How To Find Your SEO Competitors?

I'm assuming you know your business competitors. But do you know who are your SEO competitors?

In this article:

An SEO competitor, or page-level competitor, is a website that ranks on page 1 of Google for keywords you target. You want to outrank them, so you want to understand why they are well ranked.

SEO competitors are not necessarily direct competitors from your industry, but they might be.

You will want to assess:

Of course, if among your SEO competitors you find your industry competitors, then pay even more attention on why they rank well and how to outrank them as learnings applies directly to you.

Let’s find your SEO competitors with Semrush. The free version is sufficient:

1. Go to Semrush > SEO > Keyword Research > Keyword Overview

2. Enter your most promising keyword

Reach the “SERP Analysis” quadrant section showing your competitors (e.g. “luxury brand logos” 👇)

You have the possibility to navigate until your 100th competitor link with 10 competitors shown per tab (e.g. competitors links from 11 to 20).

However, only the first ones are important to you right now. You’re not going to analyze more than 1 to 3.

Now, you know the name of your main SEO competitor for each of your main keywords. By definition, your competitors SEO is better than yours because they outrank you.

As such, you should analyze deeper their target page, domain, and website characteristics.

For instance, look at:

Try to find elements that they do and you don't, or elements they objectively do better than you.

A shortcut to SEO success is to reproduce these elements, because they perform. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, leverage these elements.

However, reproduce your SEO competitors winning tactics on your own website, using your own specificity. I insist, don't plagiarize content, don't reformulate their work, rather create your own unique content and SEO strategy, with their winning tactics and ideas.