How to Find Competitors' Keywords: Tips and Tools

Competitor keyword analysis offers several benefits:

1. Identify & Close Keyword Gaps: Discover high-ranking keywords driving traffic to your competitors that you might be missing out on. Use these keywords to optimize your existing content or create new content.
2. Adapt To Market Trends & Customer Needs: Notice shifts in the keywords your competitors optimize for, indicating changing market trends or customer expectations. Align your content strategy accordingly.
3. Enhance Visibility & Rankings: Analyze competitors’ high-ranking keywords and pages to identify their winning patterns (e.g., content format, user intent focus, update frequency). Adapt these tactics to achieve higher SERP positions.

To use SE Ranking for discovering competitors' keywords:

1. Open the Competitive Research Tool and input your competitor’s domain name into the search bar. Select a region and click Analyze.
2. Depending on your goal, go to either the Organic Traffic Research or Paid Traffic Research tab on the left-hand navigation menu.
3. View data on estimated organic clicks, total number of keywords, traffic cost, and backlinks.
4. Scroll down to see a table with all the keywords the website ranks for, including search volume, keyword difficulty, user intent, SERP features triggered by keywords, ranking position, and URLs ranking for the analyzed keyword.
5. To find keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t, head to the Competitor Comparison tab and add up to two websites for comparison. Check the Missing tab to see existing keyword gaps.

Pros of using Google Keyword Planner:

1. Free access: Completely free to use, making it ideal for SEO newbies and businesses with limited budgets.
2. Core keyword data: Shows core SEO metrics like search volume, competition, and suggested bid prices for each identified keyword.
3. Keyword categorization: Allows organizing keywords into different groups for targeted ad campaigns.
4. Historical data: Provides four years of historical data.

Cons of using Google Keyword Planner:

1. No organic data: Offers data on paid keywords, mainly suitable for advertising campaigns.
2. Broad search volume data: Displayed in ranges rather than exact numbers, making it difficult to precisely assess keyword demand.
3. No keyword gap feature: Cannot compare your and your competitors’ keywords side-by-side to find missing keyword options.

SpyFu helps in competitor keyword analysis by offering:

1. Database with 10+ years of historical data: Available in the Professional plan, providing long-term insights to monitor industry trends and adapt accordingly.
2. Keyword gap analysis: Allows easy comparison of your keywords to those of your competitors using metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, organic clicks, etc.
3. Affordability: Suitable for businesses on a tight budget.

To explore competitor data, visit SpyFu's website and enter your competitor’s domain in the search bar. Navigate to the Top Keywords section and click the View All Organic Keywords button to see the search terms they rank for.

While SE Ranking offers many benefits, there are some limitations:

1. Higher-priced plans required for some features: For instance, historical data on keywords is only available to Pro and Business plan users.
2. Data limited to Google only: SE Ranking’s Competitor Research Tool only provides data for Google.