Competitor Analysis for SEO: How I Actually Do It as a One-Person Agency

The best marketing move I made for WunderType, my little macOS app, wasn't a strategy deck. I found every competitor I could, even the huge apps where text correction is one feature out of hundreds, and wrote an honest comparison post about each one. Those posts rank. They bring in people who are already comparing tools and ready to try one.

That was a competitor analysis. It just didn't look like the one this page used to describe.

This post first went up in 2019 and later got "updated" into an 8-step framework with Porter's Five Forces, a 90-day response plan, a table of social media monitoring tools and a statistic about companies being 67% more likely to beat their revenue targets. I couldn't find a source for that number. I'm not sure there ever was one. So I deleted all of it and wrote down how I actually look at competitors when the goal is rankings, for clients and for my own products.

Your Real Competitors Are Whoever Ranks for Your Keywords

Type your most important keyword into Google in a private window and look at the first page. For a lot of small businesses, the top ten isn't the company across town. It's a directory, a Reddit thread, a magazine roundup, a marketplace and maybe one actual rival.

Those are your SEO competitors, and they're often different from your business competitors. The plumber down the street competes with you for the job. The directory competes with you for the click. You need to know both, but only the second group tells you what Google wants to show for that search.

So start with the search results, not with a list of company names. Pick three to five keywords that make money (service plus city, product plus "alternative", whatever the buyer types), note who shows up repeatedly across them, and you end up with a short list. Five sites is plenty. Fifteen turns into a spreadsheet nobody opens again.

If you pay for Ahrefs or Semrush, their competing domains reports speed this up. They also love to suggest sites that overlap with you on a few random keywords. Check every suggestion against a real search before it goes on your list.

For local businesses, run the same check in the map pack. The three businesses in that box are the competitors that matter most for "near me" searches, and they're frequently not the ones with the best websites.

Read the Search Results Before You Read Any Tool

The first page of Google is already a competitor report. It shows you what kind of page wins.

If the top results for your keyword are long guides, a thin service page won't break in. If they're all comparison pages, Google has decided the searcher is choosing between options. If there's an AI Overview at the top, a big chunk of clicks for informational queries is going away no matter who ranks first, and that changes which keywords are worth fighting for.

Look at page type, rough length, whether there's a video carousel or a People Also Ask box, and whether the ranking pages are home pages or deep pages. This takes ten minutes per keyword and it saves you from writing the wrong kind of page. If you want the full process for picking those keywords in the first place, my keyword research guide covers it.

The Keyword Gap: Where Paid Tools Earn Their Money

A keyword gap report is the one place where Ahrefs and Semrush earn their subscription in a competitor analysis. You put in your domain and three or four competitor domains, and the tool lists keywords they rank for and you don't. Ahrefs calls it Content Gap, Semrush calls it Keyword Gap. Same idea.

The raw export is mostly noise. Competitors rank for plenty of things by accident: an old blog post about a holiday party, a careers page, a brand name. Filter it down to keywords that match something you sell, then sort by how many competitors rank for them. A keyword where all four competitors have a page and you don't is a strong signal the topic belongs on your site. A keyword where one competitor ranks with a random post is not.

Then group what's left into topics. Twenty keywords often collapse into four or five pages worth writing.

You don't need the paid tools to get started. For the WunderType launch I used Ahrefs and Semrush, but Google autocomplete and People Also Ask get you surprisingly far, and SERP APIs like Serper or SerpApi have free tiers big enough to pull the top results for a few dozen keywords. The paid tools are faster, not magic.

Open Their Website Like a Customer Would

Open the five sites side by side and click through them the way a buyer would. You'll learn more in twenty minutes than from any dashboard.

What to check:

• Service pages: one page per service, or everything crammed onto one page? Separate pages give Google something specific to rank.
• Pricing: do they show prices or ranges? If nobody in your market does, publishing yours is an easy way to stand out.
• Proof: case studies with names and numbers, reviews, photos of real work.
• Speed: run their key pages through PageSpeed Insights next to yours.
• Structured data: paste a URL into Google's Rich Results Test to see if they use schema for reviews, FAQs or local business info.

Also look at the design. A lot of sites built with AI tools now share the same layout: gradient hero, three feature cards, testimonial slider. If yours looks like theirs, that's a problem I wrote about in why every AI-built website looks the same. Looking different is cheap positioning.

The point isn't to copy their pages. It's to find what every competitor does (your audience expects it, so you need it too) and what none of them do (that's your opening). My on-page SEO checklist is what I use to compare the page-level details once I know which pages I'm up against.

Backlinks: Look at Where, Not How Many

Backlinks are where a lot of competitor analysis goes wrong, because people compare one number. "They have DR 60, we have DR 25" tells you almost nothing.

When I audited 17 sites for toxic backlinks, I found spam networks keeping their Domain Rating at 55 to 66 by linking to each other. Zero traffic, zero real content, and Ahrefs still showed DR 60+. If a competitor's link profile is full of that, their "authority" is mostly air. The full story is in my toxic backlink audit.

So look at the referring domains themselves. Which local news site, industry association or supplier links to them? Which of their pages attract links, and why? A competitor with forty links from real businesses in your region is harder to beat than one with four hundred links from directories. The useful output is a list of places that could plausibly link to you too, because they already link to someone like you.

Their Ads Show You Which Keywords Make Money

Organic data tells you what competitors rank for. Ads tell you what they're willing to pay for, which is a stronger signal of what turns into customers.

The Google Ads Transparency Center is free. Search a competitor's name or domain and you see their search, display and YouTube ads, with first-seen and last-seen dates. It only lists verified advertisers, and it shows the ads, not whether they're profitable. An ad that has been running for months is still a decent hint that it pays for itself. The Meta Ad Library does the same for Facebook and Instagram.

Read the headlines for the words competitors lead with. If every ad says "same-day" or "fixed price", that's what buyers in that market respond to, and your service page should answer it.

Competitor Analysis in AI Search

The newest version of this question arrives as a screenshot: ChatGPT recommends a competitor by name and not you. Three clients sent me exactly that within four months, and I wrote about what to do in when ChatGPT recommends your competitor.

To measure it, I built an AI visibility tracker into the client dashboard I run. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overview the questions a customer would ask, three times each because the answers change between runs, and counts how often the client and each competitor get mentioned. That gives a share of voice per competitor. The setup and the prompt to build your own are in build your own AI visibility tracker.

A Surfer SEO study comparing API answers with what the real ChatGPT interface shows found only 24% brand overlap between the two. My tracker uses the API, so its numbers are a trend line, not the truth. Paid tools like Ahrefs Brand Radar track competitor mentions across much larger prompt sets, and you can filter for prompts where competitors appear and you don't, which is the AI-search version of a keyword gap.

The part that does the real work is the second half of the dashboard. It crawls the client's page and the competitor page that gets cited instead, and lists the differences: topics the competitor covers that the client doesn't, FAQ blocks, schema markup, clearly named services, team bios, transparent pricing. That list is the work. The visibility percentage only tells you where to look.

Turn It Into a Work List, Then Stop Analyzing

All of the above should end in a short list of pages to create or fix, sorted by how close each one is to revenue. If your analysis ends in a slide deck, it's a hobby.

Comparison pages usually come first. "You vs Competitor" and "best alternatives to Competitor" searches come from people who already know what they want and are choosing. For WunderType, those comparison posts were the best return on anything I did, and the full numbers from that launch are public. Write them fairly. Say where the other product is better. Readers can tell when a comparison is a sales page in disguise.

AI makes the research part much faster. In my AI-assisted SEO audit workflow, the competitor phase went from an entire afternoon to about 45 minutes, because the model summarizes competitor content and spots patterns in their setup. I still check its claims by hand. It's confident about things it got wrong.

How often to repeat this? For a small business, I'd re-run the keyword gap and the AI visibility check every quarter, plus whenever rankings move without an obvious reason. I don't have data proving quarterly beats monthly. It's the rhythm that keeps the work from crowding out the fixes.

What I Still Get Wrong

When I wrote about being the tailor who can't sew his own pants, my own site had 13 keywords in Ahrefs. I'd done this exact kind of analysis for clients for years and hadn't done it properly for myself. Knowing what competitors do is the easy half. Shipping the pages is where most people stall, me included.

If you'd like someone to run this for your site and hand you the work list, let's talk. I'll show you who you're actually competing with in search and which pages close the gap, and if your real problem is something else, I'll say so.