What to include in a competitor analysis: the twelve-column template

Short answer: what to include in a competitor analysis is one row per rival (plus your own site) and twelve columns: role, organic traffic, ranking keywords, top pages, shared keywords, gap keywords, referring domains, content types, Google ads, social ads, AI citations and a decision note. Fill each column from a single source, cap it at five rivals, and end with three or four decisions that each have an owner.

That is the structure of the competitor analysis template published by seogeoaeo.ai. Below is what each column is for, in one or two lines.

Which rivals to include

Two kinds. Search rivals are the sites that rank for your keywords; they can include magazines, marketplaces and review sites that sell nothing like you. Sales rivals are the companies you lose deals to, and some of them barely rank. Include the top few of each and label every row search, sales or both. Leave out sites like Wikipedia that rank for nearly everything.

The columns, explained

Role. Search, sales or both. A "both" rival deserves the most attention.

Organic visits per month. An estimate of the traffic a site gets from Google. Useful only next to your own row.

Keywords, with top 10. How many keywords the site ranks for and how many of those sit on page one.

Top pages. The two or three pages that bring in the most visits. They tell you what is working for the rival.

Shared keywords. How many keywords you both rank for. This measures how close the rival is.

Gap keywords. Keywords the rival ranks for in Google's top 20 that you do not rank for at all. This is the to-do list.

Referring domains. How many sites link in, plus a link rank if your source gives one.

Content types. The format of each top page: guide, template, calculator, comparison page, category page or documentation. You fill this by looking, and it often explains the traffic better than any number.

Google ads. How many ads are running and what the longest-running one promises.

Social ads. Ads running on Meta and LinkedIn.

AI citations. The share of AI answers on your topic that cite the site. A site that never appears gets "Not cited".

Decision notes. One line per decision: the action, the evidence, the owner, and when you will check the result.

What to leave out

Ad spend. Google, Meta and LinkedIn publish ads but not what ordinary advertisers spend, so record how long an ad has been running instead. An ad that keeps running for months is one the advertiser keeps paying for.

Numbers mixed from different tools. Traffic and keyword counts are estimates, and two providers rarely agree. Use one source per column for every row, including yours. Keep your real Search Console clicks in the notes column.

More than five rivals. A sixth row seldom changes a decision.

Where the numbers come from

seogeoaeo.ai has a single-purpose tool for most columns, priced per run in credits:

Plans start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits, which covers a five-row sheet. It does not track rankings day to day; a suite such as Semrush does, if you need that.

How often to update it

Every quarter. Judge a decision by what changes across two refreshes, because providers adjust their estimates. Drop any column that has not led to a decision in two quarters.