Rankfill

Compare Competitor Websites to Find Your Content Gaps

You publish a post. It gets no traffic. You check Google Search Console — nothing. Then you search the keyword yourself, find a competitor ranking in position two, and read their article. It's not better than yours. It's barely coherent. But it's there, and yours isn't.

That's usually the moment people start wondering what exactly their competitors are doing that they're not.

Comparing competitor websites isn't about copying them. It's about finding the gap between what they've published and what you've published — and figuring out which part of that gap Google is actually rewarding. Once you know that, you have a list of content to build.

Here's how to do it methodically.

Step 1: Identify Who You're Actually Competing With

Your business competitors and your search competitors are not the same thing.

A local accounting firm might compete with a national tax software brand for the keyword "how to file quarterly taxes." The software brand doesn't serve the same customers, but it's still taking your traffic.

To find your real search competitors:

  1. Take 5–10 keywords you care about ranking for
  2. Search each one in an incognito window
  3. Note which domains appear repeatedly in the top 10

The domains that show up across multiple searches are your search competitors. They're the ones worth analyzing in depth.

If you want to do this faster with data behind it, tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz will surface your organic competitors automatically — they compare your keyword profile against the web and show you who else ranks for the same terms.

Step 2: Pull Their Keyword Rankings

Once you have 3–5 competitor domains, you want to see every keyword they're ranking for — not just the ones you already know about.

In Ahrefs, go to Site Explorer → enter a competitor domain → click "Organic Keywords." Export the full list.

In Semrush, it's Domain Overview → Organic Research → Keywords.

You're looking for:

Do this for each competitor. You'll end up with several overlapping lists of keywords. The ones that appear across multiple competitors — but are absent from your own site — are your highest-priority gaps.

This is the core of how to analyze competitors and steal their keywords: it's not about their domain authority or their backlinks. It's about the specific topics they've covered that you haven't touched.

Step 3: Run a Content Gap Analysis

Most SEO platforms have a built-in content gap or keyword gap tool. Here's what each does:

Ahrefs Content Gap: Enter your domain as the target, add 2–4 competitors, and Ahrefs shows you keywords those competitors rank for that you don't. You can filter by minimum search volume, keyword difficulty, and how many competitors rank for each term.

Semrush Keyword Gap: Same concept. Enter your domain plus up to four competitors and see the intersection. The "Missing" filter is the most useful — those are keywords your competitors all rank for, and you rank for none.

Moz's Keyword Explorer: Less powerful for this specific use case but still useful if you're already in the Moz ecosystem.

What you're building toward is a prioritized list: topics your competitors have covered, that real people are searching for, where your site currently has nothing.

For a deeper walkthrough on reading those results, analyzing a competitor website for SEO gaps covers what to do once the data is in front of you.

Step 4: Evaluate Their Content Quality

Raw keyword data tells you what topics exist. It doesn't tell you whether the ranking content is beatable.

For each keyword you flag as a priority, read the page that's currently ranking. You're looking for:

If the ranking content is genuinely strong, you'll need a better angle or a more specific take — not just the same article rewritten. If it's weak, publish something thorough and structured, and you have a real shot.

Step 5: Check Their Site Structure

Keyword rankings are one layer. Site structure is another.

Look at how competitors organize their content. Do they have a dedicated blog? Topic clusters? Resource hubs? Sometimes the reason a competitor ranks broadly is because they've built internal linking between related articles — and that structure signals topical authority to Google.

You can crawl a competitor's site structure using tools like Screaming Frog (or if you're looking for alternatives, there are several Screaming Frog alternatives for content gap analysis worth considering). Look at how many pages they have indexed, how their navigation is structured, and which internal pages they link to most heavily.

If they have 80 articles on a topic and you have 3, their site tells Google they're an authority on that topic. You're not going to outrank them with one great article. You need to build coverage.

Step 6: Build Your Gap List into an Action Plan

You now have:

Turn this into a content plan:

  1. Quick wins: keywords where you have existing content that's close but not quite ranking — often an optimization of what's already there
  2. New content: topics where you have nothing and competitors have something ranking
  3. Cluster builds: topic areas where competitors have coverage depth and you'll need multiple articles to compete

Prioritize by: search volume × likelihood of ranking × business relevance. A 200-search/month keyword where you can rank in six months matters more than a 2,000-search/month term you'll never crack.

If you want this process done for you — competitors mapped, keywords identified, traffic estimates built — Rankfill does exactly this and delivers a full content plan alongside a publish-ready article so you can see the output before committing to a full deployment.

For more on running this kind of structured analysis, competition analysis for your website walks through how to close the gap once you know where it is.

What to Do With the Data

The research is only useful if it turns into pages on your site. Most people do the analysis, feel overwhelmed, and don't publish anything.

A practical approach: pick one keyword from your gap list each week. Write the article. Publish it. Repeat. In six months you'll have 25 articles your competitors had and you didn't. That compounds — internal links, topical authority, and rankings start reinforcing each other.

Comparing competitor websites isn't a one-time project. Run the gap analysis quarterly. Competitors publish new content. Rankings shift. The gap you identified six months ago may be half-closed now, and three new ones have opened up.

FAQ

Can I compare competitor websites for free? Yes, with limits. Google Search Console shows your own rankings but not competitors'. Ubersuggest and Ahrefs both have free tiers that let you see some competitor keyword data. For a complete picture, you'll need a paid tool — Ahrefs or Semrush is the standard.

How many competitors should I compare? Three to five is enough for most sites. More than that and the data becomes noise. Focus on competitors who rank for a significant overlap with your target keywords, not just any site in your industry.

What if my competitors have way more domain authority? Target long-tail keywords — more specific, lower volume queries where the barrier to rank is lower. You can still capture meaningful traffic by going narrower and deeper on topics where high-authority sites have published thin content.

How do I know if my content gap analysis is working? Track rankings for every new article you publish. Give it 3–6 months. If you're publishing well-structured, thorough content on keywords with real volume and moderate difficulty, you should see movement. If nothing is ranking after six months, the issue is usually backlinks or on-page quality — not the topic selection.

Does this work for e-commerce sites? Yes, though the gap analysis looks slightly different. You're comparing category pages, product pages, and informational content. Competitors often rank for category-level keywords with pages you haven't built yet. The process is the same — find what they have, determine if it's beatable, build your version.

What's the difference between a content gap and a keyword gap? They're used interchangeably but technically: a keyword gap is any term your competitor ranks for that you don't. A content gap is when that gap exists because you haven't published on that topic at all. You can have a keyword gap on a topic you've written about (you're just not ranking) — but a content gap means the page doesn't exist yet.