SEO Keyword Research Step 2.2: Expand The Keyword List By Studying Your Business Competition

We need to differentiate between two kinds of competition, although there will be significant overlap.

• Business competition – you should know these companies or people already. They’re competitors for your customers.
• Keyword competition – websites using the same keywords you’re considering. You’re not competing for customers in this case, but for search engine ranking.

First, we’ll study business competition to get an idea of what they use for keywords, in case they have some you didn’t consider.

1. Look up the websites of your business competition.
2. Look through their websites, just like you did with your own. Pay particular attention to words and phrases in titles, headers and boldface. Does anything stand out? Seem particularly relevant? Repeated several times? Now ask if any of those potential keywords would work for you. If so, add them to your list.
3. Next we’re going to get a little more technical. We want to look up the source code for their website.
   

   • In Firefox, select View from the menu, then choose Page Source.
   • In Internet Explorer, select Page and then View Source.

   We want to find a piece of code that says meta name=”keywords” content=” as well as meta name=”description” content=”. The page may or may not have this code, so if you can’t find it, don’t spend too much time. What follows that last quotation mark is a list of keywords that website has chosen. Are there any that would work well for your site? Add them to the list. Do they inspire any other ideas or variations? Add them too!

Organizing Your Research

Just add any new keywords to your list, in the appropriate group. When you do jot down a keyword, I recommend notating the source website so you can refer back to it later. It may also be useful in future SEO campaign steps (such as cultivating inbound links).

Just notate the source website in parentheses in the same cell as the keyword. For example: sparkling dog collars (dogs.com). This is the easiest way to organize, plus the source is right there so you don’t have to go searching for it.

On the other hand, the spreadsheet won’t be quite as clean visually. Here are some other organization ideas you might consider:

1. Color-coding. Create a worksheet in your workbook entitled “Key.” Write the name of the website in one cell, and change the text color. Then, in the “Step 2″ worksheet, just change the text color of keywords culled from that site to the same color.
2. Source Column. Create a worksheet entitled “Master,” which will contain a copy of all keywords entered manually (this is in addition to the lists of keywords sorted into groups). The “Master” serves as a repository of all keywords considered during research. On the “Master” worksheet, create a second column named “Source.” Notate the website in that column next to the appropriate keywords.