The short version: Competitor keyword research means pulling the search terms your rivals rank for, sorting them by real business value rather than volume, and going after the gaps they’ve left open rather than the terms they already dominate. Done it takes about three to four hours per competitor the first time, less than an hour on repeat checks. The part nobody tells you is that copying your biggest competitor’s top keywords is usually a losing move, and I’ll explain why further down.
Start with the right competitors, not the obvious ones
Most people start this exercise by typing their own brand name into a tool and looking at whoever Google suggests as a “competitor.” That list is rubbish half the time. It’s built from broad category overlap, not from who’s stealing your customers.
When I rebuilt my own content strategy a couple of years ago, I made this mistake myself. I assumed my competitors were the big-name marketing gurus with huge followings. Turned out my real search competition was a handful of smaller, less famous consultants who’d quietly built out hundreds of long, specific blog posts answering exactly the questions my ideal clients typed into Google at 11pm. Follower count means nothing in search. Ranking pages mean everything.
So the first proper step is to search five to ten of your own most important buyer-intent phrases (not your brand name) and note who shows up on page one, over and over, across different searches. That’s your real competitor list. It’s usually three to six sites, and at least one or two will surprise you.
Step by step: how the research gets done
- Step 1. List your top 5 to 10 buyer-intent search terms (the ones someone types right before they buy or book a call).
- Step 2. Search each one, ignore ads, and write down who appears in positions 1 to 5 more than twice.
- Step 3. Pull each of those sites’ ranking keyword lists. This is where seeing which keywords your competitors rank for without paying becomes useful, because you don’t need an expensive subscription to get a solid first pass.
- Step 4. Filter out branded terms (their company name, product names) since you’ll never rank for those and they clutter the list.
- Step 5. Sort what’s left by relevance to your offer, not by search volume. A 90-search-a-month term that describes exactly what you sell beats a 4,000-search-a-month term that’s only loosely related.
- Step 6. Check which of those terms you already rank for somewhere on page two or three. Those are your quickest wins, sometimes a content refresh moves them up within four to six weeks.
- Step 7. Group the remaining terms into content clusters (a pillar page plus supporting posts) rather than treating each keyword as its own standalone article.
That whole process, done for one main competitor, takes me about three hours including the write-up. For three competitors, budget a full afternoon. It’s tedious the first time and quick every time after because you’re mostly just re-checking the same list for movement.
Free versus paid: what you need to spend
You do not need a £150-a-month tool subscription to start this. A manual pass using Google’s own “People also ask” boxes, autocomplete, and the “searches related to” section at the bottom of results page gives you a useful first list. There’s a full walkthrough of this exact method in how to do keyword research for free without expensive tools, and it’s the method I used for the first eighteen months of rebuilding my own site because I simply didn’t have the budget.
Where paid tools earn their keep is scale and speed, pulling 2,000 ranking keywords for a competitor in ten seconds instead of an hour of manual searching. If you’re doing this for a client or a business with real revenue behind it, a month of a proper rank-tracking tool is worth the £99 or so it costs, just don’t sign up for a year before you know your process works.
The gap matters more than the overlap
Here’s the part most competitor keyword guides skip because it’s a bit deflating: if a well-established site in your niche ranks in position 2 for “best CRM for small business,” and they’ve had that ranking for three years with 200 backlinks propping it up, you writing a better article isn’t going to shift them. Domain strength wins ties. Newer, smaller sites lose head-to-head fights against entrenched ones on competitive short-tail terms almost every time, no matter how good the content is.
So chasing the keywords a big competitor already owns is often just expensive practice, not strategy. The actual value in competitor keyword research isn’t finding what they rank for. It’s finding what they’ve missed, the specific sub-questions, the awkward phrasing, the long-tail variations that get 40 to 150 searches a month that a bigger site never bothered writing because it’s beneath their content team’s attention. Those are winnable in weeks, not years.
This is exactly why long-tail keywords do so much heavy lifting for smaller businesses. A competitor list isn’t a target list, it’s a map of where the gaps are.
A real example: the coaching client and the 340 keywords
I ran this exercise for a business coaching client in early 2025. We pulled the ranking keyword lists for her three closest competitors and ended up with roughly 340 overlapping terms across the three sites. When we filtered out branded terms, terms with under 20 searches a month, and terms with clear informational-only intent that would never lead to a client enquiry, we were left with just 12 keywords worth building content around.
One of those 12 was “how much does a business coach cost for a solopreneur,” a phrase none of her three competitors had touched directly, they all had generic “coaching pricing” pages that didn’t answer the actual question. She wrote one specific 1,800-word post answering exactly that. It ranked on page one within seven weeks and became her second-highest converting page within four months, ahead of pages she’d had live for two years. That’s the whole exercise in one example: 340 keywords down to 12, and one of the 12 outperformed everything.
Rank tracking and what it won’t tell you
Once you’ve built your keyword list and started publishing against the gaps, you need to know if positions are moving, and this is where a lot of people quietly stop checking because the data feels overwhelming. It’s worth knowing upfront what rank tracking can and can’t show you before you rely on it. There’s a good breakdown in how competitor rank tracking works for SEO strategy (and what it won’t tell you), which covers why a ranking jump on its own doesn’t tell you anything about whether the traffic converts.
The short version of that longer point: don’t celebrate a keyword climbing from position 14 to position 6 until you check whether it’s sending you enquiries. Rankings are a proxy metric, not the goal.
Mistakes I see people make constantly
- Copying a competitor’s full keyword list and trying to write for all of it at once, burning six months of content budget on terms with almost no commercial value.
- Ignoring question-based keywords because the volume looks low, when these often convert better than head terms because the searcher is closer to a decision.
- Only checking blog content and missing that a competitor’s service pages, FAQ sections, and even their footer links are ranking for terms worth stealing.
- Doing this once and never again. Rankings shift, competitors publish new content, and a list from eight months ago is stale. Re-run the core check every quarter.
Competitor keyword research also isn’t the whole content picture. It tells you what’s already being searched for in your space, but useful content ideas often come from customer conversations, support tickets, and sales calls, not just from what a rival site ranks for. That broader research process is covered in how to win at content marketing with kickass content research, which is worth doing alongside the keyword work, not instead of it.
And there’s a legal boundary worth knowing before you start pulling data on competitors, particularly if you’re tempted to go beyond public rankings into scraping pricing pages or customer lists. What’s fine to look at and what crosses a line is laid out clearly in what are the legal ways to spy on competitors’ websites, and it’s a shorter list of restrictions than most people assume, but it exists for a reason.
How often to do this
For a small business, a full competitor keyword refresh every three months is enough. Monthly is overkill unless you’re in a fast-moving niche where content gets published daily by rivals, think finance or tech news adjacent spaces. Quarterly gives you enough time to act on what you found last time before you go looking for more.
Frequently asked questions
How many competitors should I research at once?
Three is the sweet spot. One gives you too narrow a view, five or more turns into an overwhelming spreadsheet that never gets acted on. Pick your three closest search rivals, the ones who show up alongside you on page one for your real buyer-intent terms, not the biggest names in your industry.
Do I need a paid tool to do competitor keyword research ?
No. A manual pass using Google’s autocomplete, the “People also ask” box, and related searches gets you a usable list for free. Paid tools save time at scale, pulling thousands of ranking keywords in seconds, but they’re a speed upgrade, not a requirement to get started.
What’s the biggest mistake people make with competitor keywords?
Chasing the exact same head terms an established competitor already dominates. If they’ve held position 1 or 2 for years with hundreds of backlinks, a newer or smaller site publishing one article rarely displaces them. The better move is finding the specific long-tail questions and gaps that competitor never bothered answering.
How long before competitor keyword research shows results?
New pages built around gap keywords with low competition can rank within four to eight weeks. Pages targeting terms your bigger competitors already own can take six months or longer, if they move at all. That’s exactly why prioritising gaps over overlaps matters so much.
Related reading: What Does SEO That Works Look Like in Practice and What Is Competitor Tracking and Why You Should Use It for SEO.
For the bigger picture, see my full guide to SEO.
