How do you identify, select, and evaluate competitors for analysis?

Start competitive analysis by defining what you want to compare, then choose your competitors. To compare products and audiences, prioritize direct business competitors. To improve SEO, first identify your target market and keywords, then find websites that consistently appear in relevant search results. These two lists may overlap, but they may also differ. After selecting a small number of relevant competitors, compare their keywords, website size, and page content to identify improvements worth investing in, rather than simply chasing well-known brands or high-traffic websites.

First, clarify what kind of competition you want to analyze

Direct competitors serve similar audiences and offer similar products, making them a good starting point for analysis. Indirect competitors address the same core needs with different products and can be examined after direct competitors. For example, meal delivery services and meal kits both help busy people meet their meal needs, but they provide their services differently and should not be compared as though they were identical businesses.

• Product and market comparisons: Start with businesses that have similar audiences, products, or services.
• Organic search comparisons: Find websites competing for important search terms, whether or not they are in the same industry.
• Business model expansion: For this purpose, add industry leaders worth learning from, even if they do not compete for the same customers.

Build your SEO competitor list around your target market and keywords

First define your target region, language, and business-relevant search terms, then examine the search results. When entering a new market, familiar local business competitors may not be the strongest performers in search. Initially, you can search for core keywords directly and record domains that rank highly and appear repeatedly. When you need to handle large numbers of keywords, use keyword overlap analysis to expand the list.

Search competitors may also include media outlets, blogs, or distributors. Semrush’s 2014 case study of Samsung in the Spanish market listed these types of competitors. The case study shows that search competitors can include different types of businesses; it does not mean those rankings still apply today. When considering keywords, check their relevance to your business: someone else’s traffic sources may not bring you potential customers.

Start with a few competitors, then address gaps in the list

Two suggested starting points are to analyze three direct competitors or to select roughly three to five competitors. Both suggestions help manage the workload; neither is a fixed rule. SEO analysis still needs to include important organic search competitors, rather than simply filling a list with businesses in the same industry.

When identifying business competitors, cross-reference third-party reviews, comparison articles, alternatives encountered by your sales team, and brands your former customers have switched to. Search results are one starting point, not a complete picture of the market.

Evaluate competitiveness at the website and page levels

First consider the size of competing websites alongside your own resources, then examine keyword coverage and content gaps. Large websites may be harder to outperform, but that is no reason to remove them from your search competitor list. Third-party authority metrics use different formulas and should serve only as supplementary references, not as official criteria used by search engines to determine rankings.

When comparing pages, start with those that rank highly for your target terms or have risen in the rankings over a particular period. Do they cover topics you are missing? Do they offer more complete explanations, original research, or a clearer structure? Use differences you can verify to identify potential improvements, but do not assume that a particular content design choice caused a ranking increase simply because the page moved up.