Competition Keywords: How to Turn Your Rivals’ Traffic Into Yours

Competition keywords are search terms where your competitors already rank and your potential customers are already searching. Targeting them strategically means you are not guessing at demand, you are stepping into a market that someone else has already proven exists.

The logic is straightforward: if a competitor is ranking on page one for a term that describes what you sell, that ranking is evidence of commercial intent. The question is not whether to go after those terms. The question is which ones are worth the fight, and how to approach them without wasting months on keywords you cannot realistically win.

Why Competitor Keywords Matter More Than You Might Think

Early in my career, I was obsessed with the bottom of the funnel. Capture existing intent, drive conversions, report the numbers. It felt efficient. It felt measurable. What I missed for longer than I would like to admit was that most of what I was capturing was going to happen anyway. The person had already decided they wanted the product. I was just there when they typed it in.

Competition keyword strategy is different. Done properly, it is not just about capturing existing demand. It is about inserting your brand into moments where someone is actively evaluating options. That is a different kind of opportunity, and a more commercially interesting one.

When someone searches for a competitor by name, or for a category term where your competitor dominates, they are not necessarily loyal. They are looking. That moment of looking is where you can change the outcome. The challenge is showing up with something worth reading, not just a page that technically ranks.

If you are building a go-to-market strategy that depends on organic search as a channel, competition keyword analysis should sit near the top of your research process. There is more context on how this fits into broader growth planning in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub on The Marketing Juice.

What Types of Competition Keywords Actually Exist?

Before you start pulling data, it helps to be clear on what you are actually looking at. Competition keywords fall into a few distinct categories, and they require different approaches.

Branded competitor terms. These are searches for a competitor’s name, product, or service. “Salesforce CRM”, “HubSpot pricing”, “Mailchimp alternatives”. The searcher knows who they are looking for. Your job here is to be a credible alternative in their peripheral vision, not to pretend you are them.

Category terms your competitors dominate. These are generic terms where one or two players have built strong rankings over time. “Email marketing software”, “project management tool”, “B2B lead generation”. These are often the highest-volume terms in a category, and also the hardest to crack if you are starting from behind.

Comparison and alternative terms. Searches like “[Competitor] vs [Your Brand]” or “[Competitor] alternatives” are among the highest-converting in any category. The person searching already has one foot out of the door. They want to know what else is out there. If you are not ranking for these, you are leaving a significant amount of consideration-stage traffic on the table.

Long-tail terms competitors rank for but do not own. This is often where the real opportunity sits. A competitor might rank on page two for a specific use-case term because their page was not built to serve it. A focused piece of content from you can outrank them on that specific query even if their overall domain authority is higher.

How to Find the Keywords Your Competitors Are Ranking For

The mechanics of this are not complicated. Most SEO tools will give you a competitor’s organic keyword profile if you put their domain in. What matters is what you do with that data once you have it.

Start by identifying your three to five closest competitors. Not aspirational competitors, not the market leaders you wish you were competing with. The ones who are actually showing up in the same searches, in the same geography, for the same buyer. When I was running an agency, we would sometimes see clients define their competitive set based on who they admired rather than who they were actually losing deals to. That is a research bias that will send your keyword strategy in the wrong direction from the start.

Once you have your competitor list, pull their organic keyword rankings through a tool like SEMrush. You are looking for keywords where they rank in positions one through twenty, where the search intent is commercial or informational with commercial downstream value, and where your own domain does not currently rank. That gap is your opportunity set.

Filter that list by keyword difficulty relative to your domain authority. There is no point targeting a keyword with a difficulty score of 80 if your domain authority is 25. You will spend months producing content that never moves. Prioritise terms where the difficulty is within reach and the volume is sufficient to justify the effort. A keyword driving 200 searches per month with a conversion rate of two percent is worth more than a keyword driving 5,000 searches with no commercial intent behind it.

The SEMrush guide to market penetration is worth reading alongside this kind of analysis. It frames the question of where to compete in terms that go beyond keyword volume, which is a useful corrective if you find yourself chasing traffic for its own sake.

The Difference Between Ranking and Winning

I have judged the Effie Awards, which means I have spent time evaluating campaigns against business outcomes rather than just creative merit. One thing that becomes obvious in that context is how often marketing activity is confused with marketing effectiveness. Ranking on page one for a competition keyword is activity. Converting that ranking into pipeline is effectiveness.

The gap between the two is where most competition keyword strategies fall apart. A brand will identify that a competitor ranks for “best CRM for small business”, produce a page targeting that term, get it to page one, and then wonder why it is not driving revenue. The problem is usually the content itself. The page was built to rank, not to serve the searcher.

When someone searches for a term where your competitor is the incumbent, they are not necessarily looking for your competitor. They are looking for an answer. If your page gives them a better answer than your competitor’s page does, you will rank higher and convert better. If your page is a thin comparison table with a biased conclusion, you will rank briefly and convert poorly.

This is where the content quality question becomes commercially important. The best competition keyword pages are genuinely useful. They acknowledge what the competitor does well. They are honest about trade-offs. They give the reader enough information to make a real decision. That kind of content earns trust, and trust is what converts.

Vidyard’s research on why go-to-market feels harder than it used to touches on something related: buyers are doing more independent research before they engage with sales. That research phase is exactly where competition keyword content can do its work. If your content is there, and it is good, you are part of the consideration set before a sales conversation even starts.

Branded Competitor Keywords: The Most Mishandled Opportunity in SEO

Bidding on a competitor’s brand name in paid search is a well-established tactic. Ranking organically for those terms is harder but more durable. The most common approach is to create content around “[Competitor] alternatives” or “[Competitor] vs [Your Brand]” queries.

Done badly, this content reads like a sales pitch wearing a thin disguise. Done well, it is one of the highest-converting content types you can produce, because the person searching for it has already identified a problem with the incumbent. They are looking for permission to switch.

I have seen this play out in agency pitches more times than I can count. A prospect comes in having used a competitor’s tool or agency for two years. They are not happy, but they are not sure if the grass is actually greener. The right content for that moment is not a feature comparison. It is an honest assessment of when the competitor is the right choice and when they are not. If you are genuinely the better fit for a specific use case, that honesty will do more work than any amount of promotional copy.

There is also a practical SEO point here. Google’s quality guidelines reward pages that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. A page that presents a fair, nuanced comparison is more likely to earn backlinks and engagement signals than a page that reads like a one-sided takedown. The algorithm and the reader want the same thing in this case, which is a useful alignment.

How to Prioritise Which Competition Keywords to Go After First

Once you have a list of competitor keywords, you need a framework for deciding where to start. Here is how I would approach it.

Commercial intent first. Sort your list by how close the keyword is to a purchase decision. “Best [category] software” is closer than “[category] software overview”. Comparison terms are closer still. Start with the terms where a ranking translates most directly into a conversation or a conversion.

Difficulty relative to your current authority. Be honest about where you are starting from. If your domain is relatively new or has a thin backlink profile, targeting keywords with a difficulty above 50 is likely to be a slow burn. Pick the terms where you can realistically compete in the next six to twelve months, not the terms you aspire to own in three years.

Gaps in competitor content quality. This is the most underused filter. Pull up the pages your competitors are ranking with. Read them. Are they actually good? Are they current? Do they answer the question the searcher is asking, or do they answer the question the competitor wanted to answer? If the ranking page is mediocre, that is a real opportunity. If it is excellent, you need to think carefully about whether you can produce something meaningfully better.

Volume thresholds that justify the effort. Content production costs time and money. A keyword driving fewer than 50 searches per month is probably not worth a standalone piece of content unless it is extremely high-value commercially. Set a minimum volume threshold that makes sense for your category and stick to it.

Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models makes a point that applies here: growth strategy requires choices about where to concentrate effort, not just a list of everything you could theoretically do. The same discipline applies to keyword prioritisation.

What Competition Keywords Tell You Beyond SEO

There is a version of this analysis that stops at “here are the keywords we should target”. That is useful but incomplete. The more interesting output from competitor keyword research is what it tells you about the market.

Which problems are people searching for help with? Which competitor features are generating enough curiosity to drive search volume? Which use cases are underserved by the current content landscape? These are strategic questions, not just SEO questions. The answers should feed into your product positioning, your content strategy, and your go-to-market messaging.

When I was scaling an agency from 20 to just over 100 people, one of the things that consistently drove new business was knowing the competitive landscape better than the clients did. Not in an aggressive way, but in a way that made us useful. We could tell a client which of their competitors was investing heavily in search, which categories were becoming more contested, and where there was still white space. That kind of intelligence came from the same analytical process that underpins competition keyword research.

Vidyard’s Future Revenue Report highlights how much pipeline potential goes untapped when go-to-market teams focus only on channels they already own. Organic search, and specifically competition keyword strategy, is one of the channels most commonly underinvested relative to its potential return.

BCG’s analysis of go-to-market strategy in evolving markets makes a related point about the importance of understanding where demand is shifting, not just where it currently sits. Competition keyword data is a live signal of shifting demand. The terms your competitors are ranking for today reflect where buyer attention is moving, and that is worth paying attention to beyond the immediate ranking opportunity.

The Mistakes That Make Competition Keyword Strategies Fail

There are a few patterns I have seen repeatedly that undermine otherwise sound keyword strategies.

Targeting keywords based on volume alone. High-volume keywords are attractive. They are also usually the most contested, the hardest to rank for, and the least likely to convert if you do rank. Volume is one input, not the conclusion.

Producing content that serves the ranking, not the reader. Google has become significantly better at identifying pages that are optimised for search engines rather than humans. If your competition keyword content is thin, keyword-stuffed, or structured around what you think the algorithm wants rather than what the searcher needs, it will underperform. Often it will not rank at all.

Treating it as a one-time project. Keyword landscapes shift. Competitors produce new content. Rankings change. A competition keyword analysis done once and filed away is not a strategy. It is a snapshot. The most effective teams revisit their competitor keyword data quarterly and adjust their content priorities accordingly.

Ignoring the conversion layer. Getting traffic to a competition keyword page is only half the job. What happens when the visitor arrives? Is there a clear next step? Is there a reason to engage further? A page that ranks but does not convert is a cost, not an asset. Build the conversion logic into the page from the start, not as an afterthought.

Conflating search intent across keyword types. Someone searching “[Competitor] pricing” wants pricing information. Someone searching “[Competitor] alternatives” wants options. Someone searching “[Competitor] review” wants an honest assessment. These are different intents and they require different content. Serving the wrong content to the right keyword is one of the most common reasons competition keyword pages underperform.

There is broader context on how competition keyword strategy connects to overall growth planning in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub. If you are building out a full channel strategy, the thinking there will help frame where organic search fits relative to paid, social, and direct channels.

Building a Competition Keyword Strategy That Actually Holds Up

The early stages of any keyword strategy involve a lot of data and not much clarity. The discipline is in the filtering. Start with a clear definition of your competitive set. Pull their keyword data. Apply commercial intent, difficulty, and content quality filters. Prioritise ruthlessly. Produce content that is genuinely better than what currently ranks. Measure what happens. Iterate.

That process sounds simple because it is. The difficulty is in the execution, specifically in the willingness to produce content that is honest, specific, and built for the reader rather than the algorithm. That is harder than it sounds, especially when the instinct is to use every piece of content as a sales opportunity.

I think about it like the clothes shop analogy I have used with clients for years. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who just walks past the window. Competition keyword content is the equivalent of getting someone through the door and into the fitting room. You are not closing the sale in that moment. You are creating the conditions where a sale becomes possible. That is a different kind of value, but it is real value, and it compounds over time in a way that most paid channels do not.

BCG’s work on go-to-market launch strategy emphasises the importance of sequencing, knowing which moves to make first and which to defer. The same logic applies here. Start with the competition keywords where you have the best chance of ranking and the clearest commercial payoff. Build from there. Do not try to win every keyword fight simultaneously.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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