How to: SEO Competitor Analysis for SaaS
In the highly competitive SaaS landscape, understanding your competitors’ SEO strategies is essential. As SaaS buyers spend 27% of their time conducting research online throughout the buying process.
A well-executed SEO competitor analysis reveals the keywords your competitors are ranking for, their content strategy, backlink sources, and technical strengths or weaknesses. These insights help you refine your own SaaS SEO approach to outperform them in search.
SEO Competitor Analysis for SaaS
An SEO competitor analysis for SaaS involves assessing competing websites to uncover their SEO strategies and tactics. The process allows you to benchmark your own SEO performance against your rivals. You can pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses to help inform your own strategy.
Why Competitor Analysis Matters for SaaS SEO
SaaS companies operate in fast-evolving markets where organic visibility directly correlates with lead generation, demo requests, and revenue. Unlike other industries, SaaS SEO strategies often target a mix of product-led, feature-led, and intent-driven keywords. Competitor analysis uncovers:
• Keyword gaps (where you’re not ranking but they are)
• Content opportunities
• Link-building prospects
• SERP features (FAQs, snippets, etc.) your competitors dominate
• UX or technical SEO patterns impacting rankings
How to Conduct SEO Competitor Analysis for SaaS: Step-by-Step Guide
Effective SEO competitor analysis for SaaS businesses involves understanding content strategy, user intent alignment, technical foundations, and backlink ecosystems. Here’s how to conduct a comprehensive analysis:
1. Identify Your SEO Competitors
Start by Googling your core keywords these may include feature-specific terms (e.g., “AI proposal software”), industry terms (e.g., “marketing automation for startups”), or use-case keywords (e.g., “schedule social posts for teams”).
Don’t assume your product competitors are your SEO competitors. In SaaS, your organic rivals often include:
• Review platforms like G2, Capterra, and Software Advice
• Content-heavy players like HubSpot, Zapier, or niche SaaS blogs
• Aggregators or directories that curate tool lists
• Affiliate content or comparison blogs targeting BOFU queries
Use Ahrefs → “Competing Domains”, Semrush → “Organic Research”, or Moz → “True Competitor” features to discover domains ranking for the same terms you’re targeting.
Pro tip: Segment competitors by intent overlap (e.g., informational vs. transactional) to better plan your own content mix.
2. Analyze Their Keyword Portfolio
Once you’ve shortlisted your competitors, dive into their keyword universe. Your goal is to understand:
• What keywords they rank for (that you don’t)
• Which keywords drive most of their organic traffic
• Their balance of TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU terms
Pay attention to:
• Transactional terms: High-buying intent queries like “best project management software for agencies”
• Branded alternatives: “HubSpot vs Salesforce”, “Calendly alternative”
• Problem-solution queries: “how to manage recurring billing”, “team scheduling without email chains”
• Feature-led searches: e.g., “Slack integration”, “multi-user login SaaS”
Use Semrush’s Keyword Gap or Ahrefs’ Content Gap to identify terms where you’re absent or underperforming. Prioritize based on volume, intent, and business relevance.
3. Evaluate Their Content Strategy
This is where SaaS SEO becomes strategic. Look beyond keywords and into how your competitors structure and scale their content.
Things to audit:
• Blog cadence: How often do they publish? Weekly? Monthly? Do they batch?
• Content format: Are they investing in long-form guides, product-led tutorials, thought leadership, or checklists?
• Use of visuals: Do they embed videos, feature GIFs, screenshots, or product demos?
• Topical authority: Do they use pillar-cluster strategies? How deep is their topic coverage?
• Calls to action: Are there CTAs embedded in blogs? Do they use banners, popups, in-line demos, or free tool downloads?
Compare this with your own content funnel and see where they might be attracting or converting more efficiently.
Gap Example: If a competitor ranks well for “automate billing for SaaS” and includes a video walkthrough and customer quotes—create a better version with fresher data, custom visuals, and expert commentary.
4. Study Their Backlink Profile
Backlinks are often the invisible engine behind high rankings. Analyzing competitors’ link profiles helps you discover:
• Where they’re earning authoritative mentions
• What type of content attracts links (data, tools, templates, or opinion pieces)
• Their link velocity (how fast they gain links)
• Repeating domains (indicating relationships or outreach patterns)
Use Ahrefs → Backlinks / Referring Domains or Semrush’s Backlink Analytics to see:
• Are they listed on curated SaaS directories?
• Are they publishing on relevant SaaS blogs or digital PR outlets?
• Are their founders contributing guest posts?
From here, replicate or improve on their linkable assets. You can also create outreach lists of domains that have linked to similar content types or tools.
5. Check Their Technical SEO Health
Even strong content can underperform if the site’s technical setup is weak. Competitor audits here uncover opportunities to:
• Outperform slow-loading or unoptimized rivals
• Spot missed schema opportunities
• Understand how their site structure supports scalability
Use tools like:
• Screaming Frog: Crawl and review meta data, internal linking, crawl depth
• Sitebulb: Visualize internal structure, detect indexation and crawl issues
• Google PageSpeed Insights: Measure performance metrics like LCP, FID, and CLS
• Rich Results Test: Identify schema used (or missing)
Key things to look for:
• Speed and performance (especially on mobile)
• Indexation depth: Are important pages buried?
• Canonical handling for duplicate URLs
• Pagination and infinite scroll behavior
• Structured data use (FAQs, SoftwareApplication schema, etc.)
If their product pages or comparison posts are missing schema, you can quickly gain an edge by implementing it to qualify for rich results.
6. Benchmark with a Competitor Matrix
Create a table comparing yourself and 3–5 competitors on:
• Organic keywords and traffic
• Backlink authority and domains
• Content freshness and topic coverage
• Technical SEO scores
• SERP feature wins (snippets, site links, etc.)
7. Identify Entity and Semantic SEO Gaps
Use tools like InLinks, SurferSEO, or Google’s NLP API to analyze semantic coverage and entity optimization. Check if competitors use schema, FAQs, or strong semantic relationships to enhance search visibility.
8. Validate with Performance Metrics
Use Similarweb or Ahrefs to verify organic traffic estimates. Look at bounce rate, pages per session, and user engagement metrics to assess real performance beyond rankings.
From Analysis to Strategy: Turning Insights into Action
By analyzing your competitors’ keyword focus, content patterns, link strategies, and technical frameworks, you gain clarity on what the market expects and more importantly, where there’s room to innovate. Use this research to identify underutilized angles, neglected queries, and content formats that your audience wants but your competitors haven’t nailed.
A differentiated SaaS SEO strategy builds category leadership by aligning with your product’s unique value, your ICP’s intent signals, and the gaps your competitors leave behind. Let competitor analysis guide what to avoid, where to double down, and how to craft content that truly resonates, converts, and compounds. Instead of simply catching up to competitors, let this analysis fuel a roadmap that outpaces and redefines what SEO leadership looks like in your category.
SEO Competitor Analysis Tools
Here are some of the best tools tailored for SaaS SEO competitor analysis:
• Ahrefs – Comprehensive suite for keyword, content, and backlink analysis
• Semrush – Excellent for keyword gap analysis and traffic insights
• Similarweb – Provides competitor traffic sources and site engagement metrics
• Screaming Frog – Technical SEO crawler for comparing site architecture and on-page elements
• Ubersuggest – Budget-friendly alternative for basic competitor keyword research
• BuzzSumo – Helps identify high-performing competitor content based on social shares
• SurferSEO – Analyzes top-performing content by keyword and compares structure, word count, and NLP terms
• BuiltWith / Wappalyzer – Discover your competitor’s tech stack (especially valuable in SaaS)
6-Step Plan
- Identify 3–5 top SEO competitors
- Run a keyword gap analysis
- Benchmark backlinks and content types
- Analyze topic clusters and funnel alignment
- Identify semantic and schema opportunities
- Prioritize your content roadmap with traffic and conversion in mind
How Often Should You Perform An SEO Competitor Analysis?
We’d recommend performing an SEO competitor analysis once a month. This enables you to see any evolution in your niche and how your strategy is positioned.
However, the regularity depends on several factors:
- Size of your niche
- Number of competitors you have
- Regularity of algorithm updates
