Rankfill

Find Keywords Competitors Are Using Before You Miss Out

You publish a post. It gets a handful of visits, then flatlines. Meanwhile, a competitor's page on the same topic sits in position two and pulls in thousands of visitors a month. You know they're winning. You just don't know what they typed into their keyword strategy that you didn't.

That gap is fixable. Here's how to close it.

Why You Need to Start With Competitors, Not a Keyword Tool

Most people open a keyword tool, type in a topic, and start browsing volume numbers. The problem: you're working from your own imagination. You only find keywords you already thought of.

Your competitors have done years of trial and error. Their rankings are a public record of what worked. When you research their keywords, you're reading the results of their experiments — for free.

The goal isn't to copy them. It's to find every keyword they're capturing that you aren't, then decide which ones are worth going after.

Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors (Not Who You Think They Are)

Your business competitors and your search competitors are often different. A company you've never heard of might outrank you for your most valuable keywords.

Start by Googling five to ten phrases that describe what you do. Note which domains appear consistently across results. Those are your search competitors — the sites you're actually competing against in Google, regardless of whether you compete commercially.

Also look at:

Build a short list of four to six domains. These are your targets for the research below.

Step 2: Pull Their Keyword Rankings

You need a tool that shows you which keywords a given URL or domain ranks for. Here are your realistic options:

Ahrefs Site Explorer — Enter a competitor's domain and go to "Organic keywords." You'll see every keyword they rank for, the position, estimated traffic, and the URL that ranks. Filter by position (1–10) to focus on keywords they actually win. This is the most complete data available.

Semrush Organic Research — Same concept. Enter the domain, click "Positions," and export the full keyword list. Semrush's database skews slightly different from Ahrefs, so running both on the same competitor sometimes surfaces different keywords.

Moz Pro — Keyword rankings by domain, similar output. The database is smaller than Ahrefs or Semrush, but the interface is clean and the data is reliable.

Ubersuggest — Free tier lets you see a limited number of keywords per competitor domain. Enough to get started, not enough for a thorough analysis.

Google Search Console (for your own site) — Doesn't show competitor data, but shows you exactly which queries your site already ranks for. Run this first so you know what to subtract when you find competitor keywords — those overlapping keywords are already in your territory.

Once you have a competitor's keyword list, export it. You'll be comparing it against your own rankings in the next step.

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

The keywords worth your attention are the ones your competitor ranks for that your site does not. This is called a keyword gap.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush have built-in gap tools:

If you're doing this manually (export → spreadsheet), it's slower but works. Export your rankings and a competitor's rankings, then use VLOOKUP or a pivot table to find keywords in their list that don't appear in yours.

For a deeper look at how to run this systematically, the keyword competitive analysis process breaks down how to score and prioritize what you find.

Step 4: Filter for Keywords Worth Pursuing

A raw gap list for a mid-sized competitor might have 5,000 entries. You can't write content for all of them, and you shouldn't try.

Filter your list down using these criteria:

Search volume — Focus on keywords with at least 100 monthly searches. Below that, the traffic payoff rarely justifies a full piece of content unless the keyword has clear commercial intent.

Keyword difficulty — Look at the difficulty score (Ahrefs KD or Semrush KD). A score above 60–70 means the top-ranking pages have strong backlink profiles. If your domain authority is modest, start with lower-difficulty keywords where good content can compete without needing dozens of links.

Search intent — A keyword like "best project management software" is informational/commercial. A keyword like "buy project management software" is transactional. Match the keyword type to what your site can actually deliver — a blog post for informational keywords, a product or landing page for transactional ones.

Business relevance — Discard any keyword that your competitor ranks for only because they're a large site with sprawling content. If a keyword is tangential to what you do, ranking for it won't bring in customers.

What remains after filtering is your priority keyword list. This is what you build content around.

Step 5: Understand What's Ranking Before You Write

Pull up the top three results for each keyword on your priority list. Read them. Note:

This tells you what Google considers the right format for that keyword, and where a better piece of content could win. If every result is a shallow 600-word post, a thorough 1,800-word guide has a real shot. If every result is a comparison table, write a better comparison table — don't write a narrative essay.

This is also where you find the actual content gap inside the keyword. Your competitor might rank for "CRM for freelancers" with a page that barely addresses the real questions freelancers have. Answer those questions and you've written a more useful page.

For a full walkthrough on turning this research into content that ranks, competitor keyword analysis covers the prioritization and publishing side in detail.

Step 6: Build the Content, Track the Results

Each keyword on your priority list needs one piece of content mapped to it. One URL per keyword cluster — don't split the same topic across three posts.

Once published:

Early rankings rarely land in the top ten. A page that debuts at position 35 for a target keyword is working. Update it, add internal links pointing to it, and give it time to climb.

For a broader approach to building this into a repeatable research process, competitor keyword research goes into how to run this quarterly rather than as a one-off exercise.

One Option Worth Knowing About

If you have an established domain but haven't indexed enough content to compete for the keywords your competitors are capturing, Rankfill identifies every gap across your competitive landscape and maps a content plan to close it — useful if you want to see the full picture before you start writing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I find competitor keywords for free? Partially. Ubersuggest and Google's own search results give you some signal. For complete keyword lists, Ahrefs or Semrush free trials (usually 7–14 days) are the most practical free option. Run your full research during the trial period and export everything before it ends.

How many competitors should I analyze? Three to five is enough for most sites. More than that and you'll drown in data. Pick the two or three closest competitors in your category, plus one or two larger sites that dominate multiple keywords in your space.

My competitor has 10,000 keywords. Where do I start? Filter to their top 200–300 keywords by estimated traffic. That's where their wins are concentrated. Run those through the gap comparison and you'll find your priority targets without processing the full list.

How long does it take to rank for a competitor's keyword? For lower-competition keywords (KD under 30), well-written content on an established domain can hit page one in 60–90 days. Higher-competition keywords take longer — sometimes six months to a year. Start with the lower-difficulty gaps and build from there.

What if a competitor ranks for a keyword with a product page and I only have a blog? Either build a product or landing page targeting that keyword, or target a related informational keyword that feeds into the commercial intent. Don't put a blog post on a transactional keyword — Google's reading the intent of existing results, and it will slot your post behind pages that match what searchers actually want.

Does this work for local businesses? Yes, with one adjustment. Filter your competitor research to location-specific keywords — "[service] in [city]" patterns. Local competitors may not have large keyword footprints, so look at three to five local businesses rather than just one or two.