How to Find Competitor Keywords Worth Targeting

Exporting a competitor's keywords takes about two minutes.

Working out which of them you should chase takes the rest of the afternoon.

That is where most competitor keyword research falls apart: thousands of rows, a volume column and no idea which terms suit you.

I find competitor keywords as one stage of my own research pipeline, and almost all the value sits in the filtering.

Here are the eight steps I use, from picking rivals to a short list you can build pages for.

Before You Start

You need three things:

• A rankings tool that shows a competitor's organic keywords. Any of the large SEO platforms will do. Some offer a limited free view.
• Your own Search Console data, so you compare against what Google already shows you for, not what you assume.
• A list of the services and areas you actually sell. You will use it to throw out terms that don't fit.

No paid tool yet? Google Keyword Planner has a "Start with a website" option. Google Ads Help says you can enter any website and get keyword ideas related to its content. You need a Google Ads account with billing details to use it.

It won't show you what a competitor ranks for, only what their site is about. That is still a decent starting list.

Step 1: Pick Competitors for Each Topic

Don't pick one list of competitors for the whole business.

Pick them topic by topic.

A heating engineer might compete with local firms for "boiler repair", with national brands for "boiler cover", and with publishers for "why is my boiler losing pressure".

Each topic has a different set of winners.

So take each of your main services and search its two or three core terms.

Note the domains that appear in the top ten more than once.

Those are your keyword competitors for that topic.

Three to five per topic is plenty.

If you need a fuller method for choosing and studying rivals, start with my guide to SEO competitor analysis.

Step 2: Export Each Competitor's Organic Keywords

Now pull the terms each competitor ranks for.

In most tools this is an "organic keywords" report for a domain.

Export with these columns at minimum:

• Keyword
• Position
• Search volume
• The ranking URL
• Country

Set the country to your market before you export. UK rankings and US rankings for the same domain can look nothing alike.

Limit the export to positions 1 to 20.

Terms a competitor ranks 60th for say very little about what is working for them.

Save one raw file per competitor, untouched, with the date in the filename.

Pro tip: If a competitor has a huge site, export by folder instead of the whole domain. Pulling only /services/ and /guides/ keeps you away from thousands of product or tag pages you don't care about.

Step 3: Strip Out Brand and Junk Terms

Raw exports are noisy. Clean them before you read anything.

Remove these first:

• The competitor's own brand terms. "Acme Heating reviews" will never be yours.
• Other brands and products you don't sell. Manufacturer names, model numbers, software logins.
• Jobs, careers and complaints terms. They rank for them; you don't want them.
• Places you don't serve. A national rival ranks for towns you'll never visit.
• Duplicates across competitors. Keep one row per keyword, with a column listing which competitors rank.

This step usually removes a large share of the list.

That's the point.

Every term you remove here is one you won't waste time judging by volume later.

Step 4: Compare the List With Your Own Search Console Queries

Now bring your own data in.

Open the Search Console Performance report, switch the table to queries, set the date range as wide as you can, and export.

Match each competitor keyword against your queries. You'll get three groups:

The middle group is the one people overlook.

Google already associates your site with those terms. A better page, clearer title or a few internal links can move them.

My guide to finding low competition keywords goes deeper on mining page-two queries.

Step 5: Count How Many Competitors Rank for Each Term

One competitor ranking for a term is an anecdote.

Three competitors ranking for it is a pattern.

Add a column with the number of competitors in your set that rank in the top 20 for each keyword.

Then sort by that column, not by volume.

Terms at the top have two things going for them:

• Demand is proven. Several sites found it worth targeting, and Google rewards them for it.
• The page type is clearer. If three different sites rank with similar pages, you can see what Google wants.

Terms only one competitor ranks for still deserve a look.

Sometimes that rival found a niche nobody else spotted. Sometimes it's a fluke.

Step 6: Look at the Page That Ranks

Every competitor keyword comes with a ranking URL. Use it.

Open the top few ranking pages for your shortlisted terms and ask:

• Is it a service page, a guide, a location page or a tool?
• Is it a page built for this term, or does it rank by accident?
• How old is it, and does it still answer the query well?

This tells you what kind of page you would need to compete.

A blog post ranking for a service term often means Google sees mixed intent. A service page ranking for a question suggests buyers want a provider, not an essay.

When a competitor ranks with a thin or outdated page, that keyword moves up your list.

If you want to see every page a rival has, not just the ones that rank, use my method for finding all pages on a competitor's website.

Step 7: Filter for Fit and Intent

Now apply the judgement no tool has.

Go through the shortlist and ask two questions of every term.

Do you sell this?

If a keyword is about a service you don't offer, an area you don't cover or a customer you don't want, drop it, however big its volume.

What does the searcher want?

Search the term and look at what ranks. Providers and map packs point to a money page. Guides and videos point to the blog.

When your list runs into hundreds of terms, checking intent by hand gets slow. My walkthrough on search intent classification shows how to label large lists from live results.

What survives this step is a list of terms you could rank for and would want to.

Step 8: Map Each Keyword to One Page

A keyword without a page is just a note.

Give every surviving term one destination:

• An existing page that should target it (and maybe needs improving).
• A planned page you will build.
• A blog topic for informational terms.

Group close variants under the same page. "Boiler repair Leeds" and "boiler repairs in Leeds" don't need two pages.

Never point two pages at the same term. That splits your signals and confuses Google about which page to show, which my guide to avoiding keyword cannibalisation explains.

Then prioritise: weak spots from Step 4 first, shared gaps from Step 5 next, single-competitor niches last.

For the informational terms, check them against what you have already written before anyone drafts. That is the job of a content gap analysis.

Mistakes That Waste Competitor Keyword Research

These are the patterns I see again and again:

• Sorting by volume first. Big terms float to the top whether or not you sell the service.
• One competitor list for every topic. You miss the sites that actually win each cluster.
• Ignoring your own data. You build new pages for terms an existing page could win with a tweak.
• Copying the competitor's page type blindly. Check the whole results page, not just one rival.
• No ranking URL in the export. Without it you can't see what kind of page wins.

Turn the List Into Pages This Month

You don't need every competitor and every keyword to start.

Pick your most profitable service.

Find three competitors for it, export their top-20 keywords, and run Steps 3 to 8 on that one topic.

You'll come out with a handful of terms, each tied to a page, which is more useful than a spreadsheet with thousands of rows.

When you want this across every service and every rival, my competitor analysis automation pulls the rankings, joins them to each competitor's pages and hands you the raw data to filter.

The surviving terms then feed my keyword research automation pipeline, or a strategic keyword research project if you want the plan built for you. Either way, it starts from mapping your competitors properly.