How to Find Out What Keywords Your Competitors Are Ranking For (Step-by-Step Guide)

Why Competitor Keyword Research Is a Game-Changer

If you're starting your keyword research from scratch, you're making it harder than it needs to be. Your competitors have already done the legwork — they've tested content, earned backlinks, and found the search terms that bring in real traffic. All you have to do is look.

Knowing what keywords your competitors rank for helps you:

• Identify high-value terms you're missing
• Spot content gaps you can fill faster
• Prioritize keywords with proven search demand
• Understand which topics your audience actually searches for

This guide walks you through a proven, repeatable process for uncovering competitor keywords — from free manual methods to automated competitive intelligence tools like BenchSpy.

Step 1: Identify Your Real SEO Competitors

Your SEO competitors aren't always the same as your business competitors. A company selling the same product might not be competing with you in search — but a niche blog ranking for your target terms absolutely is.

To find your true search competitors:

• Google your most important target keywords and note which domains appear consistently on page one
• Look at the "People also search for" and related searches at the bottom of the results page
• Use Google Search Console to see which queries your site already appears for, then search those terms manually

Build a list of 5–10 domains that consistently appear alongside your own. These are the competitors worth analyzing.

Step 2: Use Google Search Console to Benchmark Your Own Position

Before diving into competitor data, understand where you stand. Open Google Search Console, navigate to the Performance report, and filter by your top pages. This gives you a baseline of the queries already driving impressions and clicks.

Make note of:

• Keywords where you rank between positions 5–20 (quick-win territory)
• Keywords where competitors outrank you despite similar content
• Branded vs. non-branded traffic splits

This baseline makes competitor comparison much more actionable — you'll know exactly where closing a gap matters most.

Step 3: Analyze Competitor Keywords With SEO Tools

Manual Google searches only go so far. To see the full keyword footprint of a competitor, you need a tool that indexes organic ranking data at scale.

Option A: Use a Dedicated Competitor Intelligence Platform

BenchSpy is built specifically for this. By entering a competitor's domain, you instantly surface the keywords they rank for, their estimated traffic share, and how your own site compares — all in one dashboard. Instead of piecing together data from multiple sources, BenchSpy gives you a unified competitive snapshot that updates automatically.

This is especially useful if you're tracking multiple competitors at once or need to present findings to a team without exporting CSV files and building pivot tables by hand.

Option B: Manual Analysis With Free Tools

If you're working with a limited budget, you can still gather useful data:

• Ubersuggest (free tier): Enter a competitor URL and see their top organic keywords, estimated monthly visits, and keyword difficulty scores
• Google's "site:" operator: Search site:competitor.com [topic] to see which pages they've published around a subject
• AnswerThePublic: Find the questions people ask around a topic your competitor covers heavily

Free tools have usage limits and less accurate data, but they're a solid starting point.

Step 4: Filter for Keywords That Actually Matter

A competitor might rank for thousands of keywords. Not all of them are relevant to your business. The goal is to filter down to the terms worth pursuing.

Apply these filters when reviewing competitor keyword lists:

• Relevance: Does this keyword align with your product, service, or content focus?
• Search volume: Is there enough monthly demand to justify the effort? Generally aim for 100+ monthly searches as a minimum threshold
• Keyword difficulty: Can you realistically compete? New sites should focus on lower-difficulty terms first
• Search intent: Is the intent informational, commercial, or transactional? Match your content type to what searchers expect

Once filtered, you'll typically have a shortlist of 20–50 high-priority keywords worth acting on.

Step 5: Find the Content Gaps

A keyword gap is a term your competitor ranks for that you don't — or where they significantly outrank you. These gaps represent direct opportunities to capture traffic you're currently losing.

To find gaps systematically:

1. Export your competitor's top 50–100 keywords (from your tool of choice or BenchSpy's gap report)
2. Cross-reference against your own ranking keywords
3. Flag any keyword where the competitor holds a top-10 position and you're either absent or ranking below position 20

Prioritize gaps where:

• The competitor's ranking page is thin or outdated
• Multiple competitors rank for the same term (proof of demand)
• The keyword has clear commercial or informational intent you can serve well

Step 6: Build Content That Outranks Them

Finding the keywords is only half the work. Now you need to create content that's demonstrably better than what currently ranks.

For each target keyword:

• Read the top 3–5 ranking pages in full — understand why Google rewards them
• Identify what's missing: depth, freshness, better examples, clearer structure, more comprehensive coverage
• Write content that answers the search intent more completely than the current top result
• Optimize on-page elements: title tag, H1, meta description, internal links, and image alt text

Don't copy competitors — outperform them. The goal is to make your content the most useful answer to the searcher's question.

Step 7: Monitor and Iterate

SEO is not a one-time project. Rankings shift constantly as competitors publish new content, earn backlinks, and update existing pages. Set a recurring schedule — monthly at minimum — to:

• Check whether your new content is gaining rankings
• See if competitors have published new pages in your target topic areas
• Identify newly emerging keywords in your niche
• Track your progress against benchmarks over time

Tools like BenchSpy make ongoing monitoring easier by automating competitor tracking, so you get alerts when a competitor's rankings shift significantly — without manually checking every week.

The Competitive Edge You've Been Missing

Most businesses do keyword research in isolation. They use keyword tools, generate ideas, and pick terms that seem promising — but they skip the step of validating those terms against what's actually working for competitors right now.

Reversing your competitors' keyword strategy gives you a shortcut. You're not guessing what might work — you're building on evidence that already exists in the SERPs.

Start with the steps above, stay consistent with your monitoring, and use the right tools to do the heavy lifting. The gap between you and your competitors is almost always smaller than it looks once you can see exactly where they're winning — and why.