Competing could be the most exciting aspect of a marketer’s career, although making money is on the top of Olympus. But if you are not a good player and try to win more, there will not be more numbers increasing your bank account.
To be a better competitor, you must improve your own strong points and be careful of what the other companies are doing to improve and even upgrade all their strategies.
Search Engine Optimization is a key factor for every marketer today. Competing for keywords can make your website or product appear at the top of every search engine your customers use.
This article will show you how to be a better competitor and find your competitor´s keywords?
Let´s go there, marketers!
Why should you find your competition’s keywords?
“All is fair in love and war,” and how you love marketing so much, you should try everything to improve your status and strategy.
And while you should look at your competitor’s strategies to have a good knowledge of everything that is going on, remember not to be obsessed about it. Instead, it is better to copy, improve, and even come with some new ideas nobody will try.
When you know which keywords your competitor is using the most, you understand where you can pass them by and even steal some keywords to beat them in the search results. With a deep search, you can even find new keywords.
All this deep research and “spy work” can help your SEO strategy to improve finding new strategies to manage more traffic to your website.
How to Find Your Competitors?
Starting your keyword research is a long a sometimes tedious process. The “Related” option on Google is useful for taking the first look at the most popular keywords. But then, you may ask, who are my real competitors?
In case you are a freelancer or work for an agency, the best option could be asking directly to your boss or client, as they may know at first thought which companies are the ones that are getting into their success way once you know that possible competitors start looking how they are performing on their keywords (we will give you some tools later) to check if they are actually your strongest competitors.
While many companies are going digital, it is also important to know that some tough competitors may be outside of social media. In this case, it´s recommendable to do a deep research of real-life competitors.
Do Keyword Research to find your Competitors.
When doing a competitor analysis, some manual work is needed to find the most obvious competitors. To achieve this, you can search on Google basic keywords on your market niche to see what are the top websites appearing on the top.
If your website is about “Real Estate” and your company is located in Portugal, then write “Real Estate Portugal” on your search engine, and a lot of competitors will show up. Study and analyze them deeply.
Some tips for finding your competitors are:
- Write a list of the most used keywords on their most important pages.
- Use your marketer instinct to search the obvious keywords on Google.
- Use keyword tools
Tools to Find Your Competitor´s Keywords
To compete and achieve every goal you want, you must use every possible tool to improve your performance on Search Engine Optimization.
We share some of the best tools to find your competitors keywords:
Google Keyword Planner Tool
This free tool can help you find the right keywords to target on your website and articles, but also one of its most interesting uses is that you can spy on your competition.
Once you have logged in to the platform, you have to:
- Choose the option “search for new keywords using a phrase, website, or category.”
- Put your competitor´s URL and click “get ideas.”
- Check the list of keywords of your competitor.
SpyFu
If you ever had a 007 fantasy where you go undercover to find secret information about other companies, SpyFu is the right choice. But don’t worry, you won’t need CIA hacking abilities to find information. It is as easy as pasting your competitors’ URL into the search box. Once you have done this, all the information about your competitors´ keywords will download for your marketing purposes.
This tool also offers you valuable information like:
- Paid Keywords
- Estimated Monthly SEO clicks
- Top organic competitors
Use SpyFu to really dig into the most valuable info about other companies.
LongTailPro
Long Tail Pro can help you get straight to the best options that work in your niche with over 400 long-tail keywords.
But we are not talking about getting the best keywords because we have other articles talking about that. In fact, the best way to do keyword research is to let your competitors do all the hard work.
All you are going to do is switching Long Tail Pro to Competitors Keyword Mode. Put your competitor URL and let Long Tail Pro do the rest.
KeywordSpy
More spy tools, so maybe after you´ve read this article, you will have become the new James Bond on keyword investigation.
KeywordSpy has grown in popularity for its accurate data and easy-to-understand interface.
Among the data KeywordSpy offers, you can find:
- Keywords
- Pay Per Click Statistics
- Organic Campaign Strategies
While this tool is not robust as SpyFu or LongTailPro, the results can get you good insights into your competitor´s marketing strategy.
What to do with Your Competitors Keywords?
With good keyword research and studying the most important aspect of your competitors, you have many improvement opportunities in your hands.
Once you know how your market is behaving and your client’s needs, you can create better content or products to offer new customers. Answer questions they haven’t found on other websites, offer products or services your competitors don’t have, and everything that comes to your mind. Your authority will grow to make your business rank at the top of search engines when you do this.
If you plan to do a Pay Per Click campaign, you can also find long-tail keywords with lower competition at a lower cost.
Also, give credit to your competitors’ things right and get inspiration from these strategies to reach many more customers.
You might also decide to run a PPC campaign for a promising long-tail keyword with lower competition at a lower cost.
Conclusion
Every marketing agency or business must know who they are competing with to be up to the challenge they are dealing with. Keyword research needs manual and digital work to be done correctly. In that way, you get to know deeply your marketing niche giving you more control over what your strategy should be.
While looking into your competitors´ keywords may seem like a shady thing to do, it is important to know that the marketing world is highly competitive, and any big company will show no mercy. To survive this “business jungle,” it is better to know every aspect of the people you are dealing with. Don´t see it as “stealing” from your competitors, instead look at it as you are “studying” them as you can learn valuable lessons from the keyword choice and marketing strategies.
While copying can bring some good results, they won’t be as good as your competitors, and common customers can notice that you are doing the same thing. Instead, take inspiration from the things they are doing and try to make it better.
Thanks for reading this article; we hope you keep improving your marketing skills and achieving great business goals.
See you next time!!!!!
About the author:
We are Codedesign – a multi cultural, award-winning digital marketing agency . We define as a search-led, innovative digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, PPC, social media ads, content marketing and data analytics. We are trusted with growing the online presence of companies on a local, national and international scale. We work very closely with our clients’ team to understand how best to meet their needs, utilizing the diverse talent within our team to create highly innovative marketing campaigns.
