What Is Competitor SEO Analysis?
Competitor SEO analysis is the systematic process of evaluating how competing websites perform across the technical, on-page, and off-page signals that influence search engine rankings. Unlike general SEO audits that measure your site against best practices in isolation, competitor analysis answers a more useful question: how does your site perform relative to the sites currently outranking you?
Search engines like Google rank pages in a competitive context. A score of 70/100 on page speed might be good enough to rank if competitors average 55 — but completely insufficient if the top-ranking sites average 90. Competitor analysis reveals the real benchmark you need to beat, not just an abstract ideal.
This tool crawls each competitor and runs a full battery of SEO checks to give you a detailed, evidence-based comparison across every dimension of SEO health.
Why Competitor SEO Analysis Is Essential
Reveals Real Benchmarks
Best-practice guidelines say your page title should be 50-60 characters. But if every top-ranking competitor in your niche uses 70-80 character titles, you need to understand the actual competitive landscape, not just the rulebook. Competitor analysis shows you the real bar.
Prioritizes Effort
You cannot improve everything at once. Competitor analysis tells you exactly which checks have the widest gap between your performance and your competitors. Focus on the high-impact checks where you are significantly behind — those improvements move rankings the most.
Uncovers Quick Wins
Technical SEO issues that competitors are failing at — missing canonicals, broken internal links, mixed content — represent quick wins. Fixing them first gives you an edge without needing to outperform anyone on harder metrics like content quality or backlinks.
Validates Strategy
Before investing months in a content strategy, verify that content quality is actually a differentiating factor in your niche. If all competitors score similarly on content but vary widely on technical SEO, your resources are better spent on the technical side first.
The SEO Checks Explained
Each competitor is evaluated across a full battery of SEO checks. Here is what each measures and why it matters competitively.
Technical Foundation
1. Robots.txt
Validates the robots.txt file for correct syntax, proper disallow rules, and sitemap references. A misconfigured robots.txt can block entire sections of a site from being indexed, silently tanking rankings.
2. XML Sitemap
Checks for sitemap existence, valid URL format, coverage of key pages, and lastmod dates. A well-maintained sitemap helps search engines discover new and updated content faster.
3. URL Structure
Evaluates URL length, special characters, excessive parameters, underscore vs hyphen usage, and URL depth. Clean, descriptive URLs are a small but consistent ranking signal.
4. Canonical URLs
Detects missing canonical tags, self-referencing canonicals, canonical chains, and cross-domain canonicals. Canonical issues cause duplicate content penalties that dilute link equity and can suppress rankings.
5. HTTP Status Codes
Identifies 404 errors, 301/302 redirect chains, soft 404s, and server errors across all crawled pages. Sites with extensive broken pages and redirect chains waste crawl budget and lose link equity.
6. Mixed Content
Finds HTTP resources (images, scripts, stylesheets) loaded on HTTPS pages. Mixed content triggers browser security warnings, hurts Core Web Vitals, and is a trust signal that affects E-E-A-T scoring.
7. X-Robots-Tag Headers
Checks HTTP response headers for noindex, nofollow, and other robot directives. Sites sometimes accidentally add X-Robots-Tag: noindex to production pages, causing catastrophic indexing drops.
8. Internal Links
Analyzes orphan pages (no internal links pointing to them), broken internal links, link depth, and anchor text diversity. Internal linking distributes PageRank and is one of the most directly controllable SEO levers.
On-Page SEO
9. Meta Tags
Evaluates title tag length and uniqueness, meta description quality and coverage, Open Graph tags, Twitter Cards, and structured data schema markup. Meta tags are one of the most influential on-page SEO signals.
10. Content Quality
Measures word count distribution, readability scores, heading structure quality, and keyword placement across the crawled pages. Content quality is one of the strongest differentiators in the competitor comparison.
11. Keyword Optimization
Analyzes keyword frequency, density, placement (title, H1, meta, first 100 words), and consistency across pages. Identifies the most prominent keywords for the domain and evaluates how well they are optimized.
12. E-E-A-T Signals
Evaluates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness signals: author attribution, about pages, contact information, trust pages, and professional credentials. Critical for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) niches.
13. LLM Optimization
Checks whether content is structured for AI citation: structured data markup, semantic HTML, heading hierarchy, content length, statistics density, source citations, and AI crawler access in robots.txt.
Performance & Quality
14. Page Speed
Runs Google PageSpeed Insights on the competitor's homepage to get Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS, INP, FCP, TTFB) plus Lighthouse scores for performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.
15. Spam Score
Evaluates the trust and spam signals that matter, including contact information, about page, privacy policy, HTTPS usage, excessive ads, thin content, and keyword stuffing. A high spam score can trigger Google manual or algorithmic penalties.
16. External Links
Checks all outbound links for broken URLs, HTTP links on HTTPS pages, and link distribution. Broken external links are a minor but easily fixed quality signal.
Off-Page & Social
17. Outbound Links Quality
Analyzes the quality of external links from top pages: domain trust scores, relevance to page content, anchor text quality, and broken link detection. Linking to low-trust or irrelevant sites can be a negative signal.
18. Backlinks Quality
On-demand analysis of backlink profiles: domain rating, referring domains count, anchor text distribution, spam score, and link velocity. Backlinks remain one of Google's strongest ranking signals.
19. Social Media & Ads
Discovers competitor social media presence (YouTube, Instagram), engagement metrics, and advertising activity via Google Ads Transparency Center and Meta Ad Library. Social presence correlates with brand awareness and indirect SEO benefits.
How the Competitor Score Is Calculated
Every check produces a 0-100 score, and those scores roll up into a single overall competitor score on the same 0-100 scale. The checks that influence search rankings the most — like content quality, meta tags, and page speed — count for more than the ones with a lighter impact, so the overall number reflects real-world SEO priority rather than treating every signal as equal.
The checks fall into four broad groups, all factored into the final score:
Technical Foundation
Robots.txt, XML sitemap, URL structure, canonical URLs, HTTP status codes, mixed content, X-Robots-Tag headers, and internal links.
On-Page SEO
Meta tags, content quality, keyword optimization, E-E-A-T signals, and LLM optimization.
Performance & Quality
Page speed and Core Web Vitals, spam score, and external link health.
Off-Page & Social
Outbound link quality, backlink profile, and social media & ads presence.
Checks that cannot be completed (e.g., a page speed API timeout) score a 0 for that competitor, so the comparison stays consistent across every site analyzed.
How to Use Competitor Analysis Results
Step 1: Find the Leader
The Overview tab ranks all analyzed sites including yours by overall SEO score. The site in first place is your primary benchmark. Study what they do differently across each individual check — not just the overall score.
Step 2: Identify Your Gaps
The “Areas to Improve” section on the Overview tab shows checks where you score significantly below the competitive average. Prioritize by impact — a large gap on a high-impact check like content quality matters far more than the same gap on a minor check like X-Robots-Tag headers.
Step 3: Drill Down on Priority Checks
Click any check card in the detail view to open a drill-down modal. These modals show exactly which pages are failing, what specific issues were detected, and what you can do to fix them. For keywords, you will see the competitor's top ranking terms. For E-E-A-T, you will see which trust signals they have that you may be missing.
Step 4: Fix Technical Issues First
Technical SEO issues (broken links, missing canonicals, redirect chains, mixed content) are typically quick to fix and have immediate impact. Address these before investing in content or link-building campaigns, as technical problems can limit the effectiveness of other SEO work.
Step 5: Monitor Progress Over Time
Run competitor analysis monthly to track how gaps are closing. As you improve your scores, re-run the analysis to see whether competitors have also improved or whether new issues have emerged. SEO is a continuous process, not a one-time fix.
Common Competitor SEO Mistakes to Watch For
When analyzing competitors, look for these common weaknesses that you can exploit:
Thin Content
Many sites rank well on brand authority alone despite having thin, poorly optimized content. If the leader has low content quality scores but high rankings, they are vulnerable — better content can overtake them.
Poor Mobile Page Speed
Page speed issues are extremely common, even among well-known brands. Competitors with LCP above 4 seconds or CLS above 0.25 are giving away ranking points that you can capture with proper optimization.
Orphan Pages
Pages with no internal links are common in large sites with poor site architecture. Orphan pages cannot accumulate PageRank and rank poorly. If your competitors have many orphan pages, their content is less visible to search engines than it could be.
Missing Schema Markup
Structured data (Article, FAQ, HowTo, Product schema) enhances search appearance with rich snippets and is increasingly important for LLM citations. Competitors without schema markup are leaving rich result opportunities on the table.