What is Competitor Analysis? How to do It (Free template)

1 What Is Competitor Analysis and Why Every SEO Strategy Depends on It

Here is the honest truth about SEO that most beginner guides skip over entirely.

You are never ranking in a vacuum. Every keyword you target already has pages competing for it. Every backlink opportunity you identify already has websites earning those links. Every piece of content you publish enters a space where other websites have been publishing for months or years before you arrived.

Competitor analysis is the process of studying those websites systematically so you can understand exactly what they are doing to rank, where their weaknesses are, and where you can outperform them with less effort than starting from scratch.

In many years of running SEO campaigns for clients across B2b, SaaS, healthcare, and ecommerce, I have never built a successful strategy without starting with competitor analysis. It is not optional. It is the foundation every other decision builds on.

A proper competitor analysis tells you which keywords are winnable right now based on your current domain authority. It shows you which content topics your competitors have left underserved. It reveals which websites are linking to your competitors but not to you, representing direct backlink opportunities. And in 2026, it now includes understanding which competitors are being cited by AI search engines like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, because AI visibility is becoming a traffic source that rivals traditional organic rankings.

2 SEO Competitors vs Business Competitors | The Difference That Changes Everything

Before you run a single report, you need to understand one distinction that most beginners get completely wrong.

Your business competitor is another company selling the same product or service to the same customers. Your SEO competitor is any website ranking in the top ten for the keywords your target audience is searching on Google.

A B2B software company selling project management tools competes directly with Asana and Monday.com as a business. But its SEO competitors for the keyword "how to manage remote teams" might include Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and a dozen independent productivity bloggers, none of which sell software at all.

This distinction matters because your competitor analysis strategy changes completely depending on which type of competitor you are studying.

3 How to Identify Your Real SEO Competitors in Under 10 Minutes

Method 1: Google your most important keyword

Open an incognito browser window and search for your primary target keyword. The websites appearing in positions one to ten on page one are your direct SEO competitors for that keyword. Write down the domains appearing most frequently across your top five to ten most important keywords. Those recurring domains are your core SEO competitors.

Method 2: Use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools free

Enter your domain into Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and open the Organic Competitors report. This shows every website ranking in the top ten for at least one keyword you also rank for, sorted by the number of overlapping keywords. The websites at the top of this list with the highest keyword overlap are the competitors your analysis should focus on first.

Method 3: Use SEMrush free version

Enter your domain into SEMrush and look at the Organic Research section. SEMrush shows a competitors map plotting websites by keyword overlap and traffic volume. The websites closest to yours on this map are your highest priority SEO competitors.

Method 4: Search for your product or service category

Type your product category or service type directly into Google without any modifiers. "SEO consultant," "project management software," "accounting services for small business." The websites appearing consistently across these broad searches are the authority players in your space whose SEO strategies are worth studying in detail.

4 How to Do a Complete Competitor Analysis Step by Step

This is the full process I follow when running a competitor analysis for a new client website. Work through each step in order and document your findings as you go.

Step 1: Build your competitor list

Identify three to five primary SEO competitors using the methods above. Do not try to analyse ten or twenty websites at once. Three well-analysed competitors give you more actionable intelligence than twenty surface-level reviews.

Step 2: Analyse their organic keyword profile

For each competitor, find out which keywords are driving the most traffic to their website. In SEMrush free, enter their domain and look at their top organic keywords sorted by estimated traffic. In Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, use the Content Gap report to find keywords your competitors rank for that your site does not.

Look specifically for:

• Keywords with high traffic volume where your competitor ranks in positions four to ten. These are opportunities where their ranking is weak enough to challenge.
• Keywords with low difficulty scores that multiple competitors rank for but you do not. These are your fastest wins.
• Question-based keywords your competitors rank for that have featured snippet potential.

Step 3: Audit their top performing content

Find your competitor's highest traffic pages using SEMrush or Ahrefs. Open each of these pages and answer these questions:

How long is the content? What format does it use: guide, list, comparison, or tool? How many images, tables, or visuals does it include? Does it have an FAQ section? Is there a downloadable resource or template? How is the internal linking structured?

The answers tell you exactly what content format Google is rewarding in your niche and what benchmark your own content needs to meet or exceed.

Step 4: Analyse their backlink profile

Understanding where your competitors' authority comes from tells you exactly where to focus your link building efforts. In Ahrefs free Webmaster Tools, run a Link Intersect report showing websites that link to your competitors but not to you. These are your highest priority backlink targets because they have already demonstrated willingness to link to content in your niche.

Step 5: Assess their technical SEO health

Run your competitor's homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and compare their Core Web Vitals scores to your own. Check whether they use schema markup by right-clicking their page and viewing page source, then searching for "schema.org." Look at their URL structure, internal linking patterns, and whether they use breadcrumb navigation.

Step 6: Evaluate their AI search visibility

This is the step that almost no competitor analysis guide includes yet and it is increasingly important. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google with AI Overviews enabled and ask questions related to your target keywords. Note which competitor websites are cited in AI-generated answers. These citations represent a new form of brand visibility in AI search that operates independently of traditional ranking positions.

5 Content Gap Analysis | Finding the Keyword Opportunities Your Competitors Left Open

Content gap analysis is the single highest-return activity in competitor analysis for a website that is building its content library from scratch.

A content gap is any keyword that your competitors rank for in the top ten that your website does not rank for at all. Each gap represents a traffic opportunity your competitor is currently capturing that you are missing entirely.

Using SEMrush free:

Enter your domain and navigate to the Keyword Gap tool. Enter two to three competitor domains alongside your own. SEMrush will show you keywords where competitors rank but you do not, filtered by your target country. Sort the results by search volume and filter for keywords with a difficulty score under 30 to find your fastest-win opportunities.

Using Google Search Console:

Export your current keyword rankings from GSC. Manually search for your ten most important keywords and note which competitor pages appear for each one. Any keyword where a competitor appears on page one and you do not is a content gap requiring either a new article or an improvement to an existing one.

Content gap priority matrix:

6 Backlink Gap Analysis | Stealing Your Competitors' Link Building Opportunities

Every backlink your competitor has earned represents a website that was willing to link to content in your niche. That willingness does not disappear when you approach them with equally good or better content.

Backlink gap analysis identifies websites linking to your competitors but not to you, so you can prioritise your outreach toward the highest probability targets.

Step 1: Open Ahrefs free Webmaster Tools and navigate to the Link Intersect report. Enter your two to three primary competitors and run the report.

Step 2: Filter the results by Domain Rating above 40 to focus on high-authority linking opportunities rather than low-quality directory sites.

Step 3: For each linking domain in the report, click through to understand why they linked to your competitor. Was it a resource page, a statistics roundup, a guest post, a tool listing, or editorial coverage?

Step 4: Categorise the link opportunities by type and create a prioritised outreach list starting with resource pages and statistics roundups, which have the highest acceptance rates for cold outreach.

Step 5: Create or identify the specific page on your website you would pitch to each linking domain. The page you pitch must be as good as or better than the competitor page that earned the original link.

7 Competitor Analysis for AI Search 

Traditional competitor analysis looks at Google rankings, backlinks, and content performance. In 2026, this picture is incomplete without understanding how your competitors are performing in AI-generated search results.

Generative engine optimisation, known as GEO, is the practice of optimising your content to appear in AI-generated answers from tools like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other large language model-powered search interfaces. AI search engine optimisation is becoming as important as traditional SEO for certain query types, particularly informational and research-oriented searches.

When I audit competitor visibility for clients today, I run searches across both traditional Google and AI search engines separately because the pages that rank in traditional results and the pages that get cited in AI-generated answers are not always the same.

Check Google AI Overviews: Search your target keywords in Google and note which websites are cited in the AI Overview boxes that appear at the top of results. These citations represent the highest visibility position in modern search and your competitors appearing there are earning brand impressions before any traditional result is seen.

Check Perplexity AI: Search the same keywords in Perplexity and look at the sources cited in each answer. Perplexity's citation patterns reveal which websites AI systems consider the most authoritative and trustworthy sources in your niche.

Check ChatGPT: Ask ChatGPT questions related to your target keywords and note which brands, websites, or experts it references in its answers. Competitors being mentioned by name in LLM outputs have achieved a level of answer engine optimisation that translates directly into brand awareness and referral traffic.

8 Competitor Analysis Tools | Free vs Paid Options Compared

You do not need to spend money to run a comprehensive competitor analysis. Here is a complete comparison of the tools available at every budget level:

For a new website with zero budget, the combination of Google Search Console, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools free, SEMrush free ten daily searches, and manual Google search analysis gives you everything you need to build a solid competitor analysis with no financial investment.

9 Competitor Analysis Template | Copy This for Every Analysis You Run

Use this template as your starting point every time you run a competitor analysis. Fill in one column per competitor.

Section 1: Competitor Overview

Section 2: Keyword Gap Findings

List the top ten keywords each competitor ranks for that you do not, sorted by search volume.

Section 3: Content Audit Findings

For each competitor's top five pages: URL, target keyword, estimated traffic, word count, content format, number of backlinks to that page.

Section 4: Backlink Gap Findings

List the top twenty linking domains that link to competitors but not to you, with their Domain Rating and the link type.

Section 5: Technical Comparison

Compare your Core Web Vitals scores, mobile performance, schema implementation, and site structure against each competitor.

Section 6: AI Visibility Findings

Note which competitors appear in Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT responses for your target keywords.

Section 7: Priority Actions

Based on findings, list your top five content gaps to fill, top five backlink targets to pursue, and top three technical fixes to implement.

10 3 Expert Tips for Running a Competitor Analysis That Actually Changes Your Rankings

Most competitor analysis guides give you the process but skip the strategic thinking that separates a useful analysis from one that collects dust in a Google Doc.

11 Conclusion

Competitor analysis is not a one-time activity you do when you launch a website and then file away forever. It is an ongoing intelligence process that feeds every decision you make in SEO, from which keywords to target next week to which websites to approach for backlinks next month.

The websites that grow fastest on Google are almost never the ones with the biggest budgets or the most staff. They are the ones that understand their competitive landscape clearly and make smarter decisions because of that understanding.

Start with three competitors. Run through the template above. Document your findings. Then take the single highest-priority action your analysis reveals, whether that is writing a content gap article, reaching out to a backlink opportunity, or updating a page that a competitor is outranking you on.

One insight acted on is worth more than a hundred insights left in a spreadsheet.