r/SEOcompetitors

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"
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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."
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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?"
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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."
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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?"
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How do you personally use competitor backlink data?

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."
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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?