A competitor keyword strategy for a small team

A competitor keyword strategy for a small team is mostly a set of refusals. You will find hundreds of searches a rival ranks for. You have time to write maybe four pages a month. The job is to pick the few where your page can win and where the person searching might buy from you, and to ignore the rest without guilt.

This is how to run that decision in an afternoon.

Step 1: get the real list, not the wish list

Founders often start by reading a competitor's blog and copying its topics. That gives you their plan. It does not tell you which parts of the plan worked, and a company can aim at hundreds of keywords while winning only a few dozen.

Get ranking data instead. On seogeoaeo.ai, Competitor Keywords takes the rival's domain and your market, and returns up to 100 keywords the site ranks for in Google, ordered by estimated visits. Each row has position, search volume, difficulty, intent, cost per click and the URL that ranks. A run is 35 credits; the entry plan is $29 a month for 2,000 credits.

Two cautions. Visits and volumes are estimates from a data provider, not Google figures, so compare rows against each other rather than reporting them as facts to your board. And the data is per country: run the market you sell into.

Step 2: cross out what you will never use

Before scoring anything, delete:

• Their brand searches. Their name, their login page, their app. Nobody typing those wants you.
• Off-product searches. Topics they rank for that have nothing to do with what you sell. Traffic you cannot convert is a cost.
• Unbeatable first places. If position one belongs to a page far better than anything you could write this quarter, move on.

This usually removes a third of the list or more.

Step 3: sort what is left into three buckets

Bucket A, buying searches. Phrases like "best X for Y", "X pricing" and "X vs Y". People searching these are close to a decision. Give each its own page even when the volume is small. These are also the searches advertisers pay for, and the cost-per-click column tells you roughly what a click is worth to the market.

Bucket B, open positions. Keywords where the rival sits somewhere between 8 and 20. Their page has not won. The slot is still contested, and a better page from you has a fair chance.

Bucket C, easy learning searches. Informational keywords with modest difficulty. These become blog posts that build topical depth. The Competitor Keywords report already pulls these out as blog topics: learning intent, difficulty 50 or less, at least 10 searches a month, brand names removed.

Work in that order. A small team gets more from five Bucket A pages than from twenty Bucket C posts.

Step 4: find the page that is actually competing

Group the remaining rows by ranking URL. You will often find that one guide or one comparison page holds a large share of the rival's keywords and visits. That page is your real competitor, not the domain. Open it, note its length, structure and what it answers, and treat it as the bar your page must clear.

Step 5: choose by beatability, not volume

A keyword where they rank third with a thin page is a better target than one where they rank first with a deep, well-linked guide, even if the second has more searches. Volume is tempting in a spreadsheet. Beatability is what turns into traffic.

What this does not cover

• Keywords they have and you do not. Running a gap comparison against your own domain is a separate step with its own tool.
• What they bid on. Google does not publish a competitor's ad keywords. You can see the ads themselves in the Ads Transparency Center, and you can see which ranking searches carry a cost per click.
• Tracking your progress. seogeoaeo.ai does not track your rankings over time. If you need a weekly chart for investors, a suite with rank tracking such as Semrush Position Tracking is the better tool for that part.

The monthly rhythm

For most early teams, one run per main competitor per month is enough. Pick the next four pages from Buckets A and B, write them, and check the list again next month to see whether the rival moved. At 35 credits a run, three competitors cost about 105 credits a month, well inside the smallest plan.