How to do a competitor website analysis (and why it matters)
To analyse a competitor’s website, work through six areas in a fixed order: where its traffic comes from, which keywords it ranks for, what content it publishes, who links to it, how the site performs for a visitor, and what it offers and charges. Free tools cover the first pass, paid SEO tools add estimates and history, and the output is a short list of gaps you can act on. This guide sets out that process so you can repeat it each quarter, with a Perth example at the end. Checking a competitor’s Google Ads spend and auction insights is a separate exercise and sits outside this guide.
What is a competitor website analysis?
A competitor website analysis is a structured review of how a rival’s site attracts visitors and turns them into customers, using public data and third-party tools. It covers marketing (traffic, keywords, content, links) and the site itself (speed, mobile experience, navigation, offers, proof). The purpose is to find what they do that you do not, and what they do badly that you can do well, not to copy them.
Why is competitor analysis important?
Competitor analysis is important because it replaces guesswork with a benchmark. Without it you choose keywords, topics and offers based on what you think matters. With it you can see which pages bring competitors their search traffic, which topics they have left uncovered, which sites link to them and might link to you, and where their site frustrates the customers you both want. It also tells you what good looks like in your market, so your own targets are realistic.
Which competitors should you analyse?
Analyse three to five competitors: the businesses that win the customers you lose, plus the sites that outrank you for your most valuable searches. There are three kinds.
- Direct competitors sell the same service to the same customers in the same area.
- Indirect competitors solve the same problem a different way, such as a DIY product against a trade service.
- Search competitors rank for your keywords whether or not they compete for the sale: directories, marketplaces, publishers and national brands.
Find them by searching your own top ten services and noting who appears, asking new customers who else they considered, and checking the competitor reports in an SEO tool, which list the domains that share the most keywords with yours.
How to do a competitor website analysis, step by step
Record everything in one spreadsheet with a row per competitor and a column per check, so the next review is a comparison rather than a fresh start.
1. Traffic sources
Start with how each competitor’s visitors arrive: organic search, paid search, social, referral, direct and email. Traffic estimation tools give a modelled split and a rough monthly volume for any domain. Treat the numbers as estimates, because they are built from panel data and clickstream samples, and compare competitors against each other rather than trusting the absolute figure.
What to note: whether they depend on organic or paid search, whether social sends meaningful traffic, and whether one or two referring sites carry them. A competitor that is mostly paid traffic will disappear from the results the day it stops spending, and a competitor that is mostly organic has an asset you need to match.
2. Keywords
Next, list the keywords each competitor ranks for and the pages that rank. An SEO tool’s organic research report shows the ranking keywords, the estimated traffic per keyword and the landing page. Sort by traffic to find the pages that matter, then filter to keywords you do not rank for at all: this is the keyword gap, and it is the most useful output of the whole exercise.
For competitor analysis in SEO, also check the intent behind those keywords. A competitor winning informational searches with a blog is doing something different from one winning “near me” searches with location pages, and the response is different too. Our guide to keyword intent explains how to sort them.
3. Content
Review what each competitor publishes: service pages, location pages, guides, case studies, videos, calculators and tools. Note how often they publish, how deep the content goes, and which pieces rank or attract links. Then look for the gaps: questions your customers ask that nobody in the market has answered well, and topics competitors cover thinly.
Also read the service pages as a customer would. What the page promises, what proof it offers, and what it asks the visitor to do. The differences between competitor pages tell you what the market has trained customers to expect.
4. Links
Pull each competitor’s backlink profile: the number of linking domains, the strongest ones, and the pages that earned the most links. Then look at who links to two or more competitors but not to you, because those sites have already shown they will link to businesses like yours. Industry associations, local directories, suppliers, sponsorship pages and news coverage usually make up the list. See our link building page for how to earn those links.
5. UX and technical performance
Now grade the site itself, and yes, you can grade a competitor’s site the same way you grade your own. Run each competitor’s homepage and top pages through PageSpeed Insights for Core Web Vitals, open them on a phone, time how long it takes to find a phone number or a price, and try the enquiry form. Check the title tags, meta descriptions and heading structure of their top ranking pages to see how tightly each page is targeted, and whether they use schema markup for reviews, services or FAQs.
A competitor ranking well on a slow, hard-to-use site is your opening, because a faster, clearer site with equal content usually overtakes it. Our technical SEO page covers what to fix on your own site first.
6. Offers, pricing and reviews
Finally, record what each competitor offers and how they frame it: packages, guarantees, finance, free quotes, response times and any published pricing. Then read their reviews. Google reviews on their Business Profile, ProductReview.com.au, Trustpilot, Facebook recommendations and the comments under their social posts show what customers praise and what they complain about. Complaints that repeat across several competitors are unmet needs you can build an offer around.
Free and paid tools for competitor analysis
You do not need a paid tool for a first pass. You need one for the keyword and link data once the analysis becomes a regular task.
| Job | Free options | Paid categories |
|---|---|---|
| Find competitors | Google search, Google Business Profile results, customer conversations | SEO suites with competitor discovery reports |
| Traffic sources | Public traffic estimators (limited free views) | Traffic intelligence platforms, SEO suites with traffic analytics |
| Keywords | Google Search Console for your own site, Google Keyword Planner, autocomplete and People also ask | SEO suites with organic research and keyword gap reports |
| Content | The site: search operator, sitemap files, the site itself | Content explorers, rank trackers for topic clusters |
| Links | Google search for brand mentions, a manual check of directories | Backlink index tools with link gap reports |
| UX and technical | PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, mobile testing by hand, view source | Crawlers that audit any domain, site graders |
| Offers and reviews | Google Maps, ProductReview.com.au, Trustpilot, social comments | Review monitoring and social listening platforms |
| AI assistant visibility | Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity directly and record the answers | AI visibility tracking tools |
Why aren’t my competitors (or my brand) showing up in ChatGPT?
AI assistants recommend businesses they can find and verify across the sources they read, so a brand missing from ChatGPT usually has little third-party coverage rather than a bad website. Assistants draw on directories, reviews, best-of lists, news, industry bodies and the brand’s own pages when those are clear and consistent. If your competitors do not appear, they have the same gap, and it is an open field. If you do not appear and they do, check where they are mentioned that you are not, then earn the same listings and reviews. Our guide to AI search visibility covers how to check and improve this.
A Perth example
Here is what the six checks look like for a typical Perth trade business. Take an electrical contractor covering the northern suburbs, losing searches for emergency and switchboard work to three competitors.
The traffic check shows two of the three competitors earn most of their visits from organic search, each with a page for every suburb they serve and a page for every job type, while the contractor has one services page. The review check shows all three hold Google reviews that mention suburbs and job types by name, which the contractor’s reviews do not. The link check shows one competitor is linked from the local sporting clubs it sponsors and from two supplier directories, and none of those link to the contractor. The site check shows the fastest competitor loads well on mobile but hides its phone number below the fold, and its enquiry form asks eight questions.
The plan that comes out of it: build suburb and job-type pages, ask customers to mention the suburb and the job when leaving a review, approach the same clubs and directories, and put a tap-to-call button and a three-field form at the top of every page. Nothing in it requires copying a competitor, and every item comes from the six checks above.
How to turn the analysis into a plan
Sort what you found into three lists.
- Quick wins: keywords competitors rank for that you can target with existing pages, technical faults you can fix this month, directories and associations you can join, and review requests you can start today.
- Longer projects: new service and location pages, content on the topics nobody covers well, links from the sites that link to several competitors, and a redesign of any page where competitors clearly convert better.
- Watch list: what to check monthly (new pages, ranking changes, new links, offer changes) and what to repeat each quarter (the full six-step review).
Give each item an owner and a date, then measure the result in your own Search Console and analytics rather than against the competitor tool’s estimates.
When to hand this to an agency
Hand competitor analysis to an agency when you need the paid data without buying the subscriptions, when the market has more than five serious competitors, when the analysis has to feed a content and link plan you also need someone to execute, or when you have done the review and the gaps are technical. An agency doing this properly will show you the raw data, name the tools, and give you the spreadsheet so you can rerun it.
PWD runs competitor analysis at the start of SEO engagements for Perth businesses, delivered in-house from our West Leederville office by a team that has been doing this since 2007. We report from accounts you own, and we do not lock SEO clients into 12 or 24 month contracts.
Get a competitor gap report for your Perth business
If you tell us who your competitors are, we will run the six checks above and show you the keyword, content, link and site gaps between you and them. It takes a scoping call to define the market, and the quote follows that call.
See PWD’s SEO services in Perth, or call 08 6146 0195.
