What is competitive SEO research?

Competitive SEO research simply means looking at how your organic SEO stacks up against your competitors. It’s an important task to do from time to time simply to get a sense of what your competitors are doing, how that’s working, and what you can learn from their successes or missteps.

A thorough look at your competitors’ SEO involves a handful of steps, including:

• SEO keyword competition analysis
• Competitor backlink analysis
• Keyword gap analysis
• Top content analysis
• Organic social media review
• SEO metrics comparison

Before these steps, however, you need to determine who exactly are your competitors. That can be an easy answer, but it’s often more complicated — and regardless, it’s something you should consider thoroughly instead of just assuming you know who to check.

Determining your competitors

While it’s reasonable to assume you’re already familiar with those businesses with whom you’re competing, we also find it’s common for small business owners and their marketers to not have a comprehensive view of who their competitors consist of.

If you’re a local business, who are the other local businesses offering the same services or products? This is of course obvious. Also, other than some fewer common cases, you typically shouldn’t pay as much attention to national competitors unless they have local locations.

Beyond just thinking about it yourself, you should also use Google and other search engines to get a more in-depth look at who’s relevant here. Do this by conducting a search of your own primary keywords — which competitors pop up in Google’s local “three pack”? Are there others who show up near the top of the search engine results?

This search engine method of finding competitors using your own keywords is also something to utilize if you’re a nationwide business. Here, of course, you’ll see a broader list of candidates.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is potential new competitors. Someone who’s just entered the market or just began putting effort into their online marketing will take a while to gain a foothold. Their domain won’t have a high level of authority — AKA Google won’t find them as “trustworthy” so to speak — for search engine algorithms to rank them highly. That said, it’s still wise to keep an eye on potential new competitors and monitor them.

What to look at during competitor SEO research

After determining just who are your competitors, you’ll do the actual SEO research on these brands. While conducting these, you’ll cover those previously mentioned steps.

Let’s check them out one by one.

For an SEO keyword competition analysis, you’ll pull a complete list of keywords from your competitors’ sites to see what types of keywords your competitors are ranking for. When doing this, we like filtering out branded terms — i.e., the company’s name, specific product names, etc. — to focus on general keywords that point to these products or services while still being relevant towards your business, too. After all, there’s little you can do (other than pray a competitor massively tanks their own online presence) to rank highly on their own name, but you can compete and rank better against their services, products, or related terms.

From your keyword analysis, you’ll then move to a top content analysis. The keyword analysis should tell you which terms are driving the most traffic to a competitor’s site. This will typically come in the form of a topic or query that appears repeatedly and in multiple variations.

What you want to assess now, is whether your competitor’s site content is “hitting” on all these variations. If not, that’s an easy space for you to swoop in and provide answers that fulfill these needs. Even if a competitor is hitting on these, could you write something that’s better? Are they using helpful images, infographics, or other media? Basically: How can you provide a more satisfactory answer to users’ questions?

After that is a keyword gap analysis. The “gap” in keyword gap is about noting which keywords both you and your competitors are using, as well as which ones only one of you is on. Identifying these helps you identify potential sources for new content on your site.

Next is competitor backlink analysis. Evaluating your competitors’ backlinks can help you unearth potential sources of backlinks for your own site. As we’ve discussed previously, a healthy backlink base helps build your domain authority.

What makes a backlink good? One that comes from a site that also has high domain authority, is high quality and not spam-y, and is generally relevant to you and your product or service.

This backlink analysis can be done through specialized SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs. During this analysis, you should look at a competitor’s number of backlinks, the domain authority of the linked sites, and the relevance of linked content.

Screenshot of SEMRush SEO Overview

The penultimate step is an organic social media review. How are your competitors communicating to the public? Which platforms appear to be the most successful via engagements and positive reception? Do your competitors have a presence on platforms you’re not on?

For better or worse, it’s the case that organic social media is one of the best ways to disseminate new content and build up your visibility; you can learn about what to do (and what not to do) by observing your competitors.

Lastly is an SEO metrics comparison. Other than previously mentioned backlinks, you should consider:

• Domain authority: Trustworthiness metrics based mostly on backlinking.
• Referring domains: These are unique domains associated with your backlinks.
• Organic traffic and keyword volume: This gives an impression of how much organic traffic a competitor has and the organic keywords their site ranks for.
• Page load times: You can gauge how Google grades your speed at pagespeed.web.dev, which is significant because a poorly-loading site will rank lower.

Screenshot of SEMRush Core Web Vitals Assessment

All these steps together will help you understand more about how your competitors are doing and what you can learn from them. By undertaking thorough competitor SEO analyses, you’ll end up with a better perspective on where you stand and how to improve.