Competitor keywords are the search terms your rival sites rank for in Google. Here is how to find competitor keywords in three moves: first identify your real search competitors (the sites that keep showing up for your target searches, which are often not your business rivals), then list what they rank for using manual searches or a paid tool’s organic keywords report, and finally pull their top pages to see which keywords actually bring them traffic. Free methods show you the shape. Paid tools show you the numbers.
Most people skip the first move. They type their biggest business rival into a tool and copy the list, then wonder why half of it has nothing to do with their customers. The wrong competitor gives you the wrong keywords, every time.
This post covers finding and reading a competitor’s keywords. Comparing their list against yours is a separate job, and my guide to keyword gap analysis owns that part. Both sit inside the expansion step of my keyword research process.
Who Are Your Real Search Competitors?
Your search competitors are whoever ranks for the searches you want. That’s it. A shop across town with a weak site might be your biggest business rival and still rank for nothing, while a blogger two states away owns page one for your main service.
I sort every domain I find into four types before I decide whether to study it.
| Competitor type | What it looks like | Study its keywords? |
|---|---|---|
| Direct business rival | Sells what you sell, to the same customers | Yes, if it ranks |
| Search rival of your size | A similar site ranking for your keywords, maybe in another city or niche | Yes, usually the most useful |
| Publisher or affiliate | Review sites, magazines, “best X” lists | Only for informational keywords |
| Giant or aggregator | Marketplaces, directories, Wikipedia, big brands | Rarely; they rank for everything |
The second row is the one most people never think about. A site of a similar size and type that ranks where you want to rank is the closest thing to a blueprint you’ll get, because the keywords it wins are keywords a site like yours can realistically win.
The SERP Tally: Finding Competitors for Free
Here’s the free method I use. Pick 10 to 20 keywords that matter to your business, the ones closest to a sale. Search each one in a private window, from the location you serve, and write down every domain in the top 10.
Then count. Domains that appear for three or more of your keywords are your real search competitors. Here’s what an illustrative tally looks like for a made-up bookkeeping firm (the domains are placeholders, not real sites):
| Domain | Keywords it ranked for (out of 12) | Type | Keep? |
|---|---|---|---|
| directory-a.com | 11 | Aggregator | No |
| bookkeeper-b.com | 7 | Search rival, similar size | Yes |
| accounting-blog-c.com | 5 | Publisher | Yes, for guides |
| local-rival-d.com | 1 | Business rival | No, it barely ranks |
| software-e.com | 6 | Big brand | No |
Two or three keepers is plenty. More than five and the keyword lists start drowning each other.
What Tools Call Organic Competitors
Paid tools automate the tally. Ahrefs defines organic competitors as “competing websites that rank in the top 10 organic search results for the same keywords that your target gets the most traffic from”, according to its Site Explorer guide. Semrush’s Competitors report ranks domains by a Competition Level score, which Semrush says it calculates from the number of keywords each competitor has and the number of keywords the two domains share.
Useful. Not gospel. I still run the eye test on every suggestion, because these reports happily list giant aggregators and sites that only overlap on a few branded terms.
How to Find Competitor Keywords: Which Route Fits You?
Three things change the method from here.
- Budget. Without a paid tool, you can see which keywords a competitor targets, but not every keyword it ranks for or how much traffic each brings. With one, you get both, as estimates.
- Competitor size. A 30-page local site can be read by hand in an hour. A 5,000-page publisher can’t, so you’ll lean on top pages and filters.
- Your goal. Want new page ideas? Focus on their top pages. Want to beat them on a page you already have? Focus on the keywords that page ranks for.
How Do You See What Keywords a Competitor Ranks For Without Paying?
You can’t see a competitor’s Search Console. Nobody can. So free methods work by inference: you look at what they target and check where they show up.
Read Their Titles and Headings
A page’s title tag and H1 usually name its target keyword. Run a site:competitor.com search and read the titles in the results, or open their main menu and service pages directly. Google’s own site: operator documentation warns that “the list of URLs returned is not always exhaustive”, so use it to discover sections, not to count pages.
For a fuller page list, check their XML sitemap, usually linked from their robots.txt file. My guide to building a competitor topical map covers the sitemap route step by step.
Ask Keyword Planner About Their Site
Google Keyword Planner has a “Start with a website” option. Google’s help page says you can “enter any website and Google will look for keywords related to the content on that site”, per its Keyword Planner guide. Paste in a competitor’s service page and you get keyword ideas built from its content.
Be honest about what that shows. It’s what the page is about, not what it ranks for. Still a solid list of ideas.
Check the Results Yourself
The last free step is the reverse search. Take the keywords you gathered, search the promising ones, and note where the competitor actually appears. If they’re on page one and you aren’t, that’s a real competitor keyword. If they don’t show up at all, it was only an intention on their part.
It’s slow work. I’d still do it on any small project, because you see every results page with your own eyes instead of trusting a database estimate.
How Do Paid Tools Show Competitor Keywords?
Every major SEO suite has an organic keywords report. You enter a domain and it lists the keywords that domain ranks for, the position, the ranking URL and an estimated traffic share. Semrush calls it Organic Positions, and its help page says it shows “all of the keywords that a domain has pages ranking for in Google’s top 100 results.” Ahrefs calls it Organic keywords, inside Site Explorer.
Remember where the data comes from. These tools build their own databases from their own crawls of search results, so the counts are estimates, and two tools will show different numbers for the same domain. Very small or very local keywords are often missing.
The Filters I Apply First
A raw export for a decent-sized competitor can run to thousands of rows. I cut it in this order:
- Position 1 to 20. Keywords where they rank on page three tell you little. Semrush’s Positions report, for example, lets you filter to top 3, top 10, top 20 and other ranges.
- Exclude branded terms. Remove their brand name and product names. You’re not going to rank for “competitor-b login”.
- Filter by intent. Keep the intent that matches the page type you’d create. My guide to search intent types explains how to read it from the results page.
- Filter by URL. Set the URL filter to one folder, like
/services/or/blog/, when you only care about one section of their site.
If the filtered list still runs past a few hundred rows, then sort by estimated traffic and read the top 50 first. If it’s under 50 rows, then the competitor is probably small or new, and the free methods above might have been enough.
How Do You Find a Competitor’s Top Pages?
Keywords are scattered. Pages tell a story. A competitor’s top pages show you which page types and topics actually earn their traffic, which is often more useful than any keyword list.
In paid tools, this is a page-level report. Ahrefs has Top pages in Site Explorer, and Semrush has a Pages tab in Organic Research. Both rank a domain’s URLs by estimated organic traffic and show how many keywords each one ranks for.
Free, you’re limited. I look at what their homepage and main navigation link to, since site owners usually push their most valuable pages there, and I note which of their pages show up most often in my SERP tally. That’s a rough proxy, honestly. It still beats guessing.
When I study top pages, I look past the topic to the format. If a rival’s top three pages are all calculators or comparison tables, that tells me what searchers in that niche reward, and I plan my own pages around that format rather than another 2,000-word guide.
Branch 1: Your Site Is New
A new site has almost no keywords of its own, so every competitor keyword looks like an opportunity. It isn’t.
Focus on the search rival of your size, not the market leader. Filter its list to keywords where it ranks with pages similar to what you could publish this quarter. My guide to keyword difficulty explains why the tool score alone won’t tell you whether those are winnable.
Branch 2: Your Site Is Established
An established site already ranks for plenty, so the interesting part is the overlap. Which of their keywords do you also rank for, but lower?
That’s where a competitor’s list turns into a comparison, and the comparison belongs to a keyword gap analysis. For topic-level patterns, like whole clusters a competitor covers and you don’t, take the same competitor into a topical map instead. Two jobs, two methods.
Situations That Change the Approach
- Local businesses. The map pack and the organic results often show different competitors. Run your tally on both, and check from inside your service area.
- A competitor that’s mostly brand traffic. If most of its traffic comes from its own name, its keyword list is mostly useless to you. Filter brand terms first, then judge what’s left.
- A competitor ranking with user-generated pages. Forum threads and review pages rank for long, odd queries you can’t easily copy. Treat them as question ideas, not targets.
- Brand new markets. If nobody ranks well yet, competitor keywords won’t show you much. Start from the long tail instead, using my guide on how to find long tail keywords.
Decision Matrix
| If you have | And your competitor is | Then use |
|---|---|---|
| No paid tool | Small (under ~100 pages) | Titles, sitemap and manual SERP checks |
| No paid tool | Large | Keyword Planner on their key pages, plus a SERP tally |
| A paid tool | Any size | Organic keywords report with the four filters, then top pages |
| A paid tool and an established site | Ranking for keywords you also rank for | Take the list into a keyword gap analysis |
| Any setup | A giant or aggregator | Drop it and find a search rival your size |
When Should You Get Help?
If you sell one service in one city, the free method works and costs you an afternoon. It gets harder when you compete in several markets, face dozens of rivals or need the findings turned into a page plan without cannibalizing what you already have.
That’s work my team does through our keyword research services, and you can try it on 5 keywords free. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your site first, the free SEO audit is a good starting point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can You See Exactly What Keywords a Competitor Ranks For?
Not exactly. Only the site owner can see its Search Console data. Paid tools estimate a competitor’s rankings from their own databases, which are close enough for planning but miss many small and local keywords and differ from tool to tool.
Is It Okay to Target Your Competitors’ Keywords?
Yes. Ranking for the same non-branded searches is normal competition, and writing a better page for a query is how search works. Be careful with their brand names, though; a page built around another company’s trademark rarely matches what those searchers want.
How Many Competitors Should I Study?
Two or three search competitors of a similar size and type is enough for most small sites. Past five, the lists overlap so much that you spend more time removing duplicates than finding new ideas.
Why Do Different Tools Show Different Keyword Counts for the Same Competitor?
Each tool crawls search results with its own keyword database, country coverage and update schedule. So one tool can list far more keywords for a domain than another. Compare trends within one tool rather than numbers across tools.
Last updated: October 2026 by Mizanur Rahman
