Understanding your competitors’ strategies is crucial to SEO and digital marketing success. One of the most valuable data points for competitor analysis is search volume – the number of monthly searches for a particular keyword.
Analyzing your competitors’ target keywords gives you insight into what topics are driving traffic to their sites. You can then refine your SEO and content strategy to focus on high-potential search terms.
In this guide, we'll cover everything you need to know about using search volume data for smarter competitor analysis - from identifying and finding gaps to outperforming your competitors.
Understanding Search Volume and Its Role in SEO
Search volume is the estimated monthly number of searches people make on search engines for a particular keyword. This number is calculated by taking the average number of searches over a given time period.
Search volume significantly impacts SEO strategy armenia phone number resources especially when it comes to keyword research . This metric gives an idea of the search interest and traffic potential for keywords.
Search volume also has predictive power for future trends. Changes in search volume are a precursor to changes in consumer demand and interest.
For example, an increase in searches for “backcountry skiing” from January to March indicates an increase in demand for the sport.
Google trends overview
If you were a skiing company, this would be the perfect time to focus on creating and promoting skiing-related content.
Tracking search volume over time gives you an early signal of rising topics and changing interests, helping you stay ahead of your competitors.
Identifying Your Competitors
Let's say you run a ski touring company in Colorado.
Your direct competitors are businesses that offer similar products and services. In this case, your direct competitors would be other backcountry ski tour providers in Colorado.
You can easily find them by Googling the main keyword you are targeting: guided mountain skiing colorado.
Googling for the main keyword - Guided backcountry skiing colorado
Indirect competitors appeal to your broad interests and audience but offer different solutions. In this case, your indirect competitors would be websites that target keywords like skiing in Colorado.
Let's do a quick Google search and see what we find.
Google search - skiing in colorado
At first glance, your indirect competitors do not focus on offering strictly ski tours like you do.
Analyzing Competitors' Keyword Strategies
Now that you have a list of competitors, it’s time to analyze their keyword targeting strategies using keyword data. This will reveal the specific terms and topics that are driving traffic to their sites.
Strategy 1: Analyze keyword overlaps and gaps between your site and your competitors.
With the help of an SEO tool , you can find competitor websites that have a high percentage of keywords that overlap with your website. This can help you find more organic competitors than the manual method.
Organic Competitors overview
You can use any major SEO tool to find content gaps – keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you’re not. This is a great way to find keyword opportunities that you can capitalize on.
Content gap
Content gap analysis
You can use a filter to find more relevant keyword ideas than your competitors. Think of a keyword that is very relevant to your niche; in this case, it’s skiing or skiing. When you enter one of these as a filter, you’ll get more relevant keyword ideas to target.
find more relevant keyword ideas from your Competitors
Strategy 2: Evaluate search volume to understand keyword priority and potential traffic.
The higher the search volume, the higher the traffic potential of the topic – if you can rank well. Let’s take one of the competitor’s domains and analyze its top keywords.
Keyword tracking - competitor's domains and its top keywords
In this case, the competitor is ranked first for the keyword ski resorts in colorado, which would be a good topic to target. We can also see that they are getting around 9,532 organic traffic from that single keyword. Still, it would be hard to beat them since they are ranked first. Let’s check what keywords the page ranks for to find more opportunities.
Keyword Impressions
The situation is different when you filter for keywords that rank between positions 4 and 10. Notice that the search volume for these keywords is significantly lower. These can be considered long-tail keywords and since most all keywords are considered long- tail, they represent quick wins to overtake your competitor.
Strategy 3: Use tools to assess ranking difficulty and opportunity for these keywords.
Volume alone doesn’t determine keyword value. You also need to consider difficulty and your ability to outrank your competitors. Most SEO tools have a keyword difficulty metric that will help you determine the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword.
Keyword Difficulty
The best practice is to target “easy” keywords as you can easily outrank your competitors even if they already have high traffic.
Top SERPs overview
In this case, we can see that even though there is a site with high DR (Domain Authority) in the second place; there are two low DR websites ranking, meaning we can easily overtake them and be in the top 5 results for this keyword.
Using Search Volume to Uncover Competitor Traffic
When it comes to estimating traffic for a specific keyword, you can use CTR statistics to provide a calculation for the top three positions . Let’s see this for the keyword ski south colorado.
Keyword Traffic = Search Volume x Click Through Rate
For this particular keyword the situation would be:
Position 1: 200 x 39.8% = 80 visits per month
Position 2: 200 x 18.7% = 37 visits per month
Position 3: 200 x 10.2% = 43 visits per month
To simplify things, you can use an SEO tool to find out how different websites are getting traffic for a particular keyword:
SERP Overview for Ski southern colorado
When a website targets a particular keyword, it may also rank for numerous other keywords, making it difficult and time-consuming to calculate traffic manually.
Checking a page’s traffic against the keyword volume of the top keyword can reveal how successful a website is at dominating search results. It can also give you an indication of how much traffic you could get if you were to leave a page in the top 10 results.
Analyzing Competitor Content Using Search Volume Data
Search volume can also help you analyze competitors’ content strategies. You can identify the topics and formats that attract the most search interest on their sites.
Let's follow a 3-step process to evaluate competitor content using search volume data:
Step 1: Match competitors' content to targeted high-volume keywords.
Use an SEO tool to see where competitor pages rank for top keywords based on their volume.
High volume keywords
This will reveal their important content that drives traffic. Focus your analysis on these pages to evaluate their approach to keyword-focused content.
You may find that they devote significant resources to optimizing just a handful of core pages for core topics. Or they may take a long-tail approach with thousands of posts targeting niche long-tail keywords.
In this case, it's a bit of both - but this competitor gets almost 40% of the traffic on a single page, so let's see what they do well here.
Step 2: Evaluate the content quality and keyword optimization techniques used.
Next, dive into the high-value page identified in step 1.
Consider factors such as:
How much do they highlight the keyword?
Use of supporting keywords and LSI expressions
Content quality for user experience
Internal links to support pages
Overall depth and uniqueness of content
This will help you gauge how effectively they optimize and structure their pages for keywords. You can identify strengths to emulate or weaknesses to improve.
Also check if they focus on keyword intent to make the content suitable for informational, commercial, or navigational searches.
Let's check the competitor's high value page:
Colorado Ski Resorts
Ski Resorts Overview
They don’t include the keyword Colorado ski resorts, but they do use a few supporting keywords like Colorado winter getaway. The competitor has modeled this page as a navigation page and internally links to all relevant ski resorts, improving the user experience.
In this case, opportunities could be:
Further optimizing content around the keyword Colorado ski resorts and other long-tail keywords that the competitor does not rank well for.
Writing more in-depth content about ski resorts, perhaps opting for a listicle format.
Always use competitor content as inspiration, but never copy it.
Best trick: You can use web scraping to gain insight into your competitors’ content ,
Step 3: Analyze user engagement metrics to measure content performance.
Look beyond optimization to evaluate actual user engagement on competitor pages.
