Understanding how much organic traffic your competitors get—and which pages and keywords drive that traffic—is one of the most powerful strategic advantages in SEO.
It helps you:
– Reverse-engineer what’s working for them
– Uncover keyword and content opportunities
– Benchmark your performance
– Spot content gaps in your own site
– Forecast traffic potential more accurately
If a competitor is getting X amount of monthly SEO traffic and you’re getting a third of that, you need to know what they’re doing differently. And more importantly—how to do it better.
You can’t log into your competitor’s Google Analytics, but third-party SEO tools estimate traffic using keyword position tracking and search volume analysis. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but it’s surprisingly good—especially since organic rankings tend to be quite stable.
Here’s how to get detailed insights into a competitor’s organic traffic and the keywords behind it:
Paste your competitor’s domain into a tool that shows estimated organic search traffic. You’ll see:
– Total monthly organic traffic
– Historical traffic growth or decline
– Total number of keywords they rank for
– Distribution of traffic by page
From this alone, you can already answer key questions:
– Are they doing SEO actively?
– Are they growing faster or slower than you?
– What content gets most of their SEO traffic?
Sort competitor pages by traffic to quickly find high-ROI content. Look at:
– URLs that bring in the most organic visits
– The SERP features they own (e.g. featured snippets)
– Estimated traffic per page
– Number of ranking keywords per page
– Whether the traffic is brand or non-brand focused
Focus especially on evergreen content that attracts traffic month after month. This type of content is the foundation of sustainable organic growth—and if your competitor cracked it, you want to know how.
Switch over to viewing their keywords. Focus on:
– High-volume keywords with good rankings (positions 1–3)
– Keywords ranking on informational vs. transactional intent
– Branded vs. non-branded queries
– Long-tail keywords: low competition, very specific
Apply filters to extract keywords with:
– Keyword Difficulty (KD) below 30
– Estimated Traffic greater than 200
– Position between 3 and 20 (easy near-term wins)
This shows you keywords where your competitor ranks, but not super strongly—giving you an opportunity to overtake them with better content.
Seeing a competitor’s top traffic pages and keywords is only the first step. The real value comes when you apply those insights to your SEO strategy.
Here’s how:
If your competitor is ranking for “how to waterproof a basement” and bringing in serious traffic, evaluate their page:
– Is the content up to date?
– Does it fully cover the topic?
– Are there gaps in formatting, visuals, or UX?
– How many backlinks does it have?
Create a better version—longer, clearer, better structured, more helpful—and optimize it better. Then build links to it. Overtaking pages like these can give you direct traffic wins.
Go beyond copying: look for keywords they should be ranking for but aren’t. Do this by:
– Running a “Content Gap” analysis between your site and theirs
– Entering multiple competitors and extracting common keywords
– Filtering by high-traffic terms you don’t rank for
Every missed keyword is potential traffic they’re not capturing—yet. You can jump in first.
If a single page about “best hiking boots” drives 20K visits/month for your competitor, they likely have complementary content around hiking gear, trail guides, and similar products.
You can create a topic cluster—10–15 related pages interlinked around a central theme—to dominate an entire category. Use the competitor’s traffic pages as a blueprint.
By analyzing the nature of their ranking keywords, you can reverse-engineer their funnel focus:
– Informational keywords: “what is VPN”, “how does VPN work” → Top of funnel
– Commercial investigation: “best VPN for travel”, “VPN for Netflix” → Mid funnel
– Transactional: “buy VPN subscription”, “cheap VPN plans” → Bottom of funnel
Are they focused on awareness? Conversion? Product comparisons?
Understanding their funnel coverage lets you spot where their SEO strategy is strong—and more importantly, where it’s weak.
Just because something works for them doesn’t mean it will work for you. Focus on identifying opportunities and gaps, not just cloning pages.
Traffic is only half of the story. You want qualified traffic—people who have the potential to become customers. Don’t chase vanity metrics.
A large chunk of traffic might be branded (e.g. “Nike shoes”). If your competitor’s traffic is mostly from brand awareness, don’t benchmark yourself against it—they’ve built that over years.
Seeing your competitor’s organic traffic gives you a massive edge—if you act on the data.
Here’s a quick 5-step action plan:
1. Identify 3–5 of your top competitors.
2. Analyze their traffic, top pages, and keyword set.
3. Reverse-engineer what’s driving results.
4. Find gaps or weaknesses they’ve missed.
5. Create better, more optimized, and more helpful content.
SEO is a game of learning what works, improving upon it, and executing consistently. Analyzing competitor organic traffic is one of the fastest shortcuts to finding what works. Use it.
