How to find your competitor's best keywords (without any shady tricks)

Let us clear up the fantasy first, because it saves everyone time. You cannot log into a competitor's account and read the exact search terms bringing them customers. That data lives in their private Search Console and analytics, and nobody outside their business can see it. Anyone promising to hand you a rival's real, private numbers is either guessing or lying. Good — now that the shady version is off the table, let us talk about what you honestly can learn, because it is a surprising amount.

Studying competitors is one of the most useful things you can do, and none of it requires anything sneaky. It just requires knowing where to look and being willing to pay attention.

The free, manual approach (start here)

Before you spend a penny, you can reverse-engineer a huge amount just by reading what your competitors have already published in public. This is our first move whenever we study a rival for a local client, and it costs nothing but an hour.

Read their page titles and headings

Open a competitor's website and look at the titles of their pages and the headings inside them. Those are not accidental — a business that understands SEO deliberately puts its target phrases in titles and headings. If a rival plumber has a page titled "Emergency Blocked Drain Service in Cardiff," they are telling you, out loud, a keyword they are chasing. Make a list of every page they have and the phrase each one targets. The shape of a competitor's site map is basically their keyword strategy written down.

Let Google's own boxes reveal the territory

Search the phrases you think your competitor targets and study the results page itself. The autocomplete suggestions, the "People also ask" questions, and the "related searches" at the bottom are all Google telling you what real people type around this topic. If your competitor ranks well, note which of these phrases their pages appear for. This is the same public signal a paid tool starts from — you are just reading it by hand.

Notice the gaps

The most valuable discovery is often what a competitor has not covered. If three rivals all have a "prices" page but none of them answers "how long does the job take," you have found an open door. Answering the questions your competitors ignored is frequently the fastest way onto page one, because you are not fighting anyone for it.

Where a paid tool genuinely helps

Here is the honest limit of the free approach: it tells you what a competitor is trying to rank for, but not which of those phrases are actually working, or which surprise phrases send them traffic they never planned for. Seeing a rival's estimated full keyword list — the phrases they rank for, roughly how much traffic each brings, and how hard each is — requires a paid data tool.

These tools (MySEO's paid tier, or the bigger and pricier Semrush and Ahrefs) do not read anyone's private account. They build their own enormous index by checking Google's results for millions of phrases and recording which sites appear where. Then they let you type in a competitor's website and see an estimate of the phrases they rank for. It is modelled, not exact, but for spotting opportunities it is genuinely powerful and completely above board. It simply automates, at massive scale, the same public reading you were doing by hand.

Whether that is worth paying for depends on how competitive your market is. For a quiet local niche, the free manual method may be all you ever need. For a crowded field where every enquiry is fought over, a tool that surfaces a rival's winning phrases in seconds pays for itself fast. We break down when it is worth it on our pricing page.

Read their reviews, not just their pages

Here is a free source almost everyone overlooks: your competitors' reviews. Read the Google and Facebook reviews on your busiest rivals and notice the exact words customers use to praise or complain. People describe what they were looking for in their own language — "finally found someone who takes on small jobs," "so glad they do evening appointments," "the only place that could fix my vintage frames." Those phrases are pure gold, because they are real customer wording tied to a real need, and they often point at services your competitors are known for that you have never thought to build a page around. Reviews are a keyword list written by the customers themselves, and nobody has to buy anything to read them.

What to actually do with what you find

Finding competitor keywords is pointless if you just copy them. The goal is not to clone a rival — it is to do the same jobs better and to fill the gaps they left. Google has been clear that it rewards genuinely helpful, first-hand content over pages built to chase rankings, as its helpful content guidance spells out. So for each phrase you uncover, ask: can I answer this more honestly, more completely, or more locally than they did? If yes, that is your page.

And keep an eye on your own results while you do it. Your free Google Search Console shows the exact phrases already bringing people to your site — the one keyword list you can see with perfect accuracy. Often the smartest move is not copying a competitor at all, but noticing a phrase you already rank on page two for and pushing it onto page one. More on that in our guide to the four numbers to check every week.

What to do this week

• Pick your two closest competitors and list every page on their sites, noting the keyword each title targets.
• Search three of those phrases and record the "People also ask" and "related searches" they trigger.
• Find one obvious gap — a question all your rivals ignored — and plan an honest page to answer it.
• Open your own Search Console and look for a phrase you already rank on page two for; that is often a faster win than chasing anyone.