SEO Process

How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis in 7 Steps (Examples) 

Leigh McKenzie
Last Updated: Jan. 17, 2025

The most impactful SEO insights come from studying your market.

I spend most of my time doing SEO competitor analysis—looking at what’s working, what isn’t, and why. The differences in performance can be striking.

With modern SEO tools, your competitors’ strategies are essentially open books. You can see their best-performing content, most valuable keywords, and strongest ranking signals. The only real barrier is putting in the time to analyze the data systematically.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through my seven-step process for turning competitor analysis into traffic.

What Is an SEO Competitor Analysis?

SEO competitor analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing competitors’ organic search strategies. This includes their backlink profiles, content tactics, keyword rankings, and optimization techniques. 

By understanding what works for your rivals, you can identify gaps in their approach and spot opportunities to gain an edge in search results. 

This research is also valuable for SEO forecasting—which helps you predict potential outcomes of your optimization strategies based on competitor performance.

Why Is Competitor Analysis Important for SEO?

The truth is this: SEO competition will unfortunately get even stronger over time. While countless websites get created every day, the top 10 spots on Google and other search engines don’t increase.

Whether you want to grow a new niche website or boost the performance of an existing one, you must know who you’re competing with. 

In a nutshell, doing SEO competitor analysis can help you:

  • Understand what SEO strategies work and don’t work in your niche
  • Reveal competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
  • Discover competitors’ top traffic generation and customer acquisition channels
  • Get new content and backlink ideas
  • Estimate how challenging it will be to outrank your competitors
  • Find keywords your competitors’ websites rank for, but your website doesn’t

These are a few of the benefits you’ll read about in any SEO book. However, you’ll learn much more while conducting an SEO competitor analysis of your own.

How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis in 7 Steps

Let me walk you through the seven-step SEO competitor analysis process I’ve used throughout my SEO career. This process is straightforward, can be easily replicated, and won’t take up a lot of your time.

Let’s pretend you run a website called artcanvas.com. Here’s what your competitor analysis would look like. 

Step #1: Find Your Top-Performing Competitors

Artcanvas.com sells canvas prints, paintings, and art home decor in the U.S. and abroad. 

By knowing your products and where you sell them, you can quickly discover your SEO competitors.

Here are a few proven-to-work methods on how you can do it. 

Manually Search for Your Competitors

Insert a keyword that describes what you sell in a search bar and hit “Search” to see who else targets this keyword.

In this case, we searched for “art canvas prints.”

While this is probably one of the easiest ways to discover your organic competitors and do an SEO competitor analysis, not every website from the top 10 search results will be your direct rival. 

In my case, I’m interested in ecommerce websites selling art canvas prints and ranking highly in organic search results, such as iCanvas, Society6, Art.com, and Fine Art America. 

If my potential customers want to purchase art canvas prints, they will probably head to one of these websites.

You can use this simple method to discover organic SEO competitors offering the same products and services. 

However, it requires you to manually review every website from organic search results. It’s a resource- and time-consuming process. That’s why I prefer the second method. 

Use SEO Tools

It’s nearly impossible to do a good SEO competitor analysis without SEO tools. I personally use Semrush and Ahrefs, as their crawlers provide immense data.



Semrush’s Organic Research report shows who you compete with depending on the country. 

In two clicks, I’ve got a list of over 5,000 artcanvas.com competitors based on the competition level. You don’t have to go through all the competitors—it’s enough to choose the top 5 to 10 from the list. 

Please note that your competitors in organic search will likely change if you select a different country. 

Use Semrush Market Explorer

Semrush has one more powerful tool for SEO competitor analysis research you’ll find particularly useful: the Market Explorer tool, which shows competitors and their market share based on country. 

Insert your website URL and hit “Explore a market.” The tool will then generate reports such as the ones on the screenshot below, which show top market players and their share of visits for every user acquisition channel. 

Again, choose five to 10 competitors based on the organic search share of visits. Now that you’ve got your list of competitors, let’s move on to the second step of the SEO competitor analysis. 

Step #2: Analyze Competitors’ Keywords and Rankings

Once you know your competitors, you can research keywords that their websites rank for, but yours doesn’t.

But you don’t want just any keywords—you want their top-performing terms. You’ll need a keyword research tool for this task. 

Enter your domain and up to four of your competitors into Semrush’s Keyword Gap Tool and hit “Compare.

In my example, Semrush returned over 19.7k untapped keyword opportunities. Even though this list has many great content ideas, we can refine it by search intent and SEO competition rankings.

I recommend filtering the results by commercial intent, which is marked as “C” in the Intent column. People searching for these keywords will likely make a purchase. 

Next, filter the terms again so you see only the ones your competitors are currently ranking for on the SERPs. 

Select “Position” from the menu, “Competitors,” and “Top 50,” “Top 20,” or “Top 10,” depending on your goals. 

Now, select “Missing” to see the terms all of your competitors rank for, but you don’t. 

When you’re done reviewing that list, select “Untapped” to view the keywords that at least one of your competitors ranks for, but you don’t. 

If you don’t have landing pages for these keywords, you’ll have to create them. On the other hand, if your website happens to have suitable web pages, you’ll have to work on on-page and off-page SEO

Step #3: Analyze Competitors’ Backlinks 

The third step of SEO competitor research is backlink analysis.

What are backlinks? A backlink is a hyperlink on one website that points to or links back to another website. 

These links are one of the strongest ranking factors for Google, and Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool can help you quickly assess the backlink profile of your competitors. 

I recommend paying attention to the following metrics:

  • Domain authority and whether it’s growing 
  • The number of referring domains and backlinks 
  • Whether the number of referring domains is growing or declining
  • “Nofollow” vs. “Follow” backlinks numbers 
  • Anchor texts

You can quickly assess the backlink profile of any rival during an SEO competitor analysis by checking the Top Anchors and Link Attributes reports in Backlink Analytics. 

In the case of icanvas.com, the domain most likely buys backlinks because the top anchor “view & buy a canvas print” is commercial. Besides, 87% of all backlinks are “Follow,” which is unnatural and might look fake for Google.

If you happen to be in a similar situation, don’t dismiss this competitor’s website. You can find many domains for collaborations by reviewing the backlinks. 

If you need more backlink ideas, I recommend using the Backlink Gap tool to discover websites that link to your competitors but don’t link to your website. 

In my example below, I’ve inserted only one competitor URL. Nevertheless, I got over 15,000 backlink ideas. 

That’s too many to go through, so I applied the Authority Score filter to only see websites with the Authority Score between 31 and 40. This way, I’ve got 252 prospects to work on. 

And one more pro tip—if you stumble upon competitors’ broken backlinks, reach out to website owners, inform them about the issue, and offer to link back to a relevant source on your website. 

I’ve used this broken link-building strategy a couple of times, and it’s a surprisingly effective way to acquire some high-quality backlinks. 

Step #4: Spy on Competitors’ Content and On-Page SEO

After conducting plenty of SEO competitor analysis throughout my career, I recommend focusing on the following aspects: 

Content Types

This step requires you to manually review competitors’ content and use the findings to shape your own content creation strategy. 

Do they: 

Consistently create new product pages?

Publish optimized listicles, how-to guides, or reviews to attract their target audience from organic search results? 

Repurpose their content for social media?

Also, what kind of outbound links do they use?  

Content creation strategies can vary, but the ultimate goal is always the same: convert visitors into customers. 

Alternatively, I recommend reviewing competitors’ top organic performance pages in Semrush’s Organic Research tool. 

This report gives you an idea of what content types perform best for your competitors. 

For fineartcanvas.com, the top-performing pages are product pages. There’s also one high-ranking blog post about one of their artists selling artistic works. 

After reviewing the fineartcanvas.com top-performing web pages, I’d probably recommend picking product terms with decent keyword search volumes and low competition

Combining this strategy with SEO copywriting and sharing artists’ stories and tips can boost organic search traffic and persuade visitors to make a purchase. 

Content Quality

Even though content quality is an abstract term, your content should follow these best practices:

  • Be well-structured 
  • Be easy to read 
  • Be up to date 
  • Free from glaring ads
  • Include an author bio section 
  • Include quotes from experts
  • Link to studies
  • Include the writer’s personal experience and opinion 
  • Share new research findings, approaches, tips, or strategies that have not been known before 

If you feel your time was not wasted after reading a particular piece of content, then it was likely written well.

I talk a lot about content quality since it has become crucial in times of rapid AI technology development.

Even though Google is not against AI content, massive content production for the purpose of rankings manipulation is a policy violation. 

Google’s “helpful content update” and the recent core algorithm updates heavily impacted websites with lots of AI content. 

Therefore, I always recommend complying with Google’s E-E-A-T and YMYL guidelines. They also help you keep your target audience in mind when creating content for your website. 

E-E-A-T and YMYL

On-Page SEO

How your competitors optimize their content can share much about their SEO capabilities. 

I’ve seen cases where content was published without optimization, and meta titles and descriptions did not include keywords and were way beyond the allowed character limits. 

Here is what you can do to find competitors’ on-page optimization weaknesses:

  • Review the website structure, in particular, category pages, product pages, tags, and blog
  • Review the URL structure 
  • Check whether any product page is accessible via multiple category pages (it’s a common issue for ecommerce websites)
  • Check whether semantically related keywords are used (in general, one keyword should be placed in every 150–300 words)
  • Check whether H1 and metadata include the target keyword 

There’s no need to review all web pages during an SEO competitor analysis. It’s enough to check five to 10 top-performing web pages to understand whether your competitors use on-page optimization strategies. 

User Experience 

User experience (UX) is a critical factor that can make or break your website’s success. It encompasses all aspects of a user’s interaction with a website, including its design, usability, accessibility, and overall satisfaction.

The first impression matters. That’s why a high bounce rate can indicate that users don’t like something about your website and leave.

You won’t be able to measure competitors’ bounce rate, scroll depth rate, the number of page views in one session, and other SEO KPIs that reflect user engagement. 

However, you can assess user experience from a user point of view. Ask yourself the following questions while reviewing competitor websites: 

  • Does the website look clean?
  • Does the H1 copy on the main page clearly communicate the website’s purpose?
  • Do website pages use one H1 and several H2, H3, and H4 titles?
  • Is the design consistent across all web pages?
  • Is it easy to navigate around the website?
  • How easy is it to buy a product or submit a contact form?

These are a few UX aspects to consider while reviewing your website versus your competitors’ websites. 

Step #5: Analyze Competitors in Search Results 

Your meta title, meta description, structured data, and overall metadata quality directly impact your organic click-through rate (CTR).

No matter how good your content is, no one will read it if they don’t open your web page first.

Therefore, your meta title and description should be catchy, have featured snippets ideally, and comply with Google’s rules. 

Even though I’ve seen websites that completely ignored metadata character limitations, I’m sure the majority have it set correctly. 

So, your goal is to assess competitors’ presence in organic search results and ensure your meta title and description are optimized to entice a reader to click. 

When analyzing title tags and meta descriptions of your competitors, ask yourself the following:

  • Do meta titles and descriptions include keywords?
  • Where are the keywords placed? The closer to the beginning, the better.
  • Do meta titles and descriptions effectively convey the purpose of web pages?
  • Do meta titles and descriptions entice a reader to click?

Do your competitors have featured snippets in organic search results? If yes, what kind and how did they achieve it? If not, that’s your chance to improve your website’s search results and attract more visitors.

Semrush and Brado published an excellent research study on how featured snippets work and how to optimize for featured snippets. Check it out if that’s relevant for you now. 

You can also navigate to the Semrush Organic Research report and open the “Positions” subreport to check whether your competitor has featured snippets and what keywords trigger them. 

Based on my experience, featured snippets are more likely to appear for web pages ranking in the top 10 organic search results. It’s also possible for one search result to display multiple featured snippets simultaneously, such as FAQs and site links. 

Step #6: Check Core Web Vitals 

If two websites are similar for Google bots, the one that complies with Core Web Vitals will most likely rank higher in organic search results. 

According to Google, “Core Web Vitals, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward.

That’s why I recommend checking competitors’ Core Web Vitals and comparing them to your website’s metrics. 

There are two proven-to-work ways to do it. 

Page Speed Insights 

Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights that helps assess website performance on desktop and mobile.

After running a quick test, the tool provides recommendations on how to improve page speed and the Core Web Vitals metrics. 

Unlike artcanvas.com, our competitor’s home page, fineartcanvas.com, has passed the page speed test.

Semrush Site Audit 

Alternatively, you can use Semrush Site Audit to see all technical issues on your website and competitors’ websites. 

I prefer this method since you get a lot more information about the current state of your website, critical technical issues, and tips on how to solve them.

Unlike PageSpeed Insights, Semrush checks the Core Web Vitals metrics for 10 URLs at a time. You’ll get the results consolidated in one report with improvement recommendations, which is very convenient. 

Step #7: Review Their Traffic Generation Channels

The last but not least important step is analyzing competitors’ top traffic generation channels. 

Using Semrush Traffic Analytics, you can see what traffic generation channels work for your competitors. 

For instance, fineartcanvas.com has over 50% of direct traffic, which indicates high brand awareness. Organic search is the second top-generation channel, which means website owners invest in SEO and content production. 

If you see a high percentage of traffic coming from paid search—like in this case of 11.87%—it’s worth exploring competitors’ PPC keywords. 

Semrush Advertising Research shows all the keywords your competitors bid in paid search, ad copies, and historical paid search trends.

SEO Competitor Analysis Report

After gathering all the keyword and ranking data from your competitors, the next step is to compile a comprehensive SEO competitor analysis report. 

This report will help you make sense of the data and turn it into actionable strategies. Here’s how to do it:

1. Organize the Data into Sections

Start by breaking down the findings into distinct sections within your report. 

These sections should typically include:

  • Competitor overview: A summary of each competitor, including their domain authority, competitor backlink analysis results, and overall visibility in search results.
  • Keyword gap analysis: Highlight the most important keywords your competitors rank for that your site does not. Focus on high-volume, high-intent keywords where competitors rank well.
  • Top-ranking pages: List the competitor pages driving the most traffic for the identified keywords. This helps you understand what content resonates with your target audience.
  • Content opportunities: Identify gaps in your existing content and opportunities for new landing pages to target the discovered keywords.
  • SEO strategies: Include recommendations for both on-page and off-page SEO based on the competitor data.

2. Use Data Visualization to Present Key Findings

Use charts, graphs, and tables to make the data more digestible. Visualizing trends, such as web traffic, keyword rankings over time, or backlink acquisition, can make your report more impactful.

For example, you can include a bar chart or line graph comparing the number of visits to your site versus each competitor.

A table summarizing keyword opportunities sorted by search intent (e.g., informational, navigational, commercial) can help prioritize your content strategy.

3. Provide Actionable Recommendations

End each section with clear recommendations based on data. For example, if you notice a competitor consistently outranking your site for high-value keywords, suggest creating new content targeting those terms to boost your page’s link-building efforts.

Include specifics like the content type (how-to guide versus listicle) and search intent to make these recommendations as actionable and impactful as possible.

4. Generate Automated Reports Using Semrush

Consider using tools like Semrush’s automated reporting features. Generate custom SEO competitor analysis reports with just a few clicks, including all the data you’ve reviewed. These reports can also be scheduled to automatically update weekly or monthly, keeping your analysis fresh.

To get started, check out Semrush’s reporting features, where you can build custom templates, integrate Google Analytics data, and add branded elements.

What’s Next?

After going through these steps, you should already know who your competitors are in terms of organic search results and how their websites perform compared to yours.

Of course, you can do more if you want to dig deeper into some areas, but it’s good enough for you to get started. 

SEO competitor analysis usually provides a lot of ideas for implementation. However, it does not mean you should implement all of them at once. Instead, prioritize the tasks you believe will help your website outperform competitors and meet your business goals. Start analyzing your competitors with Semrush today.

Of course, you can do more if you want to dig deeper into some areas, but it’s good enough for you to get started. 

SEO competitor analysis usually provides a lot of ideas for implementation. However, it does not mean you should implement all of them at once. Instead, prioritize the tasks you believe will help your website outperform competitors and meet your business goals. 

Start analyzing your competitors with Semrush today!

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