Table Of Contents
- What Is a Competitor Keyword Analysis?
- How to Do Competitor Keyword Analysis?
- Competitors High-Value Keywords
- Conclusion
Staying aware of your competition and analyzing your competitors is important for any business. You should use analytics and competitor analysis to understand how your competitors position themselves. One easier way to do that is by analyzing their keywords. A thorough competitor keyword analysis can give you insights into what they are doing and how to compete with them.
What is a competitor keyword analysis?
A competitor keyword analysis helps you find opportunities to find keywords your competitors rank for and which you can target. It is important because you have to figure out your potential customer’s whole journey in relevance to your competitors.
When people search about something on the internet, they are almost certain about what they are looking for and they've got many different options to choose from. You have to make sure that you are one of those options. Targeting competitor’s keywords will help you show up when someone searches for those keywords.
It can be a way to discover new keyword ideas for your site. We all know that keywords play a significant role in helping you to rank higher on search engines and the more relevant the keywords are to a page, the better the chance a page will have of ranking high in search results.
The fundamental idea around a competitor keywords analysis is to do a similar exercise to keyword research, but instead of simply looking at keywords, look at your competitors’ content and look for common themes as well as any unique themes you might be able to replicate or improve upon for your own website.
It can also give you an idea about the keywords that are working well for your competitors or some of the valuable keywords that they are not targeting.
How to do a competitor keyword analysis?
The first step of competitor keyword analysis is to figure out your search competitors. It is not as simple as it seems. The reason is that your typical competitors might not actually be your search competitors. Your search competitors are the ones that are ranking for the same keywords that you are targeting.
To do this, you will have to start with a simple Google search. Search for the keyword on Google and see who shows up. These are the ones that are ranking for the keyword. You might be surprised to see who is actually targeting the same keywords as you.
Another way is to try ‘related search’ on Google. (related:yourwebsite.com). This will show multiple websites related to your website.
You can always use third-party tools to find competitors. One of these tools is the ‘organic research tool’. This tool will give you a thorough competitor report, highlighting your organic competitors. You can even get to know the competitors in different markets, the kind of organic traffic they are getting, and the other information as well.
Using keyword analysis tools
There are a number of tools available out there that can help you identify keywords that your competitors are using and are actually ranking for. You can even get a detailed analysis of organic and paid keyword rankings.
When you are trying to find ways to improve your search engine rankings, being able to see your rankings against competitors is important. A keyword research tool can help you identify how popular a particular keyword is compared to other related keywords, what your competition is doing, and it can even forecast if the keyword will become relevant in the future.
To name a few effective tools, ahrefs, SpyFu, TagCrowd, and BuzzSumo are the widely used ones. One thing you’ll have to understand is that results might vary for all of these tools, and you will not get the same results. The best way is to use more than one tool and then compare the results, filtering out keywords that are unimportant.
Analyzing keywords
Now that you have a list of keywords, you will have to thoroughly analyze these keywords to figure out the ones that work best and the ones that are not important.
Some of the factors that you should be looking at when analyzing keywords are:
• Search volume
Search volume is essentially the average number of people that search for a certain keyword in a month. This goes without saying, ranking for high search volume benefits you because more people search for them, which means more people landing on your website, which means more business.
• Keyword difficulty
Another key metric to keep in check is keyword difficulty. In simple terms, keyword difficulty is used to understand the amount of competition for a certain keyword. It gives you an idea about the difficulty you’ll face to rank for that keyword.
Usually, high search volume keywords are harder to rank on and you’ll need a high domain authority website and of course, more investment to rank for high difficulty keywords.
If your website is new, you will have to start with keywords having moderate search volume and relatively low keyword difficulty.
Once you’ve ranked for a number of these low difficulty keywords, then you can start targeting keywords with high search volume and high keyword difficulty.
• Keyword relevance
Here is a key point to remember. Not every keyword that your competitors are targeting and are ranking for should be your target keyword. You have to analyze if that keyword is relevant to your service offering before you start to invest in that keyword.
You will have to understand the user’s intent. You should know what people are hoping to find when they search for a certain keyword. Once you figure out the relevant keywords based on the user’s intent, you can then start targeting the keywords that align with your value proposition.
SEO companies in Dubai and around the world focus on analyzing keywords using different metrics to figure out the best ones to target. It takes a bit of time but it is the key to not spending time, effort, and money on keywords that don’t bring in results.
Competitors High-Value Keywords
Understanding multiple metrics such as search volume, relevance, and others is indeed important. But there is another way to find the keywords that your competitors are focusing on.
You will have to look for keywords that your competitors are putting money in. That means the keywords that appear in paid search by your keywords. You can use any keyword research tool to see the ones that your competitors are running ads for. If your competitors are running PPC ads for certain keywords, they definitely value those keywords, and you can get an idea from there if those keywords are relevant to your business or not.
Another way is to find competitor webinars, eBooks, etc. It goes without saying if a competitor is putting effort into producing such content for certain keywords, those keywords must be important enough and you should also target them.
Using Keyword Research Tools
You can use any tool, for example, Ahrefs to find the keyword gap. Keyword gap or content gap tells you which keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. You will have to enter your domain as well as your top competitor’s domains in order to get the results, but it is indeed worth it.
Analyze SERPs Thoroughly
Now that you have a list of potential keywords to target, you should search each one of those keywords and analyze the pages that are ranking for these keywords. Figure out what the competitors are doing right and where they lack.
This would give you ideas as to what is working for them and where is room for improvement. Keep a checklist for this with questions such as:
Is the page meeting the search intent of the user?
- What is the load speed of the page?
- Is the page navigation easy enough?
- How is the look and feel of the page?
- Is the page mobile responsive?
This would give you ideas to work with and show you gaps and lapses to focus on.
Outperform Your Competitors
Your competitors are undoubtedly a source of valuable information when devising an SEO strategy. In-depth competitor keyword analysis gives you insights about what to do in order to outperform and outrank your competitors.
There is no easy way out though. If your competitors are ranking for certain keywords, they must be doing something right, and to outrank them, you need to do all of what they are doing, but better.
Don’t shy away from using keyword research tools. They can give you information that can give you an edge over your competitors. If done right, competitor keyword research can take you way higher in the SERPs in no time.
Conclusion
This is it for today’s blog. I hope you liked reading it and that you learned some valuable information about competitor keyword research. Don’t forget to leave your valuable feedback and if you have any queries about SEO, reach out to me and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
If you run have a website that you want to rank but you can’t focus on SEO because it’s a lot of work, contact Prism Digital, the best SEO agency in Dubai and we will help you create and execute SEO strategies that would rank your website right there at the top. Our team of SEO experts is fully capable and well equipped to take care of the SEO side for you so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. See you on the other side. Take care and Goodbye.
About The Author: Lovetto Nazareth
Lovetto Nazareth is a digital marketing consultant and agency owner of Prism Digital. He has been in the advertising and digital marketing business for the last 2 decades and has managed thousands of campaigns and generated millions of dollars of new leads. He is an avid adventure sports enthusiast and a singer-songwriter. Follow him on social media on @Lovetto Nazareth