How do I find out what my competitors rank for?
Short answer
Search for your own services and record who appears, read each competitor's website to see which searches its pages aim at, and use third-party tools as estimates only. You can't see a competitor's real ranking data. That sits in their own Google Search Console account, which Google shows only to the site owner.
A competitor’s real ranking data is visible only to them, so you find out what they rank for from outside: search for your own services and record who appears, read their websites, and use third-party estimates with caution. The only complete record of what a site ranks for is in that site’s own Google Search Console account, and Google shows it to the site owner and nobody else. Everything available from outside is observation or estimate.
First find out who your competitors are in search
Whoever appears for the searches you want is the competition, and often it isn’t the companies you think of as rivals. The company whose trucks you see all over Santee may barely show up online, while a company you have never heard of holds the top places.
Write down your main services and the cities you care about, search each combination, and record which websites appear in the organic results. A handful of names will repeat. Those are the sites to study. Keep in mind that Google adjusts results to the searcher’s location, so a search made from an office in Kearny Mesa is only one sample of the county.
Read their site the way Google does
A competitor’s own website tells you what it’s trying to rank for. Start with the menus and service pages: each page with its own address on the site is a search they are aiming at. The page title, shown in the browser tab and in search results, usually states the target phrase outright.
Many sites also publish a list of their pages at an address such as /sitemap.xml. If it’s there, it shows the pages they want Google to index. Typing site: followed by their domain into Google returns pages Google has indexed from that site. Treat it as a sample, not a full count.
This shows what they are aiming at, not whether it worked. A competitor may have thirty city pages and rank with four of them. Cross-check by searching the phrase each page targets.
What keyword tools can and can’t tell you
Third-party SEO tools estimate a site’s rankings, and the word to hold onto is estimate. They work by running a large list of searches, recording which sites appear, and then reporting the searches where a given site showed up. They don’t have Google’s data, and the limits follow from the method.
| What the tool shows | What it really is |
|---|---|
| Keywords a site ranks for | The searches in the tool’s own list where that site appeared. Searches not in the list are invisible. |
| Position | A reading taken from one place at one time. Local results differ by neighborhood. |
| Search volume and traffic | A modeled estimate, not a Google figure. |
| Difficulty score | The tool maker’s own formula. Google publishes no such number. |
These tools tend to be weakest where a home-service company needs them most: narrow searches with a city or neighborhood in them. Use them for ideas about what to check, then check by searching.
What to do with the list
Turn it into a short list of gaps. Compare what they have pages for against what you really offer. A service you perform every week that has no page of its own is a gap worth closing. A service you don’t offer isn’t, however well it ranks for them. The same goes for cities: a page is only worth building where you can say something specific about the place.
That sorting is part of keyword research, and I do the side-by-side comparison as a competitor analysis. Copying a competitor’s wording is no shortcut. A second page saying what theirs already says gives Google little reason to rank yours above it.
Knowing what a competitor ranks for still leaves a different question: why a competitor outranks you on a search you both target.