How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO
Competitor analysis gives you a proven roadmap for what works in your niche — without starting from scratch. You're not copying your competitors; you're learning from their data. Here's the structured process I use to extract every useful insight from a competitor's site.
Identify who your real SEO competitors are
Your SEO competitors are the sites occupying the top 10 for your most important keywords — not necessarily the businesses you compete with commercially. A small blog can be an SEO competitor to a major brand if it ranks for the same terms.
Semrush's Organic Research shows your top organic competitors ranked by keyword overlap. Enter your domain and it identifies who you're actually competing against in the SERPs.
Budget alternative: Serpstat (from $59/mo)
Analyse their top organic keywords
Find the keywords driving the most traffic to each competitor. Look for: their highest-volume rankings, keywords they rank in positions 4-10 (where content improvements could push them up — and where a new entrant could appear), and any commercial intent keywords they dominate.
Ahrefs' Site Explorer shows a competitor's top organic pages alongside estimated traffic — not just keywords. This reveals which content types drive the most value for them.
Budget alternative: Semrush (from $139.95/mo)
Review their backlink profile
Check their Domain Rating, total referring domains, and which pages earn the most backlinks. The pages with the most backlinks reveal what content earns links in your niche. Note the types of sites linking to them — these are your outreach targets.
Ahrefs has the most comprehensive backlink index. The 'Best by Links' and 'Best by Link Growth' reports are particularly useful for spotting what content types attract links in your niche.
Budget alternative: Moz Pro (from $49/mo)
Assess their content strategy
Look at how often they publish, what topics they cover, the average length of their top pages, and whether they use structured data. Count how many pages they have indexed. This tells you the investment required to compete.
Semrush's Content Analysis shows publishing frequency, top authors, and content performance — giving you a clear picture of how actively a competitor is investing in content.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)
Run a technical comparison
Use a site audit tool to crawl your competitor's site (if allowed) and compare their technical health to yours. Note their site speed, use of structured data, and internal linking patterns. Technical advantages are hard to see from the outside but often decisive.
Semrush can run a limited crawl of competitor sites. The resulting comparison reveals whether their technical SEO foundation is stronger or weaker than yours — an often-overlooked competitive factor.
Budget alternative: Seobility (from $0/mo)