The invention discloses a preparation method of strontium ranelate key intermediate 3-ketoglutaric acid diethyl (dimethyl) ester. The method comprises the steps of firstly adding a solvent into a reactor, cooling, putting a solid super acidic catalyst, then putting citric acid monohydrate, slowly heating, performing a thermal reaction, heating until the thermal reaction ends after no obvious bubbles exist, filtering to obtain filtrate, recycling a filter cake as a catalyst, performing solvent recovery on the filtrate, adding into ice water, extracting by adding dichloromethane, washing an extract by using a sodium bicarbonate aqueous solution, water and a saturated saline solution in sequence, and performing reduced pressure distillation to obtain a product, wherein the catalyst is solid super-acid; reaction conditions are as follows: the reaction temperature is between -20 DEG C and 60 DEG C, and the reaction time is 2-12 hours (the sum of the heat preservation time). The process disclosed by the invention does not use any liquid acid catalyst, is mild in reaction, short in steps and simple and convenient in operation, can not cause acid wastewater discharge, and is green and environment-friendly.