SEO competitor analysis: a 10-step checklist

SEO competitor analysis answers one question: why do the sites above you rank above you, and which of those reasons can you change?

The checklist below has ten steps. Work through it once for three to five search competitors and you finish with a one-page list of the five changes most likely to move your rankings. Two steps, the keyword gap and the backlink review, have their own guides, so this page links to them at the right moment rather than repeating them.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 4 October 2026.

The SEO competitor analysis checklist

Phase 1: who you are up against

1. Pick search competitors, not business competitors

Take 10 to 20 of your most commercial search terms. Search each one in a private window and write down every domain in the top ten. Count how often each appears.

The three to five domains that appear most are your search competitors. Expect surprises: a directory, a magazine or a review site often holds more of your terms than any rival company does. Keep them in, because they occupy the demand you want. The guide to finding your real competitors covers the wider version of this question.

2. Measure how visible each one is

For each domain, note the estimated organic traffic and the number of keywords in the top ten, in one tool, for one country. Then record each competitor's position for your own 20 terms.

A simple score makes the comparison readable: three points for each top-three position, one point for each position from four to ten. It is crude, and it measures the terms you care about rather than the tool's whole database. It is a rough version of share of voice, limited to the terms that pay your bills.

Phase 2: what wins

3. Find the pages that earn their traffic

Semrush's free Website Traffic Checker lists a site's top pages by estimated search traffic. Ahrefs' Top pages report does the same in its paid tool.

Look for concentration. If five pages carry most of a competitor's search traffic, those five pages are their SEO strategy and everything else is decoration. Note what kind of page they are: tools, templates, glossaries, comparisons, location pages.

4. Match the format Google rewards

For each target query, write down the format of the top five results: guide, list, product page, category page, tool, video or forum thread.

Results pages are rigid about format. If all five results for a query are category pages, a blog post will not rank there however good it is. This one column saves more wasted writing than any other step. For the content side in depth, see the competitor content audit.

5. Run the keyword gap

Find the terms where competitors rank in the top 20 and you do not. The competitor keyword research guide has the full method, including the filtering that turns a 4,000-row export into 20 to 40 terms worth writing for.

6. See who holds the SERP features

For each query, note who owns the featured snippet, which questions appear in People Also Ask, whether there is a local pack, a video carousel or shopping results, and which sites an AI Overview cites.

A competitor who holds the snippet on your best term can outrank you on clicks while sitting at position two. Snippets usually go to pages that answer the question plainly and early, so this step often ends in a small rewrite rather than a new page.

Phase 3: why it wins

7. Check the technical basics

Ten minutes per competitor, all free:

• Indexing. Compare their site: count with the number of URLs in their sitemap. A big gap points to indexing problems, theirs or yours.
• Speed. Run their key templates through PageSpeed Insights. When a page or site has enough visitors, it shows real-user Core Web Vitals from Chrome users, which is the same data for you and for them.
• Structured data. Put their product, article or FAQ pages into Google's Rich Results Test and note which markup types they use and you do not.
• Basics in the source. Canonical tags, hreflang for international sites, and how many clicks their key pages sit from the homepage.

Technical parity matters less than most audits imply. Fix the gaps where you are clearly behind and ignore the rest.

8. Read the page that beats yours

For your five most important queries, open the top result and your own page side by side. Compare the title, the opening answer, how fully it covers the question, how recently it was updated, who wrote it and why they are credible, and what it includes that you do not: data, examples, a calculator, real photos.

Write the differences down as a list. This step produces most of the actionable findings in the whole audit.

9. Check their links

Count referring domains to the competitor's site and to the specific page that outranks you. If the page has ten times your referring domains, content changes alone will not close the gap. The competitor backlink analysis guide covers finding the links you can realistically get.

10. If you are local, check the map pack

For local searches, the map pack often sits above every organic result. Compare primary Google Business Profile category, review count and rating, photos and how recently they post. The local competitor monitoring guide covers the routine.

Turning the checklist into a plan

Sort every finding into three buckets.

Fix this month. Titles, opening answers, missing markup, internal links to the page that matters. Cheap, fast, and often enough to move a page that sits at position 6 to 12.

Build this quarter. Missing pages from the keyword gap, in the format step 4 says wins.

Earn over time. Links and reviews. Real work, slow results, and only worth starting where step 9 showed the gap is the actual constraint.

Pick five actions in total. An audit that ends in forty actions ends in none. The competitor analysis template has a one-page format for writing it up.

The audit is a snapshot

Rankings move every week, so an SEO competitor audit starts going stale the day you finish it. Redo the full checklist every six months, and in between track competitor rankings weekly so you know when something has moved enough to look again.

For the paid steps you need one platform: Semrush's SEO plan is $139 a month and Ahrefs Lite is $129 a month, and a single month covers a one-off audit.

Figo covers the in-between part: each tracked competitor's Google positions and estimated organic traffic every week, plus the new pages they publish. Plans start at $49 a month for three competitors. Ours, so judge accordingly. It has no backlink data and does no keyword research, so steps 5 and 9 still need one of the platforms above.