Analyze Your Competitors
SEO competitor analysis is the practice of studying the businesses ranking above you so you can see which search terms they rank for, which pages carry that traffic, and where their coverage stops. Those stopping points become your openings. Most of the work runs on free tools, and one focused afternoon of it beats a month of guessing.
- By Mike Purvis Co-founder of NH Strategic Marketing
- August 30, 2020
- September 1, 2026
How Spying On Your Competitors Can Help Grow Your Business
It’s been said that “success leaves clues,” so it’s important to take a look at your competitors and see what they’re doing to market their business. When you do so, you can gain insights into how your competitors are getting their traffic, and you can discover what’s working for them and establish a plan to use the same methods to grow your own business.
In addition to seeing what your competitors are doing online, you can identify holes in their online marketing strategy to identify where you can leverage your expertise and marketing strategy to come out ahead.
There are many ways to ethically spy on your competitors and it’s important to have a solid competitor research strategy that you use often to ensure that your business is always ahead of the game.
Ahrefs studied roughly 14 billion pages and found that 96.55% of them pull no traffic from Google. The pages in the small remainder are no mystery. They sit in the results for terms people type, they answer the question completely, and other sites point at them. SEO competitor research is how you find out which of those pages belong to businesses in your market, and what they did to earn the spot.
What SEO Competitor Analysis Shows You Before You Spend A Dollar
The company you lose bids to and the website sitting above you in Google are often two different businesses. A paving contractor might lose jobs to the outfit two towns over, then search “driveway paving [town]” and find a directory page, a national lead site, and a forum thread holding the top three spots.
Those pages are the ones standing between that contractor and the phone call, so those are the pages worth studying.
Reading them answers three questions in one sitting. Which businesses and page types is Google rewarding for the searches you care about. What sits inside those pages that a searcher finds satisfying. And which trust signals sit behind them, from reviews to mentions on other sites.
Answer all three and your next month of marketing has a target instead of a hunch.
The stakes sit in the click distribution. Backlinko’s analysis of Google click-through rates puts the first organic result at roughly 39.8% of clicks, with position two taking about 18.7%. Two or three placements decide who gets the phone call, which is why knowing exactly who holds them is worth a couple of hours.
Anyone can guess at what Google wants. The results page tells you.
There is a second payoff that surprises people. SEO competitor research usually shortens the list of work rather than lengthening it.
Once you can see that the pages above you succeed on service-by-service depth and review volume, the ideas that were never going to move the needle fall away on their own. If you want the wider context on how the three page-one placements fit together, our guide to ranking on Google page one lays out the sequence.
Different Ways You Can Spy On Your Competitors
Which Web Design Platform They Use
Finding out what platform your competitors’ websites are on can be good knowledge to have in your back pocket, particularly if you are indecisive about a redesign of your small business website. You might be wondering why a specific competitor is outranking you on search engines, or why their site looks so much different, or better, than yours.
A lot of the DIY website builders can help you to create websites that may look nice, but they do not pack the SEO punch that your small business needs if you want to outrank your competitors online.
At NH Strategic Marketing, we develop almost all of our clients’ sites on WordPress and they rank higher than these DIY website building platforms. All things being equal, the platform your website sits on matters.
You can easily spy on your competitors and discover which platform they use by hovering over their website, right-clicking with your mouse, and viewing source. There, you can look through the code to determine which platform they are running.
A browser extension such as Wappalyzer does the same read in one click, and it also names their analytics, chat widget, and booking tool.
How Fast Their Website Loads Compared To Yours
Website speed is an important ranking factor in this day and age. Your website needs to load fast. If your competitor’s site is loading faster than yours, it could be affecting how your small business website ranks on Google.
Page experience signals, Core Web Vitals among them, feed into how Google assesses a page, and a slow site loses the visitor before the page has a chance to sell anything.
You can easily test how fast your site loads using this free tool called GT Metrix. Plug in your competitor’s URL and you can see how fast it is. Then, check your website to see how you stack up against your competitors. We put numbers to the revenue side of this in our piece on why site speed matters.
Online Reviews
Online reviews matter. Think about your own search and online shopping behavior. Don’t you look at the reviews online before visiting a restaurant, buying something online, or hiring a local contractor? Yeah, everyone else does too.
Online reviews are the new “word of mouth” marketing. By getting more reviews on your Google Business page, Facebook page, and the directories that serve your trade, you can position your business as the go-to option in your market. People look at the overall review rating, the number of reviews, and the feedback your customers have about you.
The same is true of your competitors. If they have a lot more reviews than you do, it could be holding back your online lead generation.
47% of people will not consider a business with fewer than 20 reviews, which makes review count one of the few competitor numbers you can close in a single season. Two things to write down while you are looking:
- How many reviews the top three hold, and
- How quickly the owner replies.
If keeping pace is the sticking point, our Google review management service handles the asking and the responding, and our Google Business Profile optimization guide covers the listing itself step by step.
Paid Advertising on Google (Google Ads)
Another powerful competitive research strategy we employ is looking to see if your competitors are running a Google Ads PPC campaign. We can tell if they are running Google Ads, and we can also gain insights into their monthly budget, what keywords they are paying to bid on, and how long they have been running ads.
We have some clients that are spending $500 a month on Google Ads while others are spending $30,000 a month. These kinds of insights can be very powerful to help improve a pay per click advertising campaign. If you have a competitor that is buying online ads, we can take a look and share the juicy details with you.
You can see a good slice of this yourself for free. Google’s Ads Transparency Center lists the ads a verified advertiser is running across Search, YouTube, and Display, with no login required. Search their domain, set the region to the United States, and read their headlines.
An ad that has been live for months is an ad that is paying for itself, which makes it the closest thing to a free market test you will find.
How To Spy On Your Competitor’s Paid Advertising On Facebook
Facebook and Instagram keep a public record of the ads running on their platforms, which makes this one of the simplest places to read a competitor’s message word for word. Facebook advertising can be an effective and profitable way for your business to stay top of mind with your ideal prospects and customers, and studying live ads shows you the offers landing in your market right now.
Here is a simple way to spy on their Facebook ads:
Open the Meta Ad Library in your browser. No account is needed.
Set the country to United States (or you preffered country) and the category to “All ads.”
Type your competitor’s business name in the search box and select their Page.
Read the ads that come back. You will see the creative, the copy, the format, and the date the ad started running.
Click through to the landing page behind the ad, then note which ads have been live the longest. Run duration is the free signal that an offer is working.
Do the same for your own Page. Seeing your ads and theirs side by side settles the question of who is speaking more clearly to the same customer.
How Do We Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis for Our Clients?
The moves above tell you plenty about how a competitor markets. The search side has its own sequence, and running it in order saves the most time.
Here is the SEO competitor research process our team follows on client accounts, from the first search through to the list of work that comes out the other end. Nothing in steps one through four requires a paid subscription.
1. Find out who Google counts as your competitor
Open an incognito window and search five to ten terms a ready buyer would type. Service plus town, service plus “near me,” service plus “cost.” Write down the domains holding positions one through ten.
The names that show up across several searches are your search competitors, and that list rarely matches the list in your head. Directories, review sites, and Reddit threads count, because they occupy the space you want.
Google Search Console gives you the other half of the picture at no cost. Export your top queries by impressions and check who ranks alongside you for the ones producing business.
2. Pull the keyword gap analysis
A keyword gap report compares the terms you rank for against the terms a competitor ranks for, then hands you the difference. Semrush calls it Keyword Gap and Ahrefs calls it Content Gap. Filter to “missing” terms first, where they rank on page one and you do not appear, then sort by organic search volume and difficulty to find the reachable ones.
Look at clusters rather than single terms. If an organic competitor holds forty keywords about one service and you hold two, the shortfall is depth of coverage on that service, and a single blog post will not close it.
3. Read the search engine results pages (SERPs)
Type your target term into Google and study the shape of the page (search intent). Are the top ten service pages, guides, or listicles? Roughly how long are they? Is there a map pack, a People Also Ask box, a video carousel, an AI Overview? The format on screen is Google describing what it believes the searcher wants, so match that format before arguing with it. The People Also Ask questions are subtopics handed to you at no cost.
4. Take apart the page sitting above you
Open the top two or three results and work through the same checklist on all of them: heading structure, subtopics covered, photos and video, internal links to supporting pages, schema markup, a named author with credentials, and the date of the last update. Google’s own people-first content guidance puts trust above the rest of the E-E-A-T signals, and first-hand experience is the quickest way to show it.
In our experience, the most useful finding here is almost never word count. It is the subtopic they cover that you skipped. A shorter page that answers the pricing question will beat a longer page that avoids it.
5. Perform a competitor backlink analysis
Run a competitor domain through a free backlink profile checker and read the sites pointing at them. For local businesses the sources repeat: chambers of commerce, supplier and manufacturer directories, trade associations, local news, sponsorships, and the charity work they were doing anyway.
A site that has backlinks to a competitor has already decided this subject is worth a mention, which makes it the warmest prospect on your list. Our local link building service works from lists exactly like that one.
6. Check who the AI answers name
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Google’s AI Overview the question your target audience would ask, then note which businesses get named and which sources get cited. Ahrefs study found AI Overviews associated with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page, so being quoted inside the answer now carries weight of its own.
If a competitor gets named and you do not, compare the two pages for self-contained answers, sourced numbers, question-style headings, and consistent business details across the web. That is the work behind our AI search visibility service.
How Often To Repeat Your SEO Competitive Analysis?
Quarterly suits most local businesses. That is long enough for the competitive landscape to change and short enough to catch it early. Run an extra pass in three other situations: after a ranking drop, before publishing a page you care about, and when a new name appears in the top ten.
| When | What to look at | Time it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Quarterly review | Full pass, refresh the competitor list and the competitor keyword analysis. | 2 to 3 hours |
| After a ranking drop | The affected terms alone, and which page replaced yours. | 30 minutes |
| Before a major page goes live | Depth, format, and links required to compete on day one. | 45 minutes |
| New competitor appears | Their top pages, review count, and ad activity. | 30 minutes |
Free SEO Competitor Analysis Tools That Cover Most Of This Work
Paid platforms make the reporting faster and the exports cleaner. They are not the entry fee. A small business owner can run the whole sequence above with the following list and a spreadsheet.
| SEO Tool | What it shows you | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search, incognito | Who ranks, which page types win, which SERP features appear. | Free |
| Google Search Console | Your own queries, positions, and the terms you nearly rank for. | Free |
| Google Ads Transparency Center | Competitor ads across Search, YouTube, and Display. | Free |
| Meta Ad Library | Live Facebook and Instagram ads, creative, and run dates. | Free |
| GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights | Load speed and Core Web Vitals side by side with theirs. | Free |
| Google Business Profile listings | Review counts, categories, photo cadence, owner replies. | Free |
| Ahrefs or Moz free backlink checkers | A rough referring-domain count and the top linking sites. | Free tier |
One spreadsheet with a row per competitor and columns for ranking terms, review count, referring domains, ad activity, and last content update gives you a benchmark you can compare against next quarter. Service area businesses have a few extra columns worth adding, and we cover those in our guide to SEO for a local service area business.
Turning What You Find in Competitor Analysis Report Into Booked Jobs
Competitive analysis strategy pays when it changes something on the site. We sort strengths and weaknesses into three lists before anyone touches a page, because the three lists move on different timelines and cost different amounts.
The content list
Services and questions a competitor covers that you have skipped. One page per product or service beats one page listing eleven services, and the pricing question deserves an answer even when the answer is a range. This list is where organic search traffic comes from over the following six to twelve months.
The page upgrade list
Pages you have already published that sit at position eleven or twelve. Adding the subtopics the top results cover, refreshing the photos, and pointing a few internal links at them tends to outperform starting something from scratch. This is the fastest-moving list of the three.
The trust list
Reviews, mentions, local links, licensing, warranty details, and named people on the page. This list decides who wins the click once you both appear, and it does the quiet work of convincing the visitor after they land.
Our paid and organic traffic services run against these lists together, since ads reveal which terms produce calls and search engine optimization makes those terms cheaper to hold over time. There is more on that pairing in our piece on running Google Ads and local SEO together.
Curious How Your Competitors Are Marketing?
Like we said before, success leaves clues. One of the quickest ways to get clarity on how to market your business online is to hold a competitor research strategy and always know what they are doing. Knowing where and how to look is a skill, and it is one that our team of digital marketing experts excels at.
If you would like some insights on how our digital marketing agency can help you get more traffic and search engine rankings with your online marketing, we invite you to reach out for a free consultation. Our team would be happy to dig into how your competitors are marketing online, how they are getting website traffic, and how you can outpace them.
Frequently Asked Questions About SEO Competitor Analysis
Q: Is spying on your competitors legal and ethical?
Yes, when you use public information. Search results, published web pages, Google Business Profiles, ad libraries, and page source are all openly available by design. Ethical competitor research means reading what a business chose to publish. It does not involve private accounts, scraped customer data, or misrepresenting who you are.
Q: How do I see what ads my competitors are running?
Search their domain in Google’s Ads Transparency Center for Search, YouTube, and Display ads, and search their Page name in the Meta Ad Library for Facebook and Instagram. Both are free and need no login. Ads running for several months are the ones earning their keep.
Q: What is a keyword gap analysis?
A competitor keyword gap analysis compares the search terms your site ranks for against those a competitor ranks for and returns the difference. Filtering to “missing” terms shows keyword opportunities where they appear on page one and you do not appear at all, which is the shortest route to a content strategy grounded in proven demand.
Q: Can I do SEO competitor research without paid tools?
Yes. Google Search in incognito, Google Search Console, the Google Ads Transparency Center, the Meta Ad Library, PageSpeed Insights, and the free tiers of Ahrefs and Moz cover the majority of the work. Paid platforms speed up keyword gap reports and exports rather than providing findings you cannot reach otherwise.
Q: What should I do first with the results?
Start with the pages you already have that sit at position eleven or twelve. Adding the subtopics your competitors cover and pointing internal links at those pages produces movement in weeks. New content and link building follow, since both compound over months rather than days.