Rankfill

Competition Keyword Analysis: Find Gaps Before You Publish

You spent three weeks writing a guide. You published it, waited, and watched it land on page four. Then you checked what was actually ranking for that keyword — and the top three results were from competitors who had written something half as thorough, two years ago.

The problem wasn't your writing. It was that you picked the keyword before you understood the competitive landscape. You walked into a territory someone else already owned without knowing it.

Competition keyword analysis is how you stop doing that. It tells you where competitors are winning search traffic, what they're ranking for that you aren't, and where the ground is uncontested enough that new content can actually land. Done right, you run it before you write anything.

Here's how to do it properly.

What Competition Keyword Analysis Actually Tells You

The goal is not to find keywords that are popular. Keyword research tools already do that. The goal is to find keywords where your competitors are getting traffic and you aren't — and then to understand why, so you can decide which gaps are worth filling.

You're looking for three things:

  1. Keywords your competitors rank for that you don't — these are gaps where someone is capturing demand you're leaving on the table.
  2. Keywords where you both rank, but they outrank you — these are candidates for improving existing content.
  3. Keywords neither of you ranks for — these might be genuine opportunities, or they might be dead ends. You need context to tell the difference.

Most of the value is in category one. That's where you find the content plan.

Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors

Your SEO competitors are not the same as your business competitors. A direct business competitor might not compete with you in search at all. A site you've never heard of might be taking 40% of the traffic in your category.

Start by searching for the five or six keywords most central to your business. Look at what ranks on page one. Those are your SEO competitors. Collect the domains and ignore the aggregators (Reddit, Amazon, Wikipedia) unless you're specifically targeting informational queries where you'd need to outrank user-generated content.

A working list of four to eight competitors is enough. More than that and the data starts to blur.

Step 2: Pull Their Full Keyword Footprint

For each competitor, you want to see every keyword they rank for that drives meaningful traffic — not just their homepage keywords, not just branded terms, but the full organic footprint.

Tools that let you do this:

Export the data for each competitor into a spreadsheet. You want at minimum: keyword, monthly search volume, their current ranking position, and the URL they're ranking with.

Do this for every competitor on your list. You'll end up with several thousand rows. That's the raw material.

Step 3: Find the Gap — Keywords They Have, You Don't

This is the core of the analysis. You're looking for keywords where a competitor ranks in the top 20, and your domain does not appear at all (or ranks below position 50, which is functionally the same as not ranking).

In practice, you do this with a gap analysis tool:

If you're doing it manually in a spreadsheet, you can use VLOOKUP or a pivot table to cross-reference your keyword list against your competitors'. Match by keyword, flag any row where your domain has no position.

The output is a list of keyword gaps. This is not yet a content plan — you still need to filter it.

For a more detailed walkthrough of running this type of analysis, see Keyword Competitive Analysis: How to Find Ranking Gaps.

Step 4: Score and Filter the Gaps

A gap list with 3,000 keywords is useless unless you know which ones to act on. Filter by these criteria:

Search Volume

There's no universal threshold, but for most sites: keywords under 50 monthly searches should only make the list if they're high-intent commercial terms (e.g., "buy [specific product] in [city]"). Informational queries need at least 200–500 monthly searches to be worth standalone content. Adjust based on your niche.

Keyword Difficulty (KD)

This is a measure of how strong the current top-ranking pages are. Most tools score it 0–100. A site with a new or modest domain authority (DA 20–40) shouldn't be going after KD 70+ keywords — you won't move. Look for keywords in the KD 20–50 range where competitors rank but don't have particularly authoritative content.

SERP Type

Look at what actually ranks for each keyword. If the top results are all high-DA editorial sites or official documentation, you may not be able to compete regardless of your content quality. If you see mid-size blogs and company pages ranking, that's a signal the SERP is accessible.

Search Intent Match

A keyword gap is only a real opportunity if you can create content that matches the intent behind it. Someone searching "how to reduce churn SaaS" wants a tactical guide. Someone searching "churn reduction software" wants a product page or comparison. Know what they want before you build.

Topical Relevance

Don't chase keywords just because they're low-difficulty. If a competitor ranks for something tangential to their main business, that doesn't mean you should try to rank for it too. Stay within the topics where your domain has — or is building — topical authority.

After filtering, you should be down to a manageable list: 20–100 legitimate opportunities, depending on how large your competitor set is and how active they've been in search.

Step 5: Map Gaps to Content Type

Not every gap gets a blog post. Once you have your filtered list, sort the gaps by what kind of content they need:

Map each keyword to a content type. This becomes your content calendar.

Step 6: Analyze What's Actually Ranking

Before you write, look at the top three pages for your target keyword. This is where most people skip a step and pay for it later.

Read the content. Ask:

You're not looking to copy what ranks. You're looking for the floor — what you must cover — and the ceiling — what they didn't cover that you can. Every piece of content that wins does so because it serves the searcher better than what's there. That analysis happens here, before you open a blank document.

This is also where you check whether the content ranking is genuinely good or just there by default. Weak content can rank in low-competition niches. If the current top results are thin, that's your signal that thorough coverage is the differentiator.

Step 7: Prioritize by Opportunity Score

Once you have a filtered, mapped gap list with SERP analysis done, you need a prioritization framework. Here's a simple one:

Score each keyword on three dimensions (1–5 each):

Multiply the three scores. The highest numbers are your first-priority content. Build those first.

This keeps you from spending time on keywords that are easy to rank for but send you traffic that converts at zero.

Common Mistakes That Kill the Analysis

Analyzing branded competitor keywords. Filter them out before you start. You can't rank for "[Competitor] pricing" — searchers want information about that specific company.

Using only one competitor. One competitor gives you one slice of the opportunity space. Four to eight gives you a real picture.

Ignoring position data. A competitor ranking at position 18 for a keyword is not the same as one ranking at position 2. The traffic difference is enormous. Don't treat them as equivalent opportunities.

Stopping at the data. The gap list is only useful when you act on it. The analysis should end with a prioritized list of content to build, not just a spreadsheet you return to someday.

Doing this once. Competitor keyword footprints shift. New players enter. Your site earns authority and new keywords become reachable. Run the analysis quarterly at minimum.

Tools for the Full Workflow

Here's how the tools stack up against the steps:

Step Tool
Competitor identification Google search, Ahrefs, Semrush
Keyword footprint pull Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz
Gap analysis Ahrefs Content Gap, Semrush Keyword Gap
SERP analysis Manual review, Ahrefs SERP overview
Difficulty/volume filtering Built into most tools above

You don't need all of them. Ahrefs or Semrush alone covers most of the workflow. If budget is a constraint, Ubersuggest or even the free tier of Semrush gives you enough to start, though the data depth is lower.

For a detailed approach to running this analysis end to end, Competitor Keyword Analysis: Uncover What You're Missing covers the full process with a practical workflow you can run on any site.

What to Do With the Output

The final output of competition keyword analysis is a prioritized content plan. Each item on that plan should include:

That's a brief any writer can execute from. It's also a document you can revisit quarterly, striking items as they're built and adding new gaps as the competitive landscape shifts.

If you're doing this across dozens or hundreds of keywords and need it done quickly, services like Rankfill run this analysis systematically — mapping competitor footprints, identifying your gaps, and estimating traffic potential — so you skip the spreadsheet work and go straight to building.

For teams doing the work themselves, the effort is real but the process above is repeatable. It works whether you're a solo operator or running a content team. The habit of analyzing before publishing is what separates sites that grow from sites that produce content that doesn't move.

FAQ

How often should I run competition keyword analysis?

Quarterly is a solid baseline. If you're in a fast-moving space or actively publishing content, monthly makes sense. Competitors add new content, rankings shift, and your own authority grows — the opportunity map changes over time.

Do I need paid tools, or can I do this for free?

You can start with free tools. Google Search Console shows your own keyword performance. Semrush and Ahrefs both offer limited free tiers. For meaningful competitor analysis across thousands of keywords, paid tools are close to necessary — the free data caps are too low to see the full picture.

What's a good number of competitors to analyze?

Four to eight is a practical range. Fewer than four and you're missing opportunities. More than eight and the data becomes unwieldy without adding proportional value.

My competitors are huge sites with massive domain authority. What do I do?

Look for long-tail variants of the keywords they rank for. Large sites often rank for head terms but leave more specific, longer-form queries underserved. A mid-authority site can win on "[specific use case] + [qualifier]" queries where big sites have thin or generic coverage.

Should I target keywords my competitors rank for at position 1?

Sometimes. If the content ranking is weak, or if your site has comparable or higher domain authority, competing directly can work. But the faster wins are usually the keywords they rank for at positions 4–15 — where they're getting some traffic but haven't fully captured the opportunity.

How do I know if a keyword gap is worth pursuing?

Check search volume, keyword difficulty, and the quality of what currently ranks. Then check intent match — can you actually create something that serves that query? If the answer to all of those checks is yes, and the keyword connects to your business, it's worth building.

What if two competitors both rank for a keyword my site is missing?

That strengthens the case for going after it. Multiple competitors ranking means there's genuine search demand and that sites like yours can rank for it. Prioritize keywords where two or more competitors appear — use the filter in Ahrefs Content Gap or Semrush Keyword Gap to surface these specifically.

How is this different from regular keyword research?

Regular keyword research starts from a topic or seed keyword and expands outward. Competition keyword analysis starts from competitor domains and works backward — you see exactly what's working in your market already, rather than guessing what might work. The result is a list grounded in real search behavior, not theoretical demand.

For a step-by-step breakdown of building the full process from scratch, Keyword Research Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide walks through each phase in detail.