How to Do Competitor Analysis in SEO

This guide is for business owners, marketers and junior SEOs who want to know why other sites outrank them and what to do about it. It works whether you have paid tools or only Google and a spreadsheet. By the end you will have a competitor list, a keyword and content gap list, a link gap list, and a short action plan, which is exactly what I hand clients after this stage of an audit.

Business competitors vs search competitors

The first mistake I see is analysing the wrong sites. Your business rival across town may have a weak website, while the sites beating you on Google are directories, marketplaces, publishers or businesses in another city. Analyse the sites you share search results with.

For local results, remember Google’s local ranking help page: map rankings mainly depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and you cannot pay for a better position. A competitor closer to the searcher may outrank you on distance alone, which no amount of copying will change. What you can control is covered in my Google Business Profile guide.

Step 1: Build your competitor list

1. List 10 to 20 keywords that matter commercially: your main services or categories, plus a few informational questions your customers ask.
2. Search each one in a private window, with your location set to your market. Note the top 10 organic domains and the three map pack businesses.
3. Count how often each domain appears. The ones that show up across many keywords are your real search competitors.
4. Choose 3 to 5 to study in depth: the two or three that appear most, plus one that ranks well despite looking smaller than you. That last one often teaches the most.

Paid tools (Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb) speed this up by listing domains with keyword overlap, but the manual method is accurate for small markets where tool data is thin, which is often the case for Pakistani and other non-US local searches. A quick WHOIS and domain age lookup tells you how long each competitor has been building its site.

Step 2: Compare keywords and find the gaps

For each competitor, find the pages that bring them the most search traffic. In Ahrefs or Semrush this is the Top Pages report. Without tools, search site:competitor.com plus your topic and look at which pages rank for your list.

• Missing keywords: topics they rank for where you have no page at all.
• Weak keywords: topics where you have a page ranking on page two. My guide to striking-distance keywords explains why these are often the fastest wins.
• Intent mismatch: queries where they rank with a different page type, for example a category page where you have a blog post. Google is telling you which format searchers want.

Put the results in one sheet with a column for the target page on your site, so every keyword has a clear owner. My keyword mapping guide shows the layout I use, and the keyword research guide covers how to judge which gaps are worth closing.

Step 3: Analyse their best content

Open the competitor page that ranks for each priority query and note, honestly, why it deserves to rank:

• Does it answer the query in the first screen?
• Which subtopics does it cover that yours does not?
• Does it show first-hand experience: original photos, real prices, worked examples, named authors?
• What format does it use: tables, calculators, steps, video?
• How fresh is it? Outdated prices and old screenshots are an opening.

The goal is not to copy. Google’s helpful content guidance asks whether your page provides substantial value compared with other pages in the results, and lists “mainly summarizing what others have to say without adding much value” as a warning sign. Its spam policies go further: copying content and changing it only slightly, for example by swapping synonyms, counts as scraping. Use competitor pages to find what searchers expect, then add what only you can: your data, your local knowledge, your examples.

Step 4: Compare backlinks

Links remain a large part of why one page outranks another. In Backlinko’s correlation study of 11.8 million results, the number 1 result had about three times as many referring domains as positions 2 to 10. Correlation is not proof, but in practice I rarely see a page with no links beat well-linked pages for competitive terms.

1. Pull each competitor’s referring domains from a link tool (Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz each give limited free data).
2. Filter for domains that link to two or more competitors but not to you. These “link intersect” sites already link to businesses like yours.
3. Group them by type: directories and associations, suppliers and partners, local news, resource pages, guest articles.
4. Judge each one before pursuing it. My guide on how to evaluate a backlink covers what to look for, and anything that looks paid or part of a network should be skipped.

Step 5: Check technical health and site structure

Run one competitor page and your equivalent page through the same checks: mobile layout, Core Web Vitals, internal links pointing to the page, and how many clicks it sits from the homepage. Crawl small competitor sites with Screaming Frog’s free version to see how they organise categories and service pages. The free PageSpeed checker gives a quick comparison. Interestingly, the same Backlinko study found no correlation between site speed and rankings, so treat speed as a user experience fix rather than a guaranteed ranking lever.

Step 6: Look at the search results themselves

Note which features appear for each query and who owns them: featured snippets, People also ask, image and video results, the local pack, AI Overviews, and shopping results. If a competitor owns the featured snippet with a 50-word definition and a table, that tells you the format to beat. My guide to featured snippets covers how to compete for them.

Turning findings into a plan

An analysis that ends as a spreadsheet changes nothing. I sort every finding into one of three columns and give each a rough effort and value score:

Start with high-value, low-effort items, usually improvements to pages already on page two. If your own site has deeper problems, an SEO audit should come before any new content, otherwise new pages inherit the same issues.

Mistakes I see in competitor analysis

• Studying only national giants. A small site ranking above you with fewer links is more useful to study than a household name.
• Copying structure and headings line by line. You end up with a page that adds nothing, which is the opposite of what Google rewards.
• Trusting tool traffic estimates as fact. They are modelled, and often far off for small or non-US markets. Use them to compare, not to report.
• Chasing every competitor link. Some of their links are paid or spammy; matching those adds risk, not value.
• Doing it once. Results change after core updates and as competitors publish. A quarterly check takes far less time than the first analysis.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Backlinko, “We Analyzed 11.8 Million Google Search Results” (updated April 2025).
• Google Search Central, “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content” (accessed 2026).
• Google Search Central, “Spam policies for Google web search” (accessed 2026).
• Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google” (accessed 2026).

If you would like a second pair of eyes on why specific competitors outrank you, competitor analysis is part of every SEO audit service I run, and you can send me your main keywords to start.