SEO Competitor Analysis

Pick the right competitors first

Your search competitors are often not your business competitors. The sites taking the clicks you want may be review sites, marketplaces, forums or a publication that happens to rank for your category. Analyzing the company you compete with commercially, when a magazine owns the first page, produces a plan that misses the problem.

The reliable way to find them is to look at who actually ranks for four or five terms that matter to you, and count which domains keep appearing. Reading a results page covers how to do that.

Reading the ranking keywords table

Four columns carry most of the information, and one of them is routinely misread.

• Position is where they rank today in the country and language you selected. Positions move, so treat anything outside the top ten as approximate.
• Search volume is the demand behind the term, as a monthly average.
• Ranking URL is the page doing the work. This is the column to read carefully.
• Estimated traffic is an estimate produced by the data provider from click-through rate and search volume. It is not measured from their analytics. No tool can see another site’s real visitor numbers, and any tool implying otherwise is overstating what it has.

Sorting by estimated traffic rather than by volume is what separates a useful table from a long one. It surfaces the keywords where they rank well and the demand is real, which is a much shorter list than everything they appear for.

Group by page, not by keyword

The instinct is to export the keyword list. The more useful move is to group the rows by ranking URL and see which pages carry the most terms.

A single page ranking for forty related keywords tells you something specific: that topic is covered by one comprehensive page rather than forty thin ones, and Google is rewarding that structure. That is a decision you can copy. A keyword list with no page structure attached is just a list.

Turn it into work

The output of this should be a short list of things to build, in roughly this order:

1. Terms they rank for and you do not. The clearest gaps, and the fastest to act on.
2. Terms you both rank for where they are well ahead. You already have a page, so improving it is cheaper than starting one.
3. Topics where one of their pages covers many keywords. Usually the highest effort and the highest return.

The first two of those are exactly what a gap analysis produces, and doing it as a comparison rather than by hand saves the tedious part.

What this analysis cannot tell you

Ranking data shows what is happening, not why. It cannot tell you whether a competitor ranks because of the page, the links pointing at it, the age of the domain, or something else entirely. Treat a competitor’s ranking as evidence that the topic is winnable by somebody, not as proof that copying their page will work.

Position data also comes from a ranking database that refreshes over days rather than continuously. For a live check on one specific keyword, look at the results page directly.