Keyword Research from your competitors

If you are looking to enter a business or website within an already established industry the chances are there are already established competitors. The biggest benefit of building on a competitors strategy is that you can see their downfalls, gains and projected strategy which can easily set you up as a webmaster within this particular sector. Free SEO Training has put together a list of most commonly used software used when tracking your competitors strategy.

Did you know:

In 2010 research was carried out which stated over 86% of the traffic online came from Search Engines.

Finding your competitors keywords

If you can look at the keywords your competitors are trying to rank for it can be a good indicator that they have put the research into the market and found that particular keyword(s) to be fruitful to the business. You can verify your findings with tools such as Google Adwords (Read more here) and Google Adwords Keyword Tool (Read More here). There are several ways you can find what keywords your competitor is trying to rank for, Free SEO Training has compiled the most common strategies below;

• Meta Keywords – Although this Meta tag is becoming more and more outdated each day some companies still use it, you can easily view your competitors Meta keywords by visiting their website, right clicking and viewing their “Source Code”. When you can view their source code, Meta keywords are usually located here: (click to enlarge)
  

• Page Title, Page content and Meta Description – This information can be obtained by searching their URL in Google along with looking at the keywords on their page.

• Searching Google for suitable keywords – You can search Google for keywords you think are suitable to the industry and see if your competitors are ranking for them or are trying to.

Tools to find your competitors links

There are countless backlink checking tools out there but only a few remain to be sustainable and accurate, Free SEO training has listed the three most common ways to check your competitors backlinks.

Method #1:

You can search Google for your competitors links in order to do this simply search “Links:{Competitors Website}” Google will then return a basic list of your competitors links.

Method #2:

A commonly used software to determine website links is Open Site Explorer powered by SEOmoz. To see our review of SEOmoz please click here.

Method #3:

Backlinkwatch is a free backlink checker unfortunately Backlinkwatch is nortorious for being outdated but it can provide you with some useful information.