How to Analyze Competitors' Keywords and Find Content Gaps
Practice4 minInnovialabs editorial team
In short
Find the sites that actually rank for your target queries, export their keywords, compare them with yours and turn the missing topics into a plan sorted by business value.
The short answer
Competitor keyword analysis compares two lists: the queries people use to find them and the queries people use to find you. The difference is your content gap — topics with real demand where you have no page.
The process fits into four steps:
- Identify your real search competitors.
- Collect their ranking keywords.
- Compare with your own and find the gaps.
- Filter and prioritize.
Step 1. Find search competitors, not market competitors
A business rival and a search rival are not the same thing. The company you compete with for clients may get almost no organic traffic, while the top results are taken by aggregators, blogs and directories.
How to find the ones that actually stand in your way:
- Pick 10–20 queries that matter for your business.
- Check Google and Yandex results for each one (in your region, in incognito mode).
- Write down the domains that appear most often.
Domains that repeat across many queries are your search competitors. Three to five sites are usually enough. If your business is local, compare results for your city specifically — they can differ a lot from the national ones.
Step 2. Collect their keywords
Data sources:
- SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Serpstat and similar) show which queries a domain or a specific URL is visible for.
- Manual review of the competitor's site structure: sections, categories, blog posts. It reveals topics that tools can miss, especially in smaller markets.
- Your own Search Console and Yandex Webmaster — to get an honest list of your current queries.
Export keywords per page, not only per domain. That way you see which page covers which topic.
Step 3. Find the gaps
Put all data in one table and split queries into groups:
| Group | Meaning | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Competitors rank, you don't | Pure gap | Create a new page |
| Everyone ranks, you're lower | Weak page | Improve the existing one |
| Only you rank | Your advantage | Maintain it |
| Only one competitor ranks | Possibly a niche topic | Check manually |
The most reliable gaps are queries where several competitors rank at once. That confirms the topic matters to the audience and that search engines see it as relevant for sites like yours.
Step 4. Prioritize
The gap list is almost always long. Don't try to close everything at once — score each topic on a few criteria:
- Business fit. Does the query lead to your product or service?
- Intent. Does the person want to buy, compare or just learn?
- Difficulty. How strong are the pages currently in the top results?
- Demand. Is there real volume, especially in your region?
- Effort. Do you need a new article, a landing page, or just an extra section?
A simple approach is to score each criterion from 1 to 3 and sort by the total. Topics with strong commercial intent and manageable competition rise to the top.
Common mistakes
- Analyzing the wrong competitors — big brands that win on domain authority rather than content.
- Copying article structure. A gap tells you what to write about, not how. Your page should be more useful, not similar.
- Creating one page per keyword. Group close queries into a cluster, otherwise your pages will compete with each other.
- Ignoring intent. If the top results for a query are all category pages, a blog post probably won't get there.
- Doing it once. Search results change, so repeat the analysis every few months.