How to Target Competitor Keywords

One of the best keyword research techniques is to go for keywords that your competitors are ranking for.  However, there can be too many keywords and it can be confusing to choose which ones to look for and in what order of importance.

During your competitor keyword analysis, which keywords from your competitors make the final cut?  Read the below methodology on how to target competitor keywords:

Recognize your keyword to conversion funnel 

Not all keywords convert to sales so it is important to distinguish which keywords and phrases lead to an actual purchases.

However, do not be quick to dismiss keywords and phrases that only send web traffic. Although they may not translate into immediate sales, they can be very helpful with your re-targeting campaigns in the future.

Select competitors that are most likely to covet the same audience 

When you are aiming for conversions and not just web traffic, look for websites that target the same audience as yours.  Use a digital marketing software to compare web statistics and analytics. Simply plugin a domain and check what other domain visitors are inclined to visit in the same space and what has audience overlap.

When selecting keywords, the following principles will help you to further learn how to target competitor keywords:

1.  Go for keywords that you believe are easiest to rank.  These type of keywords and phrases are characterized by low difficulty so you have higher chances of success. Based on these keywords, you can create content for your brand to rank and gain visibility in search engines.

2.  Speaking of the conversion funnel, another thing you can do is to study your Adwords campaign. Examine your paid keywords and look for ones that have high conversion rates. Keep in mind that your selected keywords should be appropriate to your existing site structure, so you don’t need to exert extra time and effort to create a whole new set of content just to support a particular keyword or phrase.

3.  It’s natural to go after keywords that have high volume but it also means high difficulty. Pay attention to organic click-through rate percentage, which translates to the percentage of people that click on the 10 blue link style, organic search results. However, if you see low figures, you might want to consider targeting SERP features. Design and optimize your content to rank highly on rich snippets (product ratings), universal results (image results, news results, featured snippets) and knowledge graph (weather, celebrity knowledge).