How to Do an SEO Competitive Analysis in 8 Steps

Google’s mission?

To answer user questions by bringing the most accurate results from the most authoritative sources. To rank your content, you must create the most relevant, accurate, and authoritative material out there.

The question is, how do you figure out what Google considers accurate and authoritative content?

The answer comes down to one concept.

SEO competitor analysis.

When you analyze the most successful sites and content in your niche, you’ll find the insights you need to create a clear roadmap to create authoritative content and boost your traffic share.

In this post, I’ll show you my SEO competitor analysis process. I’ll include how you can start from high-level traffic analysis to creating a strategic plan to increase your traffic share.

What is an SEO competitive analysis?

Competitive SEO analysis is the act of studying the SEO tactics and strategies of the top sites in your niche to see what’s working for them. This will help you to uncover gaps in your SEO strategy so that you can improve your own site’s search engine rankings.

A competitor SEO analysis should include a detailed examination of your competitors’ backlinks, keywords, traffic, and SEO metrics. A look at the competitive landscape highlights your strengths and weaknesses and gives you the information to quickly identify opportunities to improve your strategy. This will save you time and energy. Let’s be honest, who doesn’t want that?

Like in most things, it’s not what you’re doing but what you’re not doing that makes the difference. Spotting content gaps shows you specific areas to focus on so you can target your audience with greater precision.

When doing SEO competitor analysis, having accurate competitive intelligence tools can make a huge difference.

Whether you’re doing keyword research, deciding which keywords to rank for, building your editorial calendar, listing backlink opportunities, improving user experience, or rethinking your overall SEO strategy, you need accurate and real-time SEO tools.

Why Is SEO Competitor Analysis Important?

Competitive analysis is important because Google’s algorithms are looking for the best content authored by the best sites to answer user queries. This is a competitive landscape where sites compete fiercely to be ranked.

Understanding which sites are winning and what strategies they used to get there will give you a good understanding of what it takes to build traffic in your niche. You can use this information to build a strategic roadmap to gaining traffic share one subtopic at a time.

Another reason is for the importance of competitive analysis is that Google doesn’t just rank content based on how it answers the search intent. Google also has site-wide metrics that measure how authoritative a site is within any given content niche. This is because Google would prefer to rank experts in your topic.

So the question is, how do you figure out what content to create and how to present your site as an authority to Google?

The answer is SEO competitor research.

When should SEOs perform competitor analysis?

You should perform a competitor analysis whenever you are building out an SEO strategy. The reason is simple. SEO is competitive. Sites compete to rank on the SERPs. And, because of its competitive nature, your competitors are likely to be looking for ways to outperform you.

Constantly.

Here are times when you must look at your competitors:

• When starting to work on a new site
• When creating a long-term content strategy
• When researching and planning new content
• When you spot decreases in your keyword rankings

You can’t possibly create a strategy without understanding what you are competing with.

How to do an SEO Competitive Analysis

SEO competitor analysis happens in three stages.

• Identify who your competitors are
• Figure out what is working for them
• Use that information to build out your own SEO strategy

1. How to find your competitors – SERP analysis

It’s important to understand that your competitors are the sites that are ranking at the top of Google for your target keywords. You might discover, in many cases, that your biggest business competitors are not competing with you on a given SERP.

For instance, your direct competitors might compete on your keywords for bottom-of-the-funnel terms. But, if you search informational terms, you might find an entirely different market segment on the SERPs.

Think about an ecommerce site in the pet food industry. When the site targets bottom-of-the-funnel keywords, they compete with other ecommerce sites.

As you can see in the screenshot below, ecommerce sites chewy.com, amazon.com, and petco.com are all ranking for the term ‘dog food.’

Now, let’s imagine that the same ecommerce site also has a blog. It’s highly likely that their informational keywords compete with an entirely different audience.

As you can see in the screenshot below, chewy.com is competing with:

• fourpaws.com, a site that sells pet grooming products.
• Lacvets.com, a veterinary clinic
• Care.com, an online marketplace for childcare, senior care, special needs care, tutoring, pet care, and housekeeping

This means…

If you have a small site, you should literally Google each keyword and simply look at who is ranking there. When doing this analysis, it’s best to cluster your keywords into topics.

Then, look at the top ten results and see who consistently ranks there. Any site that ranks consistently for the majority of your keywords is a key competitor.

This approach works well if you have a small site or if you are just starting out. But if your site features too many pages, this method will be impossible to manage.

At this point, you should look at the data.

Finding your competitors: A data-driven approach

Let me show you how to do this with the Similarweb Organic Competitors report.

Looking at chewy.com with the Similarweb Organic Competitors report. As you can see, the tool brings a list of competitor sites.

Now, it’s always important to understand the data that you are looking at. The tool finds organic competitors that have overlapping keywords. As I mentioned above, just having overlapping keywords is not always the best way to find competitors — especially if you are looking for bottom-of-the-funnel competitors.

The Organic Competitors report finds competitors by identifying sites that target the same or similar keywords.

So, if you only want to see business competitors, you can easily filter the results. The better you filter the results, the better you’ll be able to find a direct competitor.

For instance, you can filter out sites from other industries. In the screenshot below, I’m excluding sites not in the pet food and supplies niche.

By setting the filter up this way, you’ll only see sites within your niche. You won’t see sites outside your niche that happen to target the same keywords.

So, for instance, the filter removes a review site like dogfoodadvisor.com. (Typically, review sites don’t actually sell products on their sites, which means dogfoodadvisor.com isn’t a true competitor.)

You can also refine the data by using the Website Types filter. This filter will help you to find transactional websites if you are in ecommerce or content publishing websites if you have a niche site.

2. Analyze your competitor’s organic traffic

Once you’ve found your organic competitors, the first step is to analyze their traffic. At this point, you are looking to understand the big picture.

• Who is winning the most traffic over time?
• Which site is getting the most engagement?
• What devices are your competitors winning on?

You can find all of this information and more on the Website Performance Overview page.

The first step is to set this up by comparing your site to your competitors. When you do, you’ll see high-level traffic metrics.

I’ve searched for the architecture software site chiefarchitect.com in the Website Performance report. I’m comparing their performance with their direct competitors, homedesignersoftware.com, softplan.com, and punchsoftware.com.

As you can see from the screenshot below, chiefarchitect.com is getting the majority of the traffic. In addition, most of their traffic is coming from desktop.

You can also review the Geography report to see how much traffic share your site has per country. In the screenshot below, you’ll see that chiefarchitect.com dominates in the United States, Canada, India, and Australia but has a relatively low traffic share in Turkey.

Looking at the big picture will help you make some strategic decisions. You’ll easily see who the biggest players are, where their traffic is coming from, and where there are gaps in their strategies.

If your site is new or getting a relatively small traffic market share, you might want to first target the smaller players in the market. If you are a bigger player, use this analysis to find new opportunities to grow your traffic share compared to other big players.

Once you understand your big-picture metrics, it’s time to refine your analysis by analyzing your competitive market by keywords.

3. Big-picture Keyword Gap Analysis

The next step is to see all the keywords you and your competitors rank for. A great way to do this is with the Keyword Gap report.

The goal of a keyword gap analysis is to find keywords that your competitors are ranking for where you are not. Again, this is still a broad analysis that will help you understand where your site stands within your niche as a whole.

In the screenshot below, I’ve dropped chiefarchitect.com and three of its competitors into the Keyword Gap analysis tool. The tool shows you keywords that all are competing on, as well as keywords that some are ranking on but others aren’t.

By representing these sites visually, you can see where your site overlaps with your competitors. You can also see where your site is not yet competitive. This will help you find keywords you are not yet targeting that you could add to your content calendar.

To see the keywords that your site and your competitors are targeting, scroll down to the keywords table.

To make sure this analysis is useful, you should apply some filters. I recommend filtering out branded keywords, as you’ll unlikely rank on your competitor’s branded keywords. You can also filter out keywords that don’t have enough search volume.

This will give you a large list of keywords to target that have enough search volume to justify creating assets to target them.

Now, let’s dive into the keyword lists you can create using Keyword Gap analysis.

Start with Core Keywords

If you are creating a new site or you have a relatively small traffic share, your first step is to analyze the keywords that all the sites are competing on. Think of these keywords as your barrier to entry.

You can easily see this by clicking the Core Keywords filter.

When you do that, the table below will only display keywords that all sites are competing on.

Find Keyword Opportunities

Next, click on the Opportunities filter. This will give you a list of keywords where your competitors are ranking while your site is not.

If your site is not yet one of the big players, you can potentially just look at competitors that have a similar traffic share to your site. This way, you have the opportunity to win traffic share from one site at a time.

At this stage, you’ve found:

• Keywords that everyone is ranking for
• Keywords that your competitors are ranking where you are not
• Keyword opportunities where smaller competitors are ranking while your site is not

Although you’re not yet ready to create a content strategy, you now have a high-level look at the keyword gaps your site might have.

Next, you need to understand how SEO will help your big-picture marketing strategy. How do your competitors generate revenue?

Once you have that, you can then work out the exact tactics you need to make it a reality.

4. Understand how your competitors generate sales

One of the biggest mistakes that beginner SEOs make is to focus on building traffic without thinking about how that traffic actually moves the business forward. It’s crucial to understand how your site will generate revenue when building your content strategy.

If you don’t think about this at an early stage, you might find yourself working tirelessly on a strategy that has little to no impact on your business goals.

And if you only think about traffic and neglect revenue, you don’t have an SEO strategy at all. You just have a bunch of tactics. Tactics without strategy is an easy way to pointlessly burn through resources.

To figure this out, segment your competitor’s content into:

• Product pages
• Informational pages

Product pages are designed to generate revenue. But more often than not, those pages need supporting pages. Supporting pages generally drive traffic to product pages through internal links — and those internal links usually help product pages rank in search.

By looking at product pages and supporting pages, you can easily:

• Visualize their SEO sales funnels
• Find keywords to target at every stage of the funnel
• See what informational content you need to support your sales content

For instance, I’m looking at the ecommerce site zulily.com using the Similarweb Website Structure report.

I notice that they have structured their site into subdomains. From this top-down look, I suspect that product pages are on zulily.com, while blog posts live on blog.zulily.com.

I can also see how they structure their product pages by looking at the Folders report.

From what I see, their categories are:

• zulily.com/category/women
• zulily.com/category/toys-games
• zulily.com/category/womens-plus
• zulily.com/category/electronics
• zulily.com/category/pantry
• zulily.com/category/kids
• zulily.com/category/home-garden

Looking at their blog folders, I can quickly see what categories they are investing content in.

Interesting.

Going to their site, you can see  — by analyzing their internal links — how their blog posts support their product pages.

If your competitors segment their content, you can find all their blog content that covers a particular topic by crawling their site with our Site Audit tool.

By analyzing your competitor’s site structure, you can often find gaps in their content or hidden strategic gems that you can incorporate into your content strategy.

And, once you understand how they segment their site, you can easily create separate lists of product and blog keywords.

For instance, since Zulily hosts all its blog content on a subdomain, I simply entered blog.zulily.com into the Similarweb Website Analysis and looked at the keywords report.

If, on the other hand, your competitor doesn’t host their blog on a sub-domain, you can easily look at their pages in the Organic Pages report and filter the pages to only show blog posts.

For instance, asurion.com keeps all its blog posts in a subfolder called /tech-tips/.

The report gives you access to all the keywords that each page is ranking on.

At this stage, you know who your competitors are and what keywords they are ranking on. You also understand how they make money by seeing how their informational pages support their product pages.

Now, the big question is, what tactics should you use to rank on those keywords?

Let’s look at your competitors’ content clusters.

5. Build out your strategy with Keyword Cluster analysis

Understanding keyword clusters is crucial if you want to get traction. The reason is simple. In 2018, Google added the topic layer to its Knowledge Graph. This means Google segments the web into topics and subtopics. By doing this, Google doesn’t have to look at all the content in its index whenever a person types a query into the search bar.

Instead, Google categorizes pages in its index by topic. When someone searches Google, the search engine identifies which topic the user is querying. It then only searches content that covers that particular topic.

And Google only wants to rank expert sites in any given niche. This means the best way to rank in Google is to create a network of content for each topic and subtopic.

You can easily do this by finding keyword clusters that your competitors are ranking on.

By focusing on keyword clusters, you are likely to gain traffic share one subtopic at a time.

What’s more, by focusing on one subtopic at a time, you can plan out your internal linking strategy before you begin to plan your content.

If you want to find the biggest opportunities, make sure to filter non-branded keywords and click Keyword Opportunities in the Competitive Keywords dropdown menu. This will show you keyword phrases that your competitors are ranking for where you are not.

In the screenshot below, I’m looking at the keyword phrases report. I’ve noticed that punchsoftware.com has 100% market share for the keyword phrase ‘living room size’.

The tool estimates that the phrase generates 1.8k clicks per month for the site.

Now, if you want to see all the keywords they are ranking on, you can click on the keyword, and you will be redirected to the Keywords report.

As you can see, there is a list of long-tail keywords here that are relatively easy to rank for.

Once you’ve figured out what keywords to target to beat your competitors, the next step is to look at each page.

6. Analyze what content to create with the Organic Pages report

By now, you should have enough big-picture metrics to understand your content strategy moving forward. You should understand all the keywords you are not ranking on. Also, you should have a strategy on how you are going to capture market share one keyword cluster at a time.

The next step is to understand how to rank each keyword.

To do this, go to the Organic Pages report and analyze your top competitors to see which keywords they target for each piece of content.

In the screenshot below, I’m analyzing all the keywords that punchsoftware.com is targeting for their Common Room Sizes landing page.

You now have the keywords your competitors are targeting for each page. It’s time to go a little more granular.

SERP Feature Analysis

Once you’ve figured out what content to target it pays to do some SERP feature analysis. This is important because SERP features are an easy way to increase your visibility on the SERPs.

Instead of leaving SERP features as an afterthought, you should build them into your content creation process. You can also use this analysis to see where your competitors are featured in SERP features while your site isn’t.

To get started, you can easily see which SERP features your site or your competitors are featured in on any given keyword.

So, for example, I’m analyzing the chiefarchitect.com website and three of its competitors using the Similarweb Website Analysis tool. Looking at the Keywords report, I can see all the keywords chiefarchitect.com is ranking on.

For each keyword, there is a dedicated SERP feature column that shows what features are displayed on the SERP and which site is featured.

In the screenshot below, for the keyword ‘chief architect’, chiefarchitect.com is featured in the:

• Knowledge panel
• Image box
• Related questions

You can see those features if you Google the keyword.

This all makes perfect sense, as this is a branded keyword. What is a little concerning is that Similarweb is showing us that homedesignersoftware.com, a direct competitor, is ranking on their brand SERP in the image box.

You should have a detailed content roadmap that should help you to win organic traffic share one cluster at a time. You also have a good idea of how much content you must create for each cluster and what keywords and SERP features to target.

The next step is to do a technical SEO analysis.

7. Find a technical advantage with Similarweb Site Audits

Crawl your competitor sites with the Similarweb site audit tool. This will highlight any technical errors on your competitor’s site.

This is pretty easy to do. Simply crawl the site with our tool. This will give you a comprehensive overview of every aspect of their technical issues.

Once you have the crawl, there are several ways you can find weaknesses in your competitor’s SEO. For starters, click on the Errors report, and you’ll see a long list of issues you can take advantage of.

Do they have issues with their page titles? Make sure your titles are well-optimized.

Do they have:

• Missing canonical tags?
• Duplicate Titles
• Missing H1s?
• Images over 100 KB?

You can also see the exact pages and a detailed report of their on-page SEO.

Now that you’ve found technical gaps in your competitors’ SEO, the next step is to work on a link-building strategy.

8. Competitive backlink analysis

Backlink analysis is a hugely important part of your competitor analysis. This is because link building is one of the most challenging areas of SEO. And, with any SEO strategy, it’s easy to find yourself spinning your wheels for hours on tactics that simply don’t work.

You can save yourself hours by analyzing how your competitors are building links. A backlink analysis will reveal the types of content that earn the most links over time. It will also reveal which sites link out to your competitors.

You can see sites that link out to your competitors multiple times. And the more they link, the more likely they are to link to your content.

By doing this, you can create a link-building strategy that will likely gain traction.

The first step is to identify which competitors are building the most links over time.

Once you’ve found those sites, take a look at their pages with the most high-quality do-follow links.

Do you see a pattern?

Are their most successful pages:

• Complete guides?
• Data-driven posts?
• Free tools?

This will help you to understand the types of content that people in your niche are most likely to link to.

The next step is to analyze the sites linking to these pages, starting by looking at the links.

Drop your competitors’ website into your favorite backlink analysis tool. Assess the quality of the backlinks by looking at factors such as Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Focus on high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites. (I must point out that these are not Google metrics, but you can use them as a general guideline.)

First, focus on the domains that link out multiple times. These are your best prospects, and they are likely to link out to your site if you create the right resources and build a relationship with them.

We’ve covered how to build out a strategy, as well as outlined some of the tactics to focus on.

The last step is to keep tracking your results.

Competitive SEO analysis is an ongoing process

As I mentioned earlier, SEO is competitive. Your competitors are constantly looking to outrank you. This means you must constantly track and compare your site to your competitors.

Using the Similarweb rank tracker, you can see your Weighted Average Position over time as well as the same metric for your competitors. Weighted Average Position is a site-wide metric that measures the rankings of your entire site.

By comparing your rankings to your competitors, you’ll see if one of their rankings suddenly spikes or if your rankings are dropping compared to theirs.

Another useful metric is Clicks. You can see how many clicks your site acquired over time and compare the metrics to your competitors. This will confirm what you are seeing in the Weighted Average Position graph — as, in general, the higher your pages rank in Google, the more likely people are to click.

That said, a drop in clicks might be due to an increase in SERP features.

These metrics are particularly useful when:

• Your competitors invest heavily in SEO
• You lose traffic due to a Google update

When this happens, don’t panic. Instead, do a competitor analysis to see what your site is missing.

If you’ve segmented your keyword tracking into keyword groups with keyword tags, you can also easily see how each separate tag is doing.

If you see a tag losing traffic, you can go more granular and look at each keyword.

Looking at each keyword, you see the competitive SERP landscape by looking at the top 10 rankings over time. This will show you which sites you might be winning or losing to over time.

Turning competitor successes into a powerful SEO strategy

By this stage, you’ll hopefully understand why analyzing the top winners in your niche can help you immensely.

We’ve covered some of the big-picture metrics you need in order to understand how the top players in your industry are gathering traffic. You’ll also understand how they are using SEO to generate sales.

Once you appreciate where SEO and marketing intersect, you can see how the top sites implement their top-level strategy by looking at the tactics they are using to support their product pages.

You’ll also be able to find technical gaps in your competitors’ sites. Technical gaps that you can take advantage of.

You should now have more than enough information to create a winning SEO strategy.

The only thing missing is the application.

FAQs

What is competitor link analysis in SEO?
Competitor link analysis in SEO is the process of analyzing the backlink profile of your competitor’s websites to gain insights and strategic information for your own SEO efforts. Backlinks are links from other websites that point to a particular website, and they play a crucial role in determining a site’s authority, trustworthiness, and search engine rankings. Analyzing your competitors’ backlinks can help you understand their link-building strategies and potentially uncover opportunities to improve your own site’s SEO performance.

How do you analyze your SEO competitors?
Competitor SEO analysis can be broken down into stages. Firstly, figure out who your SEO competitors are. Once you know your competitors, analyze what’s working for them. This includes analyzing the keywords they are targeting, how they are generating revenue, what content clusters they are targeting, and their link-building strategies. Once you understand how the top sites in your niche are getting traffic and generating revenue, you can use that information to build a winning long-term strategy.