Let’s be honest: your client is never the only one in the room.
In almost every niche, they are fighting for attention against dozens of hungry competitors who are publishing content, running ads, and building links every single day. If you don’t know exactly what those competitors are up to, you’re basically flying blind.
That’s why most smart agencies I know live and breathe Semrush. It gives you a behind-the-scenes pass to see what the other guys are doing: which keywords they’re winning, which pages are bringing in all their traffic, who’s linking to them, and most importantly, where they’ve left the door open for you to sneak in and win.
Competitive analysis stops being just a “nice to have” slide in your pitch deck and becomes the actual foundation of your entire strategy.
Why Competitive Analysis Actually Matters
Real competitive analysis isn’t just about spying on rival websites to copy their homework. It’s about getting answers to three massive questions:
- Who are we actually fighting against? (Hint: It’s often not who the client thinks it is.)
- Where are they beating us right now?
- Where can we beat them the fastest?
Without this, you’re just guessing. You might spend months writing content on topics nobody searches for, or chasing keywords that are way too competitive, or trying to get links from sites that don’t move the needle.
But when you have a clear view of the landscape, everything changes. You can walk into a client meeting and say, “Listen, we’ve looked at your top five competitors. Here is exactly where they are winning, and here is the exact roadmap we’re going to use to take that traffic for ourselves.”
That is how you build trust. Fast.
Finding the Gold: Keyword Gaps
One of the most powerful things you can do with Semrush is find keyword gaps.
Think of a keyword gap as money left on the table. These are keywords that your competitors are ranking for and getting traffic from that your client doesn’t even show up for.
Here’s the playbook agencies use:
- You plug your client’s domain and a few competitor domains into the Semrush Keyword Gap tool.
- Suddenly, you see a list of keywords where the competitors are sitting pretty on Page 1, and your client is nowhere to be found.
- You can filter these by search volume, difficulty, and intent (like “informational” vs. “buying” intent) to find the best opportunities.semrush
This literally becomes your content calendar. Instead of sitting in a brainstorming session hoping for a good idea, you can say: “Here are 50 keywords your competitors are already winning with. Let’s build better pages for these specific terms and start taking their traffic.”
So, when people ask how to find gaps and opportunities, this is the answer:
- Look for keywords where competitors rank high and your client has zero visibility.
- Look for topics where multiple competitors are present, meaning it’s a proven topic.
- Look for long-tail versions of big keywords that are easier to steal in the short term.
Understanding Their Traffic (and Where It Comes From)
Keywords are great, but you also need the 10,000-foot view. You need to know how much traffic these competitors are actually getting and where it’s coming from.
With the Domain Overview tools, agencies can check:
- Is their traffic growing or tanking?
- Which specific pages are doing all the heavy lifting? (Usually, it’s only a handful of pages driving 80% of the traffic.)
- Are they winning because of organic search, or are they just burning cash on paid ads?
This helps you make smart strategic calls.
- If a competitor is huge but only because they spend a fortune on ads, you know you can beat them with better SEO.
- If they have one specific guide that brings in tons of traffic, you know you need to write something better, more updated, and more comprehensive on that same topic.
- If they are killing it in a specific country or region, maybe that’s a market you should look at too.
By combining ranking data with traffic insights, you stop fighting every battle and start picking the ones you can actually win.
Stealing Their Backlink Strategy
We all know backlinks still matter. A lot. But blind outreach is a nightmare.
Semrush makes it way easier to understand who is linking to your competitors and why.
Here’s what agencies do:
- Analyze the profile: Look at how many referring domains a competitor has and how authoritative they are.
- Find the gap: Use the Backlink Gap tool to look for authoritative sites that link to two or three of your competitors but not to you. These are high-probability targets because they clearly link to sites in your niche.semrush
- Check the content: See which specific pages are attracting the most links. Is it a data study? A free tool? A massive “ultimate guide”?
This turns link building from a guessing game into a sniper mission. If you see that industry blogs love linking to “comparison guides,” you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to create a better, fresher comparison guide and then pitch it to the exact same people who linked to the old one.
You’re not asking for a favor; you’re offering them an upgrade.
Finding Content Gaps
Keyword gaps tell you terms you’re missing. Content gaps tell you entire topics you’re missing.
Using competitive analysis, agencies can:
- See which blog posts and landing pages are the real MVPs for competitors.
- Group keywords by topic to see how well each site covers a subject.
- Spot themes where competitors have five or six strong articles, and your client has… nothing.
This is how you build “Topic Clusters” that actually work. You can learn more about this process in Semrush’s guide to content gap analysis.
For example, if three of your competitors have deep, detailed guides, FAQs, and checklists about “Enterprise CRM Implementation,” and your client has one lonely 500-word blog post on it, you’ve found a massive content gap.
Or, maybe you find a competitor ranking with a piece of content that is thin, outdated, or just plain bad. That is a golden opportunity to swoop in, publish something world-class, and take that spot.
For agencies, this turns content planning into a strategic exercise:
- Identify the topics driving real traffic for others.
- Build better, more helpful resources on those topics.
- Link them all together to show Google you’re the new authority in town.
Tracking Your Wins with Position Tracking
Once you launch this strategy, you need to prove it’s working. That’s where Position Tracking comes in.
You can’t just rely on traffic numbers because those lag behind rankings. You need to see the movement as it happens.
With position tracking, you can:
- Monitor daily rankings for your target keywords.semrush
- See how you’re doing on mobile vs. desktop.
- Track your “Share of Voice” or visibility score compared to those competitors you identified earlier.
This is crucial for two reasons:
- Client Confidence: You can show them, “Look, we moved from position 50 to position 12 this week. Traffic is coming next.”
- Agility: If a competitor suddenly jumps ahead, or a Google update shakes things up, you know immediately, not a month later.
Most agencies track their main “money keywords” (the ones that drive revenue) separately from their branded keywords so they can see the real impact of their SEO work.
Turning Data into a Real Plan
All the charts and graphs in the world don’t mean a thing if they don’t turn into action. The best agencies use Semrush to build a plan, not just a report.
Here is the workflow:
- Audit the Field: identify the top 3-5 actual competitors in organic search (again, often different from business competitors).
- Map the Gaps: Use the gap tools to find the specific keywords and content topics where the client is invisible.
- Build the Calendar: Turn those gaps into a 3-to-6-month content plan. Pillar pages, blogs, FAQs, the works.
- Plan the Outreach: distinct list of sites to target for backlinks based on who links to competitors.
- Prioritize: Focus first on the keywords and pages that are tied to the client’s most profitable services.
- Watch and Pivot: Use position tracking to see what’s working and adjust the plan every quarter.
This is exactly how to use competitor analysis to plan strategy. You let the market tell you what works. You let your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses dictate where you attack.
A Real-Life Example: The Turnaround
Let me paint a picture of how this looks in the wild.
Imagine an agency lands a B2B SaaS client. The client has a decent product and some content, but their traffic is flatlining, and they are practically invisible for the keywords that matter.
Here is the Semrush-driven turnaround:
Phase 1: The Reality Check
The agency uses Domain Overview and Market Explorer to find the real search competitors. They find three strong domains that are dominating the space.
Phase 2: The Gap Hunt
Using the Keyword Gap tool, they find hundreds, literally hundreds, of keywords where all three competitors rank, but the client is nowhere. Many are “long-tail” questions that are easy to rank for.reddit
Phase 3: The Content Attack
They build a 6-month content plan.
- Massive “Pillar Pages” explaining core product use cases.
- “Alternative to [Competitor]” comparison pages (high buying intent).
- In-depth “How-to” guides that blow the competitors’ thin articles out of the water.
Phase 4: The Link Sniper
They see that many industry blogs are linking to an outdated “State of the Industry” report from a competitor. The agency creates a new, 2025 version with fresh data and reaches out to every single site that linked to the old one.
Phase 5: The Result
They set up tracking. At first, it’s small movements. Then, keywords start popping onto Page 1. Then, the organic traffic graph starts to tick up. Finally, the sales team starts hearing, “We found you while comparing tools.”
That is the power of competitive analysis. It turns “SEO” from a black box into a repeatable, logical business strategy.
Used the right way, Semrush lets agencies stop guessing. You stop hoping your content will rank and start engineering it to rank. You see exactly what the winners are doing, you find their weak spots, and you build a plan to overtake them.
From keyword gaps to backlink insights, every single data point is a lever you can pull to grow faster. And that is why, for the best agencies out there, Semrush isn’t just a tool, it’s the blueprint.
