Keywords are essential success drivers for any paid search campaign. You need to invest a lot of time and efforts to ensure that you target only those keywords that readers use in their search query. For this labour intensive effort, you need to go through an elaborate process to ensure good results. We say why go through all this when your competitor has already done the heavy lifting for you?
Yes, we are talking about making the competitors’ keywords work for your paid search campaign.
Learn from your competitors
Yes, they have put all their sweat and blood to establish their online business by finding the correct keywords to engage with their target audience. So, they know what works and what fails. It would be great if you too had that information, isn’t it?
Here are few details on how you can use your competitor’s keyword research.
1. Analytics
The main ingredient for paid search is analytics. The key to any paid search strategy is great analytics. Without analytics, it is difficult to understand which keywords produce the most favourable conversions and sales.
Both Bing and Adwords make it pretty easy to monitor conversions through actions like submissions, callbacks, chats, or offline purchase. However, the focus should be on tracking the conversions when you are checking the performance of keywords taken from the competition. This will help you know which keywords are working for you and which aren’t.
2. Competitive Research
How are the competitors getting success? Based on their ad copy, testimonials or just keywords is winning the game?
You never know which keyword works for the rival and what doesn’t work. They might be getting success based on an ad copy, testimonials or just keywords. Even if it is the keyword which is working for them, you would never know which ones are bringing results and which ones aren’t.
So, with the competitive analysis tool, you can know the exact keywords of your competitors. You just have to use sites like SpyFu and iSpionage. Here, you just enter the domain, and you will be suggested with a list of keywords that your competitors are using. After that, you can choose which keywords can add value to your business. This will help you know which keywords will generate value for your business and give returns on your paid search bidding.
3. Copying the Best Keywords from competitors
If you want to use their keywords, you should know which keywords are adding value, and which are not. This can be done through allocating a small portion of the PPC budget to testing. This is the last stage of extracting value from competition’s efforts into keyword research. You can try out news ads, and see how these are performing to make sure that your yields from these activities are worth the effort.
Once you are aware of your competitor’s keywords, you can build ads and use a portion of your paid search budget for testing. It will take a little time and hard work to grow your business. But you will beat the competition if you know the strategy.