An SEO competitor analysis checklist for developers

This SEO competitor analysis checklist is written for developers who get pulled into an SEO review and want a list they can tick through, not a strategy deck. It covers the whole process, from picking rivals to the action list, but spends more time on the technical checks, because that is where a developer can ship a fix the same week.

Tool prices are from seogeoaeo.ai's pages, checked in October 2026.

Before you start

• Agree on the country. Search results and keyword data differ by market, and most competitor tools look up one country per run.
• Write down five searches that bring the business revenue. Ask marketing or sales if you do not know.
• Open a spreadsheet with tabs for rivals, pages, links, technical checks and actions.

Rivals

• Search each of the five phrases in a private window and log every page-one domain.
• Keep domains that appear for three or more phrases.
• Remove giants such as Wikipedia and YouTube.
• Cap the list at five.
• Optional: run Competitor Finder (38 credits) on your domain. It returns 30 sites ranked by shared Google keywords and flags close competitors, where at least 5% of their keywords overlap with yours.

Pages and keywords

• For each rival, note the two or three pages with the most search traffic and their format (tool, template list, comparison, guide).
• For those pages, list the non-brand searches and the rival's position for each.
• Mark positions from about seventh to tenth as beatable and the top two or three as hard.
• Mark searches where rivals have a page and you have none. Keep the ones that repeat across rivals.
• Group those gaps by the page that would answer them.
• Optional: Competitor Keywords (35 credits per rival) returns the top 100 keywords with position, intent and ranking page, and lists the rival's top pages.

Remember that traffic, volume and difficulty are provider estimates. Compare across rivals; do not quote them as counts.

Links

• For each rival, list where its strongest links come from: directories, partners, trade press, news coverage.
• Mark the sources you could plausibly earn.
• Use one data source for every rival so the numbers are comparable.
• Optional: Backlink Finder (70 credits per rival) lists the 100 strongest linking sites with link rank, first-seen date and a spam score.

Technical checks, side by side

Pick each rival's best page and your closest page. Run every check on both.

• Status. The URL returns 200 and does not pass through a redirect chain. The Redirects, Headers & Host Checker (10 credits) follows the chain and checks that http, https, www and bare hosts end at one URL.
• Title and H1. One clear title, one main heading that states the topic. The On-Page SEO Checker (8 credits) shows the title, description, snippet clipping and full heading outline, and grades coverage of a target query.
• Content without JavaScript. The main text is in the server HTML. AI Crawler View (8 credits) compares raw HTML with the rendered page, which also matters because most AI crawlers do not run scripts.
• Mobile parity. The phone version has the same content, headings, links and markup. Mobile Parity Checker (5 credits) compares the two HTML responses.
• Speed on a phone. Core Web Vitals Snapshot (20 credits) shows real-user LCP, INP and CLS when field data exists, plus a Lighthouse lab run.
• If your page fails a check the rival passes, put the fix at the top of the action list. It is usually the cheapest win in the whole analysis.

For a page pair, those five checks cost 51 credits each side, so 102 credits per comparison.

AI answers

• Ask ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode the questions buyers ask, such as "best X for Y" and "X vs Y".
• Log which sites get cited and which brands get named.
• Optional: AI Citation Finder (160 credits) counts the pages Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT cite for a topic. It does not cover Perplexity, Gemini or AI Mode, so keep the manual check for those.

Actions

• Write three or four actions, each with the evidence, an owner and a check date.
• File the technical ones as tickets.
• Set a reminder to rerun this checklist next quarter.

Where the tools stop

seogeoaeo.ai covers every optional step above from one account, in the browser or from your editor over MCP, on plans from $29 a month for 2,000 credits. It does not track rankings over time. If you need a daily graph of positions, add a rank tracker such as Semrush Position Tracking for that one job.