How To (Intelligently) Steal Your Keyword Strategy

When I am looking for a new niche, I always do the same thing.

First I brain storm a list of actual niches by observing the world around me.

Whether that’s in your house, the street, while watching a movie, in a mall or listening to music – niches are everywhere.

For example right now I can easily think of-

  • Power tools
  • Electric scooters
  • Drones
  • Video blogging

Once I have a target list of niches, I do some Google searches to see what kind of sites exist for a topic.

The best way to find affiliate type sites is to do searches with 2x types of keyword modifier-

Best Modifier

  • Best Power Tools
  • Best Electric Scooters
  • Best Drones
  • Best video blogging

Cheap Modifier

  • Cheap Power Tools
  • Cheap Electric Scooters
  • Cheap Drones
  • Cheap video blogging

With a list of 5x sites that shows up regularly for those searches…

…We can begin to steal our way to an intelligent keyword strategy!

How To (Intelligently) Steal Your Competitors Best Keywords

The easiest way to do this is with my personal Google sheet.

This is something I had developed to help me build intelligent keyword strategies in minutes rather than days-

This sheet will automatically spit out a personalized keyword strategy based on your competitors current search rankings in less than 5 minutes.

It does a bunch of cool things-

  • Automatically find’s the best keywords with high search volumes & low competition
  • Tell you if its possible to win a featured snippet
  • Calculates the intent of the keyword to help you focus on $$$ keywords

In fact:

With this free spreadsheet and the one I am going to give you tomorrow…

You’ll be able to create intelligent keyword & backlink strategies in minutes!

How To Setup The Keyword Theft Sheet

It only takes a few minutes to find all of the best keywords in your niche.

First take a look at this SAMPLE sheet and familiarize yourself with it.

Note: The SAMPLE sheet is view only, you need to make a copy of the blank template below to use it.

There are 4x tabs at the bottom to navigate through-

  1. Start Here – Enter your competitor domains here
  2. Data – Enter the data you export here
  3. Keyword Analysis – Automatically finds the best keywords for you to select
  4. Final Selections – Shows you final keyword selections

Just take a moment to browse around and click on the checkboxes and things to see how it works.

When you are ready make a copy of the Google Sheet below-

Steal Your Keywords Sheet – MAKE A COPY OF ME

Do that by going to File > Make A Copy.

make a copy

Next:

You are going to take out the 100% free 14 day SEMRush trial.

This is where we are going to get all of the world class data to plug into the sheet without spending any cash! (mwahaha)

UPDATE: The Ahrefs & SEO Powersuite versions of the sheets have problems at the moment. We are working on a fix, in the mean time enjoy the free SEMRush data.

How To Setup The Sheet For Your Niche

Setting up the sheet is easy and really just boils down to a 2 step process-

  1. Import the data
  2. Make our keyword selections

It really doesn’t get any easier than that and the sheet will do all the heavy lifting in the background for us.

FOLLOW THIS VIDEO TO SETUP THE SHEET

Step #1 – Start Here Tab

Go to the first tab “Start Here” and enter the domains of your competitors (without http or www) in column A-

Then click on the links to automatically open the right report that you need.

Make sure you are on the Organic Research > Positions report-

And then on the right side, scroll down a bit and click on the export button and select the first 3,000 rows to export-

Repeat this for each of the competitors until you have exported all of the data.

Step #2 – Loading The Data

Head over to tab #2 – Data and import each of the files you exported in step #1.

The quickest way to do that is-

  1. Open one of the files from step #1
  2. Delete the first row of data
  3. Highlight all of the remaining data and copy it
  4. Then paste it into Tab #2 of the google sheet
  5. Repeat the process adding each report you exported in step #1 to tab #2

This is how you should do it-

Once you have loaded in the data from all of your competitors, you are ready for…

Step #3 – Keyword Analysis

Now head over to the 3rd tab #3 – Keyword Analysis.

This sheet has already found the easiest to rank for keywords with the highest search volumes for you-

It also includes some extra helpful columns like if there is opportunity for a featured snippet.

It will also tell you if it’s a tyre kicker keyword (ignore these) or a commercial based keyword.

Just work through the sheet and tick the little tick box when you find keywords you like!

Step #4 – Review Your Final Selections

Last but not least jump over to the 4th tab #4 – Final Selections and review your final keyword choices.

Once you have done that, your personalized keyword strategy is complete!

Wrapping It Up

Make sure you get that setup right now and that you tick the boxes to make your final keyword selections.

Because I am going to show you how to steal all of your competitors best backlinks for those keywords VERY soon!

And once you have done that…

…you will have an intelligent SEO plan of attack based on cold hard data!

If you have any questions, please ask below and I will help you out!

And if you want to take things to the next level I highly suggest you check out my step by step 90 Day SEO strategy to grow your search traffic.

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What Are Your Thoughts?

352 Responses

  3. Hey Matt,first of all thank you for the effort. I tried to use your sheet without success. I imported the data from Semrush as you described and compared the table to make sure it’s similar, still not getting the results on the third section. What am I missing? PS: I downloaded the sheet after I received the sub email.

    Reply

  4. Was there a fix for the page? Like all the other comments above, I have followed the instructions in the video but nothing loads on sheet 3 for the keyword analysis.

    Reply

    1. Hey Michelle, I’ve checked the process not long ago, and it was working fine.Could you, please, drop me an email explaining the issues you’re having? Thanks

      Reply

  7. I figured out, you probably might need to edit the values of the formula on the Keyword Analysis page, especially the E value

    Reply

  8. Hey theres been a lot of people who cannot pass step 2: and you are just replying with a copy paste reply like this “Hey Mik, this could be because you need to wait for Google to save the sheet then do the calculation – You have to wait for the little grey progress bar to finish on the right side and for it to say “all changes saved”. If you are still having problems then send a screenshot of tab #2 and a quick explanation to my email – matt@matthewwoodward.co.uk“i have tried waiting too, so thats not the problem i guess, is there any other way to get this done ??

    Reply

  9. the sheets doesnt load the info in keyword analysis table, i try even in excel and nothing, can you fix it? you give enormeous help.Saludos desde Chile.

    Reply

    1. Hey Rodrigo- Thanks for letting me know, I am going to have a look at it! Saludos desde Costa Rica 😉

      Reply

    1. Hey Sarthak – The sheet is working well. Something might have gone wrong when you imported the data from SEMRush. Try again and make sure you follow every step of the process.

      Reply

  14. Wonderrful article, Matthew you are just helping newbies to do lot better. You are a one stop solution for all my SEO problems. Love from India.

    Reply

  15. thanks for sharing this information, this information works very well for me. its really work, i want more tips like this.

    Reply

  16. I don’t have SEMRush. I use serpstat. Is it possible to do the same with this tool and your spreadsheet? Many thanks 🙂

    Reply

  18. Hi Matthew,Thank you for such a great tool! I’ve experienced the same problem as a number of other users – the #N/A response on Tab 3 – and I double and triple-checked everything. What finally solved it was adding the Data! before A2:C500, which means the final formula is =QUERY(Data!A2:C500,”select A,B,C WHERE A IS NOT NULL ORDER BY C ASC LIMIT 300″,0)

    Reply

  21. Dear Boss Mathew!thanks so much for the training, so impactful and you have raise my hope so hogh in this businessthanksDada

    Reply

  22. To be sincere, you lost me at SEM rush. Trial or no trial, if you are not from the United states, try paying for anything abroad without $20 to $30 extra charges draining you down.

    Reply

    1. I know what you mean but the thing is most of the SEO’s tools have to be paid in $, no matter you’re location…

      Reply

  25. It’s not allowing me to export from SEMrush – it’s saying ‘failed = server problem’ ?

    Reply

    1. Hey Natasha. I recommend you to get in touch with SEMrush support team.I am sure they’ll help you out and fix your problem.

      Reply

  26. Can the spreadsheets work with data exported from google keyword planner? I’m looking for a way to merge the researches volume to key difficulty!

    Reply

    1. Yes but to get better results I really recommend you to use SEMRush. You can enjoy the 14 days free trial to export all the data you need and then complete the spreadsheets.

      Reply

  32. Hi Matthew, your content is really helpful and interesting I also find it very accessible. I’ve finally discovered one website than I can rely on, I no more need hundreds bloggers on my Feedly. I really respect the fact that your sharing your knowledge with everyone and not keeping it for yourself. I wish you all the best for this blog.

    Reply

    1. Thank you so much for your comment Cyprien. I’m always happy to know that my work is appreciated & useful!

      Reply

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