Understanding what your competitors are doing in search is not just useful — it is essential. Your competitors have already run the experiments, built the content, and earned the links that are working in your niche. A competitor SEO analysis shows you exactly what is working for them, where their weaknesses are, and where your best opportunities for overtaking them lie.
The best part: a thorough competitor analysis requires no paid tools. Free versions of the major SEO platforms combined with Google's own tools give you everything you need to develop a data-driven strategy.
Step 1 — Identify Your Real SEO Competitors
Your SEO competitors are not necessarily your business competitors — they are the sites that currently rank for the keywords you want to rank for. Search for your five or ten most important target keywords and note which sites consistently appear in the top ten. These are your actual search competitors regardless of whether they sell the same products or services.
Step 2 — Analyse Their Content Strategy
Visit your competitors' sites and study their content structure. How many articles do they publish? How long are they? What topics do they cover that you have not? What format do they use — guides, listicles, case studies, videos?
Use the free tier of Ubersuggest or Semrush to see which of their pages drive the most organic traffic. These are their content pillars — the articles that are earning them the most search visibility. Understanding why these specific pages perform so well guides your own content creation.
Step 3 — Analyse Their Backlink Profile
Use Moz Link Explorer (free tier, 10 searches per month) or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (free for verified sites) to examine your competitors' backlink profiles. Look for:
Their highest-authority linking domains. Which sites are giving your competitors their strongest links? These are the sites you should be targeting for your own outreach. As we covered in our guide to finding competitor backlinks, these pre-qualified opportunities are the foundation of an efficient link building strategy.
Common linking patterns. Do they have links from specific types of sites — industry directories, press coverage, resource pages, guest posts? The pattern tells you the most effective link building strategies in your niche.
Anchor text distribution. Use our anchor text analyser on their backlink exports to understand how their anchor text is distributed. This benchmarks what a natural profile looks like in your niche.
Step 4 — Find Their Keyword Gaps
A keyword gap analysis identifies queries your competitors rank for that you do not. Use Semrush or Ahrefs free tier to compare your domain against a competitor and find these gaps. These are topics with proven search demand in your niche that your content strategy has not yet addressed.
Cross-reference with our keyword density checker on your own top pages — if competitors rank for variations of your target keywords that you are not covering, adding those variations to your existing content is often faster than creating new pages.
Step 5 — Analyse Their Technical SEO
Run your main competitors through our page speed checker. If your site loads faster than theirs, that is a Page Experience advantage worth maintaining and highlighting. Check their SSL and HTTPS setup with our SSL checker. Technical advantages are harder to compete away than content advantages.
Step 6 — Identify Their Weaknesses
Run competitor sites through our broken link checker. Broken outbound links are broken link building opportunities — pages on their site where your content could replace a dead resource. Their broken links are your entry points.
Summary
A competitor SEO analysis reveals their content strategy, their best backlinks, their keyword coverage, and their technical weaknesses — all translatable into actionable opportunities for your site. Do it quarterly using free tool tiers, combining backlink data, keyword research, and technical checks into a prioritised action list.
Missed the previous article? Read: What Is a Content Audit and How Do You Do One?