How to find a competitor's keywords
·4 min read
To find a competitor's keywords, start by hand. Read their page titles and headings, walk their XML sitemap, run a site: search on Google and look at the ads they run. That tells you what they are trying to rank for. To see what they actually rank for, with positions and estimated traffic, you need a keyword data tool, and then you read the list by position, traffic and ranking page before picking targets.
The manual pass costs nothing and shows intent. The data pass shows results. You want both, because a competitor's plans and its wins are rarely the same list.
Find competitor keywords by hand
Work through these in order.
- Their sitemap. Open
competitor.com/sitemap.xml, or find the sitemap line incompetitor.com/robots.txt. The URLs read like a keyword list, because most sites put the target phrase in the slug. - Their titles and headings. Open the pages that look important and read the title tag and H1. Most SEO teams put the primary keyword in both. H2s often hold the secondary keywords.
- A
site:search. Searchsite:competitor.com invoice templateto see which of their pages Google returns for a topic you care about. Treat it as a sample. Google's documentation on the site: operator says it does not return every indexed page. - Their ads. Google's Ads Transparency Center shows the search ads a company runs now. An ad that has run for months points at a keyword that converts for them.
Google Keyword Planner can also take a competitor's URL and suggest keywords from the page's text. Our Google Keyword Planner guide covers that. It returns keyword ideas the page relates to, not keywords it ranks for.
What the manual pass can't tell you is where any of these pages rank or how many visits they get. A competitor can target 400 keywords and win 30 of them.
Find competitor keywords with a data tool
Keyword data tools check Google results for millions of queries, record which URL ranks where, and estimate traffic from volume and position. Enter a domain and you get the keywords it ranks for.
Two cautions before you trust the numbers. Every figure is an estimate built from the tool's own sample, so two tools will disagree on the same domain. And the data is per country. A UK competitor checked in the US market can look tiny.
Use one tool for every competitor you compare. Compare keywords against each other, not as exact counts.
How to read a competitor keyword list
Read each row with three columns at once. A keyword alone tells you little.
| Column | What it tells you | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Position | Where their page ranks now | Positions 1 to 3 are earned and hard to take. Positions 11 to 20 mean they are close but not winning |
| Estimated traffic | Visits the keyword sends them | Sort by this first. It shows what actually feeds the business |
| Ranking page | The URL that ranks | Open it. Its format and depth are the bar you need to clear |
Then group by page. If one guide ranks for 40 keywords and brings a quarter of their traffic, that page is the real competitor, not the domain.
Last, filter out searches for their own name. Brand searches often top a competitor's list and are useless to you. Nobody searching "acme login" wants your page.
Which competitor keywords to go after
Go after keywords where their page is beatable and the search fits what you sell. A keyword they rank third for with a thin page is a better target than one they rank first for with the best guide on the web.
Informational searches with modest difficulty. These become blog posts. Our post on keyword difficulty explains how to read the score and why to check the results page yourself before committing.
Commercial and buying searches. "Best X for Y", "X pricing" and "X vs Y" searches sit close to a purchase. They are worth a dedicated page even at low volume, and they are the ones advertisers pay for.
Keywords where they rank 8 to 20. Their page is not winning yet, so the spot is still open.
Skip keywords where position 1 belongs to a page far better than anything you would write, and anything off your product.
To find the keywords they rank for and you don't, run a gap comparison with your own domain. That has its own method, covered in our keyword gap guide.
Find a competitor's keywords with our tool
Competitor Keywords takes a competitor's domain, or any page on it, and a country. It returns the domain's top 100 Google keywords by estimated traffic, each with position, search volume, difficulty, search intent, cost per click, estimated visits and the ranking URL. It then sorts them. Blog topics are informational searches with difficulty 50 or less, at least 10 searches a month, and not containing the competitor's name. Ad keywords are commercial or buying searches with a cost per click. It also lists the 15 pages that bring the domain the most estimated visits.
A run costs 35 credits. It covers the whole domain, not one folder, and only the country you pick. Volumes and visits are estimates from our keyword data, not Google figures. It does not show which keywords the competitor bids on in Google Ads. If our keyword data has no record of the site, the run is refunded. If it has a record but no rankings, the run is charged and the report says so.