Another angle for discovering keywords: find out who your competitors are and what they're trying to rank for.

Identify competitors

1. SERPs

   • Bloggers
   • People offering competing product
   • Different categories and brands

2. Ahrefs competing domains. It shows you the keyword intersection between your website or you can even put in a competitors website to find their competitors.

3. SparkToro is an audience analysis tool. It gives you 10 free searches a month. You can put in a topic that your target audience is talking about to:

   • figure out which Twitter accounts are they interacting with most recently
   • what websites do they visit
   • what content they tend to like

   Useful if you want to:

   • analyze the content strategies of other websites
   • think about where to syndicate your content

Once you have a shortlist of competitors:

1. Analyze the homepage, categories, and footer
   • For brands, their homepage is one of the most powerful pages on their website. And the reason is that they get mentions of their brands. And those tend to link to their homepage. So it's very powerful from an SEO standpoint, because link equity comes into the homepage, and is then distributed to the pages that they link to from that homepage.
2. Check for recently updated content
   • Look at their sitemap: yourcompatitorswebsite.com/sitemap.xml
   • If you don't have a sitemap, check out their robots.txt: yourcompetitorswebsite.com/robots.txt
3. Use search operators to find maintained content
4. Facebook Ads library for copy ideas
   • What are the phrases, terminology, and visuals that may resonate with your target audience
   • You can notice if something is profitable enough to run ads for an extended period of time
5. Top pages, queries, backlinks and referring domains using Ahrefs

Tools

• Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz
• KeySearch
• Backlink Checkers