How to Find New Keyword Opportunities with Competitive Research

Why not turn your competitor’s wins into your playbook?

Competitive SEO keyword research uncovers what keywords they’re finding success with.

Here are the steps to find, analyze, and target those keywords 👇

Benefits of Competitive Keyword Analysis

Before we dig into the how, here are a few words on the benefits of competitive keyword analysis:

1. Your rivals have already done the heavy lifting. Their top keywords are proven to pull organic traffic in your niche. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use what’s already working.
2. Your competitors aren’t doing everything right, though, and that’s to your advantage. Dig into their content strategy, and you’ll find keyword gaps to exploit.
3. Competitive analysis uncovers what’s driving traffic right now, so you can skip the outdated trend and only target what your audience is interested in today, not yesterday.

Step 1: Identifying Top Competitors

You can’t beat your rivals if you don’t know who they are, so step one is zeroing in on the 3-5 websites that are actually kicking goals in your niche. Get this right, and you’ve got a clear target to outmaneuver.

How:

An SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush is the simplest way to identify your closest competitors. I have access to Ahrefs, so I’ll be using it. 

1. Head to Ahrefs Site Explorer, enter the site’s URL, and from the left-hand side navigation menu, select Organic competitors. In this report, Ahrefs will list your closest competitors based on keyword overlap—keywords that both sites are currently targeting.
2. In the Organic competitors report, Ahrefs lists your top 20 competitors. Instead of analyzing them all, I’d suggest focusing on narrowing it to the handful of sites, say 3-5, that match your audience and goals.
3. Scroll down the page until you hit the Top competing domains list. Cast your eye over the Share column. This is the percentage of keywords that your site and a competitor’s site both rank for. By default, Ahrefs orders the list using this percentage as they are your closest competitors. When picking which 3-5 competitors to analyze, this column will help.

Step 2: Analyzing Competitor Keyword Rankings

You’ve got your competitors in your crosshairs, now it’s time to rip open their keyword playbook and see what’s actually driving their traffic. This step will uncover the keywords that they rank for and you don’t, the keywords you rank for and they don’t, and the keywords that you both rank for and are competing for on the SERPs.

How:

1. Okay, back to the Organic competitors report. To each side of the Share column, you’ll see two columns: Common keywords and Target’s keywords. Common keywords are the keywords that both you and your competitor rank for, while Target’s keywords are the keywords your site is ranking for but your competitor isn’t.
2. Click on the number under these columns next to a competitor to see a list of the keywords. Scroll through each list. It will give you a better feel for whether the competitor is worth analyzing further, because the Share percentage isn’t a be-all-and-end-all metric.

Step 3: Uncovering Content Gaps

Once you’ve taken a moment to cast your eye over the common keywords that both you and your competitors rank for, it’s time to uncover which keywords they rank for but you don’t. This is known as a content gap. A gap in your content that you can fill to broaden the keywords you rank for, and hopefully outcompete your competitors with.

How:

1. Click on the number next to a competitor under the Competitor’s keywords column. This will open the Content Gap report.
2. And here’s the list. For our top competitor, they rank for over 4.5K keywords that we have either not targeted or have written content on, but it isn’t ranking.

Step 4: Evaluating Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume

You’ve got a pile of keywords from your competitors’ playbook, but not all of them are worth the fight. Some are a straight-up waste of your time. This step’s about sizing up the competition, weighing your odds, and picking battles you can actually win with the resources you’ve got, whether that’s your own know-how or a writer who can crush it.

How:

1. Filter for keywords relevant to your goals. Set it to show high-volume terms (like 500+ searches) with low keyword difficulty (say, under 30) that match your content goals, so you’re not chasing irrelevant or overly competitive keywords.
2. Pick the keywords that you feel you’ve got the edge, whether it’s your deep industry knowledge, a unique angle, or a writer who’ll bury the competition with killer content.
3. Once you’ve landed on a list of keywords you’re happy with, export that CSV with all the goods—volume, positions, the works—so you’ve got a hit list ready to turn into content that kicks butt.

Step 5: Estimating Traffic Potential

Search volume’s a nice little number, but it’s not the whole story when you’re trying to figure out how much traffic a keyword can actually deliver. The goal here is to gauge the real organic traffic each keyword could bring to your site because ranking is pointless if it doesn’t pull clicks.

How:

1. Click a keyword from your filtered list to jump into the Keywords Explorer’s Overview report, and check the Traffic Potential stat. It shows the total organic traffic the #1 page gets from all its keywords, not just the one you’re eyeing.
2. That’s not the full story, though. Be sure to factor in SERP features. Peek at Google yourself to spot stuff like featured snippets, image packs, or “People Also Ask” boxes that could siphon clicks away. If the top spot’s only snagging 20% of the traffic, adjust your expectations and weigh if it’s still worth the fight.

Step 6: Prioritizing Keyword Opportunities

Step six involves ranking the keywords you’ve uncovered by what’s worth your time and what you can actually pull off. Sort the winners from the losers based on real value and how fast you can make them pay off.

You’re looking to snag quick wins that boost traffic now while planting seeds for the big, hairy terms that’ll take some elbow grease to crack because good content strategies involve playing both the short and long game.

How:

1. Score keywords based on volume, difficulty, and relevance to your goals. You could slap a number on each, say 1-3. One is bad, two is okay, and three is great. High volume gets a 3, low difficulty a 3, and dead-on relevance a 3. Add them up to see what’s hot and what’s not, so you’re not swinging blind.
2. Grab the low-hanging fruit (keyword difficulty under 30, volume over 500) for fast traffic spikes, then earmark the high-value keywords (tougher to rank but gold for your niche) for the slow burn.
3. Create a shortlist of the top 10-20 keywords to target first. Whittle it down to the best of the bunch, the ones that’ll move the needle soonest or pay off the biggest, and lock them in as your hit list.

Step 7: Organizing Keywords by Search Intent

You’ve got a killer list of keywords, but if you don’t sort them by what your audience actually wants, you’re just throwing darts in the dark and hoping for a bullseye. The objective here is to group those keywords by search intent, figuring out if they’re looking to learn, navigate, shop, or buy. With that clear, you can plan content that hits them where it hurts and keeps your clients happy.

How:

1. Split your keywords into four buckets: informational (they want answers, like “how to fix a leaky faucet”), navigational (they’re hunting a specific site, like “Loganix blog”), commercial (they’re researching, like “best SEO tools”), and transactional (they’re ready to buy, like “buy Ahrefs subscription”).
2. Use Ahrefs to confirm intent. Head back to the Keywords Explorer’s Overview report and from the left-hand side menu, click on the Matching terms report. From here, you’ll see the keyword in question, plus a bunch of related keywords. Look for the Intents column. Under it will be listed one of four letters: I for information, N for navigational, C for Commercial, and T for Transactional.
3. Fire up Google Sheets or Excel, dump in your keywords, tag each with its intent, and add a priority column (high, medium, low) based on your scoring from Step 6. Now you’ve got a battle plan you can actually use.

Step 8: Mapping Keywords to Content Plan

Let’s put your mapped keywords to work by creating a content plan around them. The focus here is aligning those keywords with what you’ve already got on your site that needs a kick in the behind, while also spotting the gaps where new content can step in and steal the show.

How:

1. Scan your site, find the pages that are close but not quite nailing it, and pair them with keywords from your list that fit their vibe. Tweak titles, headers, and content to make them rank harder.
2. Spot the keywords with no home, then decide if they need a blog post or a landing page, and work out what’ll hit the intent and outdo the competition.
3. Plan out a schedule by knocking out quick fixes on existing pages in, let’s say, week one, draft new content by week three, and have it live by month’s end.

Psst! This is a quick overview. If you want to learn how to do keyword mapping from start to finish, including how AI tools can do most of the hard work for you, head over to our keyword mapping guide.

Step 9: Measuring Keyword Performance Over Time

Last step: measuring performance. The goal here is to track your success over time, see which keywords are pulling their weight, and refine your approach so you’re not wasting effort on tactics that don’t work.

How:

1. Monitor rankings with tools like Ahrefs Rank Tracker or Semrush Position Tracking. Set up your keywords in one of these bad boys, check daily or weekly updates, and watch how your positions shift.
2. Check traffic and engagement in Google Analytics, pull up sessions to see raw traffic numbers, and peek at bounce rate to gauge if visitors stick around or bolt.
3. Adjust targeting based on performance by sorting your keywords by what’s killing it (high traffic, low bounce) and what’s flopping (stagnant ranks, no clicks), then pump resources into the winners and rework the weaklings with better content or intent alignment.

Conclusion and Next Steps

From spotting your rivals to mapping out a content plan and tracking what sticks, you’ve now got the playbook for solid SEO keyword research.

But let’s be real: if you’re juggling a dozen clients or just want this done faster and smarter, you don’t have to go it alone.

Loganix’s keyword research service takes this exact process—competitive analysis, intent mapping, the works—and hands you a ready-to-roll strategy without the late-night coffee runs.

👉 Head over to our keyword research service page and let’s get your keywords crushing it. 👈