SEO competitor analysis is a process for understanding who’s dominating in your SERPs, why they’re winning and how you can respond with competitive clarity and leverage. It’s fundamental to digital marketing success because SEO is a relative game: your performance is measured in comparison to others who satisfy the same search intent.
The goal of an SEO competitor analysis is to improve your SEO strategy by building on, rather than imitating, others’ wins. For that, you first need to understand what to look for, how to find it and why it works.
This guide outlines a practical, execution-first approach to performing an SEO competitor analysis. We’ll glance through a lens that shows how AI tools can accelerate your research and where human validation still matters.
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What Is an SEO Competitor Analysis?
Conducting a competitive analysis requires structured research into your competitors’ sites to unveil how they acquire organic traffic through keyword rankings, content gaps, backlinks, ranking factors and technical SEO opportunities. You’re looking not only at what others are doing, but why they rank and how stable those rankings are. Then, you apply this intelligence to your own strategy.
A solid SEO competitive analysis surfaces:
- Which keywords competitors own (and why).
- Content patterns that satisfy or completely miss search intent.
- Backlink strategies that compound authority with time.
- Technical or user experience (UX) weaknesses that suppress otherwise well-performing pages.
- Competitor blind spots where your brand can deliver value.
After you’ve completed the analysis, you’ll end up with a map that connects competitor behavior to measurable ranking outcomes and actionable pivots you can implement. AI can assist with a large chunk of this analysis, but deciding where to forge ahead and where to fall back still requires human input — especially regarding Google’s tendency to reward human novelty.
How To Conduct an SEO Competitor Analysis
Below is a nine-step workflow that describes how to use tools to extract the data and humans to interpret and prioritize. For context, think of it like a funnel: Start wide with keywords and domains, then narrow it down to specific strategic decisions to implement.
1. Create a Target Keyword List
Before you look outward, you need a baseline. Start by building a list of target keywords that connect directly to commercial objectives. That includes search queries and key phrases that align with your products, services and expertise.
Here’s what that process looks like:
- Jump onto Google Search Consol, Semrush or Ahrefs and export your current keyword rankings.
- Add intent-driven keywords, including consumer problems or location, where relevant.
- Record search volumes and keyword difficulty (you can find these in keyword research tools like Semrush or Ahrefs).
- Analyze the search results for important queries (including Domain Authority, word count and search intent).
This is all a manual job, but organizing it doesn’t have to be. You can use AI tools to surface patterns and cluster similar terms to identify content gaps and cannibalization risks. However, be sure to apply judgment: Not all keywords with a high search volume deserve your attention (e.g., high-volume but basic search queries). Pages with average search volume but high commercial intent are far more likely to drive conversions.
2. Identify Your Competitors
Your SEO competitors are the domains that consistently appear in SERPs for your target clusters (regardless of whether they offer the same products or services as you). Therefore, they’re not necessarily your commercial competitors.
In the second stage, you want to figure out which sites appear in the live SERPs for your target keywords. Note, these will change over time as you and your direct competitors refine your SEO.
Here’s what to do:
- Check SERPs overlap across your target keywords and clusters. Keyword research tools can also help with this process.
- List the domains that appear across multiple priority keywords and queries.
- Tag publishers, retailers and tools (they all behave differently in your competitive environment).
- Identify genuine threats: Those that consistently outrank you for the same keyword and search intent.
Because Google rewards whoever satisfies the search intent the best, data drawn from this stage will show you exactly who to pay attention to throughout the rest of the process.
3. Analyze Competitor Content
Now that you know who you’re up against in the search result pages, it’s time to see what’s working for them and what isn’t. Here, you go beyond which pages are ranking to identify which content and SEO elements they’re rocking that make them rank.
Extract the ranking pages for each of your keyword clusters and analyze:
- The keywords they’re using, including search volume and keyword difficulty.
- Any missed keyword opportunities in their content.
- Content formats, for instance, long-form guides, comparisons or landing pages.
- Content update cadence.
- Experience signals, for example, original data and reporting or case studies.
Keep a sharp eye out for the areas where other domains hold rankings despite weak satisfying content. Prioritize keyword opportunities aligned to ranking potential and unmet search intent (e.g., where you could produce more accurate, updated or experience-driven content). An effective AI writer can automate much of this content.
Speaking of which, AI can also help you draw out patterns in your competitors’ content, including keyword density and headings. But keep in mind that, depending on the AI platform you’re using, you may have limitations in identifying whether opportunities and gaps align with your brand’s commercial objectives. For example, the competitor ideation workflow in contentmarketing.ai is designed to help with exactly this type of activity and can help surface ideas based on your competitor’s content specifically.
4. Evaluate Competitor Backlinks
Backlinks are trust signals, but that trust is based on authority and relevance rather than volume alone. With a backlink competitor analysis tool like Semrush, check out how your competitors’ backlink profiles fare.
Extract these insights:
- Referring domains’ quality and relevance.
- Link velocity and anchor text signals.
- Overlaps between competitors’ backlink profiles.
Compare these results with your own backlink strategy, using tools like Google Search Console to evaluate its performance. Benchmark your strategy against those dominating the SERPs to identify what you’re doing well, what your competitors excel at and where the gaps lie. For example, if there’s an authoritative domain that links to other high-ranking pages but not yours, you’ve just found an outreach target.
Patterns are just as important. If you notice Google rewards other brands for original research or PR, that’s what you should aim to acquire.
5. Audit for Content Gaps
Back in the day, content gaps used to signal missing keywords. Now, they point to unmet intent. Audit your competitors’ ranking pages for shared search terms and identify the gaps in their content that relate to search intent.
As you sift through the content, flag:
- Content gap patterns that signal unmet intent or weak topic coverage.
- Where answers lack depth or original insight.
- Outdated or generic information.
- Homogenized perspectives.
While you’re identifying patterns, you can use AI at this stage, too. However, as always, what AI considers relevant to the search intent may not always be actually relevant from a human perspective. Likewise, a human will have better insight into whether content ranks by default rather than merit.
Your next step is to convert this data into content briefs (or content refresh projects) that address those intent gaps. These will be your highest-value opportunities because Google actively prioritizes clearer, more comprehensive alternatives.
6. Review Ranking Factors
Sometimes, rankings hinge on technical SEO and structure, rather than content, keywords and backlinks. Here, you want to check any friction that may impact a site’s usability, such as technical SEO and UX.
Take note of the following:
- Page speed and Core Web Vitals.
- Indexing issues and crawlability.
- Internal linking.
- Site architecture.
- Mobile optimization, UX and conversion friction.
Compare your technical infrastructure to competitors. Most of the time, a well-structured page with the same content will outrank a page with better content and a slower load time. A simple way to approach this step is to build a scorecard for each top competitor page and rank content quality, links and technical SEO factors. This information can guide triage in your content strategy, including quick fixes and rebuilds.
7. Benchmark Against Competitor Performance
You’ve got the data. Now it’s time to benchmark it. By analyzing competitors’ rank movement and SEO performance, you gain an understanding of which trends are transient (due to, say, a spike in PR) and which are worth actually competing against.
Here’s what you want to take note of:
- Movement over time for prio keyword clusters.
- Keyword difficulty and search volume vs. actual performance.
- Referring domains’ growth and link velocity.
- Internal links.
- Search traffic proxies (e.g., time on pace and bounce rate).
This step is important because search engine rankings change based on shifting intent, AI overviews and other external factors, making them volatile. Just because a page is ranking today doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow.
8. Develop and Implement Your SEO Strategy
Now’s the time to translate what you’ve learned into actionable improvements that help you outrank competitors. Build a prioritized SEO strategy roadmap that speaks to your content outputs, link-building plan and technical SEO efforts, informed by competitor insight. Select three to five high ROI projects that exploit the weaknesses you found.
These projects might include:
- Content initiatives, whether new articles, refreshers or mergers that align with search intent and address competitor gaps.
- Technical fixes with ROI estimates.
- Link building outreach aligned with your content assets.
- Conversion rate optimization and UX tweaks that enhance usability.
Remember, you don’t need to bite off everything at once. The best SEO strategies are selective, balancing the easy wins with the high-impact shifts (basically the battles with an asymmetric upside). Assign task owners, success metrics and clear timelines to your plan.
9. Review Your Strategy Regularly
As mentioned, the SERPs change constantly because SEO is a living system. New products shape search intent, competitor strategies evolve and audiences behave differently over time. That means you need to review your strategy and performance regularly to keep your approach updated.
Monitor the following:
- SERP volatility and feature changes.
- Competitor content refreshes cadence.
- Backlink profile shifts.
- Changes in search intent.
Set a cadence for check-ins, such as monthly monitoring and quarterly deep dives. While AI can automate alerts and generate ideas or profile data, it’s best to leave strategic adjustments to humans. Refresh keyword opportunities, content gap findings, benchmarks and SEO strategies to keep your SEO roadmap aligned with current reality.
Staying Competitive in Organic Search
Analyzing competitor SEO is more of a stance than a monthly task. It teaches you where the market is saturated and where you can strategically serve it. In an AI-driven space, the advantage lies not with those who publish more but with those who publish with intent grounded in research.
If you want sustainable rankings, you must know who ranks for your intent and why, choose the highest-leverage plays and always inject human judgment. That way, you’ll get not only a solid competitive SEO analysis, but strategic insight you can act on.
