How Small Business Owners Can Find Competitor Keywords for Free

Here is how small business owners can find competitor keywords for free. If we are being honest, it is one of the best things you can be doing for your business, because it is not always the best contractor who gets the lead. It is the one who can actually be found.

At the center of every great search engine optimization strategy is the correct SEO keyword, the one that helps you connect with your customers in the moments that matter most. Successful SEO relies on finding keywords with enough search volume to attract visitors while not carrying so much competition that you have no realistic path to page one. Yet with more small business owners investing in search engine optimization, and with AI reshaping how people search, finding those keywords is getting harder.

That is why here at MarketKeep, the small business digital marketing agency, we have put together the tools we actually use to find competitor keywords, along with the process that turns a raw keyword list into pages that rank. Most of these tools are free.

First, Figure Out Who You Are Really Competing Against

Most small business owners answer this question wrong, and it costs them.

The contractor across town who you bid against every week may not be your competitor in search results at all. Search the term you want to rank for and look at who is actually sitting on page one. For a lot of service businesses, the top five results are directories, aggregator sites, and national brands running local landing pages. Those are your search competitors, whether or not you have ever lost a job to them.

Pick three to five domains from that page one result set. Those are the sites you are going to pull competitor keywords from. If you skip this step and go straight to analyzing the shop down the road, you may spend weeks reverse engineering a website that Google does not rank either.

Tools That Show You What A Competitor Ranks For

These are the tools where you paste in a domain and get back the keyword list. This is the core of competitor keyword research, and it is where most people should start.

Semrush

Semrush is a powerful all-in-one platform with features for keyword research, competitor analysis, and content optimization. The free plan has real limitations, but it remains one of the best keyword research tools available to a small business owner at no cost.

On the free plan you get:

• The Keyword Overview report, which shows search volume, trends, and competition levels
• Organic Research, which lets you enter a competitor domain and see the keywords they rank for
• The Keyword Magic Tool, which surfaces related and long tail keywords branching off a term you already care about

Semrush gives you a comprehensive summary of keyword metrics, including average monthly search volume, cost per click, and competition in paid search. The Keyword Magic Tool is especially strong for building out lists of related and long tail terms, broken into topic specific subgroups, which is exactly what you want when you are planning a content strategy rather than chasing one keyword.

The free plan caps the number of reports you can pull per day and the number of keywords you can track. It can also feel overwhelming at first, simply because of how much data is on screen. Push through that. Organic Research alone is worth the learning curve.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs is the primary tool we use at MarketKeep, and there is a free version most small business owners do not know exists. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you a full backlink profile and keyword report for any site you can verify ownership of, at no cost. Ahrefs also publishes a free keyword generator that returns keyword ideas and difficulty scores without an account.

Verified access only covers your own site, so this is not a direct competitor lookup. What it gives you is the other half of the picture: an accurate read on what you already rank for, which you need before any competitor comparison means anything.

SpyFu

SpyFu was built specifically for the job this article is about. Enter a competitor domain and it returns the organic keywords that site ranks for, plus the terms they have paid for in Google Ads. The free version limits how many results you can see per search, but for a small business checking three or four local competitors, it is usually enough to spot the pattern.

The paid search history is the interesting part. If a competitor has been bidding on the same ten keywords for two years, those keywords are converting for them. That is a much stronger signal than search volume alone.

The Detailed SEO Extension

SpyFu was built specifically for the job this article is about. Enter a competitor domain and it returns the organic keywords that site ranks for, plus the terms they have paid for in Google Ads. The free version limits how many results you can see per search, but for a small business checking three or four local competitors, it is usually enough to spot the pattern.

The paid search history is the interesting part. If a competitor has been bidding on the same ten keywords for two years, those keywords are converting for them. That is a much stronger signal than search volume alone.

Tools That Tell You Whether A Keyword Is Worth Chasing

Once you have a list of competitor keywords, you need to know which ones are actually worth building a page around. These two tools are free and they answer different questions.

Google Keyword Planner

You cannot make a list like this without mentioning Google Keyword Planner. One clarification worth making, because it trips people up: Keyword Planner is an advertising tool, not an SEO tool. It was built for people buying ads, and the numbers reflect that.

You need a Google Ads account to access it, though you do not need to spend money to use the planner itself. Be aware of one catch. Accounts without active ad spend see search volume as broad ranges, something like 100 to 1,000 per month, rather than exact figures. That is still useful for sorting big terms from small ones, but do not treat those ranges as precise.

What it does well is tell you the average monthly search volume, whether a term is trending up or down year over year or over the last three months, and the competition level for that keyword in paid search.

Google Trends

Google Trends is one we love here at MarketKeep because it answers a question no keyword volume tool can: is this term growing or dying, and where?

Trends shows relative search interest over time. You can compare several keywords against each other, break interest down by state or metro area, and spot rising and breakout searches before they show up in any keyword database. For a business serving a defined region, the geographic breakdown alone is worth the visit. A term with strong national volume may be nearly dead in your market, and Trends will show you that in about thirty seconds.

The limitation is that Trends only reports relative popularity, never absolute search volume. Pair it with Keyword Planner and you get both halves: Trends tells you the direction, Keyword Planner tells you the scale.

Tools That Uncover The Question Behind The Keyword

Knowing that people search a term is one thing. Knowing what they are actually trying to find out is what lets you write a page worth ranking.

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic takes a different approach from everything else on this list. It pulls from search autocomplete data and organizes the results into questions, prepositions, and comparisons, then lays them out visually so you can see the shape of a topic at a glance.

For a service business, this is where you find the objections and worries your customers have before they ever call you. The who, what, when, and how variations around your service are the questions your competitors are probably not answering on their pages.

The free plan allows three searches per day, which sounds restrictive until you use it. Each search returns dozens of question variations, so if you are working on one page at a time it is plenty. Their free tier also now includes AI Model reports that pull results from ChatGPT and Gemini, which makes it one of the easier free ways to see how AI assistants frame your topic.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest, now owned by Neil Patel, is one of the more approachable tools for local SEO and small business keyword research. It gives you search volume, competition data, and related keyword ideas, including local variations, questions, and comparison terms.

Its other strength is content ideas. Ubersuggest will show you which pages and posts are performing well for a keyword in your niche, which is a shortcut to understanding what format Google is rewarding for that term. If every top result is a long guide, a three paragraph service page is not going to get there.

The free tier is tight, roughly a few searches per day through the web app plus a limited allowance through the Chrome extension. Worth using deliberately rather than exploring casually.

Do Not Overlook The Keyword Data You Already Own

This is the step most articles about competitor keywords leave out, and it is the one that turns research into a plan. Before you spend another dollar on a tool, there are three free sources of keyword data sitting inside accounts you already have.

Google Search Console

Open Search Console and pull your Performance report for the last three to six months. Export every query you receive impressions for. Now put that next to the competitor keyword list you built above.

Three groups will emerge, and each one gets a different response:

• Terms they rank for and you do not appear for at all. This is your content gap. These need new pages.
• Terms you both rank for, where they sit above you. These are your fastest wins. The page already exists, so you are optimizing rather than building.
• Terms you get impressions for on page two or three with no clicks. Google already thinks you are relevant. A stronger title tag, better headings, and more depth often move these more quickly than anything else on the list.

That third group is where small business owners consistently find traffic they did not know they were leaving behind.

Google Business Profile Performance

If you serve a local market, this may be the single most underused keyword source available to you, and it is completely free.

Inside your Google Business Profile, open Performance and find the report showing the searches that led people to your listing. These are not estimates or averages pulled from a database. They are the actual phrases real people typed before your business appeared in Google Maps or the local pack.

What makes this report so useful is how unpolished the language is. Keyword tools return clean, marketable phrases. Your Business Profile returns what customers actually say, which is often longer, more specific, and more colloquial than anything a tool would suggest. Those phrasings make excellent headings, FAQ questions, and opening lines on a service page, because they match the words your customer already has in their head.

Two things to know. Google only shows a limited number of top terms, and the reporting window is capped at several months. Export the report on a regular schedule so you build a record over time rather than losing terms as they roll off.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics deserves a place here, but with an honest caveat: it will not hand you keywords directly. Organic traffic arrives in GA4 without the search query attached, so anyone promising you a keyword report out of Analytics alone is overselling it.

There are two ways to get real keyword value out of it anyway.

The first is to link Search Console to your Analytics property. Once connected, query data sits alongside engagement and conversion data, which lets you answer a question neither tool answers on its own: which keywords bring people who actually contact you, rather than which keywords bring the most clicks. Those are frequently not the same list.

The second is the site search report, and this one is worth setting up if you have not. If your website has a search box, Analytics can record what visitors type into it. Every one of those searches is a customer telling you what they expected to find and could not. That is a page you should probably be building, and it is a keyword you already know has demand from your own audience.

Turn The Keyword List Into Actual Pages

A spreadsheet full of competitor keywords does nothing on its own. The last step is mapping.

Sort your list by intent rather than by volume. A term like “emergency furnace repair Towson” is someone ready to call today. A term like “how long does a furnace last” is someone six months out. Both are worth having, but they belong on different types of pages, and confusing the two is why a lot of small business sites publish blog posts that never generate a single lead.

From there:

• High intent, service specific terms become service pages
• High intent terms with a place name become location pages
• Question and research terms become blog posts that link back to the relevant service page

Closely related variations stay on the same page rather than getting their own, which is how you avoid two of your pages competing against each other

Assign one primary keyword per page and hold to it. Then work through them in order of how close each term sits to a phone call.

If mapping a keyword list to a site structure is where you would rather hand this off, that is a large part of what we do in our small business SEO services.

Competitor Keywords In The Age of AI Search

Your customers are no longer only typing three words into a search bar. They are asking full questions of ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews, and getting a single synthesized answer back.

That changes what a useful keyword list looks like. Short commercial terms still matter, but the question based phrasing you pull out of AnswerThePublic is now doing double duty. Those long, conversational queries are much closer to how someone talks to an AI assistant than to how they used to search.

The practical move is straightforward. When you build a page from your competitor keyword list, answer the question directly and early, use clear headings that match how people actually phrase the question, and make the answer easy to extract. The same structure that earns a featured snippet is the structure an AI assistant is most likely to pull from and cite.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I really find my competitor’s keywords for free?

Yes, for most of what a small business needs. Free tiers of Semrush and SpyFu will show you a competitor’s ranking keywords, and Google Search Console, Google Trends, and the Detailed SEO extension cost nothing at all. The limits you run into are on volume of searches per day, not on the quality of the data.

What is the best free keyword source for a local business?

Your own Google Business Profile performance report. It shows the actual search terms that surfaced your listing in Maps and the local pack, which means the demand is already proven in your service area. No keyword tool can give you that level of local accuracy.

How many competitors should I analyze?

Three to five is the right range. Pull them from the actual page one results for your most important keyword rather than from your own sense of who your rivals are. Fewer than three and you are looking at one site’s quirks. More than five and the list gets too large to act on.

How often should I redo this?

Twice a year is enough for most service businesses, with a check after any major Google update or when you notice a drop in your Search Console impressions. Rankings shift slowly for local service terms.

Should I target every keyword my competitor ranks for?

No. A competitor with a much older domain and a stronger backlink profile will rank for terms you cannot realistically reach yet. Start with the keywords where you already appear on page two or three, then work outward. Momentum matters more than ambition here.

What is the difference between a keyword and search intent?

The keyword is what someone types. The intent is what they want. Two people searching the same phrase can want completely different things, which is why sorting your list by intent before you build pages matters more than sorting by search volume.

Learn How MarketKeep Helps Small Business Owners Find Competitor Keywords and Outranks Them

Finding your competitor keywords is not complicated, but it does take a deliberate process rather than a scattershot pass through a few tools. Identify who is actually ranking, pull their keyword list, validate the terms worth chasing, compare all of it against the data you already own in Search Console, your Business Profile, and Analytics, then map what is left to real pages on your site.

If you would rather have someone run this for your business, we are happy to help. MarketKeep has been helping small business owners get found online since 2016. Schedule your free SEO evaluation and we will walk you through what your competitors are ranking for and where your fastest opportunities are.

You can also browse our keyword research resources if you want to keep working through this on your own. Once a year we update our articles on posts such as the best SEO keywords for electricians or best SEO keywords for tree services to help you understand what keywords help you grow your business.