Finding the relevant keywords appears to be one of the common challenges for most marketers. Have you ever thought of using a competitor discovery tool to reveal your rivals’ top keywords?

You will learn:

• How to discover your competitors 
• How to use a competitor analysis tool like RankingGap to find your competitors’ keywords

The right keyword lays the strong foundation for the content strategy of your business.

One of the common SEO mistakes is when marketers don’t take into account how their competitors are dealing with keywords. This oversight can create a lot more keyword gaps for the business. 

Doing competitor analysis is the start to finding these missing keywords. In this article, you will know the steps to analyze your competitors. You will also learn how to use RankingGap – an amazing competitor discovery tool to fill your keyword gaps.

What is competitor discovery?

Competitor discovery is the practice of evaluating the other players in your market and most importantly, identifying your keywords gap with them. It also entails the gathering of performance data with the goal to enrich your marketing strategy.

Your competitors can have a lot of keywords that you are not targeting at that time. The situation is even worse when your competitors are ranking higher for the missing keywords.

Moving up even by one position on a SERP can improve click-through rates by over 30%. By targeting the right keyword, you are improving your chance to rank higher and potentially get more traffic. The best scenario is that you rank on the first page of SERP because first-page results attract 95% of search traffic.

Why is competitor analysis important?

The first reason is that you can know more about your competitors. It is simply understanding who is operating in the same space as you and targeting the same audience. It also brings huge insight into the kind of content you should be serving. You can see what they’re doing right and how you might imitate their successes. 

When you do the analysis, you can identify opportunities for your keywords. This could be the keywords that you have not targeted or the potential keywords that you have not put much effort into.

SEO competitive analysis involves researching the links, keywords, content, and to identify as much insight from your SEO competitors. So instead of guessing which keywords to target, you can take advantage of what’s already working for others, and build upon that success.

Doing competitor analysis can help you successfully answer these questions:

• Who are my actual SEO competitors?
• What keywords should I target?
• What content should I cover?
• What do I need to beat the competition?

How to do competitor discovery

Competitor analysis is a matter of finding out which keywords your competitors are after, what they’re doing to rank for them, and how you can beat them.

#1. Identify your competitors

First things first, you’ve got to know who your competitors are. 

You may already have a fair idea of who they are, but there may be businesses that aren’t discovered; known as indirect competitors. Indirect competitors don’t have the exact same offering as you. Unlike direct competitors, they are selling something similar in your market. 

For example, you may be a bubble tea seller and an indirect competitor might be a fruit juice seller. You’re both selling within the beverage market to the same, or similar, audience, but you’ve got different products. 

The most known way of identifying your competitors is to simply enter your top keyword in Google, then see which domains are ranking. For accuracy, you could do this for 10–20 of your most popular keywords, track everything in a spreadsheet, and calculate which domains appear the most frequently and in what position.

Don’t forget that if your company has a local presence, you may also want to check who your local competitors are. 

You can manually check Google using a search term and place name like above, or use an online tool such as RankingGap to identify your local competitors. We will show you the tool later.

#2. Compare competitor keywords to find keyword gaps: 

The challenge is that you or your competitors can potentially rank for thousands of keywords, so this type of analysis can be difficult to do manually. Similarly, there can be thousands of keywords you are missing. It is hard to identify the priority. 

Consider these key metrics and ideas:

• Volume: The number of monthly searches on Google for the keyword. Keywords with high search volume can attract more visitors.
• CPC: The average cost per click if you want to pay for Google Ads. A high CPC indicates that a large number of advertisers are after that keyword. Also, the ads will defeat the organic results.
• Competition: Competition (or keyword difficulty) tells how hard it is to rank on the first page of Google. The higher score, the harder. 
• Search intent: It’s important to go after keywords with what’s known as high commercial intent. Or rather, target keywords that people are searching for when they want to buy products.
• Relevancy: There are still differences between you and your competitors’ services/products. Make sure that the keywords you use to match with what your business is doing.

#3. Compare competitor content: 

Keywords are one way to develop content ideas. With the keywords you find, you can also see the content that the keywords appear in. 

So the next step is to look at your competitors’ top-performing content. It includes understanding what your target audience likes and which content approaches don’t get a lot of traction.

However, don’t spend all your time doing competitor analysis. Treat your competitive analysis as an ancillary activity. It shouldn’t consume too much of your time and resources. Focus on what your customers are telling you, whether through feedback, interviews, or their behavior. They will always be your strongest source of data and insights for you to find your keywords.

RankingGap – Find your competitor and keyword gaps

With a tool like RankingGap, you can do all the above steps faster and easier. 

You can use RankingGap to discover a lot of things about your and your competitors’ keywords. The tool will show you the keywords in four views:

• Missing: Keywords that all competitors rank, but you don’t. 
• Gap: Keywords that some of your competitors rank, but you don’t. 
• Unique: Keywords you are ranking for, but your competitors don’t.
• Common: Overlapping keywords that you and your competitors are ranking for.  

Step 1: How to find competitors with the tool

You can now discover who your competitors are based on insightful data gathered by RankingGap. This is particularly useful when your website is new or if the industry has no apparent market leaders.

RankingGap provides your competitor’s core metrics. It can analyze competitors’ strengths by gaining in-depth insight into the significant data such as web traffic, intersecting ranked keywords shared, and top 10 ranking keywords. It will also create an overview of these core metrics that will allow you to have an idea of which competitors they should keep an eye on.

You will realize potential competitors based on Opportunities and Traffic Volume metrics. An attractive bubble chart like the above will allow you to discover the competitors at hand. The information provided can also let you decide on where you want to focus resources and effort on.

Step 2: How to find the keyword gaps

One of the best things about RankingGap is that you can compare your website with 4 of your competitors at once. By doing so, you can get all the data in a single profile to determine the best keywords within your niche effectively.

#1. Find the keyword gaps that you and your competitors have

Here is the way you can discover all the potential keywords on RankingGap. You want to know what keywords both you and your competitors share, or keywords you do not have. Or even the keyword that your competitors don’t have but you do.

To do that, first, create a project by inserting your domain and your competitors’ as well as picking your location and language setting.

Once you’ve generated your project, RankingGap will give you the results. You can see that there are 4 tabs for you, standing for 4 views Common, Missing, Gap, and Unique. The final tab is for keywords that you marked as noticeable.

You can go to the “Common” keyword view, which you are already on by default. From that point on, you’ll see a list of keywords with your competitors’ ranking positions as compared to yours.

What’s displayed here are the keywords that you, including all your competitors, have. However, that doesn’t mean everyone shares the same ranking. The number on each column gives you the idea of who you are competing with for these keywords’ ranking, with the change.

If you want to know the keywords that all competitors rank, but you don’t, then go to “Missing”. If you want to know the keywords that some of your competitors rank, but you don’t, you may click on “Gap”. The remaining “Unique” is for you when you want to know the keywords you are ranking for, but your competitors don’t.

#2. Know what content is missing from your site

Remember, keywords are only the opening in the building block of SEO. So if you know what keywords you are missing out on, you’ll also be able to discover the content gap between your competitors and your site.

In this case, “Missing” or “Gap” keyword views are where you need to go and find what you want to look for. 

Now, you want to make sure that you are looking at your competitor’s well-performing content. Somewhere perhaps, in the top 10 with a search volume of say, 500. 

You can go ahead and set up your parameters in the “Advance filter” for a more refined result.

After boiling down to the keywords you want to see, that’s where you can dig into the content of those ranking keywords. Just click on the “View URL” of the keyword that attracts you. Go to that link, read the content, and learn how they are using the keywords for the ranking blog.

Narrowing the content gap between you and your high-performing competitor is one of the most impactful strategies you can use in content marketing.

With the “Gap” keyword view as well, you can discover some unpolished gems because it’s not content many have tapped into yet. 

You know what keywords and URLs your competitors are ranking for, you can create content targeting those same keywords to steal it from them. Star all the keywords you find potential, and start planning your content now. 

TL;DR

In conclusion, the first thing to do when discovering your keyword gap is to get the aggregated list of websites you’re competing against, across the entire keyword set. Then, sort out the missing keywords and content.

Remember that the power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target audience and how they are searching for your content, services, or products. You can shortlist your keywords based on these ideas. 

Using a competitor discovery tool like RankingGap can help you find your competitors, discover all the keywords opportunities and then know where to optimize your content.