Competitor Keyword Research

Tracking and analyzing competitors’ keywords is a MUST and one of the most important processes of keyword research.

Here’s how you can do it using SEMrush.

• Make a list of your top five to ten competitors.

• Repeat the same step which we followed while finding keywords for our own website  (enter the URL of the competitor’s website in the search box and select ‘Organic Research’.)

• It will display a dashboard with different sets of data.

As far as competitors’ keyword research is concerned, you need to look at three tables on this page.

1. Organic Keyword Trend: Shows the overall trend of how your competitor’s keywords are performing.

2. Top Organic Keywords: Shows the list of all the organic keywords which the competitor is ranking for.

3. SERP Features: Shows the number of keywords ranking for specific SERP features. More keywords showing in SERP Features indicates that your competitor’s website is performing extremely well in terms of SEO. You can make a note of the keywords if you are aiming to get featured in any of these SERP features.

To view all the keywords that the competitor is ranking for, click on the ‘View all organic keywords’ under ‘Top Organic Keywords’.

If you want to refer to all the keywords, simply export the keywords sheet.

If you want to look for some specific set of keywords, you can do it with the help of filters as seen in the screenshot below.

Let’s understand the filter categories.

• Positions: You can enter the range of positions for which the keywords are ranking, like top 10, top 20, top 30 or any custom range.

• Filter by keyword: If you are interested in getting competitor’s keywords containing a specific word in it, add the word here and all the keywords containing that word will be displayed.

• Volume: Use this if you want to look for keywords with specific search volume.

• SERP Features: Use this if you want to look for competitor’s keywords that are ranking in SERP features.

• Advanced Filters: This allows you to apply different conditions; for instance, if you want keywords that include or exclude certain words, or if the keyword begins or ends with a specific word, or if it exactly matches some words.

‘Advanced Filters’ feature is extremely useful for finding question keywords that a competitor is ranking for.

A question always starts with either ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘how, ‘why’, ‘where’, or ‘if’.

Now to search for competitor’s question keywords you can simply select ‘Begins with’ in the ‘Advanced Filters’ and add either of the above mentioned words in it and it will display all the question keywords. I have used ‘how’ in the screenshot shared below.