Looking at which keywords already send traffic to your competitors is usually the best way to accelerate your keyword research. But first, you need to identify those competitors. That’s where your brainstormed list of keywords comes in handy. Just search Google for one of your seed keywords and see who ranks on the front page.
If none of the top-ranking websites for your seed keywords resemble your site (or where you’re trying to take it), then you should try searching for slightly more specific things.
For example, if you sell coffee-making equipment on your website, you may find more actual competitors in the search results for “cappuccino maker” rather than “cappuccino.” That’s because there are mostly e-commerce stores like yours ranking for the former and blogs ranking for the latter.
Once you find a competitor website that fits the bill, you should plug it into a competitive intelligence tool like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to check which pages bring it the most traffic and what keywords these pages are targeting.
After repeating the process with a few of your competitors, you’ll find yourself with a pretty sizable list of relevant keywords. And you’ve barely even started your keyword research!
Whether these keyword ideas are purely informational (i.e., blog articles) or have commercial intent (i.e., product pages) is something we’re going to determine in later stages of our keyword research process. For now, your goal is to collect as many relevant keyword ideas as you can.
Make sure to repeat this process for as many competitors as you can. We have a handy report in Site Explorer, which will help you discover more of them. It’s called “Competing Domains” and shows you similar websites to the one you’ve entered based on the common keywords that they rank for in Google.
ARE YOU SEEING A LOT OF TOPICS YOU’VE ALREADY COVERED?
If you’re doing keyword research for an established website, you may find that you’ve already covered most of your competitors’ keywords. In this case, you should try using the Content Gap report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. It finds keywords that one or more of your competitors rank for, but you don’t.
To use it, plug a few of your competitors’ websites into the top section, then paste your own site into the bottom field and click “Show keywords.”
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