How to find and use your competitor’s keywords

Competitive keywords are the keywords that your rivals are ranking for in Google search results. They can rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in paid results.

Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the simplest form of keyword research. If your competitors are ranking or targeting certain keywords, it might be worth targeting them too.

There’s no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the largest database of these keywords.

How to find all the keywords your competitor is ranking for

1. Go to Ahrefs Site Explorer
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Go to Organic keywords relationship

The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords that send the most visits to your competitor. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp”.

Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you may want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Does not contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any misspellings:

If your brand is new and competing with an established one, you may also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.

How to find the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t

1. Go to competitor analysis
2. Enter your domain in the This objective does not rank section
3. Enter your competitor’s domain in the file But these competitors do section

Press “Show Keyword Opportunities” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor is ranking for, but you aren’t.

You can also add a Volume AND KD filter to find popular and low difficulty keywords in this report.

How to find keywords that multiple competitors are ranking for, but you aren’t

1. Go to competitor analysis
2. Enter your domain in the This objective does not rank section
3. Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the file But these competitors do section

You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors is ranking for, but you aren’t.

You can also narrow the list to keywords that all your competitors are ranking for. Click on Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 contestants:

1. Go to Ahrefs Site Explorer
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Go to Paid keywords relationship

This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting through Google Ads.

Since your competitor pays for traffic from these keywords, this may indicate that they are profitable for them and it may be profitable for you too.

You know which keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.

1. Create pages to target these keywords

You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the simplest thing you can do for the competitor keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.

However, before you do this, it’s worth grouping your competitor’s keywords by main topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with a single page.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Export your competitor’s keywords, both from Organic keywords OR Content gap relationship
2. Paste them into Keyword Explorer
3. Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab.

For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others are grouped together under the main topic “digital marketing” because the people who search for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You just need to create one page to potentially rank for all of these keywords.

2. Optimize existing content by filling in subtopics

You don’t always need to create new content to rank for your competitor’s keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize content that you already need to rank for.

How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:

1. Export your competitor’s keywords
2. Paste them into Keyword Explorer
3. Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab.
4. Search for main topics you already have content about

For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the main topic of “press release template.”

If we search our site, we see that we already have a page on this topic.

If we click on the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format”.

To rank the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections on the subtopics “press release examples” and “press release format”.

3. Target these keywords with Google Ads

Paid keywords are the simplest: review the report and see if there are also relevant keywords you might want to target.

For example, Mailchimp bids on the keyword “how to create a newsletter”.

If you are ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword as it is relevant.

If you decide to target the same keyword through Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.

You can also see the landing page your competitor is driving ad traffic to in the URL column.

Learn more

Check out more tutorials on how to perform competitive keyword analysis: