Cannibalize Competitors' Organic Traffic via Paid Search

[Serpstat.com]

In just 3 steps, I'll show you one simple way to cannibalize your competitor's organic traffic by targeting the right keywords with PPC advertising.

STEP #1

Find your competitors that succeed in SEO. In case you already know who your top competitors are, pass to the step #2.

Enter your domain to Serpstat's search bar, choose the database and click on Search. Then go to SEO Research, and pass to Competitors report. Sort the gained results by the Relevance parameter.


STEP #2

Collect the keywords to target

Click on the required domain from the list to find out what keywords your competitor ranks for in Google.


By clicking on the domain, we jump to "Positions" feature page. Filter the results likeso:

Domain's position for a keyword → between →1 and 3;
Keywords → does not include → brand name.


Thus, we get the list of keywords our competitor ranks for in top 3 Google results excluding brand keywords. We exclude brand queries as there are very high chances that your competitor bids on them.


Depending on your PPC budget, you can vary the CPC and competition level. Just sort the gained results by "CPC" and "Competition in PPC" parameters.


STEP #3

Repeat the previous step with other top competitors to gather more keywords to use in your ads campaign. You can export these reports using any format you like.

Thus we got an extensive list of keywords to target and draw competitor's organic traffic to your landing pages. Launch a PPC campaign using these keywords. Despite the fact that your competitors are in top of organic results, your potential clients will see your paid ad.



Pros:

Quite cheap. Keywords we get with this method are not branded thus, they are low-competitive and cheap;
No risks. You don't break any rules;
Guerilla method. Your competitor won't understand why his/her organic traffic dropped dramatically.

Cons:

No results. You may find no keywords if your competitors already run PPC campaigns using their top organic queries;
Irrelevant keywords. If your niche is extensive and you've tried lots of other strategies, there are high chances that you already use all relevant keywords and the ones left are inappropriate.

For most websites, the pros would clearly outweigh the cons and I encourage you to try it out