| I don't know a whole lot about football. I'm more into cars.
But I do know quite a lot about a practice that is super popular in this world, namely that before any big match, the coach of a team takes time to study the opponent.
They look at things like gameplay, strategy, attacks, who are the team's stronger players, and other stuff like that. They break down and study all these elements to prepare for the match and build their offensive.
As a site owner (and your business coach), you're in charge of building the strategy, the game plan for outranking your competitor and winning not just one game, but every single game.
Therefore, you too need to look at how your competitors "play ball" online and evaluate their tactics. While doing so, it's important to zoom in on the right things.
One of those things is the keywords your competitors target on their site.
Why? Because keywords determine how much traffic a site receives from organic search - and what kind of traffic. It's a crucial factor impacting either a site's failure or its success.
Think about it. You can have the most amazing content, written by the best writers, but if you're targeting the wrong keywords, it can all be in vain, because it may not show up in Search.
When you know your competition's keywords, you know: - Where their traffic is coming for;
- Whether they use generic keywords or long-tail keywords;
- What are the main topics they focus on;
- Whether they use direct keywords on their site or not;
- Whether they focus on indirect keywords and build funnels to convert the people coming to their sites or not.
Having this kind of insight gives you incredible leverage and translates into a tremendous opportunity to rise above your competitors.
Let me explain with some examples:
Opportunity #1: The competitor doesn't use indirect keywords on their site.
In this case, you can start putting together a campaign where you create a comprehensive resource around the topics that are most relevant for your audience. This will help you stand out in your niche and attract quality traffic to your site that you then convert via funnels.
It can place you (in some cases) in a blue ocean where you provide all the important content that hooks your audience, while your competitors keep focusing on the same old keywords that they always have.
Opportunity #2: The competitor targets keywords you were overlooking.
By seeing the keywords your competitor uses, you can get inspired on hot topics you haven't yet covered in your content - but you should. You're basically getting access to a treasure trove of high ROI keywords that are already working out for businesses in your niche.
Then you can develop content that is more valuable around those topics by showing an interesting new perspective or providing more information - and you have a real shot of outranking your competition for different keywords and stealing their traffic.
The stronger your domain, the easier it will be for you to outrank the competition.
Also, another thing this opens up: you can take all those keywords and place them in Squirrly SEO 2019's keyword research feature. It will show you amazing new keywords that you can rank for, based on keywords that your competitors use.
I found 100 SEO blog post ideas in the fitness industry using the method outlined above.
Opportunity #3: The competitor is overlooking key topics that are relevant for your industry.
I already mentioned in a previous email that you may be surprised by how many big companies fail with their content marketing efforts and don't have a clear blogging strategy.
If you notice that a competitor's content is all over the place or doesn't cover the most important topics in your industry, this opens a whole new space for you to stand out.
You can go after industry keywords that they don't cover. Chances are that you'll score big and attract a lot of targeted traffic to your site because there won't be a lot of competition for those keywords.
Yep, it's that easy.
What it all boils down to
Those were just a few opportunities that data opens for you; there are many others that you can figure out on a case-by-case basis.
Keyword competitor research is not about downloading a list of keywords that your competitor uses and blindly start creating content. It's about looking at what that data tells you - and using it to identify ranking opportunities that were there all along, but you never knew existed.
It's about knowing what your competitor's strengths and weaknesses are in terms of keyword strategy to determine what your strengths should be and where to focus your efforts for big wins.
It's about hacking opportunity.
As I was saying:
I don't know a lot about football, but I do know a lot about SEO. And I'm telling you, when you know what keywords your competitors use, you gain a tremendous strategic advantage and start playing in the big league.
But keywords are just a chapter in the story of how you outrank your competitors and dominate any niche. Stick with me while I continue to unfold the rest in a future email.
Keep Ranking,
Florin.
| 
