigns by identifying high-performing keywords that competitors use, enabling more strategic bidding and better ad placement.
3 How to Do a Competitor Keyword Analysis
Let us now discuss how to do competitor keyword analysis.
3.1 Identify Your Competitors
The first step in discovering competitor keywords is to identify your top competitors.
Start by checking who’s already ranking in the SERPs for any target keywords you have in mind, and add those companies to your list. While you might already have a few competitors in mind, it’s essential to build a more comprehensive list by considering the following criteria:
- Size of Target: Determine whether you have the resources to compete with the biggest players in your niche or if you should target smaller, more accessible competitors.
- Nature of Competition: Decide if you want to target direct or indirect competitors. Direct competitors offer a similar product or service that serves as a substitute for yours, while indirect competitors offer different products or services that solve the same problem.
To identify the key players in your niche, a simple Google search can help. The top competitors will typically dominate both organic and paid search results.
3.2 Identify Potential Competitor Keywords
Next, it’s time to start mining your competitors’ keyword data to identify keywords you’re not currently ranking for. Use a keyword analysis tool to enter each competitor’s website and generate a list of their top-performing keywords.
Let us discuss how to discover competitor keywords with the help of Google Keyword Planner.
To start, you need to access the tool by creating a Google Ads account if you don’t already have one. Once logged in, navigate to the Keyword Planner, as shown below.
To discover competitor keywords using Google Keyword Planner, select the Discover new keywords option.
Next, navigate to Start with a website tab. This feature allows you to find keywords based on a specific website.
Let’s say you’re interested in knowing what keywords a competitor’s site for organic skincare products, such as nykaa.com/skin/, ranks for. Enter the domain URL, and choose whether you want keyword data for a specific country or worldwide.
Choose Use only this page if you want to focus on the specific page or Use the entire site for a broad keyword list. Once done, click on the Get results button, and you’ll see a list of keywords for which the domain is ranking.
It’s important to note that these keyword suggestions are not necessarily the exact organic keywords the site ranks for. Instead, they are generated based on an analysis of internal links, meta descriptions, title tags, headings, and overall text on the page, combined with search indexing data.
These keywords are closely related to what the domain is ranking for, but this list may not fully capture the specific keywords you’re targeting.
Export Competitor Keywords
You can choose to export the keywords identified in the Google Keyword Planner. This method is absolutely free, and it allows you to identify competitive keywords quickly.
Click the Download keyword ideas button at the top-right to export the data as a CSV file or Google Sheets.
This file will include keyword suggestions, search volume, competition level, and bid ranges.
3.3 Filter and Analyze the Data in Google Sheets
Once the data is imported into your Google Sheet, you can analyze and filter the keywords.
Use Data → Create a Filter and select the Competition column to create a filter for low-competition keywords. You can filter to see keywords with low competition but high search volume.
These keywords are valuable for targeting since they provide a better chance of ranking.
Once you’ve identified the best keywords, integrate them into your SEO strategy.
4 Conclusion
Finding and analyzing competitor keywords is an essential part of any effective SEO strategy. By identifying the keywords your competitors are ranking for, you can uncover valuable insights and opportunities to improve your own search engine performance.
From identifying your competition to choosing the competitor keywords to target, you can refine your keyword strategy to stay ahead of the competition.
Using tools like Google Keyword Planner, you can systematically discover these keywords and understand your competition.
With consistent effort and strategic use of these strategies, you can enhance your search engine rankings, attract a larger audience, and ultimately achieve your goals.
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