Competitor Analysis Example: Two SaaS Sites Side-by-Side
This example shows the aiwebpageseo Competitor Analysis comparing your SaaS product page against a competitor. The report compares SEO score (74 vs 61), PageSpeed (mobile 78 vs 64), Domain Rank (340 vs 180) and produces a composite verdict with specific gap analysis.
| Metric | Your Site | Competitor |
|---|---|---|
| SEO Score | 74/100 ✓ | 61/100 |
| Title | Project Management Software (54 chars) | Task Manager for Teams (22 chars) |
| H1 | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Canonical | ✅ Yes | ❌ Missing |
| Schema Types | WebSite, Organization, HowTo ✓ | WebSite only |
| TTFB | 218ms ✓ | 467ms |
| Page Size | 42KB ✓ | 87KB |
| Metric | Your Site | Competitor |
|---|---|---|
| Performance Score | 78/100 ✓ | 64/100 |
| LCP | 2.3s ✓ | 3.8s |
| FCP | 1.4s ✓ | 2.1s |
| TBT | 120ms ✓ | 380ms |
| CLS | 0.01 ✓ | 0.08 |
| Metric | Your Site | Competitor |
|---|---|---|
| Total Backlinks | 12,480 ✓ | 4,220 |
| Dofollow | 9,840 ✓ | 3,100 |
| Referring Domains | 847 ✓ | 312 |
| Spam Score | 4/100 ✓ | 12/100 |
The verdict of 76 against 58 comes from a weighting this tool chose: 40% on-page SEO checks, 30% PageSpeed, 30% backlink authority. It is a reasonable formula and it is worth understanding that it is a formula — Google does not publish one, does not use this one, and would not recognise the arithmetic.
More importantly, look at what has no weight in it at all. Nothing in the composite measures whether the page answers the question a searcher actually asked. Nothing measures whether it is the best available explanation of the thing, whether it contains information the competitor's page lacks, or whether a reader finishes it satisfied. Those are the factors that decide most rankings, and they are not present in this score because they cannot be computed from a crawl.
So the composite is a hygiene diagnostic. A low score reliably means something technical is wrong. A high score means nothing technical is obviously wrong — which is a floor, not a victory. Two pages can score 76 and 58 here and rank in the opposite order, and when that happens the explanation is almost always sitting in the content, not in the metrics.
Domain Rank 340 against 180 looks like a decisive lead, and there are three things to know before anyone acts on it.
Domain Rank is DataForSEO's number
Every third-party authority score — Domain Rank, and every competing vendor's equivalent — is that vendor's model of a link graph. Google uses none of them and has said repeatedly that it has no single site-wide authority score of this kind. They are useful for comparing two sites on the same scale. They are not a target, and optimising the number is optimising something no search engine can see.
The link gap is a symptom, not the disease
A competitor with twice your links did not acquire them; they earned them, usually with a handful of pages that gave people a reason to cite something. Find out which of their pages hold the links — it is rarely their product pages — and ask what you have published that is comparable. Chasing the count directly leads to buying links, which is a policy violation with real consequences, and the links you buy are the ones Google is best at ignoring.
There is no toxic-backlink penalty to defend against
Google's own guidance is that most sites should never use the disavow tool. Since Penguin 4.0 it devalues links it does not trust rather than punishing the recipient, which means the spammy links pointing at you are almost certainly doing nothing whatsoever. Disavow only if you have a manual action for unnatural links, or if you built or bought the links yourself. Disavowing on the strength of a vendor's toxicity metric is how sites remove links that were helping them.
A mobile score of 78 against 64 is a real advantage and a modest one. Core Web Vitals are a genuine ranking consideration, but a small one: Google's position has consistently been that they help decide between pages of comparable relevance and do not lift a weaker answer above a stronger one. Nobody outranks a better page by being faster than it.
There is also a measurement subtlety that catches out most comparisons. The score in PageSpeed Insights is a lab simulation on a synthetic device. What Google actually uses for ranking is field data — what real Chrome users experienced on your pages. The two can diverge sharply in both directions: a page can post an excellent lab score while real users on real networks suffer, and a mediocre lab score can sit on top of perfectly good field data. If this comparison matters to you, compare the field data.
Where speed does pay unambiguously is on the side of the ledger nobody puts in an SEO report: people abandon slow pages. That is a conversion argument, it is measurable in your own analytics, and it is worth more than the ranking argument on almost every commercial page.
Every metric here is measurable by a crawler, which is exactly why every metric here is a hygiene check. The comparison that decides the outcome has to be made by a person, and it takes about twenty minutes.
Open both pages side by side and read them as a buyer would. Which one answers the question the query implies? Which one contains information the other does not — a number, a limitation, a screenshot of the thing actually working? Which one is honest about what it cannot do? Which one could be quoted, in a paragraph, out of context, and still make sense to somebody who has never heard of either company?
That last question is worth dwelling on, because it is also the test that determines whether an AI assistant can use your page. Retrieval systems lift self-contained passages. Marketing copy fails that test by construction: it leans on the layout, the hero image and a reader who already wants to believe you. The competitor's page that gets cited instead of yours is usually the one where somebody wrote down the actual answer.
If your technical scores lead and your rankings do not, this is where the explanation is. No amount of schema, speed or link acquisition compensates for being the second-best answer, and the composite score will never tell you that you are.
Fix anything technically broken, then stop
Missing canonicals, missing or duplicated titles, schema that contradicts the page, pages that do not render server-side. These are defects. Once they are fixed, further technical polish has sharply diminishing returns and you should leave it alone.
Read the competitor's page, not their metrics
The most useful twenty minutes available to you, and the only part of this process that a tool cannot do on your behalf.
Improve the page until it is the better answer
Specifics, evidence, honest limitations, a direct answer near the top. Slow, unglamorous, and the only work on this list with real headroom.
Earn links by publishing something worth citing
Original data, a tool, a genuinely thorough guide. Do not chase the Domain Rank number, and do not touch the disavow file.
What does the Competitor Analysis compare?
The aiwebpageseo Competitor Analysis compares: SEO audit scores (title, meta, schema, canonical, TTFB, page size), PageSpeed Insights mobile scores (Performance, LCP, FCP, TBT, CLS), backlink authority (Domain Rank, total backlinks, referring domains, spam score) and a composite score weighting SEO 40%, Performance 30% and Authority 30%.
How many competitors can I compare?
Silver plan supports 1 competitor. Gold plan supports up to 3 competitors side by side. Diamond plan supports unlimited competitor comparisons.
What is Domain Rank?
Domain Rank is a backlink authority metric from DataForSEO. It measures the strength of a domain's backlink profile on a scale of 0–1000. Higher is better. A Domain Rank above 500 indicates a very authoritative domain. Below 200 indicates a relatively new or low-authority site.
Does a higher composite score mean I will outrank the competitor?
No, and the weighting makes that clear once you look at it. The composite is 40% on-page SEO checks, 30% PageSpeed and 30% backlink authority — a formula chosen by this tool, not by Google, and it contains no measure of the one thing that decides most rankings, which is whether the page answers the query better than the alternatives. Two pages can score 76 and 58 on this scale and rank in the opposite order because the lower-scoring one is simply the better answer. Treat the composite as a diagnostic of technical hygiene and never as a prediction of position.
Is the backlink spam score something I should act on?
Be very careful with it. Spam and toxicity scores are third-party estimates, not Google signals, and the action they usually prompt — disavowing links — is one Google explicitly advises most sites never to take. Since Penguin 4.0, Google devalues links it does not trust rather than penalising the site that received them, so unsolicited spammy links generally do nothing at all. The disavow tool exists for two narrow cases: you have a manual action for unnatural links, or you built or bought links yourself and need to renounce them. Outside those, disavowing on the basis of a vendor's toxicity metric risks removing links that were helping you.
The competitor has more backlinks. How do I close a gap like that?
Not by acquiring links at volume, which is the assumption baked into most competitor reports. A backlink count is a lagging indicator of something else: the competitor published things people wanted to reference, or spent years being written about, or both. The gap you are actually looking at is a gap in reasons to be linked. Look at which specific pages of theirs earn the links — it is almost never their product pages — and ask whether you have published anything comparable. Also note that Domain Rank is DataForSEO's metric, not Google's; no third-party authority score is used by any search engine, and treating one as a target optimises for a number nobody at Google can see.
PageSpeed is 78 versus 64 — how much is that difference worth?
Less than the size of the gap suggests. Core Web Vitals are a genuine ranking consideration, but a small one, and Google has been consistent that they act as a tie-breaker between pages of comparable relevance rather than as a way to outrank a better answer. The lab score in PageSpeed Insights is also not the thing being measured: Google uses field data — what real users actually experienced — so a strong lab score with poor field data is worth nothing, and the reverse is also true. The honest reading of a 14-point lab lead is that your page is probably a bit faster and that this is worth keeping. It is not the reason either of you ranks where you do.
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