How to Find out What Keywords My Competitors are Using

Wondering how to find out what keywords my competitors are using?

Checking competitors’ keywords look so difficult, right? But, actually, it seems like it is unable…

That’s what I thought at the beginning of my blogging career.

But, suddenly, everything changed…

When?

When I found a fantastic SEO tool.

It surprised me how powerful this method was.

It can spy on my competitor’s website traffic, find untapped keywords used by other bloggers, and do some difficult and tedious tasks within a few minutes.

The tool is…

Semrush.

You might have heard many things about Semrush earlier or didn’t know anything about it.

Semrush is a powerful search engine marketing tool that was created by the team that developed the SEOQuake SEO browser extension.

So here is how I checked my competitors’ keywords within a few seconds. Suppose you were in doubt about how you can find out the most lucrative keywords which drive buyers to your competitor’s websites, so after reading this tutorial and following my SEO strategy. In that case, you never need to worry about driving quality buyers to your website.

As you already know, a proper keyword strategy can drive more traffic and customers. It all depends on what keywords you are targeting. Of course, other things, such as content marketing, website design, typography, and colors, matter. But, the proper keyword strategy matters in driving buyers because keyword research is not dead!

How Do I Find out What Keywords My Competitors Are Using?

When it comes to search engine optimization, we can find that article websites and other web pages such as YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations, Q&A web pages, and Forum threads also rank on SERPs (search engine result pages) for target keywords.

Cute Puppies - Google Search

As the search results shown in the image above, you can find that sometimes images also rank on the first page of Google SERP. So it’s important to target related keywords in your article marketing campaigns and in image SEO and YouTube SEO.

We all know one thing…

…That is, if your competitor websites are receiving a lot of organic traffic steadily every day, their content marketing strategies are excellent.

Think about this for a moment.

Will their business exist if they didn’t get any traffic from search engines? I won’t, probably, right?

That shows that their organic keywords drive paying customers consistently. So how do you find what keyword your competitors are using?

Ask their permission to see their traffic analysis report?

This might not work, right?

But, the trick I am going to reveal works well today and will work tomorrow too. That’s one of the best ways to get creative and unique blog post ideas too.

So here’s how to get competitors’ keywords without knowing them!…

Know Your Competitors Keywords With This Simple Process

To follow this step, you need to create a Semrush account. You can open a Semrush account for free. But, it has limits. You need to buy its premium version to get more features and break limits on the free plan. After you create your Semrush account, follow this step-by-step process.

Step #1: Go to Semrush and log in to your account.

Step #2: Get your competitor’s webpage URL. For example, I got a webpage URL by searching on Google.

email marketing strategy - Google search

Now paste the web page address into the Semrush search box, select the preferred search engine (the default search engine is Google.com), and click on the “search” button.

Semrush-search

Step #3: Now, you will see an in-depth insight into your competitor’s webpage, such as total search traffic per day, traffic value, the number of backlinks, etc.

page traffic

As you see, my competitor’s webpage receives an average of 451 unique visitors daily. That is not too bad, right?

When I searched “email marketing strategy” on Google Keyword Planner, I found that an averagely of 1300 times this keyword phrase is typed on Google every month,

Google keyword planner keyword ideas

Find the “Top Organic Keywords” box and click on the “Full report” link to get other search terms.

top organic keywords Semrush competitor research search results page

Step #4: Now, you will see the top organic keywords that your competitor’s web page is currently ranking on targeted search engines. This article on “email marketing strategy” ranks on Google.com (US version) for 49 keywords.

competitor web page's keywords

You can export the table to your computer as a CSV file and make use of those keywords for your upcoming or previous content marketing campaigns.

Here’s another example.

At this time, I wanted to find keywords for a YouTube video that ranks on Google’s search engine.

youtube video url into Semrush search box

As you see, this YouTube video receives almost 1000 video visitors from Google.com alone.

organic traffic to youtube video

Here are the top keywords of YouTube videos.

keywords which drive traffic to competitor's youtube video

This video already has got 688,382 views during the first 11 months. 2086 daily views!

video view count

By repeating this process for other religions, you can also check competitor keyword rankings.

This SEO strategy helped me find what keywords drive traffic to my competitors and what keywords I am missing in my content marketing campaigns (ex: blog posts, YouTube Videos, Presentations, etc.).

I compiled a few articles by analyzing my competitor websites’ keywords and rankings.

Now you can also analyze mobile traffic of your competitor’s website using Semrush tools.

mobile tab selected

After you have chosen keywords for your content, you can track their positions. Semrush has an inbuilt tool for that. It is known as position tracking.

keyword position tracking

Also, with the competitors’ discovery feature of Semrush, you can find your top competitors.

competitors discovery - Semrush

This will help you find your competitors’ keywords and find the competition level for keywords.

Here are a few articles that will help you do more with keywords.

Conclusion on how to check competitors’ keywords

Search Engines have evolved so much, so we can’t utilize old-school SEO techniques to increase the search engine rankings of keywords. But, with a proven and practical keyword strategy, you can find many keyword ideas that your competitors don’t know anything about.

But, if your competitors are far ahead of you and receive tons of organic traffic daily, their keyword strategy is excellent. The easiest way to drive that traffic to your website is to spy on competitors’ keywords and use proper SEO techniques to increase search engine rankings.

With Semrush competitor keyword research tool, you can find any webpage, even a YouTube video’s top most searched keywords.

If your competitors can do it, so you too can.

Use this technique one time and compile a great blog post. You will surprise how this method can skyrocket your traffic and drive lots of buyer traffic in the future, not just “freebie” seekers.

So, what SEO techniques do you use for finding competitors’ keywords? 

5 thoughts on “How to Find out What Keywords My Competitors are Using”

  1. This is quite explicit at least for a beginner however a more more pragmatic approach is necessary for a guru to get better result..

    Reply
    • Yes, this is a beginners guide to competitors keyword research. Everything has to start from somewhere. I have written a few advanced guides for keyword research in past. But, by following these simple steps, we can generate keywords that will drive traffic.

      Thanks for your comment!

      Reply
    • Yes, you should have a paid subscription plan in order to get the full data for keywords. You can follow steps in this post to get a free SEMrush account valid for a few weeks.

      Reply

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