You spend hours crafting what you think is the perfect blog post, you hit publish, you wait, and then… nothing. No traffic, no rankings, no sign that anyone on the internet even knows your content exists. It's deflating. But here's the thing, it's completely avoidable.
Learning how to steal keywords from your competitors is one of the most underrated moves in SEO (especially SEO for managed IT service providers, where the competition is fierce). And before you raise an eyebrow at the word "steal," let's be clear: this isn't about copying anyone's content. It's about using competitor keyword research to figure out what's already working in your niche and building something better. Smarter, not harder.
Here's the process.
Most people think they know their competitors. They don't. At least not their search competitors. Open Google, type in your target keyword, and study the first page carefully, because the businesses showing up there are the ones standing between you and the traffic you want.
You're looking for two types: direct competitors who sell what you sell, and indirect competitors who might be bloggers, publications, or big-box sites that have simply claimed the keyword you want. Build a list of 3–5 URLs. That's all you need to get started.
This is where things get really interesting and honestly where a lot of businesses completely skip a step they shouldn't. When you plug a competitor's URL into keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or LowFruits, you get an instant keyword list — one that's already been validated by actual search traffic, actual rankings, and actual user behavior in Google search.
No guessing. No wasted effort.
You'll see search volume, keyword difficulty, ranking position, and the exact URL driving traffic for each term. What this gives you isn't just data — it's competitor keyword analysis that shows which topics your audience actually cares about, so you can skip the brainstorming phase and go straight to execution. That alone saves you an enormous amount of time that most content teams don't have to waste.
Not every keyword on that list is worth chasing, and this is the step where people either get it right or burn a ton of resources for nothing. Filter your list by keyword difficulty — if your site is newer, stay in that 1–10 KD range where you can actually compete, and if you're more established, you can push into the 20–30 range with confidence.
Then look for weak spots. These are low-authority domains sitting in the top 10 for a keyword — a signal that Google hasn't found a truly great piece of content yet. Your opportunity.
Always check search intent. A keyword with great volume means nothing if you create the wrong type of content for it.
Click through to the pages that are currently ranking and really study them, because understanding what your competitors are doing is the only way to understand how you're going to do it better — look at their H1, their H2 structure, the questions they answer, the gaps they leave wide open, and the places where their content just kind of... stops.
Fill those gaps. Go deeper. Add visuals, a unique angle, a step-by-step breakdown they don't have. Then make sure your on-page SEO is airtight. Add your keyword to your title, meta description, H1, and within the first 50 words of the page. Make sure that your document has a heathy amount of semantic keywords to give Google additional context on what your document is about. Don't stuff. Don't force it. Write for people first.
Good content wins. Great content dominates.
Publishing is just the beginning. Share your content across social platforms, send it to your email list, and if it's genuinely strong, do outreach to earn backlinks from relevant domains — because a long tail keyword strategy only compounds when your domain authority grows alongside it.
And if you don’t have the budget to purchase backlinks, we created a guide on how to build backlinks for zero dollars so you can start ramping up your site's authority at no cost to your bottom line.
The businesses winning in search aren't necessarily the smartest or the most creative — they're the most strategic. When you know how to steal keywords from your competitors ethically and systematically, you stop guessing and start growing.
Start your competitor keyword research today. The rankings are sitting there waiting.