Competitor Analysis

Understanding how your SEO compares to your competitors is essential for making informed optimization decisions. Competitor analysis helps you:

• Benchmark your progress — See where your SEO stands relative to the sites you compete with for rankings.
• Identify opportunities — Discover keywords your competitors rank for that you don't, revealing content and optimization gaps.
• Learn from their strengths — See what your competitors do well — structured data, meta tags, heading hierarchy — and apply those insights to your own site.
• Track changes over time — Monitor whether competitors are improving their SEO so you can stay ahead.

To add a competitor, navigate to the Competitors tab in your dashboard. Click the “Add Competitor” button and enter the competitor's URL. Align will add it to your competitor list, ready to be scanned.

You can add any website as a competitor — it doesn't need to be in the same industry. However, the most useful insights come from tracking sites that compete with you for the same keywords and audience.

Once a competitor is added, click the scan button next to their name in the competitor list. Align runs the same comprehensive SEO analysis on their site that it runs on yours — including title tags, meta descriptions, schema markup, heading structure, and more.

Scan results are stored so you can compare them against your own site's data at any time. You can re-scan a competitor whenever you want to check for changes.

The Overview sub-tab displays a list of all your added competitors along with their latest SEO scores. This gives you a quick snapshot of how each competitor's site health compares to yours.

Each competitor entry shows the site URL and the overall SEO score from their most recent scan. Use this view to quickly identify which competitors have the strongest SEO presence and which have weaknesses you could exploit.

The Comparison sub-tab provides a side-by-side breakdown of SEO metrics between your site and a selected competitor. Metrics compared include:

• Title tag — Length, keyword usage, and optimization quality.
• Meta description — Presence, length, and relevance.
• Schema markup — Types and quality of JSON-LD structured data.
• Heading hierarchy — H1 through H6 usage and structure.
• Image optimization — Alt text coverage, file sizes, and formats.
• Overall SEO score — A direct comparison of your score vs. theirs.

This detailed view makes it easy to pinpoint exactly where a competitor outperforms you and where you have the advantage.

The Keywords sub-tab performs a keyword gap analysis between your site and the selected competitor. It finds keywords that the competitor ranks for but you don't — these are direct opportunities for new content or optimization.

Each keyword in the gap analysis shows the competitor's ranking position for that keyword, giving you a sense of how competitive the keyword is and how much effort it would take to rank for it yourself.

When you discover valuable keywords in the gap analysis, you can add them to your tracking list with a single click. Click the add button next to any keyword to start tracking your ranking position for it.

Once added, these keywords appear in your Keyword Tracking tab where you can monitor your position over time and measure progress as you create content targeting those terms.

To remove a competitor from your list, click the delete button next to their entry in the Competitors tab. This removes the competitor and all associated scan data. You can always add them back later and re-scan.

The number of competitors you can track depends on your Align plan:

• Free — Up to 3 competitors.
• Pro — Up to 10 competitors.
• Agency — Unlimited competitors.

See Plans & Pricing for full details on plan features and limits.

Make the most of your competitive insights:

• Keyword Tracking — Monitor rankings for keywords discovered through gap analysis.
• Keyword Spy — Compare your keyword rankings head-to-head with a competitor.
• SEO X-Ray — Run a detailed scan on your own site to fix the gaps competitors exploit.
• Creating Pull Requests — Use Align's AI agent to fix SEO issues automatically.