Do you want to learn how to check and ethically “steal” your competitors’ top keywords?
Yes, that’s right! There’s actually an easy way to check your competitors’ keywords for free and use this information to get ahead and beat them in search results.
So in this post, you’ll learn how to check and “steal” your competitors’ top keywords. We’ll also cover how to first identify your competitors and spy on other crucial SEO and performance data.
Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll cover in this post. You can click on these quick links to jump straight to different sections:
- Why Should You Check Your Competitors Keywords?
- Identifying Your Competitors
- Checking Your Competitors’ Keywords (Free Tool)
- Spying on Other Crucial SEO and Performance Data
To begin, let’s explain why you should check your competitors keywords in the first place.
Why Should You Check Your Competitors’ Keywords?
You should check what keywords your competitors are using to try beating them in the search results on Google. The digital space is becoming more and more competitive with time. So to stay ahead of the game, you need to know what others are doing in your industry.
For instance, 75% of searchers don’t even bother clicking past the results on the first page, so it’s crucial to be able to compete for first page rankings on Google. And by finding your competitors’ top keywords and ethically “stealing them”, you can work on improving your own SEO and beat them in search results.
Let’s show you how to check what keywords your competitors are using, starting with first identifying which other sites you’re competing against.
Identifying Your Competitors
The first step is to identify your competitors, and we’ll show you 2 simple steps you can start with.
1. Compile a Competitor List
Start with the simple task of compiling a list with competitors that you believe are competing for the same keywords in organic search.
Simply, write down all competitors you can think of from the top of your head.
In most cases, you’re aware of at least a few rivals that are competing with your business. This will be a solid start for identifying your competitors.
2. Perform a Google Search
The next step is to browse the Google giant. Google has all the information you need to further identify your competitors.
So simply enter your services, product, or brand keywords in Google’s search and see what comes up. Check who’s ranking for the keywords that are relevant to your business or services and keep your own competitor list in mind.
For example, if your business is selling a contact form plugin for WordPress, then you can run a search on a keyphrase, such as “best wordpress contact form plugin”.
If you scroll past the ads at the top, you’ll find the organic search results of websites ranking for this keyword. That said, they’d be your direct competition related to this keyphrase and organic traffic.
Now to the fun part!
Let’s take a look at how to find your competitors’ keywords and ethically “steal” them to get ahead of your competition using the best SEO plugin for WordPress, All in One SEO (AIOSEO).
Checking Your Competitors’ Keywords (Free Tool)
With AIOSEO’s SEO Audit Checklist tool, you can easily find your competitors’ keywords and work on beating them in the rankings on Google.
If you didn’t know this already, All in One SEO is a complete SEO plugin that comes with many advanced and powerful SEO tools and features.
Here are a few of them:
- Smart XML Sitemaps — automatically generate a WordPress XML sitemap to notify all search engines of any new updates.
- Unlimited SEO Keyphrases — optimize your content on unlimited keyphrases and add related keywords in a single click.
- Rich Snippets Schema — add schema markup to your pages and get more clicks and traffic with Google rich snippets.
- Local SEO — boost rankings for all your Business Listings, and get featured in Google’s Knowledge Panel and Google Maps.
- WooCommerce SEO — Get full WooCommerce support and easily optimize your product title, meta descriptions, categories, and tag archive pages.
- …and more.
That said, let’s dig in!
Installing the SEO Analysis Tool
To get started analyzing your competitor’s site, you first need to install and connect your website to AIOSEO. If you’ve never installed a plugin before, please visit WPBeginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once you’ve installed AIOSEO, you simply navigate to the All in One SEO menu » SEO Analysis page, and it’ll open a new screen with the SEO Audit Checklist tool.
Here you can see an SEO analysis of your own website. And you can follow a checklist with helpful recommendations on how to improve your overall SEO score, fix critical issues, and check what you’ve optimized well.
But in this post, we’ll focus on your competitors’ SEO instead…
Analyzing Your Competitor’s Site
So, the next step is to click on the Analyze Competitor Site tab, and it’ll open a new screen where you can enter your competitor’s URL. Simply copy the URL and paste it into the field.
Then click on the Analyze button, and just like magic, AIOSEO will perform an in-depth SEO analysis of your competitor’s site and give you the overall SEO site score.
Checking and “Stealing” Your Competitors’ Keywords
Now to the reason you came here…
…to check what keywords your competitors’ are using and ethically “steal” them, you simply scroll down to the Keywords section.
As you can see from our example above, MonsterInsights’ website is optimized with 10 top keywords for its niche.
Do we need to tell you how valuable this information is?! We didn’t think so…
You can “steal” this information and use it to improve your own SEO and get ahead of your competition in search results.
Brilliant, don’t you think!
Spying on Other Crucial SEO and Performance Data
You don’t have to stop there…
In fact, AIOSEO’s Analyze Competitor Site tool gives you the option to spy even closer on your competitors and see how they’ve optimized their meta tags, site performance, etc. Let’s show you how to do this next.
Checking Your Competitor’s Basic SEO
In the Basic SEO section, you can see how your competitor has optimized their SEO title and meta description.
You can also find other important metrics, such as character length, keywords that were found in the title and description, H1 tag, H2 tags, image alt attributes, external links, etc.
Having said that, you can view this hard data and compare it with your own optimization and make adjustments where they may have done a better job.
Alright, let’s take a look at the Advanced SEO analysis next.
Checking Your Competitor’s Advanced SEO
In the Advanced SEO section, we take spying on your competitors’ SEO one step further.
For example, here you can see that the robots.txt file is missing and also some Open Graph meta tags.
But you can also see what your competitor has done well marked in green. So use this information and compare it with your own SEO score and make sure you’ve everything marked in green.
Checking Your Competitor’s Site Performance
As most website owners know, site speed is one of the most crucial factors for SEO. Google favors sites that load fast in its search results.
That said, you can view the response time of your competitor’s website, plus other performance metrics in the Performance section.
And you can click on the small errors to the right menu to learn more about each performance metric and get recommendations on how to improve them.
In addition, to learn more about improving your site speed, you can check out WPBeginner’s post on how to boost WordPress speed and performance.
That’s it!
You’ve now learned how to check and ethically “steal” your competitors’ top keywords. Now, use this valuable information to improve your SEO and get ahead of your competition. With a little bit of work, you can beat their rankings on Google and get more sales for your business.
And don’t forget to track your organic traffic in Google Analytics to see what keywords bring in the most traffic to your website.
Before you go…
….if you’re looking for more ways to improve your SEO, you should check out our post on SEO best practices or our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.
Not using All in One SEO yet? What are you waiting for?
Thanks a lot.. it will really help us
Hi Shourya,
we’re happy to hear that!
If you want to optimize your website on even more keywords, you can check out our post on how to find and add related keywords in WordPress.
I was wanting to know how to-
1) Remove unwanted H1 tags
2) Minify JavaScript files
3) Reduce number of page requests
4) Reduce size of HTML Document.
Your help is appreciated.
Hi Roy,
Thanks for reaching out. Please open a support ticket at the link below and one of our team members will be happy to help you:
https://aioseo.com/contact
This is a Great information. However, the analyzer only shows keywords but not keyphrases. Is there any help to get the keyphrases to work on?
Hi Evan,
thanks for your kind feedback! No, right now you can only check the most popular keywords.
If you have more questions or need any help, please feel free to open a support ticket at the link below and one of our team members will be happy to help you:
https://aioseo.com/contact.
Thank you for this very informative article.
I will use this to improve my site and my skills.
Hi Jun,
thanks for your kind feedback! We’re happy to hear that you found the post useful.
If you want more awesome SEO tips, check out our post on 30 SEO hacks guaranteed to grow your traffic.
And if you need any help in the future, feel free to contact us at https://aioseo.com/contact.
Why my website. Post title not showing on google search result
Hi Ahmed, Google uses what you set as a suggestion. We have an article about this here and it links to Google’s article explaining this too.
For the moment, my competitors have nothing to be stolen.
Hi! This is usefull information, however in another article i found that keywords are deprecated: https://aioseo.com/docs/keyword-settings/
So why is this relevant? Am i confusing these terms?
Thanks!
Hi Carlos, that documentation refers to meta keywords which are an old SEO meta tag used in the source code of content. They are no longer used in modern SEO. Our post refers to key words or phrases in competitors’ content that you may be interested in competing/ranking for.
Excellent information!
Thank you.
Woow…. So helpful
Can we get AIOSEO for Magento site?
Hi Raj, unfortunately AIOSEO only works on WordPress sites.
Wow
This is an eye ️ opener.thanks for unveiling the secret.
Hi there. Unfortunately this is not working for German websites. Instead of keywords this tool only finds unimportant words such as “and”, “so”, “we”, “the”, “cookie”, “for” (translated into English to make my point) . This is not helpful at all. Is there a way to fix that?
Hi Ben, please contact our Support team here and they’ll be happy to help you.
Thanks a lot with this helpful information I was struggling with it as I’m new in it.
Thank you Nozipho, glad you found the post helpful.