Competitive Research

Competitive research is a fundamental part of any SEO strategy. In order to improve rankings for your site and gain organic traffic to your website, you first need to understand who you’re competing against for those top spots in the SERPs! Moz’s Competitive Research tools can help you and your team identify who your competitors are along with where there may be gaps in your keyword rankings and research.

What can I learn in this section of the Help Hub?

Within this section of the Help Hub, you can learn…

And so much more! You can use the left hand navigation to explore various articles related to Competitive Research or use the search bar to query a specific term. We've also outlined some common customer queries below to help you find the information you need!

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Common Customer Queries

How does True Competitor identify SERP competitors?
True Competitor identifies the top 500 ranking keywords for your domain, and from there analyzes those 500 SERPs. An analysis of those SERPs reveals a list of the top domains that are also ranking for those keywords, allowing us to surface to you the top 25 competitors you share SERP real estate with.
How can I use Rivalry as a helpful metric to understand the competitive landscape?
Rivalry is a 1-100 score that combines your Domain Authority (DA), your competitor’s DA, keyword overlap, keyword volume, and your rankings to identify your biggest rivals. The higher the Rivalry score, the more you should likely pay attention to that competitor. Rivalry can help you to identify which competitors to hone in on and do further research.
The competitors I’m seeing listed aren’t the websites I consider to be my competitors. Can you explain this?
You may have different types of competitors depending on the vertical you work in, the different types of products or services you offer, the different markets you work in, etc. True Competitor’s analysis of the SERPs helps to identify your top SERP competitors that you may not be aware of. You can read more about this and how to leverage the data in True Competitor in the Moz Blog.
What is Traffic Lift in Keyword Gap?
Traffic Lift is the estimated amount of traffic you can expect to gain by outranking your competitor for this keyword.
How can I see what keywords my competitors are ranking for?
If you’d like to see what keywords within our current ranking keywords corpus your competitors are ranking for, be sure to check out our Keyword Gap tool. You can also use Keyword Explorer’s Ranking Keywords section to see this information.
Why am I seeing the error message “No Data” in True Competitor?
If you’re seeing the error message of “No Data” in True Competitor this indicates we don't have enough data for your site just yet. If your site is new or doesn't rank for a lot of keywords yet, try a larger site in your industry to explore the competitive landscape or dive into keyword discovery in Keyword Explorer. Learn more with this blog post on alternative workflows: Aspirational Analysis: Competitive Research for New or Small Sites.