It’s 2025, and you may not believe SEO is the future, but you still want to do some lightweight keyword research and SEO competitor analysis to analyze your competitors’ investments in SEO and content. With marketing budgets as tight as ever, are SEO and keyword tools like Ahrefs and Semrush worth their price tag of $100+ per month?
If you’re not going to really invest in an SEO platform, probably not. You can get by with a lot of the basics for free. Tools like the ércule app offer a free plan that integrates lightweight keyword research with your Google Search Console Data, and for SEO competitor analysis, Semrush is the platform I recommend for its free plan.
In this article, I’ll share how you can do SEO competitor analysis — one of my personal favorite activities — for free.
Why do SEO competitor analysis?
What’s more fun than pulling up a competitor’s web domain and seeing what organic keywords and content are resulting in a majority of their traffic? Not going to lie — for me, this stuff really is fun. But, if you need more convincing than this, there are several points in time that I think this research is particularly useful.
1) Before accepting a new job: It’s hard to know what you’re walking into when you accept a new job, but one thing that’s not a secret is how strategic a company has been about their approach to content on their website. I recommend doing this same exercise for your next potential company, and looking at their top 3 competitors, too.
2) At the start of a new job or engagement: At ércule, we kick off every client engagement with an analysis of a company’s top 3 (or more) competitors. This gives us a ton of context on the competitive landscape, competitors’ content strategy, and our own strengths and weaknesses as we build our strategy together.
3) To bring data into panic-driven SEO conversations: When a competitor is distributing really solid content and getting a lot of traction in search or social, a lot of times your Slack notifications will light up with FOMO from fellow marketers or your boss. In addition to digging into the competitor data, take the time to research how frequently your competitor is posting, what topics they’re strategically targeting, and how they’re talking about topics. What can you learn? How can you differentiate? Use SEO competitor research to build a response that backs up your strategy (and any proposed response) with data.
Get started with a free SEO competitor analysis tool
To date, Semrush is the only tool that I’ve seen where you can do a majority of SEO competitor analysis with a free plan. But you need to properly jump through some hoops to avoid giving a credit card and ending up in their free trial on accident.
The Semrush site will try to guide you toward the free, now 7-day trial, which requires a credit card number (and the risk of rolling into a $130+ monthly payment if you forget to cancel.)
The free version is free, forever. No credit card required.
The main difference between the two options is the number of credits that you’re provided. You can think of Semrush credits as actions, or requests, you're making in the web app.
The free account gives you 10 credits a day in perpetuity. After the 10 credits have been used, you’ll hit a pay wall and will need to wait another 24 hours. (At the time of updating this article in March 2025, I will warn you that you’re going to hit a lot of pay walls along the way, too. But we can still make some progress and get some good data, so let’s keep going.)
Follow these steps to get the free plan:
- Sign up for a Semrush account
- Skip the Trial offer (this is your escape hatch to Free)
- Skip adding your phone # (unless you want to be contacted by sales)
- Get through the onboarding questions asap
At this point, you should have access to the same base functionality and UI as you would if you started a 7-day cc-required trial or paid account (plus a few annoying pay walls, but we’ll get through it.)
Do SEO competitor analysis for free
Now that that’s out of the way, we can get to the fun stuff. To get started, just enter a competitor’s website url in the primary search bar. This will automatically take you to your competitor’s Domain Overview. (You can also navigate direct to Domain Overview on the left hand navigation under Competitive Research.)
I recommend documenting the following items for each of your competitors to share with your team and stakeholders:
1) View traffic makeup for organic vs paid over time
- Where to find it: Next to Authority Score, you’ll see the estimated amount of monthly Organic Search Traffic and Paid Search Traffic, and a graph below showing the trend for both over time.
- How to use this data: Compare traffic volume across competitors to get a sense of incoming traffic volume (often correlated to market share) and the distribution of organic vs paid traffic to better understand their level of investment in both areas.
2) Identify keywords generating the most traffic
- Where to find it: Navigate to Organic Research in the navigation to get an overview of a competitor’s organic performance. Clicking into Positions will give you the list of the top traffic-generating keywords.
- How to use this data: You can use this data to help you understand the split of branded vs unbranded search traffic and to understand what content topics result in the most volume for your competitors
3) See what paid search keywords are being bid on
- Where to find it: You can click in to the keyword number below Paid Search Traffic from the Domain Overview, or find this in Advertising → Advertising Research.
- How to use this data: Get a sense of paid search investment (and if it's increasing or decreasing), and to understand what topics your competitor likely believes correlate to eventual customer acquisition.
4) Check backlink referring domains for opportunities
- Where to find it: Scroll down to the Backlinks section of the Domain Overview to see the top sites referring traffic to your competitor. You can also navigate to Backlink Analytics in the side navigation.
- How to use this data: Get insight into your competitor's referral traffic, and to develop your own backlink strategy that borrows from their most relevant referrers. You can also use this data to identify content that is frequently referenced to inspire ideas on what might be your next linkable content opportunity.
5) Check the breakdown of branded vs unbranded traffic
- Where to find it: At any given time, this may end up behind a paywall, but Semrush has the ability to show a breakdown of unbranded vs branded traffic from the Domain Overview. It’s also possible to filter out branded keywords in the Organic Research → Positions view.
- How to use this data: Track these percentages against your own to understand a company’s investment in SEO (the more unbranded keywords, the more investment in search-optimized content, generally.)
Level up your free SEO tooling
If you’re ready to dive deeper into SEO competitor analysis, we’ve built a free SEO competitor analysis template that will help you compare up to 3 competitors. Our SEO competitor analysis template is a free Google Sheet that acts like a mini-SWOT analysis. It breaks up keywords you and your competitors are ranking for into a few categories:
- Strong: where you have position and your competitors don’t
- Competitive: where you’re going head to head with competitors
- Opportunities: where your competitors are investing and you haven’t (yet)
And, if you’re looking for a lightweight way to do SEO topic research and keyword research, the ércule app has a free plan with SEO topic research capabilities that—we might be biased but—we think you’ll love.
Reach out to us if you give any of this a try and have any questions!
