Competitive research is an important part of the SEO strategy process. Initially Bill Hartzer will ask for a list of competitors. Bill Hartzer will use this list to come up with a list of competitors and then a list of keyword competitors. Keyword competitor may not actually be real competitors of your business, but a list of websites that are showing up in the search results for your most important keywords. These lists are used during the keyword research process, as well as during the planning of the SEO strategy.
SEO Deliverables
There are only a few deliverables when it comes to competitive research. A lot of the information Bill gets from competitive research is included as a part of our SEO strategy, and our link strategy as well.
What Competitive Research Includes
Competitive research for SEO (search engine optimization) answers a simple question: who is actually taking the search traffic you want, and why? The answer is rarely the list of competitors a business hands me at the start of an engagement. Your business competitors are the companies you bid against and lose deals to. Your search competitors are the websites that occupy the first page of Google for the queries that matter to you, and the two lists overlap less than most people expect. A regional law firm may find that its real search competitors are a legal directory, a publisher of consumer guides and a national brand with a well-built location page, none of which it has ever met across a conference table.
The work begins with your list, then widens. I pull the organic ranking data for your most important keywords from Semrush and compare it with Google Search Console, which shows the queries where your site already appears but is not being clicked. From that I build two lists: direct competitors who rank for the same commercial terms, and content competitors who rank for the informational queries your customers search before they are ready to buy. Both lists feed the keyword research and the content plan, because the gap between what you rank for and what they rank for is the plan.
What I Look at on a Competitor’s Website
Ranking data tells you who is winning. The site itself tells you how. For each search competitor I review the site architecture, the pages that earn the most organic traffic, the depth and format of their content, their internal linking, their page speed and Core Web Vitals, their structured data, and the backlink profile from Majestic and Semrush. A competitor that outranks you on a term is usually doing one or two things measurably better, and identifying which ones saves months of guessing. If their product pages carry detailed specifications and yours carry a paragraph, that is a content gap. If they have four hundred referring domains and you have forty, that is a link gap, and no amount of on-page work closes it by itself.
I also look for what competitors are doing badly. Thin location pages, duplicate content across subdomains, broken redirects after a redesign, or a reliance on tactics Google has since penalized are opportunities. A competitor that is one algorithm update away from losing its rankings is not a competitor you need to outspend.
How the Research Is Used
Competitive research is not a standalone report that sits in a folder. It shapes three parts of the engagement. The keyword research uses competitor rankings to find terms you have not targeted. The SEO strategy uses the content and technical gaps to decide what to build or fix first. The link strategy uses competitor backlink profiles to find the publications, directories and industry sites that already link to companies like yours and are therefore likely to link to you. The research is refreshed when rankings move, because search competitors change more often than business competitors do.
Common Mistakes in Competitive Research
The most common mistake is studying the wrong competitors. The second is copying what a competitor does without knowing whether it works; a tactic that ranks a large brand with thousands of links may do nothing for a smaller site. The third is treating competitive research as a one-time task. Rankings change with every core update, and the competitor set for a keyword can turn over completely in a year. Competitive research done well is a recurring comparison, not a snapshot.