How to check a competitor's website SEO

To check a competitor's website, SEO by Zaweba gives you two routes. In any guided audit, the pages that rank above you for your term are crawled with exactly the same checks as your own page, and you can also crawl the top three competitors' sites (up to 40 pages each by default) to look at their internal linking. For a competitor you want to follow over time, set up a project as a competitor watch-list rather than your own site.

Starting from your search term

The most useful comparison is the one tied to a search you care about. In step 2, give your page and the term. In step 3, paste the Google results page for that term from your own browser. Step 4 then crawls the top organic results, 10 by default, with the same page checks your page gets: title and head tags, headings, content and readability, term placement, images, links, structured data, speed and trust signals.

The Comparison tab afterwards shows you, each competitor and the top-3 average across about 35 metrics. The Content gaps tab lists topics, questions and terms the top pages cover with a count of how many cover each, and the intent and format check shows what kind of page is winning. This answers the question most people really have, which is why a competitor ranks above them.

Crawling their sites

Step 4 can also crawl the sites behind the top three results. These crawls are smaller than your own (40 pages per competitor by default, set in Settings under Limits) because the point is to see how they link internally, not to audit their whole site. You will see how they structure sections and which pages get the most internal support, which often explains why one of their pages carries more weight than yours.

A competitor watch-list project

In step 1, a project can be your own site or a competitor watch-list. A watch-list project keeps its own scans, so the History page builds up a record of the competitor over time. If you paste results pages each time, History also shows positions for each term and competitor movements since the previous results page. That is the way to notice when a rival launches a new section or reworks a key page.

Reading competitors fairly

Remember that SEO by Zaweba scores pages with weights for your site type. A competitor's score tells you how well their page fits the checks that matter for your kind of business, which is the comparison you want.

The Can you win this term check adds a sense of their strength from free signals: WHOIS, the first capture in the Wayback Machine, the site: count, Wikipedia and, if you have set up DataForSEO, referring domains. It gives a plain verdict and suggests longer-tail terms where a head term is out of reach. It doesn't promise a ranking.

Staying polite

Competitor crawls follow the same manners as any crawl in the app. robots.txt is always obeyed, the app identifies itself with an honest user agent, and it waits at least a second between requests to each site by default. You are reading public pages, slowly, the way any well-behaved crawler would. SEO by Zaweba never contacts Google search itself; the results page always comes from you.