How to analyse your competitors' websites

There are two kinds. A business competitor fights you for the same customers. A search competitor outranks you in Google for the same keywords. They are not always the same companies.

Find your search competitors quickly: search your most important keywords and note who sits on the first page. Those are the sites you compete with for visibility, even if you never think of them as rivals offline.

Pick three to five competitors, not twenty. Fewer sites studied in depth tell you far more than a shallow glance across dozens.

Look at how each site is built: what is in the menu, the order of services, how a visitor reaches the contact point. This reveals what the competitor considers important.

Pay attention to the calls to action. Where the buttons are, what they say, how easy it is to send an enquiry or book. This is often where you can see who has thought about conversion and who has not.

Walk the full journey yourself, from the homepage to submitting an enquiry. Count the clicks and form fields. If a rival does it in three steps and you need seven, you already know what to fix.

Open the page source or developer panel and read the title tag and H1. They tell you which keywords the competitor is optimising each page for.

Map what pages they have at all. The site:domain operator in Google lists their indexed pages. If a competitor has a blog or service pages you lack, that is a gap in your own content.

Judge the depth. Top positions often go not to the prettiest sites but to the most complete answers to a user's question. If a rival covers a topic thoroughly and you wrote two paragraphs, that may be exactly why they rank above you.

Never copy text. It is legally risky and useless for SEO, since a duplicate always loses to the original. Take ideas and structure, then write your own.

Run a competitor's site through PageSpeed Insights. If it is slow, that is your chance to overtake it on speed, which Google factors into ranking.

A free extension like Wappalyzer shows what a site is built on: WordPress, Shopify, a custom system. That hints at the capabilities and limits the competitor is working with.

Check their mobile version on a real phone. Most Estonian traffic is mobile, and a site that is awkward on a phone loses customers regardless of where it ranks.

See how a competitor presents pricing: openly, in ranges, or on request. It affects trust and helps you decide how to show your own.

Read their reviews on Google and social media. Customers say plainly what they like and what frustrates them. That is free research into your shared market.

Pull it all into a simple table: for each competitor, note their strengths, weaknesses and what you could do better. That turns the analysis into a plan rather than a pile of notes.

Repeat it a couple of times a year. Competitors change, and what sets you apart today can become the market norm within a year.