Keywords are one of the only SEO aspects that stays consistent no matter how advanced SEO becomes. As the competition is getting fierce, reaching the top of SERP is not always possible.

Competitor keyword analysis is one of the most crucial steps in planning an SEO strategy. Since there are multiple ways to find targeting keywords, finding the best technique will benefit you a lot.

But for now, let’s find out more about competitor keywords.

Insight Into Competitor Keywords and Analysis Techniques

As the name suggests, competitor keywords are the terms your competitors use to improve their website traffic and SERP ranking. Using those keywords will help you get similar results or better than your competitors. Moreover, doing so also helps to identify the keywords your competitors are missing out on, giving you the much-needed edge to stay ahead of the curve.

Now, let's find out about conducting a competitor keyword analysis.

Competitor keyword analysis or research is the way you find out the keywords. Although this process can be manually done by analyzing your competitor's website, content, and keyword usage, you can also do it by using keyword research tools. Understandably, using such tools can make the process easier and quicker.

In this article, we are going to show you definite ways to find competitors' keywords manually and some of the best tools to automate the analysis.

Ways to Find Competitive Keywords

Make a List of Relevant Topics

What is your business about? What does it sell and what types of audiences does it cater to? You can figure it all out by making a list of topics that are relevant to your business. Start by thinking about your industry, products, or services, the types of questions your targeted audiences might have, and the content type they might expect from you.

Finding answers to these questions might help:

Customer expectations regarding keyword searches
Keyword relevancy to the products and services offered
Audience perspective for your company
Ways customers can find your brand online

For example, if you own a cake shop, you can associate your business with types of cakes, decoration tips, diabetes-friendly cake options, etc.

Find Your Competitors

Paying attention to online business competitors helps to build a strong digital footprint. These are different from local competitors and have better organic search results online.

You need to focus on search competitors as these companies rank higher for the same or similar keywords as your website.

Find the Keywords

Now that you know what are your relevant topics and who are your competitors, it’s time to extract the relevant keywords they are using. First, you should explore the website, and check out its home, service/product page blog post, and other pages.

After that, you can also analyze the meta-tags as these contain highly competitive keywords. Then you can take a look at the backlink profile of the company. This way you can discover more competitors and the keywords they are using. Additionally, checking out the backlink profile will help you identify authoritative sites and determine if the keywords are important and relevant.

Organize the Keywords

You cannot just add the keywords to your site randomly and expect it to work like a charm. Your job now is to sort these keywords with high keyword search volume. First, you need to set the high-authoritative keywords aside as you might not be able to rank by using them but might come in handy later.

Cross-check and eliminate all keywords that do not align with your business regardless of high ranking or competitor involvement. Moreover, list the keywords with the potential to rank your business higher online on search results. Lastly, you should use SERPs to find keywords that you might have missed. SCategorize the keywords that rank high on organic search results and others for paid ad campaigns. As always, note the keywords your competitors are using to rank.

Best Practices to Use Competitor Keywords

Finding all those high-ranking keywords won’t do you any good if you don’t implement them in your SEO campaign smartly. Well, here are some tips that can help you:

Use the Keywords in Organic SEO Campaigns

Include these keywords to your site using different techniques. You can choose to use them as either primary or secondary keywords. Simply put, start using them in your meta tag, image alt-tags, blog/article title/body, anchor text, and URLs.

Eliminate Non-Ranking Keywords

Keep an eye on the performance of the new keywords. Not all of these keywords will perform for your brand. Drop the non-performing keywords to save your effort and resources. Review the ad histories of competitor keywords to pinpoint the ones that do not work for your brand.

Keyword Grouping

Finding golden keywords and fresh concepts to enhance your content marketing is made possible with the help of competitive intelligence. However, you shouldn't adjust your advertisements haphazardly based only on what you observe.

The websites of your rivals may have several problems that undermine your plan. For instance, a poorly designed website, poorly organized material, and keyword stuffing. We advise efficiently grouping competing keywords to prevent this. This will improve the effectiveness of your on-page SEO campaign and optimize your content for greater outcomes.

Best Tools to Automate Competitor Keyword Analysis

Ubersuggest

This free Chrome extension has numerous features to offer valuable information regarding users’ web searches. Some of these features are learning about the monthly search values, keyword competitiveness, and cost-per-click. Features like the keyword tool and backlinks section offer a concrete list of links extracted from your competitors’ articles and blogs. All these insights will play a valuable role in outranking them.

Ahrefs

This powerful tool is integrated with artificial intelligence, which automatically makes it one of the smartest on this list. Addressing issues such as monitoring organic search traffic data, broken links, generating information about backlink profiles, and PPC marketing is easy with this tool.

With this tool, you can have in-depth information about your rival’s organic search traffic, backlink profiles, and paid ad strategies. Apart from advanced keyword research, Ahrefs will also let you uncover link-building prospects through its Content Explorer feature. This feature offers insights such as how much traffic your competitor is getting as well as how frequently they are republishing content.

SpyFu

SpyFu is all about conducting keyword research and boosting your online presence. This tool works like magic as you’ll get all the paid and organic keywords within a matter of seconds. Use the Competition Analysis feature to get more advanced SEO strategies. It shows you the sites that rank better than your online presence.

SEMrush

This is a versatile digital marketing platform with a wide range of competitor’s website analysis features and tools, such as keyword gap, brand sentiment monitoring, organic ranking position, and backlink analysis.

SEMrush makes it way easier to take a thorough look into your rival site’s SEO performance as well as marketing tactics making it easier to learn from their mistake or successes.

Moz Pro

Competitor keyword research with Moz Pro is the key you need to unlock SEO success. Moz Pro improves your marketing efforts and provides crucial insights such as the external link-targeted keywords and traffic rate. Explore the tool to find several other tools to improve your site’s overall performance.

Serpstat

Serpstat is just like a Swiss army knife as it has more than thirty digital marketing tools for you to use. It has all the features you could need to learn all about your competitions in depth. Learning about their search volume traffic, organic search ranking, and organic appearance statistics for a certain keyword is way easier with its user-friendly interface.

That’s not all, there is also a feature called visibility score that shows the best-ranking sites in your industry. Moreover, you would get a complete report containing a thorough analysis of all the competitor websites. There is an option to compare three different sites side by side along with the site tool and site itself. This way, you would get a comprehensive overview of the best-performing sites concerning SEO.

Why Conducting a Competitor Keyword Analysis is Beneficial?

Competitive keyword research analysis is a critical aspect of strategizing an SEO campaign. Numerous factors contribute to this. It not only saves your effort and time in finding relevant keywords but also gives a competitive edge to your endeavors. This analysis is a quick and easy process to get a deep knowledge about your competitors and their marketing efforts, which automatically gives you the upper hand to beat the competition.

Here’s a quick list of benefits why you should consider analyzing your competitors’ keywords:

A Better Understanding of Your Audience

Learning about your competitors' keywords gives you a sneak peek into your target audience and their requirements. These keywords will make it easier for you to approach your customer as you comprehend their search intent and their process of making a purchase online.

Gathering such information will help you optimize your organic search success and help you create content that will resonate with your targeted audience better.

Knowing Your Biggest Competitors

Competitive keyword analysis not only helps you comprehend the nature and behavior pattern of your audience but also finds your most challenging competitors. Routinely monitoring them will help you formulate the best SEO strategies to boost your ranking in SERPs.

You might be thinking, that manual searching on Google can easily give you a list of your toughest competitions but it will not be helpful for the long haul. You’ll need detailed insights from the rank tracker to reach your audience before them.

Enhanced Keyword Research Strategy

Your keyword research strategy will get better with it. Learning about your competitors' keywords will help you come up with more useful long-tail keywords. As a result, it will help you outrank your biggest competitors and boost your site’s visibility.

Explore New Market Opportunities and Content Ideas

Discovering new content ideas is easy when you are implementing competitive keyword analysis. By understanding what your customers are searching for, you can come up with content ideas and strategies that will create engaging and high-ranking blogs.

Improved Product Marketing

Competitive keyword analysis is quite understandably a multipurpose weapon when it comes to acing your digital marketing efforts. You can improve visibility, master product marketing efforts, and know competitor product USPs. This information helps to boost your product messaging and overall marketing campaign approaches. Apart from that, this information can help you to get new valuable ideas for your company.

Conclusion

Whether you want to increase website traffic or boost your sales, competitive keyword analysis can be the key to unlocking all these possibilities. This process makes search engine optimization way easier and time efficient. But not only for improving your site’s visibility, brainstorming new content ideas is also simpler with this. All you have to do is pick the right tools and consult the best SEO expert to get the most out of competitive keyword research.

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