How to steal organic search traffic from competitors using Ahrefs

Executive overview

Brainstorming content ideas without knowing if they'll rank wastes time. A faster approach: find competitor pages already generating traffic and build better versions.

The strategy uses Ahrefs to identify high-traffic competitor pages with few backlinks — the lowest-effort opportunities — then replicates them and builds links to outrank the original.

One well-chosen competitor page can rank for thousands of keywords at once.

Step 1: build a competitor list

• Enter your site into Ahrefs Site Explorer and open the Competing Domains report.
• The report lists sites ranking for the same keywords as yours.
• "Common" shows shared keywords; "Seek" shows keywords unique to each site.
• Scroll the list and select competitors worth analysing for content ideas.

Step 2: find pages worth replicating

• Navigate to each competitor's overview in Site Explorer.
• Use the Top Pages report, not the Organic Keywords report — it groups data by page, not keyword.
• Pages are sorted by monthly search traffic; you can also see keyword count per page.
• Target pages ranking for many keywords at once (e.g. one page ranking for ~3,000 keywords and driving ~2,000 monthly visits).

Step 3: record traffic and referring domains

• Log each target page in a spreadsheet: URL, referring domains, monthly traffic, top keyword.
• Referring domain count is found under Link Statistics in the Top Pages report.
• This data is needed to prioritise effort and gauge the backlink work required.

Step 4: prioritise by effort vs. reward

• Start with pages that have high traffic but few referring domains — lowest link-building effort needed.
• Progress to higher-domain-count pages once quick wins are captured.
• Replicating the content is only half the strategy; building backlinks is the other half.