Interested in knowing what your competitors are using for keywords? It’s not too hard to figure out. Sometimes you’ll find
that your competitors aren’t really targeting any keywords at all.
As a first step, you can go to your competitors website and right click. Go to, “view page source.” After you do that, you’ll see a bunch of code. It can look rather confusing, but a simple (CTRL + F) will help you find what you need to look for. Type in the search bar, “title.” This will highlight the word title, which is where you can find which keywords they are targeting in their title tag. The title tag is used to tell search engines what your website page is about. Each page will have a different title tag (if your competitor bothered to make one unique to each page).
Another way to find what keywords they are targeting is to do another (CTRL + F) and do a search for the word, “meta.” This search will highlight the word meta, which will show you all their meta tags such as meta descriptions and keywords. You can also include target keywords in images, also known as “image alt tags.” When you do a simple search with the word “alt” in the page source, the names of their images will be highlighted.
When you have completed your list of keywords after looking at your competitors’ websites, you should take the next step by running your keyword list through the Google’s Keyword Tool. From there you want to figure out the competitiveness of each keyword, while also looking to find other keyword opportunities. If a keyword your competitor is targeting doesn’t have very many searches, it may not be a keyword you would want to bother pursuing. On the opposite end, if a keyword has many searches and is very competitive, it might not be worth pursing if you don’t have the time or resources to generate traffic from it successfully.
The best thing to do is to figure out what you can take on in order to be successful at it, and then find a middle ground.
Once you’ve decided on your keyword list, you can manually track your keywords in the search engines with Excel (yuck) or you can utilize SEO software such as Raven Tools or SEO Moz which will make your life much easier. You can utilize this software to track a competitors website against your own to see where they rank in the search engines compared to yours for your target keywords.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below!