How to Do Competitor Landscape Analysis

What competitor landscape analysis is

Competitor landscape analysis is a strategic process used to understand the competitive environment in which a website operates. It involves identifying all relevant competitors, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and mapping their positions relative to your own domain and to each other. The goal is to identify strategic opportunities and threats, informing decisions about content creation, keyword targeting, and overall SEO strategy.

Unlike a one-to-one comparison with a known rival, landscape analysis takes a broader view. It seeks to answer questions such as:

• Who are all the domains competing for visibility for my target keywords?
• How do these competitors perform in the search results?
• Which competitors pose the greatest threat, and which offer the easiest opportunities for gains?
• Are there clusters of competition or market segments I have not yet targeted?

By understanding the entire landscape, you can make more informed decisions about resource allocation and prioritize areas where your efforts will yield the most significant results.

Landscape vs 1-to-1 gap analysis

While both competitor landscape analysis and one-to-one gap analysis are valuable competitive research techniques, they serve different purposes and operate at different scopes.

Feature	Competitor Landscape Analysis	1-to-1 Gap Analysis
Scope	Broad, identifies all relevant competitors in a market.	Narrow, focuses on a direct comparison with one competitor.
Objective	Map the entire competitive field, identify clusters, and uncover broad strategic opportunities.	Pinpoint specific content or keyword gaps between your site and a chosen rival.
Output	A comprehensive overview of market positioning, threat levels, and competitive clusters.	A detailed list of keywords or content topics where one domain outperforms another.
Use Case	Early-stage strategy, market entry, identifying new opportunities, understanding overall competitive dynamics.	Tactical execution, content planning, immediate keyword targeting improvements.

Think of landscape analysis as surveying the entire battlefield to identify all opposing forces and their general positions. One-to-one gap analysis, on the other hand, is like performing a detailed reconnaissance mission on a specific enemy stronghold to find its weak points. Both are essential, but they provide different levels of detail and insight.

Auto-discovering true SERP competitors

Identifying all relevant competitors, especially those you might not be aware of, can be challenging. Many SEO tools require you to manually input competitor domains. LemRank approaches this by automatically discovering competitors based on their actual performance in the SERPs for your tracked keywords.

LemRank clusters domains that consistently appear in the top-20 search results for the keywords you are tracking. This method ensures that the identified competitors are genuinely relevant because they are actively competing for the same search visibility you are seeking.

To refine the discovery process, LemRank applies a "mega-domain denylist." This denylist filters out extremely large, general-purpose domains such as wikipedia.org, youtube.com, or amazon.com. While these sites often rank for a wide array of keywords, they are typically not direct threats in terms of business competition and would skew the analysis of more direct rivals. By removing them, LemRank focuses the landscape analysis on domains that are more likely to be your true business competitors.

This automated discovery process ensures that your competitor list is always fresh and based on real-time SERP data, eliminating the need for manual updating and revealing competitors you might not have considered.

Scoring competitors by threat and overlap

Once competitors are identified, understanding their significance requires more than just a list of domains. LemRank scores competitors to help you prioritize your focus. Two primary dimensions for scoring are threat level and keyword overlap.

Keyword overlap

Keyword overlap quantifies how many of your tracked keywords a competitor also ranks for. This metric indicates the direct competition for search visibility. A high overlap percentage means the competitor is vying for many of the same search terms as your domain, suggesting they are a close content or business rival.

For example, if you track 1,000 keywords and a competitor ranks for 800 of them, their keyword overlap is 80%. This indicates significant competition in your core search areas.

Threat score

LemRank calculates a comprehensive "threat score" for each competitor. This score is a composite metric designed to give you a holistic view of how formidable a competitor is. It combines three key factors:

1. Keyword overlap %: As described above, this measures the proportion of your tracked keywords for which the competitor also ranks. Higher overlap contributes to a higher threat score.
2. Average position advantage: This assesses whether the competitor typically ranks higher than your domain for shared keywords. If a competitor consistently outranks you for keywords important to your strategy, this indicates a strong competitive advantage and increases their threat score.
3. Topical authority: LemRank analyzes the competitor's overall authority within the specific topics related to your tracked keywords. This is determined by a combination of factors including the range and depth of content, backlink profile strength within the topic, and consistent high rankings for related terms. A competitor with strong topical authority is difficult to displace and represents a higher long-term threat.

By combining these factors, the threat score provides a nuanced rating of each competitor's overall impact on your SEO performance. A competitor with a high threat score might have strong topical authority and consistently outrank you for many important keywords, even if their keyword overlap is not 100%. Conversely, a competitor with high overlap but low average position advantage might represent an easier target for your SEO efforts. More details on threat analysis are available in [features/competitive-intelligence/threat-analysis].

Prioritising attack targets

With a clear understanding of the competitive landscape, including automatically discovered competitors and their threat scores, you can strategically prioritize which competitors to "attack" for SEO gains. Prioritization typically involves balancing two main considerations:

1. High Threat, High Overlap Competitors (Direct Rivals): These competitors rank for many of your keywords and often outperform you. Targeting them involves a head-on content strategy, seeking to create superior content, build stronger backlinks, and optimize for better user experience to outrank them directly. This is often the most resource-intensive approach but can yield significant long-term results by displacing key competitors.

   • Example: A competitor consistently ranks in positions 1-3 for your most important transactional keywords. Prioritizing them means developing 10x content and a robust promotion strategy to take those positions.

2. Moderate Threat, Moderate Overlap Competitors (Opportunity Rivals): These are competitors who share a decent number of keywords but might have lower average positions or less comprehensive topical authority compared to the top threats. They represent "low-hanging fruit" where focused effort can quickly lead to improved rankings.

   • Example: A competitor ranks on page 2 (positions 11-20) for 50 of your core informational keywords. Creating more in-depth articles or improving existing content could push you past them relatively quickly.

3. Low Threat, Low Overlap Competitors (Emerging or Niche Rivals): These may be smaller sites or new entrants focusing on a specific niche within your broader keyword set. While not immediate threats, monitoring them can reveal emerging trends or untapped keyword opportunities.

   • Example: A new blog ranks well for a handful of highly specific long-tail keywords. This might indicate an underserved content area you could expand into.

Your strategy for prioritization will depend on your resources and overall business goals. If immediate gains are paramount, focusing on moderate threat competitors might be ideal. If you are building a long-term dominant position, tackling high-threat competitors will be a crucial, albeit challenging, endeavor.

How LemRank builds your landscape automatically

LemRank streamlines the process of building your competitor landscape by automating much of the data collection and analysis. This allows you to focus on strategic insights rather than manual data compilation.

Here is how LemRank constructs your competitive landscape:

1. Keyword Tracking Foundation: The process begins with the keywords you track within LemRank. These keywords define the specific market segments and search visibility you are interested in.
2. SERP Analysis: LemRank continuously monitors the search engine results pages (SERPs) for all your tracked keywords. For each keyword, it identifies every domain that appears in the top-20 search results.
3. Domain Clustering: Based on repeated appearances across your tracked keywords, LemRank groups these domains. Domains that frequently appear for many of the same keywords are flagged as potential competitors.
4. Mega-Domain Denylist Application: To ensure relevance, LemRank applies its internal mega-domain denylist during the clustering phase. Domains like wikipedia.org, youtube.com, and other extremely broad platforms are filtered out. This prevents the landscape from being cluttered with entities that are not direct business competitors.
5. Competitor Identification: After filtering, the remaining clustered domains are identified as your true SERP competitors. These are the websites actively vying for the same search traffic as your domain.
6. Data Aggregation and Scoring: For each identified competitor, LemRank then gathers detailed performance data across all your tracked keywords. This data includes:
   • The total number of shared keywords.
   • Their average organic ranking position for those shared keywords.
   • Historical ranking trends.
   • Topical coverage and depth analysis.
7. Threat and Overlap Calculation: Using the gathered data, LemRank automatically calculates the keyword overlap percentage and the comprehensive threat score for each competitor. This involves comparing their performance against your domain for shared keywords, factoring in average position advantage and topical authority.
8. Visualisation and Reporting: Finally, LemRank presents this data through dashboards and reports, often using visualisations such as scatter plots or matrices, to help you understand the landscape at a glance. You can see which competitors are most threatening, which have the most overlap, and where opportunities lie.

This automated approach ensures that your competitive landscape is always up-to-date with current SERP realities, immediately highlighting new threats or emerging opportunities without constant manual intervention.

Related

• How to do competitor gap analysis
• How to do a keyword gap analysis