Comptetitor Keyword Research – The 5 Best Free Tools
February 24, 2011 
2 Comments
This is a guest post. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
One of the most important things you have to figure out before you start doing search engine optimization is what keywords you should try to rank for. This can be kind of difficult so you might want to check what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which ones bring them most traffic. All of this is great, but you will need the help of special tools to do such a keyword research and most of the times these tools are paid. However, there are some really great tools that do those things properly and are actually free. Here is a list:
1. Open Site Explorer – You have probably heard of SEOmoz and this tool is available once you log in the website. If you need ideas for keywords, simply type the URL of your competitor and click on the tab that says “Anchor text distribution”. This will help you see what keywords your competitors use (up to 20) and how strong exactly their link building campaign is. This is a very useful tool that you should take advantage of.
2. SEOmoz Term Extractor – This is another tool from SEOmoz that will be very helpful. It will show you what phrases your competitors are targeting. That includes the one, two and three word key phrases. This tool will also be very helpful when it comes to on-site SEO tips and tricks. Just explore it and get the best from it.
3. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – This particular tool is perfect when you need keywords suggestions. However, it can do much more than that. What I do with it, is I go to “Columns” and I check ”Extracted from Webpage”. After that I enter the URL of my competitor and Google AdWords Keyword Tool focuses on a certain web page from the website rather than on the home page. Just play around with this tool and see what it can really do.
4. Alexa – Alexa is a popular tool that people use to track their traffic score. However, if you click on the “Site Info” tab, you will be able to get the keywords that bring a lot of traffic to your competitor after just typing the URL. After you have done that you should click on the “Search Analytics” tab and you will see which keywords are on the decline or on the rise as well as some more useful information.
5. SEMRush – Use this tool to type your competitor’s URL and see what the top 10 keywords they organically rank for are. It also shows a lot of other helpful information such as traffic percentage and the search results position.
Overall, using paid tools has its advantages but as you can see, free SEO tools for competitor keyword research do a great job as well. If you can’t afford to pay for tools like these, just use those 5 free ones when you need to. They will not let you down.
I hope the list with all those search engine optimization tools (interesting to know is that in Denmark, the people commonly refer to them as Søgemaskineoptimering værktøj) helps you, because selecting the right keywords is the most important parts of your SEO campaign.
A question that I am frequently asked is how someone can maximize their paid search account. It doesn’t matter if they are advertising on Google, Yahoo (now using Bing’s results), or Bing. While there are many ways for someone to get the best results out of pay per click advertising, there is one common mistake that I find in almost every account I look at. The enemy of every online marketer: High Cost Keywords. You would be surprised how many people start a new campaign or ad group without looking over the keywords to see how much they cost and how much traffic they may bring. This mistake is not just made with PPC novices, but also people and companies that have been doing it for a long time.
I did this search on the basis of just $0.50 per click and no budget to show the potential of what these type of keywords would bring. Does your advertising budget have this much per day? You might ask why anyone would put these terms in their search ad groups, but I have seen companies that just sell aftermarket ipod, iphone, and ipad accessories have these terms in their account. They never could understand why they were wasting so much money and never getting any conversions. The data speaks for itself I believe. Most people that search for these broad terms are notorious for not purchasing. They are in the research stage of the buying cycle. People that search for terms that usually contain 3-5 terms have a better chance of purchasing than broad searchers do. If you don’t sell these items, then you never need to be bidding on them. You will never win and you will end up broke. Do yourself and your company a favor and take an extra 5 minutes to put all your keywords through a traffic estimator and strip out all the high cost keywords. You will be happy that you did.
Paid Search is a great addition to your online marketing arsenal and should not be overlooked. Many online businesses do not look into it because of the expense, but it can be well worth the time and expense if you set up your account properly. Many small businesses that I talk to just jump into setting up their account and add outlandish keywords that will bring cost and never convert. I am going to show you the simple way to setup your account that will make it cost effective and hopefully will bring you a better click-through rate and hopefully a better conversion rate. Please make sure you have some type of analytics software installed on your site, Google Analytics will work just fine.
Follow Us!