An SEO competitor analysis is a structured look at the websites that rank for the searches you want, so you can see which keywords they win, which pages earn those rankings and where they are weak. Then you act on the gaps. The steps below take you from picking competitors to a ranked to-do list, and they work whether you have a spreadsheet and an afternoon or a full toolset.
TL;DR
- Your SEO competitors are the sites that rank for your target queries, not necessarily the companies you sell against. Forums, publishers and review sites count.
- Pick three to five domains, then compare them on keywords, content, backlinks and technical health, in that order.
- Sort keyword gaps into Missing, Weak, Shared and Unique. Weak keywords, where you already rank on page two or three, are usually the quickest wins.
- Finish with a one-page plan: quick wins, new pages, authority building, each with an owner and a date.
- Repeat the check on a regular rhythm. Rankings, content and AI citations keep moving, so one report goes stale.
Table of Contents
- What counts as an SEO competitor
- Step 1: Find the sites you actually compete with
- Step 2: Run a keyword gap analysis
- Step 3: Analyze competitor content and blogs
- Step 4: Compare backlinks
- Step 5: Check technical SEO
- Step 6: Add AI search to the picture
- Step 7: Turn findings into an action plan
- How often to repeat it
- Put your gap list to work with Tepine
- FAQ
- Sources
What counts as an SEO competitor
Start by dropping the idea that your competitors are the businesses in your industry. In search, a competitor is any site that ranks for the queries you are targeting. HubSpot’s guide gives a clear example: search “best CRM software” and the top results may include a review site, a business publication’s listicle and a Reddit thread. None of them sells CRM software, yet they are the pages you have to beat.
This matters because your real rivals for a keyword can be very different from your sales rivals. A local bakery might compete with a national recipe site for “sourdough starter,” and a small accounting firm might compete with a personal finance publisher for “how to file quarterly taxes.” If you only study business rivals, you miss the pages actually taking your clicks.
Two kinds of competitor are worth separating:
- Business competitors: companies selling what you sell. They matter for positioning, pricing and offers.
- Search competitors: domains that show up for your keywords. They matter for rankings, content and links.
The analysis below is about the second group, though the first often overlaps with it.
Search also no longer ends at the ten blue links. Semrush notes that a modern analysis should consider competitors’ visibility in Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity as well as classic results. We come back to this in step 6.
Step 1: Find the sites you actually compete with
You want a short list, not a giant one. Three to five domains is enough to see patterns while keeping the work manageable. HubSpot recommends combining three methods, because each one catches what the others miss.
Search your own keywords by hand
List your five to ten most important target keywords. Open a private or incognito browser window, search each one and write down every domain in positions one to ten. Domains that appear again and again are your real search competitors. Doing this by hand also shows you the format of the results: whether Google favors guides, product pages, videos or forum threads.
Use your own Search Console data
Export your best queries by clicks and impressions from Google Search Console. Search the ones that matter and note who ranks next to you or above you. This is the most honest view of the searches your site already has a foot in.
Check the competing-domains reports in keyword tools
Most keyword research tools have an “organic competitors” or “competing domains” report that lists sites sharing many of your rankings. Cross-check it against your manual list. Where the two agree, you have a competitor worth tracking.
If your site is new and has few rankings, these reports have little to chew on. In that case, work from the other direction: take the keywords your future customers would type, look at who ranks for them, and treat those domains as your starting set.
Choose well
A good competitor to study has two things: a healthy overlap of keywords with you and a decent number of keywords you do not share. The overlap proves you are in the same arena. The unique keywords show you where to grow. Drop sites that are far bigger than you in every way, since a huge publisher’s strategy is hard to copy. Keep at least one competitor close to your own size.
Step 2: Run a keyword gap analysis
This is the heart of the job. A keyword gap compares the keywords you rank for with the keywords your competitors rank for, so you can see what they win that you do not.
Enter your domain and up to four competitors into a keyword gap or content gap tool. HubSpot suggests filtering to “Missing” keywords first, meaning queries where competitors rank in the top 20 and you do not appear at all, then to “Weak” keywords, where you rank but they sit well above you. Sort by search volume and keyword difficulty to surface quick wins, then prioritize by how closely each topic fits your existing content.
It helps to sort every keyword into one of four buckets:
| Bucket | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Missing | A competitor ranks in the top 10, you do not rank | Write a new page, or add a section to an existing one |
| Weak | A competitor is in the top 10, you sit around positions 11 to 30 | Improve the page that already exists. Often the fastest win |
| Shared | You both rank in the top 10 | Defend with refreshes and internal links |
| Unique | Only you rank | Protect these pages and link from them to pages you want to grow |
This four-bucket approach comes from Shila.so. Weak keywords deserve the most attention for a simple reason: the page exists, Google already considers it relevant, and it needs to be better rather than new.
Filter for buyers, not just volume
A gap list can run to thousands of rows. Cut it down with four questions:
- Is the topic relevant to something you sell or a problem you solve?
- What is the search intent: someone learning, comparing or ready to buy?
- Is the difficulty realistic for your site today?
- Could this page lead to a sale, a signup or a call?
A keyword with 200 searches a month and clear buying intent is often worth more than one with 5,000 searches and no commercial value. Long, specific queries are usually where smaller sites win first. Our guide to long tail keyword targeting goes deeper on that approach.
Step 3: Analyze competitor content and blogs
Keywords tell you what they rank for. Content analysis tells you why. Open the pages that win your priority keywords and read them in full, then compare them with yours on a fixed checklist. HubSpot’s content checklist covers word count and depth, heading structure, media, internal links, structured data, author credentials and freshness.
Here is a practical version you can copy into a spreadsheet:
- Coverage: which subtopics and questions do they answer that you skip?
- Depth and evidence: do they have examples, data, screenshots, named experts or original research?
- Structure: is the answer at the top? Do headings match the questions people ask? Are there tables or a table of contents?
- Freshness: when was it last updated? Are the prices, features and screenshots current?
- On-page basics: title, meta description, keyword in the headings, internal links pointing to the page.
- Effort: a custom graphic, calculator or template signals a page the competitor cares about and will defend.
Read search intent from the results page
Before comparing details, check what type of page Google rewards. If the top ten are all how-to guides and you have a product page, no amount of polish will fix the mismatch. If the results mix guides, lists and forum threads, there may be room for a format nobody has done well, such as a worked example or a comparison table.
Study competitor blogs as a whole
Competitor blog analysis goes beyond single pages. Look at how often they publish, which topic clusters they return to, and which posts bring in the most traffic. A competitor that covers one topic from ten angles and links the posts together is building topical authority. If you spot that pattern, plan your own cluster rather than a single post. Our overview of how to increase organic search traffic shows how clusters fit into a wider plan.
Step 4: Compare backlinks
Links remain a major reason one page outranks another, and the gap between your link profile and a competitor’s can explain why they win even when your content is as good.
The core exercise is a backlink gap, also called link intersect. Enter your domain and up to three competitors into a backlink gap tool and list the domains that link to them but not to you. HubSpot suggests sorting by authority and reading the link context, then building an outreach list of 20 to 50 domains. A site that links to three of your rivals already writes about your category, so it is a strong prospect.
For each competitor, also check:
- Link types: reviews, listicles, partner pages, guest posts, press, directories, podcasts.
- Most-linked pages: often data studies, free tools or templates. These are their link magnets.
- Growth: a sudden jump in referring domains usually explains a ranking jump.
- Broken links: links pointing to their dead pages, which you can offer to replace with a live page of yours.
- Unlinked mentions: articles that name your brand without linking.
Quality beats quantity here. A handful of relevant, editorial links is worth more than a pile of directory listings. If outreach is not something you have time for, our contextual backlinks feature places links inside articles on real member sites.
Step 5: Check technical SEO
Technical gaps are often the cheapest to close because they involve fixing rather than creating. Run the same checks on a competitor’s key pages and your own:
- Speed and Core Web Vitals: run the same page types through PageSpeed Insights. Relative performance matters more than a perfect score.
- Site structure: how many clicks from the homepage do their money pages sit?
- Internal linking: do their guides link to product pages with descriptive anchor text?
- Structured data: do they use Article, FAQ, Product, Organization or similar markup that you lack?
- Mobile and rendering: is the main content in the HTML, or only after JavaScript runs?
- Basics: HTTPS, titles, meta descriptions and canonical tags.
Structured data deserves special mention. Markup helps search engines and AI assistants understand what a page is about, so a competitor using it where you do not has a real edge in how their results are presented.
Step 6: Add AI search to the picture
Rankings are no longer the only scoreboard. People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI features, and those tools name some brands and skip others. Treat this as another competitor comparison: for your ten most important questions, ask the assistants and note which sites get cited or recommended, and in what order.
You can see how your own site fares with our free AI visibility checker. The same logic applies as in classic SEO: clear answers near the top of the page, structured markup and trustworthy links tend to help. We cover the practical side in how to rank in AI Overviews and search engines.
Step 7: Turn findings into an action plan
An analysis that ends as a slide deck changes nothing. Compress what you found into a one-page plan with four lists, and give every item an owner and a date:
| List | What goes in it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Quick wins | Weak keywords, missing schema, outdated pages | Rewrite the page stuck at position 14 and add an FAQ |
| New pages | Missing keywords with clear buyer intent | A comparison guide three rivals rank for |
| Authority building | Link gap prospects, unlinked mentions | Pitch ten sites that link to all your rivals |
| Positioning | Angles competitors ignore | A format or audience nobody serves well |
Pick the two or three highest-leverage moves for the first month and leave the rest in the backlog. Then measure. Track rankings for the keywords you targeted, organic clicks to the changed pages and, if relevant, whether AI assistants begin to mention you.
A small worked example
Say you run a web design studio for dentists. Your manual search for “dental website design” shows two directories, a software vendor’s guide and a rival studio in the top ten. Your gap report finds 60 missing keywords, and 12 of them concern dental patient intake forms, which no rival covers well. You also find 9 weak keywords where you sit around position 15. Your plan: refresh those 9 pages in week one, write a patient-forms guide with a downloadable template in weeks two to four, and pitch the three dental associations whose sites link to your rivals. That is a realistic month, and every task traces back to something the analysis found.
How often to repeat it
A competitor analysis is a living document. Competitors publish, new players arrive, and AI citations shift. A sensible rhythm for a small team is the 3-3-3 rule: watch three close competitors, check three core metrics for each, such as organic traffic, keyword share and links gained, and run a fuller review every three months. Between those reviews, a quick monthly look at rankings and new competitor content keeps you from being surprised.
The rhythm matters less than the habit. The point is to catch a competitor’s new page or a lost ranking while you can still respond.
Our view: competitor insight only pays off when it becomes published content
At Tepine, we see the same pattern with freelancers, small businesses and agencies: the analysis gets done once, the spreadsheet is full of good ideas, and then nothing is published because writing is slow. The gap between insight and action is where rankings are lost.
That is why we built our platform around closing it. Our keyword research is informed by what competitors and your own products already show to have search demand, so the plan starts from proven queries rather than guesses. Our system then writes articles in the voice it extracts from your existing site content, so the pieces read like your business and not like generic AI text, and it publishes on a daily schedule to the CMS you already use.
We also believe the scoreboard has widened. Ranking on Google still matters, but being cited by AI assistants matters too, so we track AI visibility alongside classic SEO. Our aim is for every gap you find to turn into a page that answers the question your customer typed.
Tepine
Put your gap list to work with Tepine
If your analysis leaves you with dozens of keywords and no time to write, Tepine turns that list into a steady stream of published articles. It plans topics from competitor-informed keyword research, writes in your brand voice, adds structured data for Google and AI assistants, and lets you approve drafts in a review queue before they go live. The Starter plan is $79 per month, and you can see the details on the pricing page.
To see how the daily publishing side works, read about automatic publishing.
FAQ
What is the best way to start an SEO competitor analysis?
Start with a manual search. Take your five to ten most important keywords, search them in a private browser window and note every domain in the top ten. The domains that repeat are your search competitors. Then confirm the list with your Search Console queries and a keyword tool’s competing-domains report.
How many competitors should I analyze?
Three to five is a good working number. It gives you enough data to see patterns without burying you in comparisons. Include at least one site close to your own size, since a much larger competitor’s results are harder to replicate.
What are competitors in SEO?
SEO competitors are websites that rank for the same queries you want to rank for. They may not sell anything like your product. A forum, a news site or a review page can be a stronger search competitor than a company in your own industry.
What is competitor analysis in technical SEO?
It means running the same technical checks on your site and your rivals’ sites and comparing the results. Typical checks are page speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile rendering, site structure, internal linking, structured data and basics such as HTTPS and canonical tags. Fix the gaps where competitors are clearly ahead.
How often should I repeat the analysis?
Run a full review about every three months and a light check on rankings and new competitor content each month. Fast-moving niches may need a closer look. Treat the analysis as an ongoing process, not a one-off report.
Sources
- SEO Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2026, HubSpot
- How to do an SEO competitor analysis, Semrush
- SEO Competitor Analysis: 9 Steps, Template and Example, Shila.so
- Digital Marketing Competitive Analysis, Moody Media
