Competitive Research

Competitive research in SEO means, in a nutshell, stealing your competitors’ rankings and traffic.

Well, not exactly stealing.

But it does involve reverse-engineering what's working for your competitors, and using that information to your advantage!

Competitive research typically follows a few common lines of inquiry: identifying competitors, keyword research, content gap analysis, and backlink exploration . If you're not sure where to start when it comes to establishing your competitors, check out the True Competitor feature in Moz Pro, and start building your competitive strategy.

In addition, we've listed some companion resources on competitive research and analysis for SEO.

How to Do a Competitor Analysis for SEO : A terrific introduction to SEO competitive analysis with a free template to copy for your own campaigns.

The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide : An effective competitive research process starts with keywords, and this guide outlines a step-by-step process you can implement today to identify keyword opportunities.

Link Gap Analysis for SEO : Identify opportunities to increase your authority based on your competitors’ backlink strategy.

SEO Competitive Analysis Certification : Learn how to confidently build an SEO competitive analysis plan and get certified with this 6-part series. This certification combines on-demand video lessons with tasks and quizzes to affirm your understanding.

Most Recent Articles on Competitive Research

Beyond the SEO Plateau: After Optimizing Your Website, What's Next?
Rand Fishkin

Beyond the SEO Plateau: After Optimizing Your Website, What's Next?

It's a near-universal experience for consultants and in-house SEOs who've worked on numerous organic search campaigns. The first 3-6 months (longer if the site is very large or complex) of any SEO effort is almost always exclusively dedicated to fixing mistakes, improving existing issues, tweaking and tuning the suboptimal, and generally closing the gap between what exists now and current best...

Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training

Moz Academy Training

Complete courses to master SEO basics

Keyword Research Master Guide

Learn Keyword Research like the pros

Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis

Win rankings and traffic from your competition

Google Organic Click-Through Rates in 2014
Philip Petrescu

Google Organic Click-Through Rates in 2014

We've all been there. Trying to improve our organic rankings so we can get more traffic from the search engines. And every time we do that, we are left with some big questions in our minds, like: How much traffic would I actually get if I rank on the first page? This post offers a new study of click-through rates of various positions on SERPs in an attempt to answer those questions.

New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings
Cyrus Shepard

New Moz-Builtwith Study Examines Big Website Tech and Google Rankings

BuiltWith has cataloged over 5,000 different website technologies on over 190 million sites. Like BuiltWith, Moz also has a lot of data. Every two years, we run a Search Engine Ranking Factors study where we examine over 180,000 websites in order to better understand how they rank in Google's search results. We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to combine the two data sets?" We wanted to find out what technologies websites were using, and also see if those technologies correlated with Google rankings.