How to Conduct an SEO Competitor Analysis [Comprehensive]

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Want to outrank your rivals in the SERPs and in LLMs? An AI + SEO competitor analysis is your secret weapon.

By evaluating your competitors’ keyword targeting, backlink profiles, content strategies, brand awareness, and overall SEO tactics, you can reverse engineer their successes and identify gaps to exploit.

In this guide, you’ll learn a proven process to analyze your SEO competitors and extract insights to boost your rankings.

We’ll cover how to:

Why an AI + SEO Competitive Analysis is Essential

A competitor analysis in SEO involves assessing competing websites to uncover their search engine optimization strategies and tactics.

The process allows you to benchmark your own SEO performance against your rivals. You can pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses to inform your own strategy.

The insights gleaned can help you:

Analyzing the competition can give you a roadmap to LLM visibility and SEO success.

Identify Your Competitors

If your domain is already established and ranking, you probably already know who your competitors are. However, if this is your first time performing a competitor analysis, then now is the time to meet your rivals.

Your SERP competitors will be websites that rank high on page one (on Google or other search engines) for the same keywords you’re targeting. They often similar products and services as you and are competing for the same target audience, though that’s not always the case. Sometimes you’ll have SERP rivals that aren’t your business rivals. For example, a bank could compete with NerdWallet in the SERPs even though they might not compete otherwise.

It’s important to know that:

It’s a classic battle tactic: You need to know your enemy in order to defeat them.

Understand Your Niche Better

Once you know who you’re competing against, you can unlock a ton of insight into what your own brand is missing.

For example, while performing your competitor analysis, you might find products or services your competition is failing to provide, but your audience clearly wants. This is a major opportunity for your company.

A competitor analysis can shed light on multiple opportunity areas: content gaps, feature gaps, messaging gaps, PR gaps, and more. All of these can lead to strategic marketing decisions to drive growth.

Beat the Competition

The end goal of an AI + SEO competitive analysis is to spot opportunities that will help you outperform the competition.

By capitalizing on the weaknesses of your competition and improving on your own shortcomings, you put yourself in the running to beat the competition.

How to Perform An SEO Competitor Analysis

In this section, I’ll detail how to first find your rivals and then demonstrate how to perform individual competitor analysis tasks, such as:

How to Find Your Competitors

Without knowing who your competitors are, how would you be able to analyze their sites?

Step 1: Manually Search for Your Competitors

The easiest and most obvious way to identify your competitors would be to search your main keywords on Google (and other search engines) and note down all the top results.

If you come across the same domains consistently appearing in the search results for multiple keywords then this is usually a good indicator that these sites are your main organic competitors.

Set up a Google Sheet and take note of all the top-ranking domains that show up for your target keywords.

This manual method of searching your keyword on Google does work if you’re just trying to rank for a handful of terms, but it’s not exactly practical if you’re trying to rank for thousands of keywords.

This is where Semrush can do all the heavy lifting for you.

Step 2: Find Your Organic Competitors Using Semrush

Finding your organic competitors on Semrush is super easy and can save you a lot of time.

First, click on “ Domain Overview” and type in your URL:

Then scroll down to the bottom, and you’ll find a section called “ Main Organic Competitors”

These competitors are websites that are ranking for similar keywords and targeting similar audiences as you are.

If you click on the “ View details” button, you’ll be able to review all your competitors as well as more insightful info.

You can look at how many common keywords you share with these domains, and the amount of traffic these sites are pulling in:

The “ Common Keywords” section is useful as it shows you the total number of keywords you share with each site.

If you see sites with a high number of common keywords, then you can consider them your competitors.

At the end of this step, you should have identified at least 4-5 main organic competitors.

Step 3: Check the Authority Score of Your Competitors

Website authority refers to how authoritative Google and other search engines view a domain to be.

Factors that influence a site’s authority include:

Highly authoritative sites are usually very hard to compete against.

For example, if you’ve just started a financial advice website, you’d probably struggle to compete with the top-ranking pages right away.

In this instance, the SERP spots would probably be dominated by banks and major financial institutions—in other words, highly authoritative sites and seriously fierce competition!

So, the first thing you’d need to do is take note of your authority score to see where you stand.

Head back over to “ Domain Overview” and type your domain name in, hit “ Search” and you’ll see your Authority Score:

Now, you need to check the authority score of each of the competitors you’ve listed in your spreadsheet.

Given that you need to analyze the authority score of several websites at once, I’d recommend using Semrush’s Bulk Backlink Analysis tool. This allows you to check the authority of several domains at once.

To use this tool, paste in the URLs of the competitors you have identified.

Keyword Gap Analysis

Now you know who your main organic competitors are. Next, it is time to conduct the keyword gap analysis.

The “gap” in keyword gap analysis refers to the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you’re not.

The object of a keyword gap analysis is to identify any and all of these keywords that are relevant to your business, with the intent of:

The goal, as always, is to create better content than your competitors that adds more value to your readers.

Identifying these keyword gaps also ensures you stay competitive.

With the help of Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool, performing a keyword gap analysis is incredibly easy to carry out.

To use this tool, all you’ve got to do is paste in your URL, alongside the URLs of your 4 main competitors, like so:

After you hit the “ Compare” button, scroll down to the “ All keyword details for” section and click on the “Missing” tab.

New Keywords

Just as it’s important to keep tabs on the keywords your competitors have recently lost, it’s just as important to look out for the new keywords your competitors have started to rank for.

This can provide you with insights into the new directions they are taking in terms of content and target keywords. It can serve as inspiration as to what direction to take your own content in.

Analyzing the new keywords your competitors are ranking for can also be done via Semrush’s Organic Research tool.

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are where a domain gains its ranking power from. They’re incoming links from external websites, linking to your website. Google (and other search engines) consider backlinks as a vote of confidence from other sites.

The more reputable and authoritative the external website, the more ranking power you’ll gain from the backlink.

However, this section wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Semrush’s Backlink Gap” tool.

The Backlink Gap tool allows you to compare your site to several competitors at once to find gaps in your link building strategy.

Technical SEO Analysis

Last but not least, you should also assess the technical aspects of your site to see how it sizes up to your competitors in terms of performance and user experience.

These are the factors that make a [good URL structure](/content/hub/seo/architecture "What Is Website Architecture?"/index.html).

When analyzing the URLs of your competitor’s websites, consider how they’ve structured them:

How Often Should You Perform An SEO Competitor Analysis?

I’d recommend performing all the analyses detailed in this article every month. This allows you to paint a fuller picture of what’s going on in your niche.

Conducting Competitive Analysis After Major Algorithm Updates

On top of regularly analyzing your competitors, you should definitely fit in a special analysis straight after major algorithm updates.

Your Final Step in SEO Competitive Mastery

Mastering SEO competitive analysis is key to outpacing your rivals.

This guide has armed you with strategies to analyze and learn from your competitors, allowing you to refine your SEO tactics effectively. Regular competitor analysis, innovative adaptation, and strategic improvements in content, keywords, and technical SEO will elevate your site’s search engine ranking.