There is a well-known saying in business: you should work smarter, not harder. This saying is most true for digital marketing. You might have to spend months trying to figure out which search terms will bring in customers. Meanwhile, your competitors have probably done the work for you. They have sampled the market, spent money, and figured out what works.
This is not a situation where you should follow the crowd without any thought. Instead, you should consider competitor keyword research as a search for treasure in the form of data that is already available and that you can use to get the lay of the land. Specifically, the competitors’ keyword research is the careful analysis of the keywords which the competitors achieve rankings for in Google search results through their organic search efforts as well as their paid ads, in order to find areas where your business strategy might have gaps.
Discovering such information places you in a stronger competitive position. You will be able to immediately recognize their strong points, their money-draining moves, and, most importantly, their blind spots regarding valuable opportunities.
This practical tutorial reveals the step-by-step methods of how to recognize who your real competitors are (some might not be who you think), how to do a thorough SEO keyword analysis, how to discover their paid PPC tactics, and how to turn all this first-hand information into a content plan that unlocks growth.
Step 1: Finding the Competitors that Count
It’s necessary to figure out the exact competitors first, which is often a business mistake. The mistake is to assume that the competitors in the business world are the same as the competitors in the internet search world.
Direct Competitors vs. Indirect Competitors
Physically, a neighborhood boutique coffee shop is a direct competitor to Starbucks that is located on the next street. Whereas the coffee shop online, i.e., on search engines results pages – SERPs, – can be argued to be indirectly competing with Wikipedia, food bloggers, lifestyle magazines, and even Amazon.
In the case of selling “organic coffee beans,” you are, obviously, expected to be competing with other roasters. However, in reality, you are up against any website which Google shows on its first page for that search term. This differentiation is important to comprehend. What you need to do is analyze the ones that are actually hurting you in terms of traffic, and not the ones that are just taking away your sales.
Manual Search Tactics
Identify your competitors for free and quickly with a simple manual search by using Google’s Incognito mode. It prevents the results from being personalized based on your previous searches.
You can make a list of 5–10 essential keywords representing your industry and then search for them one by one. Which sites occupy the top three positions for a majority of such keywords? Are there certain information-giving blogs appearing in the results of “how-to” queries? Are there very powerful providers like Yelp or Capterra having their pages widely spread throughout the search engine results? Write down those domains that appear repeatedly because you have found your actual competitors.
Using Intelligence Tools
Manual search has its benefits; however, being limited to a few searches, it is quite insufficient to cover an extensive domain. That is why efficient professional SEO software solutions are indispensable. By providing your area of expertise, platforms, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, or SpyFu, will give you a list of competing domains at the click of a button. In fact, these tools base the competition for domains on the number of shared keywords for which both of the domains rank. You will be amazed by how different the results are and this kind of data will guide your strategy in the direction of rivals that really matter.
Deep Dive: SEO Keyword Analysis
You have finally arrived at the stage when it is time to get down to the nitty-gritty of your competitors’ organic strategy after simply having the overview of who your competitors are.
Keyword Gap Analysis
A fundamental part of competitive research is the “Gap Analysis.” It visually defines the battleground between you and your competitors. Most SEO tools have a function designated to this feature (and it is frequently named “Keyword Gap” or “Content Gap”).
The involvement of your domain and 2–3 competition domains is required. You will be given a Venn diagram or list showing:
- Common Terms: Words you’re both ranking for.
- New Terms: Words they rank for, but you don’t.
- Existing Terms: Words you rank for, but the position is significantly lower than them.
The “Missing” part accounts for the productive use of your superior knowledge environment. These words have been used in a website that is the closest to your profile, with the purpose of attracting the site traffic, but neither of the two is aware of the word usage.
The analysis of competitors’ high-traffic pages
Keywords are just simple letters and words until they are put on a webpage. However, as a rule, one would feel overwhelmed by looking at 10,000 keywords. You will be better off just looking at those that make the competitor’s “Top Pages by Traffic.”
On diving deeper into the highest-traffic URL of a competitor, you find a bunch of very valuable long-tail keywords. To demonstrate, if the top blog of a competitor is “The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work Software,” then it’s quite unlikely their ranking is for just this one phrase. Instead, they would rank for the “best tools for remote teams,” “WFH software” and “remote collaboration apps” and many other phrases.
Instead of dealing with somewhat meaningless words individually, focusing on web pages enables you to identify relevant topics to cover in order to fight head-to-head with the competition.
The concept of “Keyword Difficulty” (KD)
You cannot compete only by words, without having a battle plan. Imagine the situation where a competitor ranks #1 for an extremely generic term which has a huge search volume such as “shoes” and on top of that that competitor is a corporate giant like Nike. It would be simply foolish for you to challenge them directly.
Go for that sweet spot namely a consideration when a term has a high volume and a low difficulty at the same time. Using your analysis tool, sort out your competitor’s keywords by “KD” (Keyword Difficulty) or “Competition.” In this manner, you will be able to select those terms which drive quite good traffic, but at the same time, have the smallest possible difficulty score. These are the proverbial “low-hanging fruits”—areas with such low competition where a good piece of content that is optimized can quickly reach the top of the rankings.
Grabbing the “Zero-Click” Wins
Have you realized that Google tells the answers to a proportion of the users’ questions straight on the search page through the use of Featured Snippets? They are the boxes at the very top of a page of search results which give a definition or a list without users having to click on the link.
Your competitor is enjoying the featured snippet and therefore the prime visibility if featured in a snippet. Find those questions (usually those that start with “what is,” “how to,” or “benefits of”). Should you be able to organize your material in a more straightforward way—by means of short definitions, bullet points or numbered lists—you are setting yourself up nicely to “steal” that snippet from them, even if you do not have the #1 organic ranking.
Uncovering the Money: PPC Keyword Strategy
Organic traffic is wonderful, but the paid traffic data reveals a totally different picture. The data tell us what generates actual sales.
Why PPC Data is Important to SEO
When a company is willing to pay $10, $20, or even $50 per click for a specific keyword, you can be sure that keyword is capable of converting. No one business can afford running ads at a high cost on keywords that simply do not bring in leads or sales.
Paid keyword research gives valuable insights into the characteristics of the million-dollar customers. SEO keywords tend to be of the “browser” type, while PPC keywords, in contrast, are “buyer” keywords. Effective integration of PPC keyword strategy with SEO research naturally results in the prioritization of high-revenue content rather than vanity metrics of the traffic.
Evaluation of Advertisement Copy and Spending
There are instances when a competitor is sharing their paid strategy openly on “Ad History.” Such tools as SpyFu and Semrush allow you to see it.
It is not so much what you see right now but what you notice from the time perspective that counts. In case an ad was running for only two weeks, and the advertiser stopped, then you can be sure that it did not work. On the other hand, the situation when a competitor bids for a keyword for a whole year means that the keyword is a winner.
Also, you should not neglect the analysis of the ad copies. What benefits and features are most often highlighted? Are there frequent mentions of such things as free shipping, 24/7 support, and easy integration? This will give you a notion of the major customer concerns which you can then turn into the meta descriptions for organic listings and the copy for your landing pages.
Discovering “Costly” Keywords
One of the clever ways of trimming the budget is exploiting SEO for highly-priced PPC keywords.
Find out the maximum cost per click (CPC) of your competitor’s paid keywords. The most expensive ones are the ones that are most costly to bid on, so identify them first. Should you manage to produce such fantastic content that organically ranks for these keywords, then essentially you will be obtaining “free” traffic while your competitors are paying a premium for the same trick which is none other than the traffic attraction. This constitutes the final efficiency move in search marketing.
From Data to Action: Developing Your Content Strategy
Data that is not acted upon is mere noise. You now have plenty of sheets where SEO and PPC analysis deliver the list of opportunities. The question is how to convert them to the content plan.
The Skyscraper Technique
Discovering a keyword is only celebrating half a victory; the other half is creating content that is superior. For example, you cannot simply write a 500-word blog post and expect to outrank a competitor’s extensive 2,000-word guide.
That is the point where the Skyscraper Technique comes in handy. Check out the competitor’s page which is currently the number one for your keyword. Make an assessment:
- It is old.
- It is hard to follow or even worse has a bad design.
- It does not have any visuals, videos, or data.
- It does not have all the information a reader might be seeking.
Being “taller” means offering more comprehensive, at the same time updated, better designed, more helpful content than the one existing now.
Optimizing Existing Content
According to conventional wisdom, new pages are always a solution. In most cases, however, the fastest wins come from optimizing current content.
Put side-by-side your article with the competitor’s top-ranked equivalent. Suppose they include X, Y, and Z sub-topics, whereas you only have X and Y, then Google considers the competitor’s article more authoritative. To catch up with them, you first have to update your post to include section Z, add an FAQ section, and refresh the statistics. Bringing the “content gap” closer on each page, you often can push your rankings from page 2 to page 1 or even better.
Intent Matching
There is a small risk involved in the fact that you should select the keyword only once you have checked the “search intent” of that keyword.
In simple terms, Google strives to satisfy users’ needs. A search for a query like “best running shoes” would mean the returned pages are articles and reviews (Informational intent). Meanwhile, if one searches for “buy Nike Air Max,” then the pages returned are going to be product pages (Transactional intent).
It is surely not a good idea to outrank a product page with a blog post if your competitor ranks the first with a product page. On the other hand, you should not outrank a “Top 10” listicle with a sales page if that is what your competitor ranks with. You need to honor the format and intent of the content that Google is most likely to reward in the current situation.
Advanced Tips for Competitive Intelligence
Brand vs. Non-Brand Keywords
When you export a massive list of competitor keywords, it will contain a lot of their brand names. If you are not planning to run a very aggressive “Us vs. Them” comparison campaign, you generally want to get rid of these words. What you really want to zero in on are non-branded phrases, which are the ones that describe the problem your product solves, rather than the name of the company doing the solving.
Seasonal Analysis
As the last tip, don’t forget about the time factor. See when your competitors intensify their content production or ad spending. For example, would you say that they go big in November for Black Friday? Is their January surge for “New Year” resolutions? Knowing your competitor’s seasonal rhythm will give you the time to prepare and execute the right marketing strategy without running in the wrong season.
Turn Analysis Into Advantage
Competitor analysis is not deception; it is the art of spotting the places where the rivals have left open the market or have done it not to wholesale. It gives you the power to no longer make market predictions, but to perform based on market data.
Through the three pillars – Knowing your real competitors, deep SEO keyword analysis, and leveraging PPC keyword strategy – you can outline your path to higher rankings and better ROI.
You should not let this data become wishful thinking. Take a prime competitor today, perform a gap analysis, and find out what is missing in your strategies. You just have to be watchful in order to find the opportunities that are there.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What separates direct SEO competitors from indirect SEO competitors?
A direct competitor sells a product or service that is similar to yours. However, an indirect competitor is any website that ranks for the same keywords as your website, even if what they sell is totally different from what you offer. To illustrate, if your business is about “accounting software,” then a direct competitor would be another software company. Meanwhile, an indirect under the same keyword category is a business author like Forbes or Investopedia who publish “accounting tips” but do not sell the software. Winning SEO ultimately depends on analyzing both types of competitors.
How frequent should competitor keyword research be?
The digital world keeps evolving by the day. To keep abreast of changes, at the minimum, a high-level gap analysis should be done quarterly. On the other hand, in highly competitive industries, monthly monitoring is the norm to spot new content trends or changes in competitors’ paid ad strategies.
Is it possible to do competitor keyword research using only free resources?
Yes, although free access is usually far from adequate. For example, you can manually check rankings by using Google’s Incognito mode, get bid estimates from the Google Ads Keyword Planner (assuming you have an account) and get limited data from the free versions of tools like Ubersuggest or Moz. However, if you are looking for a complete picture of thousands of keywords and backlinks, you will land on a paid subscription to a dedicated SEO tool.
Explain syntax: What does keyword difficulty (KD) refer to?
SEO tools use keyword difficulty (KD) to predict how challenging it would be to rank on Google’s first page for a given phrase. Typically, this is a 0-100 range. In case a high KD is denoted, it signifies the top-ranking pages are very authoritative and have numerous backlinks, hence, being very difficult to surpass. If the KD is low, the chances for newer or smaller websites to climb up the rankings is high.
Should I use a competitor’s brand name for PPC bidding?
This is a frequent strategy but a very bold one. By bidding on your competitor’s brand name you are enabling your ad to show to the people who are searching for that competitor specifically. The tactic might turn out quite effective in terms of capturing the leads with the highest buying intent who are comparison shopping. However, the downside is initiating a “bidding war” resulting in both sides placing bids on each other’s names which in turn means increased costs for everyone. Be very cautious and make sure your advert copy is clear about your unique offer.
