How to Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ SEO Strategy
Competitor research is one of the most valuable exercises you can undertake when developing an SEO strategy, but it’s also something that can become unnecessarily complicated.
With so much data available, it’s easy to spend hours analysing competitors without coming away with anything particularly actionable.
The reality is that you don’t need to know everything about your competitors to understand what’s driving their organic search performance. You need to know where they’re generating traffic, which keywords they’re targeting, how their websites are structured and what they’re doing to build authority.
The process is split into two parts: understanding what’s working for your competitors and, more importantly, turning those findings into an SEO strategy that helps you outperform them.
Here’s how to do it.
Step 1: Identify which pages are driving your competitors’ traffic
Before diving into keywords, backlinks or technical SEO, I always recommend starting with a competitor’s top-performing pages.
Using the Top Pages report in Ahrefs, you can quickly identify which areas of a website are responsible for generating the most estimated organic traffic.
This gives you an immediate indication of where a competitor is seeing results and which parts of their website are contributing most heavily to their organic visibility.
Start by looking at how traffic is distributed across different page types.
Are commercial landing pages responsible for the majority of their traffic, or are they generating significant visibility through informational content? Are individual product or service pages performing particularly well? Is their organic traffic concentrated around a small number of pages, or spread relatively evenly across the website?
It’s also worth looking at how this has changed over time.
Have particular pages experienced significant increases in estimated traffic? Are there sections of the website that appear to be losing visibility? Have recently launched pages started generating rankings?
These findings can help you identify where a competitor’s SEO strategy is performing particularly well and where there might be opportunities to compete.
However, remember that third-party SEO tools provide estimates rather than actual analytics data. Their reports are useful for identifying patterns, but shouldn’t be treated as an exact representation of a competitor’s traffic.
Step 2: Understand their keyword strategy
Once you understand which pages are driving traffic, the next step is to investigate the keywords behind that performance.
Again, Ahrefs makes this relatively straightforward through its Organic Keywords report.
However, rather than simply exporting thousands of keywords and identifying those with the highest search volumes, I recommend looking at three things.
Search intent
Start by understanding the types of searches your competitor is targeting.
Are they primarily ranking for informational searches from people researching a topic, or commercial and transactional searches from people who are closer to making a purchase?
Are they targeting customers across the entire buying journey, or concentrating their efforts on a particular stage?
Understanding this can reveal whether their strategy is focused on attracting large volumes of traffic or capturing users with stronger purchasing intent.
It’s also worth considering which types of keywords are actually responsible for generating traffic.
A competitor might rank for thousands of informational keywords, but if the majority of their traffic comes from commercial searches, that tells you something important about where their organic performance is concentrated.
Keyword clusters
Next, look at the topics your competitor is targeting.
Are they spreading their efforts across a broad range of subjects, or have they established particularly strong visibility within a handful of categories?
Grouping keywords into clusters makes it much easier to identify these patterns.
A time-saving tip: If the website has a relatively straightforward URL structure, you can use its subfolders to help group keywords into categories.
By separating ranking URLs into different subfolders, you can often identify the topics or services a competitor is prioritising without having to manually categorise every keyword.
You can also use AI tools to assist with keyword categorisation, although it’s worth checking whether automation is actually saving time. For smaller datasets, manually reviewing the keywords can sometimes be quicker and more accurate.
Ranking positions
Finally, look at how well your competitor ranks across different topics and search intents.
Where are they consistently appearing on the first page? Which categories are underperforming? Are there commercially valuable keywords where they have relatively weak visibility?
This is where competitor research starts to become particularly useful.
You’re no longer just identifying the keywords a competitor ranks for. You’re beginning to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their strategy.
And those weaknesses could represent opportunities for your business.
Step 3: Analyse their website structure and internal linking
One of the most overlooked areas of competitor research is internal linking.
We often focus heavily on keywords and backlinks, but understanding how a competitor structures their website and connects different pages can reveal a lot about their SEO approach.
Start by looking at their main navigation.
Which pages are prioritised? How are services, products or topics grouped? Are important pages easily accessible? Is there a clear hierarchy between broader categories and more specific pages?
This can help you understand how a competitor organises its content and which areas of the website it considers particularly important.
But you shouldn’t stop at the navigation.
Look beyond sitewide links
A website might have hundreds of internal links pointing to a page, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has a particularly sophisticated internal linking strategy.
Many of those links could simply come from the header, footer or navigation.
To understand how a competitor is linking between its content, you need to look beyond these sitewide elements.
I recommend using Screaming Frog to crawl the website and export its internal links.
From there, you can clean the data to get a clearer picture of what’s happening.
Start by removing self-referencing links and duplicate instances where the same source page links to the same destination.
Then separate links appearing in the main navigation, header and footer from those placed within the main body of a page.
This helps you understand whether a competitor is actively connecting related content or relying predominantly on its website navigation.
Are informational pages linking to relevant commercial landing pages? Are related topics connected? Are important pages receiving internal links from other relevant areas of the website?
These relationships can help you identify opportunities to build a more effective internal linking strategy.
The important thing isn’t simply how many internal links a page has, but whether those links are helping users and search engines understand the relationships between different pages.
Step 4: Review content formats and user experience
SEO competitor research shouldn’t be limited to what you can see in a spreadsheet.
Once you’ve identified a competitor’s most successful pages, spend some time actually looking at them.
What makes those pages useful? How is the information presented? What might encourage someone to choose that website over another?
There are three areas I’d recommend focusing on.
Visual content and multimedia
Does your competitor use videos, comparison tables, infographics or interactive elements?
Consider whether these features make the content more useful, help explain complicated information or provide something that traditional written content doesn’t.
Layout and readability
Look at how the content is organised.
Are headings and subheadings used effectively? Is the information easy to scan? Are important details accessible without having to work through large blocks of text?
A page might contain all the right information, but if it’s difficult to navigate, that could create an opportunity for a competitor to provide a better experience.
Engagement and calls to action
Finally, consider what the website encourages users to do next.
Are there clear calls to action? Relevant internal links? Interactive elements that make it easier for visitors to find the information or services they’re looking for?
Does the content provide a logical next step, or does the user reach the end of the page without any clear direction?
These are all things worth considering when developing your own pages.
However, the goal shouldn’t be to copy a competitor’s website.
It’s to understand what’s working, identify where the experience could be improved and use those findings to create something better.
Step 5: Reverse engineer their backlink strategy
The final stage of the research process is understanding how your competitor is building authority.
Backlinks remain an important consideration within SEO, but simply comparing the number of links pointing to two websites won’t tell you very much about the strategies behind them.
Instead, I recommend reviewing a competitor’s backlink profile to identify patterns.
Using Ahrefs, you can examine the pages attracting links, the publications linking to them and the context in which those links appear.
Generally, there are four areas I’d look for.
Product placements
For businesses selling physical products, placements within relevant publications can be a valuable source of backlinks.
Look for coverage within buying guides, product reviews, gift guides and recommendation articles.
If a competitor is consistently appearing in these types of publications, it could indicate that product PR is an important part of their link-building strategy.
Pay attention to which pages journalists are linking to and whether there are opportunities to develop relationships with similar publications.
Digital PR and expert commentary
Next, look for links that appear to have been generated through Digital PR activity.
These might come from original research, surveys, expert commentary or data-led campaigns.
Phrases such as “according to”, “research reveals” or “a study found” can sometimes help identify this type of coverage.
Reviewing the surrounding content can provide clues about the campaigns or stories that generated those links.
If a competitor is consistently earning coverage through expert commentary, for example, that might indicate an opportunity to develop your own experts as sources for journalists.
Content marketing
Some websites naturally attract backlinks through useful informational content.
This might include comprehensive guides, original research, resources or tools.
Look for blog posts or resources that have attracted particularly high numbers of referring domains.
What makes those pages valuable enough for other websites to reference?
Understanding this can help you identify opportunities to develop content that provides genuine value beyond simply targeting a keyword.
Potential paid link building
Finally, look for patterns that could indicate paid link-building activity.
For example, a competitor might have numerous links pointing directly to commercial landing pages using highly optimised anchor text.
This doesn’t automatically mean those links have been purchased, so it’s important to examine the surrounding content and referring websites before drawing conclusions.
The objective isn’t necessarily to replicate everything your competitor is doing.
It’s to understand which approaches appear to be contributing to their authority and identify opportunities to build a stronger, more sustainable backlink profile.
Step 6: Turn your findings into an SEO strategy
By this point, you should have a much clearer understanding of your competitor’s SEO strategy.
You’ll know which pages are driving traffic, the topics they’re targeting, how their website is structured and the types of content attracting backlinks.
But gathering all that information is only half the job.
The real value of competitor research comes from what you do with it.
There are two approaches I’d recommend.
Build on what’s already working
If a competitor is generating significant traffic through a particular type of content or landing page, that’s a strong indication that the approach deserves further investigation.
But rather than simply recreating what they’ve done, think about how you could make your own content more useful.
Could you provide more comprehensive information, introduce additional features or improve the user experience?
Could you strengthen internal linking between related pages?
Could you provide additional trust signals, original insights or multimedia content that helps users make informed decisions?
The same principle applies to backlinks.
If your competitors are consistently securing links through particular types of content or outreach, consider how you could develop a stronger approach that offers something genuinely valuable to journalists and their audiences.
Competitor research can show you what’s working, but you still need to find a way to add value.
Capitalise on the gaps in their strategy
Some of the most interesting opportunities come from identifying what competitors aren’t doing particularly well.
If a competitor has strong commercial rankings but very little informational content, there could be an opportunity to build resources targeting customers earlier in their buying journey.
If they’re ranking well for a particular topic but have limited supporting content, you could develop a more comprehensive topic cluster.
This might include educational guides, comparisons, FAQs and other supporting resources that address different questions and search intents.
These pages can then link to relevant commercial landing pages, helping users move through the buying journey.
Similarly, if a competitor has weak internal linking between its informational and commercial content, you might be able to create a more connected website structure.
The important thing is to identify gaps that are relevant to your audience and business objectives.
Just because a competitor isn’t targeting a particular keyword doesn’t automatically mean it’s an opportunity worth pursuing.
Step 7: Prioritise opportunities based on impact and effort
One of the challenges with competitor research is that it can leave you with a very long list of potential improvements.
You might identify opportunities to create new landing pages, improve existing content, develop informational resources, restructure internal linking and launch Digital PR campaigns.
But trying to do everything at once rarely produces the best results.
Instead, I recommend prioritising findings based on their potential impact and the effort required to implement them.
High impact, low effort
These are the opportunities I’d typically recommend tackling first.
Look for improvements that could make a meaningful difference to organic performance without requiring significant development time or investment.
High impact, high effort
These opportunities might require more planning, development resources or investment.
Larger content projects, significant structural changes or new functionality could offer substantial long-term value but may take considerably more time to implement.
By assessing opportunities in this way, you can start developing a realistic SEO roadmap rather than simply producing a list of recommendations.
It’s also important to consider how confident you are in the potential impact of each change, particularly when you’re relying on third-party estimates rather than your own website data.
Competitor research shouldn’t be a one-off exercise
One of the most important things to remember is that competitor research isn’t something you should complete once and then forget about.
Search performance changes, competitors introduce new content and services, and opportunities emerge over time.
Revisiting your research allows you to understand how the competitive landscape is evolving and whether your strategy needs to adapt.
It’s also important to measure the impact of the changes you implement.
Are the pages you’ve improved generating more organic traffic and conversions? Is your supporting content helping users discover your commercial pages? Are your authority-building activities contributing to improved visibility?
Competitor research should inform your decisions, but your own performance data should ultimately determine whether those decisions are working.
The takeaway: Learn from your competitors, but don’t copy them
The biggest mistake you can make with competitor research is treating it as an exercise in copying what’s already working.
Your competitors might have strong rankings, but that doesn’t mean every part of their strategy is worth replicating.
They’ll have weaknesses, missed opportunities and areas where their approach could be improved.
The real objective is to understand why they’re performing well, identify where you could do better and use those insights to build a strategy that’s right for your business.
And you don’t need to spend days gathering data to get started.
With the right tools and a structured approach, an hour of focused competitor research can give you a valuable starting point for developing your SEO strategy.
