Analyzing Your Competitors for $7

You can also analyze your competitors and steal their keywords with your Ahrefs trial.

Enter a competitor’s domain into Site Explorer, then go to Organic Search > Top Pages

Here you will see which of your competitor's pages are attracting the most organic search traffic.

You’ll also see the top keyword that page ranks for, along with the search volume for that keyword.

This report also shows you all of the other keywords these pages rank for (in order of the amount of traffic they drive to your competitors page).

You can export these keywords and repeat the process for more competitors.

​Content Gaps

Content gaps exist when your competitors rank for keywords that you don’t rank for.

Here’s how to find those keywords with Ahrefs:

Enter your domain into Site Explorer, then go to Organic Search > Content Gap

Now, enter the domains of (at least) three competitors plus your domain in the “but the following target doesn’t rank for” field.

There are hundreds of keywords that (at least) one of your competitors rank for, yet you don’t.

Tip: Enter competitors with a similar Domain Rating (DR) score. This will ensure that the Content Gap analysis kicks back keywords you stand a chance of ranking for. If you enter Moz.com as a competitor and you have a DR 40 site, the sad truth is that you’re probably never going to outrank Moz.

I recommend paying particular attention to any keywords where your competitors are ranking in the top 10.

Why?

Because if they’re ranking in the top 10, chances are you could, too!

Keyword Ideas from Ahrefs

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer gives you the following types of keyword ideas:

• Phrase match – shows all keywords that have the exact match seed keyword.
• Having the same terms – these keywords have the same words as your seed keyword, but in any order.
• Also rank for – they pull the top 10 results and see what other keywords those pages rank for.
• Search suggestions – Google suggest keywords when you enter your seed keyword.
• All – shows all these categories
• SERP overview report – you can see if it’s the same few sites staying in the top results, or they are changing. If there are no changes in the top positions, that means it is very difficult to squeeze in your own site.
• SERP position history report – backlinks, DR, traffic, how many more keywords the page is ranking for
• Copy your own list of keywords to pull keyword data

When you have your list, you can drill down with search volume and keyword difficulty.