Competitor's Keywords

[geckomonkey]

Hi there,

I work for a multi-discipline land development services company that has several different types of services we provide. As such, it is very hard to either determine what primary keywords to hone in on or acheive any core density. Our clients are also not the kind to fill out even short surveys to see how or why they arrived at our site.

I've tried using Google Trends to evaluate some of terms used to describe our services, but they are unique enough that Trends often doesn't have enough detail to even create a graph.

I do, however, know exactly who our comtetitors are and so I was wondering if anybody knows of any software that would let me scan our competitor's sites and show me what keywords they use and their relative proportions (ie, "engineering" appears 5-times more that "landscape architecture" on their site).

This would at least let me be competitive SEO-wise with what their homework has indicated their keywords should be. Most of our competitors are ten times our size and can afford market studies, and contracts with professional advertising and SEO firms.

Any help would be much appreciated!

[seostew]

Originally Posted by geckomonkey

Hi there,

I work for a multi-discipline land development services company that has several different types of services we provide. As such, it is very hard to either determine what primary keywords to hone in on or achieve any core density. Our clients are also not the kind to fill out even short surveys to see how or why they arrived at our site.

I've tried using Google Trends to evaluate some of terms used to describe our services, but they are unique enough that Trends often doesn't have enough detail to even create a graph.

I do, however, know exactly who our competitors are and so I was wondering if anybody knows of any software that would let me scan our competitor's sites and show me what keywords they use and their relative proportions (ie, "engineering" appears 5-times more that "landscape architecture" on their site).

This would at least let me be competitive SEO-wise with what their homework has indicated their keywords should be. Most of our competitors are ten times our size and can afford market studies, and contracts with professional advertising and SEO firms.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Your competitors may not know your market any better than you do, but just happen to have a lot of info on their sites and have a lot of links, so they appear high. They also may or may not be using SEO companies. Many large companies don't because they depend more on traditional media.

One easy way to achieve your goal of getting your competitors keywords on a lower level would be to "view source code" on your competitors' homepage and see what keywords they have listed in their meta tags.

Google Trends is very general and uses broad matched terms to show very general trends (hence the name).

Try software like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery, or at least the Yahoo Keyword Tool(free) to get your niche terms. Wordtracker does a great job of showing even terms that were searched a very minimal amount over the past 90 days. Many long tail niche terms might only get searched less than 100 times a month, but could turn into very qualified leads. Go for phrases that are at least three or four words long.

[geckomonkey]

Thanks for the reply. I tried out Google trends and the Yahoo Keyword tool. They were helpful. What ended up being a great tool was plain old wget. I used wget in the following manner to get the keyword and descriptions from their pages:

wget -q -O - Mycompetition.com | egrep -i '<meta' > mycompetition.txt

This gave me text files showing what keywords (at least meta-tag wise) my competition is focusing on. I can also grab individual pages this way and look at them too. If I leave out the egrep, and just dump to the text and use something to strips HTML tags, I can then do a statistical analysis based solely on word-counts.

Altogether this lets me see what keywords that search engines will strongly associate them with even if that's not what user searches reflect. This gives me a two-prong attack.

[crankydave]

Your competition could very well be targeting the wrong phrases. Happens all the time.

A well targetted PPC campaign can also help you gauge what's driving traffic. Be very specific with your keyword selection and watch what phrases and descriptions are sending you traffic and conversions.

Dave

[geckomonkey]

I realize that they may very well be targeting the wrong keywords. I am doing two things:

1. I am targeting the keywords that I/We think are the ones that out clients are the most likely to use. These are the priority by far. I am using their keywords to try to provide some level of verification to our thinking (truth by concensus).

2. I am targeting keywords that are likely to show their sites prom,inently in that hopes that my site will show on the same page.

I want for my site to appear both everywhere it should AND everywhere theirs does too. A very careful trapeze act.

Thx, all!

[carpediem]

Hi geckomonkey,

Originally Posted by geckomonkey

Our clients are also not the kind to fill out even short surveys to see how or why they arrived at our site.

Try 103bees.com and Google Analytics to get this information automatically. They are both free too.

Originally Posted by geckomonkey

I was wondering if anybody knows of any software that would let me scan our competitor's sites and show me what keywords they use and their relative proportions

To check keyword density quickly, install the firefox extension, SEOQUAKE. This is the easiest way.

Just my 2 cents - It would be a mistake to focus primarily on what your competitors "keyword density" happens to be and don't rely on "meta tags" to tell you much of anything either (especially in the scope of the site's se rankings) - there are many facets to search engine rankings and keyword density is only a very small slice of it. I would suggest that you focus on delivering exactly what your customer needs are, build the site around that idea and you'll have better conversions as a result - and it won't be because you have more keyword density than your competitor.


I recommend that you read these authoritative SEO tips/how-to's found here:

http://www.webproworld.com/search-en...o-i-begin.html

All you need for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Marketing For Newbies - Jaan’s Search Marketing Blog - Toledo, Ohio


GL

Danielle