Your website is up and running, you’re getting good results in terms of keyword rankings and traffic, and it’s time to celebrate, right? Sure, you should be proud of yourself, but nowadays, you can’t relax your SEO efforts because of constant Google updates and competitors breathing down your neck all the time.
So, what’s your next move?
Continuing to do traditional keyword research may not give you the results you expect in terms of growth. What you need is to go from keyword research to keyword expansion.
Keyword expansion aims to find new keyword opportunities to target. On the one hand, this involves identifying new search intents and search queries that are relevant to them, which is a large-scale, voluminous task. On the other hand, it also has to deal with a more focused task of expanding existing keyword clusters and just finding new keyword variations.
One of the best ways of doing this is through researching your direct competitors first, then looking at your indirect competitors as well, with the help of the Competitor Analysis tool. That way, you can find out what’s working for them and use that data to create a powerful keyword list for your own website.
Identifying the competition
To spy on and get inspired by your competitors, you first need to know who they are. With the help of SEO, you can easily pin down your digital rivals.
The simplest way to find out who you are going up against in organic search is entering your website’s URL into the Competitive Research tool and going to Organic traffic research → Competitors. You can also go to Paid traffic research to learn more about your Google Ads competitors.