What a competitor analysis answers
Every business knows which competitors it loses to; few know why those competitors rank. The reasons are always specific: they have a page for a search you do not, their page answers the question better, they have links from twenty sites that have never heard of you, or their site is simply faster and cleaner. SEO competitor analysis, within my SEO services, is the work of finding those specific reasons with data and turning them into a plan. It is the fastest way to build a keyword map that is grounded in what actually ranks in your market, which is why it feeds directly into my keyword research and content strategy work.
Who this is for
- Businesses in Nepal watching one or two competitors take the searches they used to own.
- Companies entering Australia, the UK or the USA who need to know what the incumbents rank with before investing.
- Marketing teams that need a defensible plan for a budget request.
- Anyone who has been told “you need more content” or “you need more links” without being told which.
What the analysis includes
- Competitor identification: the sites that actually rank for your commercial searches, which often differ from the businesses you think of as competitors. Directories, marketplaces and publishers are included when they take the clicks.
- Keyword gap: every keyword where a competitor ranks in the top twenty and you do not, or rank well below them, filtered to commercial relevance and grouped by the page that would win it. This is the competitor keyword gap most people ask for, and it is one part of the analysis rather than the whole of it.
- Content gap: the page types and topics competitors cover that you do not (service pages, location pages, comparisons, guides, tools), and a side-by-side of the pages ranking above yours for the terms you share: structure, depth, freshness, proof, calls to action.
- Link gap: the domains linking to two or more competitors and not to you, classified by how they were earned (directory, press, partner, guest content, resource page), which shows which links are realistically available.
- Technical and experience comparison: speed, Core Web Vitals, indexation, structured data and mobile experience against each competitor.
- Local comparison where the map pack matters: categories, reviews, photos and location pages of the businesses in the pack, following the method on my local SEO service page.
- Prioritized plan: gaps ranked by commercial value and by how closable they are, so the first quarter’s work is the pages and links with the best return, not the whole market.
How the analysis runs
- Scope. Your commercial services or products, target markets and the competitors you name; I add the ones the data shows.
- Data pull. Rankings, keywords, pages and links for you and each competitor from Ahrefs and Semrush, plus Search Console for your own site, plus a crawl of each site.
- Filtering by hand. Tool exports contain thousands of irrelevant terms; the analysis is in deciding which gaps matter for your business, which no tool does.
- Page-level comparison. The ranking pages for your priority terms read and compared, not just scored.
- Plan. Pages to create, pages to improve, links to pursue and technical fixes, in priority order with the reasoning.
- Walkthrough. A call to go through the findings and decide what you do in-house and what I do.
A competitor analysis for one market with three to five competitors takes five to eight working days.
What competitor analysis is not
- A keyword gap export with ten thousand rows and no judgement.
- An instruction to copy the competitor’s site; the plan targets what you can do better or differently, because a copy ranks second at best.
- A one-time document. Competitors change; on retainers I re-run the core comparison quarterly.
- A substitute for an audit of your own site. If your site cannot be crawled, the gap analysis explains nothing; that is the job of the SEO audit service, and the two are often done together.
What you receive
- The competitor set with the evidence for each.
- Keyword gap, content gap and link gap spreadsheets, filtered and grouped by page.
- Page-by-page comparison for your priority terms.
- The prioritized plan with reasoning, and the walkthrough call.
Competitor analysis is included in every tier on the SEO packages and pricing page as part of the initial research and repeated quarterly at Growth and Enterprise; it is available as a standalone project, quoted on request.
Next step
Request a free competitor snapshot: name two competitors and I will reply with the three largest gaps between you and them and whether a full analysis is worth commissioning. All related work is under SEO services.