Topic Opportunity Finder

Finding keywords that competitors rank for is a fairly easy task with all of the tools available to us. However, it can be difficult to identify the overarching topics that your competitors rank for. To help target topics instead of keywords, Sean Malseed built a Topic Opportunity Finder, a tool that aggregates your competitors’ ranking keywords into general topics.

Just by entering SEMrush data, you can easily find the following:

• Ranking topics of competitors
• Total search volume for topics
• Best ranking competitor URL for topic
• Keywords the competition ranks for
• Search volume by keyword

Taking this information, you can identify topics that your competitors rank for versus what you rank for, or you can identify variations in the keywords presented and aim to target those better than your competitors.

You can access the tool below – but don’t forget to read the instructions first!

Instructions

1. Go to SEMrush, click on this icon in the top right (  ), click on “API” and then the green “Get API” button. Copy your API key and save it for later.

2. In SEMrush, enter in your competitor’s domain. Scroll down to the Top Organic Keywords section and click ‘View Full Report’. Export your list of keywords.

3. Repeat Step 2 for any other competitors you may want to evaluate. Combine all exports into one sheet with a maximum of 50,000 keywords (Note: If you have more than 50,000 keywords, you can reduce the number by removing duplicates, brand terms, and keywords with low monthly search volume).

4. Use the form below to access the Topic Opportunity Finder tool and make a copy of the Google sheet to save it as a local file.

5. Input the API key from Step 1 on the “Settings” tab of the Topic Opportunity Finder and enter your domain as well.

6. Paste the exported competitor rankings from SEMrush into the “Paste SEMrush competitor exports” tab.

7. Wait patiently for results! Topics will generate in the “Topic Opportunities” tab.

8. Once all topics are generated, copy the entire “Topic Opportunities” sheet and past them “as values”. Do this so that the whole sheet doesn’t have to reload every time you open it.

Now it’s time to evaluate! Remove topics that don’t align with your (or your client’s) brand, needs, or goals. Present these opportunities to your team or your client, and work on developing content to cover the relevant topics!

Use Case

Find new content for a client who already has 500,000+ pieces of content.

We have a client who was doing pretty well in organic search for their existing content. So we knew that if content was created, we could get organic traffic to it. But what to create?

To answer this, we knew that a keyword-by-keyword based approach would slow us down in creating pieces of content that could rank for a variety of searches. We wanted to find topics to write about that would be interesting to visitors too. We also knew that competition had been gaining ground, but couldn’t put a finger on what topics specifically.

So we took a step back. Maybe our client was doing better than their competition overall, but what are the weaknesses we can exploit? We needed to give them topics to actually write about and not just a keyword to include in their posts. So we had to take it a step further.

Using our Topic Opportunity Finder, we found 4 topics representing over 600 keywords and 581,000 monthly searches in total. Do we anticipate to rank for all of that search volume? No, but our goal was to find new topics that our client could write about and receive organic traffic for. And are they seeing results? You bet! And so are several other clients we’ve used this for. We find it so helpful time and again.