Finding competitor pages that drive the most organic search traffic

Executive overview

Most keyword research starts from scratch. A faster path: find the exact pages already sending your competitors thousands of monthly visitors, then create better versions.

Ahrefs Site Explorer's Top Pages report reveals which competitor pages rank highest by traffic, how many keywords each page captures, and how many backlinks they have. Filter, export, and sort to surface high-traffic topics with low competition.

A single well-researched page can rank for hundreds or thousands of keyword phrases — and competitor data tells you exactly which topics are worth targeting.

Finding the right competitors

• Search your target keywords in Google; note which domains consistently appear in top results
• Exclude general-interest sites (e.g. Business Insider for a golf blog) — they skew the data
• Use Ahrefs' Competing Domains report to discover relevant competitors you didn't know existed
• Look for sites with heavy green bars in that report — high keyword overlap signals relevance

Reading the Top Pages report

• Top Pages report ranks a competitor's URLs by estimated organic search traffic
• Traffic percentage per page reveals concentration — if one page drives 30%+ of a site's traffic, that's a strong topic signal
• Value column: equivalent PPC cost for that traffic, based on keyword CPC multiplied by clicks
• Keywords column: total number of keywords the page ranks for in the top 100 results — click to see all of them
• RD (referring domains): unique sites linking to that URL
• Top keyword and its estimated search volume show what's driving the most traffic to that page
• Position column shows where Ahrefs last saw the page rank in Google

Filtering for actionable opportunities

• Set position filter to 0–5 to isolate pages ranking in the top 5 results
• Set a minimum traffic threshold (e.g. 500 monthly visitors) to remove low-value pages
• Export filtered results to CSV for further analysis in a spreadsheet

Finding low-competition topics in the export

• Sort referring domains in ascending order to reveal pages getting strong traffic with few or no backlinks
• These are the clearest signals of low-competition topics worth targeting
• Example: a page ranking second for a specific golf club brand term, pulling 677 monthly visitors with zero referring domains

Building content outlines from competitor keyword sets

• Click the keywords count for any top page to see every search query it ranks for
• Use these keywords to map what subtopics your content must cover
• Look for patterns: year-specific searches, use-case variants (distance, handicap level, review format)
• One comprehensive page targeting a broad topic can outperform multiple narrow pages targeting individual keywords
• Ahrefs data consistently underestimates actual traffic — treat reported numbers as a floor, not a ceiling