How to find competitor keywords and decide which ones to chase

Learning how to find competitor keywords comes down to two passes. The first is free and done in a browser: you read what a rival publishes and infer what it is aiming at. The second uses keyword data to show what that rival actually ranks for, with a position and a traffic estimate on every row. Neither pass is enough alone. The pages a company plans and the pages Google rewards overlap less than you would expect, and the useful targets sit in the space between.

Pass one: read their intentions

Start with the files and pages a competitor puts in public.

• The sitemap. Try /sitemap.xml on their domain. If nothing loads, /robots.txt usually names the sitemap location. Scroll the URLs. Most teams write the target phrase into the slug, so the list doubles as a plan of what they want to rank for.
• Title tags and H1s. Open the pages that look like they matter: product pages, comparison pages, the guides linked from the main menu. The title and H1 tend to carry the primary phrase. Subheadings carry the secondary ones.
• A site: query. Pair the operator with a topic, as in site:rival.com onboarding checklist, to see which of their pages Google returns for it. Google's own documentation warns that a site: query is not exhaustive and that big sites should not expect every URL to appear, so read it as a sample.
• Their ads. The Google Ads Transparency Center shows search ads an advertiser is running. An ad that keeps running month after month is one they keep paying for, which hints at a search that pays back.

Google Keyword Planner is worth a note here. Its "start with a website" option looks at a page's content and suggests related keywords. That gives you ideas connected to the page, not a record of where the page ranks.

Pass two: read their results

What pass one cannot give you is a position or a visit count. A rival might aim at hundreds of phrases and place well for a few dozen. To see that, you need a tool that checks Google results across a very large set of queries, records which URL holds which spot, and estimates visits from search volume and position.

Treat those numbers with care. They are estimates built from each provider's sample, so two tools will report different totals for the same domain. They are also per country. Look up a British company in the US market and it will seem far smaller than it is. Pick one tool and one market and use them for every rival you compare, and compare rows with each other rather than trusting any single count.

How to read the rows

A keyword on its own says little. Read three columns together:

Next, group the rows by URL. When one guide holds forty keywords and a large slice of the estimated visits, that guide is the thing you compete with, more than the domain as a whole. Then strip out searches for the rival's own brand. Those often sit at the top of the list and do nothing for you.

Which ones to chase

Go for keywords where two things are true: the ranking page can be beaten, and the search matches what you sell. A third-place ranking held by a thin page is a better bet than a first place held by an excellent one.

• Informational searches with modest difficulty make good blog posts.
• Buying searches such as "best X for Y", "X pricing" and "X vs Y" deserve their own page even at low volume, since they sit close to a purchase.
• Keywords where the rival ranks 8 to 20 are open; their page has not won yet.

Skip the ones where a far stronger page holds the top spot, and anything outside your product. If what you want is the list of keywords they rank for and you do not, that is a gap comparison, which is a separate method.

Doing pass two with seogeoaeo.ai

The Competitor Keywords tool takes a competitor's domain, or any page on it, plus a country. It returns up to 100 of the domain's Google keywords, ranked by estimated traffic, each with position, volume, difficulty, intent, cost per click, estimated visits and the ranking URL. It splits them into blog topics (informational, difficulty 50 or less, at least 10 searches a month, no brand searches) and keywords worth bidding on, and lists the pages that bring the domain the most visits.

A run costs 35 credits, and the price shows before it starts. It covers the whole domain and only the chosen country, its figures are estimates rather than Google data, and it does not reveal what a competitor bids on in Google Ads. If the data provider has no record of the site, the credits come back. It also does not track your own rankings over time; a rank tracker such as Semrush Position Tracking covers that job.

Credits come with a monthly plan, from $29 for 2,000 on the pricing page. If you do not yet know which rivals to study, run Competitor Finder first and bring its close competitors here.