When someone types a question into Google, only a handful of websites earn a spot near the top of the search results. If your competitors keep outranking you in this highly contested space, the reasons why may be sitting in plain view on their website.
Learning how to do competitor analysis in SEO gives you a clear sense of what’s working for the other businesses in your area, giving you insight into how you can improve your own digital marketing strategy.
Here are the key pieces of SEO competitive analysis and how to use them to maximize your chances of ranking.
First: What Is SEO Competitor Analysis?
SEO competitor analysis means carefully auditing your competitors’ SEO strategies and reverse-engineering the approaches that have worked well for them. This process often involves looking closely at a competitor’s keywords, types of content, backlinks, and the overall layout of their website.
Competitor analysis doesn’t imply that you’re stealing or copying a competitor’s business model. It’s a tried-and-true way to tighten up your SEO strategy while keeping your business’s unique selling points at the forefront.
Here’s a closer look at the process.
How Do You Find Your Search Competitors?
The first step in SEO competitor analysis is always identifying who you’re up against. It’s important to keep in mind that your search competitors may not be the local businesses that you compete with for projects. Whoever is dominating the search results for your core keywords is who you want to analyze.
How To Identify Them
Start by searching your most valuable keywords and taking note of which websites show up on page one again and again. SEO platforms like SEMRush and Ahrefs can speed up this process by showing you which sites have the most keyword overlap with yours and pointing out the gaps.
From here, you can narrow down your list to three to five main competitors and make a plan for adjusting your content strategy based on what they have that you don’t.
Key Steps for Successful Competitor Analysis
Once you have a short list of competitors, take a look under the hood for each. These are the areas to look at first when you run competitor analysis.
Keyword Gaps
A keyword gap analysis shows you the searches your competitors rank for that you don’t. These gaps often indicate that your competitors have content on their sites that potential customers are searching for, but that you’re missing this content on your own site.
When doing competitor analysis for a small business, focus primarily on your competition for local, long-tail keywords. This will help you focus on your true competition rather than trying to outrank national franchises and businesses outside of your service area.
Content Quality
Read the top-ranking pages for your core keywords and read them the way a potential customer would. Note how long they are, which topics are covered, what type of media is included, and other attributes that might differ from your content. All of these attributes can contribute to Google’s ranking of their content over yours.
Backlink Profiles
Backlinks are a sign of trust to search engines, and if a competitor has more high-quality links than you, they may have a clear advantage. Look at where your competitors earn their links, focusing on local news outlets, industry groups, business partners, and local listing sites. Consider reaching out to these same outlets to earn your own citations through a sponsorship or membership.
Technical Specs
Page speed, mobile optimization, and site structure and organization all factor into how well a website ranks on search engines. To see how your pages measure up to competitors, run both through Google’s PageSpeed Insights and compare their pages to your own.
If your competitor’s site loads faster than yours, is easier for AI agents to understand, and better complies with accessibility standards, they may be more likely to outrank you.
SERP Features
Check whether your competitors show up in Google’s local map pack, AI Overviews, or People Also Ask boxes. More searches now end with an AI-generated answer, so look for places where your competitors are cited in generative answers.
Working with an agency that specializes in AEO and GEO for small businesses can help you build your visibility in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews; this can be a proactive way to set your website up to compete.
How Do You Build Competitor Analysis Into Your SEO Strategy?
Your competitor research should inform your SEO strategy so that you can fill in the gaps between your brand and your competitors’. To do this, start by improving your content, building authority, and cleaning up the technical specs of your site.
Here’s what this might look like in practice:
- Compare your service pages to your competitors’, and rewrite or retune the content on your pages to be even more comprehensive and persuasive than the competition’s content.
- Reach out to local outlets to build your profile of reputable links. Look at the links your competitors have already earned and aim to both match and outpace them in this area.
- Close the gap between your site and others’ in terms of speed, usability, and structure. Technical SEO and web development services can be incredibly helpful here.
These steps take time and energy to execute, which is why we recommend partnering with digital marketing experts rather than trying to pull these levers yourself.
Let’s Build Your Competitive Edge
Knowing how to do competitor analysis sets you up to understand what other businesses are doing to rank highly in search engine results. Knowledge is only half the battle, though; to succeed, you’ll need to turn insight into growth.
This is where we come in. The Padula Media SEO team runs detailed competitor research for all of our partners, and we fold our findings into a hard-hitting strategy that sets you apart from the competition.
If you’re ready to see how your website stacks up against your local competitors, reach out to us today. We’d love to learn about your goals and help you claim more of the search results that matter the most to your business.