Discovering your competitor’s AdWords keywords
February 5th, 2009
There is an easy way to discover which keywords your competitor is bidding on.
This service called semrush.com allows you to type your competitor’s url and it’ll find the keywords they are purchasing on AdWords.
The way it works is that they have a crawler and a large database of keywords and they just query Google for all those keywords.
So the first difference will be that you’ll not know what your competitors are actually buying, but rather for which search queries they are showing (which actually is more important anyway).
To use it for AdWords you use your competitors URL followed by “(by adwords)”.
So let’s try: google.com (by adwords)
Here we can see all the keywords google.com is showing for:
Click here to try it: www.semrush.com
I find this tool very helpful
Great article, very helpful thank you.
I just tried this tool and found that the results were not at all good for me. In b/w did you try it ??
@krishna
I use it to see what keywords competitors use. It’s not perfect as Semrush certainly don’t have access to Google database, they probably have a huge list of keywords and make searches on Google to see which advertisers show up. Also it’s mostly for English keywords, not sure what language/country you are targeting.
Seems like it has the potential to be good, but I’m not finding any Ad Words info at all for the particular industry I’m looking (automotive). It does ok with the large brands but as you drill down, less useful (where less useful means ‘no ad word info at all’).
I’ll swing back by in the future to see if the DB has grown.
Very poor results for me. Seems you’re right about the database crawling thing, but it’s not big enough at this time.
And yea, it’s only working for english keywords, I’ve try for french ones, no results found.