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Size up a competitor
Domain overview, organic and SERP competitors, the keyword gap and the backlinks behind it.
This tutorial goes from "who are we up against?" to a list of keywords and link sources to go after. Each step is a separate lookup with its own price, so you can stop wherever you have what you need.
1. Find who you compete with
Organic competitors
Open Competitors. On Organic competitors, your domain is filled in; click Find competitors. You get the domains that rank for the same keywords as you, with how many keywords you share and their estimated traffic. The top 50 costs about $0.05.
Or: who ranks for the keywords you care about
SERP competitors takes a list of up to 200 keywords instead of a domain. Click Use my saved keywords to load your saved list, highest volume first. It shows which domains appear most for exactly those searches, which is often a different list from the one you would write from memory.
2. Size them up
Open Domain overview, enter a competitor and click Run overview ($0.14). You get:
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| Organic traffic | Estimated monthly visits from Google, and what that traffic would cost in ads. |
| Organic keywords | Keywords the domain ranks for in the top 100. |
| Backlinks, referring domains | Totals from the backlink index. |
| Domain Rating, URL Rating | Link authority scores, 0 to 100. |
| Ranking distribution | How many keywords sit in each position range, and how many are new, improved, declined or lost. |
Below it, Top keywords and Top pages list what brings the traffic in. Filter top keywords by position or by a URL path such as /blog/ to study one section of a site. These lists are paged and each page is a separate lookup; the price per page is shown next to the pager.
3. Find the keyword gap
Pick a competitor
Click a competitor's name in either competitor list, or open the Keyword gap tab and type it in.
Gap or shared
Gap lists keywords they rank for and you do not: new ground to cover. Shared lists keywords you both rank for, with each side's position and how many places you trail by. Use Min volume and Max difficulty to keep it to realistic targets.
Save the opportunities
Select rows and click Save N selected to add them to your saved keywords, with their volume, difficulty and intent. From there you can track them.
4. See where their links come from
Open Backlinks, enter the competitor (a domain, a subdomain, or one exact page as a full URL) and click Run summary + history for the totals and a monthly chart of links gained and lost ($0.10). Then use the tabs:
- Backlinks: individual links, by default the strongest one from each linking domain. Filter live or lost links and dofollow only.
- Referring domains and Anchors: who links, and with which words.
- Top pages: which of their pages attract links. These are the formats worth copying.
- Link intersect: enter two or more competitors to find sites linking to all of them. Those are the most likely to link to you too.