How To Find Competitors’ Keywords

Finding the right keywords is essential to developing an effective online marketing strategy. Researching keywords that your competitors are using to improve their rankings is one of the first steps in finding keyword opportunities for your own site. Do you know how to find competitors’ keywords so you can use them as part of your SEO content strategy? 

Read on and we’ll show you how.

What are Competitors’ Keywords?

Competitors’ keywords are the terms or short phrases that other websites in your industry or business vertical are using to rank highly through search engine algorithms.

When consumers need information, they often turn to the internet, choosing a keyword or keyword phrase and typing it into search engines. The search engines scan website pages that use that keyword (and answer the keyword’s query) and generate results that serve up the website pages that give users the information they need. Unsurprisingly, websites in related industries to yours may use similar keywords to target the same audience.

Why Should You Find Competitors’ Keywords?

If you want your website content to compete with currently ranking web pages, you need to use the right keywords. Seeing what your competition is ranking for can help you fast track this process and help you find targeted opportunities for your business.

Finding competitors’ keywords gives you insight into terms and phrases you may not have thought to target in your content strategy. Seeing correlations between competitors on the terms they are targeting might help you to adjust your content strategy to better incorporate those sorts of terms.

Just as insightful, though, are finding the competitor keyword terms your competition is NOT ranking for. These keyword gaps might be a sweet spot for you to enter the SEO game and gain some online market share.

Now that you understand how competitors’ keywords are helpful, you should learn how to find them and choose the ones that will most benefit your content marketing strategy.

How Do You Find Competitors’ Keywords?

The most manual way to find which keywords your competitors are ranking for would be to first, create a list of keywords you think they would want to win. You’d have to use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner in order to create this list, and then manually Google each of those terms to see which competitors show up.

For example, if you offer HVAC services in a certain location and you’ve confirmed on Google Keyword Planner that it’s a decent keyword with some monthly search volume, you could google “HVAC services in X state/city” to see which competitors come up on search engine results pages.  The main problem with this method is the sheer amount of time it would take to jot down which competitors are winning which phrases. Not only that, it leaves out any keywords those competitors might be ranking for that you didn’t come up with before hand.

Use Keyword Research Tools That Offer Competitive Analysis

The much more efficient method of finding competitor website keywords is to build off of tools that other experts have already created. Certain paid SEO tools, such as Ahrefs and SEMrush can help you quickly see what keywords your competitors are already ranking for as well as how competitive those various keyword terms are and how many times they are searched each month. Lastly, you can utilize the help of an SEO agency to help you do keyword research on your competitors and come up with an SEO Action plan.

Using a paid tool, you can quickly put in your competitor’s website and see the number of keywords they rank for, how much monthly traffic they are estimated to get because of those keyword rankings, backlinks, domain authority and more. 

For example, in SEMRush you can quickly use the “Organic Research” tab to input a competitor’s website and immediately see all the best keywords they rank for:

You’ll be able to see your competitors’ highest value keywords, what position they rank for on Google for those terms, which pages those terms are found on as well as the estimated traffic those terms are bringing them each month. From there, you could reverse engineer the pages on their site that are ranking the best and create similar types of pages on your own site to target those same keywords and potentially beat out your competition.

Make a Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis

Another really cool tool found on SEO tools like these is the ability to compare your own site’s organic keyword profile against your competitor keyword profiles to see where the gaps and opportunities lie. You’d do this by first inputting your own business and then usually adding anywhere from 1-5 competitors (depending on the software you use:

From there, you can see where your own site’s keywords overlap with competitors keywords (to see which keywords you ALL are targeting) as well as see those competitor keywords that are unique to each competitor. You can find the “untapped” keywords that none of your competitors are currently ranking for if you want to get the jump on your competition, see the keyword clusters that are strong in your profile or the ones that are weak that could use some work.

Once you actually find competitors’ keywords, you’ll want to then be able to analyze them and see where the SEO opportunities lie.

How Do You Know Which Competitors’ Keywords To Use?

Once you find competitors’ keywords, how do you choose which ones to use in your marketing strategy?

When you think about keywords, there are four main categories you should consider. While most keywords do not overlap and meet all four criteria, they often fall favorably into at least two of these categories:

• Relevance
• Intent
• Search volume
• Difficulty (or competition)

While most keywords do not overlap and meet all four criteria, they often fall favorably into at least two of these categories. When deciding on which competitor’s keywords to find and use, consider the following:

Relevance

This should be your first filter when deciding which of the competitors’ keywords you found to use in your own SEO strategy. Is the keyword relevant to your products/services? For instance, a competing dental practice ranking for lots of keywords and bringing in lots of traffic may look impressive at first glance.

But after finding the keywords that competitor ranks for, you may see that they are mostly ranking for keywords about a charity they contributed to and wrote a blog post about. The traffic they are getting from these competitors is not qualified traffic that turns into leads and sales. Not only that, it could be hurting their ability to actually rank for the “dental” type keywords they’d actually want to win.

Make sure the competitors’ keywords you target are actually relevant to the business/industry you are in.

Search Intent

As a part of planning your competitor keyword strategy, you must understand the user intent behind specific terms and how they relate to your content. User intent falls usually falls into one of three categories:

• Transactional
• Commercial
• Informational

Commercial-intent keywords are ones where the user is intending  to get additional insight on a product or service so they can make an informed purchase. Transactional intent keywords are ones where the user intends to make a purchase. Informational-intent keywords are ones where the user is trying to just answer a question or get actionable advice on how to do something.

All three of these “search intent” categories are a part of the sales funnel. Typically people search for information about something, get curious about a product service and then finally pull the trigger on which product/service they intend to use. When searching for competitors’ keywords to target, you’ll want to make sure you understand the intent of the search query to know how to build content on your website that fulfills that user intent.

Search Volume

This is the easiest category to consider when finding and using competitor keywords. You’ll want to try and target competitors’ keywords that have a large enough search volume to make doing the SEO work for those terms worth it.

One thing to remember is that competitor keywords with the highest search volume are not always the best. Typically the higher the search volume, the harder they are to win. The trick is to find a relevant keyword with a decent amount of search volume but a low enough keyword difficulty that you can actually win it on your site – see the next point.

Keyword Difficulty

As was mentioned before, SEO tools like SEMrush, Google Keyword planner and Ahrefs can show you some pretty important stats related to your competitors’ keywords. One such keyword stat is that of KD%, or keyword difficulty. This number gives you insight into just how competitive this keyword phrase is and how much work you might have to do if you want to win it.

These SEO tools often give keyword phrases a difficulty rating from 1-100, with 100 being the hardest and 1 being the easiest to win. Keywords with a higher keyword difficulty score are likely shorter-tail keyword phrases that get tons of monthly searches. These types of keywords may be too competitive for smaller companies to target, but you can choose slightly less competitive keywords to try and win with optimized SEO content and improve your chances of ranking highly on search engines.

Here’s an example of how keyword difficulty (KD%) is displayed on an SEO tool to show how competitive keywords are:

You can see that some of the keyword phrases have a KD% above 50 and the tool shows the color as a red-orange (red also correlates to the highest difficulty, most competitive keywords). Others are below 30, showing a green color and indicating they are more winnable terms.

Find and analyze your competitors’ keywords and see how they stack up against each other. Are some more difficult to win than others? 

Don’t Overuse Competitors’ Keywords

It’s important to remember that overusing competitors’ keywords can hurt your content. When using keywords in your content for SEO, put them in naturally throughout your article to attract the attention of search engines without flagging the content as keyword-stuffed copy.

If search engines believe your content contains too many keywords, including competitors’ keywords, they are more likely to push your article down on search engine results pages (SERPs) so users are less likely to find your content easily.

How Do Competitors’ Keywords Boost Your SEO Strategy?

Keywords are the building block of any content marketing strategy. Choosing effective keywords can be challenging, but if you analyze your competition to see which keywords already have a proven history, you’re one step ahead in developing a successful SEO strategy.

Not only does using competitors’ keywords give you a shortcut to developing a successful keyword strategy, but it also helps you remain competitive on search engines. When users search for specific terms, you want your web page to rank highly on SERPs. If you use many of the same keywords as your competitors, search engines will classify your web page as competition, making you more likely to rank on the same SERP.

Your SEO strategy should evolve to meet the needs of your website, so it’s important to be aware that keywords can change. Make it a point to regularly analyze competitors’ keywords to ensure you are not missing out on any new keywords that could boost your marketing strategy.

Why Choose Our SEO Agency for Help Choosing the Right Competitors’ Keywords?

Selecting the right keywords is the cornerstone of any effective SEO strategy. Identifying which keywords competitors use to drive website traffic is an important first step. At BKA Content, we specialize in helping you find the most effective keywords to boost your website’s ranking on search engines. Learn more about how our custom SEO services can help you create a thriving content strategy.