Exploring the niche, we can assess the whole situation, learn the weak and strong points of competitors and find inspiration for the own project. But there is a fine line: some people overuse this method, some avoid it at all. Let’s figure out how to keep the balance.
In this article, I’ll tell you how to find all missing keywords for your e-commerce project and take a leading position in the search by analyzing competitors.
What’s the plan?
Our crucial purpose is to disassemble the competitors’ strategy and find what we’ve missed. In our case, we are talking about the keywords which lead a customer to our project.
So, the actual plan:
- Find direct competitors of the project;
- Find and analyze competitors’ leading pages which bring the most traffic.
- Find traffic-generating keywords which we’ve missed.
I recommend repeating all these steps at least once a month. It’ll help to notice the changes, filter, improve and adapt them to your project in time.
Stage #1 Find your direct competitors
To find your direct competitors you can use SEO tool with “competitor analysis” feature like Serpstat.
Pass to the “SEO Research” section and choose the tool “Competitors.” Then sort the results in descending order by common keywords. The indicator in the column of “common keywords” should be as close as possible to “all keywords” indicator. These domains are our direct competitors.
So, we chose three stores: https://www.bpillow.com/ https://www.mypillow.com/ https://www.downandfeathercompany.com/
Stage #2 Analyze competitors’ leading pages
Now we’ll type these domains into Serpstat, use the “Top Pages” tool, sort it in descending order by the potential traffic and select the first 10 perspective pages.
Analyzing these three sites, we can find coincidences in users’ choice. For example, despite the fact that all these sites are commercial, the most popular pages are informative (“how to choose pillow”, “things side slippers need to know” etc.). So, if we’re going to launch such store, we shouldn’t miss this way of customer engagement.
Or if we see that one of these sites offers “pillows for the neck pain” and it’s quite popular there, we should think about adding this product too.
Now we can find out which keywords lead to these pages by clicking on the number in the “organic keywords” column. Thus we can pick a lot of keywords for the bulk in case if we’re launching the same product.
Also, we can compare our site with competitors’ ones by the same product and see which keywords we’ve missed.
Stage #3 Collect all missing keywords
We need to find out what keywords bring traffic to competitors and then check if we use these phrases.
Serpstat offers two features for this purpose:
- Missing Keywords – shows keywords for which competitors’ pages rank in top 10, but are not present in your URL.
- URL vs URL – makes a side-by-side comparison of a specific URL from your site with 1 or 2 competing URLs, discover common or unique keywords of the specified URLs.
Let’s try both of them using our example with pillows.
Missing keywords
Enter the URL of any category of your store into Serpstat search line. We’ll check “pillows for neck pain”:
Here we have a large number of keywords which use our competitors, but which are not present in our URL. Remember that this tool shows missed phrases only for SERP top-10.
Also, you probably don’t need all these phrases. Export them to Exel for the detailed analysis, think and filter all useless ones. For example, if you have the commercial project without the blog, remove all “how to” phrases and queries with the wrong geolocation.
URL vs URL
There you can choose the certain category and compare it by keywords. In the diagram, we see how different it is for the same category of products on different sites.
After that, you can also take a look at the Keyword Difficulty feature at Serpstat. This parameter shows how difficult it is to rank high for the desired keyword. It based on backlink analysis, the presence of domains and URLs with your keyword in title, main pages in the SERP.
Thus, you can filter collected keywords: if KD is high, trying to get into the top using them won’t be worth the effort.
Final thoughts
Competitor analysis is not worthless approach for amateurs. Furthermore, only amateurs don’t use it at all. By doing this, we can find a bunch of useful information which helps to improve the project.
We can:
- analyze their traffic channels;
- find all keywords we’ve missed;
- find out all their weak and strong spots and take advantage of it.
But we always should think critically: even the leaders can be wrong sometimes. Analyze, sort it out and filter all useless phrases.
So, don’t be afraid of your competitors, analyze them.
