How to Find Your Competitors’ Keywords for Content Ideation

In any competitive landscape you’ll often find competitors will actually outrank you, but as an expert you’ll often know some of the key terms that you can use as a good basis to start your research. This process is about ensuring that you’re covering the right subjects with your content in order to get the best results for you and your business. In this quick vid, we’re going to talk about how to find your competitors keywords for content ideation. This is a process that helps you to find the key terms that your competitors rank for, but you don’t.

Once you’ve got this list of key terms, you’ll use this to evaluate the best opportunities from that list for new content. The key indicators that you’ll be looking for are:

• The searches in your target market
• If the trend of these searches is going up or down
• The keyword difficulty
• How that keyword difficulty compares to other keyword opportunities
• Where you and your competitors rank for these keywords

To do this, we’re going to look at three methods.

SEO Monitor

The first of these three tools we’re going to look at is called SEO Monitor and it uses something called Competitor Insights to deliver this task.

It’s a simple link that you’ll find at the top of the page. It presents you with a dashboard of opportunities for keywords that you and your competitors might be trying to rank for and a number of search volumes around terms that are linked to it according to Google Chrome’s variations and close matches. It presents you with this quick snapshot of linked terms so that you can compare yourself and your competitors to see who is stronger in particular areas. Unlike the others, this does actually present you with a list of increasing or decreasing search traffic.

Essentially, what you’re looking for is the sharper the increase, the more opportunity, but it’s also important to understand that other SEOs will have access to this information, so that may also present a tougher opportunity that others will be really competing for.

AHREFS

The second tool is something called AHREFS and they use the Content Gap Analysis for this task. It is the only one of the three that will suggest the keyword difficulty. This is a ranking out of 100 and typically you’re looking for the lower the better, but that doesn’t stand alone. You do actually need to compare this to the number of monthly searches within your target market, too.

Scroll down on the left, and you’ll see something called Content Gap Analysis – it currently has a little flame next to it to make it nice and easy to find. Then, what you need to do is take each of your competitors’ URLs, enter them at the top and enter yours at the bottom. The tool will then generate opportunities and they will be ordered by your searches per calendar month in your chosen region.

You can then tweak your results according to different factors to decide which opportunity is better than the other. These factors are:

• Keyword difficulty
• The cost per click, which is a paid advertising metric
• How the competition ranks for each of your key terms

WordStream

The third way of finding your competitors’ keywords is something called WordStream, and this is the DIY version. WordStream is limited, but it is accurate. It will provide you simply with the keywords and the search volume, which obviously doesn’t provide you with as much information as the other approaches, but it is a good tool to use in some cases. What you need to do is create a spreadsheet with columns for keywords, search traffic and competitors and list them one by one in each column.

You then search keywords within WordStream and use this to fill in your spreadsheet. What we do from there is enter those keywords one by one into Google and note down anywhere that your competitors are ranking in the top 10 within their relevant column. I would only stick to checking the top 10 because this can be quite a manual process and it can take quite a long time, so it’s not worth doing this for the top 100 rankings because you could find yourself spending many days to pursue this and find good opportunities.

Any of these approaches will give you some research that you can use to determine the top targets for new content creation. It’s then just a case of determining whether it’s more suitable for a blog, on-page copy, or something bigger like an infographic, a video or an interactive.

If you’re struggling to come up with new content ideas for your next digital marketing campaign, maybe you need to contact Koozai for help with your next project. We’ll use the research and intelligence from the industry’s leading tools, that you can then use to design content that is going to have the best impact for you and your business.