Can i see the keywords my competitors are optimizing seo for?
-
Ideally, I would get a list of the keywords my competitors are targeting.
-
I would suggest you look at www.semrush.com
You can find all keywords (or most keywords) that a particular website is ranking for in Natural/Organic Search and also look at what they are doing in terms of PPC and so on.
I am sure you'll love this tool
-
As itrogers suggests you can get lost in what your competitors are doing and miss the real opportunities. They could be optimising for keywords in your industry with very low volume while missing the real volume and bread winners.
However there is no absolute way to see all keywords your competitors are optimising, although if they are optimising you should be able to analyse on-page aspects including H1, H2 tags, the meta keywords tag, meta title, bold text, anchor links. As suggested also look at their inbound links, have they got a high percentage of exact anchor links on a specific phrase?
-
There isn't any way you can get a finite list of everything they are optimizing for short of asking them, however, there are a few methods you can use to get a pretty good idea (assuming they are optimizing their site with best practices). -Check the title tag of their home page and main content pages. Look at other onsite factors, such as keywords in their headings tags (h1, h2, etc), bold text, and internal anchor text. -Although it isn't relevant to ranking- check the keywords meta tag. Some still stuff keywords in there! -Use Open Site Explorer to check the anchor text of their incoming links I wouldn't get too focused on your competitors though. Although it is good to keep an eye on them, you should spend your time building a community, creating good content, and optimizing for keyword friendly content that will help your users. Sometimes it's easy to get lost in what others are doing, when you should be focusing on building the quality of your site with best practices. Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Methods for estimating competitor website traffic from natural search
Hi all, I'm currently working on some competitor analysis and estimating website traffic based on rankings and estimated search volume for approximately 500 keywords. I'm then estimating based on click through rate from Webmaster tools. I think this will give me a relatively accurate estimation but was wondering how everyone else does this? Any other methods out there? Thanks, Elias
Competitive Research | | A_Q0 -
How much should I analyze my competitors?
Hi, Recently I've started a competitor research (aka competitive analysis). A few hours after I began, I've started to feel that maybe I'm doing too much unnecessary work. What I've been doing so far is analyzing the competitor's links (using the Dr Pete's Link Profiling excel and some other things), and their site optimization. The on-site optimization analysis has been very light, just to see if the competitors are doing something really well, or not. But still, I think that maybe I'm doing too much work. So, I'd like to see your thoughs: How much work is necessary when doing competitor analysis? What things do you analyse? And how much do you report to the clients? Thank you all in advance! Ivan
Competitive Research | | ivankrm0 -
Choosing an SEO agency
Is this the place to find an SEO agency?
Competitive Research | | Johnnyh
We are a car leasing company based in the UK and need an SEO agency to help us rank in a very competitive market. We have a relatively small budget of £2500 - £4000 per month. I appreciate this not a massive budget but that is where we are at. Any input would be much appreciated. Regards
John0 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
How much keyword density for Google?
I have several pages on one site which have gone down during the past few months. They keyword density on those pages, which is not unnatural, pleased Google for many years. it still pleases Bing. But Google now seems very picky. Based upon your experience, what is the ideal % keyword density for 2 and 3 word phrases, and should they be left out of alt tags even when proper to put them there? While Google dominates, we do not wish to alienate BIng/Yahoo. It is a huge mystery, and experimentation with more non-keyword-related text has so far not born any fruit. Thank you, GH
Competitive Research | | gheh20130 -
How to track seo campaign success fully?
Hi All, What are the best ways to track a seo campaign successfully, other or including Google Analytic?
Competitive Research | | ITRIX0 -
Can I write guest blogs on competitor's blogs?
I have been doing some guest blogging and its hard to find guest blogs opportunities. I have found some but they are direct competitors. Is it safe to write guest post? by the way the are not local competitors. Any suggestion please. thanks
Competitive Research | | conversiontactics0