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Give The Competition A Damn Good Licking With SEO Keyword Hound [Part 2] Apr 6, 2018

A big massive tail wagging welcome back from Keyword Hound!

In part 1, we covered how to add and manage Keywords into Keyword Hound, today, in part 2, it’s time to see what we can use that data for!
How to compare with competitors.

If you haven’t read part 1, and seen how Keyword Hound got it’s name, we recommend you head over here now.

Adding a competitor

Before we do any comparing, we’ll need some competition to compare ourselves to.

Fortunately, this is exactly as easy as our GIF here shows, simply hit add competitor, Copy Paste their URL and give them a name.

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.

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. 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.

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

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 Keyword Hound.

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

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;

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 GIFs 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.

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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