How to Do Competitor Analysis in SEO? : Ultimate Guide (Updated 2024)

If you want to stay one step ahead of your competition in the ranking game, you need to look into their SEO tactics, find their best approaches, be cautious of their mistakes, and leverage all of that info to your benefit.

That means you need to first study your competitors carefully. But how to do competitor analysis in SEO?

This is what this blog is all about. Here we will make you familiar with the different types of competitor analysis and how to do each one of them with popular SEO tools.

Types of SEO Competitive Analysis

Here are some ways to research on your competitors:

• Keyword Analysis

This one is self-explanatory. You research and discover keywords that your competitors are ranking for. The goal is to find new keywords that have high search volumes but low competition, which enhances their ranking possibilities.

• Content Analysis

It’s obvious that you’ll want to do better than your competitors in the SERPs. One of the best ways to do that is through developing killer content. The key is knowing how your competitors create, manage, and market their content. Analyze their strategies and implement the best ones.

• Backlinks Analysis

You will need the backlink sources of your competition’s so you can reach out to those credible sources and gain quality and relevant inbound links.

• Technical Analysis

The technical aspects of your competitor websites are also important. There are ways to check out their site speed, navigation and structure, indexing and crawl issues, and other technical aspects,  and improve yours accordingly.

• Social Media Analysis

Yes, the social profiles of your competitors are worth looking into as well. You need to know how your competitors promote and market their brands on different social media platforms so you can see why they’re successful at their campaigns.

How to Do Competitor Analysis in SEO?

1. Competitor Identification

To start off with competitor analysis, first you need to figure out who you’re actually competing against. There are a few ways to list out your competitors:

You can directly search on Google or use SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz or Ubersuggests, and look for your true competitors in the SERPs.

Imagine you are a tech firm located in Kansas City, Missouri. How do you find out your competitors?

Just Google something like “tech services in Kansas” and see what pops up.

Your true competitors would be ones that provide similar services as yours. In this SERP, the first five websites, including GroovyTek, HelloTech and Strategy Tech are all tech firms in your area. So, they are your direct competitors and will rival you for the IT products and solutions you’re providing in Kansas.

Although the next few ones are also your competitors, they are not tech firms or services by any means but they’re still ranking alongside your niche websites.

The reason is that they’ve targeted similar keywords as yours. So, while they may not be competing for your products or services, they can still outrank you.

You’ll get similar results with SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs or Moz.

Let’s take SEMRush for example. Go to the “Organic Research” feature and type in the same keyword.

You need to know who your real competitors are. For example, here one of the organic results is Yelp.com, which is not exactly an IT company. So, don’t waste your time with domains that’re not even your competitors.

Here’s how to find niche-based competitors with Semrush:

Step 1: Go to SEMRUSH’ “Organic Research”

Step 2: Enter your domain

Step 3: Go to “Competitors”

Step 4: Get your results

2. Competitor SEO Keyword Analysis

• Find Keyword Gaps

Let’s do a keyword gap analysis first. The purpose is to find keywords that your competitors are ranked for but you aren’t.

Go to “Keyword Gap” in SEMRush. Type in your domain in one of the boxes and your competitors in the rest. Click “Compare” and see the result for yourself.

Let’s look at the keyword gap between Kansascitytech.com and their competitors.

If you select the “Untapped” filter, you’ll see a list of keywords that Kansascitytech.com never used but their competitors did. So, you can capitalize on those keywords and strategize accordingly for better rankings.

The goal is to use keywords with lesser keyword difficulties (KD) but more search volumes (SV). So, find your ideal keywords from the list and build your SEO from the ground up.

• Target New Keywords

You should be aware whether your competitors are using new keywords or not. If they are, you should also use the same keywords.

Go to SEMRush’s “Organic Research” tool again. Type in your competitor domain and click “Search.”

We are going to take hellotech.com as our primary competitor and analyze their keywords.

The search result for the domain will return with all the keywords it has ever used. However, you have to go over to the “Position Changes” tab and choose the “New” filter to get the new keywords.

Individually analyze each keyword to stay ahead of the competition. You’ll find the page URL wherein a specific keyword is located. Navigate to the page and see how relevantly they used their keywords and what the content was all about.

Focus on the search volume and KD and pick the best keyword to work with.The right keyword not only depends on how you can use it to meet your business goals but how the global competitors are leveraging that keyword as well.

For instance, we can see in the last result that “airdrop turn on” is a popular keyword with lesser keyword difficulty. A simple google search with the keyword will give you an idea about how you can make the best out of it.

As you can see, the SERP shows mostly blog posts for this keyword. So, if you can create high-quality informative blogs on “airdrop turn on,” you’ll have a higher chance to make it to the top.

Again, it’s all about the user intent. You should analyze all such keywords and optimize your own strategy to cater to the right audience. You can use long-tail keywords to further narrow down to a specific audience and increase user engagement.

• Bring Back the Lost Keywords

This is a simple trick you can use to take advantage of your competitor’s data.

Your competitors might have lost a lot of keywords in their journey so far. The reasons may be varied such as Google spam updates for which they had to remove a questionable page or content or they had stopped giving information about a specific topic.

Whatever may be the case, this serves as a golden opportunity for you to pick up the pieces and leverage them to your benefits.

Again, it’s very easy to find out the lost keywords of your competitors with SEMRush.

Go to “Organic Research” and type in your competitor’s root domain.

Now choose the “Lost” option from the “Position Change” dropdown tab.

This will show all the keywords that the site has lost over time.

Let’s go after the lost keywords of hellotech.com:

The keyword “how to cancel youtube tv” seems like an obvious choice for its good search volume and a reasonable KD score.

Keep the essentials in mind: you need to target keywords with lesser difficulty in SERP competition and those that users search for more. The rest is up to you in terms of how you want to analyze the keywords with an SEO tool.

3. Competitor Content Analysis

• Measure Content Strengths and Weaknesses

Your competitor content analysis has to be mostly manual. Tools are not equipped to tell you a whole story about the content.

You have to observe each of your competitor’s content and note down what has made them exceptional and in some cases, what went wrong.

Read between the lines and try to crack their content strategy.

Do they publish a specific type of content throughout? Do they diversify their content very often? Are they more focused on product pages or blogs and guides? Can you call them “quality content” after all?

• How Content Varies

You should also think about: what type of content is working for them and what isn’t?

Imagine your competitors are putting out blogs and gaining regular traction. You can then start optimizing your own blogs to be more SEO-friendly.

There is an easier way to do that if you are an opportunist. If a competitor’s content is failing for some reason, you can take advantage of this situation.

For example, if the competitor is not regularly updating their blogs, you can start being more active with new blogs and fill up the information gaps for the niche audience.

You can also make use of the “Skyscraper” technique. This is where you need to give more effort to create more efficient content than your competitors’ basic ones and grab more attention.

• Keyword-based Content Analysis

If you have a keyword in mind but don’t know if you should proceed with it for your new content, you can use SEMRush’s “SEO Content Template” to analyze the competitors’ content for a specific keyword and get tons of other suggestions for your content.

Go to “SEO Content Template” and type in a keyword of your choice. Suppose you want to write about “the best video doorbells.” Type it in and click ‘Create Content Template.’

The result shows the top 10 competitors for this keyword and based on them, provides you with SEO recommendations like semantically-related keywords that you can incorporate in your content to enrich your text, referring domains you can get your backlinks from, and even the number of words that your content should have.

• Take a Look at Titles and Meta Descriptions

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