Two weeks of competitive signal on rankshawk.com

Analyst take, top priorities for this cycle

1. 1"ai rewriter" and "google keyword planner" go first: both are tagged gap and beatable at once. We don't rank at all, and Semrush's own position (13th, 8th) is soft. That double signal is the tool telling us nobody is actually defending this. The intent column tells the two apart: "ai rewriter" is Commercial (MOFU), a comparison page converts; "google keyword planner" is Navigational, people want Google's actual tool, so the brief has to lead with a working tool, not an article about one.
2. 2"seo tips" (90,500/mo) is the biggest single swing. Semrush sits at #4, not #1, and the page beating them is a small independent site, not a brand. Difficulty is only 40, so it's worth a dedicated page this month.
3. 3"googlebot video" (74,000/mo, difficulty 23) is the kind of keyword that gets skipped because it doesn't sound commercial. Low competition and decent volume make it a quiet win, not a glamorous one.
4. 4"seo advice" and "seo optimization tips" look identical to the one above on volume (90,500 each) but both score Moderate, not Strong, because Google already shows an AI Overview on both. Ranking #1 might not even earn the click. Volume alone would have sent a writer here; the score says wait.
5. 5"research keywords" is tagged beatable and sized at 90,500/mo too, but difficulty is 82 and an AI Overview owns the SERP. Scored Low priority on purpose. This is the keyword a volume-sorted spreadsheet would have flagged as a top pick, and the one to actually skip.

Why the score matters more than the volume: four of these keywords share almost the same search volume (90,500/mo). Only one of them is actually worth a brief this cycle. That's the filtering a raw export doesn't do for you.

Analyst take, top priorities for this cycle

1. 1Only 4 keywords out of 2,312 land in "all three rank," and the "1 of 3" bucket is empty. Nothing here is one competitor quietly testing alone; anything worth noticing is already a two-way or three-way fight. That changes how fast we need to move on the next item.
2. 2"google advanced search" (33,100/mo, all 3 rank, positions 9-11) is the sharpest target in the set: a genuine category-standard topic where nobody has pulled ahead. One well-built page can pass all three at once instead of out-ranking them one at a time.
3. 3"seo tools" / "seo tool" (110,000/mo combined) only has 2 of 3 competitors ranking. SpyFu isn't even in this fight, a real gap in an otherwise crowded category.
4. 4"check backlinks" and its close cousin "check inbound links" (90,500/mo each) sit in the same spot: Ahrefs and Semrush locked into #1/#2, with a whole family of near-identical variants behind them (check my backlinks, inbound link checker, incoming links checker, all 90,500/mo). Don't spend a brief trying to dislodge the category leaders from their own home turf.
5. 5"ai overviews" (110,000/mo) is the one to watch, not copy yet. It's a live, rising topic in SEO itself, only 2 of 3 competitors are covering it, and both rank outside the top 5 (#7, #14). Early enough that a sharper page has a real shot, too early to call it settled.

Analyst take, top priorities for this cycle

1. 1These are the only 10 keywords (out of 2,312) where rankshawk.com shows up in Search Console at all against this competitor set, and every single one is an "alternative to" or "similar to" search. That's the exact moment someone is comparing tools and deciding, the highest-intent traffic on this whole report, and it's the one group where we already have a foothold instead of starting from zero.
2. 2"free spyfu alternative" (110/mo, difficulty 5, position 29.2) is the fastest real win on the page. Page 3, not page 9, with almost no competition. A focused comparison page could realistically push this into the top 10 this quarter.
3. 3The whole "similar to semrush" / "sites like semrush" cluster (positions 59.5 to 63.4, difficulty 5-12) moves together. One strong comparison page targeting all three phrasings at once is a more efficient brief than three separate ones.
4. 4"semrush alternatives" (1,300/mo) carries the most volume in the group by far but sits at position 81.4, the weakest showing relative to its size. It's also the header term the smaller phrasings above should funnel into once they're ranking.
5. 5"best semrush alternative" (position 87.4, difficulty 31) is the outlier: lowest position, highest difficulty of the group. Worth a second pass once the easier five are moving, not before.

Analyst take, top priorities for this cycle

1. 1Start with the four tagged Achievable, not the biggest number on the page. Free SEO Tools and Google Keyword Rank Checker already have real traffic flowing; Top Google Searches and Check Any Website's Traffic already sit on or near page 1. None of them carry a seven-figure potential. That's exactly why they're winnable this quarter instead of a bet on next year.
2. 2SpyFu's website traffic checker post is the one to study closest: 216 keyword variants off a page with only 38 referring domains. That's not an authority win, it's a coverage win, one post built wide enough to answer every phrasing of "how do I see a site's traffic." It also sits exactly where we'd want to be seen: checking competitor traffic is the thing we do.
3. 3Ahrefs' Free SEO Tools hub is worth copying structurally: a free tool used as the front door, ranking #8 for "seo tools" (110,000/mo) and pulling 2,461/mo in real traffic. It's the clearest "tool as acquisition channel" page in the whole set.
4. 4Semrush's Google My Business post is tagged Long-term bet, not Achievable, on purpose: 4 keywords, but one of them, "my business," is 1,500,000 searches/mo on its own. It took 649 referring domains to get there, so it's worth planning for, just not this cycle's brief.
5. 5The real-traffic column is what separates Business Name Generator from AI Content Detector, and they look identical on potential volume alone (495K and 546K/mo). Business Name Generator earns 21 real visits a month off that potential: tagged Low priority, it's dead weight. AI Content Detector earns 3,381, a working page, just not nearly as big as its theoretical ceiling suggests, so it's a bet worth revisiting rather than a target to copy outright.
6. 6Semrush's Search Engine List post is the cautionary one: 9 keyword variants, all 90,500/mo, and the page still doesn't crack page 1 for any of them (positions 12-22). Nine ways to ask the same question isn't the same as nine reasons to rank, so it's tagged Low priority too. Volume stacked across near-duplicates can look big and still underperform.

Why the tags matter more than the potential column: sorted by potential alone, Google My Business and Search Engine List would lead this list at 1,965,000 and 814,500/mo. Neither is a realistic brief this cycle, one is a 12-month authority build, the other already proved it doesn't convert even for the competitor sitting on it. The real-traffic numbers next to the four Achievable rows above are the ones worth sorting by instead.

Analyst take, top priorities for this cycle

1. 1Semrush has five separate dead "free tools" pages, paraphraser, title generator, summary generator, sentence rewriter, paragraph rewriter, each still pulling 240-270 referring domains of its own. That's roughly 1,250 referring domains tied to pages that no longer exist. One new "free AI writing tools" page could pitch a single outreach list against all five pools at once instead of chasing five broken links separately.
2. 2semrush.com/apps/ecommerce-booster (309 referring domains) is the highest-authority single reclaim target: a discontinued product page the web still cites.
3. 3semrush.com/state-of-content-marketing (272 referring domains) is a dead annual-report page. 272 sites wanted to cite a "state of content marketing" stat source. An actual annual report is a proven, repeatable link magnet, a format to copy, not just a link to reclaim.
4. 4On the link-gap side, prowly.com, findly.tools, crunchbase.com and patrickstox.com are the realistic near-term targets: a PR blog, a tool directory listing, a company profile, and a named SEO writer's personal site. All reachable with a normal pitch.
5. 5Every row in this table, link gap or broken, points back to Semrush. That's a format tell, not a coincidence: free tools and an annual report are the two asset types doing the heavy lifting for their backlink profile. Worth copying the format, not just chasing the individual links.

Analyst take, top priorities for this cycle

1. 1"seo tools / seo tool" (110,000/mo) is the one actually inside our category, not an adjacent SEO topic the other 85 questions were. Semrush owns the citation today; this is the AI-answer version of the same keyword gap section 01 flags for the search results page.
2. 2"search operators" (301,000/mo) is cited two different ways depending on phrasing, Ahrefs for one version, SpyFu for another. No one owns it outright. A contested field like this is easier to enter than a settled one, the same pattern as "seo tips" below.
3. 3"incoming links checker" (74,000/mo) is the realistic target: a specific, tool-shaped question, currently answered by one Ahrefs blog post, not by Google's own documentation. A sharper, more direct page has an actual shot at displacing it.
4. 4"seo tips" (60,500/mo) is already split between Ahrefs and Semrush depending on phrasing too. Two live examples of the same opening in one report.

Why 85 questions aren't in this table: "google business profile," "google search console," "keyword research" and "content marketer" all came back with bigger search volume than anything above, and all got cut. They're generic SEO terms an AI assistant reaches for by habit, not questions about what we actually do. Same filter, same business description, that cleans the noise out of Keyword Opportunities above.