Keywords are the absolute foundation of the success of your website. Your keywords are what Google uses to rank your site. So you have to ask yourself, what is it that your competitors are doing to rank so high and you’re still dragging behind? Learn how to find out what keywords your competitors are using and how you can use that data to improve your search engine rankings.
The best way to determine what keywords your competitors are using is to take advantage of keyword research tools meant to extract keywords from their pages. You would copy and paste your selected keyword into a search engine such as Yahoo! or Google to see where they show up. Beyond this you could try the easiest road to finding this information out is to see what Google thinks they are by using the new interface to Google Keyword External tool (updated to look and act like the version supplied within Google AdWords.) the new keyword tool allows you to select languages, local search targets and more.
You can use the following steps to discover keywords from competitor domains:
1. Access the keyword tool and log in.
2. Insert your competitor’s web address.
3. Review the listings, and scroll down to view all and see the collection of keywords including ad group ideas.
From this point you would want to pick the keywords that have (exact) search counts and that closely match your site as a starting formula. While you are entering some of these keywords into Google, you’ll get varying results for paid results. This will assist you in seeing how commercially successful a keyword is. Simple, the more ads, the more you can consider it to be a cash cow. You can take this a couple of steps further and input top keywords into spyfu.com and keywordspy.com to discover more detail such as potential paid campaigns and their resulting landing pages. This will give you an overall view of your competitor’s use of keywords, pages and overall strategy.
Follow me to Part II and I’ll give you some more simple tips on how to develop your money making keywords.