If you’re searching for your product in a search engine and your company is ranked very low in the search results, chances are your competitors are using keywords better than you are. Performing SEO or Search Engine Optimization is crucial when it comes to findability on the internet and can increase sales tremendously. Learn how to find your competitors’ keywords and what to do with that information in this article.
Why it’s important to identify what your competitors are doing
If your competitors have lots of online sales and brand awareness, they have a good marketing strategy that most likely includes keyword research. Keywords research includes a SEMRush keyword gap analysis. With this tool, it is easy to identify your competitors’ keywords and compare them with yours. The difference is called a keyword gap and it is likely to be the reason that your competitor is scoring high in the search engine rankings.
3 ways to identify competitor keywords
Finding competitors’ keywords is quite a tiresome job, but can be made easy with certain analysis tools. These tools can give you a good overview of your competitors’ keyword strategy and the differences between their and your website. Below you’ll find several ways to do a keywords analysis.
SEMRush keyword gap tool
A keyword gap tool with SEMRush is the best way to go about finding your competitors’ keywords. This tool works very quickly and efficiently, and gives a good overview of your keywords and those of your competitors. You can track the strength of every separate keyword and easily determine if they would be useful to apply on your website as well.
Conducting a SEMRush backlink analysis is also a good way to see what your competitors are doing. Links to websites with strong authority can give back authority to the website that it is linking to. Identifying how many links your competitor placed on other websites to a certain web page, and which keywords they used to do that, can give you a great advantage.
Browsing their website and pages
This is a tedious way of uncovering competitor’s keywords, but can certainly be very effective. Try to open a page with lots of texts and see if you can spot words or phrases that are used several times. Make a list of those words and see if you can apply them on your own website. Keywords are related to the subject so it is good practice to make a list of keywords for the different web pages, products or services that you both offer.
Google and analyze the search results
If you search in Google for keywords that relate to your product, service or information on your website, you’ll find a number of search results. Write down all the websites that appear on the first page and analyze their keywords. Appearing on top of the rankings is quite difficult and takes constant research and updating, so knowing what these websites are doing is very helpful for your own strategy.
What to do with that info?
Making your website stronger is easy if you follow the three steps below.
Create a list of keyword gaps
Firstly, make a list of keywords that you are not but your competitor is using. Analyze these keywords and find out which ones are strong.
Create content that is better
Create interesting content that applies to the keywords. Websites that offer interesting content score higher in Google than websites that use keywords in texts that have nothing to do with those keywords.
Identify backlink gaps and close those gaps
Lastly, to make your position stronger, you should analyze backlinks that your competitors are using and you are not. Close those gaps by using backlinks on the same keywords on your website.
