Successful niche competitors can help you:). Find their organic and paid keywords then there’s three possible solutions:
- Use these keywords for launching your PPC campaign
- Exclude these keywords from your list to avoid competition
- Or you can check their profitable organic keywords and cannibalize your competitors’ organic traffic via paid search
Here’s how:
First find your competitors that succeed in SEO. In case you already know who your top competitors are, pass to the step #2.
- Enter your domain to Serpstat‘s search bar, choose the database and click on Search. Then go to SEO Research, and pass to Competitors report. Sort the gained results by the Relevance parameter.
STEP #2
Collect the keywords to target
- Click on the required domain from the list to find out what keywords your competitor ranks for in Google.
By clicking on the domain, we jump to “Positions” feature page. Filter the results likeso:
- Domain’s position for a keyword → between →1 and 3;
- Keywords → does not include → brand name.
Thus, we get the list of keywords our competitor ranks for in top 3 Google results excluding brand keywords. We exclude brand queries as there are very high chances that your competitor bids on them.
Depending on your PPC budget, you can vary the CPC and competition level. Just sort the gained results by “CPC” and “Competition in PPC” parameters.
STEP #3
Repeat the previous step with other top competitors to gather more keywords to use in your ads campaign. You can export these reports using any format you like.
Thus we got an extensive list of keywords to target and draw competitor’s organic traffic to your landing pages. Launch a PPC campaign using these keywords. Despite the fact that your competitors are in top of organic results, your potential clients will see your paid ad.
Pros and cons of this method:
Pros:
- Quite cheap. As the keywords we get via this method are not the branded ones of your competitor thus, they are low-competitive and cheap;
- No risks. You don’t break any rules;
- Guerilla method. Your competitor won’t understand why his/her organic traffic dropped dramatically.
Cons:
- No results. You may find no keywords if your competitors already run PPC campaigns using their top organic queries;
- Irrelevant keywords. If your niche is extensive and you’ve tried lots of other strategies, there are high chances that you already use all relevant keywords and the ones left are inappropriate.
For most sites the pros would outwight the cons, so worth trying. Either way, the cost of the tool is just $19 so its unlikely you’ll risk anything, but it will also give series of advantages for your market research. Here’s how:
#1. Research All of your Competitors Paid Keywords:
- Enter your competitor’s domain to the search bar, choose the database and click on “Search.”
- Go to “Domain Analysis” module, then “PPC Research” and finally click on “Keywords.”
- Export this report and analyze it.
- Pay particular attention to “Keyword” column.
Here are all the keywords your competitor is displayed for in contextual advertising. It’s a ready-to-use list of keywords for launching your PPC campaign. Or you can choose another tactic and exclude these keywords from your list to avoid competition.
#2 Find out what ads your competitor is using
Writing ads seems quite simple, but inspiration doesn’t have a schedule. This method will help you to find some ads’ ideas when you run out of inspiration. As in the previous method, we’ll borrow ideas from our competitors.
- To do this switch from “Keywords” to “Ads examples” feature in PPC Research module.
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Export the gained report.
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Pay attention to “Title” and “Text” columns.
#3 What landing pages does your competitor align with PPC ads?
A landing page is an important part of successful PPC campaign. Research your competitors, analyze what landing pages they create and use. It will help you to learn which strategies work and which ones don’t. Take several minutes a day to track the landing pages of your competitors not to miss the changes they make. Analyze this changes, why your rival changed some parts of his landing page and how these changes affect the conversions.
- Same as the previous method, we need “Ads” feature of PPC analysis module. If you’ve already exported this report in the method #2, just reopen it.
- Now, look at the “URL” column.
Now you see what strategies your competitors use. Use this intel to modify your PPC campaign, ask your front-end developer and designer to create new landing pages with clear and tried CTAs.
#4 How to find missing keywords
Don’t bother thinking of new keywords and spend time and money on their research, chances are, your successful competitors already done the leg work for you. Just borrow some from our competitors 😉 So just compare the keywords you use with theirs:
- Go to “Domain vs Domain” feature, which is in the PPC research module as well.
- Type your domain to the first box and the domains of your 2 direct competitors to the other ones.
- Analyze the data you get and create a list of your missing keywords:
- that are unique for competitor #1;
- that are unique for competitor #2;
- that are common for both of your competitors.
Use these keywords to expand your semantic core. But what to do if your keywords core (whole range of keywords that you use) already bigger than your rivals, and there is nothing to borrow from them?
#5 How to get even more keywords
If you already use more keywords than your rivals, you may wonder where to get ideas for new PPC campaigns. You can try to brainstorm or spend hours perusing different blogs and forums or just use this method based on combining of several reports:
- Type a high-volume keyword, which is relevant to your website to the tools search box. If you sell laptops, enter “laptop”, for example:
- Then export the following reports one by one:
- Keyword research → SEO Research → Keyword selection;
- Keyword research → SEO Research → Cluster research;
- Keyword research → SEO Research → Search Suggestions;
- Keyword research → PPC Research → Keywords.
- After exporting all of these reports, gather them into one file
So, you’ll have a huge file full of niche keywords. Group these keywords, clean up all irrelevant ones. An increase in the number of keywords will cause the traffic growth. So be ready to pony up extra money on your PPC campaigns.