Rankfill

How to Analyze Competitors and Steal Their Keywords

You publish a post. You wait. Nothing. Then you go look at who's ranking on page one, and you recognize the name — a competitor you know has a thinner product, worse reviews, and somehow three times the organic traffic. You click through to their site and read an article that's almost identical to what you wrote. The difference is they published it 14 months before you did, and they have forty more like it surrounding the topic.

That's the gap. Not a link gap, not a domain authority gap — a content gap. They mapped the territory before you did, and Google rewarded them for being there first.

The good news: you can reverse-engineer exactly what they did. This guide walks you through how to analyze competitors and take their keywords systematically — not by guessing, but by reading the data they've already created.

What You're Actually Looking for When You Analyze Competitors

Most people think competitor analysis means "what keywords are they ranking for." That's part of it, but the real question is: what keywords are they ranking for that you are not — and that you could realistically win?

That distinction matters because your competitors might rank for thousands of terms you'd never want. A SaaS competitor might rank heavily for support documentation queries that wouldn't send you a single paying customer. An e-commerce competitor might dominate branded queries you can't touch. You need to filter for the overlap: search terms in your market, at traffic volumes worth pursuing, where you currently have no indexed content competing.

The output of a competitor analysis should be a prioritized list of keyword opportunities with enough context to make an editorial decision: should we create content targeting this, yes or no?

Step 1: Identify Your Real Search Competitors

Your search competitors are not always your business competitors. The company you lose deals to might not be competing with you in Google at all. And a site you've never heard of might be capturing 40% of the informational traffic in your space.

Start by typing five to ten of your core keywords into Google and writing down every domain that appears on page one. Do this across different intent types — transactional queries ("buy X"), informational ("how to X"), and comparison ("X vs Y"). You'll see a cluster of domains appearing repeatedly. Those are your actual search competitors.

Run this same exercise for your most important product or service categories. By the end, you should have a list of six to twelve domains that collectively represent the search landscape you're operating in.

Step 2: Pull Their Organic Keyword Data

Once you have your competitor domains, you need to see what they're ranking for. The standard tools for this are Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz. Each has a "top pages" or "organic keywords" report where you enter a competitor's domain and get a list of their ranking URLs alongside the keywords driving traffic to each one.

Here's how to use this data efficiently:

In Ahrefs: Go to Site Explorer → enter competitor domain → Organic Keywords. Filter by position 1–10 to start with keywords they're actually getting clicks on. Export to CSV.

In Semrush: Go to Domain Overview → Organic Research → Keywords. Same idea — filter by position, export.

Do this for your top three to five competitors. You'll end up with several large spreadsheets. The raw volume of data can feel overwhelming, but the next step is where you filter it down.

Step 3: Run a Gap Analysis

A gap analysis answers: which keywords are my competitors ranking for that my site is not?

In Ahrefs, this is called Keyword Gap or Content Gap. In Semrush it's also called Keyword Gap. You input your domain and your competitors' domains, and the tool returns a list of keywords where competitors rank but you don't appear in the top 100.

The output will still be large — hundreds or thousands of rows. You need to filter further:

What you're left with is a working list of gaps — keyword opportunities your competitors are capturing that you're currently invisible for.

If you want to go deeper on tooling for this process, competitor analysis tools that reveal keyword gaps covers specific options for running this analysis at different budget levels.

Step 4: Understand the Content Behind the Rankings

Don't just look at the keywords — look at what's ranking for them. For each keyword opportunity you're considering, open the top three results and ask:

What format is this content? Is it a long guide, a listicle, a comparison page, a product page? Google tends to rank one dominant format per query. If the top five results are all listicles, writing a long narrative essay probably won't work.

How thorough is the coverage? Look at headings, word count, and what subtopics they address. You're not counting words to beat them at a word count game — you're checking whether there are clear gaps in what they covered that you could fill better.

What's the search intent? Someone typing "competitor analysis tools" wants a list with explanations. Someone typing "how to analyze a competitor website" wants a process. Match the format to the intent.

Are there SERP features? Featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, video carousels — these tell you what Google thinks users want beyond the ten blue links. If there's a featured snippet, your content should include a concise, direct answer formatted to compete for it.

For a detailed walkthrough of what to look for inside each competitor's site beyond keywords — structure, internal linking, technical signals — analyzing a competitor website for SEO gaps covers that process specifically.

Step 5: Prioritize What to Build First

You now have a list of keyword opportunities. The question is which ones to pursue first. Use a simple scoring framework:

Traffic potential × Difficulty inverse × Business relevance

In plain terms: pick keywords that send decent traffic, that you have a realistic shot at ranking for, and that — if you ranked for them — would actually matter to your business.

A few heuristics:

Step 6: Build Content That Actually Takes the Ranking

Identifying the keywords is the first half. Building content that actually displaces the current ranker is the second half — and it's where most people take shortcuts.

A few things that matter:

Answer the question completely. Users landing on your page from an informational query should not need to go back to Google. If they do, that's a bounce signal, and it tells Google your page didn't satisfy the intent.

Use a logical structure. H2s and H3s aren't just formatting — they help Google understand what each section covers, and they help users navigate. A wall of text with no structure will perform worse than the same information organized clearly.

Include the secondary keywords naturally. When you're targeting a keyword cluster, write content that covers the full topic. The related terms will appear naturally if you're genuinely covering the subject.

Internal links matter. Once your content is published, link to it from other relevant pages on your site. This is how you tell Google which of your pages matter and how they relate to each other. It's also how users discover depth on your site.

Update it. Competitive keywords don't stay won. Competitors update their content, new competitors enter, and Google's understanding of the topic evolves. A page you ranked at position two last year might slip to page two if you haven't touched it.

Step 7: Monitor and Iterate

Competitor analysis isn't a one-time event. You should run a gap analysis every quarter minimum, for two reasons:

  1. Your competitors keep creating content. What wasn't a gap six months ago might be one now.
  2. Your own site changes. You publish new content, earn new links, build authority in new topic areas — all of which changes what you can realistically win.

Set up rank tracking for every keyword you're targeting so you can see what's working. When a page reaches position five to ten, it's often worth a focused update to push it onto page one — adding depth, improving the introduction, adding internal links from higher-authority pages.

For a more systematic approach to this ongoing work, competition analysis for your website walks through how to build a repeatable process rather than doing it as a one-off sprint.

The Manual vs. Tool-Assisted Tradeoff

You can do everything above manually — scraping SERPs, running exports through Excel, building your own scoring spreadsheets. It's time-consuming but doable, and it gives you deep familiarity with the data.

Most teams eventually move to a hybrid approach: tools for the data collection and gap identification, human judgment for prioritization and content strategy. The tools are fast at answering "what keywords are competitors ranking for." Humans are better at answering "which of these should we actually build."

If you want to see the full competitive picture for your domain quickly — which competitors are capturing what traffic, where your specific gaps are, and what the content plan to close them looks like — Rankfill is one option that maps this automatically and pairs it with content deployment.

For teams doing this manually who want to look at technical crawl data alongside keyword gaps, Screaming Frog alternatives for content gap analysis covers tools that complement the keyword research workflow.

Common Mistakes in Competitor Keyword Analysis

Targeting only high-volume keywords. The big keywords are tempting, but they're also the hardest. A page-one ranking for a 200-search-per-month keyword that converts well is worth more than a page-three ranking for a 5,000-search keyword.

Copying competitor content instead of improving it. The goal isn't to write the same article. It's to write a better one — more thorough, better structured, more current.

Ignoring long-tail variations. A competitor might rank for "project management software" at the head, but the long-tail terms around it ("project management software for small teams," "project management software with time tracking") are often easier to rank for and still send qualified traffic.

Stopping at the keyword list. A gap analysis tells you what to build. It doesn't build it for you. Teams that do the analysis and then don't ship content see no results.

Not tracking after publishing. If you don't track rankings, you don't know what's working, and you can't iterate.

FAQ

How long does it take to see results after publishing competitor-targeted content? Typically three to six months for a new page to reach a stable ranking on a mid-authority domain. It can be faster on established domains with strong internal linking, and slower in competitive verticals. Position changes often come in steps — Google will initially place you at position 40–60, then move you up as it gathers click and engagement data.

Do I need to pay for tools to do competitor analysis? Not necessarily. Ahrefs and Semrush offer limited free queries. Google Search Console shows you your own ranking keywords for free, which helps you identify where you're underperforming. Ubersuggest has a free tier. For a serious content gap analysis across multiple competitors, a paid tool will save significant time, but manual research with free tools is possible.

How many competitors should I analyze? Three to five is usually enough for a first pass. More than that creates diminishing returns — the same keyword gaps tend to surface across multiple competitors. You want enough breadth to catch everything relevant, not so much that you're processing thousands of rows of duplicated data.

What if my competitors are huge domains I can't compete with? You don't need to beat them across their entire site. You need to beat one page, for one keyword cluster, at a time. A smaller domain can absolutely outrank a large one on specific long-tail terms with a well-written, focused piece of content. Pick your spots carefully rather than going head-to-head on broad, high-difficulty head terms.

What's the difference between a keyword gap and a content gap? A keyword gap is a specific search term a competitor ranks for that you don't. A content gap is a broader topic area where your site has no or insufficient coverage. A single content gap often corresponds to multiple keyword gaps — fixing it with one solid piece of content can close dozens of individual keyword gaps simultaneously.

How do I know if a keyword is worth building content for? Ask three questions: Does the traffic it sends match your audience? Can you realistically rank for it given your domain authority? And if you ranked number one, would it contribute to your actual business goals — leads, sales, signups, or whatever you're optimizing for? If yes to all three, it's worth building.

Should I target the exact same keywords as my competitors? Yes, if they're relevant to your business. That's the point of gap analysis. You're identifying keywords that are already proven to have search demand (your competitor's rankings confirm that) and building content to compete for them. "Stealing" keywords isn't stealing in any negative sense — search results are a competition, and every spot on page one is up for grabs.