How to Find Your Competitors’ Keywords (And Steal Their Traffic)

By Marcel • Updated September 29, 2025

Part 1: Introduction: Stop Guessing, Start Winning

Frustrated watching your competitors dominate the top spots on Google? What if you could ethically look at their playbook and find the exact keywords that drive their success? It’s a common feeling for small business owners: you’re creating content, working hard, but it feels like you’re just guessing what your customers are searching for. Meanwhile, your competitors seem to have a winning formula, consistently attracting the traffic you want.

This feeling of being constantly one step behind ends today.

Before a major championship, a smart team studies hours of ‘game film’ on their opponent. They learn their star players (top pages), their favorite plays (top keywords), and their weaknesses (keyword gaps). SEO competitor analysis is your ‘game film’—it allows you to enter the market knowing exactly how to outperform the competition. It’s not about copying; it’s about learning patterns of success so you can create something even better.

Stop guessing which keywords will bring you traffic. The fastest way to create a winning SEO strategy is to analyze what’s already working for your competitors. This guide will walk you through a simple, step-by-step process to analyze your competitors’ keywords using free and affordable tools, giving you a decisive strategic advantage. You will learn how to find their top keywords, discover market gaps, and strategically start capturing their traffic.

Part 2: The Strategic Imperative: Why ‘Spying’ is Your Smartest SEO Move

The Business Case for SEO Competitive Intelligence

At its core, competitor keyword analysis is about reverse-engineering success. Your competitors have already invested significant time and money to figure out which keywords attract valuable customers. By analyzing their strategy, you get to learn from their successes and, just as importantly, their failures. This process saves you months of costly trial and error, allowing you to focus your limited resources on strategies that are already proven to work in your market.

For a small business, this isn’t just an SEO tactic; it’s a powerful risk-reduction strategy. Every piece of content you create is an investment of your time and money. Creating content for unproven keywords is a gamble. However, when you target keywords that are already sending traffic to your competitors, you are making a data-driven investment. You are de-risking your content marketing efforts by building your strategy on a foundation of proven market demand. This methodical examination of your competitive environment allows you to harness insights to directly enhance your own performance.

This is not a fringe activity; it’s a core component of modern business strategy. In fact, market-leading companies are 50% more likely to have a formal competitive intelligence process, allowing them to make faster, more data-driven decisions. By adopting this practice, you are not just leveling the playing field; you are operating with the same strategic mindset that defines industry leaders.

Key Concepts Translated into Tangible Business Benefits

To get the most out of this guide, it’s important to understand a few core concepts. Instead of getting bogged down in technical jargon, let’s translate each one into a direct business benefit for you.

What is SEO Competitive Analysis?

Concept: SEO competitive analysis is the process of researching the websites that rank high in search results for your target keywords. You analyze their content, keywords, and backlink profiles to understand their strategies.
Your Benefit: You are essentially getting a free roadmap to success. By learning from your competitors’ wins and failures, you can avoid their mistakes and replicate their successful tactics, saving you months of costly trial and error and giving you a clear path forward.

Identifying Your SEO Competitors

Concept: These are the websites that consistently appear on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to rank for. They are your rivals in the digital space, competing for the same audience’s attention.
Your Benefit: You learn to focus on who you’re actually competing against in Google’s search results, which may be different from your main offline business rivals. This sharp focus prevents you from wasting time analyzing the wrong players and ensures your strategy is aimed at the real competition.

Finding Their Top Keywords

Concept: This involves using SEO tools to pinpoint the specific search terms that are driving the most organic traffic to your competitors’ websites.
Your Benefit: You can pinpoint the exact search terms that are already sending valuable traffic and paying customers to your competitors. This gives you a proven, pre-vetted list of keywords to target, eliminating guesswork from your content plan.

What is Keyword Gap Analysis?

Concept: A keyword gap analysis is the process of comparing your website’s keyword rankings against your competitors’ to find valuable keywords they rank for, but you don’t.
Your Benefit: You discover the “low-hanging fruit”—valuable keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are completely missing out on. This is your most direct path to capturing untapped market share and finding new content ideas that you know your audience is already looking for.

Part 3: Step 1 — Identify Your TRUE Online Competitors

Business Rivals vs. Search Rivals: The Critical Distinction

The first and most crucial step in any competitor analysis is to identify who you are actually competing against online. Many small business owners make the mistake of assuming their biggest business competitor is also their biggest search engine competitor. This is rarely the case.

Your business rival is the company down the street that sells a similar product. Your search rival, however, is any website that ranks on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to own. These are the domains that are capturing the attention of your potential customers online.

Consider this example: a local, independent bakery in Brooklyn has a primary business competitor—the other bakery two blocks away. However, when a potential customer searches Google for “best custom birthday cakes in Brooklyn,” the bakery’s SEO competitors might include:

A national food blog with a “Top 10 Bakeries in Brooklyn” list.
A major recipe website like Allrecipes.com.
A large-scale online cake delivery service that serves the area.
A local news publication’s lifestyle section.

To win in search, the bakery needs to understand and outperform these online entities, not just the shop down the street. Focusing on the wrong competitors is a waste of time and resources; identifying your true SEO competitors is the foundation of a winning strategy.

Actionable Method 1: The Manual Google Search

The simplest way to start identifying your search competitors requires no special tools, just a bit of manual research.

Your Action Step: Open a spreadsheet and a Google search window. Brainstorm a list of 5 to 10 of your most important keywords—the search terms you believe a perfect customer would use to find your product or service. Search for each of these terms on Google.

As you review the search results for each keyword, take note of the websites that consistently appear on the first page (positions 1-10). Ignore massive directories like Yelp or Yellow Pages for now and focus on the businesses and publications that show up repeatedly. These are your primary SEO competitors. Add their domain names to your spreadsheet. This simple, tool-free method will give you a solid starting list of who you’re up against.

Actionable Method 2: Validating with a Free Tool

While a manual search provides a great starting point, SEO tools can give you a more comprehensive and data-backed picture of your competitive landscape. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest offer “Organic Competitors” reports that analyze the web and identify your rivals based on “keyword overlap”—the number of keywords your site and another site both rank for. The more keywords you have in common, the more direct your competition.

It’s also important to recognize that your competitors might not be the same across all of your business offerings. A larger business often has different sets of competitors for different product lines or content verticals. For example, a home improvement store’s main SEO competitor for “lawn mower reviews” might be a consumer reports blog, while its competitor for “how to install a ceiling fan” might be a DIY YouTube channel. As your business grows and diversifies, think about your competitors on a topic-by-topic or service-by-service basis. This more nuanced approach leads to a far more effective and targeted strategy.

Expert Tip: Diversify Your Competitor List

Don’t just list 2-3 of your most obvious rivals. For a truly insightful analysis, create a more diverse list:

A Primary Competitor: This is your main rival, likely similar in size and offering, who you compete with directly for customers.
An “Aspirational” Competitor: This is a larger, national brand or a major industry publication that dominates the search results. You may not outrank them tomorrow, but analyzing their strategy reveals what “best in class” looks like.
An Up-and-Coming Competitor: This is a smaller or newer player who is aggressively creating content and gaining traction. Their strategy can reveal new angles or emerging trends that larger competitors are too slow to adopt.

Analyzing this mix of competitors gives you a well-rounded view of the market, from established best practices to innovative new tactics.

Part 4: Step 2 — Uncover Their Most Valuable Keywords

Once you have a solid list of your true online competitors, it’s time to pull back the curtain and see the exact keywords that are fueling their success. This is where you move from identifying players to analyzing their playbook.

Choosing Your Tool: The Power of Freemium

The world of SEO is filled with powerful, enterprise-level tools like Ahrefs and Semrush that offer incredibly deep data. However, for a small business owner, these can be expensive and overwhelming.

Fortunately, there are excellent “freemium” tools that provide more than enough data to build a winning strategy. For this guide, we will focus on Ubersuggest, a tool created by Neil Patel that offers a generous free tier and a user-friendly interface perfect for beginners. The principles and steps outlined here are fundamentally the same across all major SEO tools, so you can apply this knowledge no matter which platform you choose. Ubersuggest’s free account allows for a limited number of searches per day, which is sufficient to get started.

Mini-Tutorial: Finding Competitor Keywords with Ubersuggest

Follow these simple steps to begin uncovering your competitor’s keyword goldmine.

Step 1: Navigate to the Traffic Estimation Section In the left-hand menu of Ubersuggest, find the “Competitive Analysis” section and click on “Traffic Overview.”
Step 2: Enter Your Competitor’s Domain In the search bar at the top of the page, type or paste the domain name of one of the competitors you identified in the previous step (e.g., competitor.com). Click “Search.”
Step 3: Review the Overview Dashboard Ubersuggest will present a dashboard with several key metrics. You’ll see an estimate of their “Organic Monthly Traffic” (how many visitors they get from search engines) and the number of “Organic Keywords” they rank for.
Step 4: Access the Full Keyword List Scroll down to the “SEO Keywords” table or click on the “Keywords” report in the left-hand navigation under the “Competitive Analysis” section. This will take you to a detailed list of all the organic keywords that competitor’s website ranks for in Google’s search results.

How to Interpret the Data: A Small Business Owner’s Guide

You’ll now be looking at a table with hundreds or even thousands of keywords. It can feel overwhelming, but you only need to focus on a few key columns to find the most valuable information.

Keyword: This is the exact search phrase people are typing into Google.
Volume: This metric estimates how many people search for this keyword each month. A higher volume generally means more potential traffic, but it also often means more competition.
Position: This shows where your competitor ranks on Google for this keyword. A position between 1 and 10 is critical, as this means they are on the first page and are likely receiving a significant amount of traffic from that term.
Estimated Visits: This is one of the most important columns. It estimates how much traffic this single keyword sends to your competitor’s site each month. This is the prize you’re trying to win.
SD (SEO Difficulty): This is a score from 1 to 100 that estimates how difficult it will be to rank on the first page for this keyword. As a small business, you should initially look for keywords with lower scores (e.g., under 40) as these represent more achievable “quick wins”.

Filtering the Noise to Find the Gold

Your competitor may rank for thousands of keywords, but many of them will be irrelevant to your business (e.g., branded terms, job postings, or topics you don’t cover). The next step is to filter this list to find the keywords that truly matter to you.

As you scan the list, continually ask yourself this one critical question: “If someone searching this keyword landed on my website, would they be a potential customer for my products or services?”.

If the answer is “yes,” that keyword is relevant. If it’s “no,” ignore it. For example, if you sell handmade leather wallets, a competitor’s keyword like “how to repair a leather wallet” is highly relevant. A keyword like “leather wallet company jobs” is not.

Create a new tab in your spreadsheet from Step 1. As you find relevant, high-potential keywords (good volume, high estimated visits, achievable SD), copy them over to your spreadsheet. This curated list is the foundation for the next, most powerful step in the process.

Part 5: Step 3 — Find the Goldmine: The Keyword Gap Analysis

You’ve identified your competitors and uncovered their top-performing keywords. Now, it’s time for the most strategic part of the entire process: the Keyword Gap Analysis. This is where you transform raw data into a targeted, actionable battle plan.

Defining the Ultimate Opportunity

In simple terms, a keyword gap analysis identifies the valuable keywords that one or more of your competitors are ranking for, but your website is not.

This isn’t just another list of keywords. This is a list of proven topics that your target audience is actively searching for, which you are completely invisible for. Your competitors have already validated that these topics attract traffic and customers. A keyword gap analysis hands you this intelligence on a silver platter, providing a strategic shortcut to capturing market share you’re currently missing. It is the most direct way to find new content ideas that you

know will resonate with your market.

But the opportunity goes even deeper. Beyond just finding keywords you are “missing,” this analysis also uncovers your “weak” spots. These are keywords where both you and a competitor rank, but they rank significantly higher—for example, they are on page 1 (position #5) while you are languishing on page 3 (position #23). For a small business, these “weak” keywords are often the lowest-hanging fruit. Improving an existing piece of content to jump from page 2 to page 1 is often faster and requires fewer resources than creating a brand-new piece of content from scratch to target a “missing” keyword. Tackling these weak spots can deliver quick wins, build momentum, and drive a tangible increase in traffic in a shorter amount of time.

Mini-Tutorial: Performing a Keyword Gap Analysis

Most major SEO tools, including Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Semrush, have a dedicated “Keyword Gap” or “Competitive Analysis” feature designed for this exact purpose. The process is straightforward.

Step 1: Open the Keyword Gap Tool In Ubersuggest, this is found under “Competitive Analysis” > “Keyword Gap.”
Step 2: Enter Your Domain and Your Competitors’ Domains You will see several input fields. In the first field, labeled “Enter your domain,” type your website’s URL. In the subsequent fields, enter the domain names of 2-3 of the top competitors you identified earlier.
Step 3: Run the Comparison Click the “Compare” or “Search” button. The tool will now analyze the keyword profiles of all the domains you entered and compare them against each other.
Step 4: Apply the Magic Filter The results page will show a variety of data, but you are looking for specific filters. The tool will present you with several views, often labeled as:
- Shared: Keywords that all entered domains rank for.
- Missing: Keywords that your competitors rank for, but you do not.
- Weak: Keywords that you rank for, but your competitors rank higher.
- Strong: Keywords that you rank for and your competitors do not.
Your goldmine is in the “Missing” and “Weak” tabs. Click on these filters. The list of keywords that appears is your pre-validated, high-priority content plan. These are the exact gaps in your strategy that your competitors are currently exploiting to capture traffic that could—and should—be yours.

Part 6: Step 4 — Turn Your Intel into a Prioritized Action Plan

At this point, you have a powerful list of “Missing” and “Weak” keywords. But a list of hundreds, or even thousands, of keywords is not a strategy—it’s a source of overwhelm. The final and most critical step is to turn this mountain of data into a short, prioritized action plan. The goal is to identify the top 3-5 opportunities you can act on right now to start making a difference.

From a Long List to a Short Plan: A Simple Prioritization Framework

Use this three-step framework to filter your keyword gap list down to the most impactful opportunities.

Priority 1: Focus on the Gaps

Your “Missing” and “Weak” keywords from the keyword gap analysis should be your primary focus. These represent the most direct path to gaining ground on your competition. “Missing” keywords are opportunities for new content, while “Weak” keywords are opportunities to improve existing content for a potentially quick ranking boost.

Priority 2: Filter by Business Relevance & Search Intent

Go through your list and, once again, apply the business relevance filter: “Does this keyword represent a potential customer?”. Next, consider the

search intent behind the keyword. Understanding intent tells you what kind of content to create.

Informational Intent: These are “how-to,” “what is,” or “why” queries (e.g., “how to choose a coffee grinder”). These are perfect for educational blog posts that attract new audiences at the top of the sales funnel.
Commercial Intent: These are “best,” “review,” or “vs.” queries (e.g., “best burr coffee grinder under $100”). These target users who are actively researching and comparing options. They are ideal for in-depth reviews, comparison guides, or listicles.
Transactional Intent: These are “buy,” “discount,” “for sale,” or location-based queries (e.g., “buy Breville coffee grinder”). These have the highest purchase intent and should be targeted with your product pages, service pages, or dedicated landing pages.

Prioritize keywords with commercial and transactional intent, as they are more likely to lead directly to sales.

Priority 3: Target Achievable Wins

Finally, look at the SEO Difficulty (KD or SD) score for each keyword. As a small business, trying to compete for a highly difficult keyword (e.g., KD 80+) is a long, uphill battle. Instead, look for the “sweet spot”: keywords with respectable search volume but a lower, more achievable difficulty score (e.g., a KD under 40). Winning these less competitive terms allows you to build your site’s authority, gain momentum, and see tangible results faster.

The “Can I Do Better?” Content Analysis

Simply choosing a keyword is not enough. To outrank your competitors, you must create a piece of content that is demonstrably better than what is currently ranking on the first page.

For each high-priority keyword you’ve identified, open the top 3-5 ranking pages in new tabs and analyze them using this checklist:

Content Type: What format are they using? Is it a blog post, a video, a product page, a listicle, or an interactive tool? The top results give you a clue as to what format Google believes best satisfies the searcher’s intent.
Content Depth & Word Count: Is the content a brief 500-word overview, or is it a comprehensive, 2,500-word deep-dive? Generally, longer, more thorough content tends to rank better for competitive terms.
Format & Readability: How is the content structured? Does it use short paragraphs, clear headings (H2, H3), bullet points, and bolded text to make it easy to scan? Is there a helpful table of contents for long articles?.
Use of Media: Does the content include unique, high-quality images, helpful infographics, or embedded videos? Rich media can significantly improve user engagement and set your content apart.
Unique Angle & Expertise: What makes their content authoritative? Do they include quotes from experts, original research or data, a personal case study, or a unique perspective that no one else has?.
Freshness: When was the article last updated? If the top-ranking content is several years old, you have a huge opportunity to win by providing more current, up-to-date information.

By answering these questions, you will identify the weaknesses in your competitors’ content. Your goal is to create a piece of content that is more comprehensive, more helpful, more up-to-date, and more engaging.

Building Your Content Calendar with Confidence

You are now ready to turn your analysis into action. Take your top 3-5 prioritized keywords and add them to your content calendar. For each keyword, make a note of:

The type of content you will create (e.g., “Blog Post,” “Comparison Guide”).
The unique angle you will take to make it better than the competition (e.g., “Include a video tutorial,” “Interview three industry experts,” “Update with 2024 data”).

This data-driven approach removes the anxiety of the blank page. You are no longer guessing what to write about; you are executing a strategic plan based on proven market demand.

Your Keyword Prioritization Table

To transform your chaotic list of keyword ideas into an organized and actionable plan, use a simple prioritization table. This structure forces you to think critically about each opportunity and documents your strategy in one clear, accessible place. It is the bridge between data analysis and content execution.

Fill out this table for the top 10-15 keywords you identified from your gap analysis. It will immediately clarify where you should focus your efforts first.

Target Keyword	Competitor(s) Ranking	Monthly Search Volume	Keyword Difficulty (KD)	Business Relevance (High/Med/Low)	Action (New Page / Update Page)
e.g., “best cold brew coffee maker”	Competitor A, Competitor B	8,500	35	High	New Blog Post: “The 7 Best…”
e.g., “how to clean a coffee machine”	Competitor A	4,200	22	Medium	Update existing “Maintenance” blog
e.g., “fair trade coffee beans online”	Competitor B, Competitor C	1,200	28	High	New Product Category Page
e.g., “what is a burr grinder”	Competitor C	2,100	18	Medium	New Blog Post: “Beginner’s Guide…”
e.g., “drip coffee makers reviews”	Competitor A, B, C	6,000	52	High	Future Consideration (High KD)

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Part 7: Conclusion: From Spy to Strategist

You no longer have to guess what your customers are searching for or what content you should create next. Your competitors have already spent the time, money, and effort to pave the way. By systematically analyzing their strategy, you can skip the guesswork, create content with confidence, and start competing for traffic that is already proven to convert. You have moved from being a passive observer to an active strategist, equipped with the intelligence to make smarter decisions.

Your mission starts now. Pick just one competitor from your list. Use a free tool to find three of their top keywords today. This small, manageable step is the beginning of your journey to winning more traffic and growing your business.