Competitor Website Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide (With Free Tools and Template)

Your competitors are running experiments on their websites every week. They test new pricing, rewrite their homepage, publish pages for keywords you haven't touched, and switch tools behind the scenes. All of it is public. Most businesses just never look, or look once and never again.

A good competitor website analysis turns that public information into decisions: which keywords to target, which content to create, how to position your offer, and what to fix on your own site. This guide shows how to do it step by step, mostly with free tools, and how to keep watching once the first analysis is done.

What is competitor website analysis?#

Competitor website analysis is the process of studying the websites of the businesses you compete with, to understand how they attract visitors, how they convert them, and where they're stronger or weaker than you.

It usually covers six areas:

1. Search visibility: which keywords and pages bring them traffic
2. Content: what they publish, and the topics you're missing
3. On-page SEO: titles, descriptions, headings, indexability
4. Technology: their platform, theme, analytics and third-party tools
5. Speed and page weight: how fast and heavy their key pages are
6. Positioning: pricing, messaging, offers and calls to action

Step 1: Identify your real competitors#

Your business competitors and your search competitors are often different. A local accounting firm competes with the firm down the road for clients, but in Google it competes with accounting software blogs, tax guides and government pages.

Find both:

• Business competitors: the names customers mention, the companies you lose deals to, the brands in your marketplace or category.
• Search competitors: search Google for your 10 to 20 most important keywords and note which domains keep appearing on page one. If you use Google Search Console, start with the queries that already bring you impressions.

Pick three to five competitors to analyze in depth. More than that and the analysis turns into a spreadsheet nobody reads.

Step 2: Compare keywords and find content gaps#

This is where most of the opportunity is. A content gap is a topic your competitors rank for and you don't.

With free methods:

• Search your main keywords and note which competitor pages rank and what type they are: guides, comparison pages, tools, category pages.
• Use site:competitor.com keyword in Google to see how much they've published on a topic.
• Read their blog and resources sections. List their most prominent articles and the topics they return to again and again.
• Check "People also ask" and related searches for the questions their pages answer.

With paid SEO tools, keyword gap or content gap reports list the exact keywords competitors rank for that you don't, with estimated traffic. Even a free tier with daily limits is enough for a focused analysis.

For each gap, ask: does this topic matter to our customers, and can we create something clearly better than what ranks now? Prioritize gaps close to what you sell.

Step 3: Compare on-page SEO, page by page#

Pick each competitor's equivalent of your most important pages: homepage, pricing page, main product or service page, best-performing guide. Then compare them directly against yours.

MyKavo's free Competitor Analysis Tool puts your page and a competitor's side by side, free and without signing up. It compares:

It looks at one page from each site per comparison, and server response is measured from a single request, so treat small speed differences as noise. Run it on several page pairs to see patterns.

What to look for:

• Titles and descriptions: are theirs more specific, more benefit-led, better matched to the search? (Our title tag guide covers what good looks like.)
• Headings and structure: how do they organize the page? What sections do they include that you don't?
• Internal links: which pages do they push hardest from their key pages?
• Indexability: occasionally you'll find a competitor's important page set to noindex or canonicalized elsewhere. That's an opening.

Step 4: Look at their tech stack and third-party scripts#

The tools a competitor runs tell you how they operate. A new chat widget means they're investing in conversion. A heatmap tool means they're testing their pages. A switch of analytics or email provider can signal a bigger change.

• MyKavo's free Script Detector lists the scripts a page loads and names common services such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixel, Stripe, Hotjar, Intercom and HubSpot.
• For WordPress sites, the free WordPress Theme Detector shows the theme, its version and author, the parent theme and the plugins the page loads.
• For Shopify stores, the free Shopify Theme Detector shows the theme, the original theme it was built from, its version and the apps the page loads.

Use this to learn, not to copy blindly. A tool that works for a competitor with a 20-person marketing team may not work for you.

Step 5: Compare speed and page weight#

Heavy pages load slowly, and slow pages convert worse. Compare your key pages with theirs:

• The free Page Size Checker measures a page's HTML size, total weight and request count, broken down by scripts, stylesheets, images and fonts, with the third-party share.
• Google's PageSpeed Insights shows Core Web Vitals and real-user data where Google has it.

If a competitor's pricing page is half the weight of yours and loads twice as fast, that's a fix you can make this week.

Step 6: Get a free view of their backlinks#

Links from other sites remain one of the strongest signals of authority. You don't need an expensive subscription for a first look:

• Bing Webmaster Tools is free and includes a "Backlinks to any site" report, which shows backlink data for domains you don't own, so you can compare competitors' profiles with yours. Bing's index is smaller than the big commercial tools, so treat the numbers as directional.
• Free tiers of commercial SEO tools let you run a limited number of competitor backlink reports per day.
• Your own Google Search Console Links report shows your side of the comparison.

Look for patterns rather than totals: which types of sites link to them (industry publications, directories, partners, podcasts) and which of their pages earn the most links. Those are the link opportunities worth pursuing.

Step 7: Study pricing, positioning and messaging#

This is the part SEO tools miss, and often the most valuable.

• Pricing: plans, prices, limits, free trials, annual discounts, what's in each tier.
• Positioning: who they say they're for, and the main promise in the homepage headline.
• Offers and CTAs: free trial, demo, consultation, discount, guarantee.
• Proof: reviews, case studies, certifications, customer logos.
• Objection handling: FAQs, comparison pages, migration guides.

Write down the exact wording. Messaging is where differences in strategy show up first, and you can't compare it later if you didn't record it.

A competitor analysis template#

Use one row per competitor and fill it in during the steps above:

End every analysis with three to five concrete actions, each with an owner. An analysis without actions is just research.

Step 8: Track competitor changes over time#

A one-time analysis goes stale fast. Competitors change prices, launch pages and rewrite their messaging all year, and the changes that matter most usually happen without an announcement.

The Wayback Machine helps you see past versions of a page, but only when it happens to have captured them, and it won't tell you when something changes.

MyKavo can watch competitor pages for you. Add the public pages you care about, such as a competitor's pricing page, homepage or a key product page, and MyKavo saves an approved baseline and alerts you when they change: pricing and plan changes, homepage and positioning rewrites, new third-party scripts, added or removed CTAs, and title and meta description rewrites. Every alert includes the previous and current values and a before and after screenshot. The Free plan covers one website with five monitored pages, checked weekly.

Keep it ethical: monitor public pages only, don't try to access anything behind a login, and respect a site's terms and robots.txt.

The bottom line#

Competitor website analysis isn't about copying. It's about seeing clearly where you stand: the keywords and content you're missing, the on-page and speed fixes you can make, and how your offer compares. Start with three to five real competitors, compare your key pages side by side, turn the findings into a short list of actions, and keep watching the pages that matter.

Compare your page against a competitor's now with the free Competitor Analysis Tool, then start free with MyKavo to get alerted the day a competitor changes their pricing, messaging or pages.