Why invest in keyword research competitor analysis?
Before we get into how exactly you can find keywords competitors are using, we need to look at why spending your time and maybe some money is completely worth your investment.
Search engine marketing in general requires a lot of time, money and effort.
Let’s talk about SEO first. Search engine optimization can take months to start showing some initial gains. You need to perfect your website in terms of onsite SEO and also painfully acquire high quality backlinks over several months.
Hiring SEO professionals as well as paying for quality backlinks take a lot of money. As a first step before implementing your SEO strategy, you have to research on the best keywords for your business. Then go ahead with onsite and offsite SEO hoping your website goes up the search rankings for your chosen keywords.
Now imagine after months and months of time as well as money spent, you realize the keywords you chose at the beginning were not the right ones. They do not provide the kind of traffic you were hoping. You are now back to square one and need to restart your SEO process with a new set of keywords.
Next let’s take a look at PPC ads. Competitor keywords research and analysis is even more essential for PPC on platforms such as Google Ads.
In PPC, you are directly bidding on keywords. You are spending money from day one. Keyword research is essential to any successful pay per click campaign.
Unfortunately though, too many marketers are still using the trial and error way to using keywords. They bid on as many keywords as possible. Set a bid per click. At the end of the month, they realize the keywords did not bring in much conversions to leads or sales.
They test a new set of keywords. Maybe they play around with their ad content. Whatever it is, it is constant testing of what works and what doesn’t. Before you know it, you exhaust your entire budget and PPC is not an option any longer.
Now imagine, if you had complete insight on all your competitor’s PPC campaign. You knew exactly which keywords they were bidding on, which keywords got the highest number of clicks and at what cost.
Competitor keyword analysis opens up your competitor’s PPC campaign and provides every single detail about the keywords they are using.
Now you can use exactly which keywords are working. You will know how much to bid. You will know their ad content as well as sales page content. You will know the overall budget for the PPC campaign as well as budget per keyword.
All this will ensure you have the most well optimized campaign for pay per clicks ads, outperforming and outbidding all your competitors.
In fact you can not only research on your immediate competitors, you can research on all websites that appear on top of Google search for paid ads for your chosen keywords. If you need more information on how to choose competitors for keyword research, you can check out our tutorial here. Page opens in new window.
How to find your competitor’s keywords?
Now that we know why competitor keyword research is so important, let’s learn how to find keywords used by your competitors.
The good news here is that it is much easier to gain insight on your competitor’s SEO or PPC campaign than you think. The best way to go about it is to use a ‘competitor keyword analysis tool.’
However, the bad news is most competitor keyword research tools are expensive. There are many tools available online that make you subscribe to their entire suite of search marketing services.
For the sake of this tutorial, we have chosen the competitor keyword research tool at SE Ranking. We personally use them and are also affiliates. They also offer a great free trial and allow you to view up to 10 keywords each of your competitors are using. This comes with detailed information like the keyword list, cost per keyword, number of clicks, budget, landing page URL, ad text etc.
To get started, follow these steps:
1) First visit the competitor analysis tool by clicking here. Page will open in new window.
2) In the search box on screen, type or copy the website URL of your competitor. This is also known as the domain such as https://yourcompetitor.com
3) Choose the country option just besides the search box. This is an important step. If your competitor is from USA, choose US. If you competitor is from UK, choose Google United Kingdom. For India, choose Google India. In most cases, the country from where you are searching will be chosen by default. However, do check if the correct country is showing up as otherwise you will get inaccurate results.
4) Now click “Analyse”
That is it. You will get detailed information on the Google Ads or SEO campaign of your competitor on the next screen.
As mentioned above, the free trial will give insight on up to 10 keywords being used by your competitor. This is good enough to begin with. If you have the budget or are serious about your PPC / SEO campaign, it can be worthwhile to subscribe to the paid version which starts at around US $39 per month.
Competitor keyword analysis
Now that we have the competitor keyword data that we were looking for, it is time to analyse.
We have a detailed post on how to analyse your competitor’s keyword data here.
You can read that article or if you are pressed for time, simply do the following.
1) Make a note of the keywords that are getting the highest number of clicks.
2) Note the average cost per click for those keywords.
3) Also note which keywords have a low click percentage but has a low cost as well.
4) Taking note of the best performing keywords along with the cost your competitors are paying will help you in making your own list of keywords and understand how much budget to allocate each keyword.
5) If possible, do go through the ad text and landing page URL associated with each keyword. This will help you understand the sales funnel of your competitor.
Create your own ads and landing pages accordingly for maximum conversions.
If you are performing competitor keyword research for SEO purposes, it is important you check which keywords are ranking well, the number of clicks for each keyword and the competition for each keyword. Keywords with relatively low competition but higher number of clicks are easier to rank and are worthwhile your time and effort.
Competitor keyword analysis is a must for any PPC or SEO campaign. It is completely worth the time and money you put in as the rewards can be far greater than the investment. The time you save on months of trial and error, testing various keywords and ad content are in itself the best aspect of competitor analysis.
Competitor keywords analysis tool
Get a huge competitive advantage. See what keywords competitors are bidding on, perform competitor keyword research and view detailed insights on their entire Google Ads campaign.
