Competitor analysis template for SEO: compare 5 rivals

The template has nine parts. Part 0 is a cover sheet: your business, market, date and keyword list. Parts 1–7 are comparison tables, one for each place where a customer might find a competitor instead of you. Part 8 collects your conclusions and turns them into tasks with an owner and a deadline.

It’s built for an SEO competitor analysis of a service or local business, but it works just as well for an online store or a B2B company. You can fill it in using free sources only: Google Search, Google Maps, ChatGPT, Perplexity and your competitors’ own websites. Paid SEO tools speed up the backlink part, but you don’t need them to complete the template.

The template doesn’t replace the method. How to choose keywords, read search results and assess backlinks is covered in our step-by-step SEO competitor analysis guide. This template gives you one place to record what you find, so you can run the same comparison again next quarter.

Fill the template with the companies you actually see in search results, not just the ones you know from your industry. An SEO competitor is anyone who takes a spot in Google, in Google Maps or in an AI answer to your customers’ questions. Sometimes that’s a directory or a marketplace rather than a direct business rival.

A simple rule for the five columns:

• 3 organic competitors: the domains you see most often in the top 10 for your keywords.
• 1 Google Maps leader: the business that shows up most often in the local 3-pack for keywords with your city name.
• 1 company recommended by AI: a name that comes up in ChatGPT or Perplexity when you ask the way a customer would.

If the same company shows up in several places, list it once and pick another. Note directories and marketplaces separately on the cover sheet. They’re hard to outrank with the same tactics, but a listing of your own there is often worth having.

Score each area separately for yourself and for every competitor: 0 means missing or a serious gap, 1 means average, and 2 means a clear advantage. The maximum is 14 points (7 areas × 2 points). The scale is short on purpose, so the score depends on what you can see on the page rather than on who fills in the template.

If one area matters more for your business, count it twice. For a dental office or an auto repair shop, that’s usually Google Maps, because customers look for someone nearby. Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence reflects things like links to the business and its reviews and ratings. That’s why the Maps table records reviews and the backlinks table includes local sources.

Here’s what a completed score summary looks like. The data is made up and doesn’t describe real companies: a dental clinic in Warsaw compares itself with three competitors across 10 keywords, such as “dental implants Warsaw” and “dentist Mokotów”.

What does it tell you? Competitor A wins on content, backlinks and AI answers, not on technical SEO. Your site is technically stronger and has clear pricing, but it loses wherever customers are looking for advice. The clinic weighted Google Maps ×2, because patients look for a dentist close to home (the table shows totals without weights). Priority depends on a gap’s impact and on how long the work takes, so the action list in part 8 looks like this:

1. P1, 4 weeks: separate service pages for implants and root canal treatment, with prices, an FAQ and a walkthrough of the procedure (content: 1 point behind Competitor A; AI answers: 2 points behind).
2. P1, ongoing: ask for a review after every visit and reply to every review on your Business Profile within 48 hours (Maps gap vs. Competitor B, an area weighted ×2).
3. P2, this quarter: 3–5 links from local and industry sites that already link to Competitors A and B but not to you (2 points behind, but a quarter’s work).
4. P2, monthly: ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google the same 5 questions to see whether the new content changed the answers.

• Too many competitors. Ten columns mean a shallow look at each one. Five well-chosen companies are enough, and you can add more next quarter.
• Checking rankings in your own browser. Results depend on location and search history. Use a private window and note the city you’re checking from. Maps results can differ even between neighborhoods.
• Counting ads and maps as rankings. In table 1, count organic results only. Leave ads out; Maps go in table 2 and the AI Overview in table 3. Results also change from day to day, so if a site sits on the edge of the top 10 for a keyword, check it again on another day.
• Copying a competitor’s titles. The title you see in Google isn’t always the one in the page code. Google builds title links from sources such as the title element, the main heading and other text on the page, and it truncates long ones. Record what searchers see and ask why it works instead of copying the words.
• Skipping AI answers. Some customers ask ChatGPT or Perplexity before they ever open Google. If a competitor gets named there and you don’t, the rankings table won’t show it.
• Numbers without a date or source. Two backlink tools will give you two different referring domain counts. Always write down the tool and the date so you compare like with like next quarter.
• No action list. A table full of numbers changes nothing. Every gap where you score 0 and a competitor scores 2 belongs in part 8, with an owner and a deadline.

Start with the gaps you can close yourself in a few weeks: missing service pages, an incomplete Business Profile, no prices or no FAQ. Backlinks and AI visibility grow more slowly, so plan them for the quarter and measure them monthly.

If a competitor is cited in Google AI Overviews and you aren’t, don’t go looking for AI tricks. Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for AI Overviews: a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. So check indexing first, then whether your page answers the customer’s question directly.

You can check your own site right away with our free SEO audit: a score from 1 to 100 and a list of issues for up to 25 pages. The free AI visibility check shows whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews name your business. Put the result in part 3 of the template.

If you’d rather hand it off, our SEO audit (from €350 net) covers content gaps against competitors and ends with a prioritized list of fixes. The AI visibility audit (€235 net) runs 30 customer questions across 4 sources and shows the 5 competitors that AI models recommend instead of you.