Competitive Research

Competitive research in SEO means, in a nutshell, stealing your competitors’ rankings and traffic.

Well, not exactly stealing.

But it does involve reverse-engineering what's working for your competitors, and using that information to your advantage!

Competitive research typically follows a few common lines of inquiry: identifying competitors, keyword research, content gap analysis, and backlink exploration . If you're not sure where to start when it comes to establishing your competitors, check out the True Competitor feature in Moz Pro, and start building your competitive strategy.

In addition, we've listed some companion resources on competitive research and analysis for SEO.

How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO : A terrific introduction to SEO competitive analysis with a free template to copy for your own campaigns.

The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide : An effective competitive research process starts with keywords, and this guide outlines a step-by-step process you can implement today to identify keyword opportunities.

Link Gap Analysis for SEO : Identify opportunities to increase your authority based on your competitors’ backlink strategy.

SEO Competitive Analysis Certification : Learn how to confidently build an SEO competitive analysis plan and get certified with this 6-part series. This certification combines on-demand video lessons with tasks and quizzes to affirm your understanding.

Most Recent Articles on Competitive Research

New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings
Cyrus Shepard

New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings

Competitive Research

BuiltWith has cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google's search results. We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to combine the two data sets?" We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.

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Keyword Research Master Guide

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Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis

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Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity
Tom Anthony

Link Profile Tool to Discover Paid Links or Other Anomalous Linking Activity

Competitive Research

What I'm going to share today is a tool I've built that automates a process to evaluate a domains link profile looked and whether it stands out against other domains in its niche. I'm going to show you the real data I saw for a client who I knew had bought links and how you can use the same tool to identify domains that have maybe bought links or other anomalous link profiles. It all works via Google Docs and the Linkscape API and only takes a couple of minutes to run the full report.

Competitive Analysis in Under 60 Seconds Using Google Docs
Tom Anthony

Competitive Analysis in Under 60 Seconds Using Google Docs

Competitive Research

Faced with a new client, and having established a list of keywords they need to target, you want to evaluate the competition to find out what sites are dominating the SERPs for these keywords. However... being an SEO you're a busy guy (or gal), and you need it done right now. I've built a Google Docs tool to automagically do exactly that and this post will walk you through it. The ...