What does competitor analysis cover?

Five angles: SERP overlap (where you compete head-to-head and which queries they rank for that you do not), content depth (what their winning pages look like), backlink profile (where their authority comes from), technical posture (how clean their foundation is), and brand and entity strength (how well-known they are outside organic search). Run all five for a full audit, or pick two or three for a focused investigation into a specific competitor.

How do I pick the right competitors?

By SERP and audience overlap, not by who you think you compete with. If the competitors are not yet identified, list the top 10 ranking domains for your top 10 priority keywords and pick the 3 to 5 that appear most often. A site that outranks you on one keyword but operates a fundamentally different business is not a competitor, and analyzing it wastes the audit; the ones that recur across your priority SERPs are the real set.

Is the takeaway just that they have more content?

No, and treating 'more content' as the conclusion is a failure mode. A competitor is not winning because they have 500 articles; they are winning because of a specific combination of content, links, and user experience. Find the actual lever, and beat them by being more useful rather than paraphrasing their pages, because copying their content verbatim hits diminishing returns fast.

Can content alone beat a stronger brand?

Not on branded queries. A weaker site with a stronger brand wins on branded searches that content alone cannot touch, which is exactly why brand and entity strength is one of the five angles. Ignoring it leads teams to pour effort into content that competes where they can win and miss that the competitor's real moat is branded demand, knowledge-graph presence, and reputation across the open web.

Skill · SEO competitor analysis

SEO competitor analysis.

Compare your site to its competitors and find the gaps worth closing.

Compare a site to its competitors across five angles and find the gaps worth closing: SERP overlap, content depth, backlink profile, technical posture, and brand and entity strength. Run all five for a full audit, or two to three for a focused investigation into why one competitor outranks you.

The output is a prioritized gap-closing roadmap, not a list of everything they do. The point is finding the actual lever, because a competitor rarely wins on volume of content alone.

Audience: SEO and content teams benchmarking against their category, hunting content and backlink gaps, or working out why a specific competitor outranks them.

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The framework

Five angles on the competitive field.

Run all five for a full picture, or pick the two or three that fit a focused investigation.

01SERP overlap: for each priority keyword, who ranks in the top 10, what page type wins, which SERP features one party holds, and which queries competitors rank for that you do not (the content gap).
02Content depth: the word count and structure of their winning pages, the information types they include, their update frequency, their internal linking, and their topical breadth.
03Backlink profile: referring domains, domain rating, top referring pages by traffic value, link types, link velocity, and the pages attracting the most links (their linkable assets).
04Technical posture: Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, schema implementation, site architecture, crawl efficiency, security, and AI search readiness.
05Brand and entity strength: branded search volume, knowledge-graph recognition, mention frequency in the topic area, social signals, and reviews and reputation.

Pairs with these platforms

Three cuts of the same competitive landscape.

Each platform gives a different cut of the field, and the SKILL names all three. Similarweb is the strongest source for competitor traffic estimation, channel mix, and audience overlap; Ahrefs covers backlink and keyword overlap; Semrush covers SERP-feature presence and SEO-PR overlap. Together they produce sharper signal than any one alone.

Reference files

Two references that go alongside the SKILL.md.

references/competitive-audit-template.md
A fillable competitive audit template.
references/content-gap-method.md
A detailed methodology for finding content gaps, with a worked example.

Browse all reference files on GitHub

Bridges to other skills

Where each gap gets a deeper dive.

Competitor analysis names the gaps at a high level. These skills go deep on each one, with the Ahrefs data the gaps need.

Find the competitors
seo-keyword
If the competitors are not yet named, keyword research surfaces them: the domains that recur across the top 10 for your priority queries are your real competitive set.
The content gap, deep
seo-content-gap-audit
Takes the high-level content gap this skill surfaces and runs it to ground: the topics competitors cover that the property does not, scored for opportunity.
The keyword gap, deep
seo-keyword-gap-audit
The keywords competitors rank for that the target property does not, prioritized by opportunity. Where the SERP-overlap angle becomes a worked list.
The backlink profile, deep
seo-backlink-audit
Profiles backlink health, anchor distribution, and toxic links against the competitive set. The backlink angle here is its starting point.
Close the link gap
seo-offpage
Once the backlink gap is named, building the links to close it is off-page work: linkable assets, digital PR, and outreach.

Open source under MIT

Read the SKILL.md on GitHub.

The skill source lives in the rampstackco/claude-skills repository alongside dozens of other skills covering the full lifecycle of brand and product work. This page is a structured overview; the SKILL.md is the source. MIT licensed.

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Frequently asked questions.

What does competitor analysis cover?: Five angles: SERP overlap (where you compete head-to-head and which queries they rank for that you do not), content depth (what their winning pages look like), backlink profile (where their authority comes from), technical posture (how clean their foundation is), and brand and entity strength (how well-known they are outside organic search). Run all five for a full audit, or pick two or three for a focused investigation into a specific competitor.
How do I pick the right competitors?: By SERP and audience overlap, not by who you think you compete with. If the competitors are not yet identified, list the top 10 ranking domains for your top 10 priority keywords and pick the 3 to 5 that appear most often. A site that outranks you on one keyword but operates a fundamentally different business is not a competitor, and analyzing it wastes the audit; the ones that recur across your priority SERPs are the real set.
Which tools give the clearest competitive signal?: Each gives a different cut of the same landscape, and using them together sharpens the picture. Similarweb is the strongest source for competitor traffic estimation, channel mix, and audience overlap. Ahrefs covers backlink and keyword overlap. Semrush covers SERP-feature presence and SEO-PR overlap. Any one alone gives a partial view; the three together show relative scale, where authority comes from, and which queries are genuinely contested.
Is the takeaway just that they have more content?: No, and treating 'more content' as the conclusion is a failure mode. A competitor is not winning because they have 500 articles; they are winning because of a specific combination of content, links, and user experience. Find the actual lever, and beat them by being more useful rather than paraphrasing their pages, because copying their content verbatim hits diminishing returns fast.
Can content alone beat a stronger brand?: Not on branded queries. A weaker site with a stronger brand wins on branded searches that content alone cannot touch, which is exactly why brand and entity strength is one of the five angles. Ignoring it leads teams to pour effort into content that competes where they can win and miss that the competitor's real moat is branded demand, knowledge-graph presence, and reputation across the open web.