Proactive competitor analysis uncovers actionable insights that can give you a significant edge. By dissecting your rivals’ tactics, you’ll identify opportunities they’ve missed and weaknesses you can exploit.
Want to know how to gain these insights? Follow this step-by-step guide for performing SEO competitor analysis using Ahrefs and Semrush. You’ll learn how to leverage your competitors’ successes to improve your own strategy.
What Is an SEO Competitor Analysis?
An SEO competitive analysis offers a glimpse into how your rivals optimize for on-page and off-page ranking factors. It’s a comprehensive audit that looks at factors like:
- Keywords. What do competitors rank for that you don’t? What keywords are important in your industry? How do those keywords align with search intent?
- Content quality. How do they structure their content? What can you learn from it?
- Backlinks. What is the quantity and quality of backlinks to their domain?
- Site architecture: How do they organize their content? What does this reveal about their keyword strategy and content priorities?
- SERP Optimization. How do they benefit from featured snippets, rich results, and other search features? Can you replicate their strategy?
Benefits of SEO Competitor Research
SEO competitor research reveals lots of information, but what can you do with it? The benefits include:
- Identifying easy ranking opportunities in missed keywords or SEO gaps.
- Optimizing where you allocate time and resources based on impact.
- Spotting industry trends early by combining competitors’ data points with your own.
- Improving your content strategy and landing pages with insights from other top-ranking pages.
- Enhancing link-building efforts by uncovering competitors’ backlink sources.
- Benchmarking your performance against competitors’ metrics for parity-based goals.
While a thorough analysis takes time, this initial investment saves you time in the long run by providing a detailed SEO blueprint for the future. It also reduces the risk of losing traffic to rivals by helping you stay ahead of emerging strategies.
When’s the Right Time To Do a Competitor Analysis?
There’s no wrong time to research your competitors, and it’s worthwhile to keep an eye on your industry as often as possible. However, a full analysis takes considerable resources, so it’s usually best to align the task to specific times, including:
- Before a website launch.
- Before entering new markets.
- When establishing a new SEO campaign.
- During annual or quarterly strategy reflection.
- After a significant drop in search rankings or organic traffic.
- After noticing a competitor’s search presence rising rapidly.
It may also be time to check on your competitors if you’re struggling to achieve desired SEO results or feel progress is stalling.
Whenever you plan to perform an analysis, make sure to allocate enough resources and time to act on the results afterward.
How To Run an SEO Competitor Analysis on Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular because of its comprehensiveness. Here’s how to analyze your competitors with it.
1. Identify Competitors
Before starting, it’s important to note that SEO competitors aren’t necessarily your main business competitors. That’s because other businesses may target keywords related to your products or services to gain traffic, even if they don’t offer them.
To find your SEO competitors in Ahrefs:
- Enter your domain into the Site Explorer.
- View the organic competitors report.
The organic competitors report lists websites that rank in the top 10 for keywords you’re targeting. If a specific site targets many of the same terms, you can usually consider it a competitor.
Here’s an example report for REI:
2. Discover Where Their Traffic Comes From
Once you’ve identified your main competitors, you’ll want to uncover their traffic sources next. Do this in Ahrefs by entering the domain into Site Explorer and then browsing the various reports:
- Organic Keywords: Helps with competitive keyword analysis by revealing terms that drive significant traffic to competitors’ sites.
- Backlinks: Helps reveal referral traffic sources.
- Paid Keywords: Helps with competitive PPC analysis, as it reveals the paid keywords competitors are targeting.
- Top pages: Helps you uncover pages that attract the most traffic and which keywords are driving traffic.
3. Uncover Content Gaps
Content gaps are topics your competitors are targeting that you aren’t. If you can produce better content, you can close the gap and reach competitive parity.
To check for content gaps using Ahrefs:
- Navigate to the Competitive Analysis tool from the top menu.
- Enter your domain as the “target.”
- Enter one or more competitors in the remaining fields. The more the better, because it can tell you a true content gap from an industry perspective. One competitor may just give you an untapped opportunity that only relates to that competitor’s specific strategy.
- Click “Show keyword opportunities.”
If you only want to examine search results, check the “main positions only” filter. From there, look for patterns and themes while identifying any keywords with a relatively high volume and low competition score.
When you spot keywords you’d like to target, check the SERP overview to see what types of content already rank for the term.
4. Look at Their Featured Snippets
The Ahrefs Content Gap results page also shows your competitors’ featured snippets, some of which you might win with better optimization. To see them:
- Repeat the steps from the previous section.
- Click “+ More filters” and select “SERP Features” from the drop-down menu.
- Choose “Where target doesn’t rank” to find opportunities to earn new SERP features, then select the types of SERP features you’re interested in.
The results page will now show the keywords for which your competitors hold your selected SERP features.
5. Dive Into Their Backlinks
Your competitor’s backlinks can help you uncover opportunities to enhance your own link-building efforts. To perform comprehensive backlink analysis using Ahrefs:
- Enter a competitor’s domain in Site Explorer.
- Navigate to “backlinks report.”
From there, check the following additional reports:
- Referring domains to assess monthly velocity.
- Broken backlinks for potential outreach opportunities.
- Anchors for insight into keyword strategy.
You should also check new and lost backlinks over time to understand the overall link trajectory.
6. Identify Their Broken Pages
Broken link building can be a powerful tool for increasing your domain’s authority. It’s doubly powerful if you can steal links away from competitors. To find opportunities for this using Ahrefs:
- Enter your competitor’s domain in Site Explorer.
- Navigate to the “Best by links” report.
- Toggle the “HTTP code filter” to show only pages with 404 errors.
The report will give you a list of competitors’ pages that no longer exist, as well as the associated backlinks. You can then navigate directly to archive.org from the menu to see what the pages looked like.
7. Study Their PPC Ads
The most engaging and compelling pay-per-click (PPC) ads get the most clicks, which translates to lower cost per click (CPC) because of how Google rewards relevant ads. Fortunately, Ahrefs also helps you check what your competitors are doing here.
Enter your competitor’s domain into Site Explorer, then navigate to the “paid keywords” report.
Hover over the magnifying glass next to the listed keywords, and you’ll see the ad your competitor is showing for that keyword.
Take note of their headlines and content structure to see what you can do better.
8. Take a Peek at Their Site Architecture
Select “Site structure” from the left-hand navigation menu to dive deep into your competitors’ site architecture and gain insight into what pages they’ve published, how they’re ranking, and how they’re organized.
Expand subdirectories to uncover their high-traffic pages.
Click on the down arrow next to a subfolder or page to learn more about its traffic and rankings. You can even right-click on “organic keywords” to open up a list in a new window if you find a page you want to compete with or learn more about.
How To Run an SEO Competitor Analysis on Semrush
Semrush is another powerful SEO research platform that provides extensive data and reports. Here’s how to use it for competitor analysis:
1. Pick Competitors
Finding your competitors through Semrush is relatively straightforward:
- Start by entering your domain in the top search bar.
- Click on “Organic Research” near the top of the left menu.
- Scroll down to “Main Organic Competitors.”
The Main Organic Competitors report ranks competitors by the number of keywords you share. The Competitive Positioning Map — another section of the report — provides a visual representation of this.
2. Compare Authority Scores
Semrush provides a few ways to compare your authority score with that of your competitors. If you’re just checking one site, simply enter it into the search bar, and you’ll find the site’s authority score under the Domain Analytics widget on the overview page.
However, to check up to 199 sites at once, it’s easiest to use the Bulk Analysis tool found under the Link Building section of the left menu. You can also enter four competitors into the Backlink Gap tool under Competitive Research to compare how their authority scores have changed over time.
3. Look at Their Top Pages
The Organic Research report also includes a list of your competitors’ top pages. To find it:
- Enter a domain into Organic Research.
- Click on the pages tab to see the report.
By default, Semrush ranks this data by traffic. However, you can adjust several filters to narrow down exactly what you need.
4. Run a Site Audit
If you want to compare your website’s technical SEO with a competitor, a site audit gives you plenty of relevant information. You can then compare it with competitors’ metrics in other tools.
Start the process by navigating to Site Audit under the On-Page and Tech SEO section of the menu.
While you can run site audits on competitors, too, the domain must be among your projects. This means you’ll need a free project slot.
5. Check Out Their New Keywords
Semrush’s Organic Research tool features the Position Changes report, which lets you check any changes in a domain’s keyword rankings over a specific period. To use it to track new keywords:
- Open the report.
- Enter a date range using the filter above the results table.
- Change the “position changes” filter to “new.”
This will show all keywords within the top 100 positions gained over a given period. However, you can also filter this to other position ranges, such as the top 10 or 20.
6. Notice When Their Rankings Drop
Declines in your competitors’ rankings represent opportunities for your site to grow. Semrush includes this information in the same report from before — the Position Changes report.
To see what rankings decreased in a specific time frame, click the “Declined” filter tab at the top of the page. You can also set the “position changes” filter to “lost” if you want to see completely lost positions.
7. Review Backlinks
You can review a competitor’s link profile through the Backlink Analytics tool on Semrush, located under Link Building in the left menu. Near the top of the page, you’ll get an overview of the number of backlinks and referring domains, and you can compare this data directly against your own domain with the comparison fields above.
To drill down further, click on the “Backlinks” tab. Here, you can view details such as anchor text and authority score for individual links and narrow the results further using the filters.
8. Examine Their On-Page SEO and Site Structure
Setting up a competitor’s domain as a project on Semrush enables you to learn about their content through the On-Page SEO Checker and their site structure under the Audit. However, checking certain other reports and tools provides more information to complement this. Try the following:
- Check “Positions” within Organic Research to find top-performing pages targeting your keywords.
- Enter keywords into the SEO Content Template to analyze how the top 10 pages for the term are structured.
- Check whether competitors’ pages attract any search features using the Keyword Magic Tool and Semrush’s other keyword monitoring tools.
Of course, you’ll need to pair all of this with a manual review of the page to fully understand its content.
The Hard Part: Analysis
You can pull a lot of reports and data with the right tools, but it’s how you analyze and leverage that information that can set you apart from the competition.
An SEO competitor analysis can feel overwhelming — there are a lot of components and metrics to consider — but completing it will help you make informed decisions and choose the most effective strategies to grow your organic traffic.
Not sure where to begin? Reach out for a free SEO consultation, and our experts in competitive analysis will help you get the data your business needs to gain ground against its rivals.
