4 Tools to Find Out What Keywords Your Competitors Are Using

Knowledge is power, and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely … but unfortunately there is no such thing as absolute knowledge. D’oh! However, one piece of knowledge in terms of internet marketing that equals quite a lot of power is knowing the keywords that your competitors are targeting. This gives you the opportunity to either try and target the same ones and steal their thunder (especially if you know that they don’t have an extensive or professional SEO program in place), or to target different alternatives in order to get a complementary market share. And on the net, everything is possible … so today we are looking at three tools you can use to get your competitors’ keywords.

The Keyword Spy Who Loved Me

1. The manual method

You can ‘View Page Source’ by right clicking anywhere (except on a link) on your competitors web pages, and then clicking Ctrl+F, and typing ‘keyword’. After this you’ll see the keywords listed for that page. Of course, these words might be very different to the ones that are actually drawing people to their site, or those that they rank well for in PPC, for example.

2. Visually

Check out their on-page content, and look for words or phrases that are repeated throughout the text, especially at the beginning. It is likely they are targeting these keywords.

3. Spyfu

This tool not only gives you your competitors keywords, but reveals trails of action that paid off for them, the ad copy that drives the most leads, etc. Of course, it costs money … and is not personalized to your business as ‘real’ SEO is!

4. Ranks.nl

If you are having a hard time visually picking out keywords from on-page copy, you can pop the URL in to ranks.nl and see what it thinks the most important terms on the page are.

Of course, you need to remember that knowing a competitor’s keywords doesn’t necessarily dictate the ones that you will use. Your two businesses might be more different (in consumer’s’ eyes) than you imagine. A good web marketing company can help give you a pro perspective on this.