Your Competitors' Keywords: Which One Should You Target?

Using the right keywords for your web pages is one the keys to get a good results in SEO. One of the things you can do, is to copy what others have done (and have done well), and implement the same strategy.

However, you may not want to target all of your competitors' keywords. The reason is because: your website is different that theirs, and you targeted audience may differ.

Keyword research is to achieve the highest return to your marketing investments. But the challenge when you start looking at your competitors' keywords is that you're realizing many of their keywords won't go well with your website.

Just like any important aspects of SEO, it's the strategy that matters, and that strategy should be in line, and also intentional with your goal and decisions.

So, what are the keywords that your competitors rank for, and which one should you be interested in?

Read: Improving Your E-Commerce Website's Revenue In Simple Ways: Integrating Content With SEO

Understand Your Website, Know Your Audience

This is the first thing you need to do.

Know how you website is built, how well it performs and how great it is if compared to your competitors. You need to know who are the people that visit your website, and for what reasons.

Here you need to understand the process of a classic sort of funnel, where you have people doing what you want them to do, and know how they have landed on that page, using what particular keyword. If you understand which people you lose and which people actually make it through the buying process, it's going to be very helpful in knowing which of your competitors' keywords you should be aiming.

But again, it depends on your goal.

Know Your Competitors And Who They Target

Stalking your competitors on the web is not a sin. The competitors you should focus on, are those that tend to target the same audience. Otherwise, your relevance and your conversion will be difficult.

For example, if your website sells a furniture brand, you may have difficulties if you follow competitors that sell broader items. Your competitors, due to them selling a huge variety of items, should have used more common keywords phrases which target a broader audience. So if your website sells vintage furniture, using their keywords will give you a hard time.

So if your goal is to convert, your strategy should be going after websites which have the same audience as you. Like for example, if you sell vintage furniture, your competitor can include those that also sell vintage furniture, as well as sell modern furniture only.

Know How Those Keywords Perform

After having a selection of keywords, the things you must then do, include:

Aim for the easiest

For obvious reasons, high-competing keywords would be more difficult to target because your competitors may have succeeded earlier and gained a brand recognition in their field. Keywords with a lot of campaigns required a larger budget, and you're directly competing with bigger brands here.

Read: Small Business Websites Vs. Larger Businesses: Not Against All Odds

So here you need to initially target keywords that are similar, but less powerful.

As a start, you need to go for those keywords that tend to be, or you think should be able to rank your website easier.

Unless you're selling something that is extremely unique, targeting high-competing keywords won't give you a fast start. So your best bet is to choose the easiest ones first, then go for harder ones as you progress. What this means, aim for keywords with low difficulty but high odds of success.

And to meet that high odds, you need to leverage your content at its best.

Read: Optimizing Long-Tail "Low-Hanging" Keywords To Build Short-Tail Rankings

Aim for keywords that you are already targeting

This is for variations. Look at the keywords that you're already targeting, and see which one converts best. Take that keyword, and seek for similar keywords which can be the alternatives queries your potential visitors type on search engines.

To meet that set of keywords, you may your website's structure to fit them. So here, you may need to create a new section or contents tailored especially for those keywords. You probably need a different type of UI and UX to successfully target those keywords.

High volume, low difficulty, high organic click-through rate

Basically here, you need to look at the difficulties. This will tell you how hard would it be to rank for that potential keywords.

Target long-tail keywords as a variation of your main keywords. So if you're selling vintage furniture, you may want to add keywords like "Mahogany," "Oak," "Victorian," "Georgian" or others to your existing keyword, for example.

As for volume, you may need to target as high as you can. However, this may lead to higher difficulties.

And as for organic click-through rate percentage, which is essentially the percent of people clicking on the 10 blue link style, classic SEO will help you get there.

You can also target SERP features.

Use brand names

The last thing you can do, is to go after the brands you're selling.

So if your website sells vintage furniture, don't aim for modern brands like IKEA, but use brands like Ethan Allen, Century, Durham, or whatever classic furniture brands you're selling.

You would generally not go after competitors' brand names, but you can indeed actually used their brands to highlight some of your items. But still, do not rely on this.