How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis

Last Updated: May 2024

An SEO competitor analysis (sometimes referred to as competitive analysis) is the process of researching your direct search competitors to understand their target keywords, content strategy, backlink profile, and more, for the purpose of reverse engineering the most successful elements of these tactics into your own SEO strategy.

Instead of guessing which keywords to target, which content to create, or which links to build, you can research your competitors, analyze what's already working for them, and build upon that success.

Rank higher. Get more traffic. Increase conversions. Earn more loyal customers. An SEO competitor analysis works as a powerful research strategy to help you achieve all of these goals. It can help you successfully answer questions like:

• Who are my actual SEO competitors?

• What keywords should I target?

• What does the competitive landscape look like?

• What topics should I cover?

• How do I find valuable links?

Consider a real-world example:

Imagine you operate a pet supply store and are one of three competing stores in town. Your customers are happy, but you know they also visit other stores because they can't buy everything in one place. So, you go on a road trip to gather competitive intelligence. You visit the other stores to understand the popular items they offer. By offering these items yourself — or even superior ones — you help your customers make fewer trips, and in turn, you gain more business and, eventually, brand advocates!

There are many ways to do a competitive analysis for SEO, but in this guide, we’ll take you through 5 fundamental steps in each of the following chapters of this guide:

1. Identify your SEO competitors

Who are your competitors? You may think you know, or you may have been operating under assumption, but they’re not necessarily brands selling the same products or services as you! Conducting research in the SERP - or even better, using an SEO tool - to identify your SEO competitors is crucial for precision and SEO planning.

2. Run a keyword gap analysis

Ready to do some sleuthing? A keyword gap analysis can help you discover opportunities to improve your visibility by targeting keywords that competitors are ranking for, but your website is not. By addressing areas where your competitors have a stronger online presence, you can capture a broader audience and drive more traffic.

3. Evaluate the SERP for user intent

Savvy marketers tailor their strategies to align with what users are seeking. Whether your audience is searching for a solution, an answer to their question, a product, a service, or a nearby location, understanding their intent is essential. You’ll learn how to analyze the SERP and how your competitors meet your audience’s needs.

4. Analyze your competitors’ content and improve upon it

By dissecting the content that contributes to your competitor's success, SEOs can glean insights into effective content strategies, keyword targeting, and user engagement. Armed with this intelligence, you can enhance your content, and outshine competitors in the ever-evolving landscape of the SERPs.

5. Perform a competitor backlink analysis

It’s time to pull back the curtain on your competitors’ backlink profiles. With the right tools and framework, you can unveil valuable insights into the quality and quantity of links driving your competitor's authority. By leveraging this data and fortifying your backlink strategy, you’re setting yourself up for a SERP takeover!

Here’s a helpful workflow you can follow along the way (check out the downloadable PDF with links here):

Throughout this guide, we’ll use examples to demonstrate and help explain the context around frameworks, workflows, and interpreting data. Let’s return to the pet supply store example we referenced earlier. Below is a visualization of the information you’ll collect as you move through a comprehensive competitor analysis. It includes:

• Competitors

• SEO metric comparison

• Keyword gaps

• Top competing content

• Backlink sources

You’ve heard the saying, “The only constant is change.” In that same spirit, conducting an SEO competitor analysis is not a one-time event, but rather an ongoing process to stay informed about the dynamic nature of your market, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

You should conduct a competitor analysis when:

• You launch a new website

• You launch a new product or service

• You’re entering a new market

• You find that your competitors are outranking you

• You’re implementing an SEO strategy for the first time

• You’re a freelance SEO and have acquired a new client

• Your competitors are outranking you in the SERPs, and you’re unsure as to why

• You lack benchmarks for a website and need to create them

• You’re seeking investors or stakeholders, and want to instill confidence in your strategy

Domain Overview will give you a snapshot of a competitor - or any site at all - in just a few seconds. We can perform this quick assessment and get a bird's-eye-view of nearly any site:

1. Navigate to the Domain Overview tool in Moz Pro (you can access this tool by creating a free community account here)

2. Enter a competitor’s domain, subdomain, or exact page

You’ll see a Summary, kicking off with Domain Search Theme. The Search Theme derives from the most frequently searched keywords associated with this site, and provides insight into how a website meets an audience in the SERPs. If you’re searching your own domain in this tool, it can be helpful for confirming that your domain’s target aligns with the language of ranking keywords.

The Summary also includes Domain Authority®, Page Authority, and Brand Authority™ metrics. Brand Authority is a Moz metric, on a scale of 1-100, that measures the total strength of a brand. We know brands matter online and in the real world, and this metric offers clarity into the relationship between the value of a brand and search engine results.

As you scroll down, you’ll see Domain Keyword Topics. This feature offers insight into how people search for this domain by exploring the primary topic categories based on ranking keywords.

As you continue to scroll and explore, you’ll also see a graph called Brand Authority comparison. This is a powerful visualization that compares this brand and its competitors’ Domain Authority, Brand Authority, and where they fall in this space. This graph combines the online and real-world authority of several brands at once.

As you scroll, you’ll see additional metrics, such as keyword and link opportunities, discovered and lost links, linking domains, and more. Each of these tables and graphs pulls from a Moz Pro tool, and will give you a 360 view of one site.

As we continue through this guide, we’ll dig deeper into nearly all of this data, and discuss how to extract actionable insights!

To walk you through this guide, we've put together a free, downloadable template that you can use to perform your own SEO competitor analysis. This template will also help you create an actionable report.

1. Make a copy of the spreadsheet by clicking here
2. Follow the instructions to gather data
3. Replace the sample data with your own
4. Sort, filter, and customize to your needs

If you're serious about beating your competition, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. We've tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible, and learning the basics of SEO is a vital first step in achieving your online business goals.

Go through at the pace that suits you best, and take note of resources we link to throughout the chapters — they're also worthy of your attention.

If you want to take a more systematic and comprehensive approach to learning SEO - or train your entire team! - check out the Moz Academy SEO Competitive Analysis Certification. We've consolidated all the resources you need to learn how to confidently implement a competitive analysis strategy with unique learning strategies, task lessons, and quizzes to test your knowledge. To top it off, you can validate your expertise with a LinkedIn Moz SEO Competitive Analysis Certification badge!

Next up: How To Find Your True SEO Competitors