How to Do a Competitor SEO Analysis, Page by Page

Who are your real search competitors?

Your search competitors are the pages that rank for the searches you want, which are not always your business rivals. A local bakery may compete with a recipe blog and a delivery app for "birthday cake near me". Work page by page and search by search: it keeps the analysis small enough to act on.

To find them, search your main query in a private window, and open the Performance report in Search Console to see the queries where your page already gets impressions but sits below the top results.

Competitor SEO analysis in 7 steps

1. Choose one query and your page for it. One query, one page, three to five competitors.
2. Check search intent. Are the top pages guides, product pages, lists or tools? If every result is a guide and yours is a product page, the format is the problem.
3. Compare titles and snippets. Read the competitors' titles and descriptions as a searcher would. Google explains how it picks title links and snippets, often from your own title tag and page text.
4. Compare the content. List the headings and questions each page answers, the data and examples it gives, and the date it was updated. Note what is missing from yours.
5. Compare the technical basics. Run each page through PageSpeed Insights, and check its structured data and mobile layout.
6. Compare AI-readiness. Does the page put a direct answer first, use question headings, name an author and keep its text in the server HTML? These help AI answers quote a page.
7. Plan the changes and re-check. Make your page more useful than theirs, not a copy. Re-run the comparison after you publish.

What to compare and where to look

How to find the keyword gap

A keyword gap is the set of phrases a competitor's page covers and yours doesn't. In SEO AI Assistant, open your page, enter the competitor's URL in Competitor comparison, and you get the two pages' SEO, AEO and GEO scores and key metrics side by side, plus three lists: phrases only they use, phrases you both use, and phrases only you use, with where each page places them. It works from the two pages' own text, so it shows no search volumes. Competitor comparison is a Pro feature, and a free ExtCafe account gets one free try.

Treat the gap as a list of topics to consider, not words to paste in. If a competitor covers "delivery time" and you don't, the fix is a short section that answers it. For real search demand, check the Queries tab in Search Console.

How to track competitor website changes

Rankings move when pages change, so it helps to know when a competitor rewrites a title, adds a section or changes a price. In TrackLens, add the competitor's page by its address and save snapshots. The free plan tracks 3 pages with a text diff between any two versions. Pro checks pages on a schedule, from every 15 minutes to weekly, alerts you only when something changed, and adds an SEO diff of the title, meta description, robots, canonical, headings and JSON-LD, plus a visual diff of screenshots. Ignore rules let you skip ads, dates and cookie banners so they don't count as changes.

Everything stays in your browser. Our guide to monitoring website changes compares TrackLens with other ways to do this.

What not to do

• Don't copy. Copied or lightly reworded content rarely outranks the original and can fall under Google's spam policies on scraped content.
• Don't chase every phrase. Cover what your readers need; keyword stuffing makes a page worse.
• Don't hammer their site. Check a few pages at sensible intervals, as a normal visitor would.

Sources

• Google Search Console Help: Performance report
• Google Search Central: Influencing your title links
• Google Search Central: Control your snippets in search results
• PageSpeed Insights
• Google Search Central: Spam policies