Cribbing from the Competition

In our last email we explained how to assess the level of competition for your keywords. Now we're going to look a little closer at the content of your competitors' sites...

Let's start by doing a few searches for your main keywords.

Note the competitor sites that come up. Visit each one and ‘view source’ on their pages to look at the ‘keywords’ meta tag. The ‘keywords’ meta tag isn’t actually good for anything any more, but most people still include it, and the keywords there can give you an idea of what your competitors are going for.

While you’re visiting your competitor’s sites, pay attention to titles they use for blog posts and other content.

If they are paying attention to SEO and doing keyword research (which it’s possible that they aren’t), you should see relevant keywords being included in page titles, blog post headlines, sub-heads, and elsewhere in the content.

Using Spyfu

Spyfu is an SEO research tool that can be very helpful when it comes to researching the competition. Enter your own site URL and select the ‘Competitors’ tab in the ‘SEO Research’ section and it will show you a list of competitor sites related to yours.

Click over to the ‘SEO Keywords’ tab and you will find a selection of the keywords your site is ranking for:

Switch over to a competitor's domain and you can see the keywords that they are ranking for:

That report provides estimates for how much traffic those keywords get and how much they’re worth to you or your competitors.

The ‘Kombat’ tab is a great way to find keyword opportunities. It will show you keywords where at least two of your competitors are ranking, but you are not.

AuthorityLabs’ competition analysis report provides another method for assessing competitive keyword performance. Input a few of your top competitors and the system will check through the list of keywords you’re monitoring and give you a rankings breakdown like this:

This allows you to see weak spots in your own rankings, the strengths of your competitors, and keywords where a bit of SEO legwork could really put you ahead.

Once you have identified those opportunities you can start looking at ways to put those keywords to work. In our next email we will discuss one of the most common ways to do exactly that.