Rankfill

Keyword Research Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide

You publish an article. It sits at position 18. Meanwhile, a competitor you've never heard of ranks #2 for the exact term you were targeting — and when you look at their site, it's not even that good. You dig in and realize they have forty articles covering every variation of that topic. You have three.

That's the moment most people decide to get serious about competitor keyword analysis. Not because they read it was a good idea, but because they watched traffic go somewhere else and wanted to understand why.

This guide walks through the full process: how to find which keywords your competitors rank for, how to identify the gaps that are actually worth pursuing, how to prioritize what you build, and how to turn that into a content plan. No tools assumed except the free ones — paid tools mentioned where they genuinely help.

What Competitor Keyword Analysis Actually Is

It's not spying. It's reading a map that's already been drawn.

When a competitor ranks for a keyword, search engines have verified that their content satisfies that search. You can use that signal to reverse-engineer what topics are worth covering, what angle works, and what you're missing.

The goal isn't to copy what they've written. It's to understand the territory — which keywords are proven to drive traffic, which ones they've covered poorly, and where you can show up with something better or more specific.

Step 1: Identify Your Real Competitors

Your search competitors are not always your business competitors.

A local accounting firm might compete for clients against the firm across town, but their search competitors are national accounting software blogs, tax advice publications, and freelance communities — sites with no interest in their business, but plenty of content targeting the same keywords.

How to find search competitors:

  1. Pick three to five keywords that matter to your business — not branded ones, but terms describing what you do or sell.
  2. Search each one in Google.
  3. Note which domains appear repeatedly across the top five results.
  4. Those are your search competitors.

You're looking for sites that show up consistently, not just once. A site that ranks for one keyword you care about isn't a meaningful competitor. A site that ranks for thirty of them is.

Also look at who ranks for your brand adjacent terms — "alternatives to [your product]", "[category] software", "[problem you solve]". These show you who's competing for your buyers at the research stage.

Step 2: Pull Their Keyword Data

This is where you need a tool. There's no reliable manual method for seeing all the keywords a domain ranks for at scale.

Free options:

Paid options (more reliable for serious work):

For each competitor, you want to export:

Most paid tools let you export this to CSV. Do it. You'll need the data in a spreadsheet to work with it properly.

Step 3: Find the Gaps — Keywords They Rank for That You Don't

This is the core of the exercise. You're not interested in what both of you rank for. You're interested in what they have that you don't.

The manual method (free):

  1. Export your keywords from Google Search Console (Performance > Queries, export all).
  2. Export competitor keywords from whichever tool you're using.
  3. Put both lists in a spreadsheet.
  4. Use a VLOOKUP or MATCH formula to flag keywords that appear in the competitor list but not yours. 
=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(A2, CompetitorKeywords!A:A, 0)), "GAP", "OVERLAP")

Every row that returns "GAP" is a keyword your competitor ranks for that you don't appear for in the top 100.

The tool-assisted method:

Ahrefs and Semrush both have "Content Gap" or "Keyword Gap" features. You input your domain and up to four competitors, and the tool returns keywords any competitor ranks for that you don't. This is faster and pulls cleaner data, but the manual method works if you're doing this on a budget.

For a deeper breakdown of running this process, Keyword Competitive Analysis: How to Find Ranking Gaps covers the mechanics in more detail.

Step 4: Prioritize the Gap Keywords

Not every gap is worth filling. A competitor might rank for thousands of keywords — many of them irrelevant to your business, low-volume, or too competitive to crack without significant authority.

Filter your gap list by:

1. Relevance Does this keyword connect to what your site actually does? A gap keyword that doesn't map to your product, service, or audience is a distraction.

2. Volume A keyword with 50 searches per month isn't the same as one with 2,000. Sort descending by volume and focus on the top of the list first — but don't ignore lower-volume terms if they're high-intent (more on that below).

3. Difficulty Most tools assign a keyword difficulty score (0–100). A site with a domain rating of 40 shouldn't start by targeting keywords with difficulty of 75+. Filter to keywords where your domain can realistically compete. Generally: target difficulty scores within 10–15 points of your domain authority, or look for high-volume keywords with difficulty below 40 that competitors are ranking for with thin content.

4. Intent alignment A competitor ranking for an informational keyword ("how does X work") doesn't mean you should write the same thing — unless that traffic converts for you. Prioritize:

5. Competitor ranking position If a competitor ranks #8–20 for a keyword, there's room to beat them. If they rank #1 with a high-authority page and have 200 backlinks pointing to it, the gap technically exists but the opportunity isn't great.

Step 5: Analyze What's Actually Ranking

Before you build content around a gap keyword, look at what's already ranking for it. Not just your competitor — the whole first page.

What to look for:

This step is where most people skip and pay for it later. You build a page targeting a keyword, it never ranks, and you wonder why — but if you'd looked at what was ranking, you'd have seen the format was wrong, the intent was misread, or the competition was stronger than the difficulty score suggested.

Step 6: Build the Content Plan

You now have a prioritized list of gap keywords. Turn it into a content plan by:

1. Group related keywords into clusters A keyword cluster is a group of related terms that can be covered by one piece of content (or a set of closely linked pages). For example:

These are different queries but they share intent and can be targeted with one page.

Grouping reduces the number of pieces you need to write while increasing the relevance of each one.

2. Assign a format to each cluster

3. Sequence by priority Don't try to publish everything at once. Sequence your content calendar starting with:

4. Set a publishing cadence you can actually maintain Four pieces per month published consistently beats twenty pieces in January and nothing in February.

Step 7: Track and Iterate

Gap analysis isn't a one-time project. Competitors publish new content. Google updates its index. Your domain authority changes.

Set a reminder to re-run the competitor keyword pull every 90 days. Look for:

If you want to see how this kind of ongoing gap tracking can surface opportunities you'd miss in a one-time audit, Competitor Keyword Analysis: Uncover What You're Missing goes into the patterns to watch.

A Note on Reading Competitor Content (Not Just Keywords)

Keywords tell you where to show up. Competitor content tells you how.

Once you've identified a gap keyword worth targeting, spend twenty minutes reading everything ranking for it. Look at:

The sites that consistently outrank well-resourced competitors aren't just targeting the right keywords — they're answering the question more completely, more specifically, or for a more defined reader.

How to Find and Target Your Competitor Keywords covers this side of the analysis — turning keyword data into content that actually earns rankings.

Tools Summary

Tool Free? Best For
Google Search Console Yes Your own keyword data
Ubersuggest Limited Quick competitor snapshots
Semrush Limited free Content gap feature, keyword overview
Ahrefs Paid Deep competitor keyword export, site explorer
Moz Limited free Keyword difficulty, domain authority
Screaming Frog Free up to 500 URLs Site structure analysis

If You Want This Done For You

The process above works. It's also several hours of spreadsheet work per competitor, repeated every quarter.

If you'd rather skip the manual pulling and just see the output — which keywords competitors are capturing that your site isn't, scored by opportunity and traffic potential — services like Rankfill do that mapping automatically and produce a prioritized content plan with it.

But whether you do it manually or hand it off, the logic is the same: find where the traffic is going, understand why, and build the content that earns your share of it.

FAQ

How many competitors should I analyze?

Start with three. More than five gets unwieldy and introduces noise. Pick the competitors that consistently appear across the keywords most important to your business.

What if I don't have access to paid tools?

You can do meaningful work with Google Search Console (your data), Ubersuggest's free tier, and manual SERP analysis. It's slower and less complete, but the core process is the same. Paid tools speed up the data-gathering step — they don't change the logic.

My competitor has thousands of gap keywords. How do I choose?

Filter ruthlessly by relevance first (does this keyword relate to what you actually do?), then by volume, then by difficulty. You're looking for the intersection of: high enough volume to matter, low enough difficulty to be realistic, and close enough to your product to convert.

Do I need to match my competitor's content length?

Not always. Match the intent, not the word count. If competitors are writing 4,000-word guides, a 600-word post probably won't rank. But if they're writing 4,000 words to answer a question that deserves 1,200 words of focused, accurate content, you can win with the shorter piece.

How long does it take to rank after publishing?

For a new piece of content on a site with some existing authority, expect 3–6 months before you see stable rankings. Targeting lower-difficulty keywords speeds this up. Targeting keywords where you already have some domain relevance also helps.

What's the difference between keyword difficulty and competitive analysis?

Keyword difficulty is a metric that estimates how hard it is to rank for a single term — usually based on the authority of pages currently ranking. Competitor analysis is broader: it maps which keywords a specific domain ranks for, which ones you're missing, and which content is driving their traffic. Difficulty is one input into the prioritization. Competitor analysis is the source of the opportunity list itself.

Should I target the same keywords as my competitors or find ones they've missed?

Both. Start with gaps where competitors rank and you don't — those are proven-demand keywords with existing traffic. Alongside that, look for keywords they've covered poorly or not at all. Check Competitor Keyword Research: Find Every Gap They Exploit for a framework on finding the overlooked terms within competitor data.

Can I do this for a brand-new site?

Yes, but the strategy shifts. New sites don't have the authority to compete for high-difficulty terms. Focus the gap analysis on low-difficulty keywords (under 30) where even thin competitors rank with modest authority. Build from there.