See exactly how your competitors get traffic.

Competitor analysis in SEO answers practical questions: who takes the clicks you want, how much traffic they get, which pages bring it, which keywords you are missing and which sites link to them. It does not tell you what to copy. It tells you where demand is proven and where the competition is weaker than it looks.

Website competitor analysis needs a tool for most of it, because the data is not visible from the outside. Google shows you one results page at a time; a tool estimates a domain’s rankings across millions of keywords.

Your business competitors and your search competitors overlap, but they are not the same list. A shop selling hiking boots competes in Google with other shops, but also with outdoor magazines, marketplaces and review sites.

1. 1List the three to five businesses you already know you compete with.
2. 2Look up your own domain’s organic competitors: the sites that share the most keywords with you.
3. 3Check the results for your most important keywords and note who keeps appearing above you.
4. 4Keep a shortlist of three to five sites that are close to your size or slightly bigger. Giants teach less, because their authority explains most of their rankings.

Open each competitor’s domain and read four things.

• The traffic trend over two years shows who is growing, and whether a drop hit the whole market or one site.
• Top pages show which topics and formats bring their visits: category pages, buying guides, tools or glossaries.
• Traffic value shows what the same visits would cost in ads, a quick way to see how commercial their traffic is.
• Keyword movements, new, lost, improved and declined, show what they worked on last month.

No website traffic checker can see another site’s analytics. Site Explorer estimates organic traffic from the outside: it takes the keywords a domain ranks for, the monthly search volume of each and the share of clicks each position usually gets, and adds them up.

• It counts organic visits from Google. Direct, paid, social and referral visits are not in the number.
• It is an estimate. Keywords outside the database, brand searches and SERP features that take clicks can make the real figure higher or lower.
• It is consistent. Every site is calculated the same way, so the estimate is reliable for comparing sites and spotting trends, even when the absolute number is off.

A keyword gap is the core of competitor keyword analysis: it compares your site with your competitors and lists the keywords they rank for and you do not. It is the fastest way to build a list of proven topics.

How to read a keyword gap

• Missing: every competitor ranks, you do not. Usually a whole topic you have not covered.
• Untapped: some competitors rank. Good candidates when the difficulty is low.
• Weak: you rank, but below them. Often the quickest wins: the page exists and needs improving.

Filter the result by volume and difficulty, group what remains into topics and check your keyword research for the questions around each one.

When a competitor with similar content ranks above you, links are often the difference. Open their backlink profile and look at the referring domains, the anchors and the pages that attract the most links.

Then run a link gap: the sites that link to your competitors but not to you. A site that links to two or three of them already writes about your topic, so it is a far better outreach target than a cold list. The backlink checker explains how to judge each one.

Competitor analysis is not a one-off. Rankings change weekly, and a rival’s new page can take your position in days.

• Add your competitors to the rank tracker so every keyword you track is checked for them too, with share of voice over time.
• Turn on an alert for when a competitor passes you on a tracked keyword.
• Check whether AI assistants recommend them instead of you with AI Visibility.
• Rerun the keyword gap every quarter to catch the topics they started on.

End every analysis with a short list: the missing topics to write, the weak pages to improve and the link targets to contact, each with an owner. Everything else is background.

A competitor analysis example

Say you sell hiking boots online. Organic competitors show two outdoor stores and a gear magazine sharing most of your keywords. Their top pages reveal that buying guides bring the magazine more traffic than any of the stores’ categories. The keyword gap lists sizing and waterproofing questions that all three rank for and you do not, and the link gap shows hiking clubs linking to both stores. The plan: two buying guides, a sizing page, better copy on the categories where you rank below them, and outreach to the clubs.

In Aseoma, Site Explorer covers traffic, keywords, top pages, competitors, keyword gap across up to five domains and batch analysis, and each report connects to the domain’s backlinks. Starter includes 30 research reports a day, Pro 200 and Agency 1,000, and every plan starts with a 7-day free trial. See the pricing page.