if you want your business to grow online, you need to understand what your competitors are doing right and where they are falling short. Learning how to do competitive analysis is one of the most practical skills you can develop as a marketer, business owner, or SEO professional. It gives you a real-world map of the landscape you are competing in, so you stop guessing and start making decisions backed by actual data. In this guide, you will get a clear, step-by-step walkthrough of how to do competitive analysis, along with a simple template you can start using today, and real examples to make it all click.
What Is Competitive Analysis and Why Does It Matter?
Competitive analysis is the process of researching and evaluating your competitors’ strategies across areas like keywords, content, backlinks, products, pricing, and online presence. The goal is not to copy what they are doing. The goal is to understand what is working in your market so you can do it better or find the gaps they have missed.
Think of it this way. If you open a coffee shop without ever visiting other local cafes, you are walking in blind. But if you spend a few afternoons at competing spots, you quickly learn what customers love, what they complain about, and what nobody is offering yet. Competitive analysis is that reconnaissance, done systematically for your online business.
Here is what a solid competitive analysis helps you do:
- Discover what actually works in your industry before you spend time and money testing it yourself.
- Find gaps in the market that your competitors have not addressed, and fill them with your content, products, or services.
- Benchmark your performance so you know where you stand and what realistic growth looks like.
- Prioritize your SEO and marketing efforts based on evidence rather than assumptions.
Who Are Your Real Competitors?
Before you analyze anyone, you need to identify the right competitors to study. This is where many businesses go wrong. Your business competitors and your SEO competitors are not always the same people.
Your business competitors sell similar products or services to the same audience. Your SEO competitors are the websites that show up in Google for the keywords your potential customers are searching for, regardless of whether they sell what you sell.
For example, if you run an online bakery supply store, a food blog that ranks for “best cake decorating tips” is technically an SEO competitor even if it does not sell a single product. That blog is pulling traffic you could be getting.
How to find your competitors:
Start with a simple Google search. Type in the main keywords that describe what you sell or what you want to rank for. Look at which websites appear consistently in the top five to ten results. Those are your real search competitors.
You can also use tools like Semrush’s Organic Research tool or Ahrefs to see which domains share the most keyword rankings with your website. These tools surface competitors you might never have thought of.
A good starting point is picking three to five competitors to analyze deeply rather than spreading yourself too thin across dozens.
The Competitive Analysis Template
Before diving into the steps, here is a simple template you can build in Google Sheets or a spreadsheet tool. Create columns for the following data points for each competitor you are studying:
| Field | What to Record |
|---|---|
| Competitor Name | Brand name and website URL |
| Domain Authority | Moz DA or Ahrefs DR score |
| Estimated Monthly Traffic | From tools like Semrush or Similarweb |
| Top Keywords | Their highest-ranking organic terms |
| Content Types | Blog, video, product pages, guides |
| Publishing Frequency | How often they post new content |
| Backlink Count | Number of referring domains |
| Social Media Presence | Platforms and follower counts |
| Product/Service Gaps | What they offer vs. what they miss |
| Key Strengths | What they clearly do well |
| Key Weaknesses | Where they fall short |
This template becomes your working document throughout the analysis. Fill it in as you move through each step below.
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How to Do Competitive Analysis: Step by Step
Step 1: Research Their Keyword Strategy
Keywords are the foundation of any SEO competitive analysis. You want to understand which search terms your competitors are ranking for, which ones are driving the most traffic, and which ones you are missing out on.
Start by entering a competitor’s domain into a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs and pulling their top organic keywords. You are looking for a few things:
Their highest-traffic keywords show you where the majority of their visitors come from. If a competitor gets 40 percent of their organic traffic from three keywords, those terms clearly matter in your niche.
Their keyword gaps reveal what they rank for that you do not. These are opportunities waiting to be captured. A keyword gap analysis can surface dozens of topics your site should be covering.
Keywords where you almost rank, meaning you are on page two or in positions 11 to 20, are often quicker wins than trying to rank for brand new terms from scratch.
Step 2: Analyze Their Top Performing Content
Once you know what keywords your competitors rank for, look at the actual pages that are performing best. This tells you not just what topics work but how they are being treated in your industry.
For each competitor’s top page, ask yourself:
How long is the content? Is it a 500-word overview or a 3,000-word definitive guide?
What format does it use? A numbered list, a step-by-step tutorial, a comparison table, or a video?
How does the content show Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT)? Does it include author bios, real examples, original research, or quotes from credible sources?
Does it have clear answers to common questions? Pages that directly answer “People Also Ask” questions often win featured snippets.
What is the page missing that searchers would find valuable?
That last question is the most important. You are not trying to copy a competitor’s page. You are trying to build the page that a searcher was hoping to find when they clicked.
Step 3: Evaluate Their Backlink Profile
Backlinks, which are links from other websites pointing to your competitor’s site, are still one of the strongest ranking signals in Google’s algorithm. A competitor with many high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources will generally outrank someone with none.
Pull your competitor’s backlink profile using a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. Look for:
Which types of websites are linking to them? Industry publications, news outlets, partner sites, directories?
What content earns the most links? Often it is research reports, original data, free tools, or comprehensive guides.
Are there sites that link to multiple competitors but not to you? These are your highest-priority link building targets, sometimes called link intersects.
What anchor text patterns are common? This tells you how the industry refers to your competitor’s brand or content.
Closing backlink gaps takes time, but the insight is priceless. If five authoritative sites in your niche link to every competitor except you, those relationships are worth pursuing.
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Step 4: Review Their Technical SEO Health
You can have great content and a strong backlink profile and still get outranked by a competitor whose site simply loads faster and works better on mobile. Technical SEO is the infrastructure that lets everything else perform.
When reviewing a competitor’s technical setup, check the following:
- Page speed: Use Google PageSpeed Insights or a similar tool to see how quickly their pages load on mobile and desktop.
- Mobile friendliness: With Google’s mobile-first indexing, a site that performs poorly on smartphones is already at a disadvantage.
- Site structure: Is their website organized logically? Do they use categories, internal links, and breadcrumbs that make navigation easy for users and search engines?
- HTTPS: All credible sites should be secured with HTTPS. If a competitor is not, that is a trust signal you automatically have over them.
- Schema markup: Check if they use structured data like FAQ schema, review schema, or product schema, which can earn rich snippets in search results.
You can then compare these technical factors against your own site using Google Search Console, which gives you free access to your Core Web Vitals scores, indexing status, and more.
Step 5: Study Their Content Strategy and Publishing Cadence
Competitive analysis is not just about keywords and links. It is also about understanding the broader content machine your competitors are running.
Visit their blog or resource section and look at the publishing frequency. Are they putting out two posts a week or two posts a year? What topics do they keep returning to? Do they update old content regularly?
Look at content formats too. Some brands win with long written guides. Others build audiences through video tutorials, infographics, or free downloadable tools. Your niche likely has patterns you can learn from.
Pay attention to what is performing despite being old. If a competitor published a guide in 2021 and it still drives traffic, that topic has long-term value. Creating an updated, more thorough version of that guide is a legitimate strategy.
Also note where they are not active. If nobody in your niche is publishing video content but your target audience watches a lot of YouTube, that is a wide open channel for you to own.
Step 6: Analyze Their Product, Pricing, and Positioning
If you are doing competitive analysis for a product-based or service business, you also need to look beyond SEO into how competitors position and package what they sell.
- Visit their product or service pages and evaluate:
- What do they include at each price point? How do they structure their offers?
- What language do they use to describe benefits versus features?
- How do they handle social proof, such as reviews, testimonials, case studies, or customer counts?
- What objections do their FAQs and product descriptions address?
- Where are customers leaving negative reviews, on Google, Trustpilot, or product pages? Those complaints tell you exactly what the market wants that no one is delivering well.
Pricing intelligence is particularly useful. You do not need to undercut competitors on price. But understanding the pricing landscape helps you position your offer clearly, whether that is premium quality, better value, or a more specialized niche service.
Step 7: Compile Your Findings and Build an Action Plan
Gathering data is only half the job. The competitive analysis becomes valuable when you turn insights into priorities.
Go back to your template and fill in the strengths and weaknesses column for each competitor. Then look across all of them and ask:
What patterns keep showing up across multiple competitors? Those patterns reveal what the market expects as a baseline.
What gaps keep appearing in multiple competitors’ strategies? Those gaps are your opportunities.
What single improvement to your website, content, or backlink strategy would have the biggest impact right now?
Pick one to three priorities to work on in the next 30 to 90 days. Do not try to close every gap at once. Focused, consistent execution on a few high-impact improvements will outperform scattered efforts across everything.
A Real-World Example: Competitive Analysis for a Local Gym
Let us say you run a fitness studio in a mid-size city and want to grow your online presence. Here is how the competitive analysis might play out.
You start by Googling “personal trainer near me” and “best gym classes.” You identify four local gyms and two national fitness chains with local pages that consistently rank above you.
You pull their keywords and find that the top-ranked local gym is getting most of its organic traffic from terms like “affordable personal training,” “morning yoga classes,” and “weight loss coaching for women.” You are not ranking for any of those. You now have your first three content targets.
You look at their content and see a blog with posts like “What to Eat Before a Morning Workout” and “How to Stay Consistent with Exercise.” The posts are short, generic, and last updated in 2022. Your opportunity is to write longer, more specific, regularly updated guides on the same topics.
You run a backlink check and find that a local wellness directory has linked to all four competing gyms but not yours. You submit your gym to that directory immediately.
You check their page speed and discover their website takes 6.8 seconds to load on mobile. Yours loads in 2.3 seconds. That is a technical edge you already have.
Six weeks of targeted content creation and a handful of new backlinks later, you are ranking for two of the three target keywords. That is how competitive analysis converts into measurable results.
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How Often Should You Do Competitive Analysis?
Competitive analysis is not a one-time project. Markets shift, new competitors emerge, and the content that worked six months ago may be outdated today.
A practical schedule looks like this:
Run a full competitive analysis once per quarter. Review all the main metrics: keyword rankings, traffic estimates, backlink changes, and new content published.
Do monthly check-ins on your top two or three competitors to catch any major moves early, like a new content push, a site redesign, or a sudden backlink surge.
When your own rankings drop or plateau, run an immediate competitive check to see if a competitor made a move that explains the shift.
Frequently Asked Questions About Competitive Analysis
What is the difference between competitive analysis and competitor research?
Competitive analysis is a broader strategic process that includes evaluating competitors across multiple dimensions like content, SEO, pricing, and positioning, then using those insights to guide business decisions. Competitor research typically refers to the information-gathering phase within that larger process.
Do I need paid tools to do competitive analysis?
You can do a meaningful competitive analysis using free tools. Google Search shows you who ranks for your keywords. Google Search Console shows your own performance data. MozBar gives you quick domain authority checks. Ubersuggest has limited free features for keyword research. Paid tools like Semrush or Ahrefs unlock deeper data, but they are not required to get started.
How many competitors should I analyze?
For most businesses, three to five competitors is the right number. Go deeper on fewer competitors rather than collecting shallow data on twenty. Focus on those who consistently appear in the top five search results for your most important keywords.
What is a keyword gap and how do I find one?
A keyword gap is a keyword that your competitors rank for but your website does not. You can find keyword gaps manually by comparing your competitor’s top keywords against your own rankings. Tools like Semrush’s Keyword Gap or Ahrefs’ Content Gap feature automate this comparison.
How do I use competitive analysis to improve my EEAT?
Look at how your top-ranking competitors demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Do they feature detailed author bios with credentials? Do they cite original research or include expert quotes? Do they showcase reviews or case studies? Wherever you see a stronger EEAT signal in their content, that is a benchmark you can match or surpass.
Can competitive analysis help with local SEO?
Absolutely. For local businesses, competitive analysis means looking at who ranks in the Google Map Pack and local organic results for your area. You can study their Google Business Profile, their number of reviews, their local citations, and the local pages or landing pages they have built to understand what local SEO factors are driving their visibility.
How long does a competitive analysis take?
A basic competitive analysis covering three competitors can take three to five hours if you are doing it manually. With tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, you can cut that down significantly. A quarterly review of existing competitors typically takes one to two hours once you have a system in place.
Final Thoughts
Knowing how to do competitive analysis well is one of the clearest advantages you can build in any market. Most businesses either skip it entirely or do it once and forget about it. Making it a regular part of your strategy means you are always working with current intelligence rather than outdated assumptions.
Start with the template in this guide. Pick three competitors. Follow the seven steps. Fill in what you find, identify the gaps that matter most, and commit to closing them one by one.
The businesses that grow consistently are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who pay attention and act on what they learn.
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