How to use advanced SEO competitor analysis to accelerate rankings & boost visibility

Feeling stressed about how you rank versus your competition? What if you just need to shift your mentality to instead use your competition to grow your wins?

The shift is simple: Consider your competition as an extension of your team. They’re testing out new approaches and generating free SERP data you can use to adjust your strategy.

To make this shift successfully, you need a sound approach to SEO competitor analysis that delivers actionable insights that work in today’s digital landscape. 

Here are advanced ideas to help modernize your competitor analysis.

Why competitor analysis is crucial in today’s digital landscape

The single biggest change to digital marketing in the last few years has been the widespread adoption of AI, which has revolutionized all aspects of digital marketing from analytics through content production. 

Because of shifts like AI advancements, the speed of work has accelerated to unprecedented levels. People can quickly aggregate and examine vast data sets and find critical insights to inform powerful levels of content production.

This means that more analysis is happening than ever before, followed by superfast action. To stay competitive, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of industry performance.

But in the realm of SEO specifically, we’ve also seen deep shifts in how Google evaluates websites and content. The model has shifted away from individual keywords towards entity maps that are considered alongside UX metrics and other website engagement signals.

And yet aside from the changes in how the work gets done, the reality is that marketing’s ground rules remain the same: determining potential customers’ real needs, solving them meaningfully, and winning them over forever—or at least until your customer lifetime value exceeds your acquisition costs. 

Keeping that in mind, let’s discuss some specific changes AI has brought to how SEOs operate. 

Spot SEO and PPC gaps faster to build your differentiation

SEO and PPC look different after the entry of AI. Tools like ChatGPT help businesses pump out content faster than ever. 

But speed isn’t everything, since content volume alone doesn’t determine who ranks at #1. What matters more? 

The site that Google deems best at aligning with search intent and meeting user needs is the winner. Getting there is not just about speed or scale, but requires good insights into target audience behavior and competitive differentiators.

Figuring this out by manually reviewing organic and paid search results is impossible.

Machine learning systems now optimize campaigns automatically, spotting patterns humans might miss. These tools can do more than track your competition: they predict macro market shifts and content trends. 

AI makes it way easier for marketers to spot gaps in their PPC and SEO efforts compared to their competitors. It can quickly sift through tons of data to find underperforming keywords, missing content, or areas where competitors are winning. Instead of spending hours on audits, AI surfaces insights fast so you can make smarter moves. That means better budget use and quicker tweaks to boost performance.

For instance, an AI analysis with a tool like Crayon can spot when a competitor starts building content in a new topic area weeks before launching a product. 

AI-enabled businesses catch these signals early and prepare their response. Others scramble to keep up months later. 

Did a competitor start targeting new customer segments? Did they test messaging that performs significantly better than industry averages? An AI tool can answer those questions for you. 

Key insights AI and machine learning bring to the table include:

• Future topic trends
• Emerging content gaps
• Bid optimization patterns
• Content strategy shifts
• Market position changes

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Pro tip: Check Semrush’s Market Explorer for early signals of competitor trends before everyone else picks up on them.

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Uncover user behavior and what drives conversions

You can’t stop at knowing who ranks first. You also need to understand how people actually use your competitors’ sites. 

For instance, Grow and Convert co-founder Benji Hyam shared on LinkedIn that focusing on jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) keywords—or search terms that people can use to solve a problem or complete a task—can provide conversion rates of up to 12%, compared to generic keywords with conversion rates below 2%. 

Understanding the why and how behind people’s searches offers invaluable insights that help drive conversions that support your bottom line.

But your research and your content can’t stop solely at the current SERPs if you want to provide people with what they need.

For example, if your customers are looking for detailed implementation guides, you need to provide them—even if your competitors are ranking for feature comparison keywords. In this instance, implementation guides both meet searchers’ expectations while also demonstrating the value your product or service can provide.

AI can help you get there by taking your seed words and using big data on SERP rankings to generate pillar pages, topic clusters, and article ideas in a matter of minutes. It takes care of the SEO competitor analysis on the backend, leaving you to focus on next steps for content production and making sure you fill in the entire customer journey.

Other ways to analyze what works in your target market include checking out what content drives engagement and watching out for what your competitors’ customers are saying. Comments, shares, and interactions can directly tell you what a ranking tracker doesn’t. This kind of insight-gathering is known as social listening, or keeping an ear out on social media to understand what people are saying about your brand, industry, or competitors in real time.

In particular, go through the obvious clues in the public record: 

• Your competitors’ email newsletters
• Their social media posts
• Initiatives they keep pushing 

If your competitors are repeating a strategy or coverage of a particular topic, it’s working for them and positively impacting their bottom line. 

Let’s go through how exactly to gather all this intel. 

Advanced methods for competitor analysis

The SEO game of competitive analysis used to be fairly straightforward:

• Check competitors’ rankings
• List high-performing competitors’ keywords
• Create and publish content around each competitor keyword
• Rinse and repeat

Small businesses with limited resources were at a distinct disadvantage compared to big brands and budgets, who could produce more content faster, target more keywords, and rapidly gain traction in rankings.

But the game has changed.

Developing technologies like AI have leveled the playing field, with the advantage going to marketers who take a more sophisticated approach. Content needs to align with search intent and do a good job in answering the questions people are asking.

In other words, there’s a lot more to competitor analysis nowadays than simply bridging keyword gaps.

Leveraging entity-based competitor insights

Here’s something most people miss: Google’s crawlers don’t see websites like we do. 

While we see pages, paragraphs, and keywords, Google sees a complex web of entities—real things, concepts, and their relationships. 

For example, take the term “content marketing.”  

When Google sees this topic, it’s not just processing two words. Through its Knowledge Graph, it understands the entire content marketing ecosystem:

• Content formats
• Distribution channels
• Audience targeting
• Performance marketing
• ROI measurement

In fact, Google’s algorithms help process where a piece about “content marketing” fits within this ecosystem. Depending on factors like search intent, queries will align with different parts of this web, and the websites that best fit a match for the query get served up in the SERPs.

To add some color, let’s say you’re competing with HubSpot in the marketing automation space. 

Traditional analysis says that they rank for “email marketing software,” “CRM,” and similar keywords. 

Entity analysis reveals that they’ve built topical authority around the entire customer journey, from lead capture to analytics. 

With the big-picture view of entity analysis, you can see where your competitors have real topical authority versus just ranking for good keywords. It’s like seeing the whole chessboard instead of just the piece that’s keeping your king in check. 

This broader view provides you with the additional context you need to successfully beat your competitors. 

Let’s say you’re analyzing a competitor who dominates “social media scheduling” searches.

A basic analysis shows they target terms like:

• “Best time to post”
• “Social media calendar”
• “Scheduling tools”

But an entity analysis reveals that they also cover creator workflow concepts, like: 

• Content batching strategies 
• Team collaboration features
• Content repurposing methods

Putting it all together, that’s why when someone searches for “social media planning tools for teams,” Google may see your competitor as an authority even if they don’t use those exact words anywhere on their webpages. 

This also means that in order to rank for social media scheduling, you will need to demonstrate expertise around these creator workflow concepts. Your SEO competitor analysis should look at your top business competitors and SERP competitors, and make sure you’re covering the right type of content (and structuring your site) to look like the appropriate entity.

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Pro tip: To identify your competitors’ entity patterns, check out our guide to entity-based competitor analysis.

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Once you’ve collected entity insights from your competitors, take these next steps:

• Build content clusters around key entities that Google associates with the topic
• Fill strategic entity gaps to strengthen your topical authority
• Update your internal linking strategy to connect pages that share important entity relationships in Google’s Knowledge Graph

Automate SEO competitor analysis to glean real-time insights

If you want to be the first to know when a competitor makes a new move on the chessboard, you need to establish a system that never sleeps. To do this, create a few layers of position monitoring to capture different aspects of competitor insights.

Start with Semrush position tracking.

Track the main keywords that make you money, key topics you own (or want to own), and terms where competitors dominate the SERPs. When Semrush alerts you to a ranking change, immediately check to determine what your competitor modified in the previous 2-4 weeks. 

Next, weave in smart content monitoring to track new types of content:

• Monitor key competitor pages (such as important landing pages) for changes with a tool like Visualping
• Track schema changes with a Semrush site audit
• Watch for new content structures they’re testing

Finally, consider your competition’s technical setup. Keep tabs on competitors’ Core Web Vitals, monitor their CDN setup with a tool like Wappalyzer, and watch for tech stack changes to inform your approach.

With all that said, these tools offer so much information that it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in data. To avoid feeling overwhelmed, you need to narrow your focus to the specific trends that will give you crucial insights. 

Set up smart triggers for tracking:

• Major ranking changes
• New content formats
• Changes to conversion elements
• Technical upgrades

Depending on your industry and niche, some of these triggers will emerge as higher-priority. For example, SaaS startups are more likely to test changes to conversion elements and make technical upgrades than a retail bridal shop.

Remember, you don’t need to review all of the data—just what’s most relevant to your competitor analysis approach. AI can help you summarize the results and focus on what’s most important.

Reverse-engineering competitor success

Many people doing competitor research are looking for insights in all the wrong places. They obsess over meta titles, word count, and basic keyword usage. 

But that surface-level stuff isn’t what makes top sites rank. What actually matters is how they present information to help their audience—and establish themselves as a helpful resource to be trusted.

Let’s take Zendesk’s Knowledge Base as an example. It’s not just documentation about their product offerings. Instead, they designed a hub that’s a strategic mix of implementation guides, best practice articles, customer service templates, and integration tutorials. 

All these assets reinforce their topical authority in customer support.

To reverse-engineer competitor success:

1. Look for content clusters: Pull their top 50 pages in Semrush. Navigate to the Traffic Analytics tab, enter their URL into the box, and click “Analyze.” On the results page, click the Top Pages tab. Next, you can sort the results into clusters either manually or with help from AI. You’ll notice top sites don’t just create random blog posts—they build entire ecosystems of connected content with strategic content calendars.
2. Check which pages naturally attract backlinks: You’ll likely notice a pattern: Pages with original data (also called shareable assets) get more backlinks than standard how-to content. For example, this report on how AI developments are shaping customer expectations earned over 15K backlinks for Zendesk, versus their how-to guide on calculating customer lifetime value (which didn’t even hit 1k backlinks). 
3. Review paid campaigns: They reveal what’s converting. If a competitor fills their paid ads with words like “AI-powered features” or “guaranteed uptime,” it’s most likely because they’ve tested those terms extensively and gotten results. The savviest markets often use PPC as a testing ground for new terms, so keep an eye out for topic clusters and emerging terms.

Integrate with Google Analytics for comprehensive insights

Modern marketing is omnichannel. 

Omnichannel marketing is a strategic approach that integrates and aligns all marketing channels—such as physical stores, websites, mobile apps, email, social media, and customer service—to deliver a consistent, personalized, and seamless customer experience across all touchpoints. This approach ensures that customers can transition smoothly between channels while receiving unified messaging and engagement throughout their journey.

To stay on top of omnichannel marketing, you can’t afford to spend too much energy making sense of isolated metrics about your performance or competitors’. Instead, use connected data to see how competitors orchestrate their entire online presence, and tie that back to where you source your traffic.

You want to look for answers around:

• Which content pieces get organic traffic and social engagement
• Where email marketing fits into their conversion strategy
• How paid campaigns amplify their organic content performance

For example, let’s say your competitor is getting massive engagement on LinkedIn for content about new industry regulations. However, you know that similar content barely ranks in the search results. 

You might need to produce similar content and adjust your distribution strategy. Why?

Because even though it’s not tied to organic search traffic, there is clearly an interest from your target audience for content about new industry regulations. 

Industry discussions crush it on LinkedIn, where professionals actively participate in debates. In contrast, people look for lasting problems, challenges, and solutions in the SERPs, so this kind of content often receives more search traffic. But to be seen as an industry leader, your audience needs to be able to engage across platforms—whether this means having a debate on your LinkedIn post, or searching for answers on Google and navigating to your site.

Both types of content are important for driving engagement and building trust.

You have an opportunity to connect the dots between Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and your competitor analysis takeaways to get insights into user behavior and interests. 

To get a complete picture of your competitors’ efforts, combine the following in custom dashboards:

• GA4’s user behavior data
• Looker Studio’s visualization capabilities
• Semrush data, such as position tracking, domain analytics, and site audit data
• API connections to specialized tools
• Social listening tools
• Conversion tracking across channels

Remember, when setting up your competitor tracking dashboard, your initial focus should be on metrics tied to revenue. 

Practical applications: turning insights into actions

Once again, the goal isn’t to drown yourself in data. It’s to use that data to dolphin-kick past the competition.

Developing a competitive SEO strategy

While many SEO experts copy competitor keywords and call it a day, you’re better off building a system that lets you consistently outmaneuver competitors as their marketing strategies mature.

To start, do a content gap analysis if you haven’t yet. Specific tasks should include finding:

• High-intent keywords competitors dominate (and you don’t)
• Topics where competitors have weak content
• Questions your market answers poorly
• Emerging topics not yet noticed

Now go beyond that. 

Understand why competitors win or lose on specific topics. You might notice that many of your competitors are winning on specific topics because they have curated in-depth resource hubs around solving user problems, or because they consistently post about particular topics and trigger the right combination of entity and expertise signals. 

To score big in such a cutthroat space:

• Map competitor content clusters to spot coverage gaps
• Build topic authority and brand reputation with original inputs: expert insights, unique data, and thought leadership
• Create supporting visual content—infographics, interactive charts, and videos—to create engagement and encourage shares
• Update existing content to better match changing user intent

Improving PPC ROI

To get more bang for your PPC buck, use insights based on the money your competitors have already spent to understand what’s working.

Specifically, try to associate spend and verbiage with:

• Which pain points drive clicks
• What offers convert visitors
• How ad messaging evolves
• Where competitors waste spend

For instance, if you notice a shift of increasing spending on bottom-funnel keywords instead of top-funnel terms, it’s a signal to what’s working in your market. 

Once you have the data, take action. For example, you can:

• Adjust bidding based on competitor conversion signals
• Test messaging angles competitors ignore
• Target keywords where competitors show weakness

Even though this article is intended to primarily serve SEO competitor analysis, PPC insights (just like social media and other components of omnichannel marketing) can add additional meaningful data points around audience intent. Additionally, PPC can help build brand awareness in the SERPs that can help drive organic click-through rates.

Innovating content strategies

Part of success involves noticing and improving on competitors’ strategies, but you wont win if you solely focus on catching up to your competition. You need to innovate, particularly if it helps you strengthen signals around what differentiates you.

You must understand any market gaps and figure out what user requirements competitors ignore.

Look for:

• Formats competitors underutilize, like interactive maps, infographics, and Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). For instance, not talking from experience will hurt E-E-A-T. For better results, write in the first person (“I”) perspective.
• Questions they answer poorly, like giving subjective answers instead of sharing valuable insights from data or experts. In fact, these questions can become content directions to generate shareable assets, which in turn can gain traction via earned links and social media shares.
• Perspectives they ignore, like not speaking with the target audience in the terms and vernacular they use in real life. For example, major medical centers may speak in detailed medical jargon instead of breaking concepts down into the language patients and their families use.
• User segments they neglect, or essential customer groups they ignore. A good example of this are the vocal minorities who often drive word-of-mouth marketing. Because they’re smaller in number, it could be tempting to ignore them—but this would be a big mistake given the impact they drive.

To get started:

• Note major content types across your market and consider alternatives (this is a good moment to look at other markets or industries for inspiration)
• Identify underserved user needs
• Develop unique content angles
• Test formats competitors haven’t tried
• Do original research (surveys, industry summaries, etc.) to build authority

Watch what your competitors’ audience is looking for in comments and social media by tracking brand mentions using a tool like Awario. 

For instance, if you’re competing with Zendesk, monitor terms like “Zendesk alternative” and “switching from Zendesk,” and track complaints on social media and discussion platforms like Reddit’s r/Zendesk community. These unmet needs are your content opportunities. 

Best practices for competitor analysis

For sustainable success, here are a few best practices for competitor analysis. 

Set up a consistent monitoring process

To ensure you get the most out of competitor analysis, avoid random competitor checks. Instead, set up a systematic approach that helps you catch and react to significant changes with competitors. 

The components of this system should include:

1. Daily monitoring:

• Track ranking changes: Push Semrush Position Tracking alerts (>10 positions changed) to a Slack channel (e.g., “#competitor-rankings”) via Zapier
• Monitor ad copy: Configure alerts for high-budget keyword changes
• Watch SERP features: Get notifications when you or competitors gain or lose featured snippets

2. Weekly analysis:

• Review content: Track new pages gaining over 500 monthly visits in Semrush Organic Research
• Check backlinks: Automate Semrush reports for new backlinks with a high domain rating (70+) to a Slack channel (e.g., “#competitor-backlinks”) using Zapier
• Analyze conversions: Use Visualping to monitor competitor pricing and landing page changes

3. Monthly strategic review:

• Assess position: Generate automated Semrush market position reports
• Run gap analysis: Schedule competitor content analysis via Semrush exports
• Review resources: Track competitor spending patterns across content categories

4. Special events:

• Algorithm updates: Generate automated Semrush market position reports
• Industry shifts: Generate automated Semrush market position reports

What to automate:

• Immediate alerts: Major ranking shifts and SERP feature changes
• Weekly updates: Content performance, new competitor pages, and conversion updates
• Monthly reports: Market position, content gaps, and resource allocation

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Pro tip: Instead of tracking everything, focus on metrics that inform real decision-making.

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Ethical considerations

When it comes to involving competitor insights in your approach, it’s important to set some ethical standards.

First, focus on acceptable competitor research:

• Publicly available content
• Authorized APIs
• Competitor newsletters
• Social media
• Published case studies

If you don’t have a right to use or access the data, don’t.

In other words, don’t:

• Access private competitor groups through a fake social profile
• Use automation to scrape huge amounts of data from a competitor’s website without their permission
• Inject code into a competitor’s website to monitor user activity
• Impersonate a customer or business partner in order to get information from a competitor’s employees
• Use any private data you happen to come across during your research

Next, avoid engaging in negative SEO tactics against competitors, such as:

• Fake negative customer reviews
• Toxic backlinks
• False information about competitors

What goes around inevitably comes back around!

Finally, go in with the mindset that you’re using competitor data specifically to develop positive differentiation.

Specifically, it can and should help you:

• Create more valuable content
• Improve the user experience
• Invest in authentic marketing

Turn competitor analysis into market leadership

Competitor analysis is an ongoing process of learning, adapting, and staying ahead in your market. 

Turning SEO competitor analysis into market leadership starts by identifying what keywords and content strategies are driving traffic to your competitors. By analyzing their strengths and gaps, you can uncover high-opportunity keywords they’re overlooking and areas where your content can outperform theirs. 

Creating more valuable, better-optimized content around these insights helps you climb search rankings and capture market share. Over time, consistently outpacing competitors in search visibility builds brand authority and positions you as the go-to resource in your space.

To go quickly from competitive intelligence to strategic action, explore Semrush’s competitive analysis tools.