Competitor Keyword Analysis: How to Find and Take Their Keywords

Competitor keyword analysis is the process of finding which search queries send traffic to your rivals, deciding which of those you can realistically win, and turning the gap into a publishing plan. You do it in four moves: pick the right competitors (search competitors, not business competitors), pull their ranking keywords, subtract the ones you already cover, then filter what remains by intent and by how weak the current results are.

Done properly it is the fastest way to build a keyword list, because someone else has already paid to discover which topics convert in your market. Done badly it produces a copy of a competitor's blog that ranks for nothing. This guide covers the version that works, including how much of it you can do without a paid subscription.

Search competitors are not your business competitors

The first mistake in competitors keywords analysis is analysing the wrong sites. The companies your sales team loses deals to may not be the pages you lose rankings to. Your actual search competitors are whoever occupies the top ten for the queries you want.

Build the list empirically. Take ten to fifteen keywords that genuinely matter to your business, search each one, and record every domain that appears more than once. The domains that keep reappearing are your search competitors, and the list will usually contain three types:

• Direct competitors selling what you sell.
• Publishers and review sites that rank for commercial queries in your category without selling anything.
• Adjacent tools or services that solve a neighbouring problem and rank for the same informational queries.

All three are worth analysing, but for different reasons. Direct competitors show you money keywords. Publishers show you the informational topics that pull your buyers in early. Adjacent products show you the vocabulary of the wider problem.

Pick three to five. Analysing twenty produces noise.

What you can get for free before you pay for anything

You can do a surprising amount of competitor keyword research without a subscription:

• Search your target keywords manually and log who ranks. Slow, but it is real data with no index gaps.
• Read competitor sitemaps. Add /sitemap.xml to their domain and you often get a full list of every page they publish, which tells you their topic map even without volumes.
• Read their navigation, blog categories, and internal linking. What they link to most is what they are betting on.
• Check their titles and meta descriptions. Titles are keyword declarations. A page titled around an exact phrase is a page targeting that phrase.
• Look at which pages they update repeatedly. Frequently refreshed pages are usually their earners.
• Use Google's site: operator with a topic word to see how deeply they cover a subject.

This free layer gets you the shape of a competitor's strategy. What it cannot give you is the search volume attached to each page, or the queries where they rank without a dedicated page. That is what keyword databases add.

Get competitors keywords with a keyword database

Paid tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking, and similar platforms maintain large indexes of keyword-to-URL rankings. You enter a domain and get back the queries it ranks for, with an estimated position and volume for each. All of them offer tiers from entry level to enterprise, and their coverage differs by market and language, so a keyword that appears in one index may be missing from another.

Three practical cautions when you get competitors keywords this way:

1. Traffic estimates are models, not measurements. Use them for relative comparison between pages, never as a factual claim about a competitor's business.
2. Coverage is uneven outside major English markets. If your market is smaller, verify a sample of the keywords manually.
3. The same keyword will show different difficulty scores in different tools, because each vendor computes difficulty from its own backlink index and its own formula. We unpack that in keyword difficulty explained.

If you have access to a keyword database, export each competitor's ranking keywords into a spreadsheet with columns for keyword, their position, their ranking URL, and volume. That export is the raw material for everything that follows.

The keyword gap: subtract what you already have

A keyword gap analysis is a set subtraction. You want the keywords where one or more competitors rank and you do not — or where they rank far better than you.

Build it in four columns: keyword, your position (blank if none), best competitor position, and how many of your tracked competitors rank for it. Then split the result into four buckets:

• Missing entirely. No page of yours ranks. These need new content.
• Weak. You rank somewhere between 11 and 50. These usually need a better page, not a new one.
• Contested. You and they both rank on page one. These need incremental improvement: better title, deeper coverage, stronger internal links.
• Shared by everyone. If all your competitors rank for a keyword and you do not, it is usually a table-stakes topic for the category. Prioritise it.

That last bucket deserves special attention. When several independent competitors all invest in the same topic, it is strong evidence that the topic pays. When only one does, it might be an experiment that failed.

Filter the gap: not every competitor keyword is worth taking

A gap list is a list of possibilities, not priorities. Cut it down with four filters, in this order:

1. Can you serve the intent honestly? If a keyword requires a product feature you do not have, or expertise you do not possess, drop it. Ranking for a query you cannot satisfy produces bounces and no revenue.
2. Is it commercially relevant? Rank the survivors by how close they sit to a purchase decision. Comparison queries, alternatives queries, pricing queries, and problem-specific how-to queries outrank generic industry terms almost every time.
3. Is it winnable? Open the results. A keyword where a competitor ranks with a thin page is far more attractive than one where they rank with a comprehensive, frequently updated resource that has attracted links for years.
4. Does it fit a cluster? A keyword that sits alongside five others you are already planning is worth more than an isolated one, because the pages support each other.

What survives all four filters is your publishing plan.

Advanced keyword research and competitor analysis: five deeper moves

Once the basic gap is handled, these techniques find opportunities that everyone else's export misses.

Analyse the SERP overlap, not just the domain

Take a competitor's best page and search several of the keywords it ranks for. Note which other pages appear across all those searches. Pages that co-rank across a family of queries reveal the true topic cluster Google associates with the subject — often broader than the keyword list suggests.

Find their declining pages

If a tool shows a competitor page losing positions over time, that topic is up for grabs. Declining pages usually mean stale content, a change in intent, or an abandoned section. A fresh, accurate page targeting the same intent has an unusually clear run.

Mine their subfolders

Compare how much of a competitor's traffic sits in /blog versus /product versus /compare or /tools. The proportion tells you which content type earns in your niche. If every serious competitor maintains comparison pages, comparison pages are a requirement, not an option.

Read the pages that convert, not the pages that rank

Look at which competitor articles push hardest toward a signup or a demo, and which have custom design, testimonials, or dedicated calls to action. Companies invest design effort where the revenue is. Those are the topics worth contesting first.

Track branded and alternatives queries

Queries that pair a competitor's brand with words such as alternatives, review, pricing, or vs are among the highest-intent terms available, and they are frequently under-served by the brand itself. They require genuine fairness to work — a comparison page that misrepresents a rival converts badly and ages worse.

Turning the analysis into published pages

The output of competitor keyword analysis should be a prioritised content plan, not a spreadsheet. For each keyword you keep, record four things: the target keyword, the page type it needs, the specific weakness in the current top results, and which existing page of yours will link to it.

Then produce the pages. This is where most competitor analysis dies — the research is finished, the plan is sound, and nothing gets published for a quarter. If output is your constraint rather than insight, AutoSEO covers the production half: it generates SEO-structured long-form articles from your chosen keywords, audits and fixes on-page issues, publishes to thirteen CMS platforms, and tracks rankings and AI-assistant visibility afterwards. Details and the trial are on the pricing page.

For the research half, our free keyword suggestions tool expands any competitor topic into a broader candidate list, and how to find low competition keywords covers the manual difficulty read in more depth.

How often to repeat the analysis

Quarterly is enough for most sites. Search results change gradually, and a fresh export every month mostly produces churn. What is worth watching more often is your own Search Console data: new queries appearing there tell you which parts of the plan are working before any third-party tool notices.

Re-run the full analysis immediately when a competitor relaunches their site, when you launch a new product line, or when you notice a sustained drop in a page that used to rank. Structural changes deserve fresh data. Routine months do not.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find my competitors' keywords?

Start manually: search the ten to fifteen keywords that matter most to your business and record which domains keep appearing. Those are your real search competitors. Then read their sitemaps, titles, and blog structure to map their topics for free. To attach volumes and positions to that map you need a keyword database such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or SE Ranking, which export the queries a domain ranks for along with estimated positions.

Is competitor keyword analysis accurate?

Partly. Position data is reasonably reliable for major markets; traffic and value estimates are models built on assumptions about click-through rates and should never be quoted as fact. Coverage also varies by language and country, so verify a sample of keywords by searching them yourself before building a strategy on the export.

How many competitors should I analyse?

Three to five search competitors is the practical range. Fewer than three and you mistake one company's strategy for a market pattern. More than five and the gap list becomes unmanageable without adding new information — the same core topics keep reappearing.

What is a keyword gap analysis?

A keyword gap analysis compares the keywords your competitors rank for against the keywords you rank for, and surfaces the difference. The valuable output is not the raw list but the segmentation: keywords you are missing entirely, keywords where you rank weakly, and keywords that every competitor covers — which usually indicates a topic the market considers essential.

Can I do competitor keyword research without paid tools?

Yes, at reduced resolution. Manual searching, competitor sitemaps, page titles, blog categories, and the site: operator reveal what a competitor targets and how deeply they cover it. What free methods cannot supply is search volume and the full list of queries a page ranks for. A workable compromise is free methods for discovery plus a short paid subscription when you need volumes for prioritisation. See also SEO keyword examples for how to categorise what you find.