Competitor Analysis | SEO

How to Do a Competitor Analysis to Improve Your SEO Strategy

Introduction

Understanding what your competitors are doing in SEO is one of the most powerful ways to shortcut your own success. By analysing who ranks for your target keywords and why, you can identify exactly what you need to do to outrank them. Here’s a systematic approach to SEO competitor analysis.

Step 1: Identify Your SEO Competitors

Your SEO competitors are not necessarily your business competitors — they’re the websites that rank for your target keywords. Search your main keywords on Google and note the top 5-10 organic results. These are your SEO competitors. They may include big publications, niche blogs, and industry forums — not just competing businesses.

Step 2: Analyse Their Content Strategy

Look at your competitors’ blogs and content sections. What topics do they cover? How frequently do they publish? What is their average word count? What content formats do they use? Tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush can show you their top-performing pages by traffic. Identify topics they haven’t covered — these are content gaps you can fill.

Step 3: Analyse Their Keyword Rankings

Use a tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Ubersuggest to see which keywords drive the most traffic to your competitors. Look for keywords where they rank but you don’t — these are opportunities. Also look for keywords where they rank weakly (positions 5-15) — with a stronger page, you can outrank them.

Step 4: Analyse Their Backlink Profile

Where are your competitors getting their backlinks from? Use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to see referring domains for a competitor’s page. Look for patterns — are they getting links from industry directories, guest posts, media mentions? Many of those same sources will likely link to you if you reach out with equally good content.

Step 5: Create Better Content (The Skyscraper Technique)

The Skyscraper Technique involves finding your competitor’s best-performing content, creating a significantly better version — more comprehensive, more current, better structured, with better visuals — and then reaching out to sites that linked to the original to suggest linking to your improved version instead. It’s one of the most proven link building and content marketing strategies.