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PPC – 4 min read – March 28, 2017

How To Cannibalize Your Competitor's Organic Traffic Via Paid Search

How To Set Up An Affiliate Marketing System For eCommerce Store

Elena K.
Editor at Serpstat
We recently published a blog post where shared top PPC tips. As we received lots of positive feedbacks,
I decided to go on with PPC posts.

This time I'm going to cover a little-known PPC strategy based on traffic cannibalization.
You may have already heard such term as traffic cannibalization – a practice, which allows drawing potential organic traffic to a page advertised in PPC.

In this article, I'll show you a simple way to cannibalize your competitor's organic traffic by targeting the right keywords with PPC advertising. It's the easiest way to set up an efficient PPC campaign that will bring relevant traffic to your landing pages. It's the best fit for highly competitive niches with expensive keywords. Let's see how it works.
Step #1

Determine key competitors

First of all, let's find the competitors that succeed in SEO. In case you already know who your top competitors are, pass to the next step.

Enter your domain to Serpstat's search bar, choose the database and click on "Search." Then go to "SEO Research," and pass to "Competitors" feature. Sort the gained results by the "Relevance" parameter.
Step #2

Collect the keywords to target

1
Click on the required domain from the list to find out what keywords your competitor ranks for in Google.
As to Serpstat fitnessfirstusa.com is the most relevant competitor to the analyzed nxtsupplements.com. By clicking on the domain, we jump to "Positions" feature page.
2
Filter the results as it's mentioned below.

  • 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

Results

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 and cons of this method

Pros:

  • Quite cheap. As the keywords we get via this method are not the branded ones of your competitor 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.
If you're not sure you understood this method correctly, check out this video:
As you see, the pros clearly overweigh the cons. Thus this method it worth trying.

That's it! Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions ;)
Found an error? Select it and press Ctrl + Enter to tell us

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