You know about its legendary enchantment. Digital marketers stand by its claims that it can help them find the most lucrative keywords to target.
But there are tonnes of rivals to go through, hundreds of various tools you could employ, and even more keywords to examine. How on earth can you tap into that mysterious power without devoting countless hours?
By using a tried and true method that cuts through the clutter. In this article, I will discuss the strategy my company, Rank Tree, has employed to overtake rivals, “Game of Thrones” style, on behalf of our clients.
What is a keyword analysis of the competition?
Finding out which search terms your rivals are ranking for and then figuring out how they did it is called a competitor keyword analysis.
It is one of the simplest and fastest ways to identify the highest intent keywords for your business and can be used for both SEO and PPC keyword research.
How to Conduct a Competitor Keyword Analysis Quickly and Efficiently?
Find “golden keywords,” which are what I call keywords with a lot of search volume and a high level of user intent, using this method.
You need to find out what your customers are looking for
The pursuit of high-volume keywords is a common pitfall of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click marketing. This is lethal since ranking for a high volume term doesn’t always (and frequently doesn’t) result into leads and conversions.
The keyword “content marketing,” for instance, receives 14,000 monthly searches. Even if I managed to get my site ranked for this keyword and receive a flood of traffic, none of them would ever become paying customers. Google users who are looking for an explanation of content marketing have a simple goal in mind. In all likelihood, they have no interest in investing in content marketing services.
Pick your top three rivals
Once you have a thorough understanding of the Google queries used by your target audience, you can zero in on your main competitors.
While there may be hundreds of businesses out there offering products or services that are comparable to yours, we need to narrow the field down to the top three rivals for the sake of this exercise.
There are two key reasons I recommend only checking at your top three competitors:
Nobody has 100 competitors’ keyword research done since there isn’t enough time.
If you want to identify the terms with the most buyer intent in your industry, go no further than your nearest competitors.
Pick a set of keyword analysis tools to spy on the competition
Which keyword research tool you use will determine your success or failure. Why? For the reason that which keywords you decide to pursue is determined by the metrics these tools provide, and some tools provide more accurate metrics than others.
Popular tools with access to plenty of data will have more precise information on how often a term is searched and how competitive it is, so they are the best bet. I usually use a combination of:
To find the keywords, use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.
Use data collection and analysis tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 to compare your site’s performance to that of your competitors.
Analyze the URLs of your rivals
The exciting part has finally arrived. Using the tools at your disposal, examine the keyword rankings of the top three competitors you identified in Step 2.
To see paid keywords, organic keywords, backlinks, rankings, and more for any given URL, you can use a tool like Ahrefs’ “Site Explorer.”
Pinpoint your most valuable keywords
Finding the keywords that your competitors are ranking for is the most important part of this, regardless of the tool you use.
Bring in the proper customers. (i.e. they drive customers, not just visitors).
Better content than your rivals’ can be made (or optimised) by you.
Have a high enough monthly search volume to warrant financial investment.
You should aim to appropriate these “golden keywords” from your rivals, as we discussed in Step 1. Whether you’re conducting this analysis for SEO or PPC and what your aims are will have a significant impact on how objective your results will be.
Concluding Remarks
The best keywords for your niche can be found with relative ease and speed by conducting competitive keyword research. I’ve found the best success with this method, and I’ve heard of others who rely on it nearly exclusively when searching for keywords.
Never lose sight of the importance of quality over quantity. Better than plenty of traffic is targeted traffic. You’ll be able to better define the “right” site visitors after going through this process. Take a “reverse engineering” approach.
If you can outsmart your rivals on Google by giving the search engine the information it needs, you can steal their keywords.