How Do I Find Competitor Keywords?

Enter a competitor's domain into a tool's organic keywords report (Ahrefs, Semrush or a free tier like Ubersuggest) to see every term they rank for. Then run a content gap report to find keywords they rank for and you don't. Without tools, mine their sitemap, title tags and internal navigation for the same information.

Pick the right competitors first

The competitor you lose customers to and the competitor you lose search traffic to are frequently different companies, and analysing the wrong one wastes the whole exercise.

Search competitors are whoever occupies page one for the terms you want. That's often a review site, a marketplace, a large publisher or an affiliate blog — not a business you'd name as a rival. These are the sites whose keyword profiles are worth mining.

Business competitors are who you compete with for revenue. Worth analysing if they're also visible in search, but a direct rival with no SEO presence has no keyword data to give you.

The practical method: search five or six of your most important terms, and note which domains keep reappearing. Those recurring names are your real search competitors. Pick three — one roughly your size, one somewhat ahead, one dominant. The similar-sized one produces the most actionable list; the dominant one shows you the topic map.

The tool method

Every major SEO tool does this the same way, with different names for the same two reports.

1. Organic keywords report. Enter the competitor's domain to get every keyword the tool has recorded them ranking for, with position, volume and the ranking URL. Ahrefs calls it Organic Keywords; Semrush calls it Organic Research → Positions.

2. Content gap / keyword gap. The higher-value report. Enter your domain plus two or three competitors, and it returns keywords they rank for and you don't. This is where the genuinely new opportunities surface rather than the terms you already knew about.

3. Top pages report. Sorts a competitor's pages by traffic. Often more useful than the raw keyword list, because it shows which topics actually earn them traffic — one page frequently ranks for hundreds of related terms, and the page is the unit you'd have to compete with.

A caution on the numbers: every tool's traffic estimates are modelled, not measured. Treat them as relative signals for comparing pages against each other, not as facts about how many visitors a competitor gets. The keyword lists themselves are reliable; the traffic figures attached to them are educated guesses.

Doing it without paid tools

The free route is slower but gives you most of the value, and it's often more accurate because you're reading what the competitor actually published rather than a third-party estimate.

Read their sitemap. competitor.com/sitemap.xml lists every page they've published. The URL slugs are usually the target keywords, spelled out. This is the single fastest free way to see a competitor's entire content strategy, and almost nobody does it.

Scan their title tags. Titles are where the primary keyword lives. Browsing their blog index gives you the target term for each page in a few minutes.

Use site: search. site:competitor.com [topic] shows everything they've published on a subject and roughly how Google organises it.

Check their internal navigation. Category pages and hub pages reveal how they've structured their topic clusters — which is the strategy behind the keyword list, not just the list.

Free tiers. Ahrefs' free Site Explorer, Ubersuggest, and the Keyword Surfer browser extension all provide limited competitor keyword data. Enough to validate a shortlist, not enough to build one from scratch.

Your own Search Console. Underrated as a competitor tool. Terms where you appear at position 11–20 are terms where competitors are beating you right now on queries Google already associates with you. That's a shorter path than any competitor report.

Filtering the list down to what's usable

A raw export of 4,000 keywords is not a strategy. Most of it is noise, and the filtering is where the actual work is.

Cut in this order:

1. Remove branded terms. Their company name, product names, and "[their brand] login". You cannot rank for these and shouldn't try.

2. Remove terms you can't serve. Keywords about products you don't sell or audiences you don't serve. Traffic you can't convert is a cost.

3. Filter by difficulty against your own site. Keyword difficulty is absolute while your ability to rank is relative. A new site should be looking below 20–30; anything else on the list is a later-quarter target, not a discard.

4. Check the intent. Look at what actually ranks. If the top ten are product pages and you'd write a guide, you're not in that competition. See the four intents of SEO.

5. Prioritise commercial intent over volume. "Link exchange platform pricing" beats "what is a backlink" for a business, even at a tenth of the volume. Buyer-intent terms are usually both easier to rank for and worth more.

6. Group by intent, not by phrasing. Twenty variants of one question are one page, not twenty. Building a page per variant causes keyword cannibalization.

A realistic outcome from a 4,000-keyword export is 10 to 20 pages worth building. If you end up with 200, you haven't filtered hard enough.

Read the pages, not just the keywords

The step that separates useful competitor research from a spreadsheet exercise: open the competitor's actual ranking page for your top ten target keywords.

You're looking for what it would take to beat it. How thorough is it? When was it last updated? Does it answer the sub-questions or just the headline one? Does it have original data, or is it a summary of other people's? How many referring domains point at that specific page — not the domain, the page?

That last number is usually the deciding one. A page with four referring domains is beatable with a better article. A page with two hundred needs links as well as content, and knowing which situation you're in before you write is the difference between a productive quarter and a wasted one.

When links are what's missing, that's a different job from content. Backlinkster matches you with a site owner in a related niche for a one-for-one in-content swap, each verified live by code, with five swaps a month on the free plan — aimed squarely at the case where your page is genuinely better and still sitting at position 12.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find keywords my competitors rank for? Enter their domain into an SEO tool's organic keywords report, then run a content gap report comparing your site against two or three competitors to surface terms they rank for and you don't. Free alternatives include reading their sitemap, title tags and site: search results.

How do I find competitor keywords for free? Read competitor.com/sitemap.xml for their full page list — slugs usually spell out target keywords. Scan their title tags, use site:competitor.com [topic] searches, and use free tiers of Ahrefs, Ubersuggest or Keyword Surfer for volume estimates.

Which competitors should I analyse? Your search competitors, not necessarily your business rivals. Search five important terms and note which domains keep appearing — often review sites or publishers rather than direct competitors. Pick one similar-sized site, one slightly ahead, and one market leader.

What is a content gap analysis? A report comparing your site's keyword profile against competitors' to identify terms they rank for and you don't. It's the most efficient competitor keyword report because it filters out everything you already cover.

Is it legal to use competitor keywords? Yes. Keywords aren't owned by anyone, and targeting the same search terms is ordinary competition. What isn't acceptable is copying their content, and bidding on a competitor's trademarked brand name in paid ads can raise separate legal issues.

Are competitor traffic estimates accurate? No — they're models built from keyword rankings and estimated click-through rates, often off by a wide margin. Use them to compare pages relative to each other, not as factual traffic numbers.

How many competitor keywords should I actually target? Far fewer than you'll export. After removing branded terms, filtering by difficulty against your own authority, and grouping variants into single pages, a 4,000-keyword list typically yields 10–20 pages worth building.

The bottom line

Competitor keyword research is two steps, and most people only do the first. Extracting the list is easy — a content gap report, or a sitemap and twenty minutes if you're not paying for tools. The value is in the filtering: strip branded terms, cut anything above your authority ceiling, check intent against what actually ranks, and group variants into single pages. Then open the competitor's ranking page and count its referring domains, because that number tells you whether you need a better article or a better link profile. Those are different projects, and starting the wrong one is the usual reason competitor research produces nothing.