Step 3 - Scan Your Competition for Keywords

Let's first go over some keyword lingo and things to think about while you're spying on your competitors.

Consider the following when searching for keywords:

• Do the results bring up competitors you know about in the organic search results?

• Are there any newcomers?

• How's the competition for PPC ads and sponsored links?

Tips for deducing competitor keyword strategies on the front-end:

• Which topics on the site appear to be high-yield (show up frequently)?

• How many of your target keywords appear on their home page and throughout other pages of their site?

• Which keywords are used in their internal links (to pages within their site)?  More...

 
  Tips for evaluating keyword strategies on the back-end:

• Identify keywords in the page titles.

• Which keywords appear in your competitor's meta description tags?

• Find keywords in the meta keywords tags.  More...

          How do you know if a keyword appears in a page title?

Here's how to check in Google:

Type allintitle: “your keyword” into the search box.  Click to view a snapshot of this technique.

This example tells us how many sites have "used golf clubs" in their HTML page titles; there are only 31,700 organic results.   Compare this number to the results from a regular search for used golf clubs.  More...

  Which keywords are your competitors going after?

With such front and back end questions in mind, you'll be able to scout your competition and see which keywords they’ve targeted.  Scan and do a fast sweep through your competition at this point; more competitive analysis techniques with case studies will be discussed later on.  More...  

 Another way to Find Target Keywords - View Page Source:

You can view any site's page source as an alternative method to check out page titles, meta description tags, and meta keywords tags.  It's also an easy path to find whichever keywords you're looking for.  Source code is the information that tells your browser what to display on your screen.

How do I get to the Page Source?  If you’re a Firefox user (and you have Windows), type Ctrl + U and the page source will show up.    This is what page source looks like (on a Mac).  You also can navigate from the toolbar View > Page Source.   You can easily find it in the Internet Explorer menu by navigating in a similar fashion.

What's next when I see the Page Source?  Once you are viewing it for a competitor's web page, use your browser’s find function ( Ctrl F or Edit > Find ) and type in title to find the page title or enter any keywords you want to check out.   Here's an example of how to find a keyword.

The purpose of Step 3 is to get more ideas for your keyword portfolio, see how your competition is optimized, and deduce which keywords they're primarily targeting.  More... 
 

A few research tools to serve as your "competitive radar":

• KeyCompete.com: reveals the keywords your competitors are using in their Paid Search campaigns, i.e. their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.

• Compete.com: tells you which keywords are sending traffic to competing sites; also, see how two sites match up against each other for competing keywords.

• SpyFu.com: shows very useful keyword info about competing sites such as organic keywords, paid keywords, and top ad competitors; you can sort by industries or categories.  More...

Again, the tips & tools we’ve just shared with you are fast and qualitative ways to evaluate the competition to just get a feel for what’s out there.  We hope that this step provides greater focus to your keyword research, and we know that it'll help shape your keyword portfolio into a more polished form.

Unlock the full version of Step 3:  Scan the Competition.