To succeed online, you need a multi-pronged approach. It’s important to effectively use social media, email marketing, and your website to draw in visitors and help them decide to buy from you.
What can be challenging is getting attention in such a noisy space. That’s where understanding your competitors and how they use marketing is essential. One of the top strategies is keyword research. Keywords are an integral part of search engine optimization (SEO) – and they also help you see how your competitors are positioned in the marketplace.
Are you interested in becoming more profitable online? Here’s how keyword research can make all the difference.
Why Use Competitor Keyword Analysis?
Learning from other people’s success is a great way to save yourself both time and money. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when someone else is already doing well. Take a look at what they’re doing and reverse engineer it to apply it to your own business.
When you’re thinking about how to do well with SEO, remember that Google’s overall aim is to provide the best possible experience for users by serving relevant, high-quality content in response to search queries.
Your goal as a business is to be as high-quality and relevant as possible. And that mostly boils down to using the right keywords. But which keywords should you use?
Finding the answer isn’t easy. You need to do keyword research, and you can’t just look at popularity and relevance. You also have to discover which keywords are too competitive to be worthwhile, what return on investment different keywords offer, and how much time and money it will take to rank on page one for a specific term.
By discovering what keywords your most successful competitors are targeting, you’ll have a great starting point.
How to Discover Competitors’ Keywords
How do you know what phrases your best competitors are targeting? It’s not something you can see easily with the naked eye, especially if they’re doing it well. Excellent SEO uses keywords naturally and they blend in with the content on the page.
The good news is that there are easy-to-use tools that allow you to find out what keywords your competitors rank best for. Many allow you to simply enter your competitor’s website in the search bar and receive a wide variety of insight.
You may be able to access free versions that only give you the top few results and that can be a massive boost to your research. If you want to pay for one of the tools, you can learn even more.
What Does an Example Look Like?
When you decide on which competitors are doing well, you then go into your research tools and enter their website. You’ll be able to see how many organic keywords they rank for and the pay-per-click keywords they pay for.
Knowing which keywords are worth paying for is an important data point. You can see the top paid keywords and how your competitor ranks in advertising for each one. Once you have these paid keywords, consider whether you want to add them to your company’s PPC campaign.
You can also discover what SEO keywords your competitor ranks for. Even better, you can get a link to the exact article that ranks well! Use this information to see how long high-ranking articles are so you can have similar content yourself.
No matter your industry, you can learn a lot about what keywords matter by researching the results of top competitors.
Using Top Keywords in Your Campaigns
Once you’ve discovered top keywords, it’s time to decide which ones you want to target and what your strategy will be. You can try to compete on the exact same phrases, but since they are already knocking it out of the park, that may not be a good idea.
Instead, look for ways you can adapt. Consider:
- Conceptually similar phrases, like “customer management software” instead of “CRM software.”
- Using a long-tail keyword that still has excellent search volume.
- Look for related keywords in Google’s keyword tool.
- Compare multiple competitors to identify the most critical keywords in your industry.
Finding ways to use top keywords in new ways or focus your content on relevant topics are great ways to benefit from competitive keyword analysis.
Keyword Analysis Can Help You Win at Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a vast landscape, but there are people in your industry that are succeeding in significant ways online. Whether you are a dental office, a marketing firm, or a car repair shop, you can use insights from your top competitors to help you grow.
A competitive keyword analysis is a great way to improve your SEO, focus your content, and provide your visitors with a better experience online. When you put top keywords in your industry to good use, you can become more profitable and successful than ever.
