Rankfill

Finding Competitors Online and the Keywords They Own

You launch a page, wait three months, and it sits on page four. Meanwhile, the same three sites own the top results for every keyword you care about. You've heard their names before, but you don't actually know why they outrank you — what they publish, how often, or which terms drive their traffic.

That's the real problem. Finding your competitors isn't about knowing who they are in a business sense. It's about finding who owns the search results you're trying to compete for — and reverse-engineering what they're doing.

Your Search Competitors Are Not Always Your Business Competitors

This is the first thing most people get wrong.

Your business competitor is whoever sells what you sell. Your search competitor is whoever ranks where you want to rank. These are often different sites.

A boutique accounting firm in Denver might consider other local firms its business rivals. But in search, it's competing against Investopedia, Forbes, NerdWallet, and a dozen other content-heavy domains that have no interest in stealing its clients — they just happen to rank for "how to find a CPA" or "small business tax deductions."

So before you go looking for competitors, get specific about what you mean. Are you looking for:

Most of the time, for SEO purposes, you want all three — but you start with the SERPs.

Step 1: Start With the Search Results Themselves

Open an incognito window. Search for 5–10 keywords you actually want to rank for. Not branded searches. Problem-based, category-level, and comparison searches.

Write down every domain that appears in the top 10 results across those searches. You'll notice some domains appear repeatedly. Those are your primary search competitors.

This takes twenty minutes and costs nothing. It also surfaces domains you'd never have thought to check because they don't look like competitors at a business level.

Step 2: Use a Keyword Tool to Find Competitors at Scale

Manual SERP scanning works for a starting list. But to find every competitor and every keyword they own, you need a tool that has indexed keyword-ranking data.

The main options:

Ahrefs — Enter your domain under "Competing Domains" and it shows you every site that ranks for at least one keyword you rank for, sorted by overlap. This is probably the fastest way to build an accurate competitor list.

Semrush — Similar feature called "Organic Competitors." It plots your keyword overlap graphically and lets you sort by traffic share.

Moz — Less granular than the above two, but the "Ranking Keywords" view is useful for spot-checking specific competitors.

Google Search Console — Won't show competitors directly, but shows you which queries you're already ranking for. Use that list as input into the tools above to find who else ranks for those same terms.

If you're not paying for any of these tools yet, Ahrefs and Semrush both offer limited free trials or free-tier access worth using to pull an initial competitor list.

Step 3: Pull the Keywords Each Competitor Owns

Once you have a shortlist of 3–6 competitors, the next step is to see their full keyword footprint — every term they rank for, what position they hold, and what traffic that position is likely to deliver.

In Ahrefs: Go to Site Explorer → enter the competitor's domain → click "Organic Keywords." Filter by position 1–10 to see where they're actually getting traffic.

In Semrush: Domain Overview → Organic Research → Keywords. Same filter approach.

What you're looking for:

This is sometimes called a content gap analysis. The goal is to build a map of what your competitors have indexed that you don't, so you can prioritize what to build. The guide on how to analyze competitors and steal their keywords walks through this process in more detail if you want to go deeper.

Step 4: Score the Opportunities, Not Just the Gaps

Finding keywords your competitors own is only useful if you prioritize the right ones to target. Not every gap is worth filling.

Look at three factors for each keyword:

  1. Search volume — Is anyone actually searching for this?
  2. Keyword difficulty — Can your domain realistically rank? A DR 30 site shouldn't go after a KD 80 term owned by Wikipedia.
  3. Business relevance — Will ranking for this term bring you people who might buy, or just people who will read and leave?

Build a simple spreadsheet: keyword, monthly volume, difficulty score, your current position, top competitor's position. Sort by the combination of volume and difficulty that makes sense for your domain's authority. High volume + low difficulty + business relevant = do it first.

For a deeper look at what to examine once you've found a competitor's site, the guide on analyzing a competitor website for SEO gaps covers what signals actually matter.

Step 5: Map the Content Behind the Rankings

Rankings don't come from keywords. They come from content that addresses what the searcher wants. Once you know which keywords your competitors own, go look at the actual pages.

For each high-priority gap you find:

If your competitor ranks for "best CRM for freelancers" with a thin 400-word page that's mostly a comparison table, you have a real shot at displacing them with something more complete. If they rank with a 3,000-word guide that covers every angle and has 80 backlinks, that's a harder target — go find easier wins first.

Putting It Together: What This Looks Like in Practice

Here's a compressed version of the workflow:

  1. Pull 5–10 target keywords manually from SERPs
  2. Note which domains appear most frequently
  3. Enter your own domain in Ahrefs or Semrush's competitor finder — cross-reference with your manual list
  4. For each competitor, export their top organic keywords
  5. Filter to keywords you don't rank for, sorted by volume and difficulty
  6. Look at the actual ranking pages for your top 20–30 opportunities
  7. Build a content plan prioritizing gaps where you can win

If you want this done without owning Ahrefs or Semrush licenses, services like Rankfill do this mapping for you — identifying which competitors are capturing traffic you're missing and estimating what you'd gain by closing specific gaps.

The full process, done manually with good tools, takes a few days for a thorough analysis. Done consistently — revisiting competitors quarterly — it becomes your primary input for deciding what to publish next.

Understanding the competitive landscape of your website is not a one-time exercise. Competitors publish new content, rankings shift, and new entrants show up. The sites that grow in search treat this as an ongoing operation, not a one-time audit.

FAQ

How do I find competitors if my site is new and I don't rank for anything yet? Start with the SERPs directly. Search for the problems your product or service solves. The domains appearing consistently in those results are your search competitors. You can also enter a competitor you already know into Ahrefs or Semrush and find their competitors — which are effectively yours too.

What if my competitors aren't obvious businesses — like if I'm competing with Reddit or YouTube? That happens often. Note it and move on. You're looking for the domains that are actually beatable — other businesses or content sites with similar or lower domain authority. Filter Reddit, Wikipedia, and YouTube out of your competitor list; they operate differently and you can't replicate their strategy.

How many competitors should I track? Three to six is usually enough. More than that becomes noise. Pick the ones with the highest keyword overlap with your target list and the most search traffic in your category.

Is keyword difficulty a reliable signal? It's a starting point, not a guarantee. Keyword difficulty scores are calculated from the backlink profiles of pages currently ranking. A high-DA site can rank for "difficult" keywords with strong content. A low-DA site sometimes ranks for difficult keywords because the existing content is poor. Use difficulty as a filter, not a final answer.

Can I do this without paid tools? Partially. Google Search Console shows your own rankings. Incognito SERPs show you who's ranking. Google's "People also search for" and related searches give you keyword ideas. But to see a competitor's full keyword list — which is the core of this process — you need Ahrefs, Semrush, or a similar tool. The free tiers of both are limited but worth using to get started.

How often should I revisit competitor keyword analysis? Quarterly is a reasonable cadence for most sites. If you're in a fast-moving category, monthly. The goal is to catch new content your competitors publish before it builds too many backlinks to displace.