“When I Google this keyword, our competitor is outranking us — why? What are we doing about it?” When this question comes up from clients or stakeholders, we definitely don’t want to be caught unaware — not knowing anything about the keyword referenced or its search landscape. We know that the higher we appear in search results, the more likely we are to get a click. And with more SERP features and AI overviews showing up than ever, it’s more critical than ever to try and gain that top spot in the organic results to better your chances of driving traffic.  

In addition to gaining traffic by surpassing your competitors in the SERPs, competitor keyword research can help you gain insight into your own content gaps and improve your overall SEO strategy. 

So now the question becomes — do you know what keywords your competitors are ranking for? If not, have no fear! I’m going to show you how you can find this data, along with a few additional tips and tricks, right in Moz Pro. I’ll cover how to identify your competitors, find their ranking keywords, and analyze their content for additional insights. 

Let’s dive in!

Before we can identify the keywords our competitors are ranking for, we have to first identify who our competitors are in the first place. When investigating who you're competing against for space in the SERP, be sure to consider the following.

1. Your online competitors may be different than your “real life” competitors

This may be particularly true if you have a physical business (e.g. a brick-and-mortar store, a service area business, or any business that meets with customers face-to-face). Investigating and tracking competitors directly in the area of your business should be a component of your strategy but make sure not to neglect your online competitors. Be sure to research what businesses, physical or online-only, are coming up in the search results for your target keywords, industry, and niche. This can help you get a well-rounded picture of your competitive landscape and help you spot competitors you may not have had on your radar.

Pro tip! If you have a local business, you can use Moz Local to track and monitor your rankings, spot competitors in your space, and see who is ranking in Google Maps results

2. Products, services, or verticals may have different competitors

Depending on your business, you may have more than one set of competitors to keep an eye on. For example, if I have a cupcake business that offers mail-order cupcakes and I also offer paid online cooking classes, my competitors for selling my cupcakes may be different from the ones for my cooking classes. I will need to make sure I do research around both to ensure I have a complete understanding of how I am showing up in SERPs for my target keywords.

3. Guessing who your competitors are can lead you down the wrong path, wasting time and money

Don’t just guess who your online competitors are. Not only can this lead to mistargeted content, but also blindspots in your overall SEO strategy. When doing comprehensive competitor keyword analysis, it’s important to make sure you are tracking the right competitors and examining the right SERPs.

4. Be realistic

When considering who your competitors are, make sure you’re being honest with yourself and your team about who you can truly compete against. This means that if you are a smaller business and are seeing large brands like Amazon or Apple in the search results for your keywords, you are not likely to compete with or overtake those competitors in the SERPs. Instead of aiming to be number one in those results, identify the highest-ranking site or page that is similar to your business or brand’s size and authority as a target to aim for.

Pro tip! Curious how your brand stacks up to your competitors? With Moz’s Brand Authority^TM metric, you get a quantitative understanding of your brand strength and salience. You can see your score compared to your top SERP competitors in the Domain Overview tool. 

Finding your True Competitor

The True Competitor tool in Moz Pro makes it easy to track down competitors based on your root domain, subdomain, or subfolder. These options allow you to identify competitors based on previously addressed points such as niche, products, services, verticals, and business type. Let’s look at an example of how this tool works. 

Roger’s Gardens is a nursery in Southern California that has a physical location (including an on-site restaurant on a subdomain of its primary domain), online shopping, class offerings, a blog, and more. Knowing that each of these business elements may have a different set of competitors, I can first enter the subdomain for Farmhouse (Roger’s Garden restaurant) to see the top SERP competitors for this part of their business.

After clicking Find Competitors, I can see in the list of top 25 competitors that there are other restaurants and farms with similar names competing with them in the SERPs. I can also see an Inn and some cuisine-specific sites like findmeglutenfree.com.

Next, let’s try entering the subfolder for their blog to see how these results change. 

Now, we see gardening-specific sites, such as online plant stores, blogs for specific plant types, and general plant guides, included in the Top 25 competitors list.

See how the competitors change dramatically by subdomain and subfolder? This will help keep you on the right track and work smarter. Once you have these lists of competitors, how do you pick which ones to research further? Fortunately, the tool provides a few metrics to help you narrow down your list. 

• Domain Authority (DA)Ⓡ is a Moz proprietary metric on a scale from 1 to 100 that predicts how well a domain will rank in Google based on a machine learning algorithm of link metrics. When looking at this metric for potential competitors, consider sites with a similar DA to yours. Remember that it is a relative metric, so it’s most useful for benchmarking. If my site’s DA is 50, I would not want to compare my performance to a site with a DA of 80.
• The Overlap score is the percentage of keywords we analyzed that you share with a given competitor based on where both of you are ranking in the top 10 search results. A higher percentage indicates that you are competing in more of the same SERPs.
• The Rivalry metric is a score on a scale from 1 to 100 that combines your Domain Authority (DA), your competitor’s DA, keyword overlap, keyword volume, and your rankings to identify your biggest rivals. A higher Rivalry score indicates a bigger adversary.

Your Top 25 competitors table will be sorted by the Rivalry metric by default. So, when selecting competitors to analyze further, I would typically look at sites with a higher Rivalry and higher Overlap that have a Domain Authority similar to mine. 

Looking at the example above for the blog subfolder, this means I would likely analyze provenwinners.com and epicgardening.com because they both have gardening blog content (rather than being just online shopping sites) with overlap in my keywords and a similar DA to mine. 

Pro tip! Dig into more tips and tricks for identifying your competitors in our How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis Guide.

Now that we’ve identified competitors, it’s time to find their ranking keywords. Understanding which keywords your competitor is ranking for — and where they are outranking you — can help you spot gaps in your strategy and identify opportunities for improvement to your existing content. 

Within Moz Pro, we can find our competitor’s keywords with the Keyword Gap tool.

If you used True Competitor to identify your top competitors, you can now select them and click Compare to be taken to the Keyword Gap tool. Alternatively, you can head to Keyword Gap and enter your competitors manually.

Pro tip! Entering your competitors manually is a great option if you have IRL competitors that may not be directly related to your business. For example, a coffee shop may want to research and compare its keywords to the bookstore on the same block to find overlap for niche, local keywords.

The Keyword Gap tool is the perfect place to find keyword opportunities and keywords to improve. After your competitors have been entered (either through True Competitor or via manual entry), the tool will automatically find and bucket the ranking keywords for your site and your competitors in one, easy-to-use view.

First, you’ll see a competitor overlap chart, which uses a Venn diagram to show how the ranking keywords of all the sites overlap. This interactive chart can be updated by clicking the sites to the right, and you can hover over it to see more information. You can also export it as a .png file by clicking the three dots on the top right.

Keywords to improve

Below this handy diagram is the Keyword Rankings table which is where you can really dig into the data and spot some diamonds in the rough. The first view you’ll see in this table is Keywords to improve. This is a list of all the keywords where at least one of your competitors is outranking you and where you are ranking within the top 20 results. These are considered your keywords within striking distance. Use this list to identify pages on your own site that are ranking but may need a little love to boost your rankings. Be sure to watch out for the Traffic Lift metric — this metric is the amount of traffic Moz predicts you can gain by outranking your competitor. 

Let’s quickly look at an example. Here we can see that victrola.com is outranking thesoundofvinyl.us for the keyword “record sizes” and that by outpacing their competitor, thesoundofvinyl.us could see a boost in traffic of up to 274 visits a month. Now if we click the arrow in the rank column, we can see exactly which pages are ranking for this keyword so we’re able to compare them and spot opportunities for improvement to our content. 

Pro tip! Click Analyze SERP to see the other pages ranking for this keyword and additional metrics, which will help you better understand the type of content that’s performing well.

Keyword opportunities

Now that we have a list of keywords we’re competing for already, let’s see how we can find new keyword opportunities. Fortunately, we don’t have to switch tools to accomplish this! All we need to do is select New keyword opportunities from the pre-set filters at the top of the Keyword rankings table in Keyword Gap.

This option will automatically populate a list of keywords where my competitors are ranking, but I am not, making it the perfect place to spot content gaps and opportunities.

Using our vinyl record example, I can see that thesoundofvinyl.us is not currently ranking for “rare vinyl records” or “record cleaning kit” — both of which are products they carry. This may be an opportunity to update the pages associated with those products or to create a new category page for rare vinyls, a blog post on how to care for your records, or a buying guide for these items.

With these filter options, I’m well on my way to building out a list of competitor keywords to evaluate, track, and hopefully start ranking for.

But what if I want to dig a bit deeper? Or what if there is a specific landing page, blog section, or set of product pages I really want to compete with?

Analyzing your competitor’s keywords at the page or subfolder level allows you to spot tangential content ideas and further analyze their overall strategy. Fortunately, the Keyword Gap tool offers the ability to compare ranking keywords and identify opportunities at the page level and subfolder level by simply updating the drop-down selection.

Alternatively, you can head to Explore by Site in Keyword Explorer and enter a page or site to see its ranking keywords, including branded keywords!

Pro tip! Once you identify keywords, add them to a Keyword List to analyze further or to a Moz Pro Campaign to track rankings over time.

At this point, we have a pretty healthy list of keywords to work with, but I want to show you one more trick to further bolster your competitive keyword research. Analyzing what content performs well for your competitors is a great way to see what type of content people are looking for in relation to your industry, products, or services. And the Top Competing Content tool is a great place to really dig into this data.

After entering my domain and my competitors (or by moving over from Keyword Gap), I can see a list of pages from their sites that are outranking me, along with the keywords they rank for, clustered by page. 

By expanding the Top Competing Keywords column, I can see additional information about the keywords the page is ranking for, along with the URL on my site that it is outranking.

I can now use this information to identify additional keywords to target and also review our content side-by-side to spot opportunities for improvement. When reviewing and analyzing competitor content at this stage, keep a few things in mind (outside of standard SEO best practices).

• Keyword targeting and placement — Consider how and where they are using the target keyword you’re working with, how often it’s used, how natural the use feels within the content, and what other variations are being used. Spotting additional keyword use can help you build keyword clusters and open up the possibility of driving additional traffic to your pages.
• Quality and format — How well-written is the content? And what format is it in? Keep an eye out for on-page elements like videos and graphics. Do you have those same elements incorporated into your content? Can they be improved (or added if they are missing)?
• Content gaps — Keep an eye out for gaps in your competitor’s content. Are there any topics or points that are not making that you could add to your own content? Covering gaps in your competitor’s content may be just the thing you need to push you above them in the SERPs! 

Bonus tip! Examine the SERP to find additional context

I can’t resist a good bonus tip so before we wrap up, I want to share another fantastic tool you can use to spot additional competitors you may have missed and to keep an eye on the ever-changing SERP landscape for your target keywords.

Within Explore by Keyword in Keyword Explorer, the SERP Analysis feature will show you the first page of the SERP, including what SERP features are present, website and brand health metrics (Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Brand Authority), and link metrics all in one view. 

If you have a specific keyword (or set of keywords) that is particularly important to your brand, examining the SERP with this tool can help you identify other sites within the space that you may be competing against. You can also use this feature to help you identify possible opportunities to gain SERP features inclusion. 

There you have it! You now have a targeted list of your competitor’s keywords and a few tips for further analyzing their content and spotting opportunities. If you’re looking for additional tips and tricks for performing a comprehensive competitor analysis, I highly recommend checking out our How to Do An SEO Competitor Analysis Guide (which includes a handy downloadable worksheet) for next steps. Now all that’s left to do is get out there and apply what you’ve learned! See you next time.