How to Do a Competitor SEO Analysis: Find and Beat the Competition

# How to Do a Competitor SEO Analysis: Find and Beat the Competition

The fastest path to SEO success is studying who's already succeeding. Competitor analysis reveals the exact keywords, content, and backlinks driving their rankings — so you can build a smarter strategy.

Identifying Your True SEO Competitors

Your SEO competitors are not necessarily your business competitors. They're the websites currently occupying the search positions you want.

Search your top 10 target keywords. Record who appears in positions 1-10 consistently. These are your SEO competitors — whether they're direct business competitors or not.

For most niches, your top 3-5 consistent competitors are the ones to study in depth.

Step 1: Analyze Their Keyword Portfolio

Tool: Ahrefs Site Explorer or Semrush Domain Overview

Enter a competitor's domain. Look at:

Organic keywords: Total count and their top 20 ranked keywords

Traffic value: What paid traffic equivalent would cost for their organic keywords (proxy for content quality)

Top pages: Which pages drive the most traffic (content format ideas)

Keyword gaps: Keywords your competitor ranks for that you don't

The keyword gap analysis is gold. It reveals low-hanging fruit: terms already proven to generate traffic, but not yet in your content library.

Step 2: Reverse-Engineer Their Content Strategy

Visit their top 10 traffic pages. For each, note:

Content format (article, guide, listicle, comparison, tool)

Word count (how comprehensive are they?)

Publishing frequency (how often do they publish?)

Content freshness (when was it last updated?)

Internal linking strategy (what do they link to from popular posts?)

This reveals their content playbook. Now build yours to be more comprehensive, more current, and better structured.

Step 3: Audit Their Backlink Profile

Tool: Ahrefs Backlink Checker or Semrush Backlink Analytics

Look at their top 20 referring domains. For each:

Is this a directory, guest post, editorial mention, or press coverage?

What's the domain authority?

Can you get a similar link from this source?

This reveals their link building strategy and gives you a target list for your own outreach.

Step 4: Find Their Content Gaps

Your opportunity is what they're NOT covering well. Look for:

Keywords they rank for in positions 4-20 (their weak rankings — you can beat them)

Topics they cover shallowly (write a more comprehensive version)

Recent updates in your industry they haven't covered

Questions in your niche's Reddit/Quora that no competitor answers well

Step 5: Analyze Their Technical SEO

Google PageSpeed Insights: Run their top pages. If they score below 70, you have an opportunity to rank for the same keywords with a faster page.

Screaming Frog (free for 500 URLs): Crawl their site. Look for thin content pages, missing meta descriptions, and broken internal links — weaknesses you can exploit.

Page structure: How do they format their content? What schema markup do they use? Check their source code (right-click > View Page Source) for JSON-LD schema.

Building a Competitive Content Calendar

After your analysis, you should have:

A list of 50-100 keywords your competitors rank for that you don't

A list of 10-20 topics they cover shallowly that you can improve

A list of 15-30 backlink opportunities they have that you don't

Priority 1: Keywords where competitors rank 4-15 (beatable positions)

Priority 2: Keywords where they rank with thin, outdated content

Priority 3: Their top traffic pages — create a better version

How Often to Repeat the Analysis

Run a full competitor audit quarterly. Monitor their new content monthly using:

Feedly (subscribe to their RSS feed)

Ahrefs Alerts (get notified when they publish new content)

Google Alerts for their brand name

→ Flowify provides competitor SEO analysis as part of our audit service — €497