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
-
How can I track where visitors go after exiting my website?
I don't want to track external links. I just want to know where they go when they leave. Is that possible? Can I do this with a cookie?
Competitive Research | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Can deceptive ads help sites to rank? Pogosticking effect involved...
Hello,
Competitive Research | | fablau
I have a question for you. I have noticed that many music sites that appear in the first top results for keywords our users search for, include all the same ads that deceive people by inviting them to "Download" or get the "Full Album" of what people may be search for. Look at the following websites that are often displayed at the first spots for keywords like "Christmas Sheet Music" (just an example): [....] They all have, most of the times, the same ads. Look at the following screenshots taken from the sites above (the ads are at the top of the page): http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot1.jpg
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot2.jpg Those deceptive ads could engage users more than legitimate websites not showing those ads or not showing ads at all, making Google think that people are more engaged on those website showing those deceptive ads. If it is quality that Google is looking for, shouldn't they do something to avoid having sites ranking well just because of some deceptive ads that take users into action, but without any useful result? I am eager to know your ideas on this issue. Thanks! Fab.0 -
Screaming Frog for competitor research
Hi guys, Does somebody experienced an issue with Screaming Frog spider while trying to crawl a website? It's weird since no error message appears and at the same time the crawler cannot crawl anything. There is no restriction in the robots.txt. Has someone encountered such an issue? Thank you. Cheers
Competitive Research | | lgrozeva0 -
What tools can give reliable competitor traffic data?
Could you give details of reliable tools that can measure and provide competitors' traffic data? Google Adplanner used to provide such information until June of last year, and while it's numbers didn't match Google Analytics data, the numbers were reasonably close. The metrics we are most interested in are visits, page views and unique visitors. We have looked at sites such as Compete -- but feel it is far too inaccurate/ skewed with US data only; also, would prefer to not rely on Alexa traffic stats. Thanks in advance.
Competitive Research | | ontarget-media0 -
How can I project changes to Page Authority?
Lets say I have a PA 50 website, and I just got a PA 60 link from another site. Is there any way to project, mathematically, what that new link will do to my page's authority? Would the formula look something like this? New PA = Current Page PA + ((New Link PA*dampening factor)/Total number of links on new page) In the absence of a mathematical model to predict shifts in PA, how can you be confident that a specific action will help you progress towards an authority objective?
Competitive Research | | phantom0 -
Help ranking for a keyword
Ok well I'm serious about may business and everything I do the problem is that I just can't seem this ranking for a keyword thing I do rank on the 1st plage for every keyword but in this business it's all about the top 3 my page is a pr 2,I can't rank for this keyword it's low competitive the site has a pr 0 and has one back link to it on open site explorer. They rank first. i want to say my site is the best out there I have a seo company working on it and I have spent around 5k on it since we launched it in 2010. I just can't rank for "chesterfield lawn care" or chesterfield lawn service. My webite is www.greensidelawncare.com I have watch the. Videoson here but it just does not answer my question I need to know how to do the right seo. I have a ridiculous amount of content on the site everything I do it to help the customer. It just need to know what to do I have started to blog but what do I need to do to really help my seo? I mean is it blogging should i blog about stuff and use keywords should I blog and not use keywords maybe 50/50? Do I go out and blog about pages on my site or pages that are ranking of google? I heard that links are not as important as they used to be I do try to update my Facebook and twitter pages but its hard to anyone to RT or comment or like my stuff its lawn care it's not that interesting I try to make it as interesting as i can. keywords that I rank for are st Charles lawn care, st Charles lawn service,St. Peters lawn care, st. Peters lawn service, o'Fallon lawn care. Creve coeur lawn care. If you have any suggestions on how to make my site better please let me know. Www.greensidelawncare.com thank you to all that can help me
Competitive Research | | gslc0 -
SEO Strategy Questions on an International Domain
I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question. Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated! We recently purchased a Germany-based company. They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website. Domain1 and Domain2. I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well. We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US. Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany. So we split it using GeoDNS. Any international traffic goes to their server. Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours. From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US. So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs. The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools. They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still. We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name. Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name. My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name. I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | KathleenLTG0 -
Does anyone know of a keyword difficulty API?
Hi Mozzers, I've made a script that uses the Google Adwords API to insert big lists of keywords ideas and their monthly search volume into our database. It would be awesome to be able to also automatically get a difficulty score for those keywords from a tool like the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool. Sadly this tool doesn't seem to be in the SEOmoz API. Google does provide a competition score in the AdWords API, but that's only based on the competitiveness of the AdWords auction for that keyword. So my question is: does anyone know another keyword difficulty tool, that does have an API? Thanks! Daan
Competitive Research | | Daan013