I'm going to walk you through how to do this using SEMRush. If you don't have SEMRush, see my tip and video below.

I’ll note here that each keyword should be a unique topic. Sometimes 2 different competitors can rank #1 for the same topic, with just a variation of the main keyword. e.g, “best dog food” is the same topic as “best food for dog” so in this step, you’ll want to be sure you’re only selecting unique topics.

Another thing to note is to use a wide variety of different competitors. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a corpus that could be very skewed towards one particular site. Putting this all into a spreadsheet helps, and reviewing it at the end will, too.

1. At the top of the page in SEMRush, remove your domain, paste in a competitor’s domain, and hit search.
2. You should have the same filters applied for them so that it’s only showing #1 rankings and sorted by highest volume.
3. Copy the keyword and its corresponding URL into your spreadsheet. If the same URL ranks for more than 1 keyword, then go down the list a little further and grab the next highest one with a different URL.
4. Repeat this process for the remaining 9 competitors from your list.

🤖AI Note: Sorry, this process is still manual. I’ve tried dozens of prompts between ChatGPT Code Interpreter and Claude and can’t get one that will accurately identify and remove any synonymous keywords e.g, “how many stars can you see at night” and “how many stars are visible at night” Every time, it will wrongly identify synonyms or remove unique words from the list. If you can find a prompt that will work, I’d love for you to share it with the course community!

💡 Tip: If you don’t use SEMRush or Ahrefs, then you can use a free Google Ads account to identify top keywords once you identify your top 10 competitors within your niche. Here’s a video walking you through using Google’s Keyword tool for this.