Effective search marketing hinges on solid keyword research. Advertisers optimize their PPC campaigns by focusing on relevant, high-intent keywords, creating logically structured campaigns with relevant ad groups, and minimizing wasted spend through negative keywords. Keyword research is also essential for driving organic traffic and informing content marketing strategies.
However, sometimes it’s crucial to understand your competitors’ strategies. What keywords are they using?
Analyzing competitor keywords is a powerful tactic for gaining an edge in a competitive market. So, how do you uncover those keywords your competitors are leveraging in their paid and organic search campaigns?
Here are eight competitor keyword research tools and tactics to help you keep pace with your competition, or even surpass them:
Top 8 Tools for Uncovering Competitor Keywords
This roundup covers the following tools:
- nexus-security’s Free Keyword Tool
- BuzzSumo
- Semrush
- Spyfu
- Ahrefs
- Google Auction Insights
- Seed Keywords
- Tag Clouds
Don’t miss our post on how to conduct competitor keyword analysis!
1. nexus-security’s Free Keyword Tool
One of the most effective ways to identify competitor keywords (if we may say so ourselves) is using nexus-security’s Free Keyword Tool.
How to use it? Simply enter a competitor’s URL (not a search term) into the tool and click “Search.” For instance, I’ve used the Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) website URL as an example, restricting results to the United States:
You’ll receive a range of competitive keyword data based on your search. This data can be sorted and displayed using four metrics: Google search volume, Competition, CPC, and Opportunity Score:
In this case, results are sorted by Opportunity Score (descending), a unique metric exclusive to nexus-security’s Free Keyword Tool.
Downloadable as .CSV files, these reports are easily uploaded to Google Ads or Bing Ads accounts (directly within nexus-security Advisor). The Free Keyword Tool is an excellent springboard for deeper competitive intelligence.
2. BuzzSumo
We’ve highlighted BuzzSumo before due to its exceptional capabilities. (And no, this isn’t a paid endorsement.) For content marketers, it’s an invaluable tool for competitor analysis, particularly for identifying potential competitors you might not be aware of.
Take Moz, for example. They’re well-known for their excellent content, tools, and annual conference. If you operate in the SEO space, you’re likely aware of Moz as a competitor. But what about smaller websites performing well?
That’s where BuzzSumo shines.
In this example, I searched for “SEO”—a broad term with countless potential results. Here’s what BuzzSumo found:
We can disregard the first two results (related to actress Park Seo Joon). However, the next two results are interesting. Both are from Mike Johnson on getstarted.net, a site previously unknown to me. Notice the impressive social share counts – over 35,000 each! This is a great starting point for our investigation, but we need to delve deeper, and BuzzSumo’s competitor analysis tools are perfect for that.
Let’s compare the Content Marketing Institute’s site with Copyblogger using BuzzSumo’s Domain Comparison tool:
BuzzSumo then provides a comparison between the two domains. Among the available reports, the Average Shares by Content Type and Average Shares by Content Length are particularly insightful:
Both CMI and Copyblogger see the most social shares for list-based content, followed by how-to articles. This is valuable data, but we can gain further insights by analyzing article length:
We’re starting to understand what resonates with these publishers’ audiences. As the graph illustrates, even long-form content between 3,000-10,000 words performs well in terms of social shares.
What about specific content and those valuable keywords? Let’s examine BuzzSumo’s Content Analysis tool:
In this example, I’m examining CMI’s website. We start with an overview of the domain’s content, including a summary with the number of articles, total and average social shares, and average shares per platform and content type:
While this overview is useful, we’re interested in the individual articles that performed well over the past year. This data is found in the Top Pieces of Content report:
“50 Best Social Media Tools From 50 Most Influential Marketers Online” stands out with over 10,000 shares, double the second-most popular article. With this information, we can use the article’s URL in a keyword tool to see which keywords it contains.
While BuzzSumo doesn’t offer extensive keyword-specific data, it provides a strong foundation for further research.
RELATED: The 5-Step Competitor Keyword Analysis (+Template!)
3. Semrush
Next is SEM Rush, a robust suite of keyword research tools. Search by keyword or URL, filter by region, specify PPC keyword match types, and analyze domain data for entire websites.
Let’s continue our research by identifying CMI’s main competitors using the “Competitors” dashboard (Domain Analytics > Organic Research):
This analysis focuses on CMI’s organic keywords from Google.com desktop searches in the United States. You can adjust this to other regions and choose between desktop or mobile data.
Next, let’s see how CMI fares against similar publishers in terms of organic keywords and traffic. This information is displayed in a graph generated by SEMrush:
CMI is closely matched with CoSchedule for both organic keyword volume and search traffic. We also see that CMI has over 51,000 organic keywords, along with traffic data and the estimated cost to attract that traffic.
While useful, I’d like to understand how CMI’s competitors rank for their keywords. The Organic Competitors report provides this information:
This is where things get intriguing.
CMI’s top organic competitor is Curata. Looking at the previous graph, Curata seems less significant, ranking lower for both keyword volume and organic traffic. Why is it considered the top competitor? SEMrush considers not just volume but also the overlap in keywords between sites, paid keywords (one for Curata), traffic cost, and the estimated cost of keywords in Google Ads.
Curata has approximately 15,300 search engine keywords. Clicking on this data reveals more:
Voilà! With a few clicks, we access a wealth of competitive keyword data for Curata, including the keywords themselves, average organic position, search volume, keyword difficulty, average CPC, traffic share, cost, competitive density, results volume, trend data, and even a sample SERP.
Which keywords are draining your budget? Use our Google Ads Performance Grader to find out!
4. SpyFu
SpyFu is another popular choice for uncovering competitor keywords. Unlike other tools, SpyFu is solely dedicated to competitive intelligence research.
SpyFu’s domain dashboard overview
The amount of data SpyFu provides, even for basic searches, is impressive. Information on local and global monthly search volume, CTR, ad spend, ad history, ranking history, backlinks, and ad groups offers valuable insights into competitors’ strategies.
Continuing our research, let’s select “Competition” from the menu to access SpyFu’s Kombat feature, which allows us to compare three domains:
Even at a glance, we gain valuable competitive intelligence. The Venn diagram visualizes how CMI compares to Curata and CoSchedule. Selecting the Weaknesses report reveals keywords both competitors rank for, but CMI does not:
This list of keyword weaknesses (or opportunities) is sortable by search volume, exact CPC, and keyword difficulty. It’s a quick way to identify keywords your competitors are leveraging that you’re not.
We can delve deeper into SpyFu’s data to analyze specific keywords from a competitor’s site. Let’s look at Curata using the Keyword Research > Related Keywords report:
This provides a comprehensive table of keyword data for Curata, including difficulty, CPCs for different match types, local and global search volume, and CTR:
SpyFu is a powerful tool. When used with other tools as part of your workflow, you’ll be amazed by the data you uncover.
5. Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Ahrefs is a well-respected SEO blog and the creator of Keywords Explorer, a paid tool with impressive capabilities.
Image via Ahrefs
Keywords Explorer offers a wealth of features for advertisers and SEOs. One such feature, “Top Pages,” represents a growing trend in keyword research.
This feature allows users to identify numerous relevant keywords by focusing on a page’s topic instead of individual keywords. Let’s illustrate this using Ahrefs’ example with Moz:
Image via Ahrefs
As shown, Moz’s article on a Whiteboard Friday video domain name selection has decent traffic, but notice the number of keywords it ranks for (in blue). Over 1,000 keywords in a single article! Each keyword includes volume data, showing potential keyword ideas and their search volume – very convenient.
While conventional SEO might suggest targeting each keyword with a separate page, this approach allows you to identify keywords by overarching topic, targeting multiple relevant keywords within a single article.
Besides data like search volume, CPC, traffic, and search result volume, Keywords Explorer also offers historical keyword data, including SERP Overview and Position History. This helps identify not only declining keywords but also their peak performance.
Even more impressive is the ability to reverse-engineer this technique; by inputting the identified keywords back into Keywords Explorer, you can determine their parent topic. This reveals high-performing pages based on semantically related keyword clusters.
6. Google Ads Auction Insights
Our next technique uses Google Ads data to pinpoint top competitors and their keywords.
We’ll use Google Ads Auction Insights. To access it, navigate to an active campaign and select “All” under “Auction Insights”:
This report provides competitive data from your Google Ads competitors, including impression share, average ad position, overlap rate, position-above rate, top-of-page rate, and outranking share.
This easy-to-read report gives a quick overview of your campaign performance relative to your competitors.
Google Ads Auction Insights reports offer various filters. You can view them at the Campaign, Ad Group, and Keyword levels. For our purposes, the Keywords report is most relevant, allowing you to filter by bidding strategy, impression share, maximum CPC, Quality Score, match type, and individual keywords:
Image via Google Support
One limitation is that this report only shows data for advertisers who participated in the same auctions as you, not all competitors with similar settings. This means you’ll always be missing some data.
However, considering it’s readily available within the Google Ads interface, the Auction Insights feature is powerful and shouldn’t be overlooked.
7. Crowdsourcing Keyword Research
At nexus-security, we believe hard data trumps assumptions. A/B tests are crucial because they reveal actual user behavior. But how does this apply to competitor keyword research? Through crowdsourcing.
Seed Keywords is a free tool for this purpose. Create custom scenarios by posing hypothetical questions, which are then used as the basis for real searches from which data is collected.
Here’s a sample scenario from Seed Keywords:
This is what participants will see. In this example, they’re asked what they would search for if they encountered a computer issue.
Seed Keywords allows you to specify the search engine. By default, it’s google.co.uk, but I selected google.com, yielding these results:
Some results are broad, like “pc repair” and “faulty pc fix,” while others are more specific, like “hard disk corrupt,” potentially revealing more about user behavior. The tool allows you to download suggestions as .CSV files, categorized by match type.
Remember that while this tool provides insights into actual search behavior within your scenario, it may not be representative of a broader audience unless you have a statistically significant sample size.
As its name suggests, Seed Keywords is designed to uncover seed keywords—starting points for identifying potential niches and competitors. However, it can also be used for broader competitor keyword research depending on your scenario design.
8. Tag Clouds
Tag clouds visualize the most frequently used words on a page or site. While often used for creating infographics, they can also be utilized for uncovering keywords on competitor pages.
Numerous tools exist for creating tag clouds. For example, if you run an SEO blog, you can use a program like Tag Crowd to identify frequently used keywords on competitor sites.
In this example, I used Tag Crowd to analyze the official John Deere website:
Tag Cloud visualizes the most common words on John Deere’s website. “Attachments”, “equipment”, and “tractors” are prominent, but other frequent keywords like “engine”, “loaders”, “utility”, and “mowers parts” could spark new ad group ideas.
This technique is also effective for content marketers seeking new topic areas their competitors are focusing on. It complements tools like BuzzSumo.
Finding Competitor Keywords
These are just a few tools and tactics for discovering your competitors’ target keywords. Whichever tool you choose, don’t underestimate the value of competitor analysis. Learn from what they’re doing!
One final thought: bidding on competitor keywords can be highly effective but costly. If you’re looking for budget-friendly alternatives, we have you covered! Explore three ways to target competitors on Google without Search ads and three more ways to do so using paid social media.