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Top Three Ways to 'Steal' Your Competitors' SEO Keywords
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Keywords are critical to successful SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Generating a robust keyword list, however, can be difficult and time-consuming. One of the time honored traditions in the SEO industry is to 'steal' your competitors' keywords. Stealing is a bit harsh; think of it more like 'looking' at your competitors' keywords. Whatever you call it, it's a great way to identify new SEO keywords as well as to double-check your own keyword list against others. This blog post explores the top three ways to 'steal' competitors' SEO keywords.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: July 14, 2010
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Contents:
View, Source: The Top Three Meta Tags for Keywords
Most businesspeople or marketers doing SEO will have at least a decent keyword list, a list of the top three to four keywords / keyphrases that you want to be No. 1 on Google on. After all, the point of search engine optimization is to get to the top of the free listings on Google, Yahoo, and/or Bing. To do so, you obviously need to know what keywords you wish to dominate.
So, first enter one of your target keywords into Google. Then, look at the top three results returned that are in the 'organic' or 'free' listings, appearing beneath the search box. Click over to one that looks similar to your company. A search for 'Personal Injury Attorney New York,' for example, lists http://www.stephanpeskin.com/ as the No 2 position today (July 14, 2010). So, assuming you were a competitor of the New York City personal injury law firm of Tolmage, Peskin, Harris & Falick (stephanpeskin.com), you can easily view their keywords via these easy steps -
- Enter your target keyword in Google (in this case, 'Personal Injury Attorney New York').
- Click over to one of the top three websites listed by Google in the search results.
- On that page, in your browser window (top left), click on View, Page Source (Firefox), or View, Source (Internet Explorer).
- This then pops up the HTML source of that page.
- Look for the following three HTML tags -
- TITLE - this tag has their most important keywords.
- META NAME="Description" - this tag has their Meta Description and usually contains many keywords.
- META NAME="Keywords" - this tag (optional, but often used) usually lists their favorite keywords.
So for our example, we have
- <title>New York Personal Injury Lawyer NY City Auto Accident Attorney NYC Wrongful Death Manhattan Queens Brooklyn Bronx Staten Island</title>
- <meta name="keywords" content="New York, personal injury, wrongful death, lawyer, attorney New York City (NYC), personal injury law firm, Manhattan/New York County, Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn/Kings County, Bronx, Suffolk County, Nassau County/Long Island, Westchester County, Rockland County, Harlem, NY">
- <meta name="description" content="The New York City personal injury lawyers of Tolmage, Peskin, Harris & Falick are dedicated to providing clients with aggressive, result-driven legal services to maximize recovery for auto accidents and wrongful death. Contact our attorneys today to schedule a free consultation regarding your personal injury claim.">
You can then read these tags to get keyword ideas. In this case, words like New York vs. NY vs. NYC, or Lawyer vs. Attorney vs. Law Firm etc.
In sum, View, Source is a powerful way to query your competitors as to the best keywords, including synonyms!
The Google Keyword Tool & Reverse Engineering Competitors
Beyond View, Source, a second great way to steal competitors keyword ideas is to use Google's free keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). Simply go to that URL, enter a website where it says Website, and presto - Google spiders that Web URL and spits back at you a list of potential keywords.
Google is even your helpful friend in your effort to steal competitors' keywords. Click on 'previous interface' (top right corner), and in the old tool, Google will allow you to do the same process, and also give you a list of keywords related to each keyword that it displays back to you. In that way, it not only spiders a competitor to get keyword ideas; it also goes one step further and plugs that original keyword into its own thesaurus. One competitor keyword therefore can become numerous keyword ideas. How cool is that? Remember, however, that this cool feature is only available in the previous interface of the tool. Don't ask us why Google seems to be discontinuing it in the newest version of their free keyword tool!
Keywordspy.com - Our Favorite Free Tool for 'Stealing' Competitors' Ideas
A final amazing free way to reverse engineer competitors' keywords is found at keywordspy.com. Simply go to that website, sign up for your free account, and you have a really good tool (for free) that is all about spying on competitors. We love the name, by the way. Very honest in a pirate sort of way, don't you think?
Keywordspy.com works like this. Enter a competitor domain into the search box (make sure that 'domain' is selected just beneath). Then, Keywordspy.com will return to you a list of that competitor's keywords, based primarily on advertising. It also lists any ads that your competitor is running on Google - another great source of food for thought, while building your keyword list. Click on the PPC Keyword list, in particular, and it reverse engineers the keywords that your competitor has inputted into Google for their AdWords / PPC campaign.
You can also enter a search term to see keywords, and connect it to heavy advertisers for that term. By alternating between entering domains and keywords, you can use Keywordspy.com to quickly build your keyword list, leveraging the advertising and SEO efforts of others (your competitors) all the while. In conclusion, nothing is better than using the openness of the Internet to stand on the shoulders of others, especially if those shoulders belong to your rivals.
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