Competitor Website Keywords: How to Find and Use Them

You publish something, wait three months, and it ranks on page four. Meanwhile a competitor — one you know isn't better at your job than you are — is sitting on page one for a dozen terms you never thought to target. You look at their site and can't figure out what they're doing differently.

Usually, it's not backlinks. It's not domain age. It's that they've built content around keywords you haven't touched yet, and Google is sending them traffic for it every day.

Finding those keywords and doing something with them is the whole game.

What "Competitor Website Keywords" Actually Means

When someone says they want to find competitor website keywords, they mean one of two things:

1. Keywords a competitor ranks for that you don't — the gap between their footprint and yours
2. Keywords a competitor ranks for that you also rank for — the overlap, where you're competing directly

Both matter, but the gap is where the opportunity is. You're not going to out-rank an established competitor overnight on their best term. But you can find the forty keywords around the edges of that term, build content for them, and capture traffic they're getting by accident — or capturing easily with thin content you could do better.

How to Pull Competitor Keywords

You need a tool that indexes search results at scale. You can't do this with Google alone. Here are the main options:

Ahrefs

Go to Site Explorer, enter your competitor's domain, and click Organic Keywords. You'll see every keyword they rank for, their position, the estimated monthly traffic that keyword drives, and the difficulty score.

The filter you want immediately: set Position to 1–20 (so you're only looking at real rankings, not page five noise) and sort by Traffic to see what's actually sending them visitors.

Semrush

Same idea. Use Domain Overview or Organic Research, enter the competitor URL, and go to the Positions tab. Semrush's interface surfaces keyword intent labels (informational, commercial, transactional) which is useful for prioritizing.

Google Search Console (for your own site)

You can't see competitor data here, but you can see every keyword your site already appears for — including ones ranking on page two or three that you haven't built dedicated content around. That list is worth cross-referencing against what competitors rank for on page one.

Free options

Ubersuggest gives limited competitor keyword data on a free plan. Google's "People Also Ask" boxes and autocomplete aren't keyword research tools, but they show you the vocabulary real searchers use, which helps when you're writing the content.

For a more structured walkthrough of pulling this data, Competitor Keyword Research: Find Every Gap They Exploit goes step by step through the process.

Finding the Gap — Not Just the List

Pulling a list of 3,000 keywords a competitor ranks for isn't useful by itself. You need to find the ones that are:

• Rankable for your site — low-to-moderate difficulty, not dominated by sites with ten times your authority
• Traffic-bearing — worth the effort (even 200 searches/month can be worth it depending on conversion value)
• Not yet covered by your existing content

The fastest way to do this is a gap analysis. In Ahrefs, that's Content Gap under Site Explorer — you enter your domain and up to four competitor domains, and it surfaces keywords they rank for that you don't. In Semrush it's called Keyword Gap.

What you're looking for are clusters: a competitor ranking for "project management software for agencies," "project management tool agencies," and "best PM software small agency" — three variations on the same topic. That cluster tells you there's a topic you haven't covered, not just three random missing keywords.

This is the core of keyword competitive analysis — finding the patterns, not just the individual terms.

How to Decide What to Build First

Once you have a list, prioritize by this logic:

1. Keywords where a competitor ranks but has thin content — if they're on page one with a 400-word blog post and you could write something genuinely more useful, that's your first target
2. Keywords with commercial or transactional intent close to your product — informational keywords are fine for building authority, but terms that signal purchase intent are worth more per visitor
3. Keywords your site is almost ranking for — anything where you're in positions 8–20 is closer to page one than you think; a stronger page can move it

Avoid building content just to check keywords off a list. Each piece should be the most useful thing written on that topic, or it's unlikely to move.

Turning Keywords Into Content That Actually Ranks

This is where most people stop at the keyword and start at the wrong place when writing. The keyword tells you what people search. You still need to understand what they expect to find.

Search the keyword before you write. Look at the top five results. Are they how-to guides? Comparison pages? Product pages? That's the format Google has decided answers this query. Match it — not by copying, but by recognizing what structure works.

For each keyword cluster you're targeting, decide: is this one page or multiple pages? A broad topic like "email marketing for e-commerce" might be one pillar page. But "email marketing for e-commerce abandoned cart" and "email marketing for e-commerce welcome sequence" are specific enough to earn their own pages.

The competitor keyword analysis process often reveals that competitors are ranking across a whole topic cluster while you have one undifferentiated post trying to do the work of six.

What to Do With Keywords You Already Share

When you and a competitor both rank for the same term and they're above you, the question is whether your page or their page is actually better for that query.

Look at your page analytically: Is the content as thorough? Does it answer the question faster? Is the page slow or hard to read on mobile? Sometimes it's a content quality issue. Sometimes it's that their page has more backlinks pointing to it and the content difference is marginal.

If the gap is content quality, fix the page. If it's links, decide if the keyword is worth a link-building effort, or move on to terms you can rank without it.

For a more complete look at this decision process, How to Find and Target Your Competitor Keywords covers the prioritization logic in depth.

Tools That Do the Analysis for You

If you're doing this manually across multiple competitors, you'll hit a wall quickly — not because the process is hard, but because the volume of data is. Most site owners are running this analysis on two or three competitors and looking at maybe the top 100 keywords each. That's leaving most of the gap uncovered.

Services like Rankfill automate the full gap analysis across all competitors in your market, map the traffic potential, and deliver a content plan built around the gaps — which is useful if you want to skip the spreadsheet work and go straight to building.

Whether you do it manually or use a service, the process is the same: find where competitors are capturing search traffic you aren't, understand why, and build content that closes the gap.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I find what keywords a competitor's website ranks for without paying for a tool? Ubersuggest has a free tier with limited competitor keyword data. You can also use the site:competitordomain.com operator in Google to see their indexed pages, and manually check which of those pages are ranking by searching the topics they cover. It's slower and less complete than a paid tool, but functional for a quick look.

How many competitors should I analyze? Start with two or three — the ones that rank for the keywords you care most about, not just the biggest names in your industry. Sometimes a smaller competitor with a strong content strategy is more useful to study than a giant with thousands of backlinks you can't replicate.

What if my competitor ranks for hundreds of keywords I don't? Where do I start? Filter to keywords where they rank in positions 1–5 with under 30 difficulty. Sort by monthly traffic. Build a list of twenty candidates, group them into topic clusters, and start with the cluster that's closest to your product or service. Don't try to cover everything at once.

Do competitor keywords work the same for e-commerce as for content sites? Broadly yes, but e-commerce sites often have a mix of product page keywords (transactional) and informational keywords that feed the top of the funnel. Both matter. Competitors ranking for product-level terms with strong pages are a different priority than competitors owning informational content around your category.

How long until I see results after targeting competitor keywords? For a new page on an established domain, typically 3–6 months before meaningful rankings. For an existing page you're improving, sometimes 4–8 weeks. Don't optimize and immediately check rankings — give it time and track the trajectory over months, not days.