Competitive Analysis: What It Is & How to Do It

What Is Competitive Analysis?

The structured process of researching your competitors' SEO, content, pricing, and marketing strategies to find opportunities your business can act on.

Think of it like playing chess. Before you make your move, you look at what the other player has on the board. That is what competitive analysis does for your website: it gives you a clear picture of the field before you spend a single dollar or write a single word.

When agencies define competitive analysis for clients, they usually break it into three areas:

SEO and keyword gaps. What keywords your rivals rank for that you do not.

Content performance. Which pages drive the most traffic for competitors and why.

Marketing positioning. How competitors speak to their audience and what channels they invest in.

It is not about copying what competitors do. It is about understanding the landscape well enough to do it better.

Why Competitive Analysis Matters for SEO

Many agencies skip this step and jump straight into publishing content. That is one of the most expensive mistakes in digital marketing.

What is competition in SEO? In SEO, competition means other websites fighting for the same keyword rankings you want. Every time a competitor ranks above you, they take traffic that could have been yours.

A proper SEO competitive analysis tells you:

Which keywords your competitors rank for in the top 10 that your site does not appear for at all.

How strong their backlink profiles are compared to yours.

What content formats they use that consistently perform well.

Where their technical SEO is weak and where yours needs work.

Without this information, you are essentially writing content and hoping it ranks. With it, you are making decisions based on real competitor activity data.

How to Perform Competitor Analysis: Step by Step

Here is a clear, step-by-step process for how to perform competitor analysis whether you are doing it for your own agency or building a report on competitor analysis for a client.

Step 1: Define Your Competitors

Before you analyse competitors, you need to know who they actually are. Your SEO competitors are not always your business competitors. A brand you have never heard of could be outranking you for your most important keywords.

Start by searching your core keywords in Google and noting which websites appear consistently on page one. Those are your real SEO competition.

You can organise findings into three groups:

Start with three direct competitors. That keeps your competitive market research report focused and actionable.

Step 2: Build Your SEO Competitor Analysis Template

A good SEO competitor analysis template covers these columns for each competitor:

Domain Authority / Website Strength

Top Organic Keywords

Estimated Monthly Traffic

Number of Ranking Pages

Top Backlink Sources

Content Types: blogs, landing pages, videos

Social Media Activity

Paid Ad Presence

This becomes your sample competitive analysis report, a living document your team or client can update quarterly.

At Agency Dashboard, the all-in-one reporting platform pulls SEO tracking, backlink monitoring, keyword rankings, and social media analytics into one centralized view, so agencies can build this template without juggling ten different tabs.

Step 3: Run an SEO Competition Analysis on Their Keywords

This is the heart of any competitive analysis in SEO. You want to find:

Keywords your competitors rank for that you do not. These are your fastest growth opportunities.

Keywords where you both rank but they are higher. These are your priority improvement pages.

Keywords with low competition that neither of you rank for yet. These are your white space opportunities.

Analytical competition mapping at this level shows you not just where you are losing, but specifically why, whether it is a content gap, a weaker page, or a missing topic entirely.

Step 4: Analyse Their Top-Performing Pages

Pull up the pages that drive the most traffic for each competitor. Ask yourself:

What keyword does this page target?

How long is the content and what format does it use?

Does it have internal links pointing to it?

How many backlinks does this page have?

This is the core of a competitive analysis of website performance. It tells you what content actually wins in your niche, not just what your competitors publish, but what actually earns rankings and clicks.

When running a website competitor analysis for clients, aAgency Dashboard's website audit tool and rank tracker give you page-level visibility across multiple competitors without manual pulls.

Step 5: Review Their Backlink Profile

Backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals. In your competitor analysis research, check:

Which websites link to your competitors but not to you?

Are these links from high-quality publishers, directories, or industry associations?

What kind of content earned those links?

This feeds directly into your link-building priorities. If five competitors all have backlinks from a specific industry publication, that publication is worth targeting.

Step 6: Map Their Competitors Marketing Strategy

Beyond SEO, look at the full picture of their digital marketing competitor analysis:

Paid Ads. Are they running Google Ads? What landing pages do those ads send traffic to?

Social Media. Which platforms do they post on? What content formats get the most engagement?

Email. Do they have a newsletter? How do they nurture leads?

Content Cadence. How often do they publish?

Mapping the competitors marketing strategy helps you spot where they are investing heavily, which signals what is working for them, and where they are absent, which signals opportunity.

Agency Dashboard's PPC tracking and social media analytics tools make it easy to track this data across multiple clients from one dashboard, which is especially useful when running competitive research at scale.

Step 7: Build Your Report on Competitor Analysis

Now bring it all together. A strong report on competitor analysis has:

An executive summary: what you found and what it means.

Keyword gap table.

Top competitor pages breakdown.

Backlink comparison.

Content and channel audit.

Recommended next actions ranked by priority.

This is your competitive market research report, the document that turns raw data into a clear plan.

If you are an agency delivering this to clients, Agency Dashboard's white label reporting lets you package this entire report under your own brand, with your logo, your color scheme, and automated delivery on whatever schedule your client needs.

Old Approach vs. New Approach to Competitive Research

What a Sample Competitive Analysis Report Looks Like

A good sample competitive analysis report for an agency client might look like this:

Client: Local Law Firm

Goal: Rank for high-intent legal keywords in their city

Competitors Analyzed: Three top-ranking local competitors

Summary of Findings:

Competitor A ranks for 340 keywords the client does not. Of those, 47 are high-intent terms with strong conversion potential.

Competitor B has 2.4x more backlinks, primarily from local directories the client has not listed on.

Competitor C publishes two blog posts per week and consistently ranks for long-tail question keywords.

Recommended Actions:

Create targeted pages for the 47 high-intent keyword gaps.

Submit to 18 local directories where Competitor B already appears.

Launch a weekly blog targeting question-based queries.

This is how competitive analysis translates into a concrete content and SEO roadmap.

How to Research the Competition Without Getting Overwhelmed

Here is the honest truth about how to research the competition: most teams try to track too much at once and end up with a massive spreadsheet no one uses.

Keep it simple:

Pick three competitors and analyze them deeply rather than ten competitors at surface level.

Focus on one gap at a time: keyword gaps first, then backlinks, then content.

Update quarterly because competitive landscapes shift, so stale data leads to bad decisions.

Use a single platform that brings all data together so you are not copy-pasting between SEO tools.

Agency Dashboard was built specifically for agencies that need to run this process across multiple clients without it becoming a full-time job. SEO tracking, rank monitoring, backlink data, PPC performance, and automated reports all live in one place.

Competitive Analysis vs. Competitor Analysis: Is There a Difference?

People often use these terms interchangeably, but there is a subtle distinction worth knowing.

Define competitive analysis: A broad look at the entire competitive landscape - market positioning, audience segments, pricing, and multiple channels.

Define competitor analysis: A deeper dive into one or a few specific rivals - their keywords, pages, backlinks, and tactics.

In practice, a full SEO competitor analysis step by step usually starts broad with competitive analysis and then goes deep on the two or three rivals that matter most with competitor analysis. Both inform each other.

Frequently Asked Questions