How to Find Competitor Keywords (And Steal Their Best Traffic)

Ever feel like your competitors are ranking higher, getting more traffic, and somehow always showing up right where your audience is searching?

Truth is, they’re not guessing their way to the top. They’re using data. Data that you can also access.

Search marketing success isn’t about reinventing the wheel—it’s about understanding what already works and executing it better. 

Here’s everything you need to know about how to find and analyze your competitors’ keywords so you can reverse engineer what’s working and use it to improve your visibility in search engines.

What Are Competitor Keywords?

Competitor keywords are the search terms that your competitors rank for in Google’s search results—both organically (SEO) and through paid ads (PPC). 

SEO Competitor Keywords

These are the search terms your competitors rank for in Google’s unpaid search results. They provide insight into what questions and topics resonate most with their audience.

SEO competitor keywords help:

• Identify content gaps in your strategy
• Spot ranking opportunities
• Understand search intent more effectively

PPC Competitor Keywords

These are the keywords your competitors bid on in Google Ads. If they’re spending money on a keyword, it’s likely converting for them.

PPC competitor keywords help:

• Discover high-intent keywords that drive revenue
• Optimize your bidding strategy
• Find negative keywords to avoid wasted ad spend

1. Identify your true competitors

Before you can analyze competitor keywords, you need to be sure you’re looking at the right competitors. 

Your real competitors on Google aren’t necessarily the businesses you compete with for customers—they’re the websites ranking for the same keywords you want to target.

• Business Competitors: These are companies that sell the same products or services as you. Your customers likely compare them to you before making a purchase.

• Search Competitors: These are websites that rank for your target keywords—but they may not have the same business model. They could be blogs, publishers, SaaS tools, or directories.

Here’s how to find your biggest rivals when it comes to search marketing.

Find competitors that rank for the same keywords as you

If your site already has some SEO performance, you can use its existing keyword rankings to find other websites targeting the same keywords as you. 

These are your direct SEO competitors, as they’re competing for visibility in the same search result pages (SERPs). To find them, go to Ahrefs Site Explorer > Organic Competitors report.

Use the bubble chart to find the competitor bubbles that are:

• Higher than yours (they have more traffic)
• Further to the right than yours (their traffic is worth more than yours)

You can also use the date comparison filter to identify any fast-growing competitors. 

These competitors are upcoming threats in your industry who could try to steal your SEO visibility. The dotted circle in this graph shows their past performance, and the whole circle shows their current performance.

So, look for competitors that have a gap between circles and where the dotted circle is on the left, like this:

Doing this will help you identify the competitors who may be stealing your traffic and those who are finding innovative approaches to gain traction with their content or topic coverage quickly.

Find competitors who get the most visibility for your target keywords

If your site is new or doesn’t have much SEO visibility yet, you can use an existing list of keywords instead. This can come from:

• Your Google Ads strategy
• Existing keyword research you’ve done
• The keywords you’re thinking of targeting in the future

Add the keywords into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and check traffic share by domain to find the top sites getting visibility for your target terms:

2. Use keyword research tools to find top organic competitor keywords

Once you have your list of competitors, finding their organic keywords is very easy.

In Ahrefs Site Explorer, search each competitor and then check out the Organic Keywords report:

The report shows the competitor keywords driving the most traffic at the top of the list.

You can also refine the list using some filters like:

• Keyword: Exclude your competitor’s brand name and any unrelated products, services, or topics they write about.
• Keyword Difficulty: Try setting this to a maximum of 10 to surface the easier keywords you could target.
• Search Volume: Try combining this with the difficulty filter to find keywords with high search demand and low competition.

3. Extract all paid competitor keywords to reverse engineer their ad strategy

Using Ahrefs, you can also find your competitor’s paid keywords:

This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting with Google Ads. Generally, this list indicates the revenue-generating keywords that convert well for your competitors.

You could further refine the list by applying similar filters to the previous step and also these additional ones:

• Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Try setting this to a maximum of whatever amount you’re willing to pay for a single click to your website. This will show you the cheapest keywords to bid on in your industry.
• Ad Title: You can add or remove specific words to refine the list based on your competitor’s specific ad messaging.

4. Find competitor keywords that you don’t rank for at all

If you want to compare your site with your competitors, check out Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis report and set it to “keywords” mode. 

This report is great for:

• Quickly finding keywords that multiple competitors rank for
• Identifying your content gaps against competitors
• Seeing what topics perform the best for all competitors

You can use it to compare yourself to each competitor one at a time, identifying your strengths and weaknesses. This will give you a long list of keywords each competitor ranks for and you don’t.

Or, you can add all competitors at once and condense the list of keywords by looking at the ones that multiple competitors rank pretty well for.

The idea is that if more than one competitor is ranking quite well for the keyword, it’s probably relevant to you, too. It’s a quick way to weed out irrelevant competitor keywords without having to scroll through long lists of keywords.

Best ways to use competitor keywords to improve your strategy

If you’ve followed the process so far, you might be thinking, “Well, now what? How do I use these keywords?”

Gathering the data is useless if you don’t know what to do with it. Here are the best ways you can use the competitor keywords you found to improve your visibility in search engines.

1. Close topic gaps by creating new SEO content

Start by gathering all the relevant competitor keywords you found so far, either from:

• The side-by-side competitor analysis
• The individual organic keyword reports 

Enter the full list of keywords into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. In the Matching Terms report, check out the “Clusters by Parent Topic”:

This is a great starting place to identify topics that your competitors rank well for that may currently be gaps in your strategy.

Analyze the keywords in each cluster and determine if you could create content to rank for those terms. If yes, start planning specific posts or pages you (or your team) can create and publish.

2. Improve your existing content by adding more topical depth

If you already have content about a topic, but your competitors are performing much better than you, this could be a sign that your content isn’t covering the topic as well as theirs does.

In this situation, your best course of action is to improve your existing content by adding more depth to it.

For example, this is a post I updated for a client in September 2022.

Although it had performed reasonably well when it was initially launched, competitors had slowly started to overtake this post by creating more up-to-date and detailed content.

By simply replacing a few sections and answering more questions about the topic, this post’s performance went exponential. Here’s an example of how the post was updated:

Here are some other ideas for how you can improve your existing content to stop competitors from stealing your traffic:

• Expand sections with missing subtopics: Analyze the top-ranking pages for your target keyword. What sections do they have that yours doesn’t? Add FAQs, examples, statistics, or case studies to strengthen your page.
• Integrate semantically related keywords: Use Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer or Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) suggestions to find additional subtopics that align with search intent.
• Improve content structure: If competitors are ranking higher, check if they have clearer headings, bullet points, or tables that make their content easier to digest. Adjust your formatting for better readability and engagement.
• Strengthen internal linking: Ensure your page links to and from other related content on your site. Internal links signal topical authority to search engines and improve user navigation.
• Refresh outdated information: If competitors are ranking with more recent content, add newer data and update stats, references, and examples to keep your content relevant and authoritative.

3. Optimize for featured snippets and SERP features

If competitors are ranking in People Also Ask (PAA) boxes, featured snippets, or image packs, you can reverse engineer their success.

For example, Ahrefs has a nifty filter where you can see the SERP features that show up for each keyword:

You can use this filter in:

• Keywords Explorer to filter your entire keyword list
• Organic Keywords report to filter an individual competitor’s rankings in these features
• Competitive Analysis to compare multiple competitors and their rankings in these features

Once you find the keywords that display such features, it’s just a matter of understanding what the top-ranking sites are doing that you can replicate in your content.

For instance, check if their top-ranking pages use concise answers, bullet points, or tables—Google often favors these formats for snippets.

Also, pay attention to whether they directly answer common search queries in a clear, structured way. Or if they’re using structured data (schema markup) to improve eligibility for SERP features.

4. Find PPC opportunities without wasting budget

Competitor keywords aren’t just useful for SEO—they can also reveal high-value PPC opportunities that help you maximize return on investment while avoiding wasted spend. 

If competitors are bidding on broad, high-cost keywords, you can look for overlooked long-tail variations with better conversion potential. For instance, the cost-per-click on ads for injury and accident lawyers can be quite high:

However, there are also opportunities to find keywords about the same topics that have decent search potential and a significantly lower CPC. Generally, these keywords have common patterns like:

• Inclusion of a location: Like “Manhattan car accident lawyers” having a CPC of 25 cents.
• More specificity: Like “Electrocution accident lawyer” is about a very specific injury type and has lower competition.
• Longer keyword: Like “lawyer for 18 wheeler accident near me” is a long-tail keyword many competitors may not bid on.

You can also spy on your competitors’ ad copy and learn from their messaging. Identify common phrases they use or any weak and generic messaging that you could improve on.

Overall, using competitor keywords for your SEO and PPC strategy is a smart way to stay ahead in your industry and win more traffic from search engines like Google. It also protects you from losing visibility to new and emerging competitors.