You can’t play blind if you want to win at SEO. You should be aware of what your competitors are doing, what is working for them, and where they are weak.
SEMrush is a powerful SEO and competitive analysis tool that lets you spy on your competitors and figure out how they got where they are.
We will break down in this guide:
- Why SEO needs to include competitive analysis
- What SEMrush can help you find
- How to do a step-by-step analysis
- What insights should you act on (with examples)
Let’s get started and use your competitors as a guide.
Why SEO Competitive Analysis Is Important
Knowing who your competitors are gives you a clear standard and helps you find:
- Missing pieces in your keyword plan
- Chances to get backlinks
- Formats of content that do well
- Improvements to technical SEO
- Expectations for traffic that are realistic
According to the study of Smart Insights, that brands that regularly look at their competitors are more likely to reach their organic traffic goals.
Step 1: Find out who your real SEO competitors are.
Your business’s competitors are not the same as your SEO competitors.
How to Look for Them in SEMrush:
- Go to Organic Research on SEMrush
- Type in your domain name, like yoursite.com.
- Click on the tab for Competitors
This shows:
- Websites that use the same keywords as you do
- The total number of keywords they share
- Estimated traffic from search engines
Tip: Look for sites that have similar types of content or audiences. Don’t go after Amazon or Wikipedia.
Step 2: Look at how your competitors use keywords
This is where the gold is.
Things to Use:
- Positions in Organic Research
- Tool for Finding Keyword Gaps
What to Look For:
| Insight | What It Tells You |
| Top-ranking keywords | What they’re optimized for |
| Keyword difficulty | How hard it is to outrank them |
| Position changes | Where they’re gaining or losing ground |
| Keyword cannibalization | If multiple pages compete for the same term |
| Make UX better | Use better site design and navigation tools that you know work. |
If more than one page is trying to rank for the same term
Ideas that you can use:
- Find keywords that they rank for but you don’t (gap opportunities)
- Make better content for terms where you both rank high.
- Find easy wins with long-tail or local keywords.
Step 3: Break Down Their Best Content
The best pages on your competitors’ websites show you what your audience wants.
How to Look for It:
Click on Organic Research > Pages
Check out the URLs that get the most visitors.
Look at:
What kind of content do you want? A list? A guide? A comparison?
Number of words
Using keywords
Things that make people want to engage (images, videos, tables, FAQs)
Use Case:
A post by a competitor called “Top 10 CRM Tools” is at the top of the list. You make a new, more visually appealing, and video-based “Top 12 CRM Tools” post. That’s smart SEO.
Step 4: Find out what their backlink profile looks like
Links are a big part of how well a site ranks. You can see the following with SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics:
- Where are their links coming from?
- Which pages get the most links?
- What are the most authoritative referring domains?
What to Look For:
- Ideas for linkable assets (like making a calculator or a research report)
- You could also reach out to these targets
- Links that don’t work anymore that you can get back
Tip: Use the Backlink Gap tool to find sites that link to your competitors but not to you.
Step 5: Look at the structure and user experience of their site
If the site is hard to use, great content won’t help it rank.
Take a look at:
- Links and navigation within the site
- Speed of pages and performance on mobile
- The structure of the URL (clean vs. messy)
- Using schema markup, especially for SERP features
Use SEMrush’s Site Audit tool to crawl their site and see how healthy it is from a technical point of view.
Step 6: Keep an eye on their position over time
You can use the Position Tracking tool to see how well your competitors do for a set of keywords over time.
Keep an eye on:
- Which pages go up or down
- Which keywords they’re pushing the hardest
- If you’re closing the gap.
Pro Tip: When a competitor breaks into the top 10, set alerts and find out why.
What to do with what you’ve learned
After you’ve done your competitive analysis, you can:
| Goal | Strategy |
| Get better rankings | Rewrite or improve pages that already exist and are aimed at the same keywords. |
| Look for new ideas for content | Make blog posts about the topics that get the most traffic. |
| Get backlinks | Make copies of their linkable assets (or do better). |
| Fill in the gaps in your content | Fill in the gaps in keywords or topics that your audience is looking for. |
| Make UX better | Use better site design and navigation tools that you know work. |
Bonus Tip: Keep an eye on more than one competitor. You can read further from Km. Preeti Sharma, if you want to learn how to attract backlinks organically.
You can keep an eye on up to 20 competitors with SEMrush’s Projects Dashboard.
- Health of the site
- Changes in keywords
- Link patterns
- SEO factors on the page
This ongoing study keeps you from reacting instead of acting.
Last Thoughts
Your competitors have already done the hard work of finding keywords, writing content, and figuring out what works. You can learn from them, jump over gaps, and make your SEO strategy smarter and stronger with SEMrush.
Keep in mind:
The best SEO doesn’t always come from the most original ideas; it comes from doing things the right way.
