competitor research tool pain points

“I look for low difficulty keywords, usually under 20 score, with 100+ volume to use in my articles. However, when I refresh the keyword stats to be more recent, the SEO difficulty is always significantly higher. I feel like it’s going to be impossible for me to rank with any keyword if their difficulties just keep rising, especially since I’m a new blog.”

“The problem with Reddit is that many places don’t allow links.”, so I’m having a hard time getting people to see my blog through Reddit.”

“Ubersuggest has its problems. Most SEOs complain about the same thing you did—inaccurate and changing difficulty scores.”

“The difficulty presented in Ubbersugest is not always the real difficulty for YOUR SITE.”

“I’m afraid if you’ve been blogging 3 months your domain authority and perceived by Google is probably too low to go for keywords rated 10+. You need to target 0-5.”

“The problem is, a lot of these tools aren’t free. I am just a highschooler, and I don’t want to leech off of my parents’ money too much, especially since I don’t know if this will get anywhere.”

“My tools isn't free either, but I plugged-in some of your copy and pulled a keyword list.”

“My Helium 10 subscription is coming due and I’m having a hard time justifying it. My most used feature is Market Tracker.”

“That said, it’s hard to justify paying $1000 a year just for that feature.”

“Nah Helium10 is expensive but it’s worth every dollar imo”

“Yep, agreed. You can try stackline and H10 enterprise( not sure that is the exact name) but stack line was roughly 30k.”

“Uggh, I wish there were good SEO tools that were free. Unfortunately, I really can’t buy anything because I don’t want to use too much of my parents’ money.”

“Is there a way to see how a product I see on the paid shopping feed is categorised in the GPC? So can I learn from what my competitors are doing?”

“Small business owners of reddit: how have you spied on a competitor?”

“My Helium 10 subscription is coming due and I’m having a hard time justifying it. My most used feature is Market Tracker. For those that are unfamiliar: with Market Tracker, you seed it with a bunch of ASIN’s (including your own) to seed a market. Over time it suggests other ASINs for your market and you wind up with an overall view of all of your competitors, the size of the market, where you rank in the market and the ebbs and flows of sales (when sales go down, it’s nice to know that it’s the whole market and not just me). It also is nice because it alerts me to new competitors as they enter the market.”

“We have called them asking for price quotes using personal cell phones. Or called their service department feigning a problem with the equipment we both service. Just to check out their customer service, wait times and pricing.”

“I worked for a lot of my competition and still have friends who work there, or have taken jobs at newer places that have popped up. ... so yeah, the ones that i haven't worked for, I have friends working there or I've interviewed there, gotten tours of their behind the scenes and have been shown their techniques.”

“Ohh ok. Should I target keywords with little volume or even 0 volume? I've read some articles on how it can be beneficial but is that a better idea for someone like me?”

“I think, Spying on other's businesses is part of the competition.”

“It’s clear you’re putting in a lot of effort, and that will pay off over time. Keep going — you’re tackling an important topic that has the potential to make a real difference!”

“It's not the individual keyword difficulty that matters so much as authority within a niche. ... So, if you want to rank spend less time worrying about keyword difficulty (almost all keywords with good search volume are difficult in 2025) and more about dominating your niche. Pick one topic, exhaust it, then take your next topic, exhaust that and so on... don't "spray and pray" by writing stuff that's all over your niche, you will burn out a long time before you have any topical authority.”

“How do you suggest finding what my audience needs? I am a teen myself, but I know a lot of the things I focus on are not what the majority of teens focus on, since I’m more academic than many other teens and also only hang out with academic people. Should I use Google to search things? Or search on Reddit? What do you suggest?”

“I myself, who use dark mode on my browser, couldn't read a single word on your website because it had a white background and white font (no contrast)”

“Hi! Thank you for all your advice, I’ll try to implement it to the best of my ability. However, how would I fix the dark mode issue? I’m not the most tech savvy, so I don’t know how to alter my site for people using dark mode. I use WordPress, by the way.”

“The first H1 on your homepage is blank, and none of the H1s throughout the page mention your site name.”

“Your logo doesn't have ALT text, and since it's the primary link to your homepage, it's a missed opportunity to reinforce your branding and primary keywords.”

“Speaking of broken JavaScript, there seems to be an issue with the lazy loader on the homepage. The content doesn’t appear until far below the fold, which could confuse visitors and prevent crawlers from indexing your content properly.”

“Your RSS feed doesn't have a channel title set, which means entries are missing a proper title like "Your Next Rupee Financial Management Advice."”

“My blog is about personal finance. I have started recently it's been 20 days. I'm using yoast SEO to optimize SEO for my posts. I publish one post each week. As of now as per yoast SEO my posts are ranking in a position above 100 in SERP. According to me we have to focus more on increasing domain authority. That is building backings and traffic to our website, our keywords alone won't work to increase our position.”

“Gotta get backlinks.”

“Yeah I’ve heard about that 😅. I don’t have much of an idea how to get backlinks. I’ve tried emailing about guest posting but it hasn’t really worked out. Do you have any tips for that?”

“We have about 600 posts on our main blog, 100 or so on our second and 35 or so on our third, and the fourth is in a holding pattern for now but has about 12 pieces on it. We didn't start to see a "traffic boner" as the SEO folks would say it, on our main site until we had about 300 pieces live, but then it shot past all the competition.”

“And our niche is not as competitive as teen mental health. So, if you want to rank spend less time worrying about keyword difficulty (almost all keywords with good search volume are difficult in 2025) and more about dominating your niche.”

“Your first links are likely to come from other bloggers like you, as your authority rises, more people will find you in search and more backlinks will come organically.”

“How do you suggest finding what my audience needs? I am a teen myself, but I know a lot of the things I focus on are not what the majority of teens focus on, since I’m more academic than many other teens and also only hang out with academic people. Should I use Google to search things? Or search on Reddit? What do you suggest?”

“You have missed the core purpose of blogging and just looking after the keywords. Of course, keywords are the foundational element in determining our blog's success. But the true purpose is to understand your audience's needs, their problem, and the market demand. From the above findings, you should explore the topics that those people usually search. From the topics, you have to create a content calendar. Only then, the keyword research will play its role. Now, do you understand?”

“Google search is one way to learn about market demand. Another practical method is to get connected to the peers in your niche via social media. Learning audience behavior is not like reading a book, it is a continuous learning process. You need to put yourself into the system and follow every progress consistently.”

“The problem is, a lot of these tools aren’t free. I am just a highschooler, and I don’t want to leech off of my parents’ money too much, especially since I don’t know if this will get anywhere. Are there any actual free options?”

“Uggh, I wish there were good SEO tools that were free. Unfortunately, I really can’t buy anything because I don’t want to use too much of my parents’ money.”

“My Helium 10 subscription is coming due and I’m having a hard time justifying it.”

“If you are brand registered you can use the brand analytics feature and find what you are looking for here (free): [https://sellercentral.amazon.com/brand-analytics/dashboard/query-performance?view-id=query-performance-asin-view&country-id=us](https://sellercentral.amazon.com/brand-analytics/dashboard/query-performance?view-id=query-performance-asin-view&country-id=us)”