Check Competitors' Traffic and Close the Content Gap

You refresh your analytics and see the same flat line. Then you Google one of your target keywords and find a competitor — one you know isn't stronger than you — sitting comfortably at position two. They're getting clicks you should be getting. The question isn't whether they have more traffic. It's where that traffic is coming from and what you don't have that they do.

That's the content gap. And closing it starts with understanding their traffic.

What "Checking Competitors' Traffic" Actually Tells You

Traffic estimates from third-party tools are not exact. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Similarweb all use different panel data and estimation models, so the number you see for a competitor is directional, not precise. Treat it that way.

What the number does tell you reliably:

• Which competitors are growing vs. stagnant. A site trending from 8k to 22k estimated monthly visits over six months is doing something right. One sitting flat at 15k for a year is probably coasting on existing rankings.
• Which pages are pulling the most traffic. Tools like Ahrefs' Site Explorer show "Top Pages by Traffic" — that list tells you exactly which URLs to study.
• Which keywords are driving it. Every page driving traffic has a primary keyword (or a cluster of them). Those are the gaps you need to fill.

The traffic number alone is not actionable. The keyword-level breakdown is.

Step 1: Get the Traffic Estimate and Find Their Top Pages

Pick one competitor — the one that outranks you on the most keywords you care about. Run them through Ahrefs, Semrush, or Ubersuggest.

In Ahrefs: Site Explorer → enter their domain → Organic Search → Top Pages

Sort by Organic Traffic (descending). You'll see their highest-traffic URLs at the top. Export the top 50–100. You're not trying to copy every page — you're trying to understand the pattern of what's working.

Look for:

• Content types (comparison pages, how-to guides, glossary terms, tool pages)
• Topic clusters they've built out that you haven't touched
• Specific keywords with meaningful volume where you have no ranking content at all

That last category is your content gap.

Step 2: Run a Proper Content Gap Analysis

A traffic check tells you what they're getting. A content gap analysis tells you why you're not.

In Ahrefs, use the Content Gap tool under Site Explorer. Enter your domain, then add two or three competitors. The tool outputs keywords they rank for that you don't — filtered by the intersection of their rankings. You can set it to show keywords where all competitors rank but you don't, or where any one of them ranks.

In Semrush, the equivalent is Keyword Gap under the competitive research section. Same concept.

What you're looking for in the output:

• Keywords with 200–2,000 monthly searches where competitors rank in positions 1–10 and you have no ranking at all (not even page three)
• Keywords that clearly belong to a topic you've already written about — meaning you could add a page or expand existing content to capture them
• Keywords that represent a content category you've ignored entirely

If you see fifty keywords around a topic you haven't touched, that's not fifty individual tasks. That's one content cluster to build.

For a more systematic approach to this process, how to analyze competitors and steal their keywords walks through the full workflow including filtering by intent and difficulty.

Step 3: Prioritize What to Build

Not every gap is worth closing. Filter your list by:

Search volume vs. difficulty. A keyword with 800 monthly searches and difficulty 28 is more actionable than one with 5,000 searches and difficulty 72 if you're a mid-authority site.

Business relevance. A keyword driving traffic to a competitor's blog post might be informational content that doesn't convert. Know which gaps lead to buyers and which lead to readers.

Your existing authority signals. If you already have content in a category and Google has indexed and partially ranked it, expanding that cluster is faster than breaking into a brand-new topic.

Page type match. If competitors rank with a comparison page and you have a product page for the same keyword, the problem isn't content volume — it's content type. Build the comparison page.

Analyzing a competitor website for SEO gaps goes deeper on how to read a competitor's page structure and infer why it ranks, not just that it does.

Step 4: Build the Content

This is where most people stall. The gap analysis gives you a list. Turning a list into published content requires:

1. An outline that matches search intent. Look at the top three ranking pages for your target keyword. Note the H2 structure, the content depth, the presence or absence of FAQs, tables, and examples. Your page needs to satisfy the same intent, not just target the same keyword.

2. Coverage of the full topic, not just the primary keyword. Pages that rank well tend to cover the semantic neighborhood of a topic — related subtopics, common questions, relevant comparisons. Use the "People also ask" box and the related searches at the bottom of the SERP as a guide.

3. Internal links to and from existing content. A new page with no internal links is an island. Connect it to your existing content and make sure your existing content links back.

4. Patience. New content on a crawled site typically starts showing movement in six to twelve weeks, sometimes longer on less-crawled sites. Publish and move to the next gap.

If you want to scale this beyond doing it one keyword at a time, services like Rankfill map your full competitive landscape, identify every keyword opportunity your competitors are capturing that you're not, and produce a prioritized content plan with traffic estimates attached.

The Part People Skip

Most guides stop at "find the gap, fill the gap." But the actual error companies make is building the wrong kind of content for a gap they correctly identified.

A competitor ranks for "project management software for construction" with a dedicated landing page targeting that exact audience. You write a generic blog post that mentions construction once. You wonder why you don't rank.

Match the content type, the specificity, and the depth. If the ranking page has 2,200 words, a comparison table, and three customer quotes — and your page has 600 words and a CTA — you haven't closed the gap. You've gestured at it.

For teams doing this at scale and wanting a more systematic crawl-and-compare approach, there are Screaming Frog alternatives built specifically for content gap analysis that surface missing pages across an entire site rather than keyword by keyword.

FAQ

How accurate are competitor traffic estimates? Third-party tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are typically accurate within 20–50% for most sites, and less reliable for small sites (under ~5k monthly visits). Use them to identify trends and compare relative performance, not to get an exact headcount.

Can I check a competitor's traffic for free? Yes, with limitations. Ubersuggest offers some free data. Semrush and Ahrefs both have free tiers that give you limited results per day. For a one-time deep analysis, most people use a trial period of a paid tool.

What's the difference between traffic gap and content gap? Traffic gap = how much more traffic they have than you. Content gap = specific keywords and topics they rank for that you don't have pages for. The content gap is what explains the traffic gap and tells you what to do about it.

How many competitors should I analyze? Two to four direct competitors is usually enough. Going broader rarely changes the priorities — the same gaps show up repeatedly. Focus on competitors who outrank you on the keywords that matter to your business, not just whoever has the highest overall traffic.

How long before new content starts ranking? Typically six to twelve weeks on an actively crawled site with existing authority. Faster if you have strong internal linking and the topic is close to what you already rank for. Slower if the domain is new or the keyword is competitive.

Do I need a tool, or can I do this manually? You can do a lightweight version manually — look at competitor site maps, search your target keywords and note who ranks, check what pages they have that you don't. But for any meaningful scale, a tool saves several hours of work per competitor and catches gaps you'd miss browsing manually.