SEO Competitive Analysis: Understanding the Competition

Why SEO competitive analysis matters for B2B in the DACH region

If you want to be visible in organic search, you are not competing in a vacuum. Every top 10 position is already taken. SEO competitive analysis shows who holds these positions, why, and where realistic opportunities lie. That matters more than ever: An analysis of around 14 billion pages found that 96.55% of all pages get no traffic from Google and only 1.94% get between one and ten visits per month (international study). So visibility is the exception, not the rule.

In the Austrian market, this gets even sharper. With 8.69 million internet users and 95.3% online penetration at the start of 2025 (Austria), almost the entire population can be reached online. At the same time, one channel dominates: In Austria, the search engine market shares are Google 81.87%, Bing 9.01%, and DuckDuckGo 2.75% (Austria, May 2026). If you lose visibility on Google, you lose the market. Competitive analysis gives you the basis for fighting this competition with data instead of gut feeling.

Definition and goals: search engine competitors vs. business competitors

The most important distinction comes first: Your business competitors are not necessarily your search engine competitors. A direct competitor in sales may neglect SEO entirely. Conversely, specialist portals, comparison sites, associations, or media outlets often rank for your most important keywords without ever being seen as competitors.

A clean competitive analysis therefore separates two levels:

• Business competitors: Companies that compete for the same customers and contracts. They define the market environment and give you clues about positioning and offering.
• Search engine competitors: Domains that actually rank in the SERPs for your target keywords. They define the competitive field in search and are the real benchmark for SEO.

The goal of the analysis is to match both lists, identify the 3 to 5 most relevant competitors per topic area, and derive concrete levers from them: keyword gaps, content gaps, backlink opportunities, and technical advantages. Tools such as Ahrefs (Organic Competitors) or Semrush identify search engine competitors automatically based on keyword overlap.

Share of voice and visibility index as competitive KPIs

In the DACH region, the Sistrix Visibility Index is the established industry standard for comparing competitors at a glance. Methodologically, it is based on a dataset of one million keywords for desktop and mobile, calculated as the sum of all organic top 100 rankings, weighted by search volume and position per keyword. The key point: The index measures visibility, not actual traffic. It works well for trend and competitor comparisons, but it is no direct substitute for traffic data.

Share of voice (SoV) complements this view. It describes the share of total organic visibility that a domain holds for a defined keyword set. While the Sistrix index reflects a domain's overall visibility, you can calculate SoV specifically for your own keyword set, for example only for your commercially relevant terms.

In practice: Use the visibility index for rough market comparisons and long-term trend monitoring. Use SoV on a self-defined, business-relevant keyword set to measure how much of the SERP space that matters to you is actually yours. Both values are relative: A rising value of your own can still mean a loss of market share if your competitors are rising faster.

Keyword gap and content gap analysis

Keyword gap analysis is the core of competitive analysis. It compares your domain's keyword portfolio with that of 3 to 5 competitors and uncovers terms that the competition ranks for and you don't.

Structure the results by how actionable they are:

• Missing keywords: Terms that several competitors rank for but you don't rank for at all. Highest priority, because entire topic areas are missing here.
• Weak spots: Keywords for which you rank lower than the competition. Here, optimizing existing content often pays off more than creating new content.
• Untapped keywords: Terms that only one competitor ranks for. Potential niche opportunities with less competition.

Content gap analysis goes one level deeper. Besides missing keywords, it also looks at missing content formats and topic clusters: guides, comparisons, case studies, glossaries, or tools that competitors offer and that carry their visibility. The goal is to reverse-engineer the competition's content strategy and close gaps instead of copying what already exists.

Backlink gap analysis: evaluating link profiles

Backlinks remain a central ranking factor. An international analysis of 11.8 million search results showed that position 1 has on average 3.8 times more backlinks than positions 2 to 10. If you are aiming for the top spots, you rarely get around the backlink question.

Backlink gap analysis (Link Intersect in Ahrefs, Backlink Gap in Semrush) shows domains that link to several of your competitors but not to you. These sources are the most valuable link targeting opportunities: They have already shown that they link to topically relevant pages.

Don't evaluate link opportunities by quantity alone. Check:

• Topical relevance: Does the linking domain fit your topic area and the DACH market?
• Link quality over link quantity: A few strong editorial links carry more weight than many weak directory listings.
• Reachability: Industry media, specialist portals, associations, and partners in the Austrian market are more realistic targets than international top domains.

Tool comparison: Ahrefs, Semrush, Sistrix, and Screaming Frog

No tool covers everything. For a complete competitive analysis, most B2B teams in the DACH region work with a combination:

• Ahrefs: Strong on backlink data, Link Intersect, and organic competitors. The first choice for backlink gap analysis.
• Semrush: A broad toolset from Keyword Gap to market analysis, with good coverage of commercial keywords. Strong in advertising and competitor comparisons.
• Sistrix: The DACH standard for the visibility index and trend comparisons in German-speaking countries. The best data foundation for local market comparisons.
• Screaming Frog: A crawling tool, not a competitive analysis tool. Indispensable for technical and on-page comparisons, because it examines the structure of competitor websites.

In practice: Sistrix for market comparisons, Ahrefs or Semrush for keyword and backlink gaps, Screaming Frog for the technical deep dive. If you budget for only one tool, base the choice on your most important task, not on the largest feature set.

SERP feature and CTR analysis: AI Overviews and AI visibility

Search results pages have changed fundamentally. AI Overviews, featured snippets, and other SERP features push the classic blue links further down. An international study by GrowthSRC Media (200,000+ keywords, 30 websites) found that after the AI Overview rollout, the CTR of the top result fell from 28% to 19%, a drop of 32%, while position 2 declined from 20.83% to 12.60%, a drop of 39%. A top ranking alone no longer guarantees clicks.

For competitive analysis, this adds two levels:

• SERP feature analysis: For each target keyword, check which features dominate the SERP and which competitors occupy them. Whoever holds the featured snippet or the AI Overview gains visibility beyond the ranking position itself.
• AI answer inclusion rate / AI visibility: Measure how often competitors are cited in AI answers (AI Overviews, chatbots). This AI visibility is becoming a competitive dimension of its own, alongside classic rankings.

Technical and on-page analysis with Screaming Frog

With Screaming Frog, you crawl competitor websites the way a search engine does and uncover structural advantages. Relevant dimensions for comparison:

• Site structure and information architecture: How deeply is content nested? How is internal linking organized? Flat, well-linked structures often rank better.
• On-page signals: Competitors' title tags, meta descriptions, heading hierarchy, and structured data compared to your own.
• Core Web Vitals and performance: Load times and stability as a ranking and UX factor. You can connect Screaming Frog to the PageSpeed Insights API to evaluate competitor pages.

Important: Crawl responsibly, at a moderate crawl speed, so you don't put a load on other people's servers. The technical comparison often reveals the cheapest levers, because on-page and performance problems on your own site can be fixed faster than a backlink deficit.

Putting your own GSC and GA4 data in context

Competitive data from external tools consists of estimates. Your own data from Google Search Console (GSC) and GA4 is exact. You only get the full picture when you combine the two.

• Google Search Console: Provides actual impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position for your keywords. Compare your actual CTR per position with benchmark values to spot the effects of SERP features.
• GA4: Shows what happens after the click: engagement, conversions, organic traffic by landing page. This is how you connect visibility with business impact.

The principle: External tools tell you where the competition stands. GSC and GA4 tell you where you actually stand and whether ranking gains translate into clicks and conversions. A high position with a strikingly low CTR is a clear signal that a SERP feature or an AI Overview is intercepting the click.

Reporting, KPIs, and SEO forecasting

A competitive analysis only has an impact once it is translated into KPIs you can base decisions on. For dashboards that work for management, these have proven useful:

• Share of voice and visibility index: Market position relative to the competition, ideal for trend lines.
• Keyword and content gap volume: The number and search volume of the identified gaps as a basis for prioritization.
• SEO ROI: The expected value of gained visibility, calculated from the traffic forecast, CTR, and conversion rate through to revenue.

Be careful with SEO forecasting: Forecasts should be conservative and factor in CTR losses from AI Overviews. A forecast that still works with old CTR values systematically overestimates the potential. Combine the competitive gap (market potential) with realistic CTR assumptions (click potential) and your conversion rate (business value).

Specifics of B2B in the Austrian market

The Austrian B2B market has its own requirements. Keyword volumes are often small, which makes tool estimates inaccurate. Here, rely more on actual GSC data and qualitative assessment than on volume figures alone.

• Local SERPs: Check rankings specifically for the Austrian search index (google.at), not for .de or international results. SERPs differ significantly from country to country.
• Industry competitors instead of generalists: In B2B niche markets, the relevant search engine competitors are often specialist portals, associations, and specialized providers, not the big brands.
• Assessing small keyword volumes correctly: A low-volume keyword can convert very well. Evaluate opportunities by business relevance and search intent, not just by volume.

This turns competitive analysis from an abstract tool report into a concrete action plan tailored to the DACH market.

Further reading

SEO competitive analysis is an ongoing process. Establish a quarterly rhythm for comparing visibility and gaps, combine it with continuous rank tracking, and anchor the results in your regular SEO reporting. This way, you spot shifts among your competitors early and can respond before market share shifts permanently. Link the analysis closely to your keyword strategy, content planning, and technical SEO so that the gaps you identify become prioritized, actionable measures.