The Complete Guide (for 2025)
This is the last SEO competitive analysis guide you’ll ever need.
Start by downloading this free SEO competitor research template.
Let’s get right into it.
How to Reverse Engineer Your SEO Competitors (Like a Pro)
You can break this process down into two parts: broad and page-level analysis.
Part 1: Broad Level Analysis
This process is critical because you’ll identify every gap you need to narrow.
Here’s how to do it:
Gather Organic Traffic + Backlink Data
Open Semrush, click on “Bulk Analysis,” enter your competitor’s domains (and yours), and then export:
Not sure who your SEO competition is?
Go to “Keyword Overview” and enter one of your most important commercial keywords.
Scroll down to “SERP Analysis” and find your direct competitors:
Here’s the data you’ll use from the bulk analysis report:
- Total Traffic
- Authority Score
- Domains (Referring Domains)
- Total Backlinks
Now add the data to the appropriate columns like so:
Go back to the “Bulk Analysis” report and open “Domains” in another tab.
While on the “Referring Domains” tab, export the report.
Open ChatGPT, upload one of the exports and use this prompt:
"I uploaded a referring domains CSV from Semrush. The file may be UTF-16 encoded and tab-separated. Please count how many domains fall into each AS (Authority Score) tier: 0–10, 11–30, 31–60, 61 +. List the counts clearly in plain text."It’ll quickly calculate the totals:
Go to the “Authority” section on the template and enter the data into each tier:
Repeat for your domain and the others.
The final step is to perform a keyword gap analysis.
Open Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool, enter your domain, and your competitor’s websites.
Click on “Untapped” to see the keyword gap between you and your top competitors.
Now it’s time for:
Crawl Your Competitor’s Websites
Download Screaming Frog and connect the Ahrefs API:
Go to the crawl config and change the settings to look like this:
Enter a top competitor’s domain, start the crawl, and export just the “HTML:”
Then copy the data and add it to the crawl tab.
Add a filter to the top row, go the “Indexable” column, and filter to only show “Indexable” pages.
Go to the URL column to see how many indexable web pages they have.
Enter the data into the “Indexable Pages” cell.
Go to the “Word Count” column and calculate the sum.
Add this to the “Words” cell:
Scroll over to “Unique Inlinks,” get the sum:
Add to the “Internal Links” cell.
Now scroll to the “Ahrefs RefDomains – Exact” column. Click the filter, go to “Filter by Condition,” select “Greater than,” and enter “0.”
Look at the “URL Encoded Address” column, calculate the total number of URLs.
Enter it in the “Pages with Backlinks” cell.
The “Ratio” column should be automatically calculated.
This is a simple calculation to see link distribution across the entire website (higher is better).
Now let’s gather the final data points:
Investigate Your Competitor’s Brands
This is the most time-consuming part of the process, but it’s necessary to measure brand awareness gaps.
Go to Semrush’s Keyword Overview and enter one of your competitors.
Copy their branded search volume:
Enter it into “Branded Searches.”
Yes, they’ll likely have more with variants, but you’re just trying to get a ballpark idea.
Now open their top 3-5 social media channels and calculate their audience size.
Add it to the sheet and repeat for each.
The next step is to get a rough idea of reputation through reviews.
This vary by industry, but use these guidelines:
| Industry | Best Review Platforms |
| SaaS | Capterra, G2 |
| Local SEO | Google, Yelp |
| Ecommerce | Trustpilot |
| Education | Trustpilot |
Pick one and add the totals to the sheet:
The final data point to collect is brand mentions in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
You can do this manually or use a competitive analysis tool like Otterly.
Pick a valuable keyword with obvious commercial search intent and see how many times your competitors are mentioned across the three major LLM platforms.
Enter into the sheet.
Now that you know what you’re up against on a broad-level, it’s time to drill down to the page level.
Part 2: Page-Level Analysis
Narrowing domain and brand-level gaps with your competitor is a long-term objective.
To get there, you need to drill down to the page level.
Here’s how to do it:
Pick 10 Important Commercial Keywords
Go to the “Pages” tab on the template and enter your ten keywords into each slot.
Compare Relevance
Open Rankability, go to the Content Optimizer, click on “Multiple,” and select “Import URL Content” if it’s for an existing asset.
Keep it uncheck if it’s new.
Enter ten important keywords and the corresponding URL on the same in the URLs box.
Go to the report, click on “Competitors” and enter your target URL:
Now add the word count and Rankability Score to the sheet.
Analyze Basic On-Page SEO
The primary keyword phrase should be in the URL structure, title tag, meta description, H1, and first sentence at a bare minimum.
Use the Detailed Chrome Extension to do a quick on-page SEO analysis of each competitor.
If the page has the primary keyword in each of the five critical spots, it gets a score of 5.
Measure Originality
Are you competing against humans or AI?
It’s important to know because it’ll dictate your SEO content strategy.
Use a tool like Originality to see if your competitor’s content is human written.
Add the data to the sheet:
Study Quality
“Quality” is subjective, so use your best judgement here.
Proper content analysis involves studying the page’s UX, design, readability, and copywriting quality.
If you’re not sure, download the page as a PDF and use this ChatGPT prompt:
Analyze this page's SEO content quality based on the questions below on a scale of 1-5 (5 being exceptional):
Does the page/content satisfy the intent?
Does content strategy/angle add unique value relative to the competitors?
Is the content up-to-date?
Is the page readable, scannable, and easy to digest?
Does the content have 100% unique, high-quality images and videos to break it up?
Is the content helpful?
Is the content original?
Is the content accurate?
Is the content safe?
Does the content demonstrate a high degree of effort?And then add your score:
Collect Internal Links
Go back to the “Unique Inlinks” column from your Screaming Frog export.
Enter the data for the target URL:
Grade Topic Authority
Open Google and use this simple search command:
site:example.com + "[TARGET KEYWORD]"Here’s a live example:
Count the number of pages that are directly related to the topic.
Follow these guidelines for grading:
| Score | Topically Relevant Pages |
| 5 | 26 + |
| 4 | 11-25 |
| 3 | 6-10 |
| 2 | 2-5 |
| 1 | < 1 |
Get Backlink Data
Enter the relevant keyword into Semrush’s Keyword Overview and scroll down to SERP Analysis.
Copy the “Domains” (referring domains), the DR, and enter into the sheet.
What Now?
You now have all the data you need to take intelligent action.
The question is:
- What actions can you take that’ll have the biggest return with the least amount of effort?
Here’s the order of operations that I recommend:
Create an Editorial Calendar
Create a simple kanban board with Asana, Trello, etc.
Then train your team to use this workflow to manage the content creation efficiency.
I also recommend creating templates to streamline the process even more like so:
Upgrade Existing Assets
There is no bigger point of leverage in SEO than upgrading existing assets.
It’s the single most successful SEO tactic I use.
What does it mean to upgrade?
You have a few levers to play with:
Relevance
Use Rankability to identify gaps in your content.
Then fill those gaps to make sure your page is topically relevant (relative to the competitors).
Uniqueness
Regurgitated AI content won’t here.
To win going forward, you need to bring something new and fresh that AI can’t replicate.
Notice what I’ve done in this guide.
I used a custom template and unique processes that AI can’t replicate.
Do more of that.
Quality
Upgrade your design, UX, and copywriting to take your page to the next level.
Once again, everyone knows what AI content looks like.
The cool part is that it’s easier than ever to make your content stand out.
Your competitors are lazier than ever with AI.
So just a little more effort can give you a competitive advantage.
Create New Assets
Start with your existing assets and the support those assets with new content like more commercial pages or blog posts.
One little hack I love to use is to look at related topics as seeds for new content.
For example, look at these suggestions from Rankability:
I could create dedicated pages for user experience, SEO tools, and even link building because i know they’re semantically relevant to the core topic.
Build Internal Links
The first move you should make after publishing is looking for internal linking opportunties.
Two of my favorites are:
Relevant Pages
Search in your CMS to find relevant pages and inject internal links naturally.
Powerful Pages
Go to “Indexed Pages” in Semrush and try to look for powerful pages to drop an internal link.
Create Linkable Assets
Backlink volume is the biggest gap you’ll usually face as a new business.
Sure, you could throw money at it, but link buying doesn’t scale unless you have an unlimited bankroll.
The only scaleable link building technique is creating assets that have linkability.
Become Obsessed with Link Building
Google and AI search engines like ChatGPT love websites with high domain authority.
Make it your mission to get as many high-quality backlinks as possible.
This is the single variable that’ll hold your performance back if you don’t take it seriously.
All it takes is one link-obsessed competitor who will crush you.
Don’t let it happen. Otherwise, you’ll literally pay the price later.
Start by reverse engineering your competitors backlink profiles.
So that’s how do you SEO competitor analysis like a pro.
Good luck out there!