The benefits of running a competitor analysis are endless, so it’s crucial that you do one!
By identifying competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, for your business or a client, you’ll gain significant insight into what is working within your industry.
In turn, this will steer your SEO strategy in the right direction.
In this guide, I break down the key elements you need to include in your SEO competitor analysis, including why to do them and how.
But first, what is an SEO competitor analysis?
An SEO competitor analysis is a key part of the initial steps of your search strategy. It helps you answer questions such as:
Who are my competitors?
How are competitors successfully building links?
Are any competitors optimizing for key terms better than I am?
Which competitors have a good SERP feature strategy?
Completing a competitor analysis gives you time to reflect and learn from your competitors’ strategies. It can help you learn what really works within your industry and ultimately save you time and money.
So, how do you do competitor analysis? Where should you begin? What SEO competitor analysis tool to use?
For the rest of this article, I’m going to perform a competitor analysis for the website Mister Spex to demonstrate the analysis steps.
It starts with Keyword Research
This is not only the starting point for creating your SEO strategy but also goes on to be the focal point of your content strategy; you want to get it right and not cut any corners, no matter how time-consuming you think it may be.
Keyword research is imperative; it identifies how your audience will be finding you.
While this isn’t a keyword research guide, I’ll share pointers to frame your thinking and show how important getting this right is.
Keyword research is all about investigating products or services, how people are searching for what you offer, and understanding your audience’s questions and interests.
Brainstorm what your customers would be searching for and put yourself in the mind of your audience.
When working on this for a client, involve them in the brainstorming process.
I usually like to try to think of topics that fit into different levels of commercial intent:
Searches for your services and products
Question-based searches related to your services and products
Interest-based searches your audience makes that are less related to your services or products
If you were a travel website, you may categorize like this:
The awareness searches are less commercially focused; these are engaging topics to write about that would interest your audience.
You can go even more unrelated than this example, as long as it fits well with your brand and what your audience likes.
Why does this work?
By thinking of keyword research in this way, it ensures you plan your website and SEO content process based upon marketing practices such as the purchase funnel or customer journey mapping.
Now on to finding keywords.
Here is how I tend to find keywords:
Keyword explorer tools
Keyword explorers are a quick and efficient way to do keyword research. Simply enter a keyword and in return, you will find other keywords that are related to that entry.
Examples of tools you can use are:
The only limitation of keyword explorers is that they are only as good as what you enter, which is why I use them but also alongside other tactics.
Competitor rankings
Multiple tools allow you to enter a competitor’s domain and they return their topic traffic-driving keywords.
This can be a great way to see how potential customers are finding your competitors, especially for companies entering a new market (and are lacking their own analytics data).
Examples of tools are:
Ahrefs Site Explorer
Google Search Console
Looking at your data with tools such as Google Search Console is a great way to see what you are currently ranking for and spotting opportunities to add to your keyword research.
This does, however, only work well if you’re working with an established website. I’ve written about my process for finding these types of keywords here.
Keyword suggestions
There is a nifty tool in Advanced Web Ranking to help with keyword research. One feature is a list of keyword suggestions in the keyword rank tracker tool.
It’s as simple as clicking “Show Suggestions” as you go to add keywords to your project.
In this section, enter a domain/keyword to see related keywords. You can enter your domain or a competitor's domain.
If you don’t know your competitors, come back to this later after step 2 of this guide .
See, it’s simple! Learn more about this tool here.
Once I’ve collected my keywords I want to target, I begin to categorize them into groups. I usually group them by commercial intent, category, and subcategory at this stage.
When categorizing by category/sub-category, I usually use the website structure as a guide.
For a competitor analysis for Mister Spex, I’d use both the website structure as well as the breadcrumbs on the website, which can also be helpful for this.
Alternatively, check how the primary and secondary menu navigation is organized.
This will become useful later when you are doing comparisons to your competitors, as you will be able to see how competitors change and how they perform depending on the different keyword groups.
Find out who your competitors are
Search using terms with a high commercial intent to find competitors and highlight websites similar to yours; this is a quick way to build a list of your top competitors.
I’d recommend Ahrefs Site Explorer and SEMrush’s Competitive Research Toolkit as tools to help with your research.
It’s also useful to find out who your clients think their competitors are just so when you do the analysis, it’s not all brand new names to them.
Use a mixture of brands your client wants to see as well as ones that have a large keyword overlap.
Another way to find out who your competitors are is by using Advanced Web Ranking’s Competitive Intel tools.
Once you’ve uploaded your keyword list, Advanced Web Ranking provides you with a variety of different competitor reports including a handy table in the market share report showing the intersection between you and your competitors.
What you want to look for when using the table is competitors with more green in the intersection bar as this highlights that they have a higher percentage of common keywords with you.
Want even more competitor insights? Check out the Advanced Web Ranking integration with Google Search Console in my SEO report template.
Be aware competitors can change massively, depending on both keyword category and intent. You’ll find the largest change in competitors when looking at informational keywords vs. commercial keywords.
I usually categorize competitors based upon whether they are “content competitors” or “commercial competitors.
Content competitors are websites that talk about your topic but don’t overlap commercially, such as informational news websites. Commercial competitors are your direct competitors that provide the same or similar service as you.
Analyze your competitors with metrics
With your new list of websites you’re competing against, you’ll want to identify exactly how “competitive” each of those competitors are. You want to have a top-level overview of where everyone is positioned within the market.
Next, dig deeper and analyze your competitors’ metrics; this can make it easier to spot low-hanging fruit and opportunities.
Market Share
This is where Advanced Web Ranking shines; the Market Share has fancy reports that enable you to see your competitor’s metrics in really granular detail.
Some metrics in the Market Share report are:
Click Share - The estimated percentage of clicks that your website receives from organic search, based on its top 20 positions and their related organic CTR.
Number of keywords - The number of keywords that your website is ranking for in the top 20 positions.
Estimated visits - The approximate number of visits that your website may receive during a month, from its top 20 keyword positions, based on their related Search Volume and Click Share.
The first thing you will see is a market share overview of you against your competitors.
Scroll down to see the table with each competitor alongside their estimated visits and the number of keywords.
If your project has already updated several times in Advanced Web Ranking, then you will also see how these SEO metrics change from one update to another for each website.
Take this data and fill in the table in the template. If you aren’t using Advanced Web Ranking, other tools can give you this information, including Sistrix, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and more.
Once you’ve filled that in, you’ll get a nice bubble chart visualization showing each competitor’s current market position.
It gets a little clustered in the bottom left, but you can see that Frames Direct is the obvious current market leader.
I usually dive into each competitor and see the overall trend of their estimated visits and make a note of it in the “Organic growth trend” row in the “Competitor notes” tab.
Want to also fill in the “Impacted by core” row? Advanced Web Ranking makes this easy with a “Show Google Algo Changes” button that plots known algorithm updates on the market share chart.
Link Authority
There are several link metrics you can compare, depending on your tool of choice. These typically are DA (Domain Authority) for Moz, DR (Domain Rating) for Ahrefs, and TF (Trust Flow) / CF (Citation Flow) for Majestic.
There are two main ways I look at this. One is by using domain-to-domain comparisons of link authority, which you can obtain by filling in the “Referring Domains” and “Domain Rating” columns of the template:
Another is by looking at trends for link acquisition. Most link tools will give you an overview of an increase of links each domain is getting, which can provide useful insight into their marketing activity.
There are a variety of other things you could analyze when it comes to links, but more on that later.
Brand Popularity
Another thing you’ll also want to measure is who exactly is the most popular brand in your industry.
A quick way to do this is to compare search volumes of different brands in your market. Enter the brand names into any keyword research tool to get search volumes and then enter that into the template.
Page Speed
It’s always worth taking things a step further and comparing page speed.
We’ve all been there when we’ve had to wait just a couple of seconds for a page to load and we went back and clicked the next relevant link. If your page speed is behind competitors, there’s a good chance this could be happening to you.
On top of that, Google utilizes page speed as a ranking factor. So you could potentially receive a small boost from having a fast website.
To do this, I recommend using PageSpeed Insights or Wattspeed and entering the page speed score that is returned for each competitor into the template.
To grab PageSpeed scores in bulk, I recommend trying Batch Speed.
Depending on how in-depth you want to go, you could also compare page types. On an ecommerce website, compare the homepage, category pages, and product pages. On a SaaS website, you could look at the homepage, feature pages, and blog articles.
Keyword gap analysis
A keyword gap analysis finds keywords that are driving traffic to your competitors’ websites, but not to yours.
I’d highly recommend running a gap analysis, as it could reveal invaluable opportunities that you aren’t currently competing for that competitors are.
With a gap analysis, you can find:
Opportunities to create new category/service pages
Content ideas you could include in your calendar
New product lines you could create with your merchandising team.
There are a variety of tools that you can use for a keyword gap analysis, including SEMrush Keyword Gap, Ahrefs Content Gap, and Advanced Web Ranking.
By using the comparison website report, you can filter it in different ways to highlight keywords that any of the listed websites rank in the top three positions for.
Applying the filter is as simple as using the menu at the top and entering the position range you want to look at.
After you’ve filtered, you can then scan the list to find keywords competitors are ranking well for that you aren’t.
Once you’ve spotted some, make a list, and use these as ideas to create new pages on your website or to better optimize existing ones.
Spy on competitors SERP feature strategy
SERP features are critical to your strategy. It’s important when doing your analysis to see what SERP features your competitors are capturing and if there are any trends to show how they’re doing it.
To see the most popular SERP features in your country, you can get this information for free from Advanced Web Ranking’s tool here.
To see common SERP features for all the keywords you’ve highlighted in your research, Advanced Web Ranking has a handy SERP Features Visibility tool.
This tool allows you to get an insight into what types of features are commonly popping up on the SERP alongside which features you and your competitors are capturing.
For example, it can tell you that images show up on “x percent of” search results; when creating your strategy, you will need to ensure you’re properly optimizing images for SEO.
The most useful part of this report for me is definitely the Featured Snippet overview against competitors.
Spy on how your competitors are getting links and to where
Link building strategies aren’t of the easiest of tasks. It’s sometimes difficult to know where to begin, but I’d recommend you start by looking for which competitor pages have great inbound links.
There are a couple of tools I’d recommend that provide this invaluable insight, including Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz.
To do this in Ahrefs, go to the “Best by links” report within Site Explorer.
Click the “Referring Domains” metric, which takes you to a report showing all the referring domains to that specific URL.
After that, I’ll usually pick out certain high-authority domains and click the “Links to target” dropdown to see the individual backlink.
Once you’ve got that information, make a note of how they achieved the link in the “Competitor notes” section of the template.
You can also fill out the section of the best-linking website of the template if you are so inclined.
In this section, I usually try to pick out high-authority websites that are obviously a fan of the competitor, as they consistently link out to them.
All of this information will help you strategize later.
Find potential link building tactics
By identifying which websites are linking to your competitors, you’re uncovering potential link opportunities for you to start taking advantage of.
This can then help you form the link building tactics you are going to use in your strategy.
A common tactic is called the “skyscraper technique”.
To put it simply, you’re identifying a piece of content on another website that has generated a lot of backlinks, and then you’re going to create an even better version of this.
Once you’ve improved upon a piece of content, you can reach out to the websites that have linked to the older piece of content, asking them to link to your new, updated piece.
It’s a win-win!
A few more tactics that are worth giving a go are:
Guest articles - creating a piece of content that is then placed on another website relevant to your audience.
Niche edits - a link that is inserted within text in an existing piece of content.
Resource link building - Simply getting your website listed on a page of resources. For example, a fashion blog may have a page listing sustainable brands - if you’re in this sector, you want to be included!
To really see which ones are working, this does require a manual review of competitors alongside some note-taking.
You can obviously also just give a variety of tactics a go and see what works best for you.
Finally, do some comparisons for high-importance terms
It’s useful to pick out some high-importance terms and apply some direct comparisons between your website and your competitors.
To do this, start by doing a simple SERP analysis for a specific query you want to rank well for.
Pick out any SERP features you think you could optimize for, whether that’s video, featured snippets, people also ask, etc.
It also helps at this point to make some quick notes from what you see, like below:
Featured Snippet opportunity
People Also Ask opportunity
Content is informational instead of category pages
Video opportunity
High competition (e.g., gq-magazine.co.uk, gq.com)
Next, pick out the top-performing pages and highlight what they’re doing and what you’re not. For example:
Do they have better imagery?
Custom graphics?
Are they covering certain topics you’re not?
Is there an opportunity for video content?
Once you’ve done this for a few different pages, you have a list of things you could be doing better.
After you’ve looked at on-page SEO, take a look at off-page.
You can again use Ahrefs to investigate where your competitors are getting links, how are they getting them, and any specific tactics used.
Make a note of this and make sure you’re considering these when planning out your strategy.
Build out your strategy
Once you’ve researched all the above, you should have a detailed understanding of who your competitors are as well as a grasp of what their strategy looks like.
It’s now time to build your strategy or reevaluate your existing one. Sometimes, it’s handy to do a simple SWOT analysis to help frame your thinking.
Here are some questions you should be answering:
Where does your competitor currently have an advantage over your brand?
What area does your competitor excel in?
What areas are your competitor’s weakest areas?
What are your strengths in comparison to your competitor?
Once you have a good grasp of what these answers are, you can plan out what you are going to do.
This could include:
Creating new content assets
Updating old pieces of content that need a refresh
Expanding your keyword targeting to cover new topics that competitors are currently owning
Creating more on-site category/service pages
Implementing a new link acquisition strategy or outreach plan
To Conclude
As you can see, there is so much you can do within a competitor analysis. Taking the time to run through each recommendation is only going to benefit you and put you in a good position to be ahead of the game and reap the awards.
