Reverse engineer your competitor’s SEO keywords
Reverse engineer your competitor’s SEO keywords. Adopting your competitor’s keyword strategy can help you gain valuable insights and improve your own SEO strategy. Below you will find a detailed step-by-step plan to do this. Please note that some of the tools are paid. We have no relationship with these tools, other than that we use them ourselves too.
Goal
The goal of this guide is to help you reverse engineer your competitor’s SEO keyword strategy. This allows you to understand which pages, keywords and topics your competitor ranks for organically.
Desired result
You have a standardised audit sheet that shows you which pages, keywords and topics your competitor ranks for organically.
Why is this important?
Your competitors may currently rank highly for valuable keywords with a large search volume. By replicating these strategies, you can target these keywords too and improve your SEO.
Where is this done?
In Ahrefs and Google Sheets.
When is this done?
When you start your business, and then every few months to monitor your competitors’ progress.
Who does this?
Whoever is responsible for SEO within your business.
Step-by-step plan
Step 1: Create an Ahrefs account
- Go to Ahrefs.
- Select a subscription that suits you. If a paid version is not feasible, you can use a cheaper alternative such as Ubersuggest.
Step 2: Identify your competitor
This can be done in three ways:
- Specific keywords: Use incognito mode on Google to see which websites appear for your keywords.
- General competitors: Enter your own domain and select ‘Organic Search’. Your top 10 competitors will appear below.
- Known competitor: If you already know which competitor you want to analyse, you can skip this step.
Step 3: Export your competitor’s organic keywords
- Enter your competitor’s domain in Ahrefs.
- Click ‘Organic keywords’ in the sidebar.
- Select the country you want to analyse and click “Position: Top 10”.
- Export the data to CSV by clicking ‘Export’ → ‘Start Export’. Export as many rows as possible, taking the limits of your account into account.
Step 4: Import the keywords into your sheet
- Make sure your cursor is on cell A1.
- Click ‘File’ → ‘Import’.
- Select ‘Replace data at selected cell’ → ‘Import data’.
- Go to the sheet and set it up as you wish with your competitor’s data.
Analyse the data
- URL: The URL of your competitor’s page that ranks.
- Keywords: Extensive list of all the keywords for which the page is in the top 10.
- Total Volume of Search Query: Total estimated monthly search volume.
- Total Current Traffic to URL: Total estimated monthly traffic to the page.
- Average Keyword Difficulty: Average keyword difficulty.
Manually create a second tab in which you build your own strategy by selecting the most relevant keywords for you for each URL, and ranking them per URL. By following these steps, you can get a detailed overview of the keywords and strategies that make your competitors successful. This allows you to replicate and improve their strategies for your own SEO strategy. Can’t figure it out and want to talk to an expert? Get in touch with us.