How to Check and “Steal” Your Competitors’ Top Keywords

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?