Competitor Analysis

A competitor analysis answers three questions: who is competing for your customers' attention, what are they doing to get seen, and what are they getting out of it. The answers are the basis for your own prioritization. Without them you are guessing whether a topic is hard or easy, and guesses are expensive in SEO.

What the analysis gives you

A completed analysis gives you insight into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, their marketing and their position in the market you share. It also gives you something that is easy to overlook: an honest picture of where you yourself stand next to them.

We work with competitors in search, because that is where most buying processes begin. The questions are specific. Which relevant keywords are they visible on? What did they do to get there? Which pages carry their traffic? And since 2025 there is one more: who gets cited when ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews answer a question in your field? Same contest, new surface.

Step 1: Identify the competitors

Start in the search results. Search the most important keywords for your business and note who keeps reappearing. If you run car rental, you search "car rental", "car rental london", "hire a car", "car leasing" and phrases along those lines.

The companies in the ads and the ones on page one organically are already taking part of the audience you want. Note both groups, because they tell you different things: the advertisers show what somebody is willing to pay for, the organic results show what Google judges to be the best answer.

Two additions are needed.

The ones not yet on page one. A company growing fast does not always show up in the search results. Ask your industry network who is doing well right now, and search your sector and your keywords on LinkedIn. That is where you find the ones on their way up.

The ones the AI models cite. Put your customers' questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and watch which names and domains keep returning. Sometimes they are your usual competitors. Often it is a trade publication, a comparison site or a forum, and then you know where the work sits.

You should land on a list of ten to twenty names. Mark the five closest to you in positioning, because those are the ones you follow continuously.

Step 2: Map what they do

Now it gets specific. Follow the competitors where they communicate: website, newsletter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube. How they talk and what they put forward tells you which strategic direction they are moving in.

On the SEO side, four things are worth the time.

• Which pages carry their traffic. Category pages, guides, comparisons or product pages? The pattern tells you what kind of content wins in your niche.
• Their link profile. Which referring domains do they have, what content pulls the links, and what did they do to earn them? The method is covered in link analysis.
• Their structure. How is the site built, and do the ones performing organically differ from your own structure? Depth, category logic and internal linking are often the whole explanation.
• Their technical health. Load times, indexing and the mobile experience. A slow competitor is an opportunity.

A paid tool like Ahrefs or Semrush makes the work faster, but you get a long way with Search Console, a manual pass through the results, and the free options in the SEO toolbox.

Step 3: Find the strengths, the weaknesses and the gaps

This step is qualitative, and it is where most analyses turn useful. Work through:

• Audience. Who are they reaching, and how? Are they reaching someone you also want and currently do not?
• Reviews. Trustpilot, Google reviews and the review sites in your sector give you a view of what customers actually think. Negative reviews point at their problems, positive ones point at what your shared audience values.
• Trajectory. How have they moved over the past two years, and what lies behind the direction?
• Market gaps. Are there needs their offer does not cover? Is there something you already do and never talk about?
• Industry shifts. What have they adapted to that you have not, and the other way around?

Add a plain comparison of product and price: price level against your own, breadth against depth in the range, and how they distribute. It does not have to become a full SWOT to be useful, but the structure helps when several people have to read the same document.

Step 4: Turn it into a backlog

The point of the analysis is that it should change what you do on Monday. Take the findings and make three lists.

1. Quick wins. Pages where you already sit close to the competitor and an on-page effort is enough.
2. Topics you are missing. Subjects the competitors own and you have no content for. They belong in your SEO strategy, in a clear order.
3. Structural questions. Site structure, technical health and the link profile. Slower, and also the hardest for a competitor to copy back.

Then set a date. A competitor analysis is perishable, and once a quarter is enough for the five closest names. To follow the movements continuously instead of in samples, that is what visibility tracking is for.

Getting the first analysis done

We run the mapping as part of ongoing work in our competitor analysis delivery. And a first pass over your competitors on Google and in the AI answers is included in every free SEO analysis we build.