With the right competitor analysis tool, you are able to find effective ways to compete in a crowded digital world. Without getting insights on where your competitor stands, you can’t fully understand where you and your business need to be.

You will learn: 

• The definition and benefits of doing competitor analysis.
• How to do advanced competitor analysis
• How to use a great competitor analysis tool like RankingGap
• Tips to do a competitor analysis and use a competitor analysis tool more effectively.

Competitor analysis has nothing to do with spying or eavesdropping, it’s only the right thing for every business to think strategically. It is completely beneficial for your business to identify the opportunities and gaps to improve SEO. 

Competitor keyword analysis, especially using the right keyword tools, will help you understand what your competitors are doing in SEO and what’s working for them. You can then adopt relevant strategies, improve them, and gain a competitive advantage.

What & Why Competitor analysis:

Competitive analysis is legal and heavily relies on publicly available data. Most people will go with analysing competitors’ keywords. Thus, using a competitor analysis tool can make the process quicker and effortless.

Why?

Competitor analysis has a direct correlation to content marketing because creating content is the first step to appeal to your target audience. The keyword research database relies on ranking data and user intent to build a profile of top keywords driving traffic to any website. Terms and phrases that have a good demand are leveraged to create content based on it’s its specific user intent. 

Conducting a competitor keyword research will give you access to insights on your competitors’  SEO strategies and keywords that helped them  dominate the SERPs in specific niches. With a competitor analysis tool you can get the most relevant, low-competition yet high-converting keywords for your websites. As a result, you can improve your conversion rates.

A competitor keyword research allows you to reveal your competitors’ weaknesses and valuable keywords they have yet to target. By working on the opportunity gaps, you’re able to appear on the same SERPs and platforms as your competitors. 

How to do Advanced Competitor Keyword Analysis with an SEO Tool.

Step 1. Find Your Competitors: 

Your search competitors can be very different from your business competitors. Search competitors are businesses that rank for the same type of keywords as your website. Some of your toughest business competitors might not be very impressive in terms of organic search. So the first step of your competitor keyword research is to know where you stand in relation to your search competitors. 

Before you begin keyword research on your competitor’s ranking keywords, you should start by analyzing your competition. Take a step back and dive deeper into your industry. You can ask yourself:

• Who are the main players in your niche?
• Who are the direct and indirect competitors?
• What is their digital presence like? (Their performance, ranking, etc)
• Which pages of their website appear on Google’s page 1? 

In order to find the top players in your niche, the easiest way to start is with a simple Google search. You’ll often find that these competitors have the highest organic and commercial rankings. The manual way of inserting your keyword and checking who’s on the first page is terribly time-consuming and may lead to loss of data.

If you developed a new website and are struggling to identify your competitors, here is a suggested tool: RankingGap. RankingGap’s “Competitor Discovery” feature can show you information about your top competitors. 

RankingGap allows you to identify the core metrics of your potential competitors. All you need to do is paste your domain/URL to the site, choose your location & language, and wait for RankingGap to generate your results.

Then, you can analyze your competitors’ strengths by gaining in-depth insight into the significant data such as web traffic, intersecting ranked keywords (common keywords) shared, and top 10 ranking keywords. An overview chart also allows you to have an idea of which competitors you should keep an eye on.

Step 2. Run the competitor analysis tool – RankingGap

RankingGap is a keyword gap analysis and ranks discovery tool. With RankingGap, you can compare your website with top competitors and identify ranked keywords that are missing from your website. 

By using RankingGap, you are able to learn from your competitors and fast-track your way to the top of SERP. You can achieve this by optimizing for keywords that have proven to work for your competitors.

Besides, RankingGap has a simple interface and it is easy to use even when you are not so familiar with SEO tools. To start, you need to create a project by inserting your domain and your competitors’ as well as picking your location and language setting. The great thing here is that you can add up to 4 competitors.

Once you’ve generated your project, go to the “Common” keyword view, which you are already on by default. In this view, you’ll see a list of keywords with your competitors’ ranking positions as compared to yours.

The “Missing” view is where you can find keywords that all competitors rank for except you. 

The “Gap” view is where you can find keywords that some competitors rank for except you. 

Unique keyword view tells you your strengths which neither one of your competitors possess. 

So, looking at the generated keywords in your “Unique” keyword view, you know where you are dominating in these keyword pools.

With the tool, you can clearly see what position you rank and which pages ranked the highest compared to your competitors for each keyword.

Step 3. Gather and organize your competitor keywords.

Now that you have a sense of which competitors to prioritize, you can now take a deeper dive into their keyword strategy.

The next step is to reorganize your competitor keywords. Here are 3 things you need to consider doing.

#1. Look at the keyword metrics

To identify the keyword’s potential or evaluate it further in a group of other phrases, you should look at the following data:

• Search Volume: The average number of monthly searches this phrase receives. The search volume suggests interest in the phrase. Naturally, keywords with the highest number of searches offer the biggest possibility to drive traffic. 
• CPC: How much other companies are willing to spend to place a Google ad for the keyword.
• Trends: What is the interest in the keyword over time.  This metric highlights when customers search for the keyword throughout the year. This metric does not reveal anything about the phrase’s commercial potential. However, it can help you prioritize the best opportunities. Because, if a keyword experiences only a spike of interest at the start of the year, then, there is no point in working on it right after that peak has waned. You can prioritize it for later, and use the time now to work on phrases with high interest throughout the year.
• Competition: The keywords’ percentage of competitiveness.

#2. Filter the keywords

Suppose you compare big-name websites; they commonly generate many more keywords than mid or smaller websites. That’s where you need to use the “Advanced filter” to make things quick. Fortunately, RankingGap has this feature. 

You may use the filters to explore the untapped potential of your competitor keywords and export a ready-to-use report with all the most valuable information already coherently organized. 

#3. Consider customer journeys

You’ll also need to understand the customer’s journey within the context of the competitive landscape you operate in. A potential customer will have a range of options available to them at each stage of their journey. 

Users know what they’re looking for when they enter keywords into Google. If you want to maximize your organic search success, you will need to zero in on their search intent and understand the different stages of a buyer’s journey. 

Tips to get the best keyword list for competitor analysis

• Sift through the stats for high competition keywords and set them aside: These keywords might be too competitive to go after at this moment, but they might come in handy later on.
• Make sure you know the keyword types: If you know SEO, then you’re already familiar with some common types of search terms. 

For example, “money” keywords typically drive revenue, while long-tail keywords relate to much less common but much more specific searches. To improve your SEO strategy and get greater value from your efforts, it’s helpful to think of these keyword types in terms of the intent that drives these searches. As you identify keywords to target, take the time to clarify the search intent for each. That way you can ensure low-intent searches lead prospects to introductory information about your brand and products, while high-intent searches take customers to product pages or an e-commerce site.

• Cross-check the keywords that you share with your competitors and eliminate those that don’t make sense for your business: After all, if you target important keywords with content that focuses on the wrong search intent, then your efforts won’t hit the mark.
• Review the SERPs for each highlighted keyword and note any organic or paid opportunities you may have missed, and how you might target them. Pay special attention to keywords your competitors rank higher for. Thus, there is the fact that 79% of keywords rank differently on mobile and desktop. Remember to check out the ranking later on.

What to do after you do competitor analysis.

After you choose your keywords, you can apply them to your work. For example, the keyword in the Title Tag remains to be an important on-page SEO signal, so the title is where you should apply your keyword to. Other places might include the meta description, image’s ALT, and so on.

SEO is a long-term process, there is still work for you to do after creating your content. 

• Look for gaps in your content and keyword portfolio

Use the information you learn about your competitors and your keyword strategy to inspire you to target new terms and develop appropriate content for your audience. This will boost your chances of appealing to your audience with all the information they need.

• Constantly search for new competitors

Remember that new businesses are launching websites all of the time. Searching for new competitors will allow you to update your research and gain new inspiration from other brands.

• Start by targeting weak competitors and work your way up

Don’t push yourself to try and accomplish too much too fast. Set goals for your SEO ranking strategy and work gradually towards becoming more present in the search engines for the phrases that you want people to associate with your brand.

TL;DR

Analyzing your competitors enables you to see how you’re doing in comparison. It shows you new opportunities and inspiration to push you even further. With a competitor analysis tool like RankingGap, you can do a lot of useful things and get informational data to improve your content strategy.