Stealing Keywords From Competitors To Grow My Niche Site

Introduction On The Site I Am Trying To Grow

I bought this site around 6 months ago and to be honest at the time I felt that I slightly overpaid a bit for it as it was doing just over $200 USD per month Amazon revenue per month and I paid $6000 USD for it which is say around 27-30 months revenue which for a 1 year old site which is more than what I should have paid.

Putting the small violin to one side on overpaying, the site has actually been doing pretty good the last 3 months and the growth is mostly down to the new content I have added over the last few months.

I haven’t added a crazy amount, something like 20 new articles (gradually added) but all of them are quite long say an average of 1000 words with a handful of 2000-3000 word articles. The majority of articles added are targeting buying longer tail keywords (reviews / best) with others just general information articles.

The site is also really well internally linked, I spent quite a lot of time with the internal linking over the last few months and it really helps. I actually did it all manually, it’s a boring task and probably there is an easier way but for now, I just list out my current target keywords /URLS and search through all the previous articles for suitable/natural keywords I can add an internal link to.

The sites revenue has grown to around $300-$400 now per month (still purely from Amazon) which is pretty decent . I looked deeper into the site in Google Analytics and most of the traffic boost is from the new articles I added.

Here is a quick snapshot of the sites traffic since I acquired it back in May 2016

So this got me thinking, what would happen if I add another 20 decent articles to the site? Would it make a big difference? Let’s put it to the test and see what happens.

Introducing The 20 New Articles In 60 Days Challenge

In case you are wondering, I have just randomly picked the number of 20 but it seems like quite a decent number especially as I have only added 20 new articles since owning the site and it’s made quite a big difference. The 60 days part is just to give it a swanky title, sounds good though doesn’t it?

So basically I will be adding a new article every 2-3 days until I hit a total of 20 new articles added to the site at 60 days. I don’t actually have any articles ready at this moment in time, so I first need to research and draft up 20 articles then I will send them to my writer to complete. (I am lazy when it comes to articles outside of this site so prefer to outsource most of the time).

How Will I Come Up With My 20 New Articles / Keywords

This part is going to take some time and it’s important to get this right. I am going to steal keywords from competitor sites and put a possible keyword list together that I can then analyse in Long Tail Pro to filter and pick out my final target 20 keywords which should be fairly easy to rank for naturally in Google.

Stealing Keywords From Competitors

I have been doing this quite a lot lately and it’s really effective for new keyword ideas (rather than just doing seed searches on Long Tail Pro).

I usually go to Google.com and search on some keywords related to my niche or keywords I am currently ranking for so I can see competitor sites that are in the same niche.

I copy and paste the competitor URL’s into notepad (usually around 5 to start with) then I head over to Thehoth.com (you can also use SEMrush.com) to check what keywords they are ranking for that I can potentially steal and target for my site.

Using The Hoth.com

For those who don’t know what The Hoth is (not the guy from Baywatch), it’s a really popular SEO/link building service that has a few decent tools too (I think to qualify to use the tools you do have had to of placed an order with them but not 100% sure on this, might just be once you register).

One of the tools The Hoth offers for free to its users is: “Search Engine Rankings” where you can put in any website URL and it gives you all of the sites main keyword ranking information like this;

I believe in total it gives you a list of up to 100 keywords that the site is ranking for, it also shows you;

• What Keyword/URL brings the highest % of traffic to the site.
• Current site rank for the particular keyword (I have used a random site for this so hidden the keywords of the above).
• Monthly search Volume.
• Search trends

Time To Start Stealing Keywords

At this stage I will start copying and pasting the keywords from the Hoth search results and putting them either in a word doc or notepad file, once done I will repeat the process with other competitor sites until I have a decent list of say 75 keywords as not all of them will be targetable (some might be too difficult to rank for and I will not bother with them).

Using SEMRUSH

You can do the same with SEMRUSH.com by searching the competitor URL and scrolling down on the results until you get to the below;

This again shows you the competitor sites top organic keywords and also other competitor sites so the process in the same, copy and paste the keywords onto a separate file. (same with the competitor sites if you still need more keywords to search/steal keywords from).

Analysing the 75 Competitor Keywords In Long Tail Pro

Once I have a list of 75 possible keywords stolen from competitor sites and now I need to analyse them to check how difficult they will be to rank in Google so I can narrow down and pick my 20 keywords.

This is where Long Tail Pro comes in,

The 75 keywords that I stored in a word/notepad file will now be pasted into Long Tail Pro under “Add My Own Keywords” and I will tick for Global Search Volume and hit the search button.

Once all the results are loaded (this can take a bit of time), I will get Long Tail Pro to check the keyword competition (i.e. how easy or difficult each keyword will be to rank for in Google).

Once all the data is loaded, I will pick my 20 target keywords that have 100+ global searches per month and a keyword difficulty rating of 35 and below. It’s also an added bonus if most of the competitor sites are below 2 years old.

You can check this and other competitor data on the particular keyword with Long Tail Pro by clicking on the keyword in results.

Below Is What Long Tail Pro Recommend As A Rough Guide On Recommended Target Keyword Criteria

Keyword Competitiveness: Below 30 (ideally).
Page CF: Below 35
Page TF: Below 20
Domain CF: Below 55
Domain TF: Below 40

What Kind Of Articles I Am Going To Target

For my 20 Articles I will split them up to approximately;

• 10 buying keyword target articles (best/review etc).
• 10 information keyword target articles.

On Page SEO

It’s also key to ensure I apply decent on page SEO with the articles so they have the best chance of ranking especially as I am not planning on building any back links at the moment.

For best practice and guidelines it’s a good idea to check out: Brian Dean’s on page SEO guide as in my opinion it’s by far the best on page SEO guide available online so I am not going to bother doing an on page SEO write up myself when his is spot on.

Drafting Out My Articles

So, now I have my 20 target keywords I need to start drafting each one out so I can send them to my article writer.

This process takes a bit of time but basically I will check out the competitors articles (top 3-4 in Google) for each target keyword and check;

• How Long Is their content? (I will make sure mine are always longer).
• What subjects are they writing about? (can I steal some ideas).
• How many times are they showing the target keyword in the content and where? (I will try and follow the same kind of density and keyword placement, Google obviously likes it if they are sitting in the top 3 or 4).
• If it’s a buying keyword are the products available on Amazon.com?

Once I have an idea of the above, I will start drafting the article in a word file which I will eventually send to my article writer.

Here is what i usually include in my drafts;

• Title (will of course include the keyword, I try to make this long where possible (if it makes sense) as Google indexes around 55 character). This is also helps us rank for other keywords aside from the main target one.
• Word count total (more than the top 3 competitor articles).
• Competitor article links (I usually include at least 2 of the competitor article links for my writer so he has a benchmark, obviously it will all be unique content).
• My target keyword and how many times I would like it shown and where in the article (I don’t worry about this too much but just use the competitors as a benchmark, the key thing is that it looks natural and I don’t overdo it with keyword density as it’s not really that important these days).
• Any relevant Amazon links to products being included/reviewed in the article.
• Article headings (some topic ideas for the article if needed, I generally only do this on large articles (2000+ words) for most others I just leave it down to my writer.

I will follow the above process 20 times to give me my total number of articles, I will probably send them to my article writer in batches of 10 so I have a pipeline of them coming in so I can keep on track with the 60 day challenge.

What Next?

Once I finally have my 20 articles ready to start posting I will do another update, followed by an update every 2 months afterwards to track and update on traffic and earning progress.

It will take a good few months to start seeing results but I am confident this is going to work.

Update: 20 Articles Posted

It’s taken me a while to get round to doing the update (been pretty busy!), I did make a few changes to the process, I was initially going to do 30 articles but decided to tone it down a bit to 20 which is still a heavy amount. Also to confess that I didn’t completely hit the 60 days timescale, a few was post prior to the challenge being set but the main thing is I added 20 articles!

The research process took me a bit longer than expected as I didn’t want to just post articles for the sake of it, I wanted to make sure I had a chance of ranking for most of the new target keywords.

Here is a quick overview of the articles posts, most of them are quite long word counts to try and capture additional long tail keywords;

Article 1: 1577 words (information article).

Article 2: 1846 words (buying keyword).

Article 3: 1544 words (information article).

Article 4: 1527 words (buying keyword).

Article 5: 709 words (information article).

Article 6: 1763 words (buying keyword).

Article 7: 3609 words (buying keyword).

Article 8: 2707 words (buying keyword).

Article 9: 1577 words (information article).

Article 10: 3004 words (buying keyword).

Article 11: 1697 words (information article).

Article 12: 3990 words (buying keyword).

Article 13: 1212 words (information article).

Article 14: 2643 words (buying keyword).

Article 15: 537 words (information article).

Article 16: 1944 words (buying keyword).

Article 17: 595 words (information article).

Article 18: 977 words (buying keyword).

Article 19: 1637 words (information article).

Article 20: 1960 words (buying keyword).

In total I added 11 buying keyword focused articles and 9 information articles with a combined word count of 37,055 for all the articles which is A LOT of content.

Are The New Keywords Ranking?

Most of the new keywords ranked pretty quickly and I would say 70% are sitting on page 1 – 2 on Google which is pretty good given it’s pure organic rankings. They are not massive traffic keywords, most are from 50 – 1000+ searches per month but I have tried to capture multiple keywords related to the subject where possible.

How Is The Site’s Overall Traffic Looking?

The site continues to grow each month which is great and I am confident the new 20 articles is really going to help it continue to grow, here is what the traffic looks now, this captures from the beginning where I acquired the site to present date.

It’s look great and getting close to doubling the traffic which I am really happy with, I am sure the new articles will move up the SERP’s and rank for additional keywords over the coming months so it should put the site in a good position to keep slowly growing.

Has The Growth Boosted The Revenue?

I have noticed a pretty decent boost in earnings, The traffic cannot take full credit for that as I have been receiving some mentoring and part of that involved increasing earnings from existing high traffic pages which was implemented just over a month back. We have also just had the Christmas period where earnings are generally a bit higher so it’s really hard to judge it right now but the bottom line is the new traffic is helping.

The site did just under $500 USD for November and December (Christmas) it did just over $650 USD and January (half way through the month) it’s just over $300 USD so it’s certainly going in the right direction and I am hopeful it will continue to grow.

What’s Next?

I have started doing some white hat outreach (blog commenting and eventually guest posts) to try and boost some of existing rankings of the site, I have some good buying keywords that are sitting on page 2 that should be able to get on page 1 with a bit of linking and hopefully further boost the earnings.

I will continue to keep adding new articles (buying and information) every month to hopefully keep growing the site organically.

My overall aim is to get the site to $1000 USD per month which I feel is definitely achievable but of course will take a bit of time.

I hope you have enjoyed the post and found it article, I will do another update in a few months to check in so you can see how the site is doing.

The Final Update (For Now)

It’s been quite a while since I have updated this post, I honestly kinda forgot and have neglected my blog a bit (which you will probably guess by the small amount of posts!) but here is a bit of an update of what happened with the site over the last year.

I kept adding more and more articles to the site which was initially done from targeting low KC keywords from Long Tail Pro but I moved away from that strategy and now focus on KGR keywords as I find they provide much better and faster results. I still use Long Tail Pro occasionally but not as much as I used to, I just find that sometimes the KC can be wrong and misleading without doing further due diligence.

So anyway, back to the update! here is a summary of what happened to the site;

• Traffic has tripled! when i first posted this in October 2016 the site was getting around 500-600 sessions per day, it now gets between 1500 – 2000 sessions per day. (below is the traffic from the beginning of this post to date).

Traffic October 2016 – September 2017

• The site has around 140 articles live (it was around 40-50 previously including the 20 articles I added). I ended up putting together a massive KGR keyword target list which was ‘borrowed’ from competitor niche sites.
• Revenue has tripled from $500 USD to a peak of just under $1500 USD (so far) though this is not completely down to the articles but also some changes I made to affiliate link placement from mentoring I received to grow the site.
• I have added around 40 backlinks (from outreach) to 2 specific money articles but to date the rankings haven’t moved up and neither page is in the top 30 traffic contributors for the site overall so this has not yet contributed to the sites growth (yet).
• I spent some time improving existing articles so they rank for additional keywords, this mainly consisted of seeing what keywords I was ranking for already (Semrush provides this data) in top 20 and improving my content (and in some cases just adding the keyword) to boost my existing rankings for each article.
• I made sure that all new articles added had at least 2 internal links and 1 external link (mainly to wiki or a non-competitor site).
• I also made sure where possible to add 2-3 internal links pointing from old articles to each new one added.

There is probably more that I have missed out but the above are the main changes and improvements that I have seen in the last year which I am really happy with but it has taken a lot of work but overall I feel I have learnt A LOT, It’s quite funny looking back how far things have come all from a silly 20 articles challenge I set myself!

I am trying to grow another one of my niche sites using a similar process but using the KGR system instead of LTP, you can check out how it goes here.