Strategies for discovering competitors and selecting key words
-
Hey Moz community!
What are some tools to use to find out who my competitors are and which keywords they are ranking for?
Next, once I have found out this information, is it best that I try to outrank my competitors for thee same keywords? Or should I be going for key words that are more specific? What strategy should I use when selecting my key words...?
Any help or advice is MUCH appreciated!
Thank you in advance.
-
Thanks for that David, it def helped. Awesome!
-
Hi there,
I would definitely be looking at the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool and other tools like SEMRush http://www.semrush.com/ both are great for gaining competitive insight.
Your second question is well if they are competitors then surely you would be wanting to at the very least have a competitive positioning of your online content with them. I have different competitors for instance for different keywords, I have common grouped competitors and niche competitors, they may be domestic, foreign, a specific vertical and so on.
If you were starting out on employing an SEO strategy then your question actually might be construed as a little back to front, as I would be wanting to analyse my own site's keyword phrase conversions to determine which are the most effective, have the highest CTR etc. and then utilising tools such as the ones mentioned to see who am I competing against with my best converting KWs. Plus you would be able to identify any mismatches of who you deem as your natural competitors against ones that you are not aware of from the analysis you carry out on your own site traffic data.
Hope that helps a little.
David
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
-
Need advise/strategy for cleaning up backlinks to my site
I recently redesigned my website (studio35design.com), and with that, I'm finally paying attention to SEO. I used a few different tools to find the amount of backlinking domains I've built up through the 7 or so years. The numbers are the following: 52 Total Backlinking Domains (800+ links):
Moz Pro | | rubennunez
• 17 of those are from blog commenting - they are pretty much all NF
• 20 of those are from sitewide footer credits on websites I've built. They are all old, as I stopped adding sitewide links to my client sites over a year ago.
• 7 of those are from spam. My site was hacked last year which contributed to alot of it. I've since then completely scrapped my old site and built this one on webflow (Not self-hosted like my old WP site).
• The other 10 or so are from forums, and the odd photo credit. As you can tell, almost none of these backlinks links are really any good. I'm surprised that my DA is 27 really. So moving forward, I need to know the best strategy dealing with these "bad" links. For the spam, I'm going to disavow in google webmasters. As for the rest, here are my questions... QUESTION 1:
As for the sitewide links, would the best thing be to remove the link altogether from the footer of each one of those sites? Some I can't because they are really old, and I don't have access to them (I'll probably disavow), but the rest I can still go in and update. QUESTION 2:
Will removing a ton of links at once hurt my DA and my google ranking? I can probably eliminate 500-600 links within a few days just by removing the sitewide links. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? A few months? QUESTIONS 3:
Should I disavow blog commenting links even though they are NF? Does it matter at all? QUESTION 4:
I noticed 5 or so of the domains I have links one aren't working domains anymore. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? Thanks in advance for your help.0 -
Are there any strategies (Moz-specific or other) on how to improve the Total Links metric against competitors?
In competitive link metrics, our client is doing very well in every metric against every competitor except in Total Links against one competitor in particular. Wondering how to improve this metric against this one competitor. Any strategies, whether MOZ-specific or other that can boost this metric? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | buffalonickel0 -
Competitor Analysis (help!)
Hey everyone, I'm working on keyword research, and am at the point of going through my list and doing some competitive analysis to figure out which phrases are viable as far as competition goes. What methods are you currently using? As of now, we've been manually searching the phrase in Google, and using the Moz toolbar to check the metrics, backlinks, domain authority etc. I remember before the Adwords integration with Moz was removed, there was a more efficient way to do this using the keyword difficulty tool. Any guidance/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | RCDesign740 -
How can we efficiently use Fresh Web Explorer and Just Discovered Links?
Love the fresh data sources SEOmoz is building for us. However, I'm frustrated by the lack of scale the tools offer. Let's say I have 30 competitors I want to watch (which is pretty conservative - if we're targeting 100 keywords on a site, we could easily have 100's of top 20 ranked competitors). If I have to run individual reports for each using OSE and Fresh Web Explorer, that would be hours of work every day/week. Ideally, I'd like to see a campaign feature where you could add 2-200 competitors to view in one report. You could view recent links (from FWE and JDL) for all competitors on one handy report, and sort by various metrics. So for example, if you wanted to view the top 10 links your competitors have gotten in the past week, you could see that in 30 seconds of work, vs many hours of work. Any others who think this would be useful? Any ideas for how we can use the data in such a way without this feature?
Moz Pro | | AdamThompson1 -
Estimating the number of LRD I need to outrank competitor
I just ran a SERP/keyword diffculty report for a keyword I want one of my pages to rank Also, I just conducted the on-the-page-optimization and now I am going to start buidling links. => I would like to estimate how many linking root domains I need to overrank one of my competitor. These are the MOZ data:
Moz Pro | | He_Jo
1. My page:
Page Linking Root domains: 0
Root Domain Linking Root Domains: 151 2. Competitor:
Page linking root domains: 1
Root Domain Linking Root Domains: 5,786 I don't really know on which metric (Page or domain LRD) to rely on in order to make an estimation and I would be glad for some help! To simplyfy the problem, assume that all toher factors (code, on-the-page keyword use., social etc.) are equal for both sites. Can I just get 2LRD to that page in order to likely outrank my competitor or do I need around 5000 more links poiting to my site? I think an answer to this question could help a lot of users here, since I saw similar questions/difficulties regarding the use of page LRD vs. root domain LRD P.S. Non of the pages of my website do currently rank in the top 100 for that keyword.2 -
How do I finde out how my company ranksfor each keyword compared to their competitors?
Is there a tool or way to see how my company ranks for each keyword compared to the competition.I am new at this and am wondering if there is a tool for this and how to use it . Answers please in very laymans terms. Thank you.
Moz Pro | | poweradmin1 -
Internal link question - compared with my competitors
Dear all, I started to working on SEO on my website http://www.techstation.it and I have some thing that I would clarify. I see a lot of differences between internal links of my website and my competitors that usually are placed a bit better. (Please check attached image). They have A LOT of internal links, about 2.000+ instead 137 (mine), that's wrong in my SEOMOz dashboard. Every news and article page has 120-130 links to other contents. About teh external followed links: Mine: 1,674 #1: 2,018 #2: 316 (????) - this is placed really good for some competitive keywords #3 (best ranked): 7,905 links I have two more points that I would fix: Articles ranking We were one of the first 5-6 website that published at the launch day the review of Intel Core i7 3960X CPU and started with a ranking in the last first page results, a few days alter in the second and now we are at the end of the second page. This happens .. I think... every time 😕 All my article pages are graded with "A grade" in the control panel. So what should I do for increase my rankings? Thank you very much in advance! Alex
Moz Pro | | techstation0