How can you find your competitor's keywords?

When you see a competitor ahead of you in Google results, it's natural to want to find out what keywords they rank better for than you. Keyword research is essential not only to improve your own strategy, but also to identify content gaps.

1. Identify your real competitors

• Online ≠ real life: Physical business competitors are not necessarily the same as your organic search rivals.
• Service areas: Different services (e.g. webshop vs blog) have different competition.
• Stop guessing: Identify who you share search results with based on real data, not just assumptions.
• Be realistic: If you're a small brand, don't try to compete directly with giants like Amazon - look for players of a similar size.

2. Use tools to map your competitors

A good tool will allow you to separately check competitors at domain, subdomain or folder (e.g. /blog/) level. This helps you to distinguish, for example, if your webshop's competition is different from your blog's.

• Examine the Domain Authority (DA) value - choose sites of similar strength for comparison.
• Watch the Overlap ratio - how many common keywords they competed for.
• A Rivalry indicator helps to rank the most important competitors.

3. Find out what you rank higher than you

A keyword spacer will show you which keywords you can move forward on. Pay particular attention to those where you are ranked between 6th and 20th, but a competitor is already at the top.

• Traffic Lift: shows how many visitors you could gain by ranking higher.
• Compare the content of a competitor's site and your own - what are they doing better?
• Analyse the rest of the SERP - what type of content ranks well (e.g. guide, list, product page)?

4. Discover new keyword opportunities

See which keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you're not. These are the "content gaps" you should fill.

• Create new content for them (e.g. new product page, FAQ, blog post).
• Update existing pages to be optimised for these terms.

5. Also check the content on the page level

Sometimes you are not competing with the whole domain, but only with certain sub-sites. Use a tool to analyse keywords for specific URLs or subdomains.

• Use the "Explore by Site" feature to explore the subpages.
• To save, add the keywords to a list so you can track them later.

6. Analyse the competitor's content

• Keyword use: Where and how are keywords used? Variations?
• Quality of content: Is it well written? Does it have video, infographics, other visual elements?
• Gaps: What are they not writing about? You can include this in your own content to get ahead of them.

Summary

Mapping your competitors' keywords is not just about jockeying for position - it's also about finding new ideas and content opportunities. With a good strategy, you can not only catch up with your competitors, but also outperform them.