SEO Guides · B2B
SEO Competitor Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide for B2B Marketers
An SEO competitor analysis is the process of studying the websites that outrank you in Google and AI search, so you can copy what works for them, fix what they do badly, and take their traffic. Your SEO competitors are often not your business competitors — a report hub, a comparison site, or a different kind of vendor can rank for your keywords instead of you.
This guide walks you through how to do an SEO competitor analysis in B2B: finding your real rivals, comparing keywords, content, backlinks, and AI visibility, and turning the findings into a plan you can execute this month.
Only about one-third of clicks go past the top five organic results.
Backlinko · SiteimproveRoughly 90% of pages get no Google traffic at all. If you're not getting the clicks, your competitors are.
Ahrefs · SEJAI Overviews now appear on roughly half of US Google queries — your analysis has to cover ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI answers too.
Google · Feb 2026Only about one-third of clicks go past the top five organic results (Backlinko, cited by Siteimprove), and roughly 90% of pages get no Google traffic at all (Ahrefs, cited by Search Engine Journal). Meanwhile, AI Overviews now appear on roughly half of US Google queries (Google, February 2026), so your analysis has to cover ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI answers too — not just the classic ten blue links.
Definition
What an SEO competitor analysis is (and what it is not)
An SEO competitor analysis means researching the websites that compete with you in search — their keywords, content, backlinks, and technical health — and using that information to improve your own rankings.
It is not the same as a full competitive intelligence project. You are not analyzing their pricing, sales team, or product roadmap. You only care about why they rank and how you can rank higher.
It is also not a one-time exercise. Rankings, algorithm updates, and competitor moves change constantly, so most teams run a light version monthly and a deep version once or twice a year.
The four areas you research around your site
Step 1
Who your real SEO competitors are
Your SEO competitors are the websites that rank for the keywords your buyers search — whether or not they sell what you sell. A B2B SaaS company can find itself competing with analysts, industry publications, and software comparison sites for the same queries.
Two ways to find them:
Use a competitor report in an SEO tool (or Google Search Console plus a keyword tool) to see which domains rank in the top 10 for the same keywords as you. These are your closest search rivals.
List the keywords your buyers would search, Google each one, and note which domains show up again and again.
Pick 3–5 to analyze. Before you settle on them, check each site's authority (a metric like Domain Rating or Domain Authority estimates how strong a site's backlink profile is). If every top rival is a giant like Adobe or Gartner and you're a DR 40 site, you'll have a hard time outranking them directly — look for keywords where the ranking sites are closer to your size.
Step 2 · The checklist
The SEO competitor analysis checklist
Work through these six checks. Each one answers a specific question about why your competitors rank.
Check 1
Keyword gap
Question answered: which keywords bring my competitors traffic that I'm missing?
Enter your domain and your competitors' domains into a keyword gap tool. You'll see three buckets:
They rank, you don't. These are your best opportunities — filter for keywords with real business value (buying intent, product relevance), not just high volume.
You both rank. If they rank above you, study why and close the gap.
You rank, they don't. Protect these; competitors will come for them.
In B2B, pay special attention to comparison keywords (competitor name + alternative), problem keywords ("how to fix X"), and integration keywords ("tool A + tool B"). Competitors rarely target all three.
Keyword gap — priority keywords
Sorted by business value. Missing keywords are your best opportunities.
| Keyword | Volume | Competitor rank | Your rank | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| competitor name + alternative | 290 | #3 | — | High |
| how to fix high bounce rate | 1,300 | #5 | #34 | High |
| tool A + tool B integration | 480 | #7 | — | High |
| industry benchmark 2026 | 2,400 | #2 | #18 | Medium |
| pricing comparison | 880 | #4 | #26 | Medium |
Check 2
Content gap
Question answered: what topics and page types are winning for them?
Look at the pages that earn your competitors most of their organic traffic (most tools show a "top pages" report). Note:
- What formats win: guides, templates, comparison pages, free tools, benchmarks?
- How deep they go: first-page results on Google average around 1,400 words (Backlinko study, cited by Siteimprove).
- What they include that you don't: original data, screenshots, pricing info, FAQs.
Then be honest about which pages of yours target the same topic but rank worse. Often the fix isn't a new page — it's rewriting a page that already has some traction.
Check 3
Backlink gap
Question answered: who links to them but not to me?
Backlinks are still a major ranking factor and a big driver of AI search visibility. Run a backlink comparison and look for:
- Sites that link to two or more of your competitors but not to you — a "link gap." These are your warmest link-building prospects.
- Where their links come from: directories, guest posts, news coverage, partner pages?
- How their link growth compares to yours over time. A competitor pulling ahead in rankings is often doing so because their link count is growing faster.
Check 4
Technical and on-page health
Question answered: are they beating me on fundamentals, or on strategy?
Compare site speed, mobile experience, crawlability (can Google and AI bots actually read the site?), and on-page basics: title tags, headings, internal linking. If their pages are faster and better structured, they win ties. If your technical side is fine, focus your effort on content and links instead — don't spend weeks fixing something that isn't the bottleneck.
Check 5
AI visibility (the check most analyses skip)
Question answered: when a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's AI Overview about a problem I solve, who gets mentioned?
This matters more every month. AI Overviews appear on about half of US Google queries (Google, February 2026), and B2B technology queries trigger them around 82% of the time (Digital Applied, 2026). Crucially, AI answers don't just cite whoever ranks #1 — only about 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews rank in the organic top 10 (Ahrefs, 2026), so smaller sites can win citations even where they lose rankings.
Include in your analysis:
- Which competitors get mentioned or cited in AI answers for your core questions.
- Which of their pages get cited — and what those pages have in common (clear answers, original data, named sources).
- Whether AI crawlers can access your site at all — many sites block them without realizing it.
Check 6
Paid search signals
Question answered: which keywords do they consider profitable?
Check what keywords your competitors bid on in Google Ads (tools like SpyFu expose this). If a company pays for clicks on a keyword month after month, they've probably proven it converts. Those keywords deserve a place on your organic roadmap, especially lower-competition ones.
Step 3
Turning the analysis into a plan (with a report structure)
An analysis you don't act on is wasted work. Structure your findings as a short report — this is also what a usable SEO competitor analysis report sample looks like:
3–5 domains, with authority scores.
One table comparing total keywords, traffic, backlinks, and AI mentions.
10–20 priority keywords, sorted by business value.
Pages to create, pages to rewrite, pages to leave alone.
Sites linking to multiple competitors but not you.
Which questions your competitors get cited for today.
What you'll do each month, with an owner per item.
If you'd rather not build this from scratch, our competitor research template gives you the structure ready to fill in.
Votrix AI · Automated SEO & GEO
What to do next: execute faster than your competitors
The uncomfortable truth about SEO competitor analysis in B2B: your competitors are running the same tools you are. The winner is usually whoever executes faster — publishing the gap content, earning the gap links, and fixing the technical issues first. That's a time problem, and for a lean marketing team, it's the real bottleneck.
This is where we'd point you to Votrix AI, an automated SEO and GEO agent built for exactly this workload. It runs keyword research and competitor analysis for you, checks your backlinks, site authority, and backlink gap versus competitors (data from DataForSEO), and shows what to prioritize. It writes and publishes the articles and pages that fill your content gaps, rewrites pages that are stuck on page two, and sends the outreach emails to earn backlinks and mentions itself. It also checks whether Google and AI crawlers can read your site, and tracks whether ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews mention you. Connect Google Search Console and you see your true rankings, clicks, and impressions. There's a free tier, and beyond it you pay by usage — so a founder doing their own SEO can start without a budget approval.
If you're doing the analysis manually, the workflow in this guide still stands. Automating the data collection and execution just means you run it monthly instead of annually — and that cadence, more than any tool, is what separates B2B sites that climb from ones that stagnate.
Votrix after its SEO run: the sample company ranks #1 on Google for its target term.
Cadence
How often should you run an SEO competitor analysis?
Run a quick pass monthly and a full analysis every quarter. Trigger a special deep-dive when any of these happens:
A new competitor appears in the top 10 for your money keywords.
Google rolls out a major algorithm update.
Your rankings or traffic drop and you can't explain it.
You're planning next year's content roadmap.
Watch out
Common mistakes to avoid
Analyzing business competitors instead of search competitors. The site outranking you might be a directory. Analyze whoever holds the rankings.
Chasing volume instead of value. A 10-searches-per-month keyword that matches your product beats a 10,000-search keyword that doesn't. For a deeper approach to B2B specifically, see our B2B competitor analysis guide.
Stopping at the report. Findings only pay off when they become pages and links.
Ignoring links. Content alone rarely closes a big authority gap. Pair content work with link building — our B2B link building guide covers the outreach process.
Forgetting technical health. If crawlers can't read your pages, no amount of content helps. Our B2B SEO audit guide covers the technical side.
Optimizing only for Google. With AI Overviews triggering on 82% of B2B tech queries (Digital Applied, 2026), a site invisible to AI answers loses half the game.
Keep reading
Where to go from here
If you found this guide useful, these cover the neighboring pieces:
And if you'd rather have the whole loop — analysis, content, links, and AI visibility tracking — run automatically, Votrix AI does it end to end.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
How do I create a competitor analysis?
Start by listing 3–5 websites that rank for your target keywords. Compare them against your site on keywords, content, backlinks, technical health, and AI visibility. Then turn each gap into a specific action — a page to write, a link to pursue, a technical fix — and schedule it.
What are the five best SEO tools for competitor research?
The tools most teams use for competitor research are Ahrefs, Semrush, SpyFu, Similarweb, and SE Ranking. Ahrefs and Semrush lead for keyword and backlink gap analysis; SpyFu adds paid search history; Similarweb is good for traffic estimates. Votrix AI automates the analysis itself — it runs the competitor and backlink gap checks and then executes the resulting content and link work.
Is SEO dead now with AI?
No — it has expanded. AI Overviews appear on about half of US Google queries, and AI answers still draw on web content, links, and authority. What changed is that visibility now means being cited in AI answers as well as ranking in classic results, which is why your competitor analysis should cover both.
What are the four Ps of competitive analysis?
In marketing, the four Ps are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion — a framework for comparing what competitors sell, at what price, through which channels, and how they promote it. In an SEO competitor analysis, the closest equivalent framework is keywords, content, backlinks, and technical health.
Sources
References
- Siteimprove — — How to conduct a complete SEO competitor analysis — https://www.siteimprove.com/glossary/seo-competitor-analysis/ (checked October 2026)
- Ahrefs — — How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis — https://ahrefs.com/blog/seo-competitor-analysis/ (checked October 2026)
- Moz — — How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis (Free Template) — https://moz.com/seo-competitor-analysis (checked October 2026)
- Search Engine Journal — — SEO statistics (90% of pages get no traffic) — https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/seo-statistics/ (checked October 2026)
- Omnibound — — Google AI Overviews statistics (Google Feb 2026 disclosure: ~50% of US queries) — https://www.omnibound.ai/blog/google-ai-overviews-statistics (checked October 2026)
- Digital Applied — — AI search and SEO statistics 2026 (B2B tech AIO rate ~82%) — https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-search-seo-statistics-2026-definitive-collection (checked October 2026)
- ALM Corp — — AI Overview citations from top-10 pages dropped to ~38% — https://almcorp.com/blog/google-ai-overview-citations-drop-top-ranking-pages-2026/ (checked October 2026)
- SpyFu — — Competitor keyword and PPC research — https://www.spyfu.com/ (checked October 2026)