Why They Outrank You: A Step-by-Step SEO Competitor Analysis

Last updated: 11 August 2026

Changelog: 3 July 2026: first published. 7 July 2026: tool capabilities and pricing re-checked against seranking.com and semrush.com. 11 August 2026: rewritten by our editorial team.

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Dave runs a small guttering and roofing firm just outside Croydon. His life was otherwise peaceful, as he liked to call it: Fifteen years in the trade, a decent little website, and a phone that used to ring a lot more than it does now.

Last month, during his lunch break at the nearby park, he sat down and Googled “guttering repairs croydon”. To his dismay, his site wasn’t on page one.

Two companies he’d never even heard of were sitting right at the top, along with some directory he’s pretty sure just resells his competitors’ contact details.

So, he clicked through to one of them. Then the other. And slowly it started making sense to him: they had a proper price guide, town-by-town pages for every village nearby, and a wall of Google reviews. Dave had none of that. Not because he does worse work. Just because he never knew that was the game.

That’s the whole point of an SEO competitor analysis: it’s not about proving you’re better than the people beating you. It’s about finding out exactly what they’re doing that Google rewards, so you can do it too, on purpose instead of by accident.

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Importance of Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis in SEO is the process of comparing a website against the sites that outrank it in search results, across keywords, content, backlinks, SERP features and technical performance, to find gaps that need to be closed.

It answers one question: what are those sites doing that the site in question is not?

The terms overlap in practice. SEO competitor research usually describes the data-gathering half (who ranks, for what, with which links), while the analysis half turns that data into decisions. The seven steps below cover both. One distinction matters before you open a single tool: search competitors are not the same as business competitors, and mixing them up points every later step at the wrong targets.

Step 1: Identifying true search competitors

True search competitors are the domains that repeatedly appear on page one for the keywords a business wants, and they are often not its business competitors. For example, a Cambridge plumber competes with other local plumbers for jobs, but in Google that plumber may be up against national directories, franchise brands and how-to publishers.

The free method is manual and reliable. Take the 10 to 20 most important keywords, search each one in a private browsing window, and log every domain in the top ten. Any domain that appears for three or more keywords is a search competitor. Google Search Console (free) shows which keywords already bring in impressions: a sensible place to start.

The faster method is a competitive research platform. SE Ranking’s Competitive Research module allows analysis of any domain, keyword or URL and shows how it performs in organic search, paid search and AI search, with keyword databases covering over 100 countries, as of July 2026. Its help centre documents an organic competitors view for any analysed domain, so the tool builds the shortlist that would otherwise need compiling by hand.

Either way, the final list should ideally be kept to three to five domains.

Step 2: Running a keyword gap analysis

A keyword gap analysis is a comparison that lists the keywords competitors rank for that a business does not. It is the fastest way to find proven demand a site is currently invisible for, because someone in the market already ranks for every keyword on the list.

In SE Ranking this is the Competitor Comparison tab inside Competitive Research: a domain plus two competitors are entered, and the tool splits the combined keyword set into common keywords (everyone ranks), missing keywords (they rank, the site does not) and unique keywords (only the site ranks), as of July 2026 per SE Ranking’s help centre. The missing list is the gap.

Raw gap lists always need qualifying by hand. Strip out competitor brand terms, products the business does not sell and locations it does not serve, then sort what remains by volume against realistic ability to compete. A 60-keyword qualified list beats a 2,000-row export nobody reads. For those running this workflow in Semrush instead, our guide to Semrush keyword research walks through the equivalent steps.

There is no genuinely good free tool for this step. Google Keyword Planner (free with a Google Ads account) shows ideas and volume ranges but cannot show what a competitor ranks for. This is where a paid platform earns its fee.

SE Ranking runs every step in this guide from one login, and the trial is 14 days with no credit card required, as of July 2026. We compare it against the alternatives in our SE Ranking review.

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Step 3: Finding content gaps

A content gap is a topic, page type or format competitors cover that a business does not, or cover better than it does. Keyword gaps point at individual queries. Content gaps point at whole missing assets: the cost guide, the location page, the comparison article the site has never had.

Start from the keyword gap list and cluster it. Fifty missing keywords often collapse into six missing pages. Then review each competitor’s site directly: SE Ranking’s Competitive Research surfaces a domain’s top content, as of July 2026, and the free version is browsing a competitor’s sitemap.xml and running site: searches in Google.

The user could log the findings in three columns: topics competitors cover that the business does not, formats they use that the business does not (calculators, FAQs, town-by-town pages), and pages where both compete but theirs is plainly stronger.

That third column is usually the cheapest win, because improving an existing page is faster than building a new one.

Step 4: Running a backlink gap analysis

A backlink gap analysis finds the websites that link to competitors but not to the business in question. Those referring domains are the warmest link prospects a site will ever have: they already link out to sites exactly like it, in the same market, on the same topics.

SE Ranking’s Backlink Gap Analyzer compares a domain against up to five competitors at once, drawing on an index the vendor states, holds 2.7 trillion backlinks across 420 million domains, with 6 billion pages crawled daily, as of July 2026.

For each link it’s possible to see the anchor text, the link type, dofollow or nofollow status, and the vendor’s Domain Trust and Page Trust scores. Treat those scores as each vendor’s own opinion, not a Google metric, and never compare scores across different tools.

The output can qualify the same way as keywords. For a local business, prioritise the directories, trade associations, suppliers and local press that link to rivals, and ignore obvious spam. The honest note on free options: no free tool shows another site’s backlinks at meaningful scale. Google Search Console lists a site’s own links only.

Step 5: Owning the desired SERP features

SERP feature ownership means checking which enhanced results (local packs, featured snippets, People Also Ask, image packs, AI Overviews) appear for target keywords, and which competitor occupies each one. Position one below a local pack and an AI Overview is not the top of the page, so this step often changes priorities.

The free method works well here: search the top 20 keywords manually and record, per keyword, which features appear and who holds them. A featured snippet held by a weak page is a realistic target; a local pack a business is absent from points at Google Business Profile work.

AI answers now belong in this step. SE Ranking’s AI toolkit includes dedicated trackers for AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, per its own product pages as of July 2026, making it possible to check whether rivals are cited in AI answers for key money terms.

We cover this in our guide to GEO rank tracking.

Step 6: Comparing technical performance

A technical comparison measures a site against competitors on speed, Core Web Vitals, mobile experience and crawlability. None of these is a ranking shortcut on its own, but a slow, error-ridden site loses close contests, and technical debt caps everything the other six steps might earn.

PageSpeed Insights is free, runs on any public URL including competitors’, and reports both lab scores and real-user Core Web Vitals data where enough field data exists. Run it on the key money page and the equivalent page on each competitor, mobile first, and record the results side by side.

For a business’s own site, a user should go deeper than a spot check. SE Ranking’s site audit runs over 115 checks across 13 categories, with a crawl budget of 250,000 pages a month on the entry Core plan, as of July 2026.

Our walkthrough of a technical SEO audit in an hour shows which findings matter most. Our own answer is architectural: Luckywebs builds client sites on Astro as static HTML, which removes most speed problems before they exist.

Step 7: Turning findings into a prioritised action plan

A prioritised action plan converts the six research steps into a single sheet of actions, each scored for impact and effort, with an owner and a date. Analysis that never becomes a plan is a hobby. The plan is the deliverable.

Our general prioritisation order at Luckywebs runs: technical fixes first (quick, and they compound everything else), then upgrades to existing pages from the content gap’s “weaker than theirs” column, then new pages for qualified keyword gaps, then outreach to the referring domains from step 4, then longer-term SERP feature and AI visibility plays.

Score each action high, medium or low for impact and effort, do the high-impact low-effort quadrant first, and revisit the analysis quarterly. Wire the plan into your monthly reporting so progress stays visible; our client SEO report template and our comparison of the best SEO reporting tools cover that end of the job.

Worked example: what does the full workflow look like?

This worked example of an SEO competitor analysis is a fictional illustration, not client data: Every name and number was invented to show the method. Imagine a firm named Fenland Roofline Ltd, a guttering and fascia firm with a 15-page website and a shrinking share of local enquiries at Cambridge.

Step 1 finds that its true search competitors for “guttering repairs cambridge” and 14 similar terms are two national trade directories and two regional installers, not the rival firm across town it worries about. Step 2’s keyword gap against the installers returns 240 missing keywords, qualified by hand down to 55 winnable ones, mostly “cost”, “repair vs replace” and nearby-town terms.

Step 3 clusters those 55 keywords into seven missing pages: a price guide, five town pages and a fascia-vs-soffit explainer. Step 4 shows the installers hold links from 12 East Anglian directories and trade bodies that Fenland lacks. Step 5 finds a local pack on every money term, where Fenland has 9 reviews against a rival’s 85. Step 6 shows its mobile Core Web Vitals lag both installers.

The step 7 plan writes itself: fix the mobile template, publish the price guide, start a review-request routine, build the town pages in priority order, then work through the 12 link targets. That is a quarter’s roadmap from roughly a day of analysis.

Choosing an approach to SEO competitor analysis

The right approach to SEO competitor analysis depends on how many of the seven steps you need at depth, and how often you will repeat them. Manual methods cover about half the workflow for free; keyword and backlink gaps genuinely require paid data; premium stacks add scale most small businesses never use.

Approach	Typical cost (as of July 2026)	What it covers well	Where it falls short
Manual and free (Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, hand-checked SERPs)	£0	Finding search competitors, SERP feature ownership, technical spot checks	No keyword gap or backlink gap data; slow to repeat
One mid-priced platform (SE Ranking)	£95.00/month, or £76.00/month billed annually (Core)	All seven steps in one login: competitive research, keyword and backlink gaps, audit, daily rank tracking on Google, Bing, Yahoo and YouTube	Vendor-claimed link index smaller than premium rivals
Premium multi-tool stack (Semrush and friends)	Semrush’s entry SEO plan from $139.00/month (about £102) ($117.33/month, about £86, billed annually)	The largest claimed datasets, deep advertising research, enterprise scale	Cost and complexity most local and SME campaigns never need

Prices are the vendors’ own published figures in the currency each displays, checked in July 2026.

For the comparisons behind those rows, see SE Ranking vs Semrush, our full Semrush review for a closer look at the premium option’s competitive research, our round-up of Semrush alternatives, and AccuRanker vs Ahrefs vs SE Ranking if rank tracking is your priority. The exact stack we run on is documented in our agency SEO tech stack page.

If you want to run this workflow on your own market this week, the 14-day trial covers every step mentioned above.

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FAQ: SEO competitor analysis

What is the difference between SEO competitor research and SEO competitor analysis?

SEO competitor research is the data-gathering stage: identifying who ranks and collecting their keywords, content, links and SERP presence. SEO competitor analysis is the interpretation stage: comparing that data against your own site and deciding what to change. Most people use the terms interchangeably, and every good project includes both.

How many competitors should you analyse?

Three to five true search competitors is the practical sweet spot. Fewer than three and you may copy one site’s mistakes; many more and the gap data becomes noise. SE Ranking’s Competitor Comparison takes your domain plus two competitors per run, and its Backlink Gap Analyzer up to five, as of July 2026.

How often should you repeat an SEO competitive analysis?

Quarterly is a sensible default for an active campaign. A full SEO competitive analysis each quarter catches new competitors, new content plays and lost SERP features while there is time to respond. Between runs, daily rank tracking on your agreed keyword set flags sudden movements automatically.

Can you do competitor SEO analysis for free?

Partly. Free tools cover competitor identification (manual SERP checks), SERP feature ownership (the same checks), your own search data (Google Search Console) and technical spot checks (PageSpeed Insights). Keyword and backlink gap analysis require paid data; no free tool shows another site’s rankings or links at useful scale.

How long does a full SEO competitor analysis take?

Plan for about a working day for a small site: an hour or two on competitor identification, a morning across the keyword, content and backlink gaps, and the afternoon on SERP features, the technical comparison and the action plan. Larger sites scale that up, mostly in the qualification stages rather than the tool time.