Competitor Analysis (help!)

[RCDesign74]

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!

[RCDesign74]

Thanks for the response Mark!

I'll check it out and see if it's still a working solution, definitely looks promising.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Other tools to do this also, but they aren't cheap, like SEM Rush, Searchmetrics, etc.

Tom Anthony had written a great blog post here on Moz a while back with a Google doc for doing this, but I'm not sure it's working anymore - you can check here

[KevinBudzynski]

I still use SpyFu (along with Google trends). Not always extremely accurate, but is in helpful in looking at historic data (ad copy, seasonality & etc.)

[RCDesign74]

Thanks Vizergy, are you doing all that manually via Google yourself as well then?

[Vizergy]

The only tool I know of that does this for you is BrightEdge.  Otherwise doing it manually is probably the best way to go.  If there are other tools out there that do this I have no doubt someone here will know of it.

[RCDesign74]

That's a good idea for the research phase for sure, but i'm just trying to figure out the most effective/efficient way of breaking down the SERP competition for my selected phrases at this point.

Thanks for the response!

[Vizergy]

Call me crazy but I still find myself using Google Trends to compare different iterations of like phrases.  It also gives related search suggestions...