Learn about SEO and understand how it all works
SEO has been around for a long time, and it's a process that helps websites rank higher in the search engine results pages.
Search engines use algorithms to rank websites based on their relevance to what the user is searching for. The higher your website ranks, the more traffic you will get from people who are looking for what you offer.
Some of these algorithms include:
- Google’s PageRank Algorithm
- Google’s RankBrain Algorithm
- Bing’s Rank Algorithm
- Yahoo!’s PageRank Algorithm
How to See all the keywords your competitors are Targeting
Keyword research is the foundation upon which all good search marketing campaigns are built. Targeting relevant, high-intent keywords, structuring campaigns into logical, relevant ad groups, and eliminating wasteful negative keywords are all steps advertisers should take to build strong PPC campaigns. You also need to do keyword research to inform your content marketing efforts and drive organic traffic.
Sometimes, though, you really need to figure out what your competitors are up to. What keywords are my competitors using?
Competitive keyword analysis is one of the most effective ways to compete in a crowded space and gain a crucial advantage over other businesses in your industry. So how do you actually find those keywords that your competitors are targeting in their paid and organic search campaigns?
Here are eight competitor keyword research tools and tactics you can use to find competitor keywords, so you can keep up with the Joneses (or leave them in the dust).
The 8 best tools to find competitor keywords
Here are the tools we’ll be covering in this round-up:
- WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool
- BuzzSumo
- Semrush
- Spyfu
1. WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool
One of the best ways to find competitor keywords (if we do say so ourselves) is by using WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.
How can we use WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool to find competitor keywords? Just enter a competitor’s URL into the tool (instead of a search term) and hit “Search.” For the sake of example, I’ve chosen to run a sample report for the Content Marketing Institute’s website by entering the URL of the CMI website into the Keyword field, and I’ve restricted results to the United States by selecting it from the drop-down menu on the right:
2. BuzzSumo
We’ve talked about BuzzSumo numerous times in the past, and that’s because it’s awesome. (And no, BuzzSumo didn’t pay me to say that.) For content marketers, it’s pretty much the perfect tool for competitive analysis, and one of BuzzSumo’s strengths is identifying potential competitors you may not have been aware of.
For example, most digital marketers are familiar with Moz. They produce excellent content, develop their own suite of awesome tools, and also lay on a pretty great annual conference, too. If you run an SEO blog or publish SEO-related content, you almost undoubtedly already know that Moz is among your most fierce competitors. But what about smaller, independent sites that are also doing well?
Enter BuzzSumo.
In the example search below, I entered “SEO” as my initial query – an incredibly broad term with millions of potential results. Here’s what BuzzSumo unearthed for me:
Obviously, we’re not interested in the top two results, as they both pertain to South Korean actress Park Seo Joon. But what about the next two results? Both were published by Mike Johnson at a site called getstarted.net – a site I’d never heard of prior to conducting this search. Check out those social share numbers, though – more than 35,000 shares for each article! This gives us a great starting point for our competitive intelligence research, but we need to go deeper. Fortunately, BuzzSumo’s competitive analysis tools are top-notch.
We’re going to use BuzzSumo’s Domain Comparison tool to compare two different domains across a range of parameters. For the sake of example, I’ve chosen to compare the Content Marketing Institute’s site against Copyblogger:
BuzzSumo will then provide you with a breakdown of how to two domains compare to one another. There are a range of reports available in the Domain Comparison tool, but two of the most interesting are the Average Shares by Content Type and Average Shares by Content Length reports:
As you can see, the most popular content type for both the Content Marketing Institute and Copyblogger are lists, followed closely by how-to articles. This is already proving to be valuable data, but we can go deeper to see which articles are being shared the most by length:
Now we’re getting a much clearer picture of what’s working for these two publishers. As the graph above illustrates, long-form content performs well in terms of social shares, even at lengths of between 3,000-10,000 words.
But what about specific content and those sweet, sweet keywords? Let’s dive into BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis tool:
This overview is certainly interesting, but it’s not what we’re looking for – we want to know which individual articles have performed strongly during the past year. We can see this data by scrolling down past the dashboard summary to the Top Pieces of Content report:
The top result – 50 Best Social Media Tools From 50 Most Influential Marketers Online – is far and away the most popular article published by CMI within the past year with more than 10,000 shares, twice the share volume of the second-most popular article. Armed with this knowledge, we can use the URL of that article in another keyword tool to examine which specific keywords CMI’s most popular article contains. Sneaky, huh?
When it comes to competitive keyword research, BuzzSumo doesn’t offer a great deal of keyword-specific data. It has, however, given us an excellent starting point for further research.
RELATED: The 5-Step Competitor Keyword Analysis (+Template!)
3. Semrush
Let’s say we want to continue the research we began in BuzzSumo to find CMI’s top competitors. We can do this by selecting the “Competitors” dashboard, which can be found via the Domain Analytics > Organic Research menu:
For this example, we’re analyzing CMI’s organic keywords from Google.com data for desktop searches within the United States. You can change this to localized British, German, or French Google results if needed, and you can also choose between desktop or mobile traffic data.
Next up, I want to see how CMI stacks up against similar publishers in terms of their organic keywords in relation to their organic search traffic. I can find this data by examining the graph that SEM Rush generates as part of this report.
As you can see below, CMI is very close to content marketing productivity app CoSchedule’s site in both organic keyword volume and organic search traffic. We can also see that there are more than 51,000 organic keywords across the CMI website, as well as traffic data and the estimated cost of attracting that traffic:
This data is definitely useful, but I want more – specifically, how CMI’s competitors rank for their keywords. This data can be found beneath the reports above, in the Organic Competitors report:
This is where things get really interesting.
As the table above shows, CMI’s top organic competitor is Curata. If we look at the traffic/keyword overview graph above, Curata appears to be of little threat to CMI; it ranks lower for both volume of organic keywords and organic search traffic, yet it’s listed as the top organic competitor in the above table. Why? Because SEM Rush doesn’t just factor in organic keywords and organic search traffic – it also factors in how many keywords a competitor’s site has in common with yours, as well as the number of paid keywords on the site (in Curata’s case, just one), as well as the traffic price, the estimated cost of those keywords in Google Ads.
We can also see that Curata has approximately 15,300 search engine keywords on its site. What if we want to see what those keywords are? All we have to do is click on the data we want to examine:
That’s more like it! With just a few clicks, we can now see a wealth of competitive keyword data for Curata, such as the keywords themselves, their average organic position in the SERP, approximate search volume, the keyword’s difficulty (how hard it will be to rank for that specific keyword), average CPC, the share of traffic driven to the site by a particular keyword (displayed as a percentage), as well as costs, competitive density, volume of results, trend data over time, and an example SERP. Incredible.
4. SpyFu
SpyFu is another popular competitive intelligence tool that can help you find competitor keywords. Unlike similar tools, however, SpyFu is a tool dedicated solely to competitive intelligence research.
An overview of the domain dashboard within SpyFu
It’s actually pretty remarkable how much data SpyFu can provide, even for basic or cursory searches. Data on everything from local and global monthly search volume, CTR, ad spend, advertisement history, ranking history, backlinks, and ad groups is readily available, offering invaluable insight into your competitors’ keyword strategies.
Let’s continue our research by selecting “Competition” from the menu to the left of our domain overview as seen above. This brings us to a novel and very cool feature of SpyFu known as Kombat, which allows you to pit three domains against one another to determine how competitive they are:
Even in a single click, we’re provided with a range of very interesting competitive intelligence data. These results are visualized as a Venn diagram, allowing you to quickly and easily get an idea of how CMI stacks up against Curata and CoSchedule, CMI’s two biggest competitors. On the right-hand side, you can select one of several submenus. Let’s take a look at the Weaknesses report, which lists all the keywords that both other competitors in our example rank for, but that CMI does not:
This list of keyword weaknesses (or opportunities, if you’re a glass-half-full kind of person) can be sorted by search volume, exact CPC, and keyword difficulty, and allows you to quickly and easily discover keywords your competitors are ranking for that your site is not – an invaluable part of your competitive intelligence analysis.
We can also drill further down into SpyFu’s keyword data to examine specific keywords from a competing site, in this case Curata. This is accessed by navigating to the Keyword Research > Related Keywords report:
This brings us to a comprehensive table of keyword data for Curata. This table contains data on pretty much every keyword metric you could ever need, including difficulty, CPCs for all three major keyword match types, local and global average search volume, and CTR for each match type.
SpyFu is a seriously powerful tool, and when you use it alongside other tools as part of your competitor keyword research workflow, you’ll be amazed at the data you can dig up.
Seek and ye shall find [competitor keywords]
These are just a few of our favorite tools and tactics for discovering the keywords our competitors are targeting and ranking for. Whatever tool you choose to use for keyword research, don’t forget about your competitors; they might be doing something you can learn from!
One final note: bidding on competitor keywords is highly effective but can get expensive. If you’re in need of some lower-cost alternatives, we’ve got you covered! Here are three ways to target your competitors on Google without Search and three more ways to target your competitors on using paid social.
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