SEO Competitor Analysis: Step-By-Step Guide

Does it feel like the competitors outranking you on Google know secrets that you don’t?

The hard truth is they probably do, but the good news is you can learn their secrets, too. 

By conducting an SEO competitor analysis, you’ll learn:

• Where a competitor gets their backlinks from 
• Their top content strategies 
• What their URL/internal linking structures look like 
• Their top sources for organic traffic 
• How they use CTAs and lead magnets 

In short, a competitor analysis is your ticket to learning new SEO strategies and uncovering valuable opportunities for backlinks.

It’s the embodiment of the phrase, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

In this article, we’ll equip you with a 5-step guide for conducting an extremely in-depth SEO competitor analysis. 

And no, it doesn’t involve signing up for paid tools with hefty price tags. 

Keep reading to master the art of learning from your competitors (and discover some nifty free-to-use tools).  

What is SEO Competitor Analysis?

An SEO competitor analysis is where you analyze a competing website’s performance on search engines like Google. 

This means looking at their:

1. Keyword rankings 
2. Backlink profile 
3. Organic traffic numbers
4. On-page optimizations (keyword usage, content quality, etc.) 
5. Social media presence 

Bear in mind that you’re not analyzing these factors just to appreciate them. 

Instead, your goal is to uncover your competitor’s underlying strategies to see if there’s anything you can capitalize on. 

For example, whenever you take a look at a competitor’s backlink profile, you could come across a website in your niche that they guest posted on. 

Since you now know this site accepts guest posts, you could also pitch a post of your own, which could lead to a valuable backlink for your website.

That’s how easy it is to learn from your competitors. 

Think of it as reverse-engineering the most successful aspects of industry leaders’ strategies so you can bag a bit of that success for yourself!

Why is SEO competitive research so important?

Besides finding ways to boost your own SEO strategy, conducting a competitor analysis will have benefits that stretch beyond better search rankings. 

These benefits include:

• Getting a better idea of your competitive landscape as a whole.
• Finding ways to better interact and connect with target audiences on social media.
• Learning more about what differentiates you from your competition, including what NOT to do.   

An Easy Step-by-Step Guide To SEO Competitive Analysis:

If you want to find success with an SEO competitor analysis, there are some best practices you’ll want to follow. 

These 5 steps outline the most reliable way to:

1. Identify your top competitors
2. Analyze their on-page and off-page SEO tactics 

Let’s dive in! 

#1: Identifying your competitors

First, you need to know who your top competitors are if you haven’t identified them already. 

A reliable place to start is with plain old Google. 

Simply search for your main keywords, and then pay attention to the websites currently outranking you. If you notice the same domains popping up consistently, they’re one of your primary competitors. 

The problem?

This method is pretty slow, so it’s not going to cut it if you’re trying to rank for thousands of keywords. If you run a small site that’s only trying to rank for a handful of keywords, it’s a more feasible task. 

For larger websites, you’re better off using a tool to identify your search competitors, which will take a few seconds instead of a few hours. 

You’ll have quite a few options to choose from, but let’s kick things off by taking a look at our free offering. 

Use our free tool for identifying search competitors

We offer a free Search Competition Tool as part of our suite of SEO tools available on our site. 

It uses data powered by Semrush to identify your top competitors on Google Search. All you have to do is enter your URL and sign in with LinkedIn to get started. 

Here’s what it looks like when we enter our site’s URL:

After we hit View Competition Report, we have to quickly sign in using our LinkedIn account:

Once that was done, we gained access to our competition report:

As you can see, this detailed report includes:

• Your top competitors
• Their relevance to your brand 
• Common keywords you share with top competitors
• Organic keywords
• Organic traffic
• Organic cost
• Adwords keywords

Just like that, we have a thorough list of our top competitors, which we can use for an analysis. That sure beats tracking these domains down by Googling the thousands of keywords we share in common!

This is the benefit of using our free tool: it saves you time and money.

Ahrefs Batch Analysis Tool 

You can also use Ahrefs to analyze your organic competitors if you’re already a paid subscriber. 

Ahrefs is one of the most comprehensive and positively reviewed SEO platforms, so it’s definitely worth the investment (we use it all the time). 

In terms of analyzing competitors, Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis Tool provides in-depth SEO metrics for up to 200 URLs. 

The catch?

You already need to know the URLs of your top competitor for the tool to work. That’s why we recommend using it in tandem with our free tool. 

That way, our tool will let you know who your competitors are, and Ahrefs’ tool will provide a comprehensive analysis of their SEO. 

Here’s how to use it.

Enter up to 200 URLs into the tool, but stick to one URL per line. 

You also have the option to select:

• The protocol to analyze, such as HTTP + HTTPS (or one or the other). 
• The target mode. When left on auto, Ahrefs will automatically determine which mode to target. Manual options include exact URLs, prefixes, individual domains, and domains with subdomains. 
• The web page’s indexing status. It’s most commonly set to Live, but other options include Recent and Historical (if the page isn’t currently in Google’s index). 

For this example, we only analyzed our website. Here are the results:

Metrics provided here include:

• Ahrefs rank
• The Domain Rating (DR)
• The number of referring domains.
• Number of backlinks
• Social metrics
• Organic search traffic

The tool’s data is easily exported in both UTF-8 and UTF-16 for further analysis in programs like Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice. 

Interpreting the results

Different analysis tools will give you varying information about your competitors, so bear that in mind. Also, don’t get too hung up on rankings alone! 

The company currently dominating the SERPs might actually not be your main competitor. 

You should always consider the following:

• Your niche. Who ranks well for specialized, long-tail keywords that are relevant to your business’s products and services?

• Similar services. Who else offers products and services similar to yours, even if they aren’t showing up in every search? 

Different competitors can be important to different aspects of your market, meaning they may not directly compete with you. 

An example?

Let’s say your website sells skateboard decks. 

When researching competitors, a skateboard blog containing tips and tricks is consistently ranking for the same keywords as you. 

However, they’re not a direct competitor to your business. 

Since they’re strictly a blog, they don’t sell any products or services, meaning they aren’t trying to steal your business. In fact, targeting a website like this for a guest post would be a fantastic way to:

1. Introduce your skateboard products to their audience 
2. Share some of their authority via link juice (ranking power) passed through a backlink 

The same applies to skateboard websites that are strictly news-focused as well. 

Also, you need to consider the scope of websites you’re considering competing with on the SERPs. 

This is because it’s essential to choose your SEO battles wisely. Otherwise, you could quickly find yourself in an unwinnable situation. 

For instance, if you notice that a competitor dominating first-page rankings just so happens to be a HUGE corporation with significantly more resources than you, it won’t be worth your time and effort to compete with them. 

Why is that?

It’s because SEO is largely a numbers game. 

Large corporations tend to have virtually limitless resources for content creation and link-building. As a result, they tend to have extremely high domain authority scores that make competing with them on Google virtually impossible. 

You’re much better off choosing to compete with businesses that are relatively the same size as yours (although a little bigger is okay, just not enterprise-level). 

#2: Competitor keyword analysis

Next, it’s time to start analyzing the competitors you found, and the best place to start is by analyzing their keyword strategy.

Doing so is pivotal for evaluating the strength of each competitor, and also for locating weak points that’ll offer you a way to outrank them. 

As long as you’ve chosen your battles wisely, you should theoretically be able to outrank any of your competitors once you get a grasp on their overall SEO strategy. 

Why is that?

It’s because if they stumble upon an SEO goldmine, such as a trending topic or backlink opportunity, you can always copy it through competitive analysis. 

As far as keywords go, a competitor keyword analysis is valuable for:

1. Finding relevant keywords that you aren’t targeting 
2. Uncovering keywords that they’re outranking you for 

Whenever you find a keyword they’re ranking for, but you aren’t, consider if it’s worth creating a piece of content for it. Ask yourself this question:

Will you be able to outdo the competing piece of content? Are there more insights you can add that they didn’t? Does their content lack videos, images, and infographics?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you should whip up a piece of content for the keyword and see how you rank. If you truly outdid the competitor’s content, and if no backlink gaps exist, you should be able to outrank them! 

To better understand how to conduct a keyword analysis, we’ve broken it down into two phases: opportunities and gaps. 

Find keyword gaps

When analyzing a competitor’s keyword profile, you need to keep an eye out for any keyword gaps that exist. 

A keyword gap occurs whenever there’s a significant difference between the keywords you rank for and the keywords a competitor ranks for on search engines. In particular, the kind of gap we care about occurs whenever a competitor ranks for more keywords than you do. 

This isn’t good because you’re potentially leaving lots of money on the table if you aren’t ranking for crucial keywords related to your products and services. 

To stop your competitors from hogging all that business, you need to identify and close keyword gaps. 

We just so happen to have another free tool that’s perfect for this task: our free keyword and content gap tool. 

 

To use it, enter your domain and up to 3 competitor URLs. Hit Compare Domains, sign in with LinkedIn, and you’ll have a report detailing: 

• Missing Keywords: Keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t.
• Weak Keywords: Keywords you both rank for, but where your competitor outranks you.
• Strong Keywords: Keywords where you outperform your competitors.

You should use your keyword gap analysis results to note two things.

See where you’re lacking 

Are there any keywords that all of your competitors’ sites are ranking for and you aren’t? 

To determine why this is happening, start by looking at how much content they offer for those keywords.

It could be that they offer an exceptional amount of information and resources for their content, or they could have more backlinks. 

Once you uncover why they’re outranking you, it’ll become clear what steps you need to take to dethrone them. 

For instance, if you find out they have more backlinks pointing at one of their blogs, then you’ll know that you have to build more backlinks to outrank them. 

Key point: Not all keyword gaps are created equal. There could be keywords that your competitors are ranking for that aren’t actually doing their business any good. An example would be inadvertently ranking for an irrelevant keyword that’s not related to your products or services. To avoid this from happening, focus on keywords that are: Relevant: Align with your target audience and business goals. High-Volume: Have a significant search volume to drive meaningful traffic. Achievable: Consider your website’s authority and the competitiveness of the keyword.

Do a TF-IDF analysis

You can also do a TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document analysis) to discover the keywords a competitor uses on a page, plus how often the keyword appears on that page. You can also discover low-competition keywords that you might not know about yet.

Use this free TF-IDF tool to find out how often a keyword appears on a particular page juxtaposed against how often it is expected to appear on said page. 

The evaluation may reveal that your competitor’s page includes other related terms and phrases that you haven’t included in your keyword list. By including these specific keywords and phrases, you could boost your position in the rankings, which is why it’s worth giving a TF-IDF analysis a shot. 

Close keyword gaps

Based on your analysis, start creating new content for the keywords you identified in the gap analysis. 

This could take various forms, such as developing new landing pages, blog posts, or product descriptions that are optimized for each keyword. 

Also, don’t forget about your existing content! 

You can always add new keywords to existing posts, such as related phrases that you uncovered during your TF-IDF analysis. 

Whenever you create new content to close keyword gaps, remember that quality trumps everything else. 

So, while you definitely need to properly optimize the page for each keyword, the quality of each post is what will mean the most to both readers and search engines. 

If you want to outrank your competitors, your content must outdo theirs in a big way. 

This means going into more detail, citing new sources, and adding things like videos and infographics. As long as you knock the content out of the park quality-wise, you should be good to go. 

#3: Analyze on-page SEO

Next, it’s time to take a look at your competitors’ on-page SEO efforts. 

What’s on-page SEO?

It refers to all optimizations made on the front-facing side of your website, such as content quality, internal links, keyword usage, and metadata. 

In particular, you should navigate to your competitor’s top-performing pages to peep their on-page tactics. 

You should pay attention to:

• How often your competitors publish content.
• The type and quality of content that they are pushing out.
• The keywords that they are actively targeting.
• The headline lengths, title keywords, and title tags that they are using.
• The metadata that they are using for their pages and posts.
• Their internal linking structure.

Not only does this provide you with an effective template on which to base your content and SEO efforts, but it may also reveal gaps in your competitors’ content that you can exploit with your content marketing plan.

For instance:

• Do they fail to cover certain topics in significant detail?
• Are they failing to push out certain types of content and media?
• Do some posts and pages have a low word count?

Pinpointing weaknesses like these will help you uncover ways to dethrone your competitors from the #1-ranked spot. 

Ahrefs Site Structure Report

Analyzing a competitor’s on-page SEO is made far easier with a tool like Ahrefs. Its Site Structure report will help you analyze the architecture of a website to understand its performance on search engines like Google. 

Here’s how to run the Site Structure Report using Ahrefs. 

First, log in to your account and select Site Explorer from the toolbar at the top of the page. 

 

Next, enter the URL of a website you want to analyze and hit the Search button. 

This will bring you to the Overview of the website’s SEO performance. However, we want to find the domain’s best-performing content to analyze. 

To do so, navigate to the Top Pages report under Organic Search on the left-hand sidebar. 

This will give you a detailed breakdown of the domain’s top performing pages on Google’s SERPs, which is a huge help for performing a competitor analysis. 

Here are the top metrics to pay attention to:

• Site hierarchy: How is the site organized? Is there a clear hierarchy from the homepage to category and content pages?
• Internal linking: Are there strong internal links pointing to key pages? How are links distributed across the site?
• Content clusters: How is the content grouped? Are there identifiable clusters or silos of related content?
• Depth of pages: How many clicks deep are important pages from the homepage? Pages that are too deep might not be easily crawled or indexed by search engines.
• Technical SEO issues: Identify broken links, redirect chains, or other technical issues affecting the site’s performance.
• Orphan pages: Are there any important pages that are not linked to from other parts of the site? Orphan pages can be a missed opportunity for internal linking and SEO.

Once you have a solid grasp of their on-page SEO strategies, you can move on to the next step. 

#4: Analyzing competitor backlinks 

Backlinks are one of the most crucial ranking factors on Google and other search engines. 

Therefore, it’s only natural that a competitor’s backlink profile would be included in the fun of a competitor analysis. 

9 times out of 10, if a competitor is outranking you despite flawless on-page and technical optimizations, backlinks are likely the culprit. 

They probably have A) significantly more backlinks than you or B) higher quality links from more authoritative websites. 

Google views backlinks as votes of confidence, which means high-quality backlinks can significantly boost your site’s authority and search rankings. 

Here’s what you need to know about backlinks:

✅High-authority sources: Look for links from well-known media outlets, influential blogs, educational institutions, and industry-specific publications. These signals carry more weight in Google’s eyes.

✅Relevance: Are the linking sites relevant to your niche or industry? Links from related websites are more valuable than those from unrelated sources.

✅Context: Consider how the backlink is presented. Is it embedded naturally within the content, or does it appear in a paid or sponsored link section? Natural, editorially-placed links are most desirable.

How to analyze competitor backlinks

The first step to conducting a backlink analysis is to choose a tool to use. 

Once again, our free suite of SEO tools saves the day, as we have a backlink checker tool you can use. 

Like our other tools, it’s incredibly easy to use. 

Enter a competitor’s domain, hit View Backlinks Report, and you’ll have a list of their backlinks ready for your analysis. 

Here’s what it looks like:

The tool shows you:

• A domain’s total backlinks and referring domains 
• Individual URLs that you can visit for further analysis (like to see if the site accepts guest posts) 
• The anchor text used for the backlink 
• Whether the link is dofollow or nofollow
• The backlink’s authority score (ranging from 1 – 100)

When analyzing a competitor, focus on backlinks coming from reputable sources, such as:

1. Major media outlets 
2. Recognized online publications 
3. Authoritative blogs with lots of followers 
4. Reputable business directories 

Once that’s done, use your insights to reverse-engineer your competitor’s success for your own benefit! 

Ask yourself these questions:

How did they get recommended by industry authorities? Is it possible for you to do the same? Can you secure similar coverage from news stories and press releases? 

Keep an eye out for easy win backlink opportunities, such as competitor backlinks that are broken. If you have a similar piece of content, you can contact the webmaster to provide your piece as a replacement. Business directories that you aren’t listed in are other easy wins, and so are resource pages. 

#5: Identifying available gaps in the market

Besides keyword and backlink gaps, you should also look for essential differences between you and your competitors. These could be weak points in their strategies or unique selling points (USPs) that help you stand out in your market. 

In particular, analyze these 5 factors: brand authority, content marketing, technical SEO, page speed, and linking issues.

Brand authority

The first step in comparing your site to your competitors is to assess their authority. 

This refers to whether or not they’re a known name in the industry and how trusted their domain is by search engines. 

Key metrics to check here are Moz’s Domain Authority and Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, both of which score a website’s ability to rank on search engines. 

Factors that contribute to a domain’s authority include:

• Content quality 
• Organic traffic 
• Backlink profile 
• On-page and off-page optimizations 

When comparing a competitor’s backlink profile, you should stick with Ahrefs’ DR. This is because it strictly analyzes a domain’s backlinks. 

If you’re looking for a more head-to-head comparison for overall SEO, then Moz’s DA is the way to go. It considers a domain’s backlinks but also considers other crucial ranking factors. 

Content marketing

It’s time to take an in-depth look at a competitor’s content to find any gaps. 

Ask the following questions: 

➡️Do they create high-quality content backed up by research, authority, and plentiful sources? 

➡️Is their content thorough, user-friendly, and attentive to all potential browser questions? 

➡️Do they offer supplementary supporting pages for their product pages? Do they use multiple different content marketing channels?

Note the weaknesses in each competitor’s content so that you can fulfill these needs for users instead. 

Furthermore, don’t leave yourself out of a content analysis like this. Use these same parameters to measure your content marketing efforts, noting the gaps you need to fill. 

Technical SEO

Beyond a website’s use of keywords, Google’s crawlers analyze multiple other technical factors to decide which pages to rank highest. 

Considering technical SEO factors as part of your analysis will help you spot more vulnerable competitors while also ensuring your own site is up to scratch.

You should take note of the following elements on both your and your competitors’ websites.

Page speed

The bigger a site gets, the more bogged down it gets with content and product pages. This can take a serious toll on a website’s loading speed. 

Google interprets this as a measure of the site’s user-friendliness, which is why they developed the Core Web Vitals Test. 

It measures a website’s loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. 

If your site’s speed isn’t up to snuff, Google is less likely to recommend it in its search results. 

How can you tell if your page speed is sufficient?

The best way is to use Google Lighthouse, which is a suite of free tools that includes PageSpeed Insights, a handy tool for measuring site speed. 

If your speed needs improvement, Lighthouse will make suggestions for speeding things up, which is very useful. 

Linking issues

As an extension of the technical SEO factors mentioned earlier, internal linking is a crucial factor in the crawlability of a site. 

A website should be structured with easily accessible URLs, the correct meta tags for pages and articles, breadcrumbs, anchor text, and snippets. 

Besides that, a logical internal linking structure is a must, where every page contains at least one internal link (preferably more). 

This makes it easier for Google’s crawler bots to discover new pages on your website. A web page that has zero internal links pointing at it is known as an orphan page, and it’s next to impossible for users and web crawlers to find. 

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer has a Site Structure report that can help you optimize your internal linking structure. 

If your site is structured well, you’ll be Googlebot-friendly. 

Conversely, if you find that your competitors do not match the above criteria, you’re in good standing to overtake them.

Final Takeaways: SEO Competitor Analysis 

We’ve covered A LOT so far, so let’s recap. 

While a competitor analysis may seem exhaustive, it’s essential if you want to rise to the top (and stay on top) of the search engine game. 

In fact, you should try to schedule an analysis like this every 6 months to ensure you’re keeping up with the Joneses SEO-wise. 

Do you lack the time and know-how to conduct your own SEO strategy and competitor analysis?

Then, don’t wait to check out HOTH X, our fully managed SEO service, where we take the entire process off your hands. 

Also, if you have any additional questions, why not schedule a free call with one of our experts today? We’re here to simplify your SEO success, so don’t be shy about getting in touch!