When it comes to competitive keyword research, one of the best ways to get started is to spy on your competition. I often recommend this to people (or check out a client’s competition myself) because it helps in a few ways.
1. You can see how well they are using either social media and SEO to improve their position within the industry and accurately guage what you will need to do.
2. If the competition is not totally incompetent they will have done some of the work for you. Here is what I mean:
- Their site should lead you to specific keywords
- If they are using twitter, you have easy access to a bunch of interested followers
- If they are optimizing Google Places you can see what categories they are using, what review keywords Google is looking for as well as what other sites they are listed on.
I could go on but you get the point. Here is an example of what I mean.
A prospective client recently came to me with the idea for a niche site. Without going into too much detail, they were a manufacturer who was approached about being bought out because they had certain equipment to manufacture a product they currently did not produce. The offer was low but got them thinking about it. They provided me with only one product and from there I found 10 prime keywords. Look at the table below.
| Keyword | Competition | Monthly Searches | Approximate CPC $ |
| Keyword 1 | .75 | 33100 | .64 |
| Keyword 2 | .68 | 22200 | .97 |
| Keyword 3 | .68 | 22200 | .95 |
| Keyword 4 | .68 | 22200 | .98 |
| Keyword 5 | .78 | 18100 | 1.05 |
| Keyword 6 | .76 | 6600 | 1.03 |
| Keyword 7 | .82 | 4400 | 1.15 |
| Keyword 8 | .65 | 1900 | 1.03 |
| Keyword 9 | 1 | 14800 | 1.04 |
| Keyword 10 | 1 | 9900 | 1.06 |
They told me one word and I found these keywords that have a combined monthly search volume of 155570. Which means if our niche site got 5% of the total traffic (7779) and 15% of those people (15556) who found our site bought something for $20 they would make $31,114 a month. That’s off of 1% of the total search volume!!
So I sent them this list and they said it was spot on…their list had the actual keywords of course 
The takeaway here is that if you know where to look you can accomplish a few things very quickly.
- Figure out exactly what your competitors are searching.
- Use that and google keyword tool to quickly generate your own keyword list.
- See how competitive your target market is.
- Save yourself the trouble of having to guess what works best in your industry.
Remember with most things the old adage rings true and the same applies to online marketing: “There is no reason to reinvent the wheel” Spy on your competitors and you too will find success faster…even with online marketing.
!
Related posts:
