In this lesson, we take a look at how to understand what your competitors are up to and how you could differentiate from them. We will see how we can use various free (limited usage) tools that are available online and finalize our list of keywords.
What is Competitor Research?
Competitor research involves figuring out who your competitors are and what they are upto. It will help you differentiate yourself better and create a high performance PPC campaign. It could also help you identify competitor strengths and weaknesses while uncovering opportunities for yourself.
Understanding Yourself and Your Competitors
We have already looked at how to reflect on your own business to understand your core product or service and note down your USPs and benefits. We will use the core product/services mentioned here to find out who your competitors are.
Find Out Your Competitors
- Do a Google Search — for your core service or product and just have a look at who all are advertising for it. Ads can be easily identified by the “Ad” notification in bold right next to the URL
- Note down what are the features of the products that they are conveying in the ad, how are they claiming this will benefit the customers and what “Call To Action” (explained below) are they using. Here is a table I use. Do this exercise for all your important search terms and try to note down as many competitors as you can. Try doing this during different times of the day as different companies might be showing their ads at different times of the day.
Competitor From Different Location
Now, the above method is great for when you are present in the same location as where you want to target your ads. But what if let’s say, you are in Mumbai and want to see who are the people showing up for your important search terms in Delhi. Google Ads has you covered. They offer a tool in the interface that allows you to simulate the Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for any location and for some countries you can even see the search results page for a pin code
- Go to your Google Ads account and click on the wrench icon
- Click on “Ad Preview and Diagnosis”
- Here, enter the location you want to see the competitors ads for
- Select the device. I usually check who are advertising on each of the devices. Some people might advertise only on Mobiles
- Enter your search term and see the results. Ignore the “Your ad is not showing up” warning
- Fill out the competitor information for the advertisers you see here and make sure you are looking at the ads that show up at the bottom of the page as well
This will help you identify various competitors in your target location for your main keywords. You should also now have a good idea of what kind of messaging they use. This should help you out in comparing your own products and services and see what unique benefit you can offer that others aren’t offering.
Keywords Targeted By Competitors
You already should have a good idea of some of the keywords your competitors are targeting when you searched for them on Google or through the Ad Preview tool. But what if they are targeting keywords you haven’t thought of earlier? Well, for that we have a few simple tools that help you identify those keywords:
Keyword Planner
- Yup, we go back to Google Ads Keyword Planner again. This time, we use a feature that we didn’t use earlier
- Go to keyword planner, click on “Discover new keywords”
- This time, we click on “START WITH A WEBSITE”
- Here, all you have to do is paste the page the competitors ads land on (click on their ads to find out what that page is)
- Select the right location, enable “Use only this page” option and hit “Get Results”
- This list is just what Google thinks that the website may be targeting and not what they are actually targeting. It should, however, give you a good idea of what keywords the competitor website is optimized for and thus there is a chance that they are targeting the same keywords
- Select the most relevant keywords from this list for your business and paste them in an excel sheet
SEMRush
SEMRush is another wonderful tool that lets you spy on your competitors for free. But please note that you (as a free user) are allowed only a limited number of queries a day when you use this. So be sure of what you want to look for here before you use it. Here’s how you can use it:
- Create a free account, I won’t go into the details here as it is pretty easy
- Once you have created a free account, expand the menu which says “SEO Toolkit” and choose “Advertising Toolkit”
- Here, click on “Domain Overview”
- Here, enter the competitor URL in the space provided and make sure you are getting the information for the right country and click on “Search”
- Here, you will get a bunch of data, you can have a look at it all to see if you find anything interesting, but our main objective here is to look at the “Top Paid Keywords”. Look for it after scrolling down a bit and click on “View Full Report”
- Copy all the keywords you see here and paste them in a new excel sheet
- You can even have a look at the various ad copies they are either running or used to run by click on “Ad Copies”
- Another tab you can look at is the competitors tab, here you can find out who your competitor competes with and see if you missed any
- Repeat this process for all competitors you have identified already
SpyFu
This is another great tool to use to find keywords. The drawback though is that it will only provide data for the US and the UK. If you are working on campaigns there, this should be just great. Here’s how you can use it:
- Creating an account is simple here too. Just go to spyfu.com and sign up
- Once you have signed up, look for “PPC Research”
- Enter the competitor in the space provided and hit enter
- This should populate the data for your competitor. Look for “Most Profitable Keywords” section on that page and click on “View All Keywords”
- This should give you a list of the competitors top most keywords
- Don’t worry too much about the rest of the figures there, just copy all the keywords you can on an excel sheet
- Another thing you should look at is the “Kombat” tab
- This compares the keywords targeted by the website entered and two other of its competitors. By clicking on the individual sections of the Venn diagram you can see what keywords are common between these competitors
- You can also check “Competitors” and “Ad History” tabs to see if you may have missed something
- Repeat this process for all the competitors and generate a keyword list
Besides these, there are other third party tools which will help you identify the keywords and ads that your competitors might be using. None of these tools, including the ones already mentioned here are 100% accurate. Yet it is a good idea to have a look at the keywords these tools recommend.
What Do You Do with All the New Keywords?
Target them immediately? Not quite, we still need search volumes and CPC bid data that Google recommends for these keywords. So, we go back to the keyword planner again.
- Head back to the keyword planner and this time click on “Get Search Volume and Forecasts”
- Copy paste all the keywords you have in the space provided and click on “Get Started”
- Click on the down arrow as shown in the screenshot here
- Click on “Plan Historical Metrics” to download
- Go through this list again the same way we went through with our main keywords and add the new keywords you find here to you main keyword list with all the stats
Merge both the lists to create a final list of keywords. This should give a good list of terms for your business to target on Google Ads. But before you go ahead make sure you are deduping the keywords. It means getting rid of duplicates. Here are a couple of articles that I think should help you do that.
https://blog.nhlearningsolutions.com/blog/how-to-remove-duplicate-values-excel-in-5-steps
https://www.excelfunctions.net/remove-duplicates-excel.html
Next we look at how to create a campaign structure.
