Know who you are really competing with in search
Your competitors, the smart ones, will find you and plan how to market against you. Competitor research makes sure you see them just as clearly, and spot the openings they have missed.
Your search competitors are not always your business competitors
The companies you meet in sales meetings are not always the ones taking your traffic. In search, you also compete with marketplaces, directories, publishers, review sites and businesses that solve the same problem a different way.
Some well-established competitors do surprisingly badly online because they treat their website as an IT project. Smaller, newer businesses sometimes do very well because they took search seriously early. We look at what is actually happening in the results, not at who you assume is ahead.
What we look at
- Who ranks for the searches that matter to your revenue
- Keyword and topic gaps: where they rank and you do not
- Content quality, depth and format on competing pages
- Backlink profiles and where their authority comes from
- Technical strengths and weaknesses of competing sites
- Paid search activity, messaging and offers
- Who gets cited in AI Overviews and AI assistant answers
- Local and international competitors in each target market
What you get
A written report
A clear summary of the competitive landscape, in plain language, with the evidence behind each finding.
Prioritized opportunities
Where you can realistically win, what it would take, and what to leave alone for now.
Ongoing tracking
As part of a retainer, we keep watching selected competitors and flag meaningful changes in their visibility, content or ads.
Ask why, not just what
Knowing that a competitor ranks above you is the start, not the answer. We look at why: what their pages do better for searchers, why other sites link to them, and what that says about your own positioning. It is the same thinking you would apply to any competitor, applied to search.
Competitor research is also part of every audit we do. See how it feeds into our SEO work.
Start with a free audit
Tell us about your business and your site. We will look at where you stand in search today, where your competitors are ahead, and what we would do first. No obligation, and no ranking promises.