How To Find A Competitor's Keywords — Next Level

Apr 02, 2025 02:00 PM - 11 months ago 405207

Tips for identifying your competitors

Before we tin place the keywords our competitors are ranking for, we person to first place who our competitors are successful the first place. When investigating who you're competing against for abstraction successful the SERP, beryllium judge to see the following.

1. Your online competitors whitethorn beryllium different than your “real life” competitors

This whitethorn beryllium peculiarly existent if you person a beingness business (e.g. a brick-and-mortar store, a work area business, aliases immoderate business that meets pinch customers face-to-face). Investigating and search competitors straight successful the area of your business should beryllium a constituent of your strategy but make judge not to neglect your online competitors. Be judge to investigation what businesses, beingness aliases online-only, are coming up successful the hunt results for your target keywords, industry, and niche. This tin thief you get a well-rounded image of your competitory scenery and thief you spot competitors you whitethorn not person had connected your radar.

Pro tip! If you person a section business, you tin usage Moz Local to way and show your rankings, spot competitors successful your space, and spot who is ranking successful Google Maps results

2. Products, services, aliases verticals whitethorn person different competitors

Depending connected your business, you whitethorn person much than 1 group of competitors to support an oculus on. For example, if I person a cupcake business that offers mail-order cupcakes and I besides connection paid online cooking classes, my competitors for trading my cupcakes whitethorn beryllium different from the ones for my cooking classes. I will request to make judge I do investigation astir some to guarantee I person a complete knowing of really I americium showing up successful SERPs for my target keywords.

3. Guessing who your competitors are tin lead you down the incorrect path, wasting clip and money

Don’t conscionable conjecture who your online competitors are. Not only tin this lead to mistargeted content, but besides blindspots successful your wide SEO strategy. When doing broad competitor keyword analysis, it’s important to make judge you are search the correct competitors and examining the correct SERPs.

4. Be realistic

When considering who your competitors are, make judge you’re being honorable pinch yourself and your squad astir who you tin genuinely compete against. This intends that if you are a smaller business and are seeing ample brands for illustration Amazon aliases Apple successful the hunt results for your keywords, you are not apt to compete pinch aliases overtake those competitors successful the SERPs. Instead of aiming to beryllium number 1 successful those results, place the highest-ranking tract aliases page that is akin to your business aliases brand’s size and authority arsenic a target to purpose for.

Pro tip! Curious really your marque stacks up to your competitors? With Moz’s Brand AuthorityTM metric, you get a quantitative knowing of your marque spot and salience. You tin spot your people compared to your apical SERP competitors successful the Domain Overview tool. 

After clicking Find Competitors, I tin spot successful the database of apical 25 competitors that location are different restaurants and farms pinch akin names competing pinch them successful the SERPs. I tin besides spot an Inn and immoderate cuisine-specific sites for illustration findmeglutenfree.com.

Next, let’s effort entering the subfolder for their blog to spot really these results change. 

Now, we spot gardening-specific sites, specified arsenic online works stores, blogs for circumstantial works types, and wide works guides, included successful the Top 25 competitors list.

Pro tip! Click Analyze SERP to spot the different pages ranking for this keyword and further metrics, which will thief you amended understand the type of contented that’s performing well.

Alternatively, you tin caput to Explore by Site in Keyword Explorer and participate a page aliases tract to spot its ranking keywords, including branded keywords!

Pro tip! Once you place keywords, adhd them to a Keyword List to analyse further aliases to a Moz Pro Campaign to track rankings complete time.

Analyze competitor content

At this point, we person a beautiful patient database of keywords to activity with, but I want to show you 1 much instrumentality to further bolster your competitory keyword research. Analyzing what contented performs good for your competitors is simply a awesome measurement to spot what type of contented group are looking for successful narration to your industry, products, aliases services. And the Top Competing Content instrumentality is simply a awesome spot to really excavation into this data.

After entering my domain and my competitors (or by moving complete from Keyword Gap), I tin spot a database of pages from their sites that are outranking me, on pinch the keywords they rank for, clustered by page. 

By expanding the Top Competing Keywords column, I tin spot further accusation astir the keywords the page is ranking for, on pinch the URL connected my tract that it is outranking.

If you person a circumstantial keyword (or group of keywords) that is peculiarly important to your brand, examining the SERP pinch this instrumentality tin thief you place different sites wrong the abstraction that you whitethorn beryllium competing against. You tin besides usage this characteristic to thief you place imaginable opportunities to summation SERP features inclusion. 

Wrapping up

There you person it! You now person a targeted database of your competitor’s keywords and a fewer tips for further analyzing their contented and spotting opportunities. If you’re looking for further tips and tricks for performing a broad competitor analysis, I highly urge checking retired our How to Do An SEO Competitor Analysis Guide (which includes a useful downloadable worksheet) for adjacent steps. Now each that’s near to do is get retired location and use what you’ve learned! See you adjacent time. 

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