SEO competitor analysis: a step-by-step guide

An SEO competitor analysis compares your site with the three to five sites that rank for your searches, then turns the differences into a short list of things to build or fix. Work through it in order. Pick the competitors, compare their top pages, keywords and content gaps, check their backlinks and technical basics, see who AI answers cite, and stop when you have three or four actions with owners.

Most analyses fail at the last step. Treat every step below as a question that must change your plan, or skip it.

Step 1. Pick 3 to 5 search competitors

Your search competitors are the domains that rank for the keywords you want, which is often a different list from the companies your sales team names. A review site, a marketplace or a trade publication can take more of your clicks than any rival product.

Search five of your most valuable keywords in a private window and note every domain on page one. Domains that appear for three or more are your shortlist. To skip the manual work, list the sites that share the most Google keywords with yours, and our guide on how to find your competitors covers the judgment calls.

Drop Wikipedia, YouTube and other giants that rank for everything. You can't copy their strategy. Cap the list at five, because a sixth rival rarely changes the action list.

Step 2. Compare top pages, keywords and content gaps

Look at pages first. For each competitor, find the two or three pages that bring the most search traffic and note what they are. A calculator, a template library and a comparison page win for different reasons, and the format often explains the traffic better than any metric.

Then read the keywords behind those pages. Note which searches bring the most visits, with brand searches left out, and what position the rival holds. A rival at position 2 is hard to move. One at position 9 is beatable. Intent decides the format. Searchers who want to learn need a guide, and searchers who want to buy need a product page. Our post on finding a competitor's keywords covers reading that list.

A content gap is a keyword your rivals rank for where you have no page. Look for gaps that repeat. Three rivals ranking for related phrases with the same kind of page means searchers expect that page. Group gaps by the page that would answer them, and use a keyword gap analysis to filter the list. Volume, difficulty and traffic from any tool are estimates, so compare them across rivals rather than reading them as counts.

Step 3. Check backlinks and technical basics

Backlinks tell you whether you can win a gap with content alone. Compare which sites link to each competitor, not only how many. If a rival's strongest links come from industry directories, partner pages and a couple of trade publications, you can usually get the same ones. If they come from years of press coverage, plan for a longer fight. Third-party link counts are estimates and each provider's index misses links, so compare rivals from one source. Our guide to checking a site's backlinks covers what to look for.

For technical basics, open each competitor's top page next to your nearest equivalent. Check that both return a 200, have one clear title and H1, load fast on a phone and show their main content with JavaScript turned off. If yours fails where theirs passes, fix that before writing anything new.

Step 4. See who AI answers cite

AI answers are a separate scoreboard, and the leaders there are often not the leaders in Google. Ask ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode the questions your buyers ask, the "best X for Y" and "X vs Y" kind, and note which sites they cite and which brands they name.

When a competitor keeps getting cited, read the cited page and note what it states near the top. When a site that sells nothing, like a trade magazine, gets cited most, a mention there may help you more than a new page. To count citations across many answers instead of a handful, see which pages AI answers cite on your topic.

Turn your SEO competitor analysis into an action list

Finish with three or four actions, each with the evidence behind it, an owner and a date to check it again. For example, with invented findings:

1. Build a comparison page, because two rivals rank in the top 5 for "X vs Y" searches and we have nothing.
2. Rewrite the pricing page title and H1, because the rival at position 3 targets the phrase and ours doesn't mention it.
3. Pitch the trade site that AI answers cite on our topic.

If you want somewhere to record the numbers for each rival, our competitor analysis template has a sheet and a worked example. Rerun the analysis every quarter.

Find a competitor's keywords and top pages

Competitor Keywords covers step 2 for one competitor per run. Enter their domain and choose a country, and it returns their top 100 Google keywords by estimated traffic, each with position, search volume, difficulty, search intent, cost per click and the ranking page. It groups the keywords into blog topics, keywords worth bidding on in Google Ads and searches for the competitor's own name, and lists the pages that bring the site the most visits.

It covers the whole domain, not one folder, and only the country you choose. Visits and volumes are estimates. It does not show which keywords the competitor buys in Google Ads, and it can't see anyone's Search Console data. A run costs 35 credits. A lookup where our keyword data has no record of the site is refunded.