u/Crafty_Engineer_8480

This is probably one of the most useful questions in competitor SEO research.
It's easy to look at the SERP and say:
Imagine "They have more backlinks."
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But there can be a lot more going on.
I'd want to compare:
Content
• Depth
• Relevance
• Search intent
• Freshness
Authority
• Referring domains
• Quality of backlinks
• Domain-level strength
Topical coverage
• How much content do they have around the subject?
Page-level optimization
• Title
• Headings
• Internal links
• Structure
SERP itself
• What kind of pages are Google actually rewarding?

And sometimes the answer isn't obvious at all.
What's your process for diagnosing a big ranking gap?

Do you have a specific checklist you go through, or is it more of an investigation each time?

Something I find interesting is that your business competitors and your SEO competitors aren't necessarily the same.

Let's say you sell accounting software.
Your obvious competitors are other accounting software companies.
But for a search like:
Imagine "How to calculate VAT"
​
your SEO competitors might be:
• An accounting blog
• A government website
• A financial publication
• A completely different SaaS company
• An individual expert

They are competing with you for the same searcher, even though they aren't competing with you commercially.
So maybe there are actually two questions:
Who competes with my business?
vs.
Who competes with me for search visibility?
How do you discover the second group?
Do you already have a process for finding unexpected SEO competitors?

Competitor analysis usually happens like this:
Imagine "Let's analyze our competitors."
​
You do the research, create a report, look at their keywords, backlinks, content, etc.
Then a few months later, you do it again.
But competitors are changing every week.
New pages.
Lost pages.
New backlinks.
Lost backlinks.
Ranking changes.
New topics.
Updated content.
New products.
So I'm wondering if the more useful question is:
Imagine "What changed since the last time I looked?"
​
If you could get only 3 competitor alerts every week, what would you want them to be?
I'd probably choose:
1. Major ranking changes
2. New pages/content
3. Important backlinks gained or lost

But I'm curious what other SEOs would choose.

A competitor has 500 referring domains.
You look through them and think: "We need those links too."
​
But I'm not sure that's always the best way to use competitor backlink data.

There seem to be at least three approaches:
Copy:
Try to get the exact same links.
Study:
Look at what types of websites naturally link to them.
Reverse-engineer:
Figure out what content, research, tools, or assets caused those links in the first place.

The third one seems much more interesting to me.
Instead of asking: "How do I get their link?"
ask: "Why did someone want to link to this page?"
​
How do you personally use competitor backlink data?

We spend a lot of time studying competitors that are doing well.

But I've started thinking that competitors going backwards can be just as interesting.

If a page drops from #2 to #9, for example, I'd want to know:
Was the content outdated?
Did the search intent change?
Did they lose important backlinks?
Did new competitors enter the SERP?
Did Google change what it considers a good result for that query?
Did the page simply decay over time?

Sometimes a competitor's loss can reveal something about what has changed in the SERP.

Do you monitor competitor ranking declines, or do you mainly focus on who's gaining?

I've seen this happen quite a few times.
You notice a competitor suddenly publishing a lot of content around topics you're also interested in.
The natural reaction is:
Imagine "We need to catch up."
​
But I'm not convinced that's always the right response.
I'd rather ask:
• Are these topics actually valuable?
• Are the pages getting traffic?
• Do they target our audience?
• Are they supporting an important topic cluster?
• Is there an actual gap we can fill?
• Can we create something substantially better?

Otherwise you can easily end up creating 50 pieces of content just because your competitor did.
How do you react when a competitor suddenly starts publishing aggressively?
Do you try to match them, ignore them, or investigate first?

Imagine you've been watching a competitor for a while and suddenly their organic visibility starts going up.

What do you investigate first?
I'd probably want to know:
• Which pages are responsible?
• Which keywords changed?
• Did they publish new content?
• Did old pages get updated?
• Did they gain backlinks?
• Did several pages improve at the same time?
• Did something change in the SERPs?

The interesting part is that the traffic increase itself isn't really the useful information.
The useful information is what caused it.

Have you ever spotted a competitor growth spike and actually managed to figure out what caused it?

This is something I've changed my mind about.

Just because:
Imagine Competitor ranks #4
You don't rank
​
doesn't automatically mean:
Imagine "We should create a page for this."
​
There are a lot of questions I'd want to answer first.

Is the keyword actually relevant to the business?
What's the search intent?
Is the SERP dominated by huge sites?
Does the competitor's page actually get meaningful traffic?
Is there commercial value?
Do we already have a page that could target it?
And maybe most importantly:
Would ranking for this keyword actually help the business?

I think competitor keyword research is easy.
Turning those keywords into good opportunities is the harder part.

How do you decide whether a competitor keyword is actually worth pursuing?

I see competitor keyword research discussed a lot, but I'm curious about the actual workflow people use.

Let's say you have 3-5 competitors.
You can pull all the keywords they rank for and compare them against your own domain.

But then you end up with thousands of keywords.
So what do you do next?
Do you filter by:
• Search volume?
• Difficulty?
• Competitor position?
• Commercial intent?
• Relevance?
• Traffic potential?

Or do you approach it completely differently?
I'm especially interested in how people go from "here are 5,000 keywords my competitors rank for" to "these are the 20 opportunities we should actually work on."

Something interesting I've been looking at lately:

We usually measure competitor visibility through Google rankings.

But what happens when the search starts with:
Imagine "What's the best [product] for a small team?"
​
or

Imagine "What are some good alternatives to [competitor]?"
​
The companies appearing in the AI answer aren't necessarily the same companies you'd expect from the Google SERP.

A competitor ranking #8 could be mentioned repeatedly by AI, while the company ranking #2 might barely appear. And it gets even more interesting when you change the use case.

"Best SEO tool"
vs.
"Best SEO tool for a small team"
vs.
"Best tool for finding competitor content gaps"

can produce completely different recommendations.

So I'm starting to think there's a second layer of competitor research:
Google visibility:
"Where does my competitor rank?"
AI visibility:
"For which questions does AI consider my competitor relevant?"
Has anyone here actually tracked this for their own competitors or rankings?

Hello I everyone,

I built a tool that analyses competitors seo activity and I am thinking of what could I add to help people further improve their rankings based on what competitors are doing.

For now my tool shows:
\- when a competitor shipped a new blogpost
\- where competitors rank poorly
\- for what keywords competitor rank and you don’t
\- ranking changes for competitors blog posts over the last week
\- broken backlinks competitors have with traffic on them plus velocity
\- ai mentions where competitors appear but you don’t.

I fee these are a lot but also that are not enough. I added a mcp just to be easier for my users to use the tool but I think I need to develop it more and I don’t know how.

If you were looking to analyze your competitors what would you add to this list? What would you need more to spy on?

Thanks you all!

Hello I everyone,

I built a tool that analyses competitors seo activity and I am thinking of what could I add to help people further improve their rankings based on what competitors are doing.

For now my tool shows:
\- when a competitor shipped a new blogpost
\- where competitors rank poorly
\- for what keywords competitor rank and you don’t
\- ranking changes for competitors blog posts over the last week
\- broken backlinks competitors have with traffic on them plus velocity
\- ai mentions where competitors appear but you don’t.

I fee these are a lot but also that are not enough. I added a mcp just to be easier for my users to use the tool but I think I need to develop it more and I don’t know how.

If you were looking to analyze your competitors what would you add to this list? What would you need more to spy on?

Thanks you all!

Hello I everyone,

I built a tool that analyses competitors seo activity and I am thinking of what could I add to help people further improve their rankings based on what competitors are doing.

For now my tool shows:
\- when a competitor shipped a new blogpost
\- where competitors rank poorly
\- for what keywords competitor rank and you don’t
\- ranking changes for competitors blog posts over the last week
\- broken backlinks competitors have with traffic on them plus velocity
\- ai mentions where competitors appear but you don’t.

I fee these are a lot but also that are not enough. I added a mcp just to be easier for my users to use the tool but I think I need to develop it more and I don’t know how.

If you were looking to analyze your competitors what would you add to this list? What would you need more to spy on?

Thanks you all!

Hello everyone,

I built a competitor analysis saas tool that has paying users and I want to use this and deliver services to funded teams that scale with seo.

Currently I search for them on x, LinkedIn and then try to send them dms and propose my service.

I tried multiple openers, with questions, with the full pitch, with dms where I let them know I researched them so it’s not a ai message, but seems like it does not work. I don’t get replies back only seen.

So what would be a better approach to find these?