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How to do SEO competitor analysis
How to do SEO competitor analysis: find your organic competitors, size them up, run a keyword gap and see the backlinks behind their rankings.
This tutorial goes from "who are we up against?" to a list of keywords and link sources to go after. Each step is a separate lookup with its own price, so you can stop wherever you have what you need.
1. Find your SEO competitors
Organic competitors
Open Competitors, enter your domain (in a project it is filled in) and press Enter. On Organic competitors you get the domains that rank for the same keywords as you, with how many keywords you share and their estimated traffic. The top 50 costs about $0.05.
Or: who ranks for the keywords you care about
SERP competitors takes a list of up to 200 keywords instead of a domain. Click Use my saved keywords to load your saved list, highest volume first. It shows which domains appear most for exactly those searches, which is often a different list from the one you would write from memory.
2. Compare competitor traffic and authority
Open Domain overview, enter a competitor and press Enter. One search loads everything below. You get:
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| Organic traffic | Estimated monthly visits from Google, and what that traffic would cost in ads. |
| Organic keywords | Keywords the domain ranks for in the top 100. |
| Backlinks, referring domains | Totals from the backlink index. |
| Domain Rating, URL Rating | Link authority scores, 0 to 100. |
| Ranking distribution | How many keywords sit in each position range, and how many are new, improved, declined or lost. |
Below it, Top keywords and Top pages list the 100 keywords and pages that bring in the most traffic, and Competitors lists who they compete with. Filter the keywords by text or position for free. Click any page to open it in the Page analyser, with the keywords that page ranks for and its strongest backlinks.
3. Run a keyword gap analysis
Pick a competitor
Click a competitor's name in either competitor list, or open the Keyword gap tab and type it in.
Gap or shared
Both lists load together: Only they rank lists keywords they rank for and you do not, new ground to cover; Both rank lists keywords you share. Sort by volume or difficulty to find realistic targets.
Save the opportunities
Select rows and click Save N selected to add them to your saved keywords, with their volume, difficulty and intent. From there you can track them.
4. Analyse competitor backlinks
Open Backlinks, enter the competitor (a domain, a subdomain, or one exact page as a full URL) and press Enter. One search loads the totals, a monthly chart of links gained and lost, and every list below; the tabs only switch between them:
- Backlinks: the 100 strongest live links, one from each linking domain. Tick dofollow only to hide nofollow links.
- Referring domains and Anchors: who links, and with which words.
- Top pages: which of their pages attract links. These are the formats worth copying.
- Link intersect: enter your competitors to find the sites linking to them but not to you, those linking to the most competitors first. Those are the most likely to link to you too.
