Blog, Competitive Research, Keyword Research
Free Keyword Research – An Overlooked Keyword Research Strategy
Put away your wallets and get ready to find popular and profitable keywords for free.
Everyday your competitors are showing their best keywords to you. Yes, their best performing keywords, in public, full exposed, ready for your use in your business. Why, you ask? Well, the short answer is that they have to.
This is the equivalent of you playing poker with your fiercest competitors and they have all their cards faced up on the table, in plain site, for you to see their hand and their playing strategy. Think about that. Your competitors are telling you want they are doing on their site to get better search engine rankings!
Truth is…your competitors rather not show you what their best keywords, but if they want to rank well in the search engines, they have to. (And of course, you do too.)
And guess what, it is okay that everyone needs to show their SEO hand on their site. It’s seems like it should be a great equalizer, but in reality, it’s not. You see no two companies ever implement the same way.
Sure, there could be similarities and blatant copying of one another, which I don’t ever recommend, but there are too many variables with the people within each company – skill sets, knowledge, personalities, goals, emotions, budgets, marketing, etc. So, even if I provided the exact same list of keywords to two direct competitors, there is zero chance that both will execute in the same way. (The one will the most SEO knowledge and implementation skills will likely win!)
Getting Serious about SEO:
In order to drive more customers to your business from search engines, you must get serious about search engine optimization.
One great technique is to manually review your competitors’ web sites. So, it’s time to play detective, dress up as your favorite sleuth solver (this is optional, but preferred) and launch an all-out investigation of your competition.
How to Manually Review a Competitor’s Site for Effective Keyword Research
This overlooked technique is admittedly manual, but extremely powerful. Simply block out a chunk of time in your day (say, one hour this week) to take a close look at a competitor’s site. Often, you’ll find profitable keywords staring at you right in the face.
Homepage Copy:
A great place to start your keyword research is on the homepage of your competitor. Let’s first focus on the actual copy used on the page. Take notice of phrases that are in the headers (H1, H2, etc.), headers of paragraphs, words bolded or italicized. Often these are keywords being used for search engine optimization.
Often you’ll find a lot of copy on the homepage. One popular technique used is that companies write what would seem like a mini-book of copy towards the bottom of their homepage. This is copy within the body of the homepage.
They do this for several reasons including to build more page content to theme their homepage to the search engines, to create additional links to pages within their site, pass along SEO link juice and finally, more copy on one homepage against one without much copy could be a difference if all other things are basically equal.
(by the way - I’m not recommending writing lengthy copy on the bottom of your homepage, per se, but it is a technique used to be aware of.)
One big tip, look at the anchor text being used. Anchor text is used strategically by smart search engine optimizers to help tell the search engine spiders about the next page. It is well-known that these internal keyword rich anchor tags can help improve your SEO efforts.
Homepage Meta Tags:
Staying on the homepage, you should look at their META tags, in particular their META TITLE tag. If you know this particular competitor is good at SEO (you can tell this if they appear in many keyword searches in your niche on Google.com), then the keywords in the TITLE tag should have more value to you.
It’s important to know if you are looking at a competitor that knows what they’re doing in SEO. The reason for this is that many companies have no clue about search engine optimization still (this is unfortunate and to my knowledge, it is still legal to do business online without implementing good SEO, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. Perhaps there should be penalty called the “Google Slap” – not a search engine index penalty as it is commonly known, but a literal slap from one of Google’s employees across your head for being dumb).
So, if you look at their TITLE tag and only see their company name (like Kenmore.com) or perhaps their company name and tagline, then there is little keyword research value for you in their homepage TITLE tag.
(Hold on, apparently someone in a car marked Google just drove into Kenmore’s facility and is walking up to their corporate headquarters warming up his slapping hand. Oh, it’s gonna hurt. Ouch!!!)
If, however, you see product types and non-trademarked terms in their TITLE tag, then you are onto something. You have found a competitor you can learn from. Make a note of their use of keywords. The TITLE tag usually contains head keyword phrases, popular in your industry and likely appropriate for your use.
One more note about keywords found in TITLE tags, you may do a search in Google later and find that these keywords are not being bid on by that competitor. Why? Likely, the keyword is too expensive for them in their CPC program. Meaning, they can’t make it work in terms of return-on-investment (ROI) – there are many possible reasons for this, which are beyond the scope of this post, but some likely candidates include ineffective landing pages, poor message to market match, extreme prices, lack of trust and plenty more.
Therefore, they are just relying on their organic efforts to bring in traffic to their site. Which, depending on their business, might be just fine for them.
Homepage Navigation:
Take a look at the actual shell or template of the site. What categories are used in the navigation?
By understanding these categories, you can get a good sense of merchandising concepts that the company deemed important. Each of these concepts should be noted, so you can do more thorough keyword research with keyword tools at a later time.
These concepts should be viewed as niches within your business (assuming you sell similar products or are willing to sell those products in the future). Each category (or niche) is it’s own mini-business and keyword research opportunity.
Another navigational element to investigate is the sitemap. Usually you will find a link in the footer of the site which links to a page or pages of links. This type of sitemap is standard in E-commerce and most industries.
Basically, this type of sitemap was created to help the search engines crawl all the nooks-and-crannies of a website. Thus, helping get lower level pages in your site hierarchy – e.g. product pages – indexed in search engines.
Keyword Research - Beyond the Homepage
You’ll find that by repeating the above process – reviewing the header tags (H1, H2, etc.), page content, META tags especially the TITLE tag, anchor text and page navigation) for other pages on a competitor’s site will help you discover new keywords.
For e-commerce sites, make sure to check out department or section pages, sub-department pages, product pages and other higher level page of merchandise like a manufacturer page or seasonal landing pages for additional keyword opportunities.
One last tip regarding these non-homepage pages, take an extra look at the internal links on department and product pages. You’re likely to find keyword gold!
In Summary:
Due to the nature of search engine optimization, each site exposes their hand. Unfornately, most companies don’t take advantage of this. It is one of the odd facts about doing business online - one not to be found in any offline equivalent.
Your competitor’s keywords are out in the open, ready for the taking. I believe as a business owner or online marketer, it is your responsibility to maximize traffic to your site. By implementing good keyword research and then using these keywords effectively in your marketing efforts, you can achieve more than you believe online.
Good luck in your keyword research efforts!
David Wauters
Online Store Coach
P.S. If you are new to keyword research, check out this keyword research site - perfect for beginners or those who want to make sure they understand key concepts in keyword research. It’s a good video tutorial course (with some cool bonuses) at a real low price.
LearnKeywordResearch.com
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