Study Your Top 3 Competitors
The pages already outranking you are a free blueprint of what Google rewards for your terms.
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✓ How to do it
- Search your top 3 to 5 target keywords and note who ranks on page one.
- For each competitor page, record the title wording, headings, rough word count, and extras (FAQs, images, tables).
- Note what they cover that you don't. Those are your content gaps.
- If an AI Overview shows up, note which sites it cites. Those pages are what Google's AI trusts for the topic.
- Glance at their URL structure and internal linking for ideas.
Checking by hand stops scaling past a few keywords. Bright Data's SERP API pulls Google results for many keywords and cities at once.
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Not needed to finish this step. Every step works with the free tools above.
In September 2026 we studied 17 question searches and 76 live pages to see what the top 3 results did differently. Word count barely differed, 2,364 words against 2,297. Two things stood out. Winners put a direct answer under a heading that matched the question (89% of them against 77%), and they had far more internal links (29 against 12). So when you study competitors, count their links and check where their answers sit. Don't just count words.
- Search in an incognito window so your personal history doesn't skew the results.