Every business owner can name their competitors. Very few can name their search competitors, and the two lists are often different. The plumber across town who does all his work through referrals isn’t competing with you in Google. A national water heater blog might be. Good SEO competitor analysis starts by finding out who actually holds the results you want, then turns what they’re doing into a plan you can act on.
This article explains how RankThat does that across four places: the Competitor Analysis page, the Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap in the Domain Explorer, Content Gaps, and Competitor Alerts. It ends with a monthly routine and an honest list of what the tools don’t watch.
Step 1: find your real search competitors
Open Competitors › Competitor Analysis. You can Add Competitor by hand, but the two discovery buttons are usually more revealing:
- Discover from GSC looks at the Google results for your 15 most-clicked Search Console searches and lists the domains that keep turning up next to you.
- The second discovery option uses RankThat’s search data to find domains whose keywords overlap with yours.
Once added, each competitor is crawled. The table shows their page count, average words per page, the share of pages with FAQ sections, when they were last crawled, how many keywords you share, their average position, how many keywords they rank for and an estimated value of their traffic. Crawl All refreshes the lot.
How many competitors you can add depends on your plan: 2 per project on Starter, 10 on Professional and unlimited on Enterprise (pricing).
A note on the Rank Tracker
The Rank Tracker has its own competitor setting (up to 10 domains) so you can see their positions next to yours on every tracked keyword and compare share of voice. That costs nothing extra, because their positions come from the same search results already being checked.
Choosing which competitors to keep
Discovery tends to find more domains than are worth tracking. A useful rule: keep two or three direct rivals (same service, same area), one aspirational competitor (the business you’d like to be in three years), and one information site that dominates the questions your customers ask. Drop directories and marketplaces from the list unless the client sells through them. You can’t outrank Yelp for “plumbers near me”, and tracking it every week just adds noise to your alerts.
Revisit the list each quarter. Search competitors change faster than business competitors: a new practice opens, an old one stops blogging, a national chain starts publishing city pages.
Step 2: the keyword gap
Click Keyword gap on the Competitor Analysis page and the Domain Explorer opens with your site and competitors filled in. You can compare with up to four at once. RankThat takes each domain’s top 1,000 keywords by search volume and sorts them into six groups (a keyword can sit in more than one, since every missing keyword is also untapped):
| Group | Meaning | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Missing | Every competitor you entered ranks, you don’t | The clearest case for a new page |
| Untapped | At least one competitor ranks, you don’t | A wider list of new-page ideas |
| Weak | You rank, but below every competitor that ranks | Improve the page you have |
| Strong | You rank above every competitor that ranks | Protect it; don’t let it decay |
| Unique | Only you rank | Your edge; often branded or niche |
| Shared | You and every competitor rank | Where the fight is |
Results are sorted by search volume. Select the keywords you want and send them to a keyword list or straight to Topic Ideas in the content writer. For research before you commit, the keyword research tools explain each keyword’s difficulty and intent.
Step 3: the backlink gap
Backlink gap compares you with up to five competitors and lists the sites that link to them and not to you. A local news site that has linked to two of your competitors has shown it covers your industry. That makes it a realistic outreach target, not a cold pitch. Your own links are covered on the Backlinks page.
Step 4: content gaps
Competitors › Content Gaps compares the topics on your site with the topics on your competitors’ crawled pages and lists the ones they cover and you don’t, each with a priority (high, medium or low), a short “Why this matters” and the competitors who cover it. Create Topic sends a gap to Topic Ideas.
Two things to know. The topics and priorities are an AI reading of the pages, not keyword data, so treat priority as a suggestion. And the list is cached until you press Re-analyze or a fresh competitor crawl runs, so it doesn’t change under you mid-week.
Step 5: competitor alerts
The weekly crawl runs every Sunday. RankThat reads each competitor’s sitemap (up to 50 pages each, skipping pages under 100 words) and compares it with last week. Competitors › Competitor Alerts then shows four kinds of change:
- New Content: a page that wasn’t there before.
- Updated Content: a page whose word count changed by more than 20%, which usually means a real rewrite rather than a typo fix.
- Removed Content: a page that has disappeared.
- Topic Overlap: a new page whose subject matches your project’s keywords. This is the one to read first.
Any alert can become a topic with Create Topic from Alert. You confirm a title and focus keyword, and the topic lands in Topic Ideas with the competitor’s URL attached, so whoever writes it can see what they’re up against. The alert is cleared at the same time.
A worked example: Brightside Dental
Brightside Dental’s agency runs Discover from GSC. Two of the five domains it finds are other local practices, as expected. The other three are a dental insurance comparison site, a national implant clinic chain and a health information site. The owner had never thought of them as competitors, but they hold the informational results Brightside’s patients read before booking.
The keyword gap against the two local practices shows 140 untapped keywords. Sorted by volume, the top of the list is about implants and Invisalign costs. Brightside has one thin implants page. The agency sends 12 cost and recovery questions to Topic Ideas.
Three weeks later a Topic Overlap alert arrives: one local competitor published “How much do dental implants cost in Austin?”. The agency turns the alert into a topic, attaches it to the brief already in progress, and makes sure Brightside’s page answers more of the questions, with real price ranges from the practice.
Turning findings into a plan
Competitor data is only useful once it becomes a short list of jobs. After each review, sort what you found into three buckets:
- Pages to create: missing keywords and content gaps that match a service the client sells.
- Pages to improve: weak keywords where you rank below everyone, and topic overlap alerts on subjects you already cover.
- Things to ignore: gaps on services the client doesn’t offer, and competitor pages built for a different market.
The first two buckets go to Topic Ideas or to Opportunities. The third bucket is just as important; writing it down stops the same idea coming back next month.
A monthly competitor routine
| When | Task | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Monday after the Sunday crawl | Read Topic Overlap and New Content alerts | Competitor Alerts |
| Week 1 | Turn the useful alerts into topics | Competitor Alerts › Create Topic |
| Monthly | Run the keyword gap against your top three | Domain Explorer |
| Monthly | Check share of voice against competitors | Rank Tracker |
| Quarterly | Re-run Discover from GSC; competitors change | Competitor Analysis |
| Quarterly | Review the backlink gap for outreach targets | Domain Explorer |
What the competitor tools don’t do
Honest limits, so nobody is surprised:
- No alerts for competitors’ ranking jumps. Alerts are about their pages: published, updated, removed, overlapping. Their positions are visible in the Rank Tracker, but you won’t get an alert when a competitor climbs.
- Updates are detected by word count. A competitor who rewrites a page without changing its length won’t trigger “Updated Content”.
- Only 50 sitemap pages per competitor are crawled each week. On big sites, a page beyond the cutoff can occasionally be reported as removed when it is still live. Check before acting on a removal alert for a large site.
- Competitors can’t see you. RankThat only reads public search results and public pages; nothing is sent to them.
- It doesn’t copy their content. Gaps tell you what to cover. How to cover it better is your job, and copying a competitor’s page rarely works anyway.
For agencies running competitor reviews across many clients, the agencies page shows how this fits a portfolio, and the Semrush comparison is a fair look at where a dedicated research suite goes further.
Tip: if a “competitor” from discovery is a directory or a national publisher you can’t outrank, don’t drop it. Its pages show you what kind of content Google wants for the search.