Easily find good keywords you overlooked

In the last few days, I’ve been doing a lot of keyword research for various companies. They’re not paying me to do this. In fact, they don’t even know I’m doing it (until I tell them).

I’m actually doing it to test “permissionless marketing” for ClearSERP.

That’s where you do a 100% free service for a company as a way to get noticed by them (and your followers).

See an example of this here:

So far it hasn’t driven any new customers. The reach on my tweets has been atrocious lately.

But using my own tool so much HAS given me ideas for new features.

For example, one of the easiest ways to find keywords a company should be targeting is to find keywords their competitors are targeting, that the company is NOT targeting.

I was using the Competitor Research mode in ClearSERP for this, which shows all the keywords any domain ranks for. First I’d check the domain of the company I was doing the research for. Then I’d check each of their competitors. In many cases, the company and their competitors ranked for many of the same keywords. There was no way to show keywords one site ranked for that another site didn’t. And that slowed my research down to a crawl as I had to manually check for non-duplicate keywords.

So, I had an idea. Why not add a Keyword Gap feature to ClearSERP?

And that’s what I did.

I launched it today, and it works beautifully! Just enter your domain and a competitor’s domain, and it’ll only show you keywords your competitor ranks for that you don’t.

I tried it on two of the largest social media scheduling platforms, Hootsuite and Sprout Social. I checked for keywords Sprout Social ranks for that Hootsuite doesn’t.

Many aren’t relevant to Hootsuite, but there are some clear opportunities Hootsuite could be taking advantage of. Namely, defining various social media terms and holidays like “what does dm mean” and “when is national boyfriend day”.

Another clear opportunity is “sprout social pricing”. Yes, Hootsuite should target that keyword even though it’s specific to another company. If Hootsuite ranked for “sprout social pricing”, they’d capture people shopping around different social media schedulers. These people are likely to convert soon. In the article, Hootsuite could promote themselves as a better/cheaper alternative. Other schedulers are currently doing this and getting some serious traffic:

(side note: seeing the monthly prices of these schedulers has me considering launching my own competitor lolol. I mean… $199/mo for the most basic plan is craaaazzzzyyyy. I’m sure you could charge waaaay less and still be highly profitable).

Anyway, keyword gap analysis is super powerful as you can see. Saves a ton of time when you want to “steal” your competitors’ keywords.

In ClearSERP, you can access the Keyword Gap feature from the Research page. It’s one of the four research modes (see below):

Just like the other research modes, Keyword Gap offers some powerful filters. So if you want it to only find keywords with a difficulty of up to 10, where your competitor ranks in the top 10 and gets at least 100 monthly visitors, and that include the word “best” but DON’T include the words “place, food, eat”, you can easily do so.

Here are all the filter options:

And of course, you can also analyze the keywords to see the SERP weaknesses and the complete SERP landscape (including the authority of all top 10 results):

If you already have a ClearSERP account, go check out the new Keyword Gap feature and let me know what you think! And please share any ideas for other features you want me to implement or improvements I can make.

And if you aren’t yet a ClearSERP user, what are you waiting for? 😁 

ClearSERP is already the most powerful keyword research tool on the planet, and it’s just going to keep getting better.

Thanks for reading,

Ian