How to do Competitor Analysis in SEO: 7 Best Ways to Conduct an SEO Competitor Analysis

An SEO competitor analysis, also known as a competitive SEO analysis, involves studying your competitors to understand their keyword usage, content strategies, and back links. This information helps you enhance your own SEO efforts.

In this article, we’ll cover:

1. What is an SEO Competitive Analysis?
2. Why Is an SEO Competitor Analysis Important? 
3. Importance of Conducting an SEO Competitive Analysis?
4. How to Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis: Key Steps

What is an SEO Competitive Analysis?

An SEO competitor analysis, or SEO competitive analysis, involves studying other websites that are competing for the same keywords. This process helps you understand their strategies for keywords, content, and backlinks. By learning how to do competitor analysis in SEO, you can use these insights to enhance your own SEO and boost your site’s performance.

Why Conducting a Competitor Analysis is Important?

Knowing who your competitors are and analyzing their strategies is a key part of any SEO plan.

Because your business doesn’t operate in isolation.

There are many websites with similar content, all competing for top positions in search engines like Google.

Conducting an SEO competitor analysis is a great way to stay ahead.

It helps you find out who ranks well for your target keywords so you can:

• Learn their successful strategies and use them for yourself
• Identify their weaknesses and take advantage of them
• Compare your SEO performance with theirs
• And more.

Next, let’s look at how to do competitor analysis in SEO effectively and how to analyze your competitors to improve your search engine ranking.

Importance of Conducting an SEO Competitor Analysis

Identify Your Competitors

If your domain is established and has strong rankings, you likely already have a good understanding of your primary competitors. But if you’re new to competitor analysis, now is the time to identify your rivals.

Your direct competitors are the websites that show up on the first page of search results for the keywords you’re targeting. They provide similar products or services and compete for the same audience.

Keep in mind:

• Your SEO competitors may not be the same as your brick-and-mortar ones.
• If your website offers different products, services, or covers various topics, your online competitors may change depending on what you’re focusing on.

It’s a well-known strategy: you need to understand your competitors to compete effectively. Knowing how to do competitor analysis in SEO can help you figure out how your competitors are ranking and what strategies they use to rank well in search results.

Understand Your Niche Better

Before diving into a specific niche, it’s important to thoroughly research it. A key part of this research is understanding who your competitors are, so conducting a competitor analysis is crucial.

You’ll need to identify the products or services these competitors are offering, and also examine their back link profiles, keyword strategies, content approaches, and overall authority. This will give you a clear picture of how competitive the niche is.

If your competitors are performing well, it indicates strong interest in the niche, which you can also benefit from. Additionally, conducting a competitor analysis helps you spot gaps, opportunities, and weaknesses in your competitors’ content. This allows you to refine your own content strategy to better compete in the market.

Beyond content strategy, this analysis can also enhance your business model. By identifying products or services your competitors are not providing—yet are clearly in demand—you can fill those gaps and attract more customers.

Understanding how to do competitor analysis in SEO is essential for discovering what your competition is doing right and where you can outshine them.

Beating the Competition

The main purpose of an SEO competitor analysis is to identify opportunities that allow you to surpass your competitors. By addressing your own weaknesses and taking advantage of your competitors’ shortcomings, you increase your chances of outperforming them.

Understanding how to do competitor analysis in SEO provides valuable insights that can help refine your strategy and put you ahead in the race. This analysis can help you focus on areas where you can make improvements and gain a competitive edge.

How to Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis

1. Find Your Competitors

To effectively analyze your competitors’ sites, you first need to identify who your competitors are. These competitors are websites that rank for the same keywords and target similar audiences as you do.

You can Search for Your Competitors Manually

An easy way to identify your competitors is to search for your main keywords on Google and other search engines, and then take note of the top results. If you frequently see the same domains appearing in search results for different keywords, these sites are likely your main organic competitors.

Create a Google Sheet to track all the top-ranking domains that show up for your target keywords. This method is useful for analyzing a few keywords, but it may not be practical if you’re aiming to outrank competitors for a large number of keywords.

Understanding how to do competitor analysis in SEO involves recognizing these key sites and using this insight to improve your own ranking strategy.

2. Find and Close Keyword Gaps

Now that you’ve identified your main organic competitors, the next step is to perform a keyword gap analysis for SEO. This type of analysis focuses on finding keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you’re not.

The purpose of a gap analysis is to discover all the keywords that are relevant to your business but haven’t been utilized on your site yet. Once you’ve identified these keywords, you can either optimize your existing content or create new pages to target them.

Related: How to Use Long Tail Keywords in Content

The goal is to produce better content than your competitors by adding more value for your readers. Understanding how to do competitor analysis in SEO, including conducting a gap analysis, ensures you stay competitive in the SERP. By filling these keyword gaps, you can better position your site for success.

3. Identify Keywords Your Competitors Have Lost

While losing keywords is something you want to avoid for your own site, it can actually present a big opportunity when it happens to your competitors. When your competitors lose rankings for certain keywords, it opens the door for you to step in and target those keywords yourself. Knowing how to do competitor analysis in SEO is crucial when it comes to competitor analysis, as it allows you to spot these opportunities. Along with tracking lost keywords, it’s important to gather other key details such as search volume, keyword difficulty scores, and page URLs to get a full picture of where you can gain an edge.

4. New Keywords

While monitoring the keywords your competitors have recently lost is crucial, it’s equally important to keep an eye on the new keywords your competitors are now ranking for. Understanding these new keywords can give you valuable insights into the direction they’re taking with their content and target audience. This is an essential part of how to do competitor analysis in SEO because it not only helps you understand what SEO competitor analysis involves but also offers inspiration for your own content strategy. By identifying the keywords that your competitors are focusing on, you can better align your content to stay competitive.

5. Analyze Their SEO Strategy

When conducting an SEO competitor analysis, it’s useful to apply the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) framework.

Identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and look for opportunities where you can replicate their successes or take advantage of their shortcomings on your own site. Also, watch out for areas where your competitors are outperforming you and find ways to improve in those areas.

The key to a successful search engine optimization strategy is to avoid making assumptions. Instead, let the SWOT framework guide your thinking throughout the analysis. To stay organized, create an Excel spreadsheet and use tools like Google and your SEO platform (e.g., Conductor) to gather important information.

By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and knowing how to do competitor analysis in SEO, you can enhance your own strategy.

6. SEO Content Analysis of Competitors

When you use the Keyword Gap tool to compare competitor websites, the first thing you’ll notice is the shared keywords between your site and theirs.

You might be performing better for some of these keywords, while others might be ranking higher for your competitors.

Your analysis should focus on understanding why your rankings are lower for certain keywords. Factors like back links, technical issues on your site, or even the quality of your SEO content could be influencing your performance.

In this section, we’ll concentrate on how to do competitor analysis in SEO by examining their content. This means taking a closer look at your competitors’ content to see what makes it effective and identifying any content gaps. By doing this, you can find opportunities to create better content where your competitors may be lacking.

Understanding these ranking factors and focusing on improving your SEO content can help you gain an edge in your niche.

When you’re analyzing your competitors’ content, there are a few key areas you should focus on:

Type of Content

First, take a look at the different types of content your competitors are publishing. This might include:

• listicles
• how-to guides
• or reviews. 

If these types of content are performing well on websites that are ranking higher than yours, consider incorporating similar content into your own site. You can use SEO tools like Semrush’s “Pages” report to see how well your competitors’ pages are doing.

How to do this?

By pasting the URL of a competitor into the Organic Research tool and selecting “Pages,” you’ll be able to view metrics like traffic and keywords. 

Do a thorough competitive analysis of the traffic metric, as it shows how much traffic a specific page is getting. Also, check if your competitors are using images, videos, or infographics to enhance their content. If they are, it might be beneficial to add these elements to your own content to improve the user experience.

How to Increase Traffic on Website through SEO – 10 Best Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website

Content Quality

Next, evaluate the quality of the content your competitors are producing. Is the content well-written and created by experts? Does it contain thorough research and accurate information? Are spelling and grammar on point? Above all, is the content genuinely helpful to readers? These are all signs of high-quality SEO writing, and if your competitors are excelling in these areas, it’s a strength for them. 

On the other hand, if their content is poorly researched, badly written, or full of errors, these are weaknesses you can capitalize on.

Other signs of poor content quality to watch for include outdated information, keyword stuffing, thin content that lacks depth, and a poor image-to-text ratio.

 If your competitors’ content falls into these categories, you can achieve SEO success by creating better, more valuable content that improves the user experience.

Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions

Meta titles and descriptions, while not direct ranking factors, play a crucial role in improving the click-through rate (CTR) of your pages. 

Analyze how your competitors structure their meta titles and descriptions and compare them to yours. If their titles tags and descriptions are more compelling and keyword-rich, and they appear at the top of the SERPs, you may want to take inspiration from them.

Conversely, if you see that your competitors haven’t optimized their meta titles and descriptions, you have a chance to distinguish yourself.

You can create better meta titles and descriptions that are more likely to entice users to click on your pages. As you evaluate these elements, ask yourself:

• Are the meta titles and descriptions rich with keywords?
• Where are these keywords placed?
• Are they descriptive and concise?
• Do they encourage the reader to click through to the page?

You can easily assess your competitors’ meta titles and descriptions by Googling your target keywords and reviewing how they appear in the search results.

By focusing on these aspects of how to do competitor analysis in SEO, you can gain insights into the type of content and SEO writing that is driving success for others and apply these strategies to improve your own website’s performance.

Suggested Reads: Long Form Content Vs Short Form Content: 6 Best Tips to Choose Long-Form Content vs Short-Form Content

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the brief answers that appear at the very top of Google’s search results when you type in a question. These snippets can come in various forms, such as text-based answers, tables, top 10 lists, or step-by-step instructions.

Because featured snippets are highly valuable, the competition to secure them is intense—there’s only room for one featured snippet per search term.

To win featured snippets, your content needs to answer search queries clearly, concisely, and thoroughly. You can do this either within the main content of your page or by including a well-crafted FAQ section.

If your competitors have managed to secure featured snippets, it’s important to uncover how they achieved it. By analyzing their strategies and understanding what featured snippets your competitors are using, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in the SEO competition and achieving the featured snippet you want to rank for. Knowing how to do competitor analysis in SEO is crucial in this process.

Readability

For content to be readable, it should be spaced out clearly and written in an easy-to-read font. Breaking the content into digestible paragraphs with plenty of bullet points and using H2 and H3 headings can significantly improve readability.

To assess the readability of your competitors’ content, simply review it yourself. If you notice that your competitors’ web pages contain large blocks of unbroken text, you can gain an advantage by effectively using sub-headings.

However, sub-headings are only effective if organized properly with a clear hierarchy. Each page should have only one H1 heading. Use H2 headings to divide your content into distinct sections, and H3 and H4 headings to create sub-sections.

7. Competitor Backlink Profile Analysis

Backlinks play a crucial role in determining a website’s ranking power. These are links from other websites that point to your own, and search engines like Google view them as a vote of confidence. The more reputable and authoritative the site linking to yours, the more ranking power that backlink provides.

You’re likely already familiar with the importance of back links, especially if you’ve read guides like “What Are Backlinks.” So, I won’t go into further detail about why backlinks are vital for SEO success.

However, it’s essential to emphasize the value of analyzing your competitors’ back link profiles. Using an analysis tool, you can assess the backlinks that your competition has secured. 

This process is crucial because, without conducting a competitor backlink analysis, you won’t know what kind of backlink profile you need to develop to compete effectively.

Understanding how to do competitor analysis in SEO, including reviewing who is linking to your competitors and studying their competitors’ backlink profiles, will give you insights that can strengthen your own SEO strategy.

8. Technical SEO Analysis

Finally, it’s important to evaluate the technical aspects of your site to see how it compares to your competitors in terms of performance and user experience.

Conducting this analysis will reveal areas that need improvement to help you compete more effectively. It also helps you spot weaknesses on your competitors’ sites that you can leverage to overtake your competitor.

Understanding how to do competitor analysis in SEO will give you the edge needed to stay ahead in the competition.

What a Technical SEO Analysis Involves

Website Performance and User Experience (UX)
Website performance is one of the key SEO factors that both search engines and users evaluate before considering the quality of your content. Ensuring a good user experience should already be part of your SEO strategy, but knowing how to do competitor analysis in SEO helps you deliver an even better UX than your rivals.

One way to identify your SEO competitors and gain a competitive advantage is by analyzing their Core Web Vitals. These metrics, introduced by Google, measure page speed, responsiveness, and visual stability—all critical components of a positive user experience. By examining how well your competitors rank in these areas, you can improve your site’s performance to capture more organic traffic.

URL Structure

When conducting SEO competitive analysis, it’s important to review how your competitors have structured their URLs. Check if the keywords are present in the URLs, whether the URLs are tidy and easy to understand, and if they provide context about the page content. Analyzing the URL structures of websites that rank well can offer insights into what makes a good URL structure. Applying these insights to your own site can give you a competitive advantage in your SEO efforts.

Mobile Responsiveness
Mobile responsiveness is a critical aspect of how to do competitor analysis in SEO. Determine if your competitors’ sites are mobile-friendly and ensure that your site offers an equally good or better user experience on mobile devices.

Given that a large portion of organic traffic comes from mobile users, having a mobile-optimized site can make the difference in whether users choose to visit your site over your competitors’. Websites that rank well are often those that provide seamless mobile experiences, so optimizing for mobile is essential in your SEO strategy.

Schema Markup
Schema markup is an important tool for enhancing your site’s visibility in search engines. By using schema markup, you can help search engines understand your content better, leading to rich snippets in the search results. When performing SEO competitive analysis, check if your competitors are using schema markup effectively.

Rich snippets, such as FAQs, business hours, and reviews, can significantly improve your click-through rates. Incorporating schema markup where appropriate can give you an edge in the SEO competition and help your site stand out in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Bottom Line- How to do Competitor Analysis in SEO

When it comes to how to do competitor analysis in SEO, what we’ve covered is just the beginning. There’s much more you can explore, but these basics are a great start. This guide has equipped you with the methods to analyze and learn from your SEO competitors—websites that compete with you for the same keywords. By regularly analyzing your competitors, you can refine your SEO tactics effectively.

Competitive analysis is essential for improving your content, keywords, and technical SEO, helping you to outrank your rivals and boost your site’s search engine ranking. Stay ahead in the ever-evolving SEO landscape by continuously analyzing, adapting, and outperforming your competitors. Your path to SEO success involves ongoing learning and flexible adaptation—so start now and keep evolving.

How to do Competitor Analysis in SEO FAQs