How to Conduct a Competitor Keyword Analysis

Last Updated: December 2024

Competitor keywords are keywords that your competitors are targeting in an effort to improve rankings in the search engines, drive traffic, and increase conversions.

Competitor keyword analysis - sometimes called keyword gap analysis – is a process of identifying valuable keywords that your competitors rank highly for, which you don't.

A few important points to consider:
 

• The keywords should be valuable (high-volume, related to your business, and/or likely to convert)

• The keywords should be ones you could rank for, or could rank for better

• Bonus: Comparing two or more competitors often gives you a richer analysis!

The challenge with keyword analysis is that you or your competitors can potentially rank for thousands of keywords, so this type of analysis can be difficult to do manually.

Fortunately, there are easy solutions!

To kick things off, let’s ask the obvious question — Where is my competitor winning? The answer lies in researching your competitor’s keywords. For this research, we'll use Moz's Keyword Explorer, and more specifically the Ranking Keywords feature.
 

1. In the first field, enter your primary competitor’s domain

2. In the second field, enter your domain. Your screen will look something like this:

3. In this Venn diagram, we can see that petcarerx.com ranks for 75.2k keywords, 1800petmeds.com ranks for 44k keywords, and there’s a 16.2k overlap. This means there’s considerable room for keyword discovery for 1-800-Pet-Meds!

4. If we scroll down, we can use the filters to narrow this list down to make it more manageable and practical. Here’s an example of adjusting the Rankings, Difficulty, and Volume filters:

5. We can now see the keywords our competitor is currently ranking for. We found product-related and blog topic keywords where this competitor is winning, and are relevant to our pet pharmacy website:

Getting an aerial view of your competitor’s SERP strengths is a valuable first step. It will give you perspective on where they stand, and possibly give you some ideas on new content to create.

However, if we want more actionable insights, we’ll conduct a keyword gap analysis.

The Moz Keyword Gap tool can help spot relevant and attainable gaps between your site and the competition. This tool filters out branded terms and focuses on attainability - i.e., keywords where your site already ranks in the top 20, but is outranked by your competitors.

1. In the Keyword Gap tool, enter your domain and up to 3 competitors in Keyword Gap directly. Sidenote: If you used True Competitor to identify your competitors, you can click the checkboxes to the left and click Compare Competitors. This will seamlessly carry you over to Keyword Gap.

2. Scroll down to see Competitor Overlap, a (downloadable) visualization of how these subfolders compare to each other in terms of keywords rankings.

3. Scroll further to the Keyword Rankings table and select Keywords to improve from the options.

4. You’ll see a list of keywords where your site ranks in the top 20 positions in the SERP (but you can easily expand this in the filters), but your competitor ranks higher (the winning competitor is indicated by a crown icon).  These keywords are within striking distance!

This list is sorted in descending order by a metric called Traffic Lift. This metric represents your expected gain in traffic if you were to overtake your top competitor’s ranking position.

4. You can also select the following from the table:

• New keyword opportunities - these are keywords for which your competitor ranks, but you don't.

• Winning keywords - these are the keywords for which you rank higher than your competitors

• All ranking keywords - these are all the keywords for which you and your competitors rank

Don’t forget to export the Keywords To Improve to a CSV, and copy and paste the CSV to the Keyword Gap Analysis tab in the SEO Competitor Analysis Template. 

It’s time to talk niche markets again! Similar to identifying competitors by subfolder, we can also analyze keyword gaps by subfolder. This workflow can produce valuable insights, especially if:

• You’re focused on a specific vertical for a brand

• You’re prioritizing a product or service within your organization

• You’ve been assigned to content by funnel stage, such as blog content

Top of funnel content is often educational, and can make your audience become aware of how your brand is the solution to their pain point. Let’s analyze the keyword gaps in a website's top of funnel content. To achieve this, head over to Keyword Gap:

1. Enter your site’s blog subfolder or subdomain

2. Change the dropdown to Subfolder or Subdomain

3. Enter your competitors’ parallel subfolders (or domains, if you’re unsure of where they host top of funnel content)

4. Scroll down to the Keyword Rankings table. 
 

Here we can see a list of relevant and attainable gaps between your site’s blog and the competition’s top of funnel content. Your competitors are outranking you with this list of keywords, and the Traffic Lift metric is an effective metric for prioritizing your blog content!
 

So far, we've explored keywords at the domain and subfolder level, but a keyword gap analysis is also a powerful tool for optimizing individual pages. Why get this granular?

• You’ve been tasked with seasonal products or content

• You have a piece of old content that you want to update or refresh

• Your goal is to increase traffic to specific pages

In these cases, you may want to narrow your focus on specific URLs.

If our goal is to increase rankings for a specific keyword, we’ll compare our competitor’s ranking URL against our ranking URL, and try to unearth the keywords for which the competitor is optimizing their page.

1. Head over to Keyword Gap Analysis.

2. Enter your competitor’s ranking URL(s).

3. Change the dropdown menu to exact page.

4. Repeat for your own ranking URL:

5. Scroll down to Keyword Rankings and select New keyword opportunities.  These are keywords that your competitors' pages are ranking for, but you don't.

In this example, we found quite a few keywords that we’re not targeting, but our competitor is, such as "can dogs eat guacamole" and "is guacamole bad for dogs." By adding these keywords to the page and optimizing for them, we can start to compete for profitable keywords and potentially earn good search traffic.

Next up: How To Do A Competitor SERP Analysis