How Competitor Analysis Helps Me Do Keyword Research

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

4 min readSep 8, 2017

Keyword research is one of the first things to do in search engine optimization. It is a critical step that will impact on everything you’ll do in future. Instead of making mistakes, I learn by others’ experiences and mistakes.

Exploring rivals’ semantics not only saves time but helps to keep one step ahead of competitors. Here’s how I benefit from analysing competitors.

1. I Know My Future Prospects

Your direct competitors are the sites who rank for the same keywords and target the same audience as you. As soon as you know them in the face you can tell what is happening in the market.

If I insert a certain page url or the domain name in free Serpstat’s Competitor Analysis tool, I get a list of competitors. Some get frustrated when SEO does not bring fast results. That’s not always something you do wrong. Probably you are just trying to punch over your weight. When I explore competitors carefully I know what to expect and can calculate the risks.

Click on each to see what keywords they rank for. Most of them can be added to your list of keywords.

Let’s see who are competitors for Amazon.

2. I Know Which Keywords I Omitted

Google’s Keyword Planner or Keyword Tool can be a first step of a keyword research. But hen I get a feeling I’ve run out of possible keywords, I check which keywords organic competitors rank for. Go to Missing Keywords in URL analysis to do this.

But don’t simply copy all the keywords you’ll find in this list. Depending on the search volume (in the second column) and competition strength (third) you can pick up those which are worth targeting. By this I mean that ranking in top 10 for them is in your power.

3. I Can Estimate My Success (or Failure)

If I compare rankings for just a couple of keywords, information I get may be completely controversial and cause confusion. Let’s go to SEO Research -> Domain vs Domain. Here I can add two of my competitors at once to compare my amount of phrases and visibility to all theirs’ phrases.

There will be some high volume phrases and if one manage to rank higher than competitors for them, that will give a big advantage.

5. I’ll Know How to Plan Paid Search Campaign

If you are not working with any paid search campaigns, analyzing competitors’ ads still can bring much information. If someone targets a keyword in PPC that means it has a potential to bring much traffic.

Go to PPC research and choose Ad Examples/Competitors/Keywords (depending on what you would like to explore).

I advise to sort keywords by Cost Per Click and to start exploring from the cheapest. Here you may find some keywords that are cheap but still can bring traffic.