How to Do SEO Competitor Analysis That Wins

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Doing SEO competitor analysis is all about legally spying on your rivals' digital strategies to find ways to beat them. It’s a deep dive into their winning keywords, their backlink profiles, and their content game plan to give you an edge in the SERPs.

Why Competitor Analysis Is Your SEO Secret Weapon

Let's ditch the textbook definition for a minute. Think of SEO competitor analysis not as some optional chore, but as the strategic roadmap for your entire online presence. Ignoring your rivals is like trying to drive through a new city completely blindfolded. You might get there eventually, but you'll waste a ton of time and fuel in the process.

A solid analysis gives you a clear path forward. It helps you make decisions backed by real data, which saves you both time and money. It’s the difference between guessing what works and knowing what works.

Uncover Hidden Market Opportunities

Here’s something I see all the time: your biggest business rival isn't always your main SEO competitor. Let's say a SaaS startup with project management software is only watching other software companies. They might completely miss the niche review site that's dominating the search results for "best project management tools for small teams."

This happens more than you'd think. That review site, while not a direct business competitor, is sucking up a massive chunk of high-intent search traffic. A good analysis would flag this immediately, revealing a huge opportunity to create similar comparison content or target related long-tail keywords. This is a huge reason why you should learn more about the benefits of running a competitive analysis of keywords.

By looking at who actually ranks for the terms you care about, you move from assumptions to reality. This process almost always uncovers content gaps, keyword ideas, and link-building prospects you would have completely missed otherwise.

Anticipate Industry Shifts and Trends

Your competitors' SEO efforts are basically a public record of their strategic priorities. Are they suddenly pumping out a ton of content around a new feature? Are they scoring backlinks from a new type of industry blog? These are signals you absolutely cannot afford to ignore.

Watching these shifts lets you be proactive instead of reactive. It helps you see where the market is headed and tweak your own strategy before you get left behind. For those targeting a specific platform, a dedicated guide on Amazon Competitor Analysis can offer specialized insights for an incredibly fierce environment.

This foundational understanding of the competitive landscape sets the stage for everything that follows. The insights you gather here will shape how you:

Pinpoint your true online competitors.

Break down their keyword and content strategies.

Decode their backlink profiles to find your own opportunities.

Build a concrete, actionable SEO plan.

Consider this section the blueprint for the rest of this guide. Each piece of the puzzle we'll cover fits together, helping you build a winning SEO strategy that doesn’t just compete—it dominates.

Find Your True Online Competitors

Getting this first step right is non-negotiable, and honestly, it’s where a ton of SEO strategies fall flat right out of the gate.

So many people assume their biggest business rival is also their main online competitor. That single assumption can derail your entire analysis before you even begin. Your true SEO competitors are the websites consistently winning your audience's attention in the search results—even if they don’t sell a single thing you do.

Think about it. If you run a local financial advisory firm, you probably think your competition is the other firm down the street. But when your potential clients Google "how to save for retirement," what are they really finding? National finance blogs, major investment publications like NerdWallet, and personal finance influencers.

Those are the players owning the digital real estate you need to capture.

This distinction is everything. Time and time again, research shows that businesses discover their top search competitors are actually smaller, niche sites—not the massive industry brands they were worried about.

By figuring out who truly dominates the SERPs for your core keywords, you’re building a strategy based on reality, not flawed assumptions. You can learn more about why this is so critical by reading the full 2025 guide on Riman Agency.

Start with Simple Google Searches

Before you fire up any fancy tools, your best starting point is Google itself. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and start searching for your most important "seed" keywords. These are the broad, foundational terms that define what you offer.

For example, if you sell artisanal coffee beans, your seed keywords might be:

"specialty coffee beans"

"best single origin coffee"

"how to brew pour over coffee"

Always run these searches in an incognito window to get clean, unbiased results. Now, look closely at the domains that consistently pop up on the first page. These are your first-round draft picks.

Pro Tip: Don't just obsess over the top three results. Scan the entire first page. Sometimes, a competitor ranking at #7 for a bunch of keywords is a much more realistic target to overtake than some powerhouse brand locked into the top spot.

Jot down the domains that show up over and over. What do you see? Are they all e-commerce stores? Review blogs? Educational hubs? This simple manual check gives you an immediate, real-world snapshot of the competitive landscape. You'll quickly get a gut feeling for who Google trusts.

Use SEO Tools to Build a Comprehensive List

Okay, you've got a handful of competitors from your manual searches. Now it's time to dig deeper and find the rivals hiding in plain sight. This is where tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz become your best friend.

These platforms crunch millions of data points to surface competitors you’d never find on your own.

Most of them have a dedicated "Organic Competitors" report. Just plug in your own domain, and the tool will spit out a list of other sites that rank for a similar basket of keywords. This data-driven method often uncovers competitors who only overlap with you on a small but incredibly valuable set of keywords.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty process for refining this list:

Look for High Keyword Overlap: The best competitors for your analysis are the ones who share a significant number of keywords with you. It’s a dead giveaway that you're chasing the same audience.

Filter by Authority: Tools give you metrics like Domain Rating (Ahrefs) or Domain Authority (Moz). It's smart to analyze competitors in a similar authority ballpark as you, plus a few "aspirational" ones who are a step or two ahead. Trying to copy the strategy of a global brand with a DA of 95 from day one is a recipe for frustration.

Run a Common-Sense Check: Finally, just ask yourself: does this competitor’s site feel relevant? If a tool flags a massive news publisher as a competitor because you both rank for one broad term, they probably aren't the best choice for a deep dive.

By blending manual Google searches with data from SEO tools, you can build a solid, accurate list of 3-5 primary SEO competitors. This focused group becomes the foundation for everything that follows, ensuring the insights you uncover are both relevant and actually usable.

Uncover Their Winning Keyword Strategy

Okay, so you’ve got your list of true SEO competitors. Now the real fun begins. It's time to peek behind the curtain and see exactly what they’re ranking for that you aren’t. This is where you shift from identifying rivals to actively reverse-engineering their playbook, and the best way to do that is with a keyword gap analysis.

Think of a keyword gap analysis as a treasure map. It shows you all the valuable search terms your competitors are getting traffic from, while your site is completely invisible. These are topics your shared audience is actively looking for, but you're not even in the game.

For instance, a project management software company might find its main competitor is on page one for "how to run effective team meetings." That's not a direct product keyword, but it's a high-intent query that attracts their ideal customer. Finding that gap could inspire a whole new content pillar, driving tons of qualified traffic.

Finding and Filtering Your Keyword Gaps

Most major SEO tools—like Semrush or Ahrefs—have a "Keyword Gap" or "Content Gap" feature built right in. The process is pretty straightforward: plug in your domain and the domains of your top 3-5 competitors. The tool will spit out a massive list of keywords where they rank and you don’t.

But don't get overwhelmed by that raw data dump. The real magic happens when you start filtering strategically. A raw export might have thousands of keywords, but most will be junk—irrelevant branded terms, low-value queries, you name it. You need to slice through the noise.

Start by applying these filters:

Competitor Positions: Show me keywords where at least one competitor is ranking in the top 10. This confirms the term is actually working for them.

Your Position: Now, only show me keywords where my domain doesn't rank in the top 100. This isolates the true gaps.

Search Volume: Set a minimum monthly search volume—say, 50 or 100—to weed out the super-niche terms with no traffic potential.

This filtered list is your goldmine. It's still probably long, but now it's focused on keywords with proven potential.

Prioritizing Keywords with a Strategic Eye

With a refined list of keyword gaps in hand, the next critical step is prioritization. You can't target everything at once, so you need a system to spot the opportunities with the highest impact. This is where you blend hard data with your business instincts.

I run every potential keyword through three core checks:

Business Relevance: How directly does this keyword connect to what you sell? For a FinTech company, "best small business accounting software" is a perfect match. A term like "what is a balance sheet?" is still relevant but serves a different, top-of-funnel purpose. I like to score this on a simple 1-5 scale.

Keyword Difficulty (KD): This metric, available in most SEO tools, gives you a rough idea of how hard it'll be to crack the first page. If your site is newer or has lower authority, targeting keywords with a KD below 30 is a smart move. Our guide on how to find low-competition keywords dives much deeper into this.

Searcher Intent: What is the user really trying to accomplish? Are they looking for information ("how to"), comparing options ("best vs"), or ready to buy ("buy now")? Nailing the intent tells you what kind of content you need to create to satisfy them.

By plotting these three factors—relevance, difficulty, and intent—you can build a simple but incredibly powerful prioritization matrix. Your quick wins are always the high-relevance, low-difficulty keywords. Go after those first.

To make this crystal clear, here’s how I sort keyword opportunities to find the low-hanging fruit and plan for bigger, long-term wins.

Keyword Opportunity Prioritization Matrix

Use this matrix to sort keywords from your gap analysis and focus on the ones with the highest potential impact for your business.

Keyword Opportunity	Search Volume	Keyword Difficulty	Business Relevance (1-5)	Action Priority
"best chair for back pain"	8,000	45	5	High
"how to improve posture at desk"	2,500	22	4	High (Quick Win)
"standing desk benefits"	5,000	55	3	Medium
"office decor ideas"	12,000	68	1	Low

Looking at this table, "how to improve posture at desk" is the clear winner for immediate action. It has good volume, a totally manageable difficulty score, and it’s highly relevant. While "best chair for back pain" is the ultimate goal, its higher difficulty means it’s a longer-term project. This methodical approach is how you turn a messy spreadsheet into a real, actionable content plan.

Decode Their Backlink Profile

Backlinks are one of the most powerful signals in SEO. Think of them as votes of confidence from other websites, telling Google that a competitor's content is valuable and trustworthy. Digging into their backlink profile isn't just about counting links; it's about understanding the story behind their authority and finding repeatable patterns you can use to your advantage.

When you get to this part of your competitor analysis, you're essentially hunting for high-quality, relevant sites that link to your rivals but not to you. This process gives you a direct, actionable list of websites to target for your own link-building campaigns. The goal is to reverse-engineer their success.

Go Beyond Raw Link Counts

It’s easy to get hung up on the total number of backlinks a competitor has, but that raw number is often a vanity metric. One high-quality link from an authoritative, industry-relevant site can be worth more than hundreds of low-quality links from spammy directories or random blogs.

Instead, zero in on these core metrics:

Unique Referring Domains: This is the number of individual websites linking to your competitor. A site with 500 links from 200 different domains has a much stronger, more diverse profile than a site with 500 links from just 20 domains.

Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Rating (DR): These metrics, from tools like Moz and Ahrefs, estimate a website's overall authority on a 1-100 scale. You'll want to prioritize link prospects with a respectable DA/DR, as these carry more weight.

Topical Relevance: A link from a leading blog in your niche is a massive signal of trust. A link from a completely unrelated website, on the other hand, offers very little SEO value.

By focusing on the quality and diversity of their linking domains, you get a much more accurate picture of what's actually driving their rankings.

Identify Repeatable Link Patterns

Once you have a list of a competitor’s backlinks from a tool like Ahrefs, it's time to play detective. Don't just stare at a massive list of URLs; start categorizing them to spot trends. The real goal is to figure out how they're earning these links so you can replicate their strategy.

For instance, you might discover that your main competitor gets a ton of links from:

Guest Posts: They regularly contribute articles to other industry blogs. You can see their author bio and a link back to their site.

Expert Roundups: They are frequently quoted as an authority in articles like "25 Experts Share Their Best Marketing Tips."

Podcast Appearances: They are featured as guests on popular podcasts, and the show notes page links back to their website.

Resource Pages: Their in-depth guides are often included on "Best Resources for X" lists curated by other websites.

Once you spot a pattern, you've found a blueprint. If they're succeeding with guest posts, you now have a list of blogs that are open to contributions. If they're crushing it with expert roundups, you can start pitching yourself for similar opportunities. This methodical approach is central to figuring out how to build backlinks that actually move the needle.

A common mistake is simply exporting a competitor's link profile and trying to get every single one. A much smarter approach is to identify the types of links they get repeatedly and then build a strategy to earn similar links for yourself, often from entirely new websites.

Uncover Their Most Linked-To Content

Not all content is created equal when it comes to attracting links. By analyzing which of your competitor's pages have earned the most backlinks, you can identify "link bait" topics that really resonate with your shared audience.

Using your SEO tool of choice, look for their pages with the highest number of referring domains. What do you see? Often, you'll find that a small percentage of their pages—maybe just 5-10%—generate the vast majority of their links.

These "link magnets" usually fall into a few categories:

Original Research and Data Studies: Content that presents new data, like "We Analyzed 10,000 Landing Pages and Here's What We Learned," is incredibly link-worthy because other writers want to cite your findings.

Ultimate Guides and In-Depth Tutorials: Comprehensive resources that cover a topic from top to bottom become the go-to reference for that subject.

Free Tools and Calculators: A simple but useful tool, like a "Mortgage Payment Calculator" or a "Headline Analyzer," can passively attract links for years.

Seeing that a competitor's guide to "email marketing statistics" has links from 150 different websites is a massive clue. It tells you that creating a more up-to-date and comprehensive version of that same resource is a high-potential strategy. This is how you use competitive data to create content that doesn't just rank—it earns authority.

Analyze Their On-Page and Content Game

Great SEO isn't just about keywords and links. It's about the entire experience a user has on a page. Once you’ve figured out which keywords a competitor ranks for and which pages are pulling in their traffic, it's time to put those pages under the microscope.

This is where you dissect what makes their content click with both users and Google, giving you a clear roadmap to build something way better.

We're moving beyond raw numbers like keyword density now. Think of yourself as a detective trying to understand the why behind their success. Why does Google love this page? Why do users stick around? The answers will become the blueprint for your own content.

By meticulously breaking down their content structure and on-page SEO, you can pinpoint their weaknesses and find obvious opportunities to create a more comprehensive, engaging, and genuinely valuable resource for your audience.

Deconstruct Their Content Formats and Structure

First, zoom out and look at the big picture. What type of content are they actually creating for their top-ranking pages? Different search queries demand different formats, and your competitors have likely already done the hard work of figuring out what users want.

Look for patterns in their most successful content. Are they mostly using:

In-depth guides? Think long-form, A-to-Z articles that cover a topic completely.

Interactive tools or calculators? These are often "link magnets" that attract backlinks without any outreach.

Case studies or original research? Content that presents unique data and proves their expertise.

Listicles or roundup posts? Super scannable content that aggregates tips, products, or examples.

For example, if their top page for "best project management software" is a detailed comparison table with filters, your simple blog post is probably going to fall flat. You have to meet—and then exceed—the user's expectation for that specific search.

Beyond the format, analyze the structure of the page itself. How are they organizing the information to make it easy to digest?

This structured approach is non-negotiable for creating content that performs in search. To really nail the details, check out our guide on how to write SEO content that ranks.

Analyze Critical On-Page SEO Elements

With a good sense of their content's format and structure, it's time to zoom in on the technical on-page elements. These are the direct signals they’re sending to search engines about what the page is about. They might seem small, but getting them right can make a massive difference.

Here are the key on-page factors to scrutinize:

Title Tags: This is arguably the most important on-page signal. How do they craft their titles? Do they lead with the keyword? Do they use enticing modifiers like "Guide," "2024," or "Examples"?

Meta Descriptions: While not a direct ranking factor, a killer meta description can seriously boost your click-through rate. What kind of language are they using? Are they asking a question, promising a benefit, or using a call-to-action?

URL Slugs: Is the URL short, clean, and keyword-rich? A simple URL like /seo-competitor-analysis is way better than a messy one filled with random numbers. This is a common area where you can score an easy win.

Internal Linking: How are they linking to other pages on their own site from this high-performing article? A smart internal linking strategy helps spread authority across their website and guides users to other relevant content, keeping them on the site longer.

Spotting Content Weaknesses and Gaps

The final piece of this puzzle is to critically evaluate their content for weaknesses. Remember, your goal isn't to copy them—it's to find where they fall short so you can provide way more value.

Read their top-performing article and ask yourself some honest questions:

Is the information outdated or incomplete?

Are there unanswered questions a reader might still have?

Is the design cluttered or just plain hard to read?

Do they lack visuals, examples, or data to back up their claims?

Every "no" is an opportunity. For instance, if their guide on "how to start a podcast" is a wall of text, you have a massive opening to create a better version with video tutorials, equipment photos, and audio examples. By filling these gaps, you create a resource that is objectively more helpful, making it a much easier choice for Google to rank at the top.

Build Your Actionable SEO Roadmap

All that data you just collected? It's useless without a plan of attack. Insights from a deep SEO competitor analysis are fantastic, but they don't move the needle until you turn them into specific, measurable actions. This is where we transform all those spreadsheets and notes into a prioritized SEO plan that actually gets results.

Your roadmap can't be a vague list of "get more backlinks" or "write better content." It has to be a concrete, time-bound strategy that directly addresses the weaknesses you spotted and the opportunities you're ready to pounce on. Think of it as a living document that will guide your every move for the next quarter or two.

Prioritize Based on Effort and Impact

The secret to a successful roadmap is ruthless prioritization. You can't do everything at once, so you need to laser-focus on the tasks that will deliver the biggest results with the most reasonable amount of effort.

I like to categorize potential tasks into a simple matrix. It keeps things crystal clear:

Quick Wins: These are your low-effort, high-impact tasks. Think optimizing title tags for underperforming pages or knocking out a blog post for a low-difficulty keyword your competitor somehow ranks for.

Major Projects: High-effort, high-impact initiatives. This is where you go big—like creating a massive, link-worthy "ultimate guide" designed to completely outperform a competitor's top page.

Fill-in Tasks: Low-effort, low-impact jobs. These are great for slower periods. Think improving internal linking on old posts or updating a few meta descriptions.

Reconsider Later: High-effort, low-impact tasks. Avoid these like the plague, at least for now. They're resource drains with little payoff.

This framework forces you to think strategically about where your time and money should go first. To make this process even smoother, you can use an SEO strategy template to organize your thoughts and build out your plan.

From Analysis to Actionable Tasks

Alright, let's turn your findings into real-world tasks with clear timelines. This is where your roadmap truly takes shape.

For example, your plan might include specific items like this:

Q1 - Content: Publish three in-depth articles targeting the keyword gaps we found: "how to improve team productivity," "best remote work tools," and "project management styles."

Q1 - Link Building: Launch an outreach campaign to 15 websites from Competitor X's backlink profile, focusing on their resource pages and guest post opportunities.

Q2 - On-Page SEO: Update and optimize our top 10 existing blog posts based on the on-page and content structure analysis of top-ranking competitor pages.

The SEO market—and the tools that power it—have grown immensely, thanks in large part to AI and better analytics. The global SEO market was valued at around 143.9 billion by 2030. That's a massive jump, and it shows just how much businesses are investing in these strategies. Learn more about the growth of SEO technologies on Agency Analytics. This growth makes having a structured plan more critical than ever if you want to stay in the game.

Ready to turn your SEO roadmap into reality without the manual grind? Outrank uses AI to automate content creation, from generating SEO-optimized articles to custom on-brand images, helping you execute your strategy faster. Get started with Outrank today.