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How to Do SEO Competitor Analysis

December 21, 2022

Whether you work for a local business or enterprise brand, SEO competitor analysis is a great way to improve your search engine optimization.

Why? Because understanding how your competitors use SEO can help your business gain strategic insights that you can later leverage in your SEO strategy.

This article will teach you how to do SEO competitive analysis to improve how your web pages rank in the SERPs.

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What is competitive analysis?

An SEO competitive analysis is a process of researching a competitor’s SEO presence. It also involves leveraging those strategic insights in your on-page, off-site, content marketing, and PPC campaigns. 

An SEO competitive analysis can help you:

  • Benchmark your current search engine visibility
  • Understand your industry and the competitive landscape of organic search
  • Identify areas of improvement in your SEO campaigns or website content
  • Locate untapped SEO opportunities
  • Reveal which areas of SEO where you have a competitive edge
  • Understand which SEO tactics have proved successful for your competitors and may also prove successful for your website

According to Ahrefs, over 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, meaning improving your SEO strategy can significantly benefit your revenue growth.The first step toward improvement is monitoring your competitors and understanding what it takes to rank. You can easily track your competitors through various competitor tracking tools. Their automation saves time and effort by updating you about product information changes of your closest competitors.

Getting started with the process

Having a solid foundation is key to performing a helpful competitive analysis.

To start an SEO competitor analysis, do the following:

1. Identify your SEO competitors

The first step is to make a list of competitors that you would like to analyze.

They should have a strong SEO presence and the following qualities in common with your website:

  • Similar products or service offerings
  • Same target audience/target market
  • Ranking for the exact keywords that your target audience is using
  • Reputation as a market leader in your industry niche
  • For Local Search: targeted regional location to your brick-and-mortar business


You may already have a good idea of who your competitors are. If not, you can use an SEO tool to get an idea of what other websites rank for your industry’s keywords.

Screenshot of an SEO competitor analysis tool analyzing the domain fatjoe.com and displaying a list of the competitors in organic search

To set yourself up for success, avoid comparing yourself to a competitor with a massive website and online presence compared to yours. Instead, try to find some competitors with a Domain Authority score that’s within reach of your own.

As your SERP presence grows, you can compare your website to larger competitors.

2. Use the right SEO tools

It would be best if you had the right SEO competitor analysis software to analyze successfully.

You’ll need access to the following SEO tools to spy on your competitors’ performance:

  • A keyword research tool
  • A backlink analyzer
  • An SEO Content Optimizer

These tools allow you to see the keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can also see where their organic clicks come from and all the websites linking to their pages.

They’ll also help you optimize your web content to be better and of higher quality than theirs.

If you’re running an agency, you might need specialized SEO agency software to help your competitor analysis in bulk.

3. Find realistic keyword targets

If you have a list of keywords you’d like to rank for, make sure that those are reachable goals for your website.

Not all keywords are considered equal. Some keywords are more competitive than others because they have higher search volume or conversion potential.

You can use a metric like Keyword Difficulty (KD) to benchmark your competition. I suggest aiming for keywords with a KD score less than or equal to your website’s Domain Authority.

For example, my website wanted to rank for the keyword link-building services. I can use a keyword research tool and see that the KD score of 44 is a realistic goal for my website, which has a DA of 63.

A keyword research tool displaying search volume, keyword difficulty, and cost per click metrics for the keyword link building services

Then, I can use the SERP overview feature to see which websites are currently ranking for that keyword. I’ll use the below three competitors for my analysis because they meet the proper criteria and have similar DA metrics as my website.

List of websites with domain rating, domain traffic, and referring domains and red outlines around domains that will be used for competitor analysis

Running an SEO competitor analysis in three parts

There are many ways to run a competitive analysis. For example, as your SERP presence grows, you can use SEO tools to track who your competitors are and the strategies they may be deploying continually.

If you are new to competitive analysis, this three-part analysis is a great place to start. It will provide your marketing teams with both off-site and on-page SEO insights.

You can use that competitive intelligence to understand better where you need to focus your time, resources, and marketing budget.

Part 1: Run a backlink profile comparison

Because backlinks are Google’s number one ranking factor, they are the best place to start your competitive analysis.

If you want to outrank your competition, you need to have a backlink profile similar in strength and quality to your competitors.

A backlink profile comparison will give you a high-level overview of how your backlink profile measures up. In the example below, I used SearchAtlas to compare against the competitors identified in the previous image.

Screenshot of the Backlink Profile Comparison tool in the SearchAtlas SEO software platform

Some of my competitors have more backlinks than my website, forming a reasonably significant gap. However, we have similar Domain Authority and Page Authority scores.

Regarding backlinks, quality is much more important than quantity. If one of your competitors has more backlinks, that doesn’t guarantee they’ll outrank your website for your target keywords. However, backlinks from higher-quality websites ultimately will pass more link equity than those on low-quality websites.

When you make your comparison, keep in mind that the perceived “strength” of a backlink profile is measured by the following:

  • The quality of websites linking to yours,
  • The total number of backlinks pointing to your website,
  • How many unique referring domains link to your website
  • The spam or toxicity level of backlinks
  • The textual relevance of the content on the page linking to you
  • The anchor text of the backlinks

If your competitors’ backlink profiles are more robust than yours, you’ll want to invest in link-building services or digital PR to improve your off-site signals.

However, if your backlink profile is similar in strength, you should instead focus on improving the content on your website.

Part 2: Run an on-page audit

An on-page audit can help you understand how your content measures against your competitors.

Google wants to promote content that’s high-quality and valuable to searchers. They’ll look at a range of quality indicators on the page. But in-depth, topically-rich content will perform better in search than thin content that doesn’t explore a topic thoroughly.

A content audit tool can help you see your content like search engines do.

An on-page audit report comparing the content quality of the top-ranking pages in the SERPs

If your audit reveals that your web pages are less in-depth than the top-ranking results, you should improve the page’s quality.

A chart of websites with columns labeled ranking position, content score, word count, readability, and domain traffic

Because many ranking factors determine SEO success, these two steps are a great starting point.

Both improved content and link building will benefit your SEO performance, but this process can help you determine which will help you outrank your competition. on the other hand you can read this guide that recommends these great tactics that increase your conversion rate and will help you turn your website visitors into paying customers.

Part 3: Run a keyword gap analysis

A keyword gap analysis will help you identify which keywords your competitors are ranking for that your website still needs to rank for.

For example, the below keyword gap report shows me a list of keywords my competitors are ranking for that my website isn’t.

Screenshot of the Keyword Gap Analysis report in the SearchAtlas SEO platform

When you identify a keyword gap between you and your competitors, there are two possible causes for the gap:

  1. Your current content isn’t optimized enough for the keyword.
  2. You don’t have any content on your website that Google perceives as relevant to that keyword query.

A keyword gap analysis will show you missed opportunities. It can also help you identify new keyword goals for your SEO content strategy.

If your competitors are proving to earn organic clicks for those keywords, they’ll likely be profitable for your website.

How to leverage competitive intelligence for SEO

Now that you’ve gathered new insights from your SEO competitor analysis, it’s time to incorporate your findings into a comprehensive SEO strategy.

Here are six ways to leverage the data you acquire from your competitive analysis.

1. Create better versions of your competitors’ top-performing content

If your competitors have some high-performing web pages, take those ideas and run with them!

Look at what they write about on those pages and how they present their products/services. How can you take what they have and amplify it on your page?

I’m not talking about plagiarizing their content but adding your business’ unique spin and making your content even better. Better content can mean more in-depth information, adding interactive elements, or enhancing your pages by relying on eye-catching infographic templates.

You can deploy this strategy for both off-site and on-page purposes. You can also use this content for social media. Improving your content to be more helpful than your competitors can make earning backlinks to those pages easier. It also helps you increase your rankings for relevant keywords.

2. Optimize for your competitor’s long-tail keywords

Keyword strategy is a very nuanced part of SEO. This is because there are so many ways that users may be searching for products like yours.

Also, the competitive landscape of each keyword is different, meaning a unique strategic approach is required to reach page-1 positions.

The example below shows two keywords with similar search intent, but one is far less competitive than the other.

Screenshot of keyword research tool in Ahrefs comparing the keyword metrics for “marketing budget” and “how to create a marketing budget”

If your competitor is driving lots of clicks from a long-tail keyword, consider optimizing your relevant page for that keyword instead.

Make sure, though, that your keyword targets accurately represent the content topics on the page.

3. Create new content for any keyword gaps

If your keyword gap analysis reveals that your competitor ranks for a keyword when you don’t, you should do the work of creating that missing content.

You can use a blog topics generator to identify relevant topics and article ideas that would have the potential to rank for that keyword.

Enter the keyword that you are missing content for into one of these SEO tools, and browse the suggested article ideas the software generates.

List of AI generated blog topics for the keyword “link building for ecommerce websites”

Writing and publishing consistent content on your blog is one of the best ways to close any keyword gaps.

As you do more content production, you can use strategies like topic clustering and internal linking to improve your rankings for all keywords that fit within that same cluster.

4. Use your backlink research to identify link-building outreach targets

Not sure how to deploy a link-building and backlink strategy? Your backlink profile comparison will reveal some places your team can begin.

Look at the list of your competitors’ linking domains. If those websites link to your competitors’ content, they may be willing to link to your content, too (or instead).

You can add those websites to your outreach list for link building as long as they meet the criteria for what makes a high-quality backlink.

5. Run PPC ads on their top keywords

Organic search doesn’t have to be the only method of outperforming your competitors. For example, you can take the same list of your competitor’s top keywords and run PPC ads on them.

This option can be especially beneficial if you have a larger marketing budget and want to leverage multiple digital marketing channels.

If those keywords prove to represent qualified audiences, you can then focus on earning organic rankings for that keyword in the long term. In the meantime, not only will you improve your search visibility by appearing at the top of the SERP, you can take away clicks from your competitors.

Conclusion

After all this competitor analysis, you’ll likely have a good grasp on the ins and outs of your competitor’s SEO strategy.

All the strategies listed above are about reverse-engineering what works for your competitors and making it work for your website. But remember, just because something works for your competitor doesn’t guarantee it will work for you.

Still, SEO competitive analysis can be a great way to gain concrete strategies to test and iterate. An excellent digital marketing strategy always takes a lot of experimentation. More likely than not, your competitive analysis will reveal fantastic insights into what it takes to rank in your industry.

Manick Bhan
Manick Bhan is the founder and CTO of LinkGraph, an award-winning SEO and digital marketing agency. He is also the creator of the enterprise SEO software platform, SearchAtlas. SEO is his greatest passion and his life’s work. Follow him on Twitter at @madmanick for more SEO insights.
Manick Bhan
Manick Bhan is the founder and CTO of LinkGraph, an award-winning SEO and digital marketing agency. He is also the creator of the enterprise SEO software platform, SearchAtlas. SEO is his greatest passion and his life’s work. Follow him on Twitter at @madmanick for more SEO insights.