Complete Workflow for Competitor SEO Analysis

Chapter 6: Practical Advanced Section · Question 91

Why Do Competitor SEO Analysis?

SEO isn't done in isolation. Your ranking is relative—there are only 10 positions on the first page of search results; if you move up, someone else has to move down.

The essence of competitor analysis is:Find your rivals' traffic secrets, identify their weak points, and then formulate targeted strategies to surpass them.

Rather than learning through trial and error from scratch, it's better to start from competitors' proven experience.

Complete Analysis Workflow: The Seven-Step Method

Step 1: Determine the Competitor List

Many people list competitors based on intuition, but SEO competitors and business competitors don't necessarily overlap.

How to determine：

1. Search your coreKeyword(top 10-20), and see who repeatedly appears in the results
2. Use 5118's "Competitor Discovery" feature: enter your domain to find sites with high SEO overlap
3. Ask the sales team: who else did customers look at before choosing you?

Suggested quantity: Select 3-5 core competitors for in-depth analysis, and 10-15 extended competitors for regular monitoring.

Step 2: Analyze Traffic Source Composition

Understand where competitors' traffic comes from:

Key question: Does the competitor's traffic mainly rely onbrand termsor industry keywords? Does it rely on the homepage or on a large number of long-tail content pages?

Step 3: Reverse-Engineer Keyword Strategy

This is the most valuable part of competitor analysis.

Steps：

1. Enter the competitor's domain in 5118 → check "Baidu ranking keywords"
2. Sort by traffic to identify the top 50 keywords that bring the most traffic to the competitor
3. Categorize them: brand keywords, product keywords, informational keywords,long-tail keywordand what proportion each accounts for
4. Flag the keywords you currently don't cover (these are your opportunity gaps)

Advanced step: Use Ahrefs (if you do Google SEO) to check the competitor's keyword growth trends and identify the new directions they've been pushing recently.

Step 4: Study content strategy

Knowing the keywords isn't enough—you also need to study how competitors do content.

Analysis dimensions:

• Content type: blog posts, product pages, tool pages, encyclopedia pages, Q&A pages?
• Content depth: average word count, whether there are charts/videos/downloadable resources
• Update frequency: how many new pieces of content per week/month
• Content structure: how titles are written, how H2/H3 are organized, whether there is a table of contents navigation
• Viral hit characteristics: what the top 3 ranking pages have in common

Practical tip: Use site:competitor.com Search on Baidu, then filter by time to "last month" to see what content competitors have published most recently—this reflects their current strategic focus.

Step 5: Evaluate backlink profile

backlinksBacklinks remain an important factor in Baidu rankings.

Analysis content：

• Competitor's total backlinks and growth rate
• Types of backlink sources (news media, industry sites, forums, directory sites)
• High-quality backlink sources (whether there are channels you can also acquire)
• Anchor text distribution (ratio of brand keyword vs keyword anchor text)

Recommended tools: Ahrefs, Majestic (more overseas-oriented), 5118 backlink query (more domestic-oriented).

Step 6: Technical SEO benchmarking

Technical gaps are often the easiest to close:

检查清单：
□ 网站加载速度对比
□ 移动端体验评分
□ 页面收录率（已收录/总页面）
□ 结构化数据使用情况
□ URL 结构是否清晰
□ 内链架构是否合理
□ 是否使用 HTTPS
□ 是否有 sitemap 和 robots.txt 配置

Step 7: Identify weaknesses and opportunities

Based on the above analysis, look for breakthrough points:

• Keyword gap: high-value keywords competitors cover but you don't
• Poor content quality: pages where competitors rank high but content quality is mediocre (you can do better)
• Topic gap: niche topics no competitor covers
• Technical weakness: competitor sites are slow,Mobilepoor experience
• Backlink weakness: competitors rely on a single backlink source; you can diversify and surpass them

From analysis to action

After the analysis, produce a "Competitor SEO Analysis Report" containing:

1. Quick-win list(executable in 1-2 weeks): e.g., fix technical issues, optimize existing page titles
2. Mid-term opportunities(1-3 months): e.g., create content pages competitors cover but you don't
3. Long-term strategy(3-6 months): e.g., build a backlink system, create a content moat

Monitoring cadence

Competitor analysis is not a one-time task:

• Weekly: track ranking changes for core keywords
• Monthly: competitor traffic changes, new content releases
• Quarterly: full competitor analysis update, strategy adjustment
• Real-time: set up 5118 competitor monitoring with automatic alerts on ranking anomalies

Practical recommendations

• Start by digging deep into one competitor: Don't analyze 10 competitors right away—pick the one ranked one or two tiers above you and do a complete seven-step analysis. The gains from deeply analyzing one competitor far exceed a shallow scan of ten.
• Build a "competitor inspiration library": Create a database in Feishu or Notion, and jot down good content, page designs, and backlink sources you see from competitors whenever you come across them. After a month of accumulation, you'll find that many optimization ideas surface automatically.
• Watch for competitors' mistakes: Search Baidu for site:competitor.com, if their indexing volume suddenly plunges or rankings drop across the board, it means the competitor may have been penalized by the algorithm. This is both your window to overtake them and a warning to self-check—don't make the same mistake.