Do you ever think about SEO and competitors keywords analysis or how you can best analyze your competitors and compare it to climbing Mount Everest? I would be surprised if you didn’t. A lot of people would rather not deal with it at all. Even more, if they hear that there is a competition in the mix.

But what is the truth? Is SEO really that complicated?

The answer is no. Sometimes your competitors can be your greatest allies. Now I know this sounds odd but think of the case where you’ll be able to analyze someone’s success, identify their weaknesses and use that to your advantage.

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

But how can someone achieve it? Well, the answer is through competitor’s keywords analysis which we are going to take a look at in this blog.

What Is Competitors Keywords Analysis? 

Most people rely solely on a keywords analysis tool to tell them some competitor keywords.

That is a mistake.

Keyword competition is the level of difficulty involved in ranking for a certain keyword. In essence, it gives you a sense of how many web pages you need to beat to claim a top spot in search engine rankings.

You have to take into account your entire competitive landscape to know just how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword.

How to find and analyze your competitors

Competitive research is the foundation of any strong marketing strategy and the beginning of a competitor’s keywords analysis.  

It’s important to analyze your competitors and their marketing tactics to help you differentiate your offering.

The first step of your analysis is to get all the data necessary to have a panoramic view of your competitive landscape. 

Here is the framework that I use to find and analyze my competitors and the keywords that they are ranking for: 

1. Find top competitors

Who is your competition you might ask? 

There are two things to consider:

• Size of target – Do you have the means to go after some of the biggest players in your niche, or do you want to go after a lower player?
• Nature of competition – Do you want to target businesses that are direct or indirect competitors? A direct competitor would be a business that offers a similar product or service that serves as a substitute for yours. An indirect competitor offers a different product or service that can solve the same problem as you.

The best thing to do when analyzing your competitors is to collect both sets of data and let your entire competitor analysis lead you to the best targets.

Here’s how to find both types of targets: 

Finding your competitors doesn’t have to be a time-consuming process.  The first step is to identify the keywords that you want to rank for. If you don’t have a list of seed keywords, don’t panic.

There are a number of tools that you can use to create your list of competitors and keywords, including Google and Ubersuggest.

A. Searching your keywords on Google

For the big players in your niche, a simple Google search will do the trick. They’ll be the ones dominating both the organic and commercial rankings.

This is the easiest way (and the most manual) for finding your competitors online. 

A simple Google search of your keyword will display other companies that are ranking on your keywords.  

For example, if you are an online business coach, and you search for this term you will instantly be able to see who’s ranking on the SERP (search engine results page)

Review and click on the results that you see in the Google search, do a quick browse and determine if they are relevant to what you are trying to do. 

B. Form keyword clusters

Targeting single categorical keywords is not a good strategy. 

These are keywords that describe a primary niche or category. They are usually a low-medium volume and high competition. In extremely populated niches, the search volume may be higher.

In any event, these keywords are difficult to rank for organically and expensive to rank for paid search.

Some examples may include:

• Content marketing agencies
• Email marketing services
• Online business coach

When users are about to investigate their options, they will add modifiers to their categorical searches. Geography is a common modifier that introduces a great opportunity for you to dominate local searches.

For example, a prospective buyer would likely search for “online business coaches in Australia” rather than the general “online business coach”.

While single categorical keywords may not signify immediate commercial intent, as prospects begin to use more modifiers in their search queries, that intent increases.

Let’s take a look at the first example. Here are the varying modifiers that a prospect may use when searching for an “online business coach”.

• Online business coach in Australia
• Online business coach in Melbourne Australia
• Online business coach services in Melbourne Australia

As you can see, these modified search queries can get very specific. The result is that they’ll have very little search volume and not much impact on your business if they’re your only target keywords.

That’s why it’s so important to form keyword clusters. Collectively, they’ll have higher search volume, more commercial intent, and an overall bigger impact in terms of SEO.

2. Competitors keywords analysis 

Now that you have a list of competitors, you can further analyze your competitors. 

You can use a  tool called Ubersuggest to find your competitor details and keywords to add to your existing database. This tool has a paid subscription but you can sign up for a free trial. 

The first thing you want to check is your competitors’ traffic and see how competitive they really are. 

Go to Ubersuggest and under Competitive Analysis/Traffic Overview paste your competitors URL. There you can check your competitors status for: 

• Organic keywords – the number of organic keywords this domain ranks for in Google search results
• Organic monthly traffic – the total estimated traffic this domain gets considering the organic keywords 
• Domain Authority – search engine ranking score that predicts how likely the website is to rank on the Google search results 
• Backlinks – how many incoming hyperlinks from other websites to this domain 

A. Benefits of competitors keywords analysis

In this section, we’ll add competitors keywords to the mix to give you the best results. We’ll first analyze some of the most important benefits and then dig in on how to find these keywords. 

Some of the benefits of competitors keywords analysis are:

• Identifying your ideal keywords is half the step. Once that is complete, putting these keywords in the right location is the next part.  This will have a huge effect on your organic search ranking.  You should have these optimal keywords in your page title, alt text, URL, and anchor text to improve your site’s crawlability in search engines
• An engaged audience: To begin producing content that is relevant to your audience you must understand what keywords are bringing traffic to your site.
• Increased conversion: Relevant content will not only attract visitors, but it will also attract qualified traffic. You will have a higher conversion rate if the content you are providing is meaningful to those who are reading it.
• Engagement of your audience: To begin creating and implementing content that has relevance to your audience, you must understand what keywords are bringing traffic to your site. Figure out what interests your audience, then write content around that.

B. Identify competitors keywords

Once you have a list of your competitors, the next step is to start analyzing the keywords they are ranking for. 

In Ubersuggest under Competitive Analysis/Keywords by Traffic check out the SEO keywords data that your competitor ranks the higher: 

• Keywords – the keywords this domain ranks for in the organic search 
• Volume – the number of searches this particular keyword has during a month 
• Position – The position this URL is ranked in Google search 
• Estimated visitors – The estimated traffic this webpage gets from Google for this particular keyword

The key here is to pull out as many relevant keywords with high search volume that your website can rank for. 

C. Drilling down and filtering on the keywords

Now with a list of your keywords, it’s time to start assessing the competition for them.

You want to identify search results that suggest easy low competition targets.

You can click on each of these keywords to find out additional information about that specific keyword. When looking at the Keyword overview you want to check out the following data: 

• Search volume – The number of searches this particular keyword has during a month 
• SEO Difficulty – Estimated competition in organic search, the higher the number the more competitive
• Paid difficulty – Estimated competition in paid search, the higher the number the more competitive
• Cost per click (CPC) – Average cost per click if you want to pay Google to be seen as an ad. If somebody is paying a high CPC, the keyword is usually more valuable

But what do they all mean? How can I figure out what to choose? 

The key here is to drill down into each of the keywords and find the right balance between the search volume, SEO difficulty, and paid difficulty.  Usually, a higher search volume with lower SEO difficulty works the best.  

D. Decide which organic keywords you’re going after

After you analyze each of your competitor’s keywords, you have to decide if it’s worth going after or not.

To make this decision, you need to first consider some factors:

• How strong is your domain?
• How easily can you get backlinks? 
• What level of content can you produce?

At some point, the authority, trust, and relevance of the page you create for a particular keyword need to exceed all other results that you have examined.

Based on these factors, you have to determine if a keyword is worth going for during analyze your competitors stage. 

3. Identify high-performing content that attracts SEO traffic 

High-performing content not only helps you build trust and connect with your target audience but also acts as fuel for your other marketing techniques. It’s the base upon which you promote your business online, so it’s essential to give it the attention it deserves. If you want to analyze your competitors the right way you can not miss this step. 

Armed with a list of the keywords that you want to rank for, the next step in competitors keywords analysis is to start identifying the winning content that generates traffic for your competitors, so this way you have a really good understanding of the type of content that you can start writing for your site. 

Under Keyword Analyzer/ check out the titles for that keyword that is getting the most traffic and engagement: 

• Estimated visitors – The estimated traffic this web page gets from Google for this particular term 
• Backlinks – How many incoming hyperlinks from other websites to this domain 
• Domain Authority – is a search engine ranking score that predicts how likely a website is to rank on a search engine results page 
• Social Shares – The total number of times this URL was shared on social networks 

As you are coming across the keyword title that is getting a lot of traffic, save the keyword and the article. You want to start collecting a list of existing articles that already have great SEO and engagement for the keywords that you want to rank for, so you can start creating similar content.

With Competitors keyword analysis and analyze your competitors stage complete, the next step is to start doing some more extensive keyword research. You can read the blog that talks all about Keyword Research Secrets and to learn how to get inside the mind of your audience. 

So there you have it. The ways you can actually have a competitors keywords analysis and use it to your advantage. I admit some things might seem like a mountain but as you break it down to small parts, it will be easier.

What are your thoughts about it? Did you know any of these techniques mentioned above?