Leveraging Website Competitor Analysis for Finding New Keywords in Content Marketing
You can use several marketing plans to help successfully advertise your website to your target audience. One of these is website competitor analysis.
You can research your competitors in many ways to gain the upper hand against other businesses. Finding keywords to rank for using your competitors is an excellent way to rank on top of search results.
This tactic is what an authoritative digital agency would do for its clients. But, lucky for you, this post will help you implement this on your own!
We’ll discuss the advantages of competitor analysis using keyword research. We’ll also cover how you can do it to help you uncover low-hanging fruit keywords for your site.
What Is Website Competitor Analysis and Why Should You Do It
A website competitor analysis refers to the research conducted on competitors to help you understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Knowing about top pages and websites covering the same topic gives you insights into the marketing strategies you must implement. This way, you can improve the performance of your business and differentiate it from the rest.
Consider why you should look at your competitor’s websites to find out what they’re doing that’s working. You can apply those same strategies on your site:
- Analyze backlink profile – Identify competitor backlinks and replicate how they acquire that backlink to their site.
- Monitor social media activity – See the messages they publish on various social platforms. Find out which posts drive the most engagement and conversions from their audience.
- Find out copy used for ad campaigns – Check the copy they’ve used for their paid ads, when they changed the previous ones, and the differences over the years.
Using competitor research, you can find out tactics that worked and replicate them on your site. Doing so allows you to reach the same level as your top competitors — if not exceed them!
How To Find Your Competitors’ Keywords
Another benefit of a website competitor analysis is it helps boost your keyword research. Generating ideas from a seed keyword is time-consuming. You can check the keywords-related sites ranking for and target those you aren’t ranking for yet.
Competitor sites rank for these keywords and generate lots of organic traffic from them. That means that you should try and rank for these too!
Below is a straightforward process of competitor research to boost your content marketing:
Find out who your competitors are.
Your competitors are those who share the exact keywords as you do on search results.
Ubersuggest gives you a free way to find out who your top competitors are among the different SEO tools available.
Enter your domain on the search bar of the Competitor Analysis page. Then click on Similar Websites to find out sites that rank for the exact keywords as you.
From here, the domains that share the most keywords are listed at the top. Ubersuggest shows the top five domains for free. To analyze more competitors, you must sign up for a paid subscription.
Identify keywords they’re ranking for.
Once you’ve put together a list of competitors, it’s time to find out what keywords they’re ranking for.
Going back to Ubersuggest, click on “View All” on the Keywords Gap column of the domain you want to analyze.
The Keywords Gap shows you terms that your competitors are ranking for, but you aren’t.
This makes the keyword research process much more manageable. Just choose which keyword to target for your site that’ll give you the best chance of ranking high on Google. Your high ranking will generate more traffic.
To see keywords you’re not ranking for from multiple competitors simultaneously, you must use premium competitive analysis tools like SEMrush.
It has a Keyword Gap feature similar to Ubersuggest. But SEMrush lets you compare up to five domains and see opportunities based on keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Source: YouTube
This makes competitor keyword research simpler because you can identify keyword opportunities from many sites with just a few clicks.
Determine keywords you must rank for from the list.
You have obtained a broad list of keywords. Now you need to determine which among these low-hanging fruit keywords you should optimize on your site.
Two of the most vital factors to consider when choosing which keywords to prioritize are search volume and keyword difficulty.
The former refers to the number of searches a keyword receives in a month. The latter measures how difficult ranking for that keyword would be, i.e., lower scores easier to rank for.
In this case, you want to find keywords that lots of people search for and are easy to rank for.
Both Ubersuggest and SEMrush have these factors. Use them to decide which among the keyword opportunities you should pursue first.
You Now Have Your Competitor Keywords…What’s Next?
Once you have found keywords you need to optimize for, it’s time to build content for them.
There are two ways you can do this. First, you can create content optimized for the keyword from scratch. The second works if you already have content published about the same topic. You can just re-optimize it using the keyword you found from your research.
SEMrush’s SEO Content Template provides you insights into the top-ranking pages on the search engine for your search query.
The tool’s Writing Assistant keeps track of factors like readability, word count, recommended keywords mentioned, and more.
Source: YouTube
If you follow the suggestions, your content will reach a high overall score. Your content is ready for publishing and should have a good chance of ranking on Google for its target keyword.
After posting them on your site, you can give them a traffic boost by sharing the pages on social media. Doing so helps increase their visibility, precisely what you want to achieve as part of your content marketing strategy.
Conclusion
It pays to find the right keywords if you want to increase your organic traffic and visibility online.
To do this best, identify what your competitors are ranking for that you’re not—then optimize those pages.
You can create content from scratch or reword an existing article on a different page of your site. Google will recognize your new or revised content as relevant to these terms.
