SEO Competitor Analysis Guide

In organic search, you are not just competing against businesses that sell similar products; you are competing against every single website that ranks for the keywords your customers use. This distinction is critical. A Wikipedia page, an industry blog, an aggregation or comparison website, or a government resource, can be just as much of a competitor as your direct rival across the street who you have considered a nemesis for decades.

This guide outlines a strategic framework for assessing competitors in organic search across major search engines like Google and Bing. By dismantling their strategies, you can uncover their strengths, exploit their weaknesses, and build a roadmap to outrank them in search engine result pages (SERPs) across both the traditional ‘10 blue links’ and the various additional search features appearing in modern search.

Phase 1: Identifying Your ‘True’ Organic Competitors

Before you can analyse, you must identify. A common mistake is assuming your business competitors are your SEO competitors. While there is often overlap, the domains dominating the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for your high-value terms are your actual targets.

The Keyword Intersection Method

To find your true organic competitors, you need to look at the data.

1. Select Your Core Keywords: List the top 10–20 keywords or topics that drive the most revenue or traffic to your site.
2. Analyse the SERPs: Manually search these terms in an incognito window. Note which domains appear consistently in the top 3–5 positions.
3. Use “Share of Voice” Tools: Platforms like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Sistrix, or SpyFu have dedicated “Organic Competitors” reports.These tools analyse the intersection of your keyword set with other domains.
   • Look for: Domains that share a high percentage of common keywords with you but have higher organic traffic.
   • Ignore: Giants like Amazon or Wikipedia unless you are a massive enterprise.It is often more actionable to analyse niche competitors who are punching above their weight.

Categorising Competitors

Once you have a list, categorise them:

• Direct Competitors: Sell the same product/service and rank for commercial intent keywords.
• Indirect/Publisher Competitors: Blogs, news sites, or educational platforms that rank for informational queries. You cannot “beat” them in sales, but you must beat them in content quality to win top-of-funnel traffic. Additionally, you must beat them in ‘momentology’ (meeting the different informational needs of your prospective customers in moments that matter).  Search engines arguably reward those sites which add value throughout the whole search journey, rather than targeting simply transactional queries looking to simply take a conversion win at the end of the search journey.

Phase 2: Keyword Gap Analysis

Keyword Gap Analysis (or “Content Gap Analysis”) is arguably the highest-ROI activity in this process. It identifies the search terms your competitors rank for, but you do not.

The “Missing” Opportunity

Most SEO tools feature a “Keyword Gap” tool. Input your domain and 2–4 competitor domains.

1. Filter by “Missing”: This view shows keywords where all your competitors rank, but you have zero visibility. These are your biggest blind spots.
2. Filter by “Weak”: This shows keywords where you rank, but significantly lower than your competitors (e.g., you are on Page 2, they are in positions 1–3).

Assessing Keyword Value

Do not just copy their keyword list. Validate the intent:

• Commercial Intent: Are they ranking for “best [product] software” or “buy [product]”? These are high-priority revenue drivers.
• Informational Intent: Are they ranking for “how to…” or “what is…” guides? These build topical authority.

Actionable Insight: Create a spreadsheet of “Missing” and “Weak” keywords. Group them by topic clusters. If you see a cluster of 20 keywords related to a specific feature you offer but haven’t written about, that is your next content campaign.

Phase 3: Content Quality and Structure Analysis

Why is Google choosing their page over yours? It rarely comes down to luck. You need to dissect their top-performing pages to understand the “Content Standard” for your industry.

The “Skyscraper” Assessment

Choose a high-priority keyword where a competitor outranks you. Open their page and your page side-by-side. Analyse the following:

1. Search Intent Satisfaction

Does their page answer the user’s question faster or more thoroughly?

• Example: If the user searches “how to fix a leaky tap,” does the competitor provide a video and step-by-step photos, while you only have a wall of text?

2. Content Depth and Breadth

• Word Count: While not a direct ranking factor, a significantly higher word count could correlate with greater depth.  Also check in SERPs whether longer form content is typically in top positions, notwithstanding that AI Overviews now takes much of the direct answer informational positions in search results.
• Topic Coverage: Look at their H2 and H3 headers. What sub-topics are they covering that you missed? Are they including FAQs, expert quotes, or statistical data?  Are they covering all the possible intents of the ‘underspecified query’ where you are not?

3. Media and User Experience (UX)

• Visual Assets: Do they use custom diagrams, infographics, or original photography? Google favors unique media over stock photos.
• Readability: Is their text broken up with bullet points, short paragraphs, and bold text?
• Engagement Hooks: Do they have interactive elements like calculators, table of contents, or jump links helping users to reach different sections of intent on their pages?

SERP Features

Check if they own any SERP features.

• Featured Snippets: Are they winning “Position Zero” with a concise definition or a list?
• People Also Ask: Have they answered the PAA questions directly in their content?
• AI Overviews and AI Mode: Are they appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode as part of grounding for large language models?

Actionable Insight: If a competitor’s page is a “10,” and yours is a “7,” you cannot just optimise your meta tags to beat them. You must rewrite your content to be an “11” – better data, better visuals, and better depth.

Phase 4: Backlink Profile Auditing

Backlinks remain an important ranking signal for Google, albeit Google now states they are just one of very many things. If a competitor has a significantly higher Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Rating (DR), they might rank with weaker content. You need to understand how they earned those links.

Quantity vs. Quality

Use a tool like Majestic, Ahrefs, or Moz Link Explorer to review their profile.

• Total Referring Domains: This is more important than total backlinks. 1,000 links from one site is less valuable than 1 link from 1,000 sites.
• Link Velocity: Are they gaining 50 new referring domains a month while you are gaining 5? This indicates an active PR or outreach campaign, or a very busy marketing team building relationships and buzz across their sector.

Analysing Link Sources

Exclude obvious spam such as low end directories which are likely ignored anyway by search engines and after doing so you should then proceed as below with the remainder of the backlink profile:

Where are their best links coming from?

• Industry Contributions: Do you see author bios on industry blogs? This reveals which sites accept writing contributions.
• Resource Pages: Are they listed on “Best Tools” or “Industry Resources” pages? You can reach out to these page owners and ask to be included.
• Digital PR: Do they have links from major news outlets (Forbes, NYT, industry news)? This usually comes from publishing original data, surveys, or newsworthy studies and possibly building relationships with journalists.
• Broken Backlinks: Check their 404 pages.If they have a high-authority page that is now broken, you can email the sites linking to it, suggesting your working resource as a replacement.

Actionable Insight: Export their top 50 referring domains. Mark which ones are attainable for you and build an outreach strategy.  Backlink analysis can unearth a whole competitor marketing strategy and should never be underestimated.  However, be careful to exclude links from your backlink analysis which are obvious spam since these are very likely ignored by search engines in the first place and analysing these is simply not worth your time.

Phase 5: Technical SEO Reconnaissance

Sometimes, you might be losing because your competitor’s site is simply healthier from a crawling and indexing perspective. Technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and understand a site efficiently.

Core Web Vitals (CWV) & Speed

Google uses CWV as a ranking signal.

• Use PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix to run a test on their key landing pages.
• Check their LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).
• If your competitor is slow and clunky (e.g., heavy code, slow server), this is a major opportunity. If you can deliver a lightning-fast experience, you may win the tie-breaker for rankings.

Site Architecture and Internal Linking

Crawl their site (using a tool like Screaming Frog or just manually navigating).

• URL Structure: Are their URLs clean and keyword-rich (e.g., /services/seo-audit) or messy (e.g., /p=123)?
• Internal Linking: How do they pass authority? Do their blog posts aggressively link back to their product pages? Do they use “Hub and Spoke” models (a central pillar page linking out to cluster content)?

Mobile Usability

With Google’s Mobile-First Indexing, the desktop site matters less than the mobile one.

• Check their site on a mobile device. Is the text readable without zooming? Are buttons clickable?
• If their mobile experience is poor, prioritise your mobile UX to capture the growing mobile-first audience.

Phase 6: Assessing Brand and “Off-Page” Signals

Search engines rely on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Much of this is established off-site.

Social Signals and Brand Search

• Brand Search Volume: Use a keyword tool to see how many people search for their brand name directly. High brand search volume signals trust to Google.
• Social Media Presence: Are they active on LinkedIn, Twitter, or TikTok? While social shares aren’t a direct ranking factor, they drive traffic and increase the likelihood of earning backlinks naturally.

Reviews and Reputation

• Google Business Profile (Local SEO): If you are a local business, compare your reviews against theirs. Do they have a 4.8 rating with 500 reviews while you have 4.2 with 50? Recency and frequency of reviews matter.
• Trustpilot/G2/Capterra: For SaaS and service businesses, third-party reviews rank highly for “brand + review” keywords. A competitor with stellar reviews on these platforms will often steal conversions even if you rank higher organically.

The Competitor Analysis Toolkit

You cannot do this effectively by hand. Here is a summary of the tools mentioned and their primary use cases in this workflow:

Tool	Primary Use Case
SEMrush / Ahrefs / Sistrix	The heavy lifters. Essential for keyword gap analysis, backlink auditing, and traffic estimation.
Screaming Frog	The gold standard for technical crawling. Use it to map competitor site structures.
Google Search Console	Note: You cannot see competitor data here, only your own. Use it to benchmark your performance against what you find in other tools.
Moz / Majestic	Excellent for granular backlink metrics (Trust Flow, Domain Authority).
PageSpeed Insights	Free Google tool to check competitor site speed and Core Web Vitals.
BuzzSumo	Great for seeing which competitor content gets the most social shares.
Wayback Machine	Useful for seeing how a competitor’s landing page has changed over time (e.g., A/B testing headlines).

Conclusion: Turning Data into Strategy

A competitor analysis is useless if it sits in a drawer. The goal is to build an Action Plan.

1. Defensive Moves: specific keywords where you are slipping, and they are gaining. Refresh that content immediately.
2. Offensive Moves: The “Missing” keyword clusters. Build a content calendar to target these gaps over the next 3–6 months.
3. Technical Fixes: If your site is slower or harder to navigate than theirs, fix this before investing heavily in new content.

Remember, SEO is a zero-sum game. For you to move up to position 1, someone else must move down. By systematically analyzing the competitors who currently hold that spot, you remove the guesswork and replace it with a blueprint for victory.