How to find competitors' keywords: a free, step-by-step method

Ahrefs calls knowing your competitors' keywords "the easiest form of keyword research", because someone else has already tested which queries pay off. It is also blunt about the limit: "There is no way to see your competitors' keywords without a tool like Ahrefs." Free methods give you a partial but usable picture. The four steps below work with free tools, and each one says where a paid tool saves real time.

Step 1: Find the sites you compete with in search

Your search competitors are not always your business competitors. Semrush draws the line clearly: SEO competitors are the sites that "appear in search or AI results for the same keywords you target", while business competitors "sell similar products or services to the same audience." A bakery's business rival is the bakery down the street; its search rivals for "how to feed a sourdough starter" are food blogs and baking magazines.

To find yours:

1. Write down five to ten queries that describe what you sell or the topics you want to own.
2. Search each one in a private browser window, in the market you serve, and note every domain in the top ten.
3. Keep the domains that appear for several of your queries. Set aside the giants that rank for everything, such as Wikipedia, Amazon and Reddit; they show you the topic, not a site you can learn from.
4. Compare what is left with your own site's strength. A competitor with a far higher domain authority can rank pages you cannot yet; a site close to yours is the best guide to what your site can win.

Three to five competitors is enough. More adds noise faster than it adds keywords.

Step 2: Pull the keywords they rank for

Read their pages

Start with what each competitor publishes. Titles, H1 headings and URL slugs usually carry the keyword a page targets, and blog categories show which topics the site invests in. Semrush notes that this manual review "won't give you data about the search demand for those terms", but it yields seed keywords. Many sites also publish an XML sitemap, often at /sitemap.xml, or /wp-sitemap.xml on WordPress without an SEO plugin, listing every URL in one place.

Let Google show you the questions around each topic

Search the topics you found. Autocomplete, the People also ask box and the related searches show the longer, more specific phrasings people use, which are often what a competitor's page actually ranks for. A search for site:competitor.com plus a topic lists the pages that site has on it, whether one or twenty.

Check your own Search Console

Search Console is where Google shares real ranking data for free, and it covers only your own site. Its Search performance report "shows how much traffic you're getting from Google Search, including breakdowns by queries, pages, and countries." Sort the queries by impressions and look for the ones where your average position sits between roughly 11 and 30. Google already connects your site to those searches, and the pages above you on page one are, by definition, your competition for them. That is your half of the gap, seen from the inside.

Use a keyword gap tool for the complete list

The full list of a domain's rankings needs a database of search results, which is what the paid tools sell. In Ahrefs, the Organic keywords report shows what one competitor ranks for, and its Competitive Analysis tool shows "all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don't." Semrush's Keyword Gap lets you "compare your domain against up to four competitors": its Missing tab lists keywords all of them rank for and you do not, and its Weak tab lists keywords where every rival outranks you. Semrush offers a seven-day free trial, long enough for a one-off audit of a few competitors.

Step 3: Filter the list down to what you can use

A raw export can run to thousands of rows, and most of them are no use to you. Cut it in this order:

Filter	Keep	Drop
Brand	Generic topics	The competitor's brand and product names, which you are unlikely to rank for
Relevance	Queries your own customers would type	Topics the competitor covers for reasons of its own
Intent	Keywords whose results show the kind of page you can publish	Keywords where Google rewards a format you will not make
Difficulty	Keywords where the ranking pages are within reach of your site	Keywords held by sites far stronger than yours
Overlap	One keyword per topic, as the target	Variants that the same page would answer

Three of these need judgment. Intent is read off the results page, not off the keyword itself; search intent explains how to read it. For difficulty, Ahrefs suggests that a new brand up against an established one filter for keywords with at least 500 monthly searches and a keyword difficulty of 10 or less. For overlap, Ahrefs recommends grouping the export by parent topic first, because keywords that "mean the same or similar things" can be won with one page.

Step 4: Turn the gaps into pages

Before writing anything new, check whether a page you already have could cover the keyword. Semrush's advice is to improve that page first, since "improving an existing page is usually faster than starting from scratch." Ahrefs makes the same point: often the fix is adding sections on the subtopics a competitor covers and you do not.

For the rest, write a short brief per keyword: the query, its intent, what the top pages cover, and what they leave out. Then plan the gaps as a set rather than a queue. Gaps that cluster around one subject belong in one group of linked pages, which is how a site builds topical authority instead of a scatter of unrelated posts; the post on what a content strategy for SEO includes covers taking stock of what you already have. If the gaps repeat one pattern with a single part changing, such as "best X for Y" across many values of Y, you are looking at a programmatic SEO opportunity, and the post on building a programmatic SEO strategy shows how to test whether the pattern deserves pages.

Repeat the research every few months. Competitors keep publishing, rankings move, and a gap you closed can open again.

How Structura handles this

The free keyword generator works from a seed keyword, not a domain, so it cannot list what a competitor ranks for. It fits step 2: enter a topic you found on a competitor's site and it returns 50 related keyword ideas with monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, cost per click and search intent, plus a note on what to publish for each intent. Filter to keywords with a difficulty of 25 or less, select the ones you want and export them as a CSV.

On paid plans, the competitors saved in your site profile feed the keyword research behind every campaign. For each of up to five competitors, Structura reads the keywords it ranks best for, drops the ones your site already ranks for, and marks the rest as gaps. Each candidate is scored for difficulty and intent, and the campaign's keyword list leads with the keywords a site at your strength can win. Before each post is written, the pages currently ranking for its keyword are read, so the draft covers what they cover and fills in what they miss.

What it does not give you is a complete export of any domain's rankings, or of a competitor's ad keywords. For a full gap audit, Ahrefs or Semrush is still the tool.

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