Your search competitors aren't necessarily your business rivals. They are whichever domains Google places above you for the keywords you target.
An SEO competitor analysis, sometimes called a competitive analysis, is researching those domains to understand their target keywords, content strategy, backlink profile and more. Moz's guide puts the point of it simply: reverse-engineer what already works, instead of guessing which keywords to target, what content to create or which links to build.
What a Competitor Analysis Examines
Five things are on every list:
- Target keywords that bring your competitors traffic.
- Content gaps: valuable topics they cover and you don't.
- Backlink profiles, for link opportunities you haven't found.
- Search intent, whether a query is informational, commercial or transactional.
- Technical signals such as page speed and mobile-friendliness.
Moz's guide lays the work out in five steps: identify your SEO competitors through the results pages or a research tool, run a keyword gap analysis, evaluate the results pages for intent, analyze and improve on competitors' content, and analyze backlinks. The guide treats it as an ongoing process, worth rerunning when you launch a new site, product or market, when you find yourself outranked, when you take on a new client, or when you have no benchmarks yet.
Build the Keyword Universe Before You Check Who Ranks
The competitor list should come out of the results, not out of assumption. Start from the business rivals you already know and you miss the domains Google actually puts above you. Start from a list of keywords, check who ranks for each, and the real competitors surface on their own.
One builder running an SEO pipeline in a coding agent puts the order bluntly: pull your full keyword universe from a keyword tool's related-keywords and "people also search for" endpoints, then send that entire list to a SERP API to see who is actually ranking and where the gaps are. A SERP API is an interface that returns a live Google results page as data your code can read.
In practice that means:
- start from seed terms you already own, expanded through related queries and the questions People Also Ask shows;
- keep one row per unique keyword, deduplicated before you spend anything on results pulls;
- then check each keyword against the live results page.
The fuller version of that expand-then-validate loop is keyword research with agents. For competitor analysis, the rule is short: no keyword universe, no reliable picture of who you're up against.
There's also a shortcut when you already know whose visibility you want to unpack. One widely shared framing is to enter a competitor's website and get back the keywords bringing them traffic, the pages winning those searches and the backlinks helping them rank. That is domain-first research. It answers "what is this rival doing", and it can't tell you which rivals you're missing.
Check Who Actually Ranks Now
Once you have the list, the research step is a pull per keyword. One builder's teardown puts it in a line: hit a SERP API with the keyword, pull the top 30 Google results, and grab their headings and themes. That pull then goes to a model with instructions to write an outline. Another builder calls the same opening move phase one, competitor landscape analysis: who else is in this space and what their strengths and weaknesses are, the kind of positioning gap "you'd normally need a $200/hr strategist to find."
Run that check per keyword:
- Fetch the current results page, pinned to the location and language that matter for the page.
- Note who holds the organic positions, and which blocks sit above or among them: People Also Ask boxes, AI Overviews, shopping listings.
- Pull each ranking page's headings and recurring themes, not only its position.
- Record the date of every pull before you compare anything.
The date matters because the picture moves. A gap without a date reads as permanent; a gap with one reads as what Google ranked that week, and can be checked again before anyone writes. An agent can run the fetch in step one through qequals, which serves live Google results and autocomplete suggestions per query, across the whole list.
Watch What Competitors Ship Before It Ranks
Results pages show what already ranks. Competitors' sitemaps, the files that list every page a site wants crawled, show what they've published, including pages that haven't ranked yet. One builder describes two versions of the same idea across September:
- A one-off keyword map. Grab the sitemaps of your top competitors and your own, keep the shared SEO pages (dropping contact, about and similar pages), map them into a sheet with the URL slug as the assumed target keyword, list the keywords competitors seem to target that you don't, then verify the search intent of each by Googling it.
- A monthly diff. Once a month, pull your sitemap and those of three to five competitors and compare them with last month's copy. List every new landing page or blog post since then, then layer on new referring domains and ranking gains and losses per URL.
In that builder's words, you see what competitors are shipping before it ranks. The diff only works if you keep last month's copy yourself.
Turn Gaps into a Calendar and Briefs
A gap is only useful once it becomes an assignment. Compare the ranking pages and their topic coverage with your own pages, and sort each miss into one of three kinds:
- keywords you don't rank for at all;
- subtopics your page skips that the ranking pages cover;
- result features, such as questions or shopping blocks, where rivals collect clicks you never contest.
Then log each miss where work actually gets scheduled. One row per gap: the keyword or subtopic, who ranks now, the headings and themes they use, the intent the page serves, and the date of the pull. Add an outline starter built from those headings and themes, and a priority note based on what the live page shows. Put the rows in a shared sheet or planner so outlines queue into a calendar instead of dying in a chat.
What a Who-Ranks Sweep Can't Tell You
A results sweep shows what Google ranks today and the language searchers see. It doesn't prove why a competitor's authority holds, and it isn't a traffic forecast. Link depth and traffic estimates come from backlink and traffic databases, and how accurate those are is a separate question, argued over in its own right.
Start with ten keywords you care about. Pull the live results for each, list every domain that appears above you, and compare that list with the rivals you thought you had.
