How should competitive analysis guide optimization priorities? Define your SEO goals first, then break down the gaps

If the goal is to improve your website’s SEO, competitive analysis should start by identifying target keywords and the competing websites appearing in their search results. Then turn the gaps into a list of changes: prioritize areas where your site is clearly weak, promptly catch up where competitors are doing well and you lag behind, and assess areas neither side has addressed as potential opportunities. The following is based on an article published by awoo in 2016. It applies to planning SEO improvements, not to a comprehensive competitive strategy covering areas such as pricing and revenue.

Choose keywords first to identify whom to compare

The sites to analyze are not just familiar industry peers, but the websites that actually appear in search results for your target keywords—especially competitors ranking above you. The original article recommends first examining the types of websites on the first results page, search volume, search trends, and competition levels to determine which keywords to pursue, then comparing website optimization factors.

For example, if most first-page results are blog posts, you could consider creating corresponding content. However, this is a clue for evaluating your content strategy, not a promise that following suit will earn rankings. Clarifying which search needs you want to address helps keep subsequent comparisons from becoming an exercise in copying everything competitors do.

Turn findings into three categories of tasks rather than focusing only on overall scores

• Areas where your site is particularly weak: Using “content reach” as an example, the original article recommends making areas with clear room for improvement the highest-priority changes.
• Areas competitors have addressed but your site has not handled well: The article uses website title tags as an example. If comparisons show that competitors have addressed them more thoroughly, you should promptly remedy your own shortcomings.
• Areas neither side has addressed: The article identifies structured data markup as a potential opportunity, suggesting that it can help search engines understand a website and enrich its appearance in search results. This was the article’s recommendation at the time, not a guarantee of improved rankings.

These three categories can help organize the work, but the original article provides no fixed formula for prioritizing across them and does not quantify the time required or expected benefits. It therefore cannot support a claim that any particular change should always come first.

Use representative pages to identify template issues, while keeping scoring limitations in mind

When multiple pages use the same template, the original article recommends choosing one representative page and saving and tracking its assessment. For example, if product pages share a template, you can start with one page to examine issues with that template. After including each template type, identify which templates have more issues and need changes first. This approach focuses on shared templates; it does not mean that every page’s content has been checked.

The article also presents a booking website example in which the site scored 50 and a competitor scored 48, yet the competitor ranked higher. The author took this to mean there was still an opportunity to overtake the competitor. However, the example itself does not prove that a higher score leads to better rankings. When planning work, focus on specific shortcomings rather than treating the overall assessment score as a promise of rankings.

The tool’s feature for automatically updating scores each week after saving an assessment was a product description from 2016. It should not be assumed to remain available today.