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How To Find All The Keywords Your Competitors Rank For
This video will show you how to find all the keywords your competitors rank for
One of my favorite methods to find keywords
is to reverse engine the competition. What this essentially means is looking at the websites that are already on page one, and looking at all of the keywords that are already typed in. The reason why this works so well is because the sites on page one, they’ve already done the hard work of doing all the keyword research, finding the best keywords. So all we simply need to do, is plug in their website into our clever little SEM rush tool, and look at all of the keywords they targeting, and simply cherry pick the ones that are suitable for our business. So, this is how you do it. So, you go up to Google.
You wanna type in one of the keywords you’re targeting. So, example for me will be carpet installation Richmond, Virginia. Scroll down, and you wanna find a local business. So, in position one I’ve got Yelp, I’m going to ignore that. I’ve got Angieslist, so again, I’m going to ignore that, because it’s not a local business. Keep on scrolling down, I’ve got Custom Floors, potentially this could be a good example to use right now, or I could use Jeter’s Carpet, or even, I could scroll down further, and go for, not Level Finish, because that’s actually us, but essentially you need to find a local business. So, in this scenario, I’m gonna go with www.jeterscarpet.com.
So, you will simply right click, and then click Copy Link Address, go over to Sem Rush, and plug in the domain into the search bar, and then click Search. Wait for the page to load, it should actually remove the http part of the URL, so, you will see when I copied it, it’s got the https there, when you paste it into Sem Rush, it should actually remove that for you automatically. If it doesn’t, then just remove it yourself, because if you include that there, you won’t actually get any information. So, the first thing to do is to make sure you have the right data base selected. So again, the United States is what I need.
So now the information is loaded, I can actually scroll down and see loads of information about this domain. I can see how many Back links they have, I can see the Traffic Trend, and again, the most important part I want to look at, is the Top Organic Keywords. So, this tells me that this website, www.jeterscarpet.com, actually appears for 860 different keywords in Google. So again, let’s click View Full Report, like we did the last time, and this will list out all of the keywords this site is ranking for on Google.
Just like that. So you can see, there are keywords going up over time and time, which is good, it shows there is a positive correlation that this site is definitely doing the right thing, because Google is starting to show this site for more and more keywords. If you see a site going downhill, I’d probably avoid this, and maybe go further back on page one, or even to page three, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re not analyzing a site that is above you, you’re going in the right direction. Scroll down now, you can see all of these keywords.
There’s quite a lot of keywords to manually review here, so best thing to do is to scroll to the top, and then click Export, and let’s download a CSV file. Let’s get that open.
So, this is what it looks like. Let’s close that, so you can see this a bit better. So, the first one we want to do is get rid of columns we don’t need. So, we don’t need column B, which is a Position. So this is the position they are in Google, we don’t actually need that. Previous Position, we don’t need that either. We do want the Search Volume, we don’t want keyword difficulty, so get rid of that. We don’t want CPC, so get rid of that. We do what the URL, and we want to get rid of all of the rest, we don’t need these ones. So once you’ve got that, let’s tidy up the spreadsheet a little bit.
Just makes things a little bit easier to see. The reason we want to keep URL, is so we know what the URL is appearing for that keyword. So, as you can probably see already, sometimes you see the Home Page appearing, and sometimes you see the flooring shop appear. So, it’s good to know what URL Google thinks is relevant for the search tone, this way we know when we put our campaign, we can optimize certain URLs for certain keywords. For example, if I wanted to target carpet and flooring, I would need a flooring page. Well, that’s probably not the best way to do it, but it’s just showing you how they’ve done it. Let’s put that in bold.
First thing we want to do, is filter through all the keywords, as there is going to be, I think over 800 keywords there was in this spreadsheet. Let’s just have a double check. They have 860, so we don’t want to waste our time going through all of these. So, to save you time, simply take the column like so, and go to Data, and then go to Filter, and that’s added the little arrow right here, once the arrow comes through, give it a click, and we want to choose what it contains, the word, let’s go for any service, let’s go for carpet first. Just like so, that will now filter all the keywords that do not contain carpet.
So you might think, “Okay, these keywords are great, so let’s just copy these to our master file.”, pause, we don’t want to do that straight away. You have to remember, these keywords are keywords that this website appears for, so the company is called Jeter’s Carpets, as a result, they’ve got a lot of keywords coming through, which contains the word Jeter, so we don’t want to have these keywords in our results, because if someone types in Jeter’s Carpet, they obviously looking for a Jeter’s Carpets website, so the conversion for us will be super low anyways, so let’s filter out these ones as well.
So, does not contain Jeter’s. Just like so, that has removed a bulk of them, there will still be a few in there, like Jeter’s, because as you will see from my filter, I just put in Jeter, but this should remove the bulk of them, and now I’m left with 159 different keywords, which is pretty good. So now you can kind of copy this straight over to your keyword research template, or if you want, you can tidy it up a little bit more, because there’s still gonna be some keywords in here that are not relevant for us.
For example, we’ve got this keyword right here, Mohawk URSA Major Carpet, this is obviously just a type of carpet, as we only install carpet, we don’t actually sell carpet, this isn’t a good key word, so we can actually go ahead and delete this, or just zoom a little bit, just in case you can’t actually see this, hopefully it’s a little bit better, but essentially depends how you want to do it. You can clean up the list here, or you can clean up the list on your master file. I would advise to clean it up on your master file, just because it’s more easier to work with, everything’s on one tab.
So, once you have the information here, we can copy the keyword and the Search Volume, and just before I do that, actually just to make a note, for the URL column, when you see a long URL like this, it’s typically a blog post, or to do a product page, if you don’t sell products on your site, or don’t plan on writing those blogs, you can simply delete these ones, cause they are going to be more of the longer keywords.
So if I show you what I mean, so this is a long one, look at this keyword Cedar Creek Carpet, again we don’t sell carpet, you can see all of these keywords down here, massive URLS, and the keyword’s Trove Carpet, Trove Carpet again, so we don’t need any of these, so you can see what I mean. So, the main keywords we want are typically the shorter URLs. So, let’s get all of this observation over to our spreadsheet now, which I’m pretty sure should be here. Keyword Research Template. This is to do with carpet, so I will go to the carpet tab, and I will paste all of these below here, with the monthly search volume.
So, that is essentially how you do it for one of them. So, what you want to do now, is to obviously repeat that. We’ve only done carpet, which you have to remember, we need to check which other keywords they appear for. They could be actually targeting hardwood, or as we know from experience, we need to type in wood, and not hardwood. So let’s take out hardwood like that, which they have indeed, they have quite a few keywords here for hardwood. They’ve got maple tumbleweed hardwood flooring, pretty interesting one, to see if somebody’s going to buy a product,
they’ve got hardwood flooring Richmond, Virginia, which I’m pretty aware of. Unfinished flooring, that’s a pretty good keyword. Hardwood floor repair, they’ve got 7 hardwood flooring, rustic maple hardwood. So again, just filter through these, and see which is relevant. So for us, I would say we don’t need this one, this one can stay, unfinished, that’s not to do with installation, however we can leave that and maybe go for unfinished walnut hardwood flooring installation. So keep that, and go for a longer type keyword. Hardwood flooring gunstock color, again, it’s not to do with installation. We don’t need this one. Golden oak hardwood flooring, potentially we can have this one there.
Country hardwood floors, not sure what that is, that’s pretty generic, get rid of that one. Somerset maple hardwood flooring, again, not sure what that is. Natural red oak hardwood flooring, again, it’s not to do with installation, so it’s just more generic flooring in such terms, again, there’s no harm in keeping them, it’s just for us to know, I would say from experience, it’s better to put all the keywords on the master file, the ones you’re unsure about. If you know it’s a no, then just remove it. If you’re unsure about it, put it on the sheet, I’ll show you why. Let’s copy these back to our master sheet.
The reason why you want to add it is because when it comes to optimizing your hardwood page, this is what you’re going to refer to, all of these keywords, so if you don’t like it, you just don’t optimize your site for it, but it’s better to have information than not to have it. Just doing the same thing now, we’ve done carpet and we’ve done hardwood, let’s move on to tiles. So, go back to the filters, and simply type in tile. So, we’ve got quite a few keywords for tile, quite a lot in deed actually. So you can see again, you can add more keywords to filter out more of these words we don’t actually need.
So again, I would go for this one seems pretty good.
I’ll take out this one, that’s actually not actually needed. Mosaic tile, potentially, there could be different variation, so some people look for mosaic tile installation, so again, I can keep this keyword here for a bit of reference. Delete this one, we don’t actually need this one. Slate tile, that’s a pretty good one. Don’t need this one. Tile companies in Richmond is a good one, tile stores Richmond, tile stores again, we will keep that one.
Again, someone looking for a tile store, they might be looking to go to the shop and actually buy the tile, while we just install them, so again I’m going to delete it, which means I should delete this one, Richmond tile stores, and hopefully you get the idea of what I’m saying now. So, you go through the list, and you pluck out the best keywords. So, when it comes to your business, you will obviously know what keywords are best for you, and what you offer as a service. Once you finalize that, just copy it across to master spreadsheet. Master tile as it is said there. So, that is fine, so that is literally how you do it.
So, do bear in mind, we’ve just done one website. What you want to do, is go back and plug in all of your websites into Google. So, all of your keywords into Google. So I just plugged in carpet installation, Richmond, Virginia, that is one of the service. I now want to plug in hardwood installation, Richmond, Virginia, for example, and now I want to find more local business sites. So again, I will ignore Yelp, ignore Home Advisor, ignore Angieslist, ignore Thumbtack, I would go for Costen Floors, I would go for Flooring RVA. Typically, I would do about three websites per service, that way you know you cover all of the keywords, that way you know nothing is left unturned.
So, with the carpet installation, I obviously just done one as an example, but you want to be doing at least three. Hopefully that makes sense, and this way you will make sure you cover all of the keywords.
Reverse engineering your competitors is a great way to find tons of relevant keywords literally within minutes.
The competition have already done all the initial hard work and heavy lifting to find the best keywords, we simply need to review them all and cherry pick the most relevant ones for our business.
Reverse engineering your competitors is a solid method, however, its always best practice to incorporate this with the other keyword researches strategies as there’s no guarantee that your competitors have found all the possible keywords!
This article is from the online course:
Local SEO: A Definitive Guide to Local Business Marketing
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Local SEO: A Definitive Guide to Local Business Marketing
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