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
-
Unsolved Mobile Rankings for me and competitors disappear in Moz but still ranking.
Hi, I'm trying to create an SEO report for my client however their mobile rankings have completely disappeared for Google Mobile rankings. Competitors rankings have disappeared as well. Could this be a Moz configuration issue?
Moz Pro | | baddjuju0 -
Competitor is climbing google faster then me utilizing an RSS feed?
Hello everyone, I am fairly new to SEO (I've learning as much as possible the last 2 weeks!) and its a fun and interesting process thats already helped immensely with my website thanks to the community members for answering questions. I am a wedding photographer and videographer on Kauai, and as with most photography sites we are fairly image heavy text light (Working to change that as we speak). That being said my competitor www.joshuagrantrose.com (my site is www.balihaiphoto.com) is growing his organic results very quickly. Is this due greatly in part to this Parent directory which then leads to single pages like this of images? With how many single pages there are like this linked in the background of the site with Im assuming with descriptive and proper text, keywords, and so on of each alum like this (lots and lots of images and pages/links). If someone could help with understanding this or implementing it would be of great help as I've only gotten my feet wet with SEO and don't want to be making wrong assumptions or analysis! Many thanks for any ideas or insight everyone, -Jon
Moz Pro | | Jon_Gibb0 -
Why does a word show as 'Google en-US Mobile Friendly' = FALSE when it also shows that it ranks 3 on mobile?
I pulled a recent report for all words I'm tracking locally and it states that a specific term ranks #4 on desktop and #3 on mobile. But in separate columns, specifically "Google en-US Mobile Friendly" that same terms shows as 'FALSE'. Any idea what this means? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | KristinaWitmer0 -
Competitor outranking us despite all SEO metrics in our favour
Hi, We are trying to outrank a competitor of ours on Google for around 100 terms that we are both clearly targetting. Our competitor currently 'wins' in the SERPS around 70% of the time, often ranking in the top 3 positions. The problem is, we are absolutely convinced that all onsite and offsite SEO metrics we are monitoring would suggest that our content should almost always place higher than theirs. Here is what I know: All pages on both websites are rated 'A' by the Moz on-page-grader tool for the phrases we are targetting, with virtually no tech issues to be addressed on either site Our domain authority is 10 points higher than theirs Neither of us have external links to the relevant pages on our sites (although we are working on some for ours) Our Page Authority is considerably higher on average - often by 10 points or more We have considerably more linking route domains, from better sites. Also many more total external links The HTML title and H1 headings of our pages contain the target phrases at the beginning - our competitors are the same. Although they often ONLY include the target phrases in their title, wheras in our title they might only take up 1/3 of the total characters We have images optimised for the target phrases on our pages. As do they. We use the target phrases roughly the same number of times in our copy text, as do they I have totally run out of ideas now for further optimising our site/pages to consistently rank better for these target phrases, although maybe these are a couple of factors that could be having an impact on the rankings: The structure of their website is perhaps optimised more for these target phrases - our site is much bigger, so perhaps our 100 pages are given less relevance on our site than their 100 pages? - but surely our stronger page authority would suggest otherwise? Perhaps Google is using page engagement statistics to determine that their site is 'betteer' than ours in terms of user appeal and engagment? Can anyone think of something that I might have missed? Is there another major ranking factor I have perhaps neglected in my research? I know link building strategies are a good way to approach this in the long run, but we are currently just concerned about why we are not already ranking better when clearly they are not undertaking any link building strategies of their own. Any help or pointers here would be enormously appreciated. Thanks Lou
Moz Pro | | OBG0 -
New to Moz, need some probably basic answers about Keywords, Linking, Competitors and General SEO
Hi, So I have quite a lot of data colelcted about my site now, regarding keyword research, page crawling and competitor research ect. But I find myself second guessing myself about what I have done and what to do next. I have done basic research for as many relevant keywords I could think of to my site, including branded and non branded terms. If the main competitive keywords for my niche are very competitive, shall I start doing more research for long tail keywords and only try to rank for them? Does is matter how many keywords I am doing research for? Does is matter how many keywords I try to optimise for each webpage? Are the amount of branded keywords I am researching skewing my results? As they are all ranked #1, but nearly all of the non branded keywords are much further down the list... Once I have decided what keywords are worth trying to ranking for for each page, are the techniques to actually rank more highly for them - Title, H1 Tag, Description, Meta Data, Fresh Content and using the keywords on the page? Or are there more techniques I haven't heard of? Under Keyword Rankings - I noticded that some of my keywords are directing to specific pages, like "Cavity Waxes" is directing to the URL ending in .com/cavity-waxes - How do you assign the keywords im researching to specific URLs? - Or does Moz do it automatically? As most of my keywords seem to be unassigned to any URL, is that because they are not ranking highly enough? How do I best use the data collected through Moz? Good practices? Techniques? Tips and Tricks? What is the best practice for finding potential link partners and asking them for mutual linking? Techniques for finding partners that are likely to link with us, but still provides link juice. I must apologise for this long-winded set of questions, but these are troubling me! Any help would be greatly appreciated, Kind regards, Max Johnson
Moz Pro | | BiltHamber10 -
How do you distinguish competitor backlinks by categories?
Hi We are trying to produce an outreach list based on the competitor backlinks using SEOmoz link analysis tool (open site explorer). I have few questions related to this: 1. How many backlinks per competitor would be a reasonable starting point? And maybe suggest a strategy on how these outreach list can be managed over time? 2. Is there a way to distinguish what types the backlinks are? So for example, can we have list of backlinks that are categorised under online bloggers, traditional journalist or article/press release/directories? 3. Should we be more concerned about the Page authority or the Domain authority when creating this outreach list? I look forward to your answer, thank you.
Moz Pro | | Glassworks0 -
How to select a quality site with SEOmoz root domain ranks for guest blogging?
Hi all! I'm going to submit a few guest posts to several web sites. When I'm selecting a blog, to submit a post, I use SEOMoz root domain statistics ( specially DA). I need to know what is the optimum rank level for select a good quality website to submit posts? Currently I use DA30 or higher sites. Is it a good? Apart from that, what are the other criteria that I should check? Specially after the penguin 4 update?
Moz Pro | | Godad1 -
Competitor Analysis
Hi, Is it possible to use SEOMoz to see the keywords my competitors rank for? Thanks Andrew
Moz Pro | | Studio330