How to See Which Keywords Your Competitors Rank For Without Paying a Penny

The short version: you can see a solid chunk of what your competitors rank for using nothing but Google search operators, their own sitemap, and a handful of free tool tiers, but you will never get the full picture without paying eventually because that limit is the entire business model of every keyword tool that exists. What you get for free is enough to make smart content decisions this week. It is not enough to run a serious SEO strategy forever.

Why this works even though the "proper" tools want you to think it doesn't

Every paid SEO tool, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, they all want you to believe that competitor keyword research needs a database of trillions of backlinks and a monthly subscription. Some of that is true. But most small business owners are not trying to build a full keyword map of a competitor with two million pages. You are trying to answer one question: what is this specific competitor doing that is working, and can I do a version of it too?

For that question, free tools and a bit of manual digging get you further than people admit. I have done this exercise for clients who could not afford a £199 a month tool, and the free version of the research still turned up real, usable keyword gaps. Not thousands of them. Usually twenty to thirty solid ones in an evening. That is the honest ceiling, and anyone telling you free tools will hand you a full competitor keyword database is selling you something.

Start with the sitemap, not a tool

This is the step almost every "free keyword research" article skips, and it is the single most useful thing you can do in ten minutes. Every website with basic SEO housekeeping has a sitemap.xml file, usually at competitorname.com/sitemap.xml. Open it in your browser.

What you get back is a raw list of every URL on the site, often broken into sub-sitemaps for blog posts, product pages, and category pages. Read the URL slugs. A URL like /guides/self-employed-tax-return-checklist tells you exactly what keyword that page is built to target, no tool required. I did this for a client in the freelancer accounting software space, checking the sitemap of a much bigger competitor, and found an entire content silo under a URL pattern targeting "self-employed" guides that our client had never touched. We built out nine similar posts over the following four months. Six of them ranked on page one within twelve weeks, three of them for terms with genuine monthly search volume, not vanity long tail.

Steps:

• Go to competitorname.com/sitemap.xml (try /sitemap_index.xml if that fails)
• Open the blog or content sub-sitemap
• Scan every URL slug and note the pattern (guides, comparisons, "vs" pages, "how to" posts)
• Paste the most promising slugs into Google to see current ranking position and what else shows up
• Build a simple spreadsheet: URL, apparent target keyword, content type, your gap or not

Google search operators do most of the real work

You do not need a login for this. Open Google and type:

• site:competitorname.com to see every indexed page, roughly ordered by how Google weighs relevance
• site:competitorname.com intitle:"how to" to isolate their how-to content and see which topics they have covered
• site:competitorname.com inurl:blog "checklist" to find content by format
• "competitorname" -site:competitorname.com to see who is talking about them and linking to them, which often surfaces the keywords other sites associate with their brand

Then take their page titles, the exact wording in the blue link, and search them directly in a fresh incognito window. Look at what else ranks around them, what the "People also ask" boxes surface, and what related searches appear at the bottom of the page. That box at the bottom of Google results is doing free keyword research for you every single time you search anything.

Free tool tiers, used, without the marketing spin

Every major paid tool gives away a limited free tier because it wants you hooked before you hit the wall. Use that on purpose:

• SEMrush's free account gives you around 10 searches a day. Use them on your top three competitors, one search each, rotate daily rather than burning them all on one domain.
• Ubersuggest's free tier gives a handful of domain overview searches a day before it asks you to pay. Enough to spot their top ten ranking pages by traffic estimate.
• Ahrefs' free Keyword Generator tool (not their paid platform) will show you keyword ideas and rough volume for a term you type in, capped at around 100 to 150 suggestions. It will not show you a competitor's ranking list directly, but you can feed it their main topics and see the surrounding keyword cluster.
• Google Trends is completely free with no cap, and it is underused for this. Compare your brand name against a competitor's and watch which one spikes around which season or launch, that tells you what content they are pushing and when.
• The Keyword Surfer Chrome extension shows estimated monthly search volume right inside Google's results page for free, with no account needed. Search a competitor's exact page title and you get a rough volume estimate on the spot.

None of these give you a clean exportable list of "every keyword competitor X ranks for." That feature is what you are paying for when you eventually pay. What the free tiers give you is enough confirmation, ten data points here, five there, to build a picture without a card number.

The uncomfortable bit nobody wants to say out loud

Here is the truth most posts on this topic dance around: the free version of this research does not scale, and it is not meant to. You are not "beating" the SEO tool companies by finding a workaround. You are doing manual detective work that a £99 a month tool would do in four minutes across ten thousand keywords. That is fine for a solo business owner doing this once a quarter. It stops being fine the moment you are managing content for five clients or trying to track thirty competitor keywords weekly, because at that point the hours you burn manually checking sitemaps and rotating free searches cost more than the subscription would.

I also want to be honest about something else: half of what you "discover" doing this free research, you already suspected. Reading a competitor's blog headlines for twenty minutes tells a marketer with any instinct roughly what they are targeting. The tools, free or paid, mostly confirm your hunch and give you a number to put next to it. That is useful, it is just not the magic revelation the "10 free tools" listicles promise.

Reading their content structure, not just their keywords

A keyword without context is close to useless. Once you have a list of pages a competitor ranks for, read the actual page. Note the word count, the number of headers, whether they answer the question in the first fifty words or bury it. I once pulled up a competitor's top ranking guide expecting a heavily optimised 3,000 word monster and found a scrappy 900 word post from 2019 that had simply never been touched since. That told me the topic was winnable with a better, more current piece, not that I needed to out-word them. Volume of content is a lazy proxy for quality, and Google increasingly does not reward it on its own.

If you want to check who is linking to that page and giving it authority, that is a separate but related exercise, and it is worth doing. I have written a full walkthrough on how to run a backlink search for a competitor without losing a week to it, because keyword gaps and link gaps usually point at the same underlying opportunity.

Do not stop at Google

YouTube's search bar autocompletes based on real search volume too, and it is completely free to use. Type your competitor's main topic into YouTube search and watch what it suggests. If you run video content at all, I cover how to turn that into a proper targeting strategy in the piece on setting up YouTube channel keywords.

Instagram and Facebook searches work the same way, and they surface a different flavour of keyword, more conversational, more question-based, closer to how real customers phrase things rather than how an SEO tool categorises them. If you are already active in Facebook groups, watching what members ask inside a competitor's or adjacent group is one of the most underrated free keyword sources there is, and I go into the wider strategy of using groups for growth in how to grow a Facebook group organically. On Instagram, checking which hashtags a competitor consistently uses and ranks under is another free layer, and getting that organised so it is usable is covered in the guide on sorting Instagram hashtags effectively.

Turning the list into something you use

A spreadsheet of forty competitor keywords does nothing sitting in a Google Sheet. Rank them by three things: how directly relevant the keyword is to what you sell, how weak the current top-ranking content is when you read it, and how recently that content was updated. A keyword with decent search interest sitting under a three-year-old, thin, poorly formatted page is your best target regardless of what any tool's "difficulty score" says. Difficulty scores are estimates built on backlink counts, they say nothing about whether the content answers the question well.

Once ranked, pick your top five and write better, more current, more specific answers than what is currently ranking. That is the whole strategy. Everything before this point, the sitemaps, the operators, the free tiers, exists purely to help you find those five topics faster than reading a competitor's entire site cover to cover.

When free stops being enough

There is a point where this stops being a smart use of an evening and starts being a bad use of your time. If you are doing this monthly across multiple competitors, if you need historical ranking data to see trends rather than a snapshot, or if you need to track hundreds of keywords rather than dozens, the free workaround costs you more hours than a paid tool costs in money. That is worth admitting rather than pretending the free route scales forever. If you would rather have someone map this out, build the strategy, and run it alongside the rest of your marketing, that is exactly the kind of work I do with clients through AI consultant for small business support, and it is worth reading what that costs before you decide either way.

And on the question of which tool to eventually pick when you do pay, that decision matters less than most people think. I wrote a longer piece on which keyword research tools are most accurate, and why that is the wrong question, because accuracy is not really the thing that determines whether the research helps your business. Using what you find is the thing that matters.

Related: accounting: guidelines and how to pitch.

Frequently asked questions

Can I really see a competitor's ranking keywords without any paid tool at all?

Yes, to a meaningful degree. Checking their sitemap.xml, using Google search operators like site: and intitle:, and rotating the free daily searches on tools like SEMrush and Ubersuggest will give you twenty to thirty real, usable keyword insights in an evening. You will not get their full ranking database, no free method gives you that.

What is the single fastest free method to start with?

Open competitorname.com/sitemap.xml directly in your browser. It takes under two minutes and gives you a raw list of every page they have built, which tells you their content strategy in URL slugs alone, before you touch a single tool.

Do free keyword tools give accurate search volume numbers?

They give estimates, and the estimates vary between tools, sometimes by a lot. Treat the number as a rough signal of scale, small versus large, rather than a precise figure. What matters more for decision making is the relative comparison between keywords, not the exact digit.

How often should I redo this research?

For most small businesses, once a quarter is enough to catch new content a competitor has published and spot fresh gaps. Doing it weekly with free tools alone is not a good use of time, that is the point where paid tools with tracking dashboards start earning their cost.