How to Reverse Engineer Your SEO Competitors (Like a Pro)

Understanding your SEO competitors is crucial for developing a successful strategy. By systematically analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, you can identify opportunities to outperform them. This guide will walk you through a comprehensive process to reverse engineer your competitors’ SEO efforts, from a broad overview down to page-level specifics.

(Note: This guide often refers to a spreadsheet template. While the template itself isn’t provided here, the data points to collect are detailed for you to create your own or adapt an existing one.)

Step 1: Gather Organic Traffic + Backlink Data (Broad Analysis)

The first step is to collect high-level metrics for your own domain and at least three of your top competitors. This provides a foundational understanding of the competitive landscape.

Actions:

1. Use Semrush Bulk Backlink Analysis:

   • Go to Semrush’s Bulk Backlink Analysis tool.
   • Input your domain and the domains of your chosen competitors.
   • Export the generated report.

2. Populate Spreadsheet (Broad Tab):

   • Create a “Broad” tab in your analysis spreadsheet.
   • From the Semrush report, enter the following for each domain:
     • Domain URL
     • Total Traffic
     • Authority Score (AS)
     • Referring Domains (RDs)
     • Total Backlinks

3. Analyze Referring Domain Tiers:

   • For each domain (yours and competitors’), navigate to their referring domains list in Semrush and export it.
   • Upload this CSV file to ChatGPT (or a similar AI tool).
   • Use a prompt like: "I uploaded a referring domains CSV from Semrush. Please count how many domains fall into each AS (Authority Score) tier: 0-30, 31-60, 61-100. List the counts clearly."
   • Add these tiered counts to your spreadsheet under respective columns (e.g., “RDs AS 0-30”, “RDs AS 31-60”, “RDs AS 61-100”).

4. Conduct Keyword Gap Analysis:

   • Use the Semrush Keyword Gap tool.
   • Enter your domain and your competitor domains.
   • Filter for “Untapped” keywords. These are keywords your competitors rank for, but your domain does not.
   • Export this list of untapped keywords and add it to a new sheet/tab in your analysis template.

Step 2: Crawl Your Competitor’s Websites

Next, gather on-site data by crawling your competitors’ websites. This will reveal insights into their content structure and on-page optimization.

Actions:

1. Use Screaming Frog SEO Spider:

   • Optionally, connect your Ahrefs API to Screaming Frog for richer data.
   • Configure the crawl to focus on HTML pages. You can speed up the crawl by deselecting images, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

2. Crawl and Export:

   • Crawl each competitor’s website individually.
   • Once a crawl is complete, go to the “Internal” tab and filter for “HTML” pages.
   • Export this report.
   • Create a new tab in your spreadsheet for each competitor’s crawl data.

3. Populate Spreadsheet (Broad Tab - Continued):

   • From the Screaming Frog crawl reports, add the following data to your “Broad” analysis tab for each competitor:
     • Indexable Pages: Count of pages filtered by “Indexable.”
     • Total Words: Sum of the word count for all indexable pages.
     • Total Internal Links: Sum of “Unique Inlinks” for all indexable pages.
     • Pages with Backlinks: Count of indexable pages that have more than 0 Ahrefs Referring Domains (RDs).
     • Ratio: Calculate this as (Pages with Backlinks / Indexable Pages) * 100%.

Step 3: Investigate Your Competitor’s Brands

Assessing the brand strength of your competitors provides context to their SEO performance.

Actions:

1. Gather Branded Search Volume:

   • Use Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool for each competitor’s main brand keyword (e.g., “Semrush”, “Ahrefs”).
   • Add the search volume for their brand name to your spreadsheet.

2. Collect Audience Size:

   • Visit the major social media profiles of your competitors (e.g., YouTube, X/Twitter, LinkedIn).
   • Sum their total followers/subscribers across these platforms.
   • Add this cumulative audience size to your spreadsheet.

3. Assess Reviews:

   • Check relevant third-party review websites (e.g., Capterra, G2 for SaaS; Google Business Profile for local businesses; Trustpilot for e-commerce/general).
   • Gather the total number of reviews and the average review score for each competitor.
   • Add this information to your spreadsheet.

4. Check Brand Mentions in LLMs:

   • Use a tool like Otterly.ai (or similar) to check how frequently your competitors’ brands are mentioned by Large Language Models (LLMs) in response to relevant keywords.
   • Add this data to your spreadsheet.

Step 4: Page-Level Competitor Analysis

Now, it’s time to drill down and analyze specific competitor pages that are ranking for your target keywords.

Actions:

1. Use ‘Pages’ Tab in Spreadsheet:

   • Create a “Pages” tab in your analysis spreadsheet. This tab should be structured to analyze multiple keywords, with rows for your page (if it exists) and several top competitor pages for each keyword.

2. Gather Page-Specific Metrics:

   • For each target keyword and each ranking page (yours and competitors’), fill in the following:
     • URL: The specific URL of the ranking page.
     • Rankability Score: Use a tool like Rankability.
     • Word Count: Use Rankability or data from your Screaming Frog crawl.
     • On-Page SEO Score: A manual score (1-5, where 5 is best) based on whether the target keyword is present in the:
       • URL
       • Page Title
       • Meta Description
       • H1 Tag
       • First sentence/paragraph of the main content.
     • Originality %: Use a tool like Originality.ai to check for AI-generated content.
     • Quality Score: A manual score (1-5, where 5 is exceptional). You can also use ChatGPT with the page’s PDF and Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines for a more structured assessment. Consider:
       • Does the page/content satisfy user intent?
       • Does the content strategy/angle add unique value?
       • Is the content up-to-date?
       • Is the page readable, scannable, and easy to digest?
       • Does it have unique, high-quality images/videos?
       • Is the content helpful, original, accurate, and safe?
       • Does the content demonstrate a high degree of effort?
     • Internal Links (to page): From Screaming Frog, find the number of “Unique Inlinks” pointing to this specific page.
     • Topical Authority/Supporting Pages: Perform a Google search: site:competitordomain.com "broad keyword related to page". Score 1-5 based on the number of relevant supporting pages found (e.g., 1 for <1, 2 for 2-5, 3 for 6-10, 4 for 11-25, 5 for 26+).
     • RDs to Page: Number of Referring Domains pointing to this specific URL (use Semrush or Ahrefs).
     • Domain AS/DR: The overall Authority Score/Domain Rating of the competitor’s website (from your broad analysis).

Final Step: Actionable Insights

With all this data collected—both at the broad domain level and the specific page level—you now have a powerful overview of the competitive landscape.

• Identify Gaps: Look for areas where your website and content significantly lag behind top competitors. This could be in total traffic, authority, number of referring domains, content depth (word count), on-page SEO, content quality, internal linking, topical coverage, or brand presence.
• Formulate Strategy: Use these identified gaps to create a targeted SEO strategy. For example:
  • If competitors have vastly more high-authority backlinks, a robust link-building campaign is needed.
  • If their content is significantly more thorough or higher quality for target keywords, you’ll need to improve your content.
  • If they have stronger brand signals, consider strategies to increase brand awareness and reviews.
• Prioritize Actions: Focus on the actions that will likely yield the biggest return for the effort involved.

By consistently applying this reverse engineering process, you can make informed, data-driven decisions to improve your SEO performance and effectively compete in your niche.