When your own product has no meaningful search history, you borrow someone else's. Your competitors rank for the keywords in your niche, and Amazon will tell you which ones.

Done properly, this recovers **90%+ of the relevant keywords for your product** in an afternoon.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-kwnodata-explainer-7fc5a73b.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? One hundred and twelve seconds on choosing competitors whose keywords are genuinely yours, the check that validates the list, and what the list still cannot tell you.*

## **Step 1: pick the right competitors**

**List 5–10 direct competitors** — products genuinely like yours, not merely in the same category.

**Choose the biggest sellers**, identified by Best Seller Rank. They rank for the widest set of terms, which is what makes their keyword footprint useful.

**Match on the things that determine shared search terms:** features, quality level, price band, and customer type. A premium version of your product attracts different searches from a budget one, and mixing them dilutes the list.

**If a competitor has variations, take the child ASIN that sells most.** Parent-level selection blurs the keyword picture across variants that may target different searches.

**Getting this step wrong invalidates everything downstream.** The whole method assumes their keywords are your keywords.

## **Step 2: pull their search terms**

**Brand Analytics → Top Search Terms**, with the date range set to the **last month**.

**Enter your competitor ASINs** into the ASIN field, space-separated.

Amazon returns the search terms where those products appear, along with which products receive the most clicks on each.

## **Step 3: sanity-check the output**

**For each keyword returned, at least one of the top three clicked products should be one of your chosen competitors.**

**That check is how you know your competitor selection was right.** If your competitors are not among the top-clicked products for most of the terms, you picked products that do not actually compete for the same shoppers — go back to step 1 and reselect.

**When it passes, the list should cover 90%+ of the relevant keywords for your product.**

## **Step 4: capture search frequency rank alongside each keyword**

Download the report and keep two columns: **the keyword**, and its **Search Frequency Rank**.

**SFR is a rank, so lower means more searched.** It is how you will size the keywords when you group them — a term at SFR 8,000 is a completely different proposition from one at SFR 400,000.

![Search terms and their volume](/kb-assets/shot-b28-brandterms-view-a83aae.png)

## **Step 5: fill in whatever data you do have**

You have thin data, not zero data.

**Add whatever exists** for these keywords from your own Search Query Performance and advertising reports. On a sleeping product most rows will be empty, but the ones that are not are the most valuable rows in the sheet — those are keywords where you have already converted at least once.

**Any keyword where you have real conversion data goes to the top of your list**, because it is the closest thing to evidence you have.

See [**Understanding Search Query Performance**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-search-query-performance) and [**Search Terms and Aggregated Search Terms**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/search-terms-and-aggregated-search-terms).

## **What you have now — and what you do not**

**You have:** the keyword universe for your niche, sized by search frequency.

**You do not have:** any idea which of them *you* convert on.

**That distinction is the whole reason for the next step.** This list tells you what people search. It does not tell you whether shoppers respond to your product when they search it, and that is the question a relaunch depends on.

**So group these keywords, then buy the data** — see [**Grouping and Prioritising Keywords**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/grouping-and-prioritising-keywords) and [**Buying the Data You Are Missing**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/buying-the-data-you-are-missing).

## **A use beyond sleeping products**

**This method is worth running even on healthy products**, because your own data only shows keywords you already appear for.

Competitor keyword footprints reveal terms you have never ranked for and never bid on — which is the same gap [**Outlier and Trending Keywords**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/outlier-and-trending-keywords) attacks from a different angle.

## **Common mistakes**

**Choosing competitors by category** rather than by genuine similarity.

**Using parent ASINs** where the variants target different searches.

**Skipping the top-three check**, and building a plan on the wrong keyword set.

**Discarding SFR**, then having no way to size the groups.

**Treating the list as a plan.** It is an input; the test campaign is what turns it into one.

## **Related**

- [**Reviving a Sleeping Product**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/reviving-a-sleeping-product) — why this step exists.
- [**Buying the Data You Are Missing**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/buying-the-data-you-are-missing) — turning the list into evidence.
- [**Grouping and Prioritising Keywords**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/grouping-and-prioritising-keywords) — the grouping step, unchanged.