How to Steal Any Competitor's SEO Strategy

Keyword research from scratch is inefficient, a wheel-reinvention exercise that wastes hours you could spend actually building something, and frankly, if you're starting from zero when competitors in your space have already spent years and significant budgets figuring out what works, you might be thinking about SEO backwards entirely.

Don't reinvent what's already been invented, don't guess when you could know, just reverse engineer what's already working and build from there.

Step 1: Identify Real Competitors

Your business competitors and your search competitors aren't always the same, which sounds like a minor distinction until you waste weeks analyzing a company that competes for your customers but ranks for entirely different keywords than you're targeting, or worse, you ignore some random industry blog that's absolutely crushing it for the exact terms you care about.

Search for your most important keywords and actually look at who ranks, because these are your SEO competitors regardless of whether they compete for the same customers, and this list might include:

• Direct business competitors
• Industry publications
• Review sites
• Educational sites

Make a list of 5-10 sites that consistently appear for keywords you care about, not just the ones you recognize but also the ones that keep showing up when you'd rather they didn't, and for each keyword, assess whether you can realistically compete before investing time in a battle you're not equipped to win.

Step 2: Find Their Top Pages

In Ahrefs or Semrush, pull their "Top Pages" report and sort by traffic, which immediately tells you which pages are driving the most organic visits, revealing in one click which bets they made that paid off and which topics and formats actually resonate with the audience you're both trying to reach.

Look for patterns, because individual data points are noise but repeated patterns are signal:

• What topics appear repeatedly?
• What content formats dominate (guides, lists, tools)?
• What word counts are common?
• What types of pages (blog, product, tool, resource)?

Step 3: Analyze Their Timeline

Use the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org to see how their site has evolved over time, because the current snapshot tells you what's working now but the historical record tells you how they got there, which is often more valuable information.

Look at snapshots from 6 months ago, 1 year ago, 2 years ago, and pay attention to what changed, what they added, what they restructured, because if their traffic grew significantly at some point, whatever they added or changed before that growth spike is almost certainly what caused it, which reveals their strategy in a way that just looking at their current site never could:

• Did they launch a new content hub?
• Did they expand into new topics?
• Did they rebuild existing content?
• Did they add new tools or resources?

Step 4: Find Their Content Gaps

In Ahrefs, use the "Content Gap" tool by entering your domain alongside your competitor domains, which produces a list of keywords your competitors rank for that you don't, each one representing a direct opportunity where demand has been validated but you're not yet capturing any of it.

Filter for keywords where multiple competitors rank, because if 3 or more competitors rank for a keyword and you don't, that's not just an opportunity but a validated topic where the market has essentially done your keyword research for you, confirming that people search for this and that content can rank for it.

Step 5: Analyze Their Link Sources

Look at their backlink profile to see where their links come from, because links remain one of the strongest ranking signals and understanding where competitors get theirs tells you where you might be able to get yours, assuming you're willing to do the work they did to earn them.

Find patterns in their link acquisition, because random one-off links don't help you but repeated patterns reveal a strategy you can replicate:

• Do they get links from specific types of sites?
• Are there linkable assets that attract links?
• Do they appear in resource lists you could also target?
• What content earns them the most links?

The sites that link to them might also link to you if you create something comparable or better, which is a big "if" but at least you know the opportunity exists and what it would take to capture it.

The Competitive Intel Stack

Here's the complete toolkit, which you don't need all of but which gives you options depending on what you're trying to learn and how deep you want to go:

• Ahrefs/Semrush: Top pages, content gap, backlink analysis
• Wayback Machine: Historical evolution, timing of changes
• Google Search: What's actually ranking right now
• SimilarWeb: Traffic trends and sources
• BuiltWith: Tech stack and tools they use

Every successful competitor is essentially a free intelligence report on what works in your market, a case study written in their traffic graphs and backlink profiles, so use them, study them, learn from both their successes and their failures, and build something better on the foundation they've inadvertently provided.