Give The Competition A Good Licking - SEO Keyword Hound [Part 2]

The SEO Keyword Hound is the ultimate SEO plugin to perform Competitive Analysis.

After giving an overview of our SEO plugin, in this post we’ll talk about how to add competitors and how to compare your stats with theirs.

Adding a competitor

Fortunately, this is exactly as easy as our image here shows, simply hit add competitor. Then it’s just about copying and pasting their URL and giving them a name.

How to add a competitor in Keyword Hound

Now only people with the authority to edit this page can see the names of competitors – that includes authors and higher ranks. Keyword Hound does all the hard work of hunting down their data from the URL, so there is nothing to stop you putting in an affectionate pet name for them.

The SEO Keyword Hound is pretty smart, and can track hundreds of competitors, but chasing down all that data could take a while (well, a minute or two, depending on your server settings) so it’s best to set some kind of some kind of limit, say 50 competitors.

Think of this limit like a leash. The Keyword Hound loves walkies and will run all day if you let it, a leash of a dozen or so competitors will make sure you see it before dinner time.

Marking your territory – the Top Competitors!

There are competing sites that will always beat you for clicks. There are also competing pages that you really want yours to rank higher than. This could be business or personal competition.

The SEO Keyword Hound allows rivals to be marked as “Top Competitors” when creating them or after, as you can see in our image

Marking top Competitors

Marking a top competitor allows Keyword Hound to directly compare your page with all the top competitors, speaking of which…

Comparing competitors

This brings us to the real meat of this article. One of the most useful aspects of the Keyword Hound.

With a few simple clicks, we can compare our article with all competitors

Comparing all competitors using Keyword Hound

Or with our top competitors.

The difference being that Keyword Hound will only compare rivals marked as top. Easy to spot these thanks to the star!

For more direct comparison between your page and a rival’s, Keyword Hound can compare with a single page, you can see the process here;

How to Compare a single competitor with Keyword Hound

Regardless of if we are comparing ourselves with one site, a group of our top rivals or all of our competition, the report works with all clustered keywords too, allowing you to break down this report even more.

Using this report, we can spot any gaps where we aren’t using a keyword, but our competition is.

This can give us some insight into if there is a keyword reason behind ranking and where we can target and adjust our own article for better SEO.

Moz can be your friend too

You may have noticed in our images two fields marked DA and PA. These stand for Domain Authority and Page Authority and are measurements Moz have created to evaluate the SEO potential of pages.

A site with high Domain Authority is one which has a large number of links from other webpages. Especially if they are from trusted sources.

Moz Toolbar showing DA and PA in action

Page Authority does the same thing, but for individual pages.

DA and PA are both scored out of 100. A new website will score much lower than an established, trusted site.

Moz have also created a useful toolbar which is free to download, that lists the DA and PA of any site or page. It’s very user-friendly.

Its influence in determining rankings is obvious, and may explain why a competitor ranks higher than your page even when your keyword game is on point.

Summary

A tool that directly compares competitors’ pages?

If you work with SEO, and you adopt Keyword Hound then you may just have found your new best friend!

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Read the next part: Using The SEO Keyword Hound To Track The Best Indicators [Part 3].