Competitive keyword analysis is the lifeblood of keyword research for any SEO expert or a website owner.
If you're only just starting your SEO campaign — great! Use competitor analysis tools to help you figure out which organic keywords are usually targeted in your particular niche, which will then guide your content creation.
And if your site is ranking pretty well already, it's absolutely vital to keep abreast of the SEO strategies used by the other big players, to avoid lagging behind.
What Every piece of content needs keywords to rank high on SERPs, and luckily, you don't need to only use Google Ads Keyword Planner anymore. One of the most effective keyword research strategies is to look at how your SEO competitors rank in search results, and find their top ranking keywords that you aren't targeting yet.
By finding competitor keywords and analyzing them across dozens of metrics, you can create a better keyword core for your own website.
Rank Tracker keyword research tool has the perfect module for this called Ranking Keywords. Using it, you can see all of the ranking keywords of any domain you need, along with a host of SEO metrics, which makes it indispensable for competitive keyword research.
Sometimes you only need to find important keywords, but in some cases it will be useful to get a list of your keyword competitors. Here, you've got two ways to mine keyword opportunities:
For the perfect competitive analysis, you should check both to have the fullest list of your keyword competition.
Of course, you can do the entire thing by hand, but checking Google results manually is incredibly time-consuming. Alternatively, you can find both types of your SEO competitors in Rank Tracker.
There, in the same-named Competitor Research menu, you'll see two modules: Domain Competitors and Topic Competitors. Both the methods are great to discover your rivals. Take top 10 on SERPs in your niche, find competitors' keywords that you are still missing, and integrate them into your content to start ranking and raise your site's traffic volume.
First off, let's collect the list of domains that target the same list of keywords as you.
Step 1. Go to Competitor Research > Domain Competitors.
Step 2. Enter the URL of the domain in question, and the tool will collect the keywords your domain is ranking for, and then give you a list of the domains also ranking for these keywords in organic search.
You'll see exactly what domains are your biggest rivals. Sort them by Intersection to find the domains that are covering most of your topics first. Hover over their URLs and add them as competitors by pressing a button.
You'll also get to see a host of competitor analysis metrics like their unique keywords — use that info to boost your content marketing strategy.
Now that you have a list of your domain competitors, you need to find your topic competitors.
Step 1. Go to Topic Competitors module. There, enter your keywords, one per line (if you already have a list of target keywords, simply paste them), select the search engine (Google search is a favorite), and click Search.
Step 2. Rank Tracker will now look through the top 30 results for all keywords you entered and put together a list of domains that come up most frequently. In a minute, you'll see a list of 30 domains sorted by their Intersection.
For every one of the web pages presented here, you can click on them and see what exact keywords they used in their text. Get those keywords for yourself and start ranking.
That's it — you now have a very significant list of your main keyword competitors. From now on, every time you check rankings, competitors' ranks will be updated along with your site's positions. This will let you quickly spot any changes in competitors' visibility and see how your website is performing in comparison.
Once you know a few of your competitors, it's time to optimize or create content for your domain.
After some keyword analysis, you can find exactly which terms, and therefore, which topics you might still need to cover. Keyword gap is a brilliant tactic not only to generate keyword suggestions, but also to discover opportunities for content creation. If, for example, your site sells 'winter gear', and you find several competitors ranking high for 'winter gear for toddlers' or 'winter gear clearance', consider creating a page like that on your website as well.
The bad news: you can't effectively do all keyword gap research by hand.
The good news: this is exactly why our Keyword gap tool was created.
Step 1. Head over to Keyword Research > Keyword Gap module. There, you can add your domain and those of your competitors (the tool will automatically suggest your rivals).
You can choose between looking up what keywords you and them have in common, or simply focus on the topics that some (or all) of your competitors cover on SERPs.
Step 2. Analyze the list of keywords you aren't ranking for yet and start tracking them. Simply click on them and add the relevant keywords to your rank tracking.
From then on, you'll be able to track the rankings of these terms as you implement them into your own content marketing.
Before you start optimizing your pages for all of the keywords you've found, you still have plenty of keyword analysis to do. You need to find out what website traffic these keywords can potentially bring in, whether it's better to opt for search optimization or paid ads for different keywords, how much it would cost to run a CPC campaign for them, and so much more.
In Rank Tracker's analysis tools we have such metrics as Number of Searches, Expected Visits, Competition, Cost Per Click, Keyword difficulty etc. — using them you can find the perfect competitive keyword group for any type of content you might be building.
Step 1. In the Rank Tracking module, click the Update SEO/PPC data, and check the # of Searches, Keyword Difficulty, and Competition columns:
Step 2. Filter those columns to find the happy medium and start bringing your perfect keyword ideas to life. Remember: the most competitive keyword is the one that is Low in Competition, but high in searches volume.
Step 3. For the final touch, go to the Ranking Details column, and you'll be able to see exactly how well you're doing against other websites trying to rank for your keywords.
While doing keyword analysis, pay especially close attention to such stats as competitors' domain and page authority.