How to Do a Competitor Analysis: Find Their Strengths, Exploit Their Gaps

You know your competitors exist. You check their website sometimes. You see their ads occasionally. But you have never sat down and systematically figured out what they are doing, what is working for them, and where they are leaving opportunities wide open for you. That is what a competitor analysis does. It turns a vague awareness of your competition into a specific, actionable map of their strengths, weaknesses, and the gaps you can exploit.

This guide covers how to do a competitor analysis step by step, what to look at across marketing, SEO, content, and product, and how to turn the findings into moves that give you an actual advantage.

What is a competitor analysis?

A competitor analysis is a structured review of your key competitors: who they are, what they offer, how they market, where they rank, and where they are strong or weak relative to you. The goal is not to copy them. It is to understand the landscape so you can differentiate, find gaps, avoid their mistakes, and make smarter decisions about where to invest your own effort.

Why competitor analysis matters

Without one, you are making marketing and business decisions in a vacuum. With one, you know which keywords they rank for that you do not, which content drives their traffic, which channels they invest in, what their customers like and complain about, and where they are vulnerable. That knowledge shapes your content strategy, your SEO priorities, your ad targeting, your positioning, and your product decisions. It is the difference between guessing and knowing.

How to do a competitor analysis, step by step

1. Identify your real competitors

Start by listing your actual competitors, not just the brands you think of as competition. There are two types: direct competitors (businesses that sell the same product or service to the same audience) and SEO competitors (websites that rank for the keywords you want to rank for, even if they sell something different). Use Google to search your main keywords and see who consistently appears. Those are your SEO competitors. Use your market knowledge to identify your direct business competitors. Analyse three to five of each.

2. Analyse their website and positioning

Visit each competitor's website and assess their positioning: who they claim to serve, what problem they solve, how they differentiate, and how they present their offering. Note their messaging, their tone, their pricing model, and their calls to action. This tells you how they position themselves in the market and where your own positioning can differ.

3. Analyse their SEO and organic traffic

This is often the most valuable part. Use an SEO tool (Semrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest) to check which keywords they rank for, how much organic traffic they get, which pages drive the most traffic, and what their domain authority looks like. Export their top keywords and pages. Compare them against your own rankings to find the gaps: keywords they rank for that you do not, and keywords you rank for that they do not. Those gaps are your opportunities.

4. Analyse their content

Review their blog, resource centre, and any content they publish. Note what topics they cover, how deep their content goes, what formats they use (guides, lists, videos, tools), and how frequently they publish. Look for content gaps: topics they have not covered, questions they have not answered, and areas where their content is thin or outdated. These are where your content can win.

5. Analyse their backlink profile

Use an SEO tool to see who links to your competitors and what content earns them the most links. This tells you which sites in your space are willing to link out, what kind of content earns links in your niche, and which specific linking opportunities you can pursue. A competitor's backlink profile is essentially a roadmap of link-building opportunities for you.

6. Analyse their paid advertising

Check whether competitors run Google Ads or Meta Ads. Tools like Semrush and the Meta Ad Library let you see their active ads, the keywords they bid on, and the messaging they use. This tells you which keywords they consider worth paying for, what offers and angles they test, and which landing pages they drive paid traffic to. It also reveals their budget priorities and where they think conversions happen.

7. Analyse their social media

Review their social profiles: which platforms they are active on, how large their following is, what content gets the most engagement, and how often they post. Look at what their audience responds to, since the posts with the most comments and shares reveal what resonates. Note what they do well and where their presence is weak or inactive.

8. Analyse their customer experience

Read their customer reviews on Google, app stores, and review sites. Note what customers praise and what they complain about. This is gold: it tells you what your competitors are getting right (so you match it) and what they are getting wrong (so you can solve it better). Customer complaints about competitors are literally a list of features and improvements your own product or service can offer.

9. Compile and find your opportunities

Bring all the findings together. For each competitor, summarise their strengths (what they do well), weaknesses (where they fall short), and the specific opportunities they leave open for you. The opportunities are the gaps: keywords they miss, content they do not have, audiences they underserve, complaints they do not address, and channels they ignore.

Competitor analysis for SEO

SEO competitor analysis is often the highest-leverage part, so it deserves extra attention. The specific process is to export your top competitors' ranking keywords using an SEO tool, compare their keyword list against yours to find the gap (keywords they rank for that you do not), prioritise those gaps by volume and difficulty (target the ones you can realistically win), review the content that ranks for those keywords and identify where you can create something better, and analyse their backlinks to find link-building opportunities you can pursue. This keyword gap analysis alone often reveals months' worth of high-value content opportunities that you would never have found by brainstorming alone.

Competitor analysis for content strategy

Your competitors' content reveals exactly what topics the market responds to and where the gaps are. Look at their most-shared and most-linked content to see what earns attention. Check their blog's publishing frequency and depth. Identify topics they cover thinly that you could cover thoroughly. Find questions their content does not answer that their audience clearly asks (check their social comments and customer reviews for these). And note formats they do not use that you could (video, tools, templates, interactive content). Your content strategy should not mirror theirs. It should fill the gaps they leave.

How often to do a competitor analysis

A full analysis once or twice a year is enough for most businesses. Between full analyses, keep a light, ongoing watch: set up Google Alerts for competitor brand names, check their content and rankings quarterly, and review their ads and social whenever you plan a campaign. The competitive landscape shifts, and what was true six months ago may not be true today. Regular monitoring keeps you informed without the full effort of a deep analysis every time.

Tools for competitor analysis

You do not need many tools, and several have free tiers.

An SEO tool plus review sites plus the ad libraries covers most of what you need.

Common competitor analysis mistakes

A few patterns make the analysis less useful. Obsessing over competitors rather than your own customers means you become reactive rather than strategic. Copying what competitors do instead of finding where they are weak produces a less convincing version of them. Analysing too many competitors dilutes focus; three to five is enough. Looking only at what they do well and ignoring their weaknesses misses the biggest opportunities. And doing the analysis once, filing it, and never acting on it wastes the effort entirely. The value is in the gaps you find and the actions you take, not in the document itself.

Using SWOT to summarise your competitor analysis

Once you have gathered all the data, a simple SWOT framework for each competitor helps you see the picture clearly. List their Strengths (what they do well, where they lead), Weaknesses (where they fall short, what customers complain about), Opportunities (gaps they leave open for you), and Threats (areas where they are strong and could threaten your position). Then do the same for your own business. The comparison reveals exactly where you have an advantage and where you need to improve. A SWOT per competitor takes ten minutes to fill out and gives you a one-page summary that is far more useful than pages of raw data. It also makes the findings easy to share with a team or stakeholder, since everyone can read a SWOT in under a minute.

How to use competitor analysis to sharpen your positioning

The most strategic output of a competitor analysis is better positioning. Once you see how competitors position themselves, you can find the space they leave unclaimed. If every competitor targets enterprises, the small-business niche is open. If they all lead with features, leading with outcomes and results differentiates you. If they all use the same formal tone, a more human voice stands out. If they ignore a specific audience segment, owning that segment is an immediate advantage. Positioning is not about being better at everything. It is about being the obvious choice for a specific group of people, and competitor analysis shows you exactly which group nobody else is serving well. That gap is your strategic opportunity, and filling it gives you a defensible position that does not depend on outspending anyone.

The bottom line

A competitor analysis shows you exactly where the opportunities are: which keywords they rank for that you can target, which content gaps you can fill, which customer complaints you can solve, and which channels they are ignoring. Analyse their positioning, SEO, content, ads, social, and customer reviews. Find the gaps, prioritise them, and build your strategy around what they are missing. That is how you compete on insight rather than on budget.

If you want experts to run a competitor and SEO analysis for your business, LetMeRank includes competitor gap analysis in every SEO engagement, starting with a free audit.

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