Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis, in an SEO context, is the systematic review of what's working for competing sites — their ranking keywords, backlink profile, content structure, and technical setup — to find opportunities and threats for your own strategy.
Updated
November 12, 2026
Category
SEO Glossary
The first and most commonly skipped step is picking the right competitors: the businesses you compete with commercially aren't always the sites you compete with in search results, and a useful SEO competitor analysis should include both — direct business rivals and whichever sites are actually occupying the SERP for your target keywords, even if they're a media publisher or a tangentially related tool. A thorough analysis typically covers ranking-keyword overlap and gaps, backlink profile strength and link sources, content depth and format on shared topics, technical factors (site speed, structure), and on-page patterns (title tag formats, content length, schema usage) that seem to correlate with their ranking success. The output should feed directly into prioritized action items, not just a static report — a competitor analysis that doesn't change what gets built next has limited value.
Example
A competitor analysis for an SEO tool company reveals its top SERP competitor for 'ai seo software' is actually a review-aggregator site, not another SaaS product — reshaping which pages are worth building to compete there.
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Free tool: Want to see the links behind any site? Use our Free Backlink Checker.
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