Competitor keyword research: a method that produces pages worth building

Business competitors and search competitors overlap but are not the same. Search your five most important queries and note which domains appear repeatedly: they may include publishers, review sites, and tools outside your category. Use three to eight domains that rank for queries your buyers use. For this site we pulled ranked keywords for eight domains, including SEOmatic, Machined, Byword, Frase, AirOps, Surfer, Scalenut, and Profound.

Most suites offer a keyword gap or content gap report that does this automatically.

Remove keywords where the competitor ranks only for its own brand. Remove terms outside your product's scope, even if the volume is large. Remove keywords already covered by one of your pages; those are optimisation tasks, not new pages. Check intent: a keyword showing tool pages in the SERP needs a tool, one showing lists needs a comparison. Then weigh difficulty against your site's authority. In our own research, only about a third of the competitor keyword rows we pulled were relevant to our product at all, and far fewer became pages.

Several gap keywords often share one intent: 'geo vs seo', 'seo vs geo', and 'difference between geo and seo' belong on one page. A quick test is to compare the top results for each pair: if they share several of the same ranking URLs, Google treats them as the same intent. Building one page per intent avoids cannibalising yourself.

Before writing, note why your page deserves to outrank the competitor's: first-hand data, a working tool, a clearer answer, or more honest comparisons. If you cannot name a reason, the keyword is not ready. Our free SEO competitor analysis and content gap finder run lighter versions of these steps. SerionFlow is the wrong tool if you only need a one-off gap check or a keyword database; a suite's gap report is cheaper for that.