Keyword Research Competition

[Jasonalanmagic]

Hello everyone.  Was talking to my "competition" the other day and they mentioned the amount of traffic they are getting from google.  It's double what I currently am receiving.  I feel like I am not targeting the correct keywords.  What is the best way to research competitions keywords?  Anyway to find out what is driving traffic their direction?

[katandmouse]

I love Keri's response. Traffic isn't everything, just like rank isn't. My recommendation would be not to think about whether or not you're targeting the right keywords, but whether you're targeting customers. What can you put on your website to attract them? Hint: it's not keywords. Keep focused on giving them what they want. The traffic will happen naturally. And so will the keywords if you keep your focus in the right place.

[KeriMorgret]

Are they making double the money you are? Like Tony said, the type of keywords matter a lot.

I get traffic for Bismarck waterjet from people in North Dakota looking for a waterjet cutter, but what they find is a page on my site that talks about using a waterjet cutter for the DKM Bismarck warship model. That's traffic my competitor isn't getting, as he doesn't mention waterjet on his page, but that traffic isn't doing me any good.

[Tony-Dimmock]

Hi Jason,

For competitive analysis I'd start with SEMrush. It shows a ton of data, including keyword terms that are driving traffic to their website (and yours) plus which pages rank for which terms.

However, not receiving as much traffic as your competition depends on a number of things:

1. Carrying out extensive keyword research for terms that are appropriate for your business, not your competitors - ensure you check "exact match" terms..

2. Analysing your content - is it "thin" and not worthy of being presented by Google as a worthwhile "subject-matter-expertise" piece? If your pages stood on their own, could they be used as proof of authority?

3. The overall quality of inbound links to your site - check OpenSiteExplorer / MagesticSEO / AHRefs to compare  yours to theirs

4. Are they more active on social (greater reach) or have more online mentions (engagement)

5. Is Analyse your top page views and landing page stats in Google Analytics - is there high bounce-rate issues (ie the pogo-stick effect?) - If so and your competitions pages are more engaging or "sticky" Google will prefer theirs to yours

6. Check your site for internal technical SEO issues that could be roadblocking Google crawls within your site ie robots.txt, canonical, too-deep pages, broken links, 302's instead of 301's etc - use MOZ's Crawl Test to find out these metrics and a ton more

7. Could some of your pages be suffering from algo penalties? Again, check OpenSiteExplorer for potential issues with keyword-rich anchor text

8. Page speed - are yours clunky compared to theirs - medium to high download speed can have a detrimental affect on rankings and therefore on traffic

9. Usability issues - are specific pages on your site causing visitors unnecessary roadblocks? Again if they land on your pages and bounce quickly, this will be picked up by Google

10. Lastly, your on-page SEO. Are your pages over-optimised, too diluted or have many images and little text?

There's more areas that you could investigate, but the above will give you an initial understanding of your site's overall SEO and health and will help you compare yours to theirs.