What A Competitor Keyword Analysis Is All About Plus The Best Tools

We use Competitor Keyword Analysis Tools or Competitor Gap Analysis Tools to remove all the SEO complexity drawbacks. Whilst, helping us target the right keywords or creating custom SEO reports. Such SEO tools also help us to understand more about our website visitors. For instance, how are people searching for your products/services?

Bear in mind, that knowing which keywords are being used and what questions are being asked can help you create high-quality content. You’ll strategically target keywords with accurate keyword volume and difficulty metrics. Or even save keyword lists that you can track and update as needed. A good example of such tools is the one by Moz, to begin with.

Whereby, their Keyword Explorer Tool neatly ties together every keyword research metric. Making even complex analyses easy. So that we can spend less time in spreadsheets and more time generating qualified website traffic. If you want to rank above your competition on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), a competitor keyword analysis is why it’s essential.

But, what exactly is competitor keyword analysis, how do you find competitors’ keywords, and what are the best tools that we can all use? Well, in this post, we’ll melt down everything for you. We’ll try and define what competitor keyword analysis is, how to conduct it, and recommend high-quality tools that you can use to create a successful content strategy.

What Competitor Keyword Analysis Is All About

According to HubSpot, a competitor keyword analysis is a process of uncovering the keywords your competitors are ranking highly for in an attempt to create content that outranks them in search results. Keywords are a crucial part of any SEO strategy. They help you stay focused on what you create and ensure that your audience knows what you have to offer.

And, that you have the content they’re looking for. Generally, keyword search research can help you uncover the keywords you should use when creating your business content. In addition, it’s also important to have an understanding of how your industry competitors — those who are using these same keywords. And the successes they’re achieving with their own strategy.

Meaning, that you can easily get this understanding through competitor keyword analysis. The keywords that you conduct competitor analysis for should be relevant to your business and related to the content you already create. This analysis also helps you understand how difficult it will be to outrank a competitor — that is doing better than you in the SERP results as well.

And then, you can now pinpoint opportunities for high ROI — where it wouldn’t be too difficult to outrank a competitor for a relevant keyword. But, before you actually can conduct an analysis of your competitor’s keywords, you have to find their keywords first. Fortunately, you can use free and paid tools to find their keywords and identify content gaps in your strategy.

What Are Competitor Keyword Analysis Tools?

As aforementioned, competitor keyword analysis is the process of uncovering the keywords your competitors are ranking highly for. Particularly, in an attempt to create content that outranks them in search results. While, keeping in mind, that keywords are a very crucial part of any successful holistic SEO strategy that any web-based business has in place.

Whether online or offline, free, freemium, or even paid-for, competitor keyword analysis tools will help you track, analyze, and learn from your topmost competitors’ strategic plans. Then, thereafter, you can use that information to fire up your marketing campaigns and win big! Okay, we realize that there are hundreds of competitor keyword analysis tools to choose from.

And, in that case, knowing which is going to work best for you and your brand, can be a pain in the ass… right? So, why are SEO Analysis Tools so important? Simply, because websites that appear higher up in the search results will get more traffic to their pages. Coupled with potentially more landing page visits, lead conversion, and product sales in your business.

Your goal is to get to page one and ideally to position one. But, whether that is feasible largely depends on the market that you are operating in. Search Engine Optimization encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings. Including, driving on-site traffic, increasing awareness through search engines, and your content listing on web pages.

The main aim of using competitor keyword analysis tools is to help:

Understand your visitors using their keyword explorers:— Perse, by strategically targeting keywords with accurate keyword volume and difficulty metrics. As well as by saving keyword lists that you can track and update as needed.
Track your and your competitor’s rankings:— Know what searchers see in the SERPs. Particularly, by tracking national and local searches. So that you can get a holistic picture of how you rank for your keywords with a Search Visibility score.
Crawl and audit your overall website content:— Most competitor keyword analysis tools have crawlers that hunt for issues that keep search engines like Google or Bing from fully crawling your site. And, as a result, they send alerts to ensure you’re the first to know when site issues are found — so that you can easily but quickly fix them fast.
Optimize your web pages for the search result queries:— As you’ll learn, thereafter, a tool such as Moz Pro will ensure you’ve got the maximum potential to rank for your target keywords. Especially, by auditing the content on your pages and recommending specific improvements.

What’s more, you can easily find link opportunities from sites with high Domain Authority (DA) Score back to yours:— We all know that backlinks are a critical element of an effective holistic SEO strategy given any web-based business. Fortunately, some of these tools will help you maximize the effect of the links you have and find new ones to improve your rankings.

Get Started: On-Page SEO | The Best Practices For Site Content Audit

So, in reality, from helping you target the right keywords to creating custom reports, some of the best competitor keyword analysis tools will remove all that SEO complexity for you. Suffice it to say, the competitor keyword analysis tools neatly tie together all critical keyword research metrics together. And, in return, it becomes so easy to utilize SEO on websites by even novices.

Whilst, making complex analysis easy — so we can spend less time in spreadsheets and more time generating qualified website traffic. It’s a go thing if you want to get those higher rankings, quality traffic, as well as measurable results.

How To Perform A Competitor Gap Analysis

In the eternal pursuit of market share, businesses need to keep tabs on their competitors. Without insight into their relative strengths and weaknesses, businesses will struggle to stay competitive. In the digital world, it’s no different.

Let’s consider that you manage and or observe organic website traffic. If you manage the organic search presence of a website, at one point or another, your client or boss is going to ask you for competitive SEO insights. There are many reasons they might want this.

Some of these reasons are:

Staying competitive: They want to avoid falling behind.
Finding new opportunities: They want to know what’s working for others in their niche that they may not have thought of.
Diagnosing performance issues: They want to understand why their competitor is outranking them or getting more organic traffic.

But, what exactly does this type of analysis entail? Or rather, what Should a Competitor Analysis Include? Well, what a competitor analysis (or “competitive analysis”) includes will depend on your unique goals. For example, if your focus was growing your backlink profile, you could perform a competitor link analysis.

With this option, you might choose to look at a competitor’s top-linked pages to get ideas for linkable assets or analyze their referring URLs to get a better idea of what link-building methods they’re using. But, what are the key features to look out for in the best competitive research tools — something that you’ve been looking for all this while in vain?

Why The Competitor Keyword Analysis Tools Matter

In reality, before even diving into a competitor analysis, it’s important to know your competitors first. The most obvious type of competitor is a “direct” or a “market” competitor. This is a business that offers the same or similar product/ service as you do. As such, you can think of Coke vs. Pepsi or Nike vs. Adidas. When you turn to Google, however, the game changes.

You likely have different competitors for every keyword that’s important to your business, many of whom aren’t even your direct competitors. Without Competitor Keyword Analysis Tools, you won’t know how your site is ranking in SERPs such as Google, Bing, or Yandex. They allow you to stay ahead while using and implementing your overall SEO strategy.

Especially, when it comes to White Hat SEO Techniques and other quality web search methods. As this is a term that’s searched for often, it’s necessary to get a bit more creative than just using Google suggestions and experiments. So that you can get a competitive word, with which you stand a chance at competing and gaining good placements.

This also applies to paid-for and organic searches and it’s not necessarily a speedy process. I’m also sure you’ve heard the phrase ”content is king.” Unfortunately, this is no longer entirely true. Of course, content is everything (well, pretty much). But, it’s no longer enough to stick a poorly written blog up once a month — or worse, use text spinners to rejig old content.

Choosing The Right Plus Best Competitor Keyword Analysis Tools

So far, it’s good to note that; by analyzing what keywords our competitors are targeting, we can come up with ideas for new content. Or even improving on existing content with the goal of capturing more organic search traffic. But, not unless we go for the best toolkit in that case — something that can do all the dirty work for us, from start to finish, and all free!

For beginners, a good Site Explorer Tool should be able to combine all the powerful SEO elements and features in one unified interface

A must-have feature for the tool you’ll be looking for:

Organic Traffic Research: See what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which pages bring the most search engine traffic.
Backlink Checker: See which websites link to your competitors’ sites and gauge the quality of their backlink profiles.
Paid Traffic Research: Learn whether your competitors are doing paid search advertising and where they funnel their paid traffic.

How are people searching for your products/services? Knowing which keywords are being used and what questions are being asked can help you create high-quality content. You’ll also be able to strategically target keywords with accurate keyword volume and difficulty metrics. As well as save keyword lists that you can track and update as needed.

With that in mind, below are some of the topmost competitor keyword analysis tools listing that you can consider in your next strategy.

1. HubSpot Website Grader

To begin with, we are kicking off head-on with our Web Tech Experts Taskforce and SEOs team’s favorite tool — the HubSpot Website Grader toolkit. We all know that the goal of marketing is to generate traffic and qualified leads via the company’s website. That’s why, as marketers, we need to understand exactly what we can do to improve the SEO of that website.

With the HubSpot Website Grader, you can:

Website performance: Learn about your website’s performance in seconds, identify specific performance issues, and receive clear, actionable feedback on how you can fix them.
On-demand support: Receive how-to education on how you can improve your website.
Improve specific website issues: Gain access to a five-lesson HubSpot Academy course on Website Optimization so you can understand how to improve upon your website’s specific problem areas.
Optimize for mobile: Discover how to optimize your website for mobile.
Boost web security: Learn how you can implement website security best practices.
Enhance the user experience: Personalize your website’s UX to create a delightful experience for users.

So, with HubSpot’s Website Grader, simply enter the URL of your website to automatically receive a report card with actionable insights about your SEO efforts. From there, you can sign up for the HubSpot Academy SEO course that teaches you how to improve your website’s SEO, User Experience (UX), and more.

2. Google Search Console And Google Analytics

Google Search Console has a number of tools available to help you appear in the SERPs for the search terms and phrases your target audience is looking for. If you’re the owner of a business or an SEO on your marketing team, Search Console can help you conduct an initial SEO analysis from scratch or update your existing SEO strategy with fresh keywords.

By all means, Google Search Console monitors, debugs, and optimizes your website — and you don’t need to know how to code to benefit from this tool. There are some examples of website elements Google Search Console will teach you about and help you optimize.

Consider the following:

Keywords: Learn about the keywords your web pages are currently ranking for.
Crawl Errors: Identify any crawl errors that exist on your website.
Mobile Responsiveness: Understand how mobile-friendly your website is and discover opportunities to improve the mobile experience for your users.
Google Index: See how many of your web pages are in Google’s Index (if they aren’t in Google’s index, you can use the tool’s URL Inspection Tool to submit a page for indexing).
Analytics and Metrics: The website-related metrics that matter most to you, like clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position.

Although Google Analytics has a paid version, the free version of the product can help you manage your website’s SEO — this is especially true if you pair Google Analytics with Google Search Console. In doing so, all of your website’s SEO data will be centrally located and compiled, and you can use queries to identify areas for improvement with the keywords.

As well as key phrases that you want your website and web pages to rank for. There are other ways that you can use the free version of Google Analytics to understand and improve your SEO.

Consider the following:

Filtering your referral traffic: Get rid of the traffic that has the potential of ruining SEO reports, such as fake traffic.
Compare organic versus non-organic website traffic: Understand where your visitors are coming from and optimize those channels to increase traffic.
Determine engagement metrics: Use Site Content Reports to determine engagement metrics on each web page, engagement for the directories and pages on your website, page exit metrics, as well as acquisition, behavior, and conversion of landing pages.
Review the Multi-Channel Report’s Assisted Conversions feature: Identity which of your channels led to the most conversions and the value they bring to your business.

3. Quick Search Form

Talkwalker’s powerful social media search engine — Quick Search Form — gives you an instant overview of your brand online. Whilst, bringing extensive coverage of social networks, news sites, blogs, and forums. You’ll be able to monitor the conversations surrounding your brand, the influencers talking about you, and the trends in your industry.

Working in real-time, you can enter multiple brands – your competitors – and compare sentiment, with 90% accuracy. Also, discover audience demographics, gender, location, mentions, and more. Using filters, you can dig deep into trends and topics and find the stories that are currently impacting.

Boom! You’ll know how your competitors are performing. Areas you’re missing out on. Ideas for content creation that are going to resonate with consumers.

4. WordStream

WordStream is a simple, easy-to-use tool that gives you an instant list of your competitors’ keywords. Unlike other tools, it’s completely free to use, and you’ll get plenty of information without creating an account. All you need to do is provide your email.

To begin your journey:

Head to wordstream.com/keywords.
Enter your competitor’s website URL in the text bar.
Click Find My Keywords.
Confirm the URL, choose an industry (optional), and enter a location.
Click Continue.
Click Download all Keywords to send the list to your email.

The only downside is that the tool doesn’t provide your competitors’ actual rankings — to inform you how well they’re doing for those terms. Because it was created by a marketing agency, not a software company, WordStream is only what you see — it doesn’t offer an upgraded version of its tool with additional features.

5. Wappalyzer

The Wappalyzer add-on is one of the most interesting competitor analysis tools in the game — because of how it operates. And, it’s absolutely free! It runs as a Firefox add-on and only does one thing — but boy oh boy, does it do that one thing well. Wappalyzer is a cross-platform utility that reveals technologies that are used on different websites.

In layman’s terms, Wappalyzer acts as an add-on to your browser and can identify the types of software running on a specific website. You can click on your competition’s websites and get a quick scan of what software they’re using. Now, that’s awesome!

4. Google Keyword Planner

Moving on, the Google Keyword Planner is a powerful tool for seeing your competitors’ top keywords with impressive filtering and sorting capabilities. Unlike WordStream, you can filter and sort the keywords in any way you’d like: by average monthly searches, by three-month change, by year-over-year change, by the level of competition in the SERPs, and more.

In addition, you can choose which columns you’d like to include in your report, then download it as a CSV or Sheets file.

To get started:

Head to ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner.
Click Go to Keyword Planner.
Log into your Google account if you’re not logged in.
Choose your Google Ads account from the list, or create a new one by clicking New Google Ads account.
In your dashboard, tap the box that says Discover new keywords.
Tap the Start with a website tab.
Enter your competitor’s URL in the text bar. Choose whether you want to use the entire site or only the home page. Note: We recommend using the entire site first.
Click Get results.

However, Google Keyword Planner does not offer information on your competitors’ rankings, which won’t tell you where they perform best. Knowing how well they perform is critical for you to compete (and win) in organic search results.

6. BuiltWith

BuiltWith is a website profiler, lead generation, competitive analysis, and business intelligence tool. It is a service that helps marketers determine what technology was used to build a website, in order to provide leads, intelligence, and analysis. Described as a business intelligence and competitive analysis tool, BuiltWith provides profiles of websites, lead generation, etc.

As well as sales and business intelligence, eCommerce data, and competitive analysis. Impressive, no? Using BuiltWith in your competitive analysis will identify key market segments that your brand may be missing out on. Track your competitors and build a list of prospects. In nutshell, BuiltWith is a very powerful website profiler tool.

It’s among the best competitor keyword analysis tools list, obviously, because you can use it to track data for different market segments. And even find usage trends and market share information for the whole Internet. Alongside insights about competing technologies and how they’re performing.

Competitor comparison means you can find out:

If technology is gaining or losing market share
If a technology’s competitors are increasing market share at a faster rate
The rate of churn between technology competitors
Sites that shifted from one competitor to another

The BuiltWith Chrome Extension lets you find out what a website is built with by a simple click on the BuiltWith icon! Upon looking up a page, BuiltWith returns all the technologies it can find on the page.

Another yet neat thing about BuiltWith is that it offers a free plan — to use for individual site lookups, plus Basic, Pro, and Enterprise access. That way, if you only need a select few services, you’re not roped into paying a giant fee.

7. Semrush

By definition, Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. Its tools and reports are able to help marketers that work in a variety of services. Including but not limited to SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, and Campaign Management.

SEMrush is a fantastic SEO tool that can be used to carry out keyword research, including tracking the keyword strategy of your competitors. You can also use it to run SEO audits, search for backlink opportunities track everything through reports and so much more. You can start your Semrush journey by completing a few basic tasks.

Learn how to level up your online visibility and attract more traffic to your website. What’s more, you can see on its Prices Page that they have 3 levels of subscription. Including the Pro, Guru, and Business subscription packages. If you are opting to take a trial of Semrush, we offer Pro and Guru for trial.

8. SpyFu

To enumerate, SpyFu is a keyword research and competitive intelligence tool. And, it’s used by digital marketers to improve their performance in an online searches. More specifically, SpyFu can be used to identify the most profitable search terms in your competitors’ paid and organic search campaigns.

Spyfu is a fantastic tool for more holistic competitive research, even at its free level. You not only get a list of your competition’s top keywords, but also your competition’s top competitors, inbound links, top pages, and page-one keywords. You can even do a surface-level comparison between your domain and your competitor’s domain.

To get started:

Head to spyfu.com.
Enter your competitor’s URL in the text bar.
Under the header, tap the SEO Keywords tab between Kombat and Ranking History.

In comparison, Semrush is an all-purpose SEO tool, right? Well, SpyFu is more focused on competitor analysis. But based on my analysis, even from a competitive intelligence perspective, Semrush is a far superior tool. Unfortunately, in its free version, Spyfu is a limited competitive keyword research tool.

Whilst, offering only the first 5-10 keywords that your competitor ranks for and gating specific information behind a subscription paywall. The good news is that you can easily snag a subscription starting at $33/month (paid annually), which will help you access all of Spyfu’s features.

9. WooRank

WooRank is an SEO checker and digital marketing tool. It’ll scan your website and give you an audit of its SEO. The reason I’ve included it in my list of competitor analysis tools is that you can look at your competition too.

The tool allows you to add three competitors, so you can perform a comparison of:

Technical SEO
Site performance and usability
Keyword usage
Backlink quality
Social media engagement

WooRank’s Keyword Tool measures and tracks keyword rankings and SEO impact. Your competitors have added automatically, meaning you’ll receive insights into their marketing strategies, their goals, and their priorities. Not only does it monitor your website’s SEO performance, but the keyword ranking and landing pages of your competitors.

You can sign up for a 14-day free trial. Give it a go! If you’re happy to pay, there are various price plans that won’t break the bank and could see your website outranking those of your competitors and increasing traffic. ROI is a given!

10. MOZ Pro

Moz is an SEO and data management software that helps businesses increase traffic, ranking, and visibility of sites in search results. Key features include site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and keyword search tools. The software allows users to categorize, compare, and prioritize keywords and phrases to fine-tune content and marketing strategies.

It also enables businesses to outrank the competition by providing intuitive keyword suggestion tools, which are derived from an extensive online database using updated SERP data. Moz supports businesses to fix technical SEO issues that impede site visibility, traffic, and quality ranking. It also allows them to track competitors’ movements on the SERP.

Whilst, allowing businesses to uncover competitive advantages in order to attain top positions. Additionally, it can perform automated weekly checks on the site, alerting administrators to any existing issues to facilitate prompt fixes.

Another great tool is Ahrefs Site Explorer that’s very similar:— a Competitive Analysis Tool For SEO auditing and website rank tracking. Get a high-level view of all your projects and track their SEO performance and progress. Research your competitors’ backlinks and keyword rankings. Find winning keyword ideas from our industry-leading database.

The Best SEO Practices To Stay Competitive On SERPs

Perse, good content must be original and not infringe on the intellectual property rights of others, highly relevant and useful to the target industry and audience, and very well written with good grammar and spelling. The images and videos should also include a title, ALT tag, and description. And if appropriate, try to give credit to the original artist.

For example, if you’re using creative commons for licensed images in your content. Lastly, it should also point to the source of research and quotes where applicable, etc. Give valuable content to your audience. In other words, the best possible way you can perform best in the search is by giving value to your audience.

And, preferably, your industry too. This includes having a site that is well-built, performs well, and is capable of being used across various platforms. Like desktop, tablet, mobile, etc. Producing content that is actionable and contains fresh ideas and having a good mix of multimedia content, not just written. As well as utilizing social media platforms effectively.

Learn More: SEO Best Practices | SERP Tools For Ranking Sites No #1

In the end, your brand is recognizable across all platforms and content can be distributed. Furthermore, this is becoming even more important now than ever. Whereby, social signals (Facebook likes, G +1s, Retweets, etc.) indicate that your content is useful. Why? Simply, because people are reading/watching and ideally, sharing and commenting every now and then.

Likewise, in this brave new world of content and post-Google algorithm changes such as Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, white hat SEO is the only way. That’s if you want to go ahead of others and if you want your site to get better and become a useful part of the internet. Carrying out white hat practices also means that the search engine giants will like your site more.

And, even position it accordingly in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) too. It’s also worth mentioning that your link profile remains important but that this is something that takes time and should be carried out sensibly and organically. Buying links will get you a Google penalty, as will any indication that you might have.

Final Thoughts:

Notably, your competition’s link profiles can provide either you (if sole) or your SEO team with very important and valuable insights. After all, your competition’s link profiles, along with your own, should also be a core component of this analysis.

However, it’s good to know that this is where things can get dicey. That’s if you don’t have a good grasp on SEO. And what may seem to be obvious in terms of correlation may be entirely different when looked at from the POV of having everything. So, beware that this is where the dicey part comes in.

On one hand, if you don’t do a link analysis, but there are other weaknesses, you may never be 100% certain what was responsible for improving the site. On the other hand, if you have all of the information, you may still never be 100% sure. But at least, you can narrow down the exact root cause of the improvement.

Always remember, a search is not a simple correlation – since correlation is not causation. And just because you added one thing doesn’t mean that that one thing caused said improvement. In reality, the daily algorithms a search engine like Google chooses to announce, just so happen to be the most devastating if you’re in any way engaging in spammy practices.

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Competitor Keyword Analysis Tools | 10 Best For SEO Webmasters

What Competitor Keyword Analysis Is All About