Competitor Keyword Analysis: How to Identify Competitor Keywords
Although the focus has shifted more towards the user intent, keywords still remain a major ranking factor. Advances in Natural Language Processing or NLP have enabled Google search algorithms to understand the intent behind the user-generated search query and the contextual meaning of words in your text.
However, that being said, keywords haven’t become obsolete but their magical powers still drive traffic, leads, and sales for businesses if you use them optimally in a natural manner without keyword stuffing, which could at worst penalise your website.
Had it not been for the sway keywords hold over search and content marketing, marketers and SEO specialists won’t be swearing by keywords! Though it’s not a cakewalk to uncover some of the most profitable and searched keywords in your industry, competitor keyword analysis is a great starting point.
With the help of competition analysis, you can not only eye on your competitors but also uncover tons of keywords that your competitors are ranking for but you don’t. You could create content around those search terms to bridge the gap with your competitors without spending hours researching keywords from scratch. This readymade methodology can be leveraged to reverse engineer your competitor’s search engine optimization strategies to not just drive more traffic to your website but outrank your competition as well.
Not only will you extract a bunch of valuable words and phrases but also identify new opportunities to capitalize on with a competitor keyword analysis. The data generated will inform your own search strategy and troubleshoot SEO issues to make your strategy more robust and foolproof.
What is Competitor Keyword Analysis?
A competitor keyword analysis is a unique SEO strategy that involves sifting through your competitor’s organic and paid search data to uncover queries it’s ranking for in search engine result pages or SERPs.
The keywords identified can then be used to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns to get quality returns on investments in the quickest possible time. Moreover, with competition analysis keywords are sorted based on their intent. You’ll get keywords with transactional and commercial and informational intent. Thereby, you can pick and choose and create content accordingly aligning with the keyword intent. Transactional and commercial intent keywords for landing pages, and informational keywords for blogs, case studies, whitepapers, and resources.
The Importance of Competitive Keyword Analysis
- First of course is that it helps you discover valuable keywords related to the niche industry you’re in.
- Second is that it helps you outrank your competitors by keeping an eye on what they’re up to and what keywords they’re targeting.
- Third is that it allows you to disclose competitors’ secret SEO strategies. Sometimes competitors publish an education section on their website but keep it hidden from the main page. This could be your marketing goldmine and help you outrank your competitors in SERPs for specific keywords and topics.
- Fourth is that competitive keyword analysis would give you insights into your strategies and campaigns and see what you’ve done right and what needs to be changed in your campaigns.
- Fifth is that competitive analysis is your gateway to uncovering the industry trends and understanding what’s working right now.
Two Ways to Analyze a Competitor’s Keywords?
Competitor analysis on your own may take you more time than you could afford. Additionally, it takes SEO and analytical skills to dig up the right data. Thankfully, there are tools available to do it efficiently, such as Semrush. Tools like these make the keyword analysis process simple and quick.
Moreover, an SEO agency like Vistoplex Media can offer you its skills and technical expertise which you can leverage to analyze competitors’ keywords and store loads of information. We can handle the whole process quite efficiently.
Results drawn from these processes help businesses make solid decisions and utilise the data to come up with a robust SEO strategy and empower your marketing team.
How to Identify Competitor Keywords
Step #1: Understand your customers’ search intent
Volume is the obvious benchmark to target a keyword but it should really be the search intent if you’re to drive leads and conversions, not merely traffic. Doing so will see to it your SEO and PPC campaigns yield the best ROI than chasing high-volume keywords would ever do.
In other words, you’ll have to identify what your customers intend to accomplish when typing a query in the search bar. Are they looking for just a piece of information on a specific topic, that’s the informational intent like in the search query “content marketing.” Or are they intending to purchase a product or service, that’s the commercial or transactional intent as in the keyword “content marketing services.”
As a marketing agency, you would rather go for the latter even if its volume is less compared to the former. Because it would bring actual customers to their business. That’s not to say that informational keywords are any less important, it really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. And it’s also highly likely that those who read your content created around informational search terms like content marketing, may like your content and see you as an authority on the subject only to convert into a client from just being a reader.
Step #2: Identify your biggest competitors
Focus on competitors in your niche who are doing better than you when it comes to organic and paid traffic. For the sake of convenience, zero in on the three biggest competitors. This would help you generate much more accurate data in a lesser amount of time without feeling overwhelmed.
Now is the time to start digging out the highest-value keywords your competitors in your market rank for and craft a strategy based on the results to capitalize on the newly found opportunities. However, that doesn’t mean this is a game done.
You will have to create more valuable content and be original if you want your competitors’ audience to gravitate towards you by ranking higher in search results. As the target is the same, the products and services that you offer are the same, it takes loads of hard work to outrank your competitors.
However, we can make things easier by offering SEO-optimized content writing services if you want to publish quality blogs, articles, website content, guest posts, and landing pages. Call us on 0208 050 1545 or email at hello@vistoplexmedia.co.uk.
Step #3. Pick a competitor analysis tool
There are plenty of competitor keyword analysis tools to choose from. Pick the one that suits your budget or you are comfortable operating. These tools give you the edge you need to outrank your competitors and close your keyword gap with them.
From the data generated, you can cherrypick keywords to go after and write content around. At all costs, your strategy has to be dictated by data. For that to happen, you can use free as well as paid tools.
Among the free tools, Google Search Console and Google Analytics are the best to see what search terms drive traffic to your website and compare that with what your competitors’ metrics have revealed about what drives their traffic.
This would give you a fuller picture of where you lack. But for this, you’ll need paid tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush so that you can compare their data with yours. Based on the data, you can refine your content to incorporate more relevant keywords into your blog posts and SEO-optimise your web copy.
Step #4: Analyze your competitors’ domain
Copy the URL of your competitor’s domain and paste it into your favourite competitive analysis tool to get a domain overview. Domain overview offers insights into your competitor’s organic and paid traffic, their domain authority and backlink profile, along with the number of keywords they rank for and a list of those keywords.
Obviously, this is valuable information which you can put to good use to solidify your position in top search results. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can reveal information about metrics like paid organic keywords, keywords, rankings and backlinks regarding your competitor’s URL. for more in-depth analysis you can also take advantage of content gap analysis to look for those search terms your competitor’s rank for but you don’t.
Step #5. Zero in on the most valuable keywords
Of course, you would not, and you could not, want to rank for all those keywords. Instead, try to focus on search terms that are most relevant to your products or services, and are valuable. The easiest way to figure out how valuable a keyword is is to check its CPC. Higher the CPC more valuable the keyword.
That’s to say, higher CPC means people are willing to spend any amount on the specific keyword because they know it brings higher returns on their investment. Also, you must keep in mind that you don’t just want visitors but customers to visit your site. That’s why creating content around relevant keywords is a must both when trying to bring organic traffic to your website and when launching paid campaigns.
Wrap-Up: Identifying Competitor Keywords for Improved SEO & PPC
Competitive analysis is an important first step if you want to improve your search engine optimization and pay-per-click strategy. Because both can only be successful if you have the right keywords to target. In the beginning, you may not have much data available to know which keywords to target. The easiest and most efficient and most accurate data collection method for you would be competitive analysis.
Through this, you can analyse your competitor’s website in a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to see what organic and paid keywords they’re targeting for their SEO and PPC campaigns. You can pick a bunch of keywords and write quality and valuable content around those keywords to outrank your competitors.
Also read: How to Create Social Media Marketing Strategy for your Business