Most founders can name two or three competitors. Searchers see others: the sites Google puts on the first page for the phrases your customers type. Those are the competitors that take your traffic. Here is how to find them, and what to look at on each one.
The brands you know are the ones you compete with in your head. Search competitors can be different: a small blog, a niche tool or a comparison site may hold the first page for the exact query your customer types, while the big brand you worry about does not show up at all. The reverse happens too — a well-known rival may rank for nothing your customers search.
So in this guide a competitor is a site that appears in Google for the searches that should lead to you. Always keep the query next to the competitor: it tells you why that site matters.
This is what a competitor website analysis — or a competitor website audit — comes down to:
If you have an app, store competitors are a separate list. Store search reads the app's own listing, not your website, so the apps on top for your phrases are often not the companies you meet in Google. Repeat the exercise inside the App Store and Google Play: type your phrases, record the apps on top, look at their names and ratings. Then compare the two lists. A competitor that is strong in the store and weak in Google — or the other way round — shows you where to start. How to find App Store keywords →
The free check on Riwords does the first part for you: paste your website, an app link or a one-line description and get your ten real competitors and the words they put in their titles; for apps, also what their users complain about. No signup. The full report adds the keywords each competitor ranks for, the keyword gap and difficulty for each keyword in the countries you choose.
Search the phrases your customers type, in a private window and for your target country, and write down the sites on the first page after removing directories, marketplaces and social networks. Sites that appear for many of your phrases are your main competitors. The free check on riwords.com does this from a link or a one-line description.
Yes: by hand in Google, as described above, or with the free check on riwords.com — paste your site, app link or description and get ten competitors with the words they use in their titles. No signup.
Enough to see a pattern: the free check shows ten. Look closely at the three to five that appear for most of your searches; the rest are useful mainly for their keyword lists.
A look at a competitor's site from the search side: which pages rank and for which keywords, what their titles and headings say, how strong they are and what they charge. The point is not to copy them but to find the searches they cover and you don't.