Competitor SEO Analysis: 5 Tactics to Reverse Engineer Their Rankings

SEO can feel endless. You spend hours on keyword research, creating perfect content, and pursuing valuable backlinks. And after all that, your competitors can still outrank you on Google.

It can be extremely frustrating, especially when you feel certain you’ve done everything right. You might have asked yourself, “what are they doing that I’m not?” Fortunately, there’s a way to find out. Competitive analysis is a way of ‘spying’ on your competitors to take a peek into their toolkits, see which keywords they’re targeting, identify which websites are linking to them, and understand what kind of content is driving their traffic.

You might be thinking, “Spying!? That sounds unethical!” But have no fear; competitive analysis is perfectly ethical. It doesn’t involve hacking into anyone’s systems or doing anything illegal. Conducting competitive analysis involves using data that is publicly available and SEO tools to reverse-engineer your competitors’ efforts.

Some business owners feel uneasy about ‘spying’, but it’s strategic. Plus, it’s almost certainly what your competitors are doing to improve their SEO. Keeping an eye on your rivals is essential in such a competitive game like SEO, and it makes your decisions so much more informed.

This article will explore how to conduct competitive analysis effectively. You’ll learn who to watch, what to look for, which tools to use, and how to use the data you discover to your advantage. Whether you’re a small startup or a big e-commerce brand, these techniques will help you understand why your competitors are ranking so well and how you can catch up.

Let’s dive in.

How to spy on your competitors’ SEO strategies

We’ll start off by exploring how to conduct competitor analysis, answering the frequently asked questions about this strategy:

Who should I spy on?

You probably have an idea of your main competitors, but direct SEO competitors aren’t always the same as your business competitors. Even if they don’t offer the exact same products or services as your business, your direct SEO competitors are those who are ranking on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to rank for.

To find them, search your main keywords in Google using an incognito window. Look at the top results that consistently appear and take note of any sites that show up across multiple relevant queries. Pay special attention to:

• Companies that are a similar size to yours or share the same audience
• Businesses ranking locally or in the same niche as yours
• Content-driven competitors like blogs or directories that dominate informational search terms

You can begin your analysis once you have a shortlist of three to five competitors.

What tools do I need?

There are several tools that will help with your competitor analysis efforts. Some popular ones include:

• For keyword and backlink analysis: Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz
• For technical SEO: Screaming Frog
• To track content changes over time: Wayback Machine
• For plugins and technologies: BuiltWith
• For content performance: BuzzSumo
• For social media listening: Sprout Social
• For email campaigns: Owletter
• For online mentions: Google Alerts

Before committing to a whole range of tools, continue to read this article so you can determine which tools will be useful to your strategy. With different pricing plans and features, you should be able to cultivate a toolkit that suits your business’s budget and needs.

What do I need to do?

There are a few different aspects of competitive analysis. These involve looking at:

• Keywords
• Content
• Backlinks
• Technical SEO
• Social media and content distribution

Using one of the tools listed above, keyword analysis is when you explore both the organic and paid keywords that your competitors are ranking for. When doing so, look out for:

• Keywords driving the most traffic
• Keywords they rank for, but you don’t
• High-volume keywords with low difficulty

Keyword analysis tools often allow you to filter by keyword intent (e.g., informational, transactional, or navigational) so you can focus on the terms that are most aligned with your business goals.

In terms of content, you should first visit their top-performing pages. Make an effort to notice:

• Whether they publish long-form guides or short, punchy articles
• How often they update their older content
• Whether their content is targeting informational or commercial queries
• Whether they use specific formatting styles (e.g., listicles, how-tos, and FAQs)

Tools like BuzzSumo allow you to see what content produced by your competitors gets shared the most. This can clue you in on what resonates with their audience.

Next, onto backlinks. You should examine your competitors’ backlink profiles using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to get insights into potential backlink opportunities for yourself. Pay attention to:

• The total number and quality of backlinks
• Where their best backlinks come from (e.g., industry blogs, news outlets, directories, etc.)
• Anchor text distribution

Looking at technical SEO involves understanding how a competitor’s website is structured. You can use tools like Screaming Frog to crawl their site, learning about their category pages, internal linking, use of schema markup, URL slugs, mobile-friendliness, and page load speed. You should also identify whether they use content silos or topic clusters, as you might want to replicate their efforts.

Your fifth thing you should look for is competitors’ social media and content distribution efforts. While these aren’t exactly SEO, a lot of organic visibility is indebted to how content is shared and repurposed. So, it might be valuable to keep an eye out for their social media activity, newsletter archives, LinkedIn articles, and any other platform activities.

How often should I check in with my competitors?

If you’ve never done competitor analysis before, you’ll probably want to do a big, deep dive initially. Once that’s done, and you’re just looking to stay in the loop with their recent activity, a monthly check-in should be sufficient for most small to mid-sized businesses.

If your competitors are more dynamic (i.e., they’re producing new content regularly and aggressively amping up their SEO efforts), you might feel more in touch with fortnightly checks. The only time a weekly check-in would be necessary is if you’re running a campaign against specific keywords.

How long will it take to get useful insights?

Within a few hours of researching your competitors, you’ll be able to uncover useful insights that can inform your strategy, particularly with keywords and backlinks. Other things might take a few weeks of observation, like how their content performs over time or how often they update it.

How to use competitors’ SEO data to your advantage

Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to plan what you’re going to do with what you find. Equipped with all your competitive data, it’s time to make sense of it, make comparisons, and apply it to your own SEO efforts.

So, here are five tactics to reverse engineer your findings:

1. Compare keyword strategies

As mentioned earlier, once you’ve pulled keyword data from competitor sites, you can organise it into a few categories:

• Keywords that they rank for, but you don’t
• Keywords you both rank for, but they outrank you
• High-value keywords with low competition
• Keyword intent

This will give you a few opportunities:

Firstly, finding untapped keywords. If your competitors are getting traffic from long-tail keywords or niche questions that you’re not targeting yet, that’s plenty of inspiration for better content created by you. Questions and long-tail keywords also tend to be less competitive.

Secondly, you can improve your existing keywords. For shared keywords where your competitors are ranking higher, it’s worth looking more closely to see what they’re doing differently. Is their content more in-depth? Do they use different subheadings or FAQs? Are their pages better optimised with internal links?

Whatever you find can be used to optimise your own content, whether it’s adding missing sections, improving readability, answering questions more clearly, or including newer statistics to support your writing.

Thirdly, you can use keywords to identify mismatches in intent. Sometimes businesses target keywords without matching the right content type. If a competitor outranks you with a product page for a keyword that you’re using on a blog post, that tells you the search intent favours a different format. Then, you can adjust accordingly and optimise your product pages.

2. Use backlinks to guide outreach

Your next tactic is to use backlink data as a blueprint for your outreach efforts. The first thing to do is to group your competitors’ backlinks by type. I.e., industry blogs, news publications, directories, forum mentions, resource pages, and guest posts. If a particular source stands out as more prolific, that’s where you should start your outreach.

Next, you can use tools like Moz or Ahrefs to evaluate the quality of the backlinks. I.e., assessing their domain rating or domain authority. Look closer at the links with higher authority; these are probably helping significantly with your competitors’ rankings.

Another thing you can do is to identify what sort of content is earning your competitors the most links. For example, are they guides, statistic pages, thought leadership, tutorials, tools, or templates? You might find that it’s a good idea to incorporate a new type of content into your strategy.

3. Dissect their content strategies to improve your own

Content is very important, and it isn’t just about keywords. When looking at your competitors’ top-performing content, pay particular attention to:

• The length and depth of the content
• Whether they include custom images, infographics, or videos
• What tone and style they adopt in their content
• How they break up their content with headings, lists, and formatting
• How often they post or update their content

4. Strengthen your site structure and UX

If your competitor ranks consistently across multiple content pieces, part of their strength might come from strong internal linking and a clear site structure. Use Screaming Frog or a manual crawl to observe their page speed and mobile friendliness, how they group content into categories or silos, and whether they’re using breadcrumbs, schema, or jump links.

Investigate whether their blog is easier to navigate, if their product pages link to relevant content, and if their internal linking strategy is spreading authority across pages. Then, apply what’s working for them to your own site. For example, you might decide to build topic clusters around core themes and make sure high-traffic articles are linking to key landing pages.

5. Look into the past for trends

Your final tactic is focused on looking at how your competitors’ strategies have evolved over time. In particular, this means looking at:

• How frequently they refresh their content
• How fast they catch on to new SEO trends
• Which topics they focus more on, and which ones they leave
• How they’ve changed their pages over time

The Wayback Machine can show you archived versions of old web pages. If you see a page that used to be short but was expanded significantly around the time their ranking improved, that’s a good indicator that content depth or refreshes contributed to their success.

Actionable steps after competitor analysis

To summarise, here’s what you might do when turning your insights into an effective action plan:

• Update your blog posts with a better structure or added value
• Optimise underperforming keywords you already rank for
• Add internal links to orphaned content (pages that aren’t linked to by others on your site)
• Reach out to backlink sources that link to your competitors
• Create new content around high-opportunity keywords that competitors rank for
• Build out content clusters or topic hubs
• Develop linkable assets like tools, reports, or resources
• Improve site structure and user experience
• Position yourself as a topical authority in areas they dominate
• Diversify your traffic sources if they’re dependent on SEO alone

Many of these steps are SEO best practices, but the difference is that you’re not working in isolation. You’ll be building your strategy based on what’s actually working in your niche, giving your SEO efforts a much higher chance of success.

Final thoughts

By comparing what works, identifying what’s missing, and adapting what you learn to your own goals and audience, you can steadily build an SEO presence that not only matches your competitors but outperforms them!

If you’d like some assistance with competitive analysis or your SEO strategy in general, you might be interested in purpleseo. This is our dedicated service to helping businesses grow through their organic efforts. Enquire below about your specific needs or book a free consultation:

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