Competitor Keyword Rankings
-
Is there a way within SEOMoz to uncover the keywords your competitors rank for and their respective SERPs?
Thx
-
Hi David,
I was wondering if you have come across a tool for this? Or what the tool is that Broadbeach recommended? (I can't see his post??)
Thanks
-
Keri, you are of course absolutely correct. One way it can be useful is that it allows organizing your competitor's keywords into related groups
Looking at my own eCommerce analytics identifying those which have proven conversions and matching them with the keyword groups. At this point do the competitor linking research to identify those high value to go after.
Not only is it a great way to understand the keyword landscape (clusters) better but can show keyword phrase variations you can use in creating content.
Never was my intend to blindly use my competitor's keywords and blindly copy their linking / keyword profile.
-
Keep in mind a site can rank for a ton of keywords that no one ever searches for. Our business ranks first in Google (above Wikipedia!) for the string [Fast Gun, Treaty, and Big Gun styles of RC model warship combat] but I can tell you nobody has ever come into my site with that exact query.
-
Hi David,
If you are willing to spend money, then the above is a very good way to go about finding what keywords your competitors are ranking for. Just to clarify, the tool I listed above is free (choose the demo option), the only thing what differentiates the free and paid version, is that the paid version allows you to bring up fancy (and customizable) ranking reports, and it allows you the save the keywords you entered so you can re-check it easier next time. What I just do is save the keywords in an excel file and just copy/paste it each time into the tool. Ranking reports can easily be made yourself anyway and the "hassle" of copy/pasting keywords into the tool for me isn't worth buying the pro version..
Fingers crossed that SEOMoz will have it one day!
Regards
-
I will checkout the tool Broadbeach recommended and see if that suits me.
The only thing is that I am not interested in learning what any particular website is hoping to rank for based on keyword meta research, etc....but what they actually do rank for.
If the suggested "free" tool provides me with that answer I will be a happy camper. Thanks for your input 406Lucy.
-
@David Corner - Based on that input, Broadbeach addressed your question much better than I.
Also, it looks (to me) that there are some close similarities between the described functionality of SEMRush and the free link assistant tracker tool Broadbeach recommends in his answer .
-
Thanks for your input as this is addressing more the reason behind my question.
Even though the "Anchor Text" tab can give insight into what a particular website is aiming to rank for, it does not tell you what they actually rank for. Same holds true for checking their meta keywords.
I think the best and most efficient option is to use SEMRush to get the (excel) list of my competitor 's ranking keywords and their SERP's. It would be a great feature for SEOMoz to have (realize not everything is possible -:).
- Competitor keyword and SERPs
- Get their demand and competitiveness (Google KW tool)
- Filter for low/medium competitiveness and minimum demand
- Use resulting keywords as starting point for linking strategy (process described by 406lucy)
-
406lucy, thx for your answer.
I understand the process you describe which assumes you already have your keywords through traditional keyword research.
For some reason the starting point (including when talking to SEO companies) seems always that keywords obtained through researching demand vs. competition is appropriate starting point.
For what I am trying to accomplish it is important to have the ranking keywords of my competitors with some further pruning is the starting point for the process you described above.
Was hoping to avoid the extra cost of SEMRush or SpyFu in order to obtain the list I am looking for.
Reason why is that knowing my competitor's keywords and their respective SERPs in conjunction with keywords obtained through regular demand / competition research, allows for much more specific targeting.
-
Good day David,
The above information is great. What I could add though is if you add competitors into Open Site Explorer, there is an "Anchor Text" tab you can click, which often shows what keywords they are trying to rank for. It could also be possible that the website might have a meta keywords (even though they were outdated years ago). To access these, go to their website and check their source (ctrl+u), then look for the meta keywords line.
Once you have a general list of keywords that you think they are trying to rank for, instead of manually checking yourself with Google, I use the following software (http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/). Even with their free version, you can enter any URL, followed by a list of keywords you would like to see the rankings of.
Good Luck
-
The Keyword Difficulty & SERP analyis tool, available with in the pro dashboard [ http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty ] allows you to input a keyword or keyphrase - it then returns the top-ranking 10 competitors, who usually fall on the first SERP for the keyword of interest.
By running the report for a number of your keywords, you'll be able to identify which competitors have the best strategies in place, helping narrow your focus on which competitors to target.
Next, you may want to input these competitors into the Open Site Explorer (also in the Pro Tools section) to get insight into their link-building strategies, as well as visiting their websites directly to review their content strategies.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do you select which keywords to push in SEO?
Hi Guys Selecting the right keywords that a website can realistically rank for is a key to gain top rankings relatively quick. I am just curious to hear how you guys do it (the methodology) when selecting which keywords to push? I mean you need to check the competition for each keyword as well so how to check this quickly to see what we realistically can rank for? Cheers John
Competitive Research | | igniterman751 -
I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website is doing on google ranking
Hello, I am confused/frustrated/surprised how bad my website (flyhy.co) is doing on google ranking and I have no clue why even though I have been doing my homework regarding SEO. Just a bit of background, I have created a new website about 6 months ago for the paragliding community, the primary goal is to provide a platform for people to publish their ads (osclass), but also to provide some interesting reviews and tools to help paragliders chose their wing. We have been putting a lot of effort to provide a nice user experience and tio build the tools mentioned above. Our main channel to connect with the community is Facebook, and we have been quite active there. I have looked at many SEO articles and I made sure the website provides a good UX, the URLs are SEO friendly, good meta data, etc. Also have been using the google search console and analytics to monitor all of this. But here is the thing, all these does not seem to change anything in our ranking for important keywords such as "paraglider for sale", "paragliding equipment", etc. We seem to only rank (looking at Google’s keyword tool) for very specific wing model names that people have mentioned in their ads. I have ran out of ideas on how to improve our SEO !!!!!! I know the website is only 6 months old, but by now we should get some results. As an example, I will mention one our main website competitors: www.paraglidingequipment.org. OK the URL is pretty obvious and this website ranks in page #1 for "paragliding equipment" (but also for "paraglider for sale" and other paragliding related key phrases). OK there is the URL (paraglidingequipment.org), but I thought nowadays google bots are smarter than just that. The website is 1 year old (so not really much older than us, and was ranking high anyway even 6 months ago). The website looks like it was clearly made by one person and then quickly just left it running, so no content has been added (except for people putting their ads), there is almost no activity on the Facebook account. I have run some test such as "pagespeed insights" and we both rank the same. On "seositecheckup.com", we are clearly better with more 10 points. Is there anyone out there who can tell me what is going on? Have I missed a very important aspect of SEO? Is our website somehow compromising the robots crawling (although I can see about 80 pages have been already indexed in google search console)? I know content is king, but in paraglidingequipment.org the only content I see are ads, and we have ads and other interesting (ie reviews and tools) for paragliders. To conclude, I am basically completely clueless of what to do to rank at least on the first couple of pages of google for the key phrases above. I need help. Hichem. PS: in Moz bar our score is non existing (PA=1,DA=10), on paraglidingequipment.org (PA=23,DA=15). So it looks that essentially we are not apparent on the web! PSS: We have also tried to build some backlinks on few important paragliding community websites.
Competitive Research | | hichemboudali0 -
What keywords & phrases are my competitors targeting?
I wanted to compare our keyword focus, to my competitors. What is the best way to audit what type of content / keywords - my competitors are using?
Competitive Research | | jwochna0 -
Anybody here look at Alexa Rank and or PageRank when doing research?
Any Seo'ers out there still looking at PageRank and or Alexa Rank? Any suggestions on how to look at these stats? I personally believe both are not relevant in todays SEO researches. I'm i very wrong?
Competitive Research | | PrizeWize0 -
Why is different the difficulty of a keyword in Google Spain and Google mexico?
In your opinion, Which are the main reasons of this difference?
Competitive Research | | BorjaUrreta910 -
In my competitive campigans have less ranking and points according to your analysis, how can i form external links or large links ???
in my competitive campigans have less ranking and points according to your analysis, how can i form external links or large links ???
Competitive Research | | bullionguru0 -
Our site being outranked by competitors with lower "moz" scores - due to on-page SEO?
Howdy, Our SEO efforts are doing well, but for a few keywords it seems we cannot budge one of the competitors sitting in spot #1. Through some competitive analysis I've noticed that our website has a much higher mozRank with regards to both page and domain compared to the current #1 spot. My question is what kind of factors could be the issue as to why we are still being outranked. Is it simply a case of poor on-page SEO at this point or should I be taking the mozRanks with a grain of salt.
Competitive Research | | marketingdepartment.ch0 -
Twitter as a website's #2 ranked linked page?
A site I'm researching on open-site explorer has a #2 link with page authority of 52 and Domain authority of 97, and that link is the site's twitter page. No other sites I've researched have had their twitter page show up in it's link rankings like this, can someone explain?
Competitive Research | | TheSquareFoot0