Knowing where your own keywords rank is only half the story. If you climb to position 5 but your main competitor just took position 2 for the same keyword, the competitive picture looks completely different from a situation where every rival sits below you. Tracking competitors' rankings helps you understand where you are winning, where you are losing, and which keywords deserve your effort. This article shows you the practical approach: set up a separate project for your competitor's domain with the exact same keyword set you track for yourself.
Why track your competitors' rankings?
- Know exactly which keywords you are losing: keywords where a competitor sits in the Top 10 while you are outside it form the clearest possible optimization priority list.
- Spot new competitors early: an unfamiliar domain suddenly appearing in high positions across many keywords is a signal worth catching soon.
- Judge your own performance fairly: if your ranking holds steady while competitors slide, your relative position is actually improving.
- Learn from the pages that are winning: studying a competitor's high-ranking landing pages gives concrete hints about content depth and presentation.
The method: one project for you, one project for them
Step 1: Choose the right competitor and a shared keyword set
Pick only one or two of your most direct competitors — the ones selling the same products or services to the same customers. The keyword set used for the competitor project must be an exact copy of the set you track for your own website. Using two different sets makes comparison meaningless, because you cannot tell whether a gap comes from SEO strength or simply from different keyword lists.
Step 2: Create a project with the competitor's domain
In a tracking tool, each project is tied to one domain to be checked. Simply create a new project, enter your competitor's domain instead of your own, and add exactly the keyword set from step 1 to that project. From then on, every check gives you the competitor's ranking for each keyword, recorded over time in exactly the same way your own project runs.
Step 3: Keep the checking conditions identical
A comparison is only fair when both projects are checked under the same conditions: same country, same device, same timing. Do not compare your desktop ranking with your competitor's mobile ranking — those two numbers belong to two different results pages. If you have enabled automatic daily checks for your own project, enable them for the competitor project too, so the two historical curves always run side by side.
Step 4: Set a regular review rhythm
Do not open both projects every day and worry over every small movement. Fix a regular rhythm — once a week, for example — to place the two ranking curves next to each other and write down a few lines of notes: which keyword groups did we close the gap on this week, where did the competitor just surge ahead? After a few weeks, these short notes become a very clear picture of the balance of power between you and your rivals, far more trustworthy than a gut feeling from staring at a single number.
How to read the comparison data correctly
The most effective way to read it is keyword by keyword: for each keyword, how many positions is the competitor ahead of you, and is that gap narrowing or widening week by week? Pay special attention to the group of keywords where a competitor has just entered the Top 10 — that is where they are investing, and where you risk losing customers first. Conversely, keywords where you are far ahead of competitors are "fortresses" to maintain; neglect them and you may be overtaken in return.
Stay level-headed about short-term fluctuation as well: a competitor being two positions above you for one day means very little. Judge by the trend over several weeks, the same way you read your own rankings. These principles for reading ranking movement are analyzed in more depth in the the Keyword.help blog — they apply to competitors exactly as they apply to you.
What if you have several competitors?
Most businesses face more than one rival, and nothing stops you from creating a project for each of them. The discipline that matters is keeping the keyword set identical across all of them, so every project is measured with the same ruler. Start with the competitor who overlaps most with your own customers, add a second once the routine is in place, and resist the urge to track every domain you have ever seen in the results. A long list of half-watched rivals produces noise; two or three carefully watched ones produce decisions.
Also remember what this data cannot tell you. A competitor project shows where their pages rank, not why. Rankings are the starting point for questions — is their page longer, clearer, faster, better matched to the search intent? — and the answers come from opening those pages and studying them, which is exactly the kind of insight a simple ranking table alone will never give you.
Keyword budget: plan ahead when you add competitors
Each competitor project consumes roughly the same number of keywords as your own project, so do the math against your current plan first: the Free plan allows 10 keywords, the Pro plan 500 keywords, and the Agency plan 2,000 keywords. For someone just starting out, one main competitor and a compact keyword set are enough for a clear picture; as your scale grows, check the the pricing page to pick a plan with room for both your own projects and your competitor projects.
Conclusion
Tracking competitors needs no secret tool — just a separate project for their domain, the same keyword set, and the same checking conditions. When two ranking curves sit side by side over time, you will know exactly where to attack and where to defend, instead of doing SEO without knowing a rival is right on your tail.