Competitive analysis strategies
The competitors that matter in search are the sites that appear for your keywords, not always the businesses you think of first.
How to find your real search competitors
The sites in your results are your competitors, whether or not you sell the same thing.
02 · 6 min readKeyword gap analysis: what rivals rank for and you do not
Compare ranked keywords with a rival, and remove brand terms first.
03 · 5 min readHow accurate are competitor traffic estimates?
Use estimates for direction, and know what can mislead you.
04 · 6 min readHow to read a competitor's backlinks before copying them
Find out whether their authority is earned, repeated or bought.
About competitive analysis
In search, your competitors are the sites that appear when your customers search, which is not always the list of businesses you would name. These guides show how to find them from the results themselves, compare what they rank for, and judge how much of their traffic and authority is real.
The aim is a short list of decisions: keywords to add, pages to improve and sites worth contacting, not a large spreadsheet of someone else's data.
More strategies are added regularly. Each one links to the tool that runs it.