Content coverage and depth
How many commercial terms each side has a dedicated page for, how deep those pages go on specifications, lead times and tolerances, and how many supporting answers sit beneath them. Counted by page, not by word.
Fixture sheet · not a screenshot deck
SEO Competitor Analysis That Ends With An Action List
Anyone can screenshot a rival's homepage. The useful question is narrower: which page is taking the clicks you should be getting, how far ahead is it, and what would it cost you to close that gap before next quarter. This is the scoreboard that answers it — every surface scored, every gap priced in hours.
- 01Three to five opponents, chosen by SERP overlap — not by company size
- 02Five scored surfaces: content, links, technical, SERP occupancy, conversion path
- 03Gap chart with effort-versus-impact ranking, so the fixture list writes itself
- 04Delivered as a working document your team can execute without us
No rank guarantees. We score what exists today and show you the size of the gap.
Choosing the fixture
Pick opponents you can actually lose to
The first mistake in competitor work is benchmarking against the wrong team. A components supplier compares itself to a marketplace with fifty thousand product pages, concludes it cannot compete, and stops. The relevant opponent is the site that keeps appearing at position three for your commercial terms — not the largest brand in the category.
We build the fixture list from SERP overlap. For twenty of your target terms, we log who appears in the top ten and how often. The sites with the highest overlap are your real opponents. That set usually contains three types, and each needs a different response.
Where existing pages are already losing ground, the fix list and the scoreboard should be produced together, which is why most of this work sits beside our SEO Audit Services rather than in place of them.
Direct competitors
They sell what you sell to whom you sell it. They constrain your pricing story and your product-page structure. Beat them on specification clarity and proof, not on volume of blog posts.
Search competitors
Different business, same queries. A distributor, a trade magazine and a certification body can all appear on a page where a manufacturer ought to rank. These are usually beatable with one genuinely better page.
Content competitors
They own the informational layer — the guides, standards explainers, calculators. They rarely convert, but they intercept your buyer early. You borrow their question set; you do not need to out-publish them.
The five surfaces
What gets scored, and why each one matters
One overall number is a headline, not a diagnosis. We break the score into five surfaces, weight them by how much they move revenue in your category, and publish the arithmetic so you can argue with it.
Backlink profile quality
Referring domains, not total links. We separate directory noise from trade-association, supplier-network and editorial links, then estimate how many genuinely relevant domains you would need to match the rival's authority on your money terms.
Technical readiness
Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile, index bloat, duplicate parameter URLs, crawl depth, canonical handling, structured data coverage and whether the sitemap tells the truth. A fast rival with clean structure wins ties.
SERP occupancy
Of ten results for a target query, how many slots does each side hold — including the image pack, video block and People Also Ask. Occupancy shows whether you are absent or merely outranked, which are different problems.
Conversion path
Form length, response promise, phone number visibility, downloadable specs, chat availability and whether a mobile visitor can request a quote in under thirty seconds. This is the surface most often ignored and cheapest to fix.
One number you can defend
Weighted total, per-surface breakdown, and a written note on which surface is worth money this quarter. If a surface cannot be improved within ninety days, we mark it as background and keep it out of the action list.
Head to head
Side by side, term by term
The comparison below is the middle page of every report we deliver. Each row is a claim about the market backed by a number you can re-check yourself. Rows are ordered by how quickly a fix would change your position.
Surface
Your site
Rival
Gap
Content
11 mapped commercial pages · 0 comparison pages
34 mapped pages · 6 comparison pages
−23
Backlinks
12 referring domains · 3 relevant
240 referring domains · 61 relevant
−228
Technical
2.4s LCP · 1,900 crawlable URLs · no schema
1.1s LCP · 610 crawlable URLs · 28 templates with schema
−44
SERP slots
1 of 10 for the core term · 4 of 10 for the long tail
6 of 10 for the core term · 2 of 10 for the long tail
−5 / +2
Conversion
9 form fields · no phone number · 3-day reply promise
4 form fields · click-to-call · WhatsApp · sample download
−42
SERP occupancy for one target query
1RIVAL
2RIVAL
3DIR
4YOU
5DIR
6RIVAL
7MAG
8DIR
9MAG
10DIR
Three directory listings and two magazine articles hold five of ten slots. That is not authority you have to beat — that is a formatting and intent match you can win.
The gap chart
How far behind, in hours rather than adjectives
Every gap gets two numbers: the hours needed to close it, and the share of commercial queries it unlocks. Plot those against each other and the priority order stops being a matter of opinion. A rival with two hundred and forty referring domains looks invincible until you notice that sixty of them point at a single older guide — and that your long-tail terms are already winnable without any of them.
The chart below is the one page clients pin up. Bars on the left are your current coverage of each surface; bars on the right are the rival's. The numbers above each pair are the realistic closing window, assuming normal publishing capacity and no new links purchased.
your coveragerival coverage
Turning the score into fixtures
Five steps from scoreboard to schedule
-
01
Fix the fixture list
Twenty target queries, top ten logged for each, overlap counted. Three to five opponents selected and named in the report — with the reason each one earned a place and the one we left out.
-
02
Score both sides on the same rubric
Identical checks applied to you and to them, on the same day, with the same tool settings. Screenshots archived so the comparison can be re-run later without arguments about methodology.
-
03
Read the SERP, not just the score
For each unwon term we note what the ranking pages actually are: directory, PDF, video, product page. Occupancy tells you whether the obstacle is authority or format, and format is the cheaper of the two to fix.
-
04
Convert gaps into a ranked list
Each gap becomes a task with an owner, an hour estimate and an expected effect. Tasks that need six months of link building get separated from tasks that need one afternoon, and the afternoon tasks go first.
-
05
Re-run the board every quarter
Same queries, same rubric, same archive. A scoreboard that is never re-run is a photograph, and photographs do not tell you whether the work you paid for moved anything.
Name your three rivals. We will score the gap and send the first four moves.
Recent rounds
Three fixtures that changed the plan
3.4×
A pump manufacturer assumed it was losing to a global brand. Overlap analysis showed the real opponent was a regional distributor with a better spec table. Rewriting eleven product pages took six weeks and tripled commercial impressions.
Industrial · 6 months12 → 47
A contract furniture exporter had one top-ten slot against a rival holding six. The gap was schema and page depth, not links. Structured product data plus three comparison pages moved rankings in nine weeks.
Furniture · 3 months−61%
A lab-equipment supplier was quoted twelve months of link building. The scorecard showed the rival's advantage sat almost entirely in six comparison pages. Building them cut the quoted timeline by sixty percent.
Equipment · plan revisedScope of the report
What a fixture costs in effort
Reports are sized by market, not by seat. A single-market scorecard covers three opponents and twenty queries; a multi-market report multiplies both and adds a language check. Neither option includes a rank promise, because nobody can honestly sell one.
Where the analysis exposes a technical foundation that cannot support the plan, the remediation usually runs as a separate workstream under B2B SEO Agency delivery, with the scorecard as the brief. That sequencing matters: publishing more pages onto a broken crawl path just makes the next audit more expensive.
Asked before kickoff
The questions that decide scope
How many competitors should we actually track?
Three to five. One is a grudge, ten is a research project. The right number is the set that appears in the same top-ten results as your money terms, plus one content competitor whose guides intercept buyers earlier than you would like.
Can you analyse competitors we cannot name publicly?
Yes. We often label them A, B and C in the shared document and keep the real names in a private annex. The analysis does not depend on naming them, and several clients prefer the report to be safe to forward internally.
Do you need access to our analytics?
Read access to Search Console and analytics makes the report far sharper, because we can compare what you rank for against what actually converts. Without it we can still score the market, but we cannot weight the surfaces by your revenue reality.
How long does the analysis take?
A single-market scorecard takes ten to fifteen working days. Multi-market work with localisation checks runs four to six weeks, mostly because each market's SERP has to be read by someone who understands the language and the buyer.
Will you tell us if we cannot win a term?
Yes, in writing. Some terms are owned by marketplaces and will stay that way. We mark them as background, explain the cost of contesting them, and redirect the budget to queries where a realistic twelve-week plan exists.
Is this the same thing as a technical audit?
No. The scorecard tells you where you stand against the market. A technical audit tells you what is broken inside your own site. They overlap on one surface only, and the fix lists are different documents with different owners.
What happens after we receive the action list?
You can run it yourself — the list is written to be executable without us. If you would rather not, the same team can deliver it, and for teams standardising search across several markets we fold the work into one reporting rhythm instead of a stack of separate scorecards.
Who keeps score
Analysts who have run the plays they recommend
Our team has spent the last eight years inside B2B search — export manufacturers, industrial distributors, technical software. We have been the in-house person who has to explain a flat quarter, so the scorecard is built to survive that meeting rather than to impress a conference.
Every number in the report is reproducible. You get the query list, the tool settings, the date of capture and the raw export. If a claim cannot be re-checked, it does not go in the document.
We also refuse work where the honest answer is "your market is not search-led". That happens more often than agencies admit, and saying it early has been the single best source of referrals we have.
No invented case studies, no borrowed logos, no ranking promises. The scoreboard is the pitch.