How to Find Keywords Your Competitors are Ranking For [4.3]

Part 3: How to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for "He who wrestles with us, strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper." - Edmund Burke This quote perfectly applies to content marketing and blogging. We can study our competitors, pinpoint their best performing content and beat them at it. But first, you need to know who you're up against. You might already know which websites you're competing with in Google search results. But in case you don't, just put the keywords found in the previous excercise into Google and see who ranks there. Those are your competitors. Let's try that with one of the keywords we've discovered earlier - "can cats eat dog food." When browsing Google search results for that keyword, I see a cool website that catches my attention. The website name is way too awesome to ingore it - lovemeow.com - I love it. So we know that lovemeow.com website ranks well for "can cats eat dog food" search query. Wouldn't it be awesome to know all other search queries that it ranks for? Because we have a tool for that in Ahrefs. Let's put lowemeow.com into Ahrefs' Site Explorer and go to a report called Organic keywords. Here I can see all the search queries that a target website or article ranks for. That is very cool, but not very actionable to be honest. That's why I prefer the report called Top pages. It groups all these keywords that a website is ranking for by the ranking page. So I can easily see which articles bring the most search traffic to this blog. The top-performing article at lovemeow.com blog is titled "Why Does My Cat Stick His Tongue Out". And in brings almost 900 visitors from the United States alone. And the total traffic is 1,200. So how cool is that? Usually when people see this feature for the first time they are totally blown away by the amount of value they can get from it. In just a few seconds you can see all the best performing pages of any competitor. And there's also a column with the number referring domains to each of these pages.

So all you need to do from here is cherry-pick the pages that bring them the most traffic while having the least amount of websites linking to them. And once you're done with the first competitor, you can click on Competing domains report and see which other websites are ranking for the same search queries as this competitor. Here's a cool one I see right away: catster.com. Let's browse their top pages. Looks like their articles get vastly more search traffic than what we've seen at lovemeow.com. And some of them have less than 10 referring domains. Which means they should be fairly easy to outrank. And once you're done with catster.com you can click Competing domains again and dive even deeper into your competitive space. I'm sure you get the idea. So hit pause and take action! Spend some time digging into websites of your competitors and noting their pages best into your spreadsheet. And I have one last source of awesome content ideas left for you.