You can’t deny the importance and benefits of choosing the right keywords for your website. Although I’m not a fan of keywords, keyword research is fundamental to SEO.

You need to master the basics before getting your hands dirty with advanced keyword research which includes keyword clustering. I will write about keyword clustering later on.

In this article, I will guide you on how to identify your competitor’s keywords.

You might wonder why do I need to find my competitor’s keywords. I already have a list of targeted keywords relevant to my business.

That’s not enough!

In this digital age, you should be aware of your competitor’s digital marketing efforts especially SEO. By getting to know their SEO efforts, you’ll be able to craft a strategic SEO plan to gain a competitive advantage over them.

Identifying your competitor’s keywords means:

1. The keywords your competitors are targeting but not ranking high on SERPs.
2. The keywords your competitors are currently ranking at the top of SERPs.

Why Identifying your competitor’s keywords is important?

Some companies spend too much time spying on their competitors and often fail to create leverage over their competitors. To avoid such failures, you want to stay informed with your competitor’s keywords and figure out what they are trying to achieve.

Well, these are some of the best ways you can use your competitor’s keywords to your advantage:

• To have a clear understanding of how your competitors are performing on search engines and how you can perform better.
• To get all the keywords your competitors are targeting and identify the best way to rank higher than them.
• To identify some of the top keywords you’ve missed out or overlooked when doing keyword research.

The mentioned advantages are extremely valuable to take your SEO initiatives to the next level.

So, now you need to dive deep into identifying your competitor’s keywords. You can do them manually but it requires a huge amount of effort and time. Rather than relying on manual methods, you can use various tools that will help you reveal competitor’s keywords in no time.

Let’s take a look at the tools that can help you perform competitor keywords research.

1. SpyFu
2. SEMRush

** There are other SEO tools available to identify competitor keywords and analyze them. But I prefer using these tools as I’ve been using them for years.

SpyFu

If you want to learn how your competitors are attracting potential customers with organic and paid traffic, SpyFu is the tool you need.

In this section, I will go over the features and functions of SpyFu and how you can steal your competitor’s keywords.

The tool lives up to its name. Helping businesses to spy on their competitors’ SEO and Google Ads performance. It’s not illegal because you’re not spying on their organization or their intellectual properties. Even your competitors may be using SpyFu to spy on your business.

It’s easy to use SpyFu. You don’t need any technical knowledge to fully utilize the tool. You just need to enter the website URL of your competitors and the tool will generate reports on the metrics you’re looking for. The best part of SpyFu is that it offers insights in the form of data and charts which is easy to understand.

The SEO Overview Report

In the SEO overview report, you will get the following information:

• Organic keywords the site is ranking for
• Similar sites
• Inbound links to the website

You will get a clear overview of your competitors’ SEO strategy. You will get the list of keywords they are ranking for and the particular pages that are ranking for the listed keywords. It will give you a good kickstart by looking at SEO Overview.

The Competitor Report

You might be shocked to know that you have more competitors. When you enter the URL of your competitor in SpyFu, it also shows other competitors competing within the same niche.

These are some of the things you can do with the competitor feature in Spyfu:

• Learn more about your top competitors on search ranking pages.
• Get notifications on websites that are actively gaining top positions for your targeted keywords.
• Understand the value of the search clicks your competitors are getting in search results.
• Reverse engineer the strategies used by your competitors as your leverage.

The most important part is that the competitor report will also show you how the latest Google Updates affecting the keyword rankings.

Kombat Report

SpyFu offers an analysis tool called Kombat. The tool will help you identify the right keywords that will bring in targeted traffic.

Here’s how the tool works: you just need to choose two competitors and enter their URLs. The Kombat tool will generate a report that makes a deep comparison of your keywords with your competitors.

The report will reveal:

• Keywords that your competitors are ranking. You’re not ranking for these keywords.
• Keywords that you’re ranking for and your competitors are not.
• Keywords that you and your competitors are competing for.

Don’t be too happy if you’re ranking for certain keywords that your competitors not ranking. Sometimes those keywords does not sufficient volume or having different search intent which does not convert the visitors into paying customers.

Keywords Group Report

SpyFu does a big favor by grouping your competitor’s keywords in segments. This helps you to identify the content development strategy your competitors are using. This report will allow you to:

• Filter the results based on targeted keywords
• Export those keywords info Excel spreadsheets
• Get more information about the keywords like CPC for keywords, search volume, etc
• Perform local and global search for the keywords

When keywords are grouped, it provides a clear indication of the topic you can write to attract more visitors to your website from search engines.

Ranking History Report

Most companies miss out on the ranking history of their competitors. It is important to know how they have improved their ranking over time. This will help you identify the competitors which are serious about their SEO efforts. The ones continuously implementing SEO strategies will see good improvement in their search rankings.

The ranking history report generated by SpyFu will show you whether your competitors were affected by Google Algorithm updates. Currently, SpyFu has a ranking history for the past nine years. The ranking history is not limited to the website where you can also check rank history for specific pages on how their ranking has changed over the years.

SEMRush

In this article, I’m talking about identifying your competitor’s keywords. But, to successfully identify and implement the right keywords you need to do a thorough competitor analysis. That is what I have explained if you choose to use Spyfu to perform competitor analysis.

SEMRush is another tool that can help you perform in-depth competitor analysis and find out the best keywords to target.

I won’t dive deep into the competitor analysis part and will get straight to the part on how to identify competitors’ keywords and leverage them by incorporating them into your website.

Some businesses might not be aware of their competitors, tools like SEMRush can help you identify your top competitors.

If you’ve been doing SEO for some time, you’re most likely ranking for some of the top keywords related to your business. You just need to enter your URL in the SEMRush dashboard.

When you look at the overview page of your domain, you will find the Main Organic Competitors section at the bottom which shows you the top 5 competitors ranking for the keywords you’re already ranking.

Click on the “view full report” to show the full list of search competitors based on the keywords you’re already ranking.

Once you land on the full report, you can take a look at the list of competitors and other metrics like Common Keywords, SE Keywords, SE Traffic, SE Traffic Price and Paid Keywords.

If you want to know what other keywords your competitors are ranking, click on the SE Keywords and it will show every single keyword your competitor is ranking for.

You can also check the specific web page ranking for the keywords. This allows you to understand their content strategy in ranking for the keywords your business is targeting.

SEMRush offers extensive features when it comes to competitor analysis. You can perform a complete competitor analysis in terms of their backlinks as well.

Final Thoughts

I will always advise my clients to perform competitor analysis than spending time in keyword research. Why do you need to perform keyword research when you can get to know the keywords worth targeting by looking at the competitors ranking high on search engines.

Learning about your competitor’s keywords will make your keyword research task easier. You only need to identify the keywords and analyze the content strategy your competitors are implementing to rank higher and reverse engineer it by doing it better.

I have to agree for some competitor sites are dominating with high-quality link building strategies. You can also identify what kind of backlinks they are acquiring and put your efforts into acquiring those links.

Don’t underestimate the value of competitor analysis. It’s one of the powerful SEO tools that can take your business to the next level in search engine rankings.

Have you performed the competitor analysis to identify your competitor’s keywords?

Share it with us by commenting below.

Note: Navenpillai.com is a SpyFu & SEMrush affiliate. If you click to SpyFu and SEMRush using our links to sign up for a paid account, we may be compensated monetarily. Navenpillai.com pays for our own SpyFu & SEMrush account and always has.