How to Find Your SEO Competitors

Last Updated: November 1, 2022

Before you can start digging into an SEO competitor analysis, you need to know who your SEO competitors actually are. You may think you know, but until you dive into the data, it's not always apparent.

So, where do we begin?

Let’s start with the manual process of identifying your SEO competitors:

1. Enter your target keyword in Google

2. Collect the results in a spreadsheet

3. Identify which domains are ranking

4. To get more accurate results for a topic, repeat steps 1-3 for three to five keywords per cluster

5. Combine the results into one spreadsheet

6. Calculate which domains appear in which positions, and the most frequently

You’ll need to repeat the above steps for every product, service, and content topic on your website.

Phew, talk about exhausting!

This process is laborious, and really only possible if you rank for a handful of keywords. But realistically, most sites rank for far more. What about hundreds of keywords, thousands, or tens of thousands? The most popular sites on the web can even rank for millions of keyword phrases! Checking rankings by hand becomes a cumbersome - and often inaccurate - process.

To make your life easier, various SEO tool solutions can automatically look at all of the keywords you rank for in their databases, and accurately tell you who your true search competitors are.

One such solution is Moz's True Competitor tool. Let’s check it out:

1. Enter your domain or subdomain. For this example, let’s take a look at 1-800-Pet-Meds, an online pet pharmacy (1800petmeds.com).

2. You’ll see a list of your top 25 competitors. In the screenshot below, True Competitor shows 1-800-Pet-Meds’ biggest SERP competitors, and their Domain Authority (DA) scores. Their top 5 competitors are Chewy, PetCare Rx, PetCo, Walmart Pet Rx, and VCA Hospitals:

3. If you’re logged into Moz with a free trial or Pro account, you’ll see some additional metrics, such as a Rivalry score. Rivalry is on a scale of 1-100, and it combines your DA, your competitor’s DA, keyword overlap, keyword volume, and your rankings to give you one powerful way of identifying your competitors. The higher the Rivalry score, the bigger the rival.

4. Do you already know who your competitors are? That doesn’t mean you should skip this step! This tool can also validate your own competitor choices. If you have competitors in mind, run your site through this tool, and see what comes up. It's crucial to have metrics that substantiate your assumptions.

5. Final step: In the SEO Competitor Analysis Template, add your competitors to the True Competitors tab.

Now that we know our true competitors, we can use this data to perform an SEO competitor analysis.

Oftentimes, a brand’s offering covers a wide span of products, services, and content. This can result in your competitors differing across the various verticals. You may find your competitors differ due to:

• A diverse group of products

• Multiple service categories

• A wide range of content topics

• Seasonal products

• Local aspects of your business

• Various customer personas you serve

One practical way to think about it is this: if the content on your website is organized by subfolders or subdomains, there’s a chance that each subfolder has a different set of competitors. Let’s take a look at an example. PetSmart, a pet product retailer, offers a range of products for different animals, various in-store services, and a blog where they regularly post informational articles.

We can search for PetSmart’s niche competitors in the True Competitor tool:

1. Enter your subfolder or subdomain. In this example, I’ve entered PetSmart’s Fish product subfolder (petsmart.com/fish), and selected Subfolder from the dropdown menu:

We can see That Pet Place, YouTube, Live Aquaria, Modest Fish, and Bulk Reef Supply are just a few of the competitors in this market.

2. For the sake of comparison, let’s look at another PetSmart niche market. I’ve entered PetSmart’s Bird product subfolder (petsmart.com/bird), and selected Subfolder from the dropdown menu. Scroll down, and we can see a list of competitors in this pet bird niche market:

We can see the competitors in this market include Tractor Supply, IDA, Ace Hardware, Bird Snow, and Custom Cages.

We could keep going with PetSmart’s dog, cat, and reptile subfolders, as well as their dog training and veterinary service subfolders. Additionally, petsmart.com publishes advice on their blog - such as the best dog food for small breeds - which means they’re competing with magazine and informational sites like nymag.com and akc.org. All of these subfolders may produce a different set of competitors.

You’ve now discovered a whole new way to think about your SEO competition!

Next up: How To Conduct Competitor Keyword Analysis