If you are a business owner, you should keep an eye on your competitors. And that is the norm of any business.
When it comes to your digital marketing strategy, you should keep track of the keywords your competitors use for ranking in search engine results. It is one of the most potent ways of gaining insights into their digital marketing strategies. And it helps you to anticipate their next moves.
What is a Competitor Keyword Analysis?
You are perhaps already familiar with what a keyword is and what function it performs. In simple terms, keywords elicit the results you are looking for when you type them into Google.
If you want to maximize your organic search success, you should understand the search intent behind your competitors’ keywords and understand the different stages of a buyer’s journey.
You should figure out the customer’s journey in the competitive landscape in which your business operates. Customers can have a wide range of keyword options at every stage of their buying journey.
Targeting competitor keywords can help your website appear on the same SERPs and platforms as your competitors. Competitor keyword research can also help you understand the weaknesses of your competitors’ digital marketing strategies.
But, you should find out the keyword phrases that are working well with your competitors.
How to Find Your Competitors?
Searching for competitors is different for different businesses. Bear in mind that you cannot have a one-size-fits-all all formula to find your competitors. And, interestingly, some of your most challenging business competitors might not be very competitive in terms of organic search.
The first step in your competitor keyword research is to know where you stand vis-a-vis your search competitors. Your competitors are the websites that rank for the same or same type of keywords as your website.
The best thing to find the top players in your niche is to start with a simple Google search. The competitors you will find. As a result, you will find competitors with the highest organic and commercial rankings. After that, choose the main keywords most relevant to your business from the search.
If your website is new, you can use a third-party tool to generate a report containing the main organic competitors to your target domain. Moreover, the tool will return many metrics, such as their top organic keywords, top pages, and any position changes for their organic keywords.
The Organic Research tool returns a wealth of metrics, such as their top organic keywords, top pages, and any position changes for their organic keywords.
Gather Keywords
The next step is to gather and organize your competitor keywords. The tool can also help you to compare target keywords from two or more domains. Moreover, the tool highlights any common target keywords the domains share apart from highlighting keywords your competitors are ranking that you are not ranking.
The tool also enables you to organize the aggregated data from multiple platforms in one Excel sheet. With the organization, you can see the position you rank vis-a-vis your competitors.
Besides, it will help implement a strategy to organize the data so your Excel sheet displays every keyword information. And the keyword organization becomes crucial if you gather data from multiple sources.
After that, you need to assess your competitor keyword list by:
- Segregate the high competition keywords and set them aside
- Cross-check the keywords that you share with your competitors
- Eliminate the keywords that are not valuable
- Highlight keywords that have higher domain and trust authority
- Review the SERPs for each keyword and determine if you missed out on any organic or paid opportunities
Examining Competitor Keywords
There is no universal formula for determining important keywords. And, there is also no alternative to performing a manual analysis of your competitors’ keywords and consider their relevance, organic traffic, and current SERPs.
When you narrow your competitor keywords list to the most relevant ones, it gives you the flexibility to work with a much shorter list. After that, you need to analyze each keyword with a tool that can help you explore the important metrics for each keyword.
Assess Ranking Difficulty
The subsequent step is to examine the ranking difficulty and finding a competitive edge. And check how your competitors’ ranking changes.
Check the list of lost and declined keywords in the tool. It will help you to determine the weak points of your competitors. And you can see keywords they have recently lost that you can now target.
When you examine these insights with the tool, you can formulate a winning content strategy based on your competitors’ opportunities.
Look At Your Competitors’ Paid Campaigns
After you get an idea of your competitors’ organic traffic opportunities, you must cross-check the organic results with your competitors’ paid traffic.
The tool also helps you monitor the keywords your competitors are bidding on and their results.
The tool also helps you to analyze any paid keyword gaps. And it allows you to plan your ad campaigns. But, of course, you can also delegate this task to a trusted company providing reliable SEO services.
Conclusion
Now, you must know that competitor keyword research is an integral part of a digital marketing strategy. And many tools can help you to research the keywords and analyze them. In addition, the tools can help you to target the best keywords that are relevant to your business. We believe that this article will help you research and analyze your competitors’ keywords in the best possible way.
