How to: SEO Competitor Analysis for B2B 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.
What is an SEO Competitor Analysis for SaaS?
An SEO competitor analysis for SaaS involves systematically assessing competing SaaS websites to understand their SEO strategies, tactics, and market positioning. 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
8 Key Aspects of B2B SaaS SEO Competitor Analysis:
1. Identifying Competitors
- Determine your direct and indirect SaaS competitors.
- Look at both SERP competitors and product-based competitors.
2. Keyword Research
- Analyze which keywords competitors rank for.
- Identify high-traffic and high-conversion search terms they target.
3. Backlink Analysis
- Examine their link-building strategies using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
- Identify authoritative sites linking to their key pages.
4. Content Analysis
- Evaluate the depth, structure, and targeting of competitor content.
- Spot gaps or underdeveloped topics you can improve on.
5. On-Page SEO Analysis
- Assess their title tags, meta descriptions, page speed, and internal linking.
- Compare technical SEO performance using tools like PageSpeed Insights.
6. User Experience Analysis
- Review how intuitive and fast their site is.
- Study how content is presented to improve your own UX signals.
7. Social Media Analysis
- Observe how they promote SEO content across platforms.
- Measure social proof and engagement levels tied to their top content.
8. Tools and Techniques
- Use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, Similarweb, and BuzzSumo to gather data.
- Set up alerts or tracking dashboards to monitor changes in rankings and content.
How to do 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.
SaaS SEO Competitor Analysis Example
A project management SaaS startup could analyze how leaders like Asana or Trello:
- Structure their feature pages and blogs,
- Earn backlinks from industry publications,
- Emphasize specific features (like templates or integrations),
- Use strategic keywords like “project roadmap tool” or “workflow automation software.”
This analysis informs SEO targeting, content gaps, and product positioning, empowering smaller SaaS companies to refine their messaging and scale organic growth effectively.
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.
Monitoring Competitor LLM Visibility
As AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode reshape how B2B buyers discover and evaluate SaaS solutions, traditional SERP tracking tells an incomplete story. Your competitors may be invisible in traditional rankings yet dominate as the default answer when buyers ask AI systems for recommendations.
LLM visibility tracking reveals where your competitors appear as citations, how often they're grounded in AI responses, and which semantic patterns trigger their inclusion. This intelligence uncovers a new competitive surface area that most SaaS companies haven't systematized yet.
Why LLM Visibility Matters for SaaS Competitor Analysis
When a prospect asks ChatGPT "What's the best project management tool for remote teams?" or Perplexity "Compare Asana alternatives for startups," AI systems retrieve and cite sources based on consensus mechanisms, not PageRank.
The LLM's weight signals differently:
- Google Gemini: Prioritizes recency and established authority. If your competitor published fresh comparison content or earned citations from recognized SaaS publications, they'll surface first in AI Mode responses.
- ChatGPT: Emphasizes evidence density and corroboration. Competitors with multiple high-quality sources discussing their product in similar contexts (reviews, case studies, integration guides) gain disproportionate visibility.
- Perplexity: Favors source diversity and structural accessibility. Well-structured content with clear schema markup and semantic relationships outperforms thin or unstructured pages, even from authoritative domains.
Understanding where competitors appear (or don't) across these platforms reveals which optimization strategies are working and where gaps exist in their AI search footprint.
What to Track in Competitor LLM Visibility
Build a systematic monitoring framework around these dimensions:
1. Citation frequency across platforms
Track how often competitors appear as sources when you test category-relevant queries. A competitor consistently cited across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity has likely built strong entity associations and semantic authority that traditional SEO metrics won't capture.
2. Query categories triggering visibility
Map which types of questions surface your competitors. Are they dominant for feature comparisons ("tools with Slack integration"), use case queries ("scheduling software for agencies"), or alternative searches ("Calendly competitor")? This reveals their topical authority patterns in AI systems.
3. Grounding accuracy and context
When competitors are cited, assess whether the AI system accurately represents their positioning, features, and differentiators. Misrepresentation signals weak entity optimization or conflicting information across their digital footprint.
4. Response positioning and framing
Note whether competitors appear as primary recommendations, alternatives, or contextual mentions. First-position citations carry significantly more influence than buried references in longer responses.
5. Entity relationships and co-citations
Identify which other brands, categories, or concepts consistently appear alongside your competitors in AI responses. These patterns reveal the semantic neighborhoods AI systems associate with their brand.
How to Monitor LLM Visibility Systematically
1. Develop a test query set
Build a library of 100 to 250 prompts representing real buyer questions across your category. Include product research queries ("best invoicing software for freelancers"), feature-specific searches ("tools with two-way calendar sync"), comparison questions ("HubSpot vs Salesforce for startups"), and problem-solution prompts ("how to automate recurring billing").
Structure queries by funnel stage (awareness, consideration, decision) and buyer persona (founder, ops lead, finance team) to mirror actual search patterns. Update this set quarterly as language evolves and new product categories emerge.
2. Use specialized LLM visibility tools
Platforms like Hall and Goodie AI automate citation tracking across multiple AI systems. These tools run your query sets against ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, then extract which domains appear, how frequently, and in what context. This creates baseline visibility metrics and trend data over time.
Set up weekly or biweekly monitoring runs to detect when competitors gain or lose visibility. Sudden shifts often correlate with major content launches, schema deployments, or link acquisition campaigns that improved their AI retrievability.
3. Conduct manual prompt testing
Automated tools miss nuance. Supplement with hands-on testing where you can probe follow-up questions, test different phrasings, and assess response quality. Ask the same question across platforms to identify platform-specific biases and optimization opportunities.
Pay attention to response structure. Does the AI system present a comparison table? A numbered list of options? A narrative recommendation with inline citations? Format patterns indicate what content structures AI platforms prefer for different query types.
4. Audit competitor entity architecture
Use schema testing tools and manual inspection to evaluate how competitors structure their entity relationships. Check for Organization schema, SoftwareApplication markup, FAQ implementations, and semantic linking between product pages, use cases, and resources.
Competitors with comprehensive entity graphs and clear product-feature-benefit relationships in structured data will consistently outperform in AI retrieval, even with weaker traditional backlink profiles.
5. Track changes in consensus patterns
LLM visibility operates on consensus, not authority alone. If three reputable sources describe a competitor's product as "ideal for enterprise teams," AI systems will anchor to that framing. Monitor review sites, industry publications, and community forums to understand the narrative consensus forming around competitors.
When you spot emerging consensus patterns ("X is becoming the standard for Y use case"), you can either compete directly with counter-evidence or pivot to own an adjacent positioning before consensus calcifies.
Integration with Traditional Competitor Analysis
LLM visibility monitoring doesn't replace traditional SERP tracking, backlink analysis, or keyword research. It reveals a parallel competitive landscape where different signals determine success. Integrate both perspectives:
Compare traditional organic visibility with LLM citation frequency. Competitors ranking #1 for commercial keywords but absent from AI responses have optimization gaps you can exploit. Conversely, brands dominating AI visibility despite modest SERP presence have cracked entity optimization and semantic authority.
Track correlation between backlink acquisition and AI visibility changes. High-authority links from respected publications often boost both traditional rankings and LLM retrieval probability. But some backlinks (like those from niche SaaS communities or technical documentation) may influence AI grounding more than PageRank.
Monitor whether content performing well in traditional search also surfaces in AI responses, or if different content types excel in each channel. This informs whether you need separate content strategies for SERP optimization versus LLM retrievability.
As search evolves from document retrieval to probabilistic answer generation, competitor analysis must track both where rivals rank and where they're cited. The SaaS companies that systematize LLM visibility monitoring now will build defensible competitive intelligence as AI search becomes the default research mode for B2B buyers.
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
What Should a Competitor Analysis Include?
Your competitor analysis should have the following sections։
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
