Are you wondering why your competitors rank higher than you?

The secret to your competitors’ SEO success could be as simple as targeting the right keywords.

Because these terms are effective for your competitors, there’s a strong possibility they’ll be useful for you as well.

In this article, we’ll look at the most effective yet simple strategies to identify competitors’ keywords, allowing you to lead your own SEO approach and maybe surpass your competition in SERPs.

Benefits Of Competitor Keyword Analysis

Competitor keyword analysis involves identifying and studying the keywords that your competitors are targeting in their SEO and PPC campaigns. This process provides several benefits for your own digital marketing strategy:

1. Improved SEO Strategy

• Identifying Gaps: Discovering keywords your competitors rank for that you are not targeting can reveal content gaps and opportunities.
• Keyword Prioritization: Helps in prioritizing keywords based on the success and ranking of competitors, ensuring you focus on terms with the highest potential ROI.

2. Enhanced Content Creation

• Content Ideas: Competitor keywords can inspire new content topics, ensuring your content strategy is both relevant and comprehensive.
• Quality Improvement: Understanding the type and quality of content that ranks well can guide you in creating superior content.

3. Competitive Benchmarking

• Performance Metrics: Helps in benchmarking your SEO and PPC performance against competitors to see where you stand.
• Strategy Adjustment: Allows you to adjust your strategies in response to competitors’ tactics and performance.

4. Increased Organic Traffic

• Higher Rankings: Targeting effective keywords that competitors rank for can help you improve your own search engine rankings.
• Long-Tail Keywords: Helps in discovering long-tail keywords that might have less competition and higher conversion rates.

5. Strategic Planning

• Long-Term Strategy: Provides data-driven insights that can inform your long-term SEO and content strategy.
• Adapting to Changes: Keeps you informed about changes in competitor strategies and market conditions, allowing for agile adjustments.

By leveraging competitor keyword analysis, you can gain a competitive edge, improve your search engine visibility, and drive more targeted traffic to your site.

How To Identify Your Competitors’ Keywords

There are numerous approaches to identify keywords used by competitors in their content. Let’s analyse the advantages and disadvantages of the most common solutions.

1. Use Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free Google service that allows you to discover competitors’ sponsored keywords.

Here is a list of the advantages this tool provides in terms of competitive keyword analysis.

• There is no fee for access:  Keyword Planner is free to use, making it an excellent choice for SEO beginners and organisations with restricted expenditures.
• Core keyword data: The tool displays crucial SEO information such as search volume, competitiveness, and proposed bid rates for each identified phrase.
• Keyword classification: Keyword Planner helps you to organise keywords into categories, which can be useful for designing tailored ad campaigns.
• Historical data: The tool has four years’ worth of historical data available.

When you log into your Google Ads account, go to the Tools tab.

Now, click on the keyword planner and then the Discover new keywords option.

Now, Choose Start with a website option, then entering your competitor’s domain, region, and language. From there, you can pick whether to analyse the entire site (preferred for deeper insights) or just one URL.

And there you have it: a table of all the keywords used in your analysed website’s Google Ads campaigns.

2. Use SpyFu

SpyFu is a thorough SEO and PPC analysis tool designed with the intent of “spying” on competitors.

Its main advantages in terms of competition keyword analysis are as follows:

• Database includes over 10 years of historical data: Although only available in the Professional plan, SpyFu provides long-term analytics for monitoring industry changes and adapting accordingly.
• Keyword gap analysis: This tool allows you to easily compare your terms to those of your competitors based on parameters such as search volume, keyword difficulty, organic clicks, and so on.
• Affordability: It is appropriate for enterprises with a limited budget.

To access competitor data, simply go to their website and type your competition’s domain into the search bar, and select the region.

Now, click on the Top Keywords tab and click the View All Organic Keywords button.

A table of all the keywords used in your analyzed website’s.

However, this free edition only shows the top 5 keywords for a domain and includes information such as search traffic, rank change, SEO clicks, and so on. To do a more thorough investigation, you’ll need to subscribe to a paid subscription.

Wrapping Up

There’s no doubt that researching competitors’ keywords is an excellent technique to optimise your own content strategy and surpass your competition in SERPs.

We are confident that by following the step-by-step steps outlined in this article, you will be able to discover high-value keywords that you had not previously considered.

Ready to begin optimising your website? Sign up now and acquire the data you need to provide excellent user experiences.