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Competitive Research

Competitive research is a fundamental part of any SEO strategy. In order to improve rankings for your site and grow your organic traffic, you'll first need to understand who you’re competing against for those top spots in the SERPs!

Moz’s Competitive Research tools can help you and your team identify who your competitors are and where there may be gaps in your keyword rankings and research.

Getting started with competitor research

Competitive research is an important process to carry out regularly so you're not left behind. We've got the knowledge and tools to get you started right here on the Moz Help Hub. Click through the sections to get up to speed on:

And so much more! You can use the left-hand navigation to explore various articles related to Competitive Research or use the search bar to query a specific term.

Want to learn more about competitive research?

At Moz, we value SEO education. We offer a range of free and paid learning resources and training courses via Moz Academy and our guides, like How to Do an SEO Competitor Analysis. These resources will take you from basic knowledge to performing competitive research and more.

Put your knowledge into practice

All this theory is great, but how can you put it into practice today without pulling out your credit card? We've got you. Try out our Free SEO Competitive Analysis Tool to turn your competitors' advantages into your own.

Want to learn more about the Moz Tools?

We offer 2 courses from the Moz Academy to help you get oriented in the tools and set you up for success! Sign up today for How to Use Moz Pro and 30 Days of SEO for tips, tricks, and more.

Common Customer Queries

  • True Competitor identifies the top 500 ranking keywords for your domain, and from there analyzes those 500 SERPs. An analysis of those SERPs reveals a list of the top domains that are also ranking for those keywords, allowing us to surface to you the top 25 competitors you share SERP real estate with.
  • Rivalry is a 1-100 score that combines your Domain Authority (DA), your competitor’s DA, keyword overlap, keyword volume, and your rankings to identify your biggest rivals. The higher the Rivalry score, the more you should likely pay attention to that competitor. Rivalry can help you to identify which competitors to hone in on and do further research.
  • You may have different types of competitors depending on the vertical you work in, the different types of products or services you offer, the different markets you work in, etc. True Competitor’s analysis of the SERPs helps to identify your top SERP competitors that you may not be aware of. You can read more about this and how to leverage the data in True Competitor in the Moz Blog.
  • Traffic Lift is the estimated amount of traffic you can expect to gain by outranking your competitor for this keyword.
  • If you’d like to see what keywords within our current ranking keywords corpus your competitors are ranking for, be sure to check out our Keyword Gap tool. You can also use Keyword Explorer’s Ranking Keywords section to see this information.
  • If you’re seeing the error message of "No Data" in True Competitor this indicates we don't have enough data for your site just yet. If your site is new or doesn't rank for a lot of keywords yet, try a larger site in your industry to explore the competitive landscape or dive into keyword discovery in Keyword Explorer. Learn more with this blog post on alternative workflows: Aspirational Analysis: Competitive Research for New or Small Sites.

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