# SEO competitor Human Guide

## What This Is For
Compare a site to its competitors and find the gaps worth closing. It gives the agent a clearer input/output frame for search and SEO workflows: what context to ask for, what decisions to make, and what usable artifact to return.

Use this as a human-readable version of the SEO competitor agent skill. It is meant for marketers, operators, founders, and other non-coders who want the workflow without reading agent-specific implementation instructions.

## When To Use This
- Use this when you need a repeatable process for SEO competitor.
- Use this when the task needs judgment, examples, constraints, or a clear output format rather than a one-off prompt.
- Use this when you want to hand an AI assistant enough context to produce a usable marketing artifact.

## When Not To Use This
- Do not use this when you only need a quick factual answer.
- Do not use this when the work depends on private data you cannot share with the assistant.
- Do not use this as a replacement for legal, compliance, financial, or medical review.

## What You Need Before Starting
- The goal or business outcome you want.
- The audience, customer segment, or market context.
- Any source material the assistant should respect, such as notes, briefs, examples, URLs, or brand guidance.
- Constraints such as tone, length, channel, deadline, region, or approval requirements.
- A clear definition of what a good final answer should look like.

## Step-By-Step Workflow
1. State the job clearly: "Use the SEO competitor guide to help me with..."
2. Add context: audience, goal, offer, channel, source material, and constraints.
3. Ask the assistant to identify missing inputs before producing the final output.
4. Have the assistant follow the skill-specific guidance below.
5. Review the result against the final checklist and ask for revisions where needed.

## Skill-Specific Guidance
- Identifying which competitors to study
- Finding content gaps (topics they cover, you do not)
- Finding backlink gaps (sites linking to them, not you)
- Understanding why a specific competitor outranks the user
- Benchmarking authority, technical posture, and content depth
- Single-page optimization (use `seo-onpage`)
- Initial keyword research with no competitors yet identified (use `seo-keyword` first to find them)
- Auditing one's own existing content (use `seo-content-audit`)
- 3 to 5 named competitors (or the topic area, if competitors are not yet identified)
- Access to a keyword tool, a backlink tool, and any crawler
- For each priority keyword, who ranks in the top 10?
- For each top-10 ranking, what page type wins (article, product, comparison, video)?

## Decision Points And Nuance
The original skill emphasizes: When to use, When NOT to use, Required inputs, The framework: 5 angles, SERP overlap, Content depth, Backlink profile, Technical posture, Brand and entity strength, Workflow.

Use these questions to steer the work:
- What is the intended audience or buyer?
- What source material must be preserved?
- What should the assistant optimize for: clarity, persuasion, accuracy, speed, creativity, or conversion?
- What examples represent the desired quality bar?
- What should the assistant avoid?

## Common Mistakes
- Finding content gaps (topics they cover, you do not)
- [3 to 5 critical findings. Lead with the most important. What is the single biggest gap to close, and what is the single biggest strength to defend?]
- **Keywords where they rank, we don't:** [N]
- **Keywords where we rank, they don't:** [N]
- **Keywords where they hold a SERP feature we don't:** [N]
- Their territory (we don't rank)
- [Top 20 keywords they rank for that we don't, ranked by traffic potential]
- [Topics or page types they cover that we don't, organized by theme.]

## Copy-And-Paste Prompt
```text
Use the SEO competitor human guide.

My goal:
[Describe the business outcome]

Audience:
[Describe who this is for]

Context and source material:
[Paste notes, examples, links, or existing copy]

Constraints:
[Tone, length, channel, timeline, must-include items, must-avoid items]

Before producing the final output, ask me for any missing information that would materially improve the result.
```

## Final Checklist
- [ ] The output matches the original goal.
- [ ] The audience and context are reflected in the answer.
- [ ] Important constraints and source material were preserved.
- [ ] The assistant made the relevant decisions explicit.
- [ ] The final artifact is ready to use, review, or hand to the next person.

## Source
This guide was generated from the rampstackco/claude-skills skill entry for `seo-competitor`.

## Source Skill Notes
These notes preserve the nuance from the original skill. Use them as supporting reference when the workflow above feels too generic.

# SEO Competitor Analysis

Compare a site to its competitors and find the gaps worth closing. Stack-agnostic. Tool-friendly but tool-optional.

---

## When to use

- Identifying which competitors to study
- Finding content gaps (topics they cover, you do not)
- Finding backlink gaps (sites linking to them, not you)
- Understanding why a specific competitor outranks the user
- Benchmarking authority, technical posture, and content depth

## When NOT to use

- Single-page optimization (use `seo-onpage`)
- Initial keyword research with no competitors yet identified (use `seo-keyword` first to find them)
- Auditing one's own existing content (use `seo-content-audit`)

---

## Required inputs

- The user's site
- 3 to 5 named competitors (or the topic area, if competitors are not yet identified)
- Access to a keyword tool, a backlink tool, and any crawler

If competitors are unknown, start by listing the top 10 ranking domains for the user's top 10 priority keywords. Pick the 3 to 5 that appear most often.

Where competitor traffic estimation is the input you need (relative scale, channel mix, audience overlap), Similarweb MCP is the strongest source. Pair with Ahrefs (for backlink and keyword overlap) and Semrush (for SERP feature presence and SEO-PR overlap). Each platform gives a different cut of the same competitive landscape; using them together produces sharper signal than any one alone.

---

## The framework: 5 angles

Competitor analysis covers five angles. Run all five for a full picture, or pick two or three for a focused investigation.

### 1. SERP overlap
Where do you and the competitor compete head-to-head?

- For each priority keyword, who ranks in the top 10?
- For each top-10 ranking, what page type wins (article, product, comparison, video)?
- Are there SERP features (featured snippet, AI overview, video, image pack) one party holds and the other does not?
- Which queries do competitors rank for that the user does not? (the content gap)

### 2. Content depth
What does their winning content look like?

- Word count and structure of their top-ranking pages
- Information types they include (data tables, original research, video, calculators, downloadable assets)
- Update frequency on key pages (last modified date, change history)
- Internal linking patterns (do their winning pages link to commercial pages?)
- Topical breadth (how many related topics do they cover?)

### 3. Backlink profile
Where does their authority come from?

- Total referring domains
- Domain rating (or equivalent authority metric)
- Top 50 referring pages by traffic value
- Backlink types (editorial, directory, partner, paid, spam)
- Link velocity (gaining or losing referring domains over time)
- Pages on their site attracting the most links (these are their "linkable assets")

### 4. Technical posture
How clean is their technical foundation?

- Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS)
- Mobile usability
- Schema implementation (which types, on which page types)
- Site architecture and internal linking density
- Crawl efficiency (are they wasting crawl budget?)
- HTTPS, security headers
- llms.txt and AI search readiness

### 5. Brand and entity strength
How well-known are they outside organic search?

- Branded search volume (how many people search their name?)