Your competitors have already done a significant portion of your SEO research for you: the keywords worth targeting, the content formats that earn traffic, and the sites you can get backlinks from.

It’s all visible in their rankings, pages, and data. You just need to know how to read it.

In this guide, we explain how to do an SEO competitor analysis, step by step.

Learn how to identify your top-performing competitors, review their content, assess their backlink profiles, and benchmark their technical performance against your own.

By the end, you’ll have a clear picture of where you stand and what to focus on next.

Key takeaways:

• SEO competitors aren’t always your obvious business competitors. They’re the websites competing with you for the same organic search terms.
• Competitor analysis shows what’s working and not working in your market. You can use competitor rankings, pages, backlinks and technical performance to guide smarter SEO decisions.
• Search intent should guide every content decision. Before creating or improving a page, work out whether the user wants information, a comparison, a local provider, a specific brand or a clear action.
• Page-by-page reviews reveal why competitors outrank you. Review their titles, headings, URLs, content depth, internal links, E-E-A-T signals, visuals, schema, layout and calls to action.
• There are a few SEO competitor analysis tools to choose from. Ahrefs and Semrush are strong all-rounders, Screaming Frog is useful for technical crawling, Similarweb helps with market-level traffic insights, and Google Search Console gives the most reliable data for your own site.
• The goal is not to copy competitors. Instead, aim to understand why they’re performing well, then create clearer, more useful, better-structured content and a stronger overall search experience.

What is an SEO competitor analysis?

An SEO competitor analysis is the process of examining the websites that outperform yours in search results to understand why they rank, what they’re targeting, and where they’re falling short. You can then use that intel to sharpen your own strategy.

An SEO competitor analysis generally covers four core areas:

• Keyword gaps: Terms your competitors rank for that you don’t
• Content strategy: The topics, formats and depth that earn them traffic
• Technical performance: Site speed, structure and other signals that affect rankings
• Backlink profile: Which sites link to them and why

Done well, this deep dive removes assumptions and blind spots.

Instead of creating an SEO strategy from scratch, you’re studying what already works in your search landscape and building on it.

Why you need to analyse your SEO competitors

An SEO competitive analysis sheds light on the most important considerations for your strategy:

Which keywords should you be targeting?

What content does your audience actually want?

Where are the gaps your competitors haven’t filled yet?

Which websites are worth pursuing for backlinks?

How difficult will it be to outrank the sites above you?

The answers to these questions shape everything from your content calendar to your link-building outreach. This research helps you to:

• Identify what’s working for your rivals and replicate the strongest elements in your own strategy.
• Spot their weaknesses, thin content, poor site structure, neglected keyword clusters, and move into those gaps before they do.
• Get an honest benchmark for your own performance, so you can track progress against the market rather than just against your own historical data.

There’s a compounding benefit, too.

Competitor analysis surfaces industry trends early. If a rival is gaining traction on a topic you’ve ignored, that’s a signal worth acting on before the window closes.

For businesses with limited SEO budgets, this process is especially valuable.

It tells you where to focus first, which means less time on low-return tasks and more effort directed at opportunities with a realistic chance of moving the needle.

How to perform an SEO competitor analysis

Make the most of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. Here, we walk you through the step-by-step process of an SEO competitor analysis, with instructions on how to use the most common research tools, Ahrefs and Semrush, throughout.

1. Pinpoint your SEO competitors

Your SEO competitors aren’t necessarily your business competitors. They’re any websites competing for the same organic search terms as you.

For example, a furniture retailer’s product category page and an occupational physio’s blog on healthy workstation tips could both compete for the term ‘benefits of ergonomic office chairs’.

Despite selling in completely different spaces, they still go head-to-head for certain keywords and search traffic.

To identify your SEO competitors, enter your target keywords for each topic into Google and make note of which websites are ranking well. These are the brands to beat.

For faster, more in-depth insights, you can also use an SEO competitor analysis tool.

Ahrefs

To quickly identify your SEO competitors in Ahrefs:

1. Open Site Explorer
2. Enter your website domain
3. Select the Organic competitors report

This report highlights websites that rank in the top 10 search results for keywords your website also ranks for. These sites are often your closest competitors in organic search.

For newer websites, this report might not return enough useful data. In that case, try this approach:

1. Open Keywords Explorer
2. Enter keywords your target customers would likely use when searching for your products or services
3. Go to Traffic share by domain

This shows which websites receive the most organic traffic from those keywords, helping you spot key competitors in your search market.

Semrush

To find SEO competitors in Semrush:

1. Enter your domain into the Organic Rankings tool
2. Open the Competitors tab

Semrush will compare your domain against others in its database and identify websites with the highest number of shared keyword rankings.

These domains are usually competing with you for visibility across similar search terms.

2. See which competitor pages are driving the most traffic

Once you know who your SEO competitors are, the next step is to work out how they’re earning their organic traffic and if there are any useful trends across the industry.

A good place to start is their website structure.

This gives you a clearer picture of what’s working for them in search. It helps you see whether their traffic is coming from blog articles, service pages, product categories, location pages, guides, resources or another part of the site.

Here’s how to do it:

Ahrefs

To review a competitor’s website structure in Ahrefs:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Open the Site structure report

This report shows which sections of their website are estimated to attract the most organic traffic. For example, you might see that their /blog/ folder drives most of their visits, or that their /product/ folder is responsible for a large share of their rankings.

Semrush

You can also use Semrush to find out which parts of a competitor’s website are bringing in organic traffic.

To review their top-performing pages:

1. Go to Organic Research
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Choose the relevant country database
4. Open the Pages tab
5. Sort the results by Traffic

This will show you which individual pages attract the most organic visitors.

To look at their broader website structure:

1. Open the Traffic & Market toolkit
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Go to the Subfolders & Subdomains dashboard
4. Select the Subfolders tab

Here, you’ll be able to review which folders are driving the most traffic.

3. Spot keyword gaps

A keyword gap analysis helps you find the search terms your competitors rank for, but your website either doesn’t rank for at all or doesn’t rank for as strongly.

This is helpful because your competitors might rank for high-value keywords you haven’t targeted yet, or they might outrank you for terms where your content is too thin, outdated or poorly structured.

By finding these shortfalls in your keyword rankings, you can make smarter decisions about what to improve, rewrite or create next.

Importantly, the goal isn’t to chase every keyword. Look for terms that match your services, products, audience and user intent to boost search visibility.

Once you find useful gaps, you can close them by updating existing pages, adding missing sections, improving on-page SEO or writing new content that covers the topic properly.

Ahrefs

To run a keyword gap report in Ahrefs:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
2. Enter your website in the Target section
3. Add your competitors’ websites in the Competitors section
4. Click Compare
5. Open the Content Gap report
6. Filter results to show keywords where competitors rank in the top 10, but your website doesn’t rank in the top 100

Semrush

To find keyword gaps in Semrush:

1. Open the Keyword Gap tool
2. Enter your domain and up to four competitor domains
3. Set the comparison to Organic keywords
4. Apply the Missing filter to find keywords your competitors rank for, but your website doesn’t
5. Use the Untapped filter to find keywords where at least one competitor ranks, but your site has no ranking
6. Use the Weak filter to find keywords where your website ranks lower than your competitors

These filters help you prioritise different types of opportunities. Missing and Untapped keywords can guide new content ideas, while Weak keywords point to existing pages that need improvement.

4. Analyse the search intent tied to your competitor’s content

Now, you can look at the intent behind your target keywords from the gap analysis. Search intent focuses on why a user is entering a keyword into Google in the first place.

Generally, terms fall under one or several of the following categories:

• Informational: The user wants an answer. They might be learning a topic, solving a problem or looking for a clear explanation with blogs, guides, FAQs and how-to content.
• Navigational: The user already knows where they want to go. They’re searching for a specific brand, website, product, tool or login page.
• Commercial: The user is comparing options. They’re looking at brands, products, services, reviews, pricing or features before deciding who to choose. Help them with comparison pages, service pages, case studies and buyer guides.
• Transactional: The user is ready to act. They want to buy, book, call, enquire, download or request a quote. Encourage action through landing pages, product pages and service pages.
• Local: The user wants a nearby solution. They’re searching for a business, service or product in a specific suburb, city or region. Stand out with location pages, local SEO content and Google Business Profile optimisation.

You should be able to identify the search intent of each term in the reports from Step 3. You can also check out the competitor pages ranking highest for each term, and the sorts of content they feature.

Whether your audience is looking to buy a product, learn more about a certain topic or find a specific brand, aligning your content with their search intent (and how top-performing competitors are fulfilling it) is key.

For instance, if a competitor is getting strong traffic from educational content, you might need to build stronger blog or guide content based on the depth and type of information that’s ranking well.

If service pages are performing well, you may need to review how your own service pages are structured, written and optimised.

5. Review your competitors’ on-page content

If a competitor outranks you, their page may be doing a better job of answering the query, structuring the content or giving users a smoother experience.

This is where page-by-page analysis is paramount. Instead of looking at the whole website, compare the exact competitor page ranking above you against the page you want to improve. Look at what they cover, how they lay it out and what makes their page more useful than yours.

This will help you understand why Google is viewing their page as a stronger result, so you can improve your own page with clearer, more useful and more complete information.

Here are the on-page factors to examine:

• URL structure: URLs should be short, readable and descriptive. They should give users and search engines a clear idea of the page topic.
• Title tags: Check how competitors write their page titles. Do they place the main keyword near the start? Do they use clearer wording? Do they include useful modifiers such as “best”, “guide”, “cost”, “near me” or “Australia”? A strong title tag helps Google and users understand what the page is about.
• Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions don’t directly improve rankings, but they can influence click-through rates from search results. Review how competitors summarise their page, highlight benefits and encourage users to click. Then make yours clearer and more compelling.
• Headings: Look at how competitors use H1s, H2s and H3s to structure the page. Strong headings make content easier to scan and help Google understand the main topics covered. They can also support featured snippet opportunities when written as questions or direct statements.
• Page layout and user experience: Look at how easy the page is to use. Is the content easy to scan? Are calls to action prominent? Is the navigation simple? Does the page work well on mobile? A page that’s easier to use often performs better because visitors can find what they need faster.
• Content depth: Compare how much useful information each page provides. Do competitors answer more of the user’s likely questions? Do they explain each concept in more detail? Do they include examples, pricing guidance, comparisons, FAQs or next steps that your page is missing?
• Keyword use: Review how naturally competitors use the main keyword and related terms. Look for secondary keywords, semantically-related terms, common questions and subtopics you haven’t covered.
• E-E-A-T signals: Look for signs of experience, expertise, authority and trust. This can include author details, real examples, case studies, reviews, qualifications, sources, business information, contact details and evidence that the content comes from someone who really understands the topic.
• Images and videos: Review whether competitors use helpful visuals, product images, diagrams, videos or screenshots. Also, check whether their images have descriptive file names and alt text. Visual content should support the page, not just fill space.
• Internal links: Check how competitors guide users to related pages. The right internal links help users keep exploring and help search engines understand which pages matter most. Link to relevant services, products, guides, case studies or contact pages where it makes sense.
• Schema markup: Structured data can help search engines understand page content and may support rich results. Depending on the page, competitors may use FAQ, Product, Review, Local Business, Article or HowTo schema.
• Unique selling points: Check how competitors position themselves. Do they offer clearer benefits, stronger guarantees, faster delivery, better service, more proof or a more specific offer? Your page should make it obvious why someone should choose you.
• Tone of voice: Compare how competitors speak to the audience. Are they more approachable, straightforward, professional or practical? Remember, the best tone isn’t always the most polished. It’s the one that makes the user feel understood and helps them make a decision.

Use these findings to inform your content strategy. Every update should help the user get the right answer sooner, trust your business more and take the next step with less friction.

6. Find your competitors’ featured snippets

Featured snippets are the short answers Google sometimes displays at the top of the search results. They’re usually pulled from a page that already ranks well for the search term and are designed to give users a fast, direct answer.

If a competitor owns a featured snippet for a keyword you already rank for, that’s a strong optimisation opportunity.

You don’t always need a brand-new page, either. In many cases, you can improve the existing page by making the answer clearer, tightening the structure and formatting the content in a way Google can easily understand.

You can check featured snippets manually by searching your target keywords in Google, but SEO tools make the process much faster.

Ahrefs

To find featured snippet opportunities in Ahrefs:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
2. Enter your competitor’s domain in the Target section
3. Enter your domain in the Competitors section
4. Click Compare
5. Open the Content Gap report
6. Set the SERP features filter to Where target ranks
7. Select Featured snippet
8. Set the target position filter from No to Any

Semrush

To find featured snippet opportunities in Semrush:

1. Go to Organic Research
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Open the Positions report
4. Look for SERP feature icons in the Position column
5. Filter the report by Featured snippet
6. Review the keywords where your competitor holds the snippet
7. Compare those terms against your own rankings to find pages you could improve

Whichever tool you use, focus on terms where your website already ranks on page one, especially positions 2 to 10. These are the most realistic opportunities because Google already sees your page as relevant.

Your job is to make your answer more useful, concise and easier to extract. To do this:

• Answer the question early: Place a clear, direct answer near the top of the relevant section.
• Use the right format: If the query asks “what is”, use a concise definition. If it asks “how to”, use numbered steps. If it compares options, use a table or bullet points.
• Match the search intent: Don’t force a sales pitch into an informational query. Give the user the answer they came for first.
• Use clear headings: Structure the page with headings that closely match the questions people search for.
• Keep answers tight: Featured snippet answers often favour short, plain-English explanations over long, padded paragraphs.
• Add schema where relevant: Structured data can help Google understand your page, especially for FAQs, how-to content, products, reviews and local business information.
• Optimise supporting images: Use relevant, high-quality images with descriptive file names and alt text where helpful.

7. Look at your competitors’ Core Web Vitals (and other technical factors)

Core Web Vitals show how fast, stable and responsive a page feels for users. They form part of Google’s page experience signals and can influence SEO performance, especially when competing pages offer similar content quality and relevance.

The three Core Web Vitals are:

• Largest Contentful Paint: Measures how quickly the main content loads.
• Interaction to Next Paint: Measures how responsive a page feels when a user interacts with it.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: Measures how visually stable the page is as it loads.

Checking your competitors’ Core Web Vitals helps you understand whether their site delivers a smoother experience than yours and what technical elements you should work on.

This technical SEO won’t make weak content rank on its own, but it can be valuable when two competing pages are similar in quality. If your content is just as useful, but your page loads faster and works better on mobile, you may have a stronger chance of competing in search.

Ultimately, a quicker, cleaner and easier-to-use site gives both users and search engines fewer reasons to choose a competitor.

PageSpeed Insights

You can review individual competitor pages using Google PageSpeed Insights.

To do this:

1. Open PageSpeed Insights
2. Enter a competitor’s URL
3. Review the mobile and desktop results
4. Check their Core Web Vitals assessment
5. Compare the results against the same type of page on your website

This works well for checking important pages, like service pages, product pages, location pages or high-traffic blog posts.

The downside is that PageSpeed Insights only analyses one URL at a time, so it’s pretty slow if you want to review a full competitor site.

Ahrefs

To review a competitor’s technical performance in Ahrefs:

1. Go to Site Audit
2. Set up a crawl for your competitor’s domain
3. Connect the PageSpeed Insights API
4. Run the crawl
5. Review their Core Web Vitals alongside other technical SEO issues

This gives you a wider view of their technical health, not just the performance of one page. You can review issues like slow-loading pages, broken links, missing metadata, redirect problems, indexability issues and other technical barriers that might affect organic performance.

Semrush

You can also use Semrush Site Audit to review technical SEO issues across your own website or a competitor’s site.

To use it:

1. Open Site Audit
2. Create a project for the domain you want to analyse
3. Run a full site crawl
4. Review the Site Health score
5. Check the Errors, Warnings and Notices
6. Open each issue to see what it means and how it can be fixed

Like Ahrefs, Semrush can help you spot technical issues such as crawl errors, HTTPS problems, slow pages, duplicate content, broken internal links, missing tags and mobile usability concerns.

Search Console

Google Search Console only shows data for websites you own or manage, so you can’t use it to inspect a competitor’s private reports. That said, it’s a handy free tool for monitoring your own site’s technical performance.

Useful reports include:

• Core Web Vitals: Shows how your URLs perform against Google’s page experience metrics.
• Page indexing: Shows which pages Google has indexed and which pages have problems preventing indexation.
• HTTPS: Confirms whether your pages are served securely.
• Mobile usability and experience signals: Helps you spot issues that may affect users on mobile devices.

8. Check out competitors’ backlink profiles

A competitor backlink analysis shows which websites link to your competitors but not to you. This can help you find opportunities like industry directories, supplier pages, partner websites, guest content, resource pages, media mentions and broken links you may be able to replace with better content.

The aim is to find the links that make sense for your business, your audience and your SEO strategy.

Importantly, the quality of the link matters far more than the number of links. A backlink from a trusted, relevant website can help build authority and support rankings. A backlink from a low-quality, spammy or unrelated site can do the opposite.

That’s why competitor backlink analysis should focus on finding useful, legitimate link opportunities, not chasing links from anywhere that will take them.

Regardless of the tool used, focus on these factors when reviewing backlink opportunities:

• Authority: Links from trusted websites usually carry more SEO value than links from weak or low-quality sites.
• Relevance: A link from a website in your industry, location or niche is usually more useful than a random link from an unrelated site.
• Context: The best links appear naturally within useful content, not in spammy footers, comment sections or link farms.
• Placement: A link on a relevant page that people may actually visit is more valuable than a hidden or low-quality listing.
• Link type: Nofollow links won’t pass the same SEO value as standard links, but they can still bring referral traffic and brand exposure.
• Brand fit: Only pursue links that make sense for your business. A backlink should support trust, not just rankings.

Now, let’s look at how to perform a banklink analysis on Ahrefs and Semrush.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ Link Intersect report helps you find websites that link to your competitors but do not link to your site. Here’s how:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
2. Enter your domain
3. Open the Link Intersect report
4. Add your competitors’ domains in the top section
5. Add your domain in the bottom section
6. Click Show link opportunities

This report shows websites that link to your competitors but not to you.

You can also use Ahrefs to find broken pages on competitor websites that still have backlinks pointing to them:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
2. Enter your competitor’s domain
3. Open the Best by links report
4. Set the HTTP code filter to 404 Not Found
5. Review the broken pages that still have backlinks

Look for broken pages that are closely related to your business or content. If you find a good opportunity, check the old version of the page using Wayback Machine. This tool will show you exactly what the page used to cover.

From there, create a better version on your own site. Then reach out to the websites linking to the broken page and suggest your working resource as a helpful replacement.

This works best when your content genuinely improves the user experience and gives the publisher a clean, relevant link to use.

Semrush

Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool helps you compare your backlink profile against competing websites.

Follow these steps:

1. Open the Backlink Gap tool
2. Enter your domain
3. Add your competitors’ domains
4. Review the Best prospects
5. Look for websites that link to your competitors but not to you

The Best prospects are the most useful place to start because they show domains linking to multiple competitors, but not your site. If a website links to several businesses in your space, there’s probably a reason for them to mention or link to you as well.

Our top picks for SEO competitor analysis tools

No single tool covers every step of an SEO competitor analysis perfectly. Most experienced SEO specialists run two or three in combination, each focusing on different parts of the picture. Here are the ones worth knowing about.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has built its reputation on the depth of its data, and today it functions as a full competitor analysis platform. It covers keyword research, content gap analysis, rank tracking, and site auditing alongside one of the most comprehensive link databases in the industry.

For Australian businesses, its keyword explorer returns reliable local search volume and difficulty data, making it a strong choice whether you’re targeting a city-specific audience or the national market.

 Semrush

Semrush takes a similarly broad approach, with particularly strong coverage of paid search intelligence alongside its organic features.

If your competitors are running Google Ads alongside their SEO, Semrush is the tool that shows you both strategies in one place.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog sits in a different category. It’s a technical crawler rather than a research platform, used to audit site structure, identify crawl issues, and analyse on-page elements like meta tags and headings.

Where Semrush and Ahrefs show you what competitors are doing, Screaming Frog shows you how their sites are built.

Similarweb

Similarweb is useful for a higher-level view: overall traffic estimates, traffic sources, and audience behaviour.

Its data is broader and less granular than Ahrefs or Semrush, but it’s good for benchmarking market position and understanding how competitors attract visitors beyond organic search.

SpyFu

SpyFu earns its place for businesses running paid search alongside SEO. It specialises in uncovering competitor keyword histories across both organic and PPC, including terms they’ve tested and dropped, which can surface insights the bigger platforms miss.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo takes a content-first approach. It excels at showing which competitor content earns the most shares, backlinks, and engagement, making it useful for identifying topics worth covering and formats worth adopting.

 Google Search Console

Google Search Console isn’t a competitor analysis tool, but it belongs on this list because it’s such an accurate source of data for your own site when comparing it against competitors.

Free, direct from Google, and essential context for interpreting everything the paid tools tell you about the competition.

Deep dive into your competitors with Redback

An SEO competitor analysis gives you the structure to extract and interpret invaluable insights. It tells you which gaps are worth moving into, which tactics are gaining traction in your market, and where your current strategy is leaving traffic on the table.

But with so much ground to cover, it takes a lot of time and skill. If you’re not sure where to begin, we’re here to help with every aspect.

Our SEO specialists equip clients of all sizes with actionable insights into competitors, built around practical business goals. Let’s chat.