Your competitors have already done a lot of your keyword research for you. The pages ranking above you are, in effect, a list of keywords that work in your niche — proven to attract exactly the audience you want. The trick is reading that list without paying for an expensive tool.
Here’s how to do it for free, and where free quietly runs out of road.
1. Just read the search results
The most basic method costs nothing and most people skip it. Search your core topics and look at who keeps showing up in the top ten. Not the giant publishers — the sites your size, with your kind of audience. Those are your real competitors.
Now go through their site. Their blog titles, their page headings, their navigation — those are their target keywords, sitting in plain sight. Make a list of the ones that overlap with what you could realistically write about. You’ve just done competitor keyword research with nothing but a browser.
2. Paste a competitor’s URL into free tools
Several tools let you drop in a rival’s homepage or a specific page and get back keyword suggestions, for free:
- Google Keyword Planner lets you enter a website or page as the seed instead of a keyword, and it’ll build a keyword list from that page’s content. Free with a Google Ads account, no ad spend needed.
- WordStream’s free keyword tool takes a competitor URL and returns contextual keyword ideas.
- Free tiers of the big suites (Semrush, Ahrefs) will show you a limited slice of a domain’s top keywords before asking you to pay.
None of these give you the full picture on a free tier — that’s the point of the free tier — but stacked together they’ll surface the obvious gaps fast.
3. Build a target list from the overlap
Don’t just collect keywords — collect the right ones. Log the domains that rank in the top ten to twenty across several of your core searches, and prioritise the ones that match your content type, audience and intent, not the big brands you can’t touch. A dozen realistic competitor URLs will give you more usable keywords than a hundred from a site you’ll never outrank.
Free tools and free methods are genuinely good at this stage: extracting ideas and spotting the obvious openings. Where they leave you stuck is the next question.
Where free stops being enough
You’ll end up with a solid list of keywords your competitors rank for. What free methods won’t tell you reliably is two things: exactly how much traffic each keyword pulls, and how hard it would be for you specifically to take it off them.
That second one is the decision that matters. A competitor ranking for a keyword tells you it’s valuable. It doesn’t tell you whether you can win it — that depends on how strong the pages on page one actually are, and free tools give you a fuzzy read on that at best.
This is where a cheap paid tool pays for itself. I use Mangools for competitor work — its SERPChecker shows you exactly who’s ranking for a keyword and how strong each of them is, so you can judge whether you’ve got a realistic shot before you commit. Paired with the keyword difficulty score in KWFinder, you go from “here’s a keyword my competitor ranks for” to “here’s a keyword my competitor ranks for that I can actually take.” I’ve written up the whole suite in my Mangools review if you want the detail, and there’s a 10-day free trial with no card required.
The honest version
Free competitor research is excellent for finding out what to target. It’s weak at telling you what you can win. Use the free methods to build your list — the search results and a couple of free tools will get you a long way — then check the ones worth chasing against a proper difficulty read before you spend a day writing.
Your competitors handed you the keywords. Whether you can take them is a different question, and it’s the one worth getting right.
For the free tools I’d start with, see my free keyword research tools roundup.
Frequently asked questions
Can you really find competitor keywords for free?
Yes, up to a point. Reading the search results, checking competitors’ own page titles and headings, and pasting their URLs into free tools like Google Keyword Planner or WordStream will surface plenty. Free tiers of Semrush and Ahrefs add a limited slice more.
What’s the catch with free competitor keyword research?
Free methods tell you which keywords a competitor ranks for, but not reliably how much traffic each brings or how hard it would be for you to outrank them. For that you need exact volumes and a difficulty score.
What’s the easiest free method?
Just search your main topics and study the sites your size that keep appearing. Their page titles and headings are their target keywords, in plain view, for nothing.
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