SEO Competitor Analysis

An SEO competitor analysis studies the sites that appear above yours on Google and in AI answers: which searches they rank for, with which pages, which content and links reward them, and where they are exposed. It shows you where you can overtake them and where competing is not worth it.

For English-speaking clients this usually means one of two things: a foreign company that wants to understand who it is up against in Italy, on Italian-language searches, or a company that wants to compare itself with competitors in several countries and languages, alongside our international SEO work.

Market competitors and search competitors

The competitors you know are not always the ones beating you on Google. That is why we distinguish between:

• direct competitors: they offer a product or service similar to yours, to the same customers;
• indirect competitors: they offer something different that meets the same need;
• potential competitors: they are about to enter your market;
• search competitors: the sites that occupy the results for your searches even if they don't sell what you sell, such as portals, marketplaces, newspapers, blogs and forums.

For SEO, the last group matters most: they are the ones taking the visits that could be coming to you.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

A competitor analysis is right for you if:

• a competitor has overtaken you on Google and you want to understand why;
• you are about to launch a site, a product or a service and want to know how hard the market is;
• you want to decide which searches to invest in and which to leave alone;
• you want to know which sites AI tools cite when customers ask about your industry.

It is not right for you if you are looking for a list of data with no guidance on what to do. The analysis only makes sense if it leads to decisions.

What we analyze

1. Who your competitors are. We start from the searches that matter to you and from the competitors you point out, and we see who occupies the results, on Google and in AI answers.
2. Searches and pages. Which searches they rank for, with which pages, and which of those searches your site is missing. This is where the work overlaps with keyword research.
3. Content. How their best pages are built: structure, depth, data, images, FAQs, how often they are updated, and their content marketing strategy.
4. Links and mentions. Which sites cite them and why, to find the link building opportunities you can earn the right way.
5. Technical aspects. Speed, mobile version, site structure, structured data.
6. Other channels. Presence on social media, in local listings and on marketplaces, when they matter in your market.

What we deliver: an example

The final document has two parts: the competitor table and the action priorities. Below is a generic example, with made-up names and situations to show the format, for a company selling a service to customers across Italy.

Competitor	Type	Where it beats you	Where it is exposed
Competitor A	Direct	One page per service, with indicative prices and FAQs	Slow on mobile, no informational guides
Industry portal	Search	Guides and comparisons on informational searches	Doesn't sell the service: it sends leads to others
Competitor B	Direct	Cited by trade magazines and industry associations	Short, generic service pages
Marketplace	Search	Searches with "price" and "best"	No pages for custom requests

The table produces the priorities, ranked by impact:

1. High impact. Create the missing service pages, answering the questions customers actually ask: these are the searches closest to a quote request.
2. Medium impact. Write a guide on the informational searches the portal covers today, with a clear link to the service pages.
3. Medium impact, longer timeline. Get cited by the industry sites that already cite your competitors, with content and data worth citing.

Alongside this there is a SWOT analysis: your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, and the opportunities and threats for you.

How we work

1. Audit and data. We start from your site and your Search Console data, so we compare what can actually be compared.
2. Strategy and keywords. We choose the searches to compare on and the competitors to study in depth.
3. Technical implementation and content. The gaps we find become changes to pages and to the structure of the site.
4. Authority and multichannel. Links, mentions, social media and the sources AI tools consult.
5. Measurement and iteration. Markets change: we repeat the comparison over time to see who is moving up, who is moving down and what has changed.

How long it takes

It depends on how many competitors and how many searches we analyze: a local business with a few services needs far less work than a nationwide online store. We give you the timeline in the quote. The effects on traffic come later, with the changes, and are measured in months.

What we don't do

• We don't copy competitors. We study what works in order to do better, not to do the same: copied pages add nothing, either for customers or for Google.
• We don't just hand you data. Every comparison ends with what to do, ranked by impact.
• We don't promise to overtake a competitor by a given date: it also depends on what they do.

How much a competitor analysis costs

Competitor analysis is included in our monthly SEO consulting, which starts at €300 a month + VAT. If you need it as a one-off project, for example before a launch, we quote it based on the number of competitors, searches and channels to analyze.

The project is run by Eugenio Tommasi, founder of SEO SRL. We have been managing Google Ads campaigns for over 15 years, so we also look at who is advertising on your searches. To see what an SEO agency should do for you, read our SEO agency page.

The first step

Want to know why a competitor is beating you? Contact us with your website and the competitors that worry you, and we will tell you what the analysis would cover and what it would cost. You can write to us in Italian, English, Spanish, German or Portuguese.